For sure, but being able to make adjustments on the fly (which they do), is necessary to keep the game fun and accessible to everyone. Obviously there have been plenty of professions in the past that have been a bust relative to gold making and usually there are 1 or 2 that net a lot and cost a lot. The difference though was players could quickly adjust if needed. So much so you could drop a profession one day and pick up another and max it out. This helps keeps competition high and even keeps prices reasonable for everyone. The market adjusts.
Now, there is a huge cost of entry and a large of time (start to finish) that is needed to make professions viable. The margins are so thin on many professions that until your a couple months in, you’re really not going to make much gold unless you’re really investing a lot of time. Couple that with bots and the average player is really being left behind.
Quick example. I have enchanting on a couple toons. Very often the prices of the enchants are less than the materials it takes to produce them. Clearly players aren’t operating a loss, so how does the casual player make gold? Well, they don’t outside of lots of time spent farming and that clearly isn’t how it should work. There are ‘players’ that spam EVERY profession in chat and have multiple accounts online at once to snipe orders. I don’t think that’s a good system.
I can’t speak for you or others of course, but for me TWW crafting has been much cheaper than either DF or SL
And blizzard did make changes! They took down tinderbox hard. They took down storm dust. Those were both markets I was selling in and so it made me sad. Lol
I do intent to empty the coin purses before the next season. Those vacationing raiders better come back before the conversion or there will be tears! I am a delver also… Haven’t felt the need to buy boxes in AH in quite a while now. Still cringe at bs WOs but tis more a grumble.
They did and that’s my point. I think continued adjustments would help. BS is still substantially more than any other profession. Not that is has to be cheap, but given the huge amount of skill points needed to level it up, some help would be good.
In the end, a catch up mechanic of some type would be good and/or a way to redistribute your skill points, though I doubt that would ever happen.
I started my final crafter (Inscription on Silvermoon Horde) on 15 Jan. Four days later (I could have done it in one just did not feel like it) I hit 50 skill, dumped 70 KP into Staves, and filled my first Work Order for a R5 Vagabond’s Bounding Baton that provided a nice 10k gold. In the three weeks since starting, that character has outlays of 19k gold and filled 163k gold worth of commissions. Net profit: 142k gold. Not horrible for three weeks at the tail end of Season 1 on a new crafter.
Your point about the huge cost of entry. Leveling 70-80 via questing will net you around 8-9k without doing a single world quest. More than enough now to finance entry into any profession.
Your follow on point about Enchanting is very specific to Enchanting and sort of Alchemy. Very thin margins that often require you to farm your own materials to make a profit. That is no different from many other expansions when they were current except for very specific periods of time, like when a new raid released. And since we’re on this part of the topic, this is why even though I have multiple Enchanters and Alchemists, I don’t try to compete or make gold with them. BS, Inscription, Tailoring, JC, and LW (in that order so far in TWW) provide more than enough return on investment to cover my costs in the others.
Your server(s) and profession(s) mileage will vary, but to say it takes months of work to be viable and make gold is flat wrong.
It’s not. For the average player, they aren’t coming close to this. As I have said, the margins on a lot of crafted items are already very low. So what does that leave you with? Work orders and sitting in trade sniping orders. If you’re on a big realm, that can be tough unless you want to sit and wait. This is assuming you went down the ‘correct’ path that is profitable. Some routes are more so than others. To that, as you just said, a lot of this depends on the realm you’re on.
Regardless, your vantage point is coming from someone who has clearly put in a ton of time to understand how things work. That is also a part of the cost of entry. None of my friends do professions any more.
That said, going back,
Where is the average player even learning about this, little less even knowing it exists.
It’s all too much. If you’re on a large realm and you’re competing with bots and thin margins, then basically every profession just turns into a gathering profession.
We are back to different contexts and possibly different definitions. I am talking in the generic that anyone CAN, not that anyone WILL. Nothing you brought up for why I am wrong is pertinent in that context because any player CAN do what I said. Yes, I have almost 20 years of experience on Uther (Alliance) and around 12 years on Silvermoon (Horde). But frankly, any person could come onto either server for one or two months, observe what goes on in Trade Chat, talk to some people from the various guilds, and then choose a profession and a KP investment strategy that would net them gold. Even if they only played 1-2 hours per day. It IS possible, but if they are unwilling to put in that work, they will not make money without being dead lucky.
As point, one of the five biggest Blacksmith goblins on Uther only started playing WoW in the middle of DF, and he was there before the end of the expansion. Yes, far above whatever either of us would define as ‘average,’ but still shows what can be done when one wants to.
Is spending 1-2 months to learn your server unreasonable for an average player? Is spending a few hours interacting with other crafters, your local guilds, and reading to really understand your chosen profession too much for an average player?
So let’s try this:
What are you defining as an ‘average player’?
Time played? Per session? Daily? Monthly?
Content done?
Time spent on a particular type of content?
Gold made?
Involvement with a particular type of content?
Other(s)?
Because go back to your high school math classes. In any sort of environment or context where we are discussing averages, medians, and distributions, there will always be people far below, below, around, above, and well above. But to have a meaningful discussion you first need to agree on what constitutes that average, median, or base-point.
Quoting me out of context? Where do you see me insulting that bloke that wants to do professions by feel and not use any guides?
Your victim mentality is rearing its ugly head again it reads like. Lemme quote you in the same manner then:
Who is civil and who is resorting to insults then?
Lots of post in this thread trying to explain things to you and your responses read like this:
You ever go to the supermarket and that nice single mom is there with her two year old? Kid is stomping his feets cause he wants the sugary teeth rotting treat on the top shelf. That is very much how you read to me in this whole thread. Its becoming very boring and useless. Like power leveling.
OP is very far from being the average player or a casual btw. Posting with a private classic toon? Nothing casual or average there. Give a better example.
Guess we are back to that reading thing we talked about again. I could return the favor, sure but that would bring me down to your level sooo pass. Stomp your feet all you like. The adult says no.
I’m actually scratching my head at how you determined that with this paragraph I was not being civil.
You only quoted the first sentence so I assume it was that sentence you found offensive.
Yet it is the leading sentence in a paragraph. Therefore to evaluate the sentence you need to evaluate it in the context of the paragraph. As written, it was intended to indicate where you should have learned the information contained in the following sentences within the paragraph. No insult intended whatsoever.
It was not a command or imperative which would have read: ‘Go back to your high school math class.’ If I had written it this way, agreed that would have been an insult.
I suppose I could have made the link more obvious by replacing the period with a colon to read ‘math classes: in any’. While potentially more correct, the way I phrased it still left the leading sentence as a guide for the paragraph in place.
So I remain at a loss to understand your perspective of why you found it uncivil.
At least make an attempt to be honest and own it. It reads exactly as you intended it. Regardless, the statement has nothing to do with math. The other thread I linked IS the average player.
Actually no, you did not READ the exchange with Sniperorc. You took what suits your narrative.
And the OP in that thread you quoted me out is a heroic raider/mythic runner with 21k achievements points. That’s average to you? He’s just not a crafter, and seems very much into investing his time elsewhere. That is fine.
I am eargerly awaiting you put that into effect by the way.
I would not construe anything on the forums as the output of an “average player”. A lot of players view this forum not as a place to converse with other players but as a way to complain to Blizzard. Considering you are basically looking in the “complaint box” as it were, you’ll find heavily negative opinions about pretty much anything. Similarly neither you nor I can use our circle of friends as “average” because that has a) too small sample size, b) not randomly selected, and c) anecdotal. Blizzard sends out surveys, and we are not privy to those results.
I am not trying to attack you, just asking you to consider a different point of view, because I feel like you are a reasonable person. I wouldn’t waste my time replying if I did not believe that.
There’s one thing in all this that I’d like you to consider, if you don’t mind:
I do not think it is feasible for all crafters to make a profit from their crafts.
Why?
Because 50-80% of the playerbase in a given expansion are crafters or gatherers. In comparison, 30%-40% complete the end boss of a given expansion on any difficulty, including LFR. Similar numbers complete the “conqueror” levels of mythic +.
More players have professions than there are customers for those professions.
The purpose of crafting isn’t to make gold. The purpose of crafting is TO CRAFT. And while you might complain about lots of people (and they are people with addons, not bots) jumping all over someone asking for a craft, this implies frankly that there are a lot of people who can make the item. They can make it for you, but, more importantly, they can make it for themselves. Which is the point of crafting.
Are there some who cannot figure it out? I’m sure there are some. How many I don’t know. But the majority of complaints aren’t “I can’t make items”. Rather the complaints are: “I can’t sell items” or “I want to complete this tree but I am too far behind (so I can’t sell items)” or “I don’t like it” (even though they’ve barely tried it). It is perfectly fine not to understand the details like flickers and glimmers and finishing reagents and stats. You don’t need that to complete a craft.
Those vacationing raiders better come back before the conversion or there will be tears! I am a delver also… Haven’t felt the need to buy boxes in AH in quite a while now. Still cringe at bs WOs but tis more a grumble.