Blizzard Finally Broke their Silence on the DF Crafting System

Unfortunately, it was a blue reply on the Community Council forums which means 99% of players can’t access it or offer feedback. Seems to me it was a very deliberate choice because they know how overwhelming negative the feedback has been and didn’t want to face a direct backlash on the regular forums.

They also seem to have an overly positive view of the system with the worst self criticism being limited to a vague “we know it’s not perfect” statement. The post goes on to say that they don’t want to rush into making any changes before “things have a chance to settle.” In other words nothing is going to be done to address the mess… as usual.

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Anyone can see the post:

Though obviously, only CC members can engage.

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By access I meant the ability to reply. I could have been clearer.

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Sounds very similar to early SL with the covenants.

“No, there aren’t issues, we’re happy with how they’re working out”, while the forums and game are full of people very unhappy with how they’re working out.

I’ve been primarily focused on professions since WotLK as a player (alts and maxed every profession every expansion), and I gave up on this new system. Between a low-ish population server and all the bugs that allowed a few 24/7 crafters to corner markets, it’s not a pleasant or worthwhile part of my gameplay anymore.

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I don’t know how much good it does, but I’ve seen folks start threads in General as a “reply” to Blizzard posts in the CC forum, so that the larger community can engage.

I agree with you that the Blizzard post was a lot of word salad on a nothing burger, though. Would have been really nice to have a few more details of what “fixes” might be coming at some point. It also would have been amazing if this sort of thing:

In addition, there will be lots of other quality of life features we will be looking into to help making it smoother to use, easier to learn, and more.

would have been part of the system from release, or better yet, beta. As it is, a good part of the frustration with the system is how unclear most of it is.

Yup, total word vomit. As a lawyer myself, when I read it for the first time I through it was written by Ion. :joy::joy::joy:

It would be nice if these PR types wouldn’t have to be a graduate of the school of BS. Just speak plainly. The system doesn’t work. It’s bad. You know it’s bad. We know it’s bad. Just make work orders a box that gets checked in the auction house. You want something? You check the box and fill out how much you’re willing to pay for it. Someone logs in and sees it? They can fill it.

Handle it like actual auctions.

Say you have a crafter that can make x, y, z widgets. He can post on the auction house a listing for x, y, z widgets with bid and buyout prices. Someone sees what he can make and says, “I’ll take x widget please.” Crafter gets a note in the mail from the auction house confirming interest. Walks over to the crafting emporium and makes x widget. Drops it in the mail and gets C.O.D. payment.

Problem solved.

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Crafting Orders and the new profession system is terrible.

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My two biggest complaints are as follows.

  1. It has turned it into a gold sink, massively unbalancing the economy. There is zero reason I should ever have to use my mats, and then pay someone 50k to click a button.

  2. There should not be 3 levels of everything. My bags are full of herbs and inks that are 3 different levels of the same damn thing. They take up space and it’s annoying. This was something that should have been ironed out in beta but it’s very obvious that they rushed it through into an “early access” state before the end of the year. I do not want to occupy 3 spots in my bank/bags of the same crafting item.

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wow profession never felt this bad since the start, garbage system in my opinion.

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Honestly, I wasn’t going to reply to the thread there cause the blue post was essentially just “We hear your feedback but we’re ignoring it and doing what we want like usual” - but some other CC members deciding they wanted to say people like Linaori aren’t allowed to not want to engage with strangers made my blood boil. So I made a large post lol.

The crafting order system is not a success and until they expand Public Orders, it won’t be.

Literally all they need to do is let us be able to specify a minimum quality for public orders and add Recrafting to Public Orders. That’s all they have to do. Scarcity of Crafting Orders would drop dramatically when this occurs as well, killing two birds with one stone.

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Needs some adjustments. Yeah.

No. The new system is a quantum leap forward.

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Except that’s not what they said, at all.

It doesn’t matter what you think they said, whether through willful ignorance or attempting to score brownie points with the court of public opinion, what matters is what they actually said. Here’s what they actually said, for people interested in the actual context instead of knee-jerk reactions:

“Are the devs sure that the crafting order system is a success?”

The crafting order system is by no means perfect. There are many ways we would like to improve it over time. We have been having many of these discussions internally, as well as listening to feedback from all of you. Since this is such a new system though, we don’t want to make any snap-judgements and make big changes before giving things a chance to settle and seeing how it develops over time.

It has also been successful in providing a new way to for crafters and customers to interact, one which is inherently more social, and when you get to use it, hopefully more satisfying than previous ways to do so! But again, very much not perfect!

As far as the public order system goes, it seems to be working well as an easy way to get something crafted for yourself if you aren’t worried about getting the best quality and want it quickly. This was always its intent. We definitely wish that as crafters, it was easier to find public orders to fill. Unfortunately even though there are quite a few public orders going through the system, given the minimal effort it takes to fulfill a public order and the relative number of crafters around to fill those orders, there will almost never be many orders up an any given time with the way it currently works…they get filled too quickly and easily.

We suspect that as players finish getting their high end crafting gear and complete purchases of other one time uses for Artisan’s Mettle, players will be more willing to use Artisan’s Mettle to guarantee higher quality crafts. That will help, but even then, inspiration will always be a useful way to get max quality gear crafted. The crafting orders system is not supporting this as well as we would like it to, since as a customer, you cannot place an order and know exactly what you will get - you need to rely on a handshake deal that your crafter has the inspiration they promised when attempting to craft items for you.


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The new system, as it stands right now, is terrible.

If they had added recipes baseline that go to 100, and specialization was JUST specialization, then I’d agree with you.

However, some professions, like Enchanting, are pretty much stuck at 80ish unless they spend hundreds of thousands of gold and tons of spec. points.

That shouldn’t be the case.

Not to mention unless you do plenty of research ahead of time, using your points the wrong way may make you unable to hit 100 in your profession for months, if not a year.

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You actually, unironically think that the previous system was a better one? Cmon.

You could literally make a shopping list, go to the AH for mats and max a profession in 20 min. It was lame af. There is zero game in that.

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I’m sorry Mai that won’t fix it at all, and in fact would be choosing a worse situation over a bad one. They took it out during beta on purpose.

I agree right now it is of little use because a customer isn’t likely to risk mats on an uncertain outcome.

If you could specify quality though there is no reason anybody would ever specify less than 5*. This has two fatal problems:

  • a large number of recipes can not be guaranteed at 5*. This is so that Inspiration has value.
  • leveling crafters will never be able to accept a Work Order, which means they can’t ever level, which is a vicious circle that basically locks out all crafters except the ones that are already maxed.
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You can specify in Personal/Guild orders, try again.

And for those recipes, if someone specifies 5 star, then the work order goes unfulfilled, logic isn’t hard you know.

Just find it frustrating that the feedback being provided by the community now is exactly the same as the messaging we were sending through during the beta phase. Its not like the pain points were unanticipated (well, other than the late changes such as increasing the skill needed to unlock the final tabs which would have been flagged by testers)…

Immediately jumping to angry retorts doesn’t solve issues. Please take the time to understand what I’m saying.

Of course you can specify in personal and guild. It is assumed there that you are on communication terms with the crafter and they can explain the vagaries of the system. But you don’t have that for public orders. It is stranger to stranger with no communication and with the buyer having no idea what is or isn’t possible.

They will go unfilled with no explanation as to why. Buyer will complain “lazy crafters didn’t do my order!” and then try again, maybe with a bigger tip. It still won’t be filled because it is still impossible. Repeat.

And you didn’t address the fact that this locks out leveling crafters forever, which is the biggest problem.

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Ive suggested just removing inspiration on BoP items and adjusting the skill required to hit q5.

When surrendering expensive mats the outcome should be known beforehand by both parties. Mat quality, crafter skill and insights should set the item quality, Not RNG. Otherwise its just McForging again.

Recrafting diminishes this problem but at that point just let it go to q5 on the first try and be done with it.

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