This is my biggest gripe with Dragonflight. Which is a good thing in the big picture. But still it is a gripe.
The crafting order system is cool in theory, but just doesnt exist in the game. No one is placing crafting orders, mainly because they don’t feel the need to. People will simply post into trade chat and ask if someone will craft something for them and pick the person with the lowest/no cost to craft it for them.
I wish there was more of a push to use the crafting order system. I feel like it would breathe a lot of fresh air into professions and give people a reason to spend more time in town and even make a little gold.
Yeah, it’s now Monday and I still have not completed the quest from Tuesday for completing 3 crafting orders. Not for a lack of trying - I’ve sat by this bench off and on every day all week and I’ve managed to get just 2 done. Hours staring at and refreshing this thing and there’s just nothing happening.
It’s more annoying because the crafting order system is clearly a key part of leveling and skilling up professions, but… nothin’.
Send yourself private orders from alts, then you can clear your weekly quests in 5min every week without ever looking at the public work order page. That is how I take care of the work order quest on my characters when no public work orders (at least none that I can touch) are available.
Blizzard knows that the public order system is DOA but nothing they have done has been more than putting a band-aid on an amputated limb and watching the blood gush.
I do not know what they can do to fix public orders at this stage but I think it would probably require scrapping the whole ranks and recrafting system. Final Fantasy XIV did scrap ranks or mats and crafts and it didn’t hurt the crafting system at all. However this is an expansion level fix that I don’t see blizzard being able to implement in a patch given how it is tied into the whole core of the profession specializations.
Many people say that all you need to do is put requestable ranks back on public orders but that just means that the few able to make the highest ranks get all the work and less hardcore crafters or newer crafters are locked out for months so this doesn’t fix the problem in any meaningful way.
As opposed to now where crafting either gets ignored altogether because people cannot be bothered to read through chat spam or contribute to chat spam to get stuff made via private work orders anyway.
Lowbie crafters are screwed no matter what. Always have and likely always will.
With minimum quality public work orders, at least there is a chance that the volume of stuff being posted could exceed the high-level crafters’ weekly cap and force people to lower their expectations if they want stuff crafted in a timely manner. That would still be an improvement over the public work order page simply being blank 99% of the time.
Adding minimum quality level to public orders would make many more public orders. Whether less dedicated crafters will get to do them or not is beside the point.
We need a better system to find crafters who can craft specific pieces of high quality gear. Right now it’s either do it through your guild crafting order system (which lets you specify min quality), or sit around in town looking for someone for hours or days. Why would they not facilitate or automate public orders? Right now it’s cumbersome and completely wastes player time.
The supply and demand, crafting skill, the “exploit early and often” problems… All of that is kind of moot unless we get better tools to match crafters with people wanting things crafted. Trade chat is not the way to do it.
Oh well. Maybe in the next big patch we will have a better implementation and a slew of new things to craft. It’s too late to save 10.0.2 crafting for the general public, to be honest. It’s a new system, but it just feels unfortunate.
Mainly because crafters can spam-craft stuff so only one crafter capable of max-quality of any given item can fulfill the entire realm block’s demand. If crafting had a real-time queue where crafting most stuff took hours, then you’d likely have more people settling for less-than-max-quality gear and consumables for the sake of timely delivery.
I have an alt army that I can use to level up my main(s) professions. However, I’ve decided to help out the fellow crafter, today on my warlock I placed three public work orders (stave, ring and necklace) and thanked the crafters for their hard work, even included a nice sizable tip.