Come to Gaze Upon Me, Have You?

I've said in the past that the whole trade skill system in EQ2 should be scrapped, preferably in favor of some sort of mini-game that is specific to each crafting skill. This would make trade skills more fun and less susceptible to bots, both of which are severe problems right now.

Anyway, that will mostly likely never happen. So, looking at the current system, there is one obvious improvement to be made: instant recipe filtering. You would have a couple text boxes where the user can type things in, and an item box next to each text box where the user can drop an item. When something is typed into the "Product" box, all recipe names containing that string would be displayed. Same thing for "Ingredient" box. Or you can just drop a product or ingredient in your inventory (it also remains there) into the item boxes for the same effect.

So let's say you had some extra pristine tanned stretch of leathers in your inventory. You could type in "tanned stretch of leather" into the ingredient box, and all recipes that use that component would be displayed. Now you have a much easier time finding a recipe you can use.

Or perhaps you are looking for a certain recipe--say, "steel rapier". It will take you a good amount of time and effort to find that recipe in your list of hundreds, if you even have it. Allowing a search/filter, where you can just type in "steel rapier" and immediately see the recipe, would simplify and speed up this process significantly.