Here’s my idea for public order. “CRAFTING SAMPLES”
Basically, instead of taking a public order and completes it, the player crafts a ‘sample’. So multiple crafters can take the same order and each creates a sample.
This way, the customer can wait for a 5 star piece or just take the 2 star piece. In addition, the crafter should set the price, not the customer. That way, the customer has to choose between a pricey 5 star item or a cheap 2 star item.
The ‘sample mechanic’ will also populate the public order list. Right now, its always empty because orders get competed right away. But if the customer doesn’t choose right away, their list will stay up longer. And it’ll appear there’s tons of activity.
I think the work order system is a good idea, however there are for sure some holes in it. As a player who logs in every day for a few hours and spends time researching wow content, I would call myself a middle of the road player, not casual not hardcore. There must be a better way to keep the progress rolling.
As a middle of the road player, I pick up professions to gear my own characters. I find crafting to be more rewarding, than just running a dungeon and getting a drop.
Leveling a profession is now community driven, I really feel completely stalled out leveling up professions, in the last week I saw a single work order for a pickaxe that was gone in minutes.
Between the time gating of the Sparks of Ingenuity, farming Primal Chaos in Heroic or Mythic+ “when I have time” and trying to obtain a recipe, is there any point to picking up a profession? At a heroic level difficulty, you get one Primal Chaos on the end Boss, one recipe calls for 100+ primal chaos” assuming you have the recipe”, Now you can supplement that with some world quest that I have seen drop 5+ Primal Chaos, buy the time I am done building a set it will more than likely be irrelevant.
What’s stopping the gold farmers for creating multiple characters and basically owning the work orders? Maybe the complexity of crafting will scare them off.
This system only exists because everything thats good was set as BOP. They had to fabricate a reason for this system to even exist. Its a lame excuse to make a system. They literally had to fabricate a reason for it. Just scrap it already
Seems to me like the ability to specify exactly the stats and special effect you want on equipment instead of hoping someone puts exactly the variant you want on AH or having to hunt down a crafter to make something exactly the way you want without worrying about the possibility that the crafter may screw it up or disappear with your expensive mats are pretty good reasons to have a work order system.
Only thing missing is a minimum quality spec on public work orders.
If the system requires us to talk to people to get the exact piece made, then you could do that under the old system if the item were simply tradeable.
Greatdealz point stands. The system exists only because the items are BoP.
I think the problem is they got work orders back to front, It should not be driven by a player requesting an item but rather by the crafters advertising they want to craft and this is what I can make. It should be a system more like Etsy with appropriate ways of removing crafters that are no longer active from the advertising system.
This would even the playing field a lot between the hardcore who can advertise in trade chat all day and those with jobs/families/lives who want to engage in the crafting system but are currently locked out.
They received much feedback to this effect, but were only able to make minor changes to the system because it entered testing in only the last couple of weeks.
In fairness, this sort of system is very hard to test because test server economies aren’t representative of live economies.
They already had a crafter-to-buyer system, the AH. They wanted to add a buyer-to-crafter link with this system. However, they did so by silo’ing the tradegoods available in the two systems.
An advertising system, an Etsy-system to use your comparison, would likely meet similar problems. The gear isn’t good enough to warrant the difficulty of acquiring it. It’s catchup gear for bad luck. By definition bad luck doesn’t happen to most players. Therefore, the system is not only optional, but is unlikely to be needed by most players BY DESIGN.
It just doesn’t feel like whoever designed the system is working with good demographic data, or perhaps they had an outside party cripple their original design. That happens a lot in game design, especially when you have entrenched design philosophies that focus on keeping high end players feeling elite.
If they let us reset knowledge to be able to craft what people actually want, this would not be a problem. I just wanted to have brez, and I am stuck because to have level engi itself, I’d have to do work oders, and I don’t want to have to type in trade chat to be able to level a profession. The whole system is a huge money-sink and rather disappointing…
Yep there are not enough orders in the system. I have been saying this is the core of the problem from the beginning because I did some ballpark math with very generous to blizzard assumptions and proved that demand for work is 100x the work available.
However the white-knights and early movers said just wait it’s week one, then it was wait until season 1 starts, then it was wait until people are filling in their missing slots…
Guess what, there are still no orders.
The sad thing is that if they had no quests to fill orders and people could grind cheap AH sell-able recipies to 100 skill and only use the work order system for occasional high end crafts it would be a wonderful system. Unfortunately blizzard has tied to much other stuff to what should be a low volume high margin trade hub.
They also say that they want a better way to connect crafters and custormers than trade chat spam.
Overall the wins of the system are minimal and the admitted flaws are serious so for me this is an acknowledgement that much more work is needed and planned.
I spied this just now as well. Their comment about trade chat not being an ideal way for crafters and customers to connect is super confusing in context of that seeming exactly like what they’re hoping for. Removing the option to set a minimum quality for public orders suggests that they want customers to find crafters and likely remember them for future crafts/recrafts.
Here’s my question: why are they avoiding public sale orders? I feel like that’s something that works really well with similar crafting systems in other MMOs. See above, I guess…
The blue post also does little in addressing how lopsided the gold rush is for certain professions/crafters over others. My guess is that they have a lot of work ahead of them to let inspiration help rebalance the flawed, initial rollout if the system. If nothing changes, the top of every economy are those that lucked into “correct” specs/sub-specs and got in early enough to be remembered by customers.
That definitely explains the absence of sale orders, but it wouldn’t explain a situation where they’re avoiding implementing them from here. But yeah, agreed; a lot of the flawed rollout likely has to do with them running up against it. I wonder what this would have looked like with proper testing. What we get to see is what it will look like adapted after testing on live.
I can agree it’s definitely not a perfect system right now. The single spark every week feels horrible to either spend on an order or for yourself. From what I’ve seen on my server everyone just puts in orders for maxed items and so if you’re not capping your craft you’re not finding work.
Since almost all the quality items are BoP you can’t just craft items and post on AH like we’ve done for 17 years. This causes a massive amount of spam in trade chat to the point I have to leave it cuz I can’t see anything beyond constant links.
It’s still at an early point in development and a lot of people don’t even understand how to use it effectively or are unaware of what is really out there item wise unless they do thorough research for gear mostly. Each profession has so many unique items now that there isn’t an easy way to search for them.
I’m hoping as time goes on more orders eventually get made, right now I always see an empty window. Too many active crafters eager to skill up or gain profits and not enough people wanting to utilize crafting over M+ or Raiding.
It’s something I’m both eager to see grow and worry about greatly. Nothing that I have that’s BoE sells really or if it does, it’s a 100g and not really worth it. Feels frustrating to think I made more gold in Shadowlands than I am now, even with the rush of players coming back and powerful gear available.
I’ve got my fingers crossed this works out better in the near future though.
people are talking about it, i posted about it not long ago too and it did garner some response from other players who seemed to generally agree
this crafting system is really really bad. for such a title, and how long WoW has been around, im flabbergasted they went this way with it. there are so many games that do it so much better. did play testers really think this was fun? if it was play tested anyways lol
on the bright side other aspects of the game are fun for now but, this system completely squashes trade skills as a worthy time investment for most, i think. whatever time investment devs thought they’d get out of players for tradeskills im guessing is going to be largely non-existent