Hey guys,
Let me try to add some clarification to this:
It's disappointing that you've missed the opportunity to stimulate some markup on hunting loot, and instead have chosen to further incentivise grinding a 10 HP mob for an item that already has high markup. What is the point of that?
So this is a bit bigger than just this small crafting part for the key, so try and bear with me.
Ideally, there will be uses for every loot (which is something that we've always tried to do and have attempted to improve upon over the years) of the items available on Cyrene for crafting, hunting is far and away the most sought after of the loot.
While there was some success for the textures thanks to some of the more fashionable Entropians, the majority of mining materials are behind any general hunting loot in terms of usage.
I also feel that pleak wings, which were designed to be a good source of income for newer players and lower level players, may have not been the right choice here, perhaps another low-level creature drop can be better used (of course there's time to adjust this, and due to the swift nature of the Mini Patch did we not add on the fee to go into the caverns) so the blueprint can be adjusted for the future.
The super short answer is: trying to find better usages for mining loot that hunters can use, which then in turn will get them loot items that crafters will need along with ores and enmatters.
I prefer the refining idea to the crafting one as well. Crafting is good for (relatively) high volume or high TT items. It's not good for low TT items that will be used one at a time.
I think it's very common to see on Cyrene that a lot of the items are combines, and I think that there's merit to having simple combines for crafting like this.
However aren't a lot of components, which are technically used one time in other blueprints in a similar fashion to this? The issue is because these are consumed versus being used later down the line? (I'm not trying to question, I'm trying to understand this difference from a player point of view).
When it comes to hunting and crafting there isn't a one size fits all solution. However, the material from pleaks used for these "Byg Byrd" keys goes hand and hand as its the same species of creature. You're correct as we've been slacking on finding more use for current and other Cyrene specific items. This is something we've been working on for a while and will hope to have more crafting phases out.
If I can elaborate a little bit about what my cohort replied here. The short version is that there's no silver bullet to crafting (and we've looked). While in the short term, yes, the current new blueprints (3 of them) do not meet the needs of hunters, that doesn't mean we don't have plans to better utilize all hunting loot (as well as mining loot) in future recipes.
The point of it is that we've been trying to find things that players can craft, that they want to craft, that feels good to craft, and everyone can benefit from that ecosystem. However implementing this has been more difficult from a development side, especially in a game like Entropia Universe where it needs to be balanced.
The developers of planet Cyrene and I think the players are playing on Cyrene want the same thing: meaningful crafting for the items available on planet/good usage and markup for their loot, which is something that we're working towards with MindArk, however the process has been quite slow (from the developer side as well).
Cheers,
Kris