Crafting used to be relevant, and even though crafting mechanics have improved, crafting has become more irrelevant. Why?

Mainly because leveling speed has increased. So people really don't worry about crafted products any more. Why craft, when you will quickly outlevel whatever is made. If you just continue questing, you'll gain a level pretty soon, then start getting drops as good as any you could craft right now. Yes, if you put a LOT of time into crafting, you might very temporarily get better gear, but it will again be quickly made obsolete by leveling.

(I'm not talking about any crafting bonuses in end-game. There, crafting might be relavent, depending on the game. Because of this, crafting for many people is something to be ignored until they are at max level, then grinded though as quickly as possible, just gaining crafting levels and ignoring any products made, to get to max skill in crafting.)

I would like to see crafting meaningful in a game, and there is only one way I can think of to make it so. SLOW DOWN the leveling. Now I know many of you, especially those that frequent forums will cry "ARE YOU CRAZY?" Well yes, probably. But I believe that there is a large group of people that would like slower leveling, and that they tend to be the people that stick with an MMO as a long term project, and not the 'get to the max level, raid a bit, then on to the next game' crowd.

If there is any other way Bethesda can figure out to make crafting relavent during leveling, I would be glad to see it.

Probably in this day and age, there is no way to get game designers to make leveling slower again, but I propose a possible solution:

Often in many games there is an experience modifier, games temporarily increase experience gained for many reasons. Use the idea of this modifier to have a few servers, some should be RP, listed as slower experience servers. It would be a grand experiment. I forecast that the following would occur:

The slow experience servers would at first get much fewer users than the normal servers. The normal servers would go through the standard process of expansion to handle all the people at first, then contraction as people leave for the next game. The slow leveling servers would grow slowly in population and their population would be much more stable. A character that is leveled fast can be tossed for the next game. When you get to max level, after working very hard at it, you get a sense of accomplishment, now missing in games, and tend to keep with that character for a longer time.

I'm not sure how experience will work in ESO, I can only point to a recent game, SWTOR. There you got enough experience for the next level without doing all the quests, much less doing any of the Space Missions or PvP. I wish experience would have been slower, allowing me to do most if not all the quests, then dabbling in warzones and space combat enough to get the experience necessary to level for the next quests. I hope for something similar in ESO.