Time traveling.
"We are working towards releasing a build containing the tradeskill system to the testlive servers quite soon." - Nusquam, october 2013.
That qoute was from the GD letter, october 2013. Almost a year ago now. Dear Game Director, can you please elaborate on why this is takeing so long?
anzu already answered- b/c they are all sniffing catnip for some strange reason. and also, lego game is out
Short answer - It wasn't working well enough to let you guys play around with it.
Longer answer - It was "functional" at that point and has been for a long time - and I thought we would be able to patch it to testlive (at least the basic functionality) but the people working on it convinced me that it would just annoy people rather than make them happy.
There is *so much* cleaning up that has had to be done for the crafting system. To give you some idea of the challenges faced - when Conan was originally in development, some of the items were created using the original AO tools (from 2001).
There was a new item tool made for Age of Conan, and the bulk of items for AoC were made in that tool.
Then a new tool was made for TSW - but with the idea that all new items for AoC would be made in that tool as well (unifying the projects is always good, especially when you have a shared live team).
So Age of Conan has items made in three different tools, which all function differently in code.
In the crafting system, you need to be able to salvage crafting materials from items that you find. The salvaging system is only compatible with items that work in the third tool I mentioned above.
So...one heroic team member has spent a long (long) time recreating every item in AoC in the newest tool to make sure that everything will work with the salvaging system. That is thousands of items. That is months of work.
That is just one of the problems that we have been wrestling with on the crafting revamp.
And to make it clear, I have had a team member focused only on the crafting revamp for over a year now. Just working on crafting. That should give you some idea of the scope.