What if the crafting system worked like this:
When you fight badguys, you get IGC and raw materials somehow. Never pre-made, fully usable Augments, just raw materials and IGC. So you have to go and do crafting to make the Augments you want from the raw materials you have or have bought on the auction house. Once you process the raw materials, your Augment or Refinement is now ready for you to use, but it's account bound at that point. You can't sell it. Once you slot it into a power, its then character bound and can't be taken out unless you buy an unslotter to do that.
So the auction house would deal primarily in raw materials, which are tradable, and come in different rarities, but actual usable Augments and Refinements would have to be made, never found. At least the good ones. Maybe you could still have really weak, disposable Training type stuff at low levels, but as soon as people try to move up to the "Double Origin Enhancement" level of gear, they have to start crafting it for themselves. Then maybe the "training" level stuff could still drop and could be converted into a raw material or two via a randomized salvaging process.
The idea here is to ensure that the item making process is basically a one-way door that won't allow you to just rent your gear then sell it all later, so that when IGC get's sunk by the game, it basically stays sunk.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
A lot of this would depend on whether MWM considers crafting to be a "mandatory" part of the game or not. According to the Devs of CoH you didn't technically have to craft anything in CoH - the game had been balanced around builds that effectively didn't require any crafted enhancements to succeed (or at least be able to muddle through most of the PvE content at any rate).
Now if CoT is designed in such a way that if you don't craft you'll be constantly dying then I could see where some people might find that annoying. I'm not against crafting myself - I'm just pointing out if there's no way to buy the best crafted Augments/Refinements then it will by definition force everyone to craft whether they want to or not.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
This is the sticking point for me. I don't care for things that are character- or account-bound. Mostly because it limits it's giftability. If I'm not playing solo, then I'm playing with either my wife or my friends. And I want to be able to share the love, particularly if I can't use something or they just need it more than I do. Or even thinking outside of friendship circles. How can you give some of that great crafted stuff away as prizes for community-related events, such as the classic costume contest, if it's bound somehow?
I do like the idea of being able to break stuff down again.
This is a good point - there would be fewer contest awards if no one could give away anything of significant value.
If they make the cost of using an "Unslotter" relative to the value of what it's unslotting then you'll still preserve a pretty huge IGC sink regardless of what players do. For example let's say Augment X is worth 1,000,000 quatloos on the open market. Now let's say it costs 750,000 quatloos to unslot Augment X from a character. Sure the character could still make 250,000 quatloos if he/she sold it, but it's not like they'd make the kind of profit they'd make if they just sold an unslotted one. This would be a reasonable compromise towards eliminating the "rental" issue you're talking about without forcing anything to become "character-bound".
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
The raw materials, which would likely be things like salvage components and recipes in CoX, would still be tradable. You just wouldn't be able to trade the actual Augment once you made it. So you could acquire all the base ingredients and trade THEM to someone, but once you pull the trigger on make the thing, the process becomes irreversible. This forces people to use more storage space to store stuff long-term, but items tend to appreciate in IGC value long-term while IGC tends to be subject to inflation.
Edit: While it's true that this causes people to craft, the items made aren't armor pieces and swords like in a fantasy game. They're more likely the representation of your character growing and learning how to use their superpowers better, etc. As such, the loss of tradability isn't exactly against the immersion flavor of the game.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
And to add on to what @Radiac said, we don't even know what the crafting interface is going to be. I've put forth some ideas as have a good number of us. One idea I had was that you didn't actually craft anything, you trained the ability you wanted to add the augment to. During your training you use up the material ingredients and when you are done, you have an augment. Of course, you would have to decide what augment you wanted on which ability before you trained it.
But that's just one idea out of the many that I've seen. I really hope its not a craft workbench, because not only is that uninspired, but it doesn't even fit with what augments and refinements even are for most characters. I suppose there might be some technologically based characters for whom a workbench would be appropriate. And for them, maybe a workbench should be an option.... so.....
So when we build our bases, we have several options for the "self-improvement center." A cleanroom workbench, a dojo, a summoning circle, a bubbling chemistry lab, a clone manufactory, a moolit grotto, and a greasy garage should all be aesthetic options, each with its own set of animations that we get to choose to use to augment and refine our abilities.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Huckleberry, the idea is to provide some themed locations, with customable emotes. When you get to setting up a "crafting station"' in a base, again all customizable.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Niiice. I like this idea. I didn't do a lot of the heavy lifting on my SG base, but thanks to at least two talented SG members, it ended up being a solid place to hang one's head. The one thing that I always wanted, and we actually got at one point, was the Dimensional Vortex. I personally wanted it based on the character concept I had for my canon Cobalts. It was one of the coolest-looking pieces and, of course, it was locked behind a PvP zone kill badge, which to me was total bullplop. It was one of two badges (the other being Immortal) that I can say that we didn't get through expected gameplay (i.e. we farmed the kill badge amongst ourselves in Warburg).
[img]https://paragonwiki.com/w/images//c/c1/Dimensional_Vortex.jpg[/img]
As an example of a high-end object requiring PvP and only PvP, it just emphasizes a point made elsewhere about having something locked behind a single achievement or event or content, which I don't agree with.
Do you honestly think that most people who'd be reading/posting to this forum don't know these things about the superhero genre already? Regardless of your answer to that there are some people who simply don't like to spend the time/effort to craft regardless of the rationale established by the given game.
Again I would want to see if the Devs of CoT intend to make crafting required or optional before I'd base fundamental IGC sink mechanics around it. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with someone just wanting to buy the things to improve their builds without having to invest the time/effort to craft those things. Your original post in this thread kind of makes the assumption that playing that way is effectively "wrong" somehow.
IGC sinks are good for a game to get rid of EXCESS amounts of money from the system. But players using REASONABLY sized hordes of IGC to buy (or even "rent" as you put it) their own Augment or Refinement without crafting is perfectly fine.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]