New house! Part Duex

I bought a new house today, the Imperial Palace, but I'm not wholly satisfied with it. The yard is great and has lots of space but the amount of space inside is insulting for the amount you have to pay. Looking back, I haven't been wholly satisfied with any of the houses I've bought.
The Wooded Cottage was nice, but is altogether too small.
The Metropolitan Manor again too small for my tastes.
The Royal Estate is the best so far. the inside is a nice size and the yard is pretty good, but most of it is taken up by the river.
I'll sit on the Palace for a few days and if I still don't like it I'll move back into the Royal Estate.

I don't really have a good answer for why I don't like them altogether. I guess it's just the all too common thought of "I can do it better." I don't know if I could do anything that others would prefer, but I know that I could do something that I would like better.

Mooshu

These past few days, I've been doing the area around Shoshun Village. I've just finished up Cave of Solitude and Kishibe Village, and I can honestly say that I won't miss them even one tiny bit.
The Cave had that bottleneck in the middle of the map that made questing incredibly tedious.
Kishibe Village wasn't bad geographically, but having to defeat 16+ Balance mobs for two quests soured me on the whole area. As a balance Wizard, I don't have the highest damage around and facing mobs that can resist and weaken my attacks slows me down even more.

Crafting: my 2 Cents

Most everybody else has weighed in on one side or the other of the crafting debate, so I figure it's my turn.
Starting off: I fall heavily on the side of "It's a good start but it needs a lot of work."
When I was doing the WC and Krok crafting quests, I didn't have a problem with the system but when I hit Marleybone I realized how messed up the system is. The first MB crafting quest alone required 80 pieces of scrap metal (I currently have a grand total of 10 pieces). As Tipa has pointed out, that requires hours spent running around the roofs in vain hope of finding a scrap metal node. Even after you've collected all the reagents, you have to make the rings and daggers. Since you only have two crafting slots at this point, it'l probably take you somewhere in the area of 15 hours to craft all 10 of the daggers and rings you need. And once you've spent the equivilant of a full day crafting, you get to turn in all your items to the quest giver who will give you another quest that will probably require just as much work.

There are things that need to be done, to make Crafting work.
Problem: A lot of the items you can make, particularly the housing items but not limited to them, require a large number of reagents to make.

EX.

This Housing item (stone Brazier) requires 18 Ore and 28 Bronze Gears (among others) to make. Ore is not too hard to come by but Bronze Gears only come from the Golems running around MB, so unless you're really lucky or you buy on the bazarr you're going to be spending a lot of time fighting golems for their gears.
Solution: for each reagent in a recipe that requires more then, say, 5 of an item cut the required number by half. Maybe 75% for large numbers of reagents.
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Problem: The quests are just way too time consumming and force us to buy recipes for items we're probably not going to make again once the quest is done.
Solution: One way is to do away with the quests entirely and just award the titles (and crating slots) the way the do with monster kill titles, except a bit different: to get the novice title and your second slot (everybody should start with one slot), you have to craft 5 rank-1 items then you get your title and slot and you can start on the next title track except you have to craft rank-2 items and so-on.

IMO: I love Wizard 101, but...

Like every other W101 blogger in our little community, I love the game. I do have one big complaint though. I agree that both Crafting and the Bazaar are good but incomplete ideas. And making Boss fights more difficult so people can't solo them is a step in the right direction but making them so hard that nobody at all can beat them is two steps in the wrong direction. But these are not my big complaint.
My big complaint is quest rewards, equipment specifically. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on MMOs but I've played my fair share and in every one I've played quest reward equipment, barring any special circumstances, is supposed to be an upgrade and even if it's not it's a unique item found nowhere else.
Now I can understand quest rewards not being an upgrade if you have a high level character providing equipment for the lower level character. But if the character you're playing is the pioneer, blazing the trail for characters to come, then the equipment they get from quests, barring any incredibly lucky drops, should be superior to earlier quest equipment. I haven't found that this to be the case, in fact i've found them to be quite mediocre. I don't expect them to be as good as boss drops, cause boss drops are always the best for their level, but I expect a quest robe in the East Counterweight to give better then 4% balance damage. Not only is a lot of quest equipment inferior, it's also not unique. On a few occasions, I've gotten equipment (usually daggers) that are normal 'trash' drops'.

Okay, I'm done. Sorry for making you sit through that, had to get it off my chest.

P.S. I'm sorry I missed the Bloggers meet-up