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Recipe/Resource Exp Reformulation Ever since beta, players have always found leveling some professions (namely the crafting ones) very tiresome.

It takes an enormous amount of ingredients to craft equipment pieces and other kind of items. To make it worse, knowing you will get the same experience, from making either an item that needs just 3 pieces of Gobball Leather and one that needs 55 pieces of Gobball Wool (among with other ingredients!).

This would make mid/high leveled professions a nightmare to level.

Regarding this, I have been thinking about changing the experience earned from crafting and resource gathering, using the levels of the items based on the process to determine how much exp you will get.

Let us take, for example, crafting an item that needs 4 pieces of Gobball Skin.
Gobball Skin is a Lvl 10 item. It would give a player, through a designed formula, let's say, the standard 200 Exp; 5 Exp per level of each skin.

Now if I had an item that needed 4 Gobball Skins and 1 Salt (Lvl 10 as well); it would give 250 Exp.

This could also be applied to resources, such as monster essences.

This method would end with the current experience fall-off when dealing with a recipe or resource of a level lower than your profession's; it wouldn't discourage a Level 40 Farmer from harvesting wheat.

Needless to say that in order to apply such system, item levels and the ingredient count for recipes should be reviewed in order to keep things balanced. It should also be stated that following this method would also require a reformulation on the profession leveling curve.

Even with these changes, though, this method would be much more efficient and player-friendly when it would come to mid-high levels of any profession: "I can craft 20 easy to make items in order to level up, or I could make 5 items that require lots of rare ingredients".

Anything that would allow to level professions through filling supply rather than providing inordinate amounts of demand is good with me. I'll try to take another dig at the system and see what I can come up with tomorrow. Actually, I have an idea right now, but it's going to take some time to take shape properly before I can write it up. In short: it involves research and allows you to rake in XP without producing anything at all.

I remember Aion had a system like that. It basically involved an NPC giving you orders from other people. I was a chef, so I did things such as "A client wants 10 grilled steaks"; and then it gives you a some of the materials (the raw steaks), and you provide the rest (sauces).
After crafting, I would give the NPC what I made, and that would give me even more job exp.

It as a nice, practical and honestly, very relieving inventory wise. Here in Wakfu I keep about 80 pieces of equipment/food I am never going to use in my entire life, and nobody is going to buy them.

Back there in beta I was a leather dealer, and I always walked around with about 300 Larvresque belts. Never sold -one-.

I did not like Aion's system. It only required very few basic materials that you could usually buy from the same NPC you got the mission from, thus allowing you to level your crafting essentially with just the money. It saved the market from overflowing with useless items like that, and served as a money sink, but it was completely uninteresting and diminished the role of gatherers.
Actually, there is no need to give crafting XP based on the total level of items used in the recipe. It is entirely possible, and is in fact the right way to go about just changing numbers, for a designer to go through the whole list of items and assign each of them a correct value based on rarity of items, probably.

So anyway, here's my sketch of a possible research system.
Any crafting profession can, instead of crafting, invoke research. Doing so creates a random list of items required for items the profession can currently craft with a non-zero probability, excluding crafted items (Like soles, planks or polished runstones) or equipment pieces. Upon taking up such an order, the character is unable to craft anything at all for 24 hours.
If all the specified items are gathered and used at an appropriate crafting station,
Reward method 1 (Flat progression): the character receives 300XP per item in the profession in question, and is able to craft or research again. The materials are obviously gone.
Reward method 2 (Raising stakes): a research "bank" is increased with 100XP per item used, and the crafter can choose to take this "bank", gaining all XP in it, or try another project, this time adding 150XP for each item. This continues cyclically, each time adding 50XP per item, until the crafter decides to take the "bank", or is unable to assemble the materials within 24 hours, at which point the chain is broken and only half the XP in the "bank" is received.

Secret recipe method 1: if any item used for research (The whole chain in the second method) is used in a yet unknown secret recipe, this item is added to a list of recipes-in-progress for the crafter. Only one item can be added to this list in this way - meaning that if a recipe requires more than one item of a given type, it has to be researched several times to find out the right amount to use. Even then, there is no mark on a recipe that its list of ingredients is complete, meaning you'll have to try making it at least once.
Secret recipe method 2: if the materials used in the research (Just the one project in case of second reward method) contain in its entirety a recipe for a yet unknown secret item, the crafter makes this item by accident. No further information is provided.

Kind of crude, now that I've written it up, but it might work with some alterations.

Indeed, using a value based on the item's rarity would be a viable option, but it would leave most players with no knowledge of how much experience they would get from crafting something, unless they did so, no?

I feel that using an item's level would not only help players with an easier understanding of how much experience each recipe gives, not to mention it would actually give resource and ingredient levels some use, apart from how much extra damage refinement will deal.

And regarding your own suggestion, Grichmann, I couldn't really understand much of it.

" Doing so creates a random list of items required for items the profession can currently craft with a non-zero probability, excluding crafted items (Like soles, planks or polished runstones) or equipment pieces."

This system wouldn't help professions such as leather dealer or armorer, which can make either suplement items (like soles and etc) or equipment.

But either way, your system revolves basically handling randomly chosen materials you use in your profession's recipes? If that's so, it sounds relatively interesting, but I do not understand why you should refrain one from crafting while doing this.

Either way I'm looking forward to your alterations, and hope that whichever suggestion Ankama takes (if they!), they just fix this silly and unrewarding exp system as soon as possible.

Sorry, it did come out rather confusing. Definitely not my best attempt at writing.
Yes, it's basically get a random list of resources that you can hand in, without actually making anything, for a decently large sum of XP - either a static one (First reward method) or one that starts out about the same as you'd get for crafting normally, but grows as you keep researching. The resources themselves are chosen from the materials you'd use to make things with this profession, but they cannot include already crafted items or equipment, so, say, a leatherworker does not get an order of 10 soles (Common ingredient in a number of recipes) and 4 piwi belts (Taken from the Royal piwi belt recipe).
Forbidding regular crafting is a means to prevent rerolling these research orders until you get one with readily available resources - note that if you do collect them, you can craft again.
The part about figuring out secret recipes is just a bonus that fits with the theme, and provides additional incentive to use the system.