I’m really not a fan of the “This won’t matter to you by Season 3” takes. Apply that to anything else.
“A BiS tinket for my spec dropped and I was dragging it from my bag to my character to equip it and released too early, then reflexively hit the confirmation button when it asked me if I wanted to delete it, thinking it was the pop-up that warns you that the item can’t be traded after it’s been equipped. I accidentally deleted it!”
Imagine someone saying, “Ah, well, it happens. You won’t care about this season’s BiS trinkets by season 3, so don’t worry about it.”
And that’s just one of virtually countless analogous situations. It’s needlessly dismissive of the actual problem in this case: The way Blizzard decided to handle gating professions to artificially slow people down with them and throttle supply of certain valuable crafts has been exceptionally clumsy and without nuance.
Players have no recourse if they make simple, extremely common mistakes. It’s actually faster to re-level an alt than it is to just wait for more of the gated resources until you’re 100+ knowledge points into a tree. Telling someone, “Just wait until next season and you won’t care anymore,” when they can just reroll their character or roll a completely new one and fix the mistake the hard way by next week, which is week 1 of this season, just doesn’t make any sense to me, personally.
It took years to get Blizzard to make talent respecs acceptable rather than punishing, and I feel like crafting is currently in an even worse state. It’s unreasonable to expect people to make informed decisions with their first few dozen points and first few weeks’ worth of Artisan’s Acuity without them metagaming super hard and going and reading up on optimal investments.
I’m an engineer irl and my preferred solution would imitate what we do in real life when we make mistakes while studying, designing, or building a new product: We break down our steps, dissemble our work, and analyze it to figure out what went wrong.
To that end, I think we should be able to dismantle items crafted with Artisan’s Acuity to get some back, plus some of the materials and some knowledge points. It could be a weekly cooldown or even its own specialization tree focused on accelerating your crafting growth.
I like the latter option because it gives players a choice between immediate payoffs for crafting vs investing in acceleration, which would yield better long-term gains. Early in an expansion, the choice is hard. There’s a lot of gold to be made and lot of early power to acquire by skipping the “failure analysis” specialization I’m proposing, but the longer the expansion is out the less valuable those early crafts are and the more valuable an acceleration mechanism becomes.
For knowledge points, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to unlearn things and there’s potential for abuse in people spending points to make things and then refunding the points. To that end, I think the “failure analysis” specialization makes sense again. Part of figuring out why what you studied was “wrong” for your goals involves studying what you produced with what you studied.
For example, if you spent blacksmithing points on crafting frames only to realize you probably should have spent them on improved alloys, it makes some sense to make and dismantle some frames to figure out exactly why. Then you use the resulting knowledge points on alloys.
This effect would probably require a weekly cap, but it’d be a nice decision for players. “Do I sell this thing I made or dismantle it for more knowledge?” I actually deal with that exact dilemma irl all the time when I make things to sell on sites like etsy. And for players that make huge mistakes, like accidentally crafting two BoP artisan professional tools or the wrong tool entirely, it’s not a decision at all. It’s a reliable remedy for mistakes that “everyone makes”, according to many commenters on the issue.