No actually. That was the degenerate play I was talking about.
The guy who did it was basically spending full work days of dirt farming for months. All so that what? He is done grinding KP weekly?
The markets are saturated. Every optimized build now has quite a few players that can do them - so no one is cornering anything - even with a fully maxed profession.
Not sure what to tell you here. Sadly this ship has sailed. This is still not an indictment of the profession system so much as it is the amount of exploits and bugs that came out with DF (which were quite a few).
On a personal level, professions turned from being interesting to flat-out not worth the effort since:
I didn’t progress them fast enough before taking a break from the game.
My server group is low pop and there simply aren’t work orders for me to skill up on.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea behind prof changes…20x better than Shadowlands (whatever that’s worth,) but since I’ve returned for class changes + S2 of M+, I’ve looked at my professions and lost interest almost immediately. I just don’t care for them.
Tying profession prog to needing others to buy your stuff was a mistake, imo. Yes that has been apart of profs in the past, but it’s gone from a bonus to a requirement. There’s simply too much supply and not enough demand, and that diminishes their value tremendously.
If I cared enough I’d brainstorm what I think would fix it, but…well, as I said earlier, I kinda just don’t care at this point.
I gave up my professions as soon as it came out that bugs were being patched but the people that already profited for them wouldn’t have their progress set to where it should be. If cheaters are incentivized why even try?
People cry over systems because others exploit em, but as a casual gamer I could careless what a few players are doing. Players always exploit every system in this game. Professions have never had so much identity and depth in this game then they do now.
I feel like this is the fallacy most people fall into. You can get the cap on profession skill relatively quickly.
Your bottleneck is and always has been the knowledge points which are limited to around ~14 per week.
Early on, the skill thing was a challenge, since very few crafters could satisfy the entire market demand, but that is less of a thing now.
If you are a low pop realm, then that is a different issue entirely. There is an added problem of playing the low pop faction in a highly imbalanced realm. Trade chat is not cross-faction even though the work orders are. So without cross-faction trade chat, people won’t know you exist (if you play the 1 in a 9:1 faction server - even 50/50 would be bad as it splits your market in half).
They exposed so many problems but there were a lot of good ideas. Hope they don’t toss the baby out as well.
One I recently realized, how were crafting tools supposed to increase over the course of expansions?
And there’s the one big issue of everyone having crafting alts. Too many suppliers and too few buyers makes the AH more of a convenience niche and crafting more a single player experience.
How is this an “issue”? I’ve always done most of my crafting on alts. So do most folks I know. If anything, Dragonflight really clamped down on that by adding the skill trees so you needed others to make items for you. But that’s largely also to do with how powerful crafted gear is this expansion, it’s never been this powerful.
If you just want crafting as a single player game, it’s not an issue.
If you want crafting as multiplayer game, it’s a big problem. Because everyone has their own horizontal and and vertical monopolies.
If everyone has their own alchemist, everyone makes their own phials and everyone is trying to sell their extra phials to everyone that has their own alchemist that makes their own phials…
Except, as I pointed out, Dragonflight makes us go to other people more than any prior expansion, because of the specialization angle in the skill trees.
Now that profs aren’t just “skill up to 100 making garbage greens, then you can make anything” like profs have been through most of WoW’s history, suddenly things become a lot more interesting (and multi-player focused).
Or alts. Anyone taking crafting seriously will make the vertical monopoly as well.
It’s not an absolute where everyone has a leveled one of everything, but there will be a lot more of every profession than if professions were limited per account instead of per toon.
And it’s getting more macroscopic everyday. My lessor played alts are catching up on a lot of these things.
And as more and more people catch up, fill in the holes they’re missing, the value of everyone’s effort will diminish.
We’re getting to the same place, it’s just not happening in the first week.
Which begs the question, has this made crafting more fun? Limiting alt crafting by making it so monotonous, FOMO, and cumbersome that people wont want to level alts.
No I don’t advertise at all anymore. My main is a LW and I made enough gold to pay for all my other characters professions from the advertising I did initially (only 2 times each day) but there is another LW who advertises about 4-5 times a day who seems to get all the business so I make most of my gold off of JC and BS now. JC via the public work orders and some AH sales and BS via requests on trade that I am able to pick up.
I have a lot of characters though and I save myself a lot of time being able to make things for myself whenever I want.
I only play a couple of hours most days but it takes me all week to get everything done and that is getting a little tedious to be honest. I originally only planned on doing the weekly quests on each and on some just collect the mettle each week but I have expanded since I got more efficient.
It is an issue because that is why there are little to no public works on most servers, except the full raid heavy population ones perhaps.
I have put in 2 work orders for others the entire expansion and have made 100s of items for my characters - that takes 100s of items out of the work order system that blizzard probably counted on when they designed the work orders.
That’s what I said (or meant; unsure where the misunderstanding comes from,) It’s gone from a bonus (like in the past when profs had old specializations) to a requirement in DF.
