No minimum quality on public work orders makes them useless

Gameplay Professions
1

We’re back to trade chat spam as the only means of playing the game, which is awful. 95% of people spamming there can’t do what you want, and 99% of the time you post, nobody replies. Work orders are supposed to fix this, but public work orders can’t specify a quality, meaning crafts that aren’t base quality don’t really exist outside of guild or friend relationship networks.

The point of this system having a range is to enable upgrades, not minimum crafts. It is completely defeated by the bot or gold farmer standing there to fulfill every order with minimal capability, guaranteeing you precisely 372, 333, or 382 item levels, despite you using rare drops, time gated mats, and spending a lot of gold on materials.

Imagine if you could only buy a burger by supplying all of the materials, and no matter how good the materials you provided, it was that 1.4* rated McDonalds down the street cooking all of the orders. This is an utter and complete failure of a system. This makes matrices and sparks useless for most players, and any quality material above base completely useless, simultaneously devaluing gathering skill and crafting skill. Without a minimum quality on public orders, this system remains as useless as crafting has always been, and you spent developer time and resources building something nobody should use, since you can get substantially better by just playing the game casually.

To clarify on that point: WQs and rares drop better than 372, even 374 if you provide maximum quality mats. With M+ coming out, even extremely easy keys will drop substantially better. These matrix items don’t have a purpose beyond filling slots with 372 gear, and with M+ you will be able to both do better and target pieces. Where does crafting fit in? What is the purpose supposed to be? If you could reliably get 382, they’d actually benefit players, but at 372 they do not. This would equal mid LFR gear and +6 keys for fresh characters or new players, at a fairly high gold expense, allowing people to quickly jumpstart normal/heroic raiding and working towards higher keys. As it stands, all (yes, LFR, world quests, easy M+ keys, and pvp, literally 100%) content will outshine what is provided by workorders. If that remains the case, why should any player, ever, pay gold for materials and post a work order?

6 Likes
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A big part of this is that people just don’t understand how any of it works yet. On either side. Most buyers don’t know what they can ask for and many crafters don’t really know what they can do. That aspect of it will hopefully improve over time. Ideally people who do understand the system could be a bit more helpful about it in chat, but of course greed rules the day and goblins refuse to help anybody else in case they are competitors.

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On my realm – high population, there are zero work orders for Blacksmithing. I specialize in mace and long blade weapons. The Public Work Order system is completely dead from the Blacksmithing perspective.

You know what isn’t dead, Trade chat. Rather than the ‘customers’ placing their orders through the Public Work Order system, they are using Trade chat for specific items and quality, which completely defeats the purpose of using the order system. Crafters are posting in Trade chat their learned purple recipes with the quality and for FREE, no charge. I’ve seen one crafter post Free made gear and if they earn a knowledge point they’ll pay the customer 5k gold. I get it, how else are crafters going to gain access to customers, new recipes and knowledge points? No wonder there are no Public crafting work orders. Trade chat is just going to be spammed like crazy once we’re into season 1.

I was really excited for the Work Order system and now I feel deflated. I’ve decided that in order for me to complete my 20 work order QUEST, I’ll need to dust off my plate alts and level them and grind out time gated soul bound mats all the while spamming Trade chat to hopefully gain new customers.

The guild I’m in is my own and I have an alt army and I’m a solo player, thankfully I have an alt army at level 60, a bunch are plate wearers and easy enough to level them to 70. But I was planning to level my alts later on into DF and not because I need them to fill work orders!!

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The work order system itself is functional if not inspired and hampered by a bad UI

The problem is blizzard tied it to leveling your profession skill for which it is supremely unsuited. This is a common blizzard problem where they ties a functional stand alone system to something unsuitable and break both things. A similar issue happened in Torghast with legendary crafting.

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My active characters are on Stormrage. I have one character with enchanting, JC, LW and tailoring. Public work orders are pretty much dead for all of those too and I suspect the same applies for everything else that has grades.

The inability to specify minimum quality on public WOs for things that have 3-5 grades makes it into a wasteland.

1 Like
6

Yup I can’t find anyone to make my stuff been a week now.

7

i cant find anyone to make anything for to actually lvl my blacksmithing and there are never any work orders up