Crafting skills completely random?

[Jonny_Reload]

How exactly do you go up in crafting skills? I've been crafting items appropriate to my Crafting level yet I only went up once out of 20 items in my skill for Fletching, then I make something 4 levels lower and then all of a sudden I start earning more points towards Fletching... How does this make sense or is there a system for calculating what items make you eligible to receive increases in your Crafting skills?

[NiamiDenMother]

Skillups come, mostly, from using in-tier reaction arts.  The level of the item does not matter, but the tier of the arts used does.

[Condar Tarsonia]

As Niami said, make sure you are using your best tradeskill arts (or the ones that give you the best risk/power:reward ratio).  Also remember there is only a chance at a skillup, just like every other skill in the game.  Consequently, you are relying on the RNG (Random Number Generator) to smile favorably on you.  Sadly, it rarely does - at least in my case.  That's why you could potentially go for hours and not find a single rare, but then get a lucky streak and find 2 on the same node.

[Killerbee3000]

in addition to what was said above: the exp gain was increased massively at low lvl's, but not the speed one gets the skill ups at... so, in fact that you simply lvl again before getting all  the skill ups of the lvl which leaves you with some catching up to do skill wise in the earlier tiers.

[Jonny_Reload]

Thank you everyone for the info and help! <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> This is so much more of a relief now that I see my Fletching skill rising again (slowly, but still rising!)