There were more than one interesting parts of soph. The actual crafting, figuring it out, was SUPER FUN. Making spider queen stuff, trollan. Trying to make stuff with Razor Meat (can.) It was just a bar to see how far you can push, just like pots. Except, yeah, the bar didn't mean anything and I'm a tru soph cook who ate soph food, had my lil shift spam macro, and ended up giving most of it away haha, selling a bunch too, ofc. I can tell you that until they added in the ability to see your soph change IN THE MOMENT I had no legit idea the level of soph food I was making except that it was 'somewhere between 70 and 80.' Pre aloe. I know I could have done better, but that's not using oils and such. Point is, it was not just non-functional, but it was also an ugly science. Still, the actual science of it, I wrote stuff down in notebooks!
I dunno how it could ever tie into the game now unless it was rep, but that'd be OP. It kinda makes sense tho hue, except for soph fishes. BLE like I said on my 'best cook evor' meme vid, at least let the best cooks in the game 'prepare' raw fish in a way that breaks it out as 1.5 or something. It's grindy and wack, and that still shouldn't be close to 'the best,' but I'm not against soph fish, but I think a cook should be involved somehow. Same w/ those ridic reserve fishes. They need to have the ability to make that kinda food, and yea you could make some of them, but... lol GL getting 80 health. I'm not saying it's impossible (seems like a p high bar, but there are modifiers en masse,) but cooks and fishers should be partners not competing parties.
You could have fun with it, won't deny it. Fun is relative to the person. But the actual system was trash, just piling up shit. The more the rarity of the items generally ment more soph.
I have entire sheets of complete alchemy and cooking breakout that i made over years of playing, in MO1 i have banks and banks and banks of stacks of every possible ingredient.
Discovering a system and making it work is what gaming is all about, the learning curve is often the most pleasurable time. Problem is you spend a lot of time "figuring out" a system that you realize is incomplete broken placeholder shit.
Sophistication was a layer of cooking, more like the 2nd necessity type of food, way more complex because it required good amounts of travelling, harvesting, transporting, trading, etc. But the 1st layer of meaning, weight mechanics and reserves mechanics was poop, so how could you add more layers of complexity to a system thats incomplete in the first place.
I rather not see sophistication until the first layer of meaning for cooking is actually well designed and functional.
Then we can talk about the same issues MO1 had, that certain fishes or raw ingredients often had better values than way more expensive recipes and this bypassed the value of cooking, that can't be happening, thats just plain and simple stupid design.
Like for example, making a dish with meats and fat and oils and bla bla bla was worse than ambrosial pig, or rodspine would be better than any other HOT - weight food in the entire game. Or the sophistication fishes that were easier to get than gathering all the materials required to make the same amount of sophistication, it turned those recipes virtually useless.
And you couldn't use ropdspine meat for cooking cuz it would lose its properties, as you couldn't use high sophistication raw ingredients in recipes either.
SV is dumb cuz they create systems that should work but they don't, so in responce of this they add "exception to the rules". For example raw ingredients being better than complex recipes, or introducing non-dropable items to a full loot game.
When you introduce content that defeats the purpose of other already introduced mechanics makes the game look like shit.
