Tradeskilling is a huge part of this game, yet seems to be not worthy of a Forum section? Maybe this is old news, but I am certain that newer players would benefit tremendously from it. The instructions for crafting are very poorly written, and assume that you know things that you just do not know. I finally tried my hand at Baking, and it took forever to get started. Now I get it, but I wasted hours trying to figure out where to actually combine ingredients. As I stated, I think a section on the Forums is in order.
Probably for the same reason as maps... because someone else has already done it for them (EQtraders)
I am thinking that if I owned this game, and this site, this would be where I would want users to congregate, and not some 3rd party site.
A long time back, the forums did have a section for tradeskills. Had a bunch of extra sections, actually. They archived and removed them. You could visit the archives for a long too but I don't see the link anymore.
Not saying the forums shouldn't be more robust, but in the case of Tradeskills, you can't beat EQ Trader. It's always been the go to. It's not just some third party site, it's the collective work of legions of actual EQ players who have chosen to demystify all aspects of tradeskilling.
Something to remember about EQ forums vs EQtraders. EQ intentionally makes that information unavailable. EQ launched with no directions. You combined gold and diamond and then posted on EQtraders. Part of what makes EQ great is the unknown. EQ has made some positive changes such as in game recipes. This is a good change as it makes life easier, but the recipes still need to be learned. Your character wont be able to see a list of items from ToV and the required combines until after you make the first combine. I don't tradeskill a lot so I dont have a ton of specifics. EQtraders will always have a greater pull because people are going there for recipe information. Even if EQ had TS forums, people would just constantly redirect people to EQtraders. EQforums is not going to host all that information just like the quest data on Zam. It's suppose to be the way it is.
Isn't eqtraders.com maintained by Ngreth; the dev who actually implement the recipes in the game? It isn't anymore "third-party" than everlore.com was back then...
Even if you put a tradeskill section here - there are decades of history over at EQTC that can't realistically be duplicated. You can ask tradeskill questions in any forum and if any of us are wandering through here, you'll probably still get an answer or a reference to where the details are over on EQTC or Alla's. You can also ask tradeskill questions in the cross server tradeskill chat channel. It's quiet, but someone might be around to answer or point you in the right direction.
The archives still exist, Daybreak simply no longer maintains their version of them. http://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/soearchive/ It holds all of the messages, but due to how it was made and transferred, some of the messages are poorly formatted and subjects were lost. Also the search features somewhat stunted for similar reasons. The reason why we don't have any TS board here is simply because SOE wanted to move away from maintaining boards themselves at all. I believe that EQ is the only game that they still have which Daybreak/Darkpaw actively maintains a set of forums like this for. They sent all others to reddit and other sites years ago. We just got to keep ours due to the age of the game, the fact that a signficant portion of the player base doesn't do things like reddit, and the forum community has always been rather robust.
