Gold farmers never took root in SWG where crafted equipment was better than anything you could find, this was before the NGE. Not sure about afterwards because I stopped playing when it went live. Eve Online has a different way of dealing with gold farmers and it works well, plus same again all equipment is crafted in Eve unless of course you get very lucky and find officer spawns.

During my time in UO I could go toe to toe with other players by just using GM crafted equipment where as they used vanquashing blades and magic armour. So I can't see why we can not have a MMO where crafted end game equipment is the same as what is found in dungeons and raids.

Your going to get gold sellers in any mmo, its down to the players and devs to make it very unprofitable for them to flourish. Just to note I have played MMO's since UO was released and the first time I see a gold seller was when I had a momment of madness and played WoW. Before that game I had played EQ1 and 2, DAoC, SWG and Eve Online.

I just do not wish to see this game turn into another gear grind fest where you have to traipse through endless dungeons just to hope to get a decent role on a RNG at the end of it all. Just like every other land based MMO thats out there at the moment.

How the devs and the players see "on par" though is often vastly different.

Well obviously. Now I don't honestly expect that the best possible gear in the game can/will be crafted. But on par can still be items that are at least close to that of the better gear.

Why? Crafted gear can be the exact same it just needs to require very rare / hard to obtain materials. This is what Aion did and both elite loot and elite crafted gear were both being used 50% time each.

From all the interviews at pax they were saying crafting will yield the BEST gear. even saying they want crafing to be used for endgame and not just leveling

I know about the PAX interviews about all the crafting gear and that's why I said crafting gear will be on par with all the endgame items. But when I mean by 'the best possible gear' I was more talking about if they decide to add any type of 'legendary' items to the game they should never be something that can be crafted by players and only found as drops or done after an incredibly long and tedious quest line.

I still think they do something different, like gear-grind can be replaced by something else easily, like GOLD, which one is cooler gold or gear. Of course its how you make it. Originality on today's market is big plus (theres tons tons of wow-clone, wow-style games.. ) Gear-grind doesnt have to be it, but it could secondary stuff, you want to have excellent gears BUT right after gold, gold makes the world go round, not gears. They would for example put heavy emphasize on gold, imagine what kind of stuff gold can get to you.

But the moment they add those legendary "drop or long quest" items they are taking away the importance of the crafter's endgame gear and the whole reason of investing time to get your crafter to their max abilities. That would be going against what they are saying about their craft system. Again if they add those legendary drop gear then they could just add legendary crafting materials that are just as hard to obtain for the crafter to make the same gear.

On the endgame progression it doesn't seem they are doing it based off gear like other games (which takes the importance of a crafting away) It looks like they are following Darkage of Camelots realm rank progression system. The AVA rank system with the skill trees to improve your character with passives and abilities to keep making them better far after max level. (fighter, seigemaster, and warlord skill trees)

They say it will be important and spec the way you can upgrade and scarp endgame loot.

But the problem whit all old mmos is that crafting have bean grate at start off the game but for every new update the crafting are slipping behind and become more and more useless.

The real problem with crafting providing the "best loot" is that its so stupidly easy. If you want gear to mean something it must be an achievement to get it.

surely that depends on the crafting system? So if the mats are easy to obtain and crafting is a button click with no risks then sure, its just a question of time before you can create anything. Its also a fairly uninspiring crafting system.

What is we make mats difficult to come by and the crafting itself into a mini game?

Being a master crafter is an achievement in of itself. Doesn't mean to say crafters get it easy, Vangard had a realy good system as did SWG for crafters, and to make the best weapons and armour you needed to know what you was doing. Crafting in recent mmo's has been dumbed down or non existant because people like you tell the devs that players don't wish to see crafting in a game, and so we end up with a half hearted atempt to please the crafters from the devs with a simple and useless system for crafting.

Why do all MMORPG's have to be equipment driven? The older ones never use to be, it wasn't until WoW came that this has become a trend which has destroyed many other things that made MMO's a pleasure to play. Stop thinking within the confines of other and past mmo's and open your mind up to other possibilities that can exist. That are better and more enjoyable ways to obtain equipment other than the mindless dungeon / gear grind of the RNG machine that all MMO's have.

yes i am afraid that its gatering the resourses that will be the hard part and and the cradting is just a click away.

Nothing wrong whit that the gatering will be a important part of the engaming tho...

Legendaries would never take away the importance of crafters making endgame gear, because they wouldn't make a full set of armor that is legendary. They would possible only have one item that is a legendary (normally that would be a weapon). And by hard and tedious I mean look at the legendary items back in Vanilla WoW. Getting any of those legendary items in themselves was a huge accomplishment and took forever and great dedication. Now not everyone Joe Slim will be carrying a legendary with them, only 1% of the population will. So that doesn't take anything away from the crafters.They will still have the ability to make some of the best gear in the game, but that one, just one, item will be better than anything they could possible make. Which I'm fine with, because crafters should never be able to craft something on a legendary scale, unless they decide to make legendary items is through crafting, but you have to get incredible lucky for the recipe to drop and the items to get it have to be incredibly rare too. Also the legendary would have to be BoP so that you wouldn't be allowed to trade/sell it.

Because there are vast issues surrounding that. Look at the minigames that were Eq2 (god did I hate thee) and what FF14 is shaping up to be. They are tedious for the sake of being tedious, especially when you add in the roll of the dice that many other systems have put into place (Aion and Gw2). In Swtor for example you could craft gear that was better than the initial tier of raid loot, did not stop the piles and piles and piles and whines because it was expensive to accomplish, and next to no one did it.

You really need less nostalgia in your diet. Galaxies all you needed was a spreadsheet (which were readily avialable) and a decent network of miners to pick up mats for you.
You also seem to have missed how rpg's in general are loot driven because its one of the better forms of reward. D&D, Muds, Jrpgs so on. Rng is not going anywhere because hitting a jackpot is fun.