I agree with folks talking here about the system being young, because it is. I do think that it needs tweaks to incentivize needing to hit up other players for crafts. For example, as much as I hate to admit it, allowing players to craft across characters within their own account may have been a design miss. Obviously, there’s player-positivity inherent to designing that way, but it completely washes out any need to rely on others for anyone devoting even mediocre attention to crafting.
I also think that there should either be a minimum commission for all crafts that is tied to rarity/quality or there needs to be a bounty system baked in. For example, maybe crafting provides you with valuable non-gold currencies. Maybe crafting PvP gear gives you Bloody Tokens. Maybe you get more mettle per craft. Maybe you receive more mettle if you’re commissioning a character outside your account. That kind of thing.
It just needs more incentive. There’s hardly any outside of skillups at the moment.
Sadly none of those actions will help. The problem is that there is a fundamental missmatch in demand between the crafting community and the purchasing community. This missmatch is at least 100-1 ratio and nothing you are suggesting will solve this problem. Blizzard have tacitly acknowledged this by dropping the requirements of the work order weekly quest to 3 or 2 work orders.
The only way to solve this is to create highly desirable consumable items for all professions that most serious players will want to purchase multiple times a week.
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There are a couple of things Blizzard could do to mitigate the current situation honestly, while its true there is nowhere near enough demand, there are still people spending money through the AH for a variety of things.
They need to add every single recipe to the work order system, the fact that things like mana potions, inks or any other of the raw mats cannot be made through the work order system is absurd.
Remove restrictions around what can be placed on a work order. It would allow for enchanters to DE other people’s BOPs and give them the mats, or herbalists to decide what to do with their Writhebark, health and mana pots. It would also normalize prices because other people outside of those professions would be able to contribute to the AH and would help lower inflation by paying for each transaction on the work order system.
All recipes need to be relatively easy to acquire and should by no means be tied to drops, they should come from a vendor at no higher renown than 10. Materials on the other hand should be what is hard to come by, you could make it so that a specific material for a specific quality level comes from Mythic raids and keystones. Then the onus is not placed on the crafter but on the player that wants the recipe.
Training Kits: Develop some sort of “training” for each recipe, it could be something like it would cost you 10% of the mats with no rare mats, but it is simply for training and becomes vendor trash, BUT it guarantees progression towards that specific item, then you dont have to get rid of quality, you simply give people an alternative way to get their quality skills up.
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You’re approaching this at the wrong angle. That guy who can make it all, also can’t make any of it good. Doubt he’s making more than a few thousand per commission.
Meanwhile. YOU. GIGALORD OF BREAST…PLATES
YOU ABSOLUTE UNIT OF A BEAST, can make a breatplate that can be crafted to 405 with EVERY reagent. And you know what, you need an insight to do this. Meaning, you can now make BANK off that craft. Higher skill = more gold. I generally charge 50k-100k per insight for what I specialize in. And the customers are happy enough they send their friends to me.
So KING, those people who got everything, will need 10 orders or more just to make up for a single craft your MIGHTY BREAST…PLATE.
For real though, you specialized in something that jack of all trades can’t do. Exploit that.
To add on to this - because you specialized, you’re now one of the only crafters that can push 418 crafts without insights since inspired procs will take care of the rest. You can make some real good gold off this.
You might be overlooking how degree and continuous rewards can help the problem. Blizzard’s move to nerf the order weekly is only really acknowledging that the chore of it gated knowledge knowledge points, which are a also a timegating element in themselves. It was convoluted on arrival and didn’t provide the right reward (ie. instead providing an expected, quasi-guaranteed progression material) to make continued, individual, unexceptional batchs crafts feel important on their own.
But also granted, allowing for more and better crafts to be orderable would be good. However, that’s also a slippery slope - and maybe a different subject matter entirely. Shadowlands showed us what too many consumables can do for the player experience. It’s fine to draw a line somewhere.
my server is dead and I haven’t been able to get anyone to do my public orders in the last 4 days with 15000g added when on other servers people will do it for free just for the skillup. There’s like 15 max levels on at most at any time
“Just use the AH like normal”
Meanwhile: Everything crafted on the AH is below materials cost
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Let’s not even mention some of the weekly profession quests asking you to craft multiples of some item that costs thousands of gold in material cost / worth to make in order to get 3 knowledge points. Blizz must mistakenly think that we’re all so flush with gold that we can just throw it away like it’s nothing…
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Work orders should function like Etsy where you can see what a crafter has to offer and then place your order directly to them. It should also be fully integrated with the AH so you can just click “by mats” to fill up the rest of the order.
Orders should have no more than 24 hours completion time and if that time comes up go into a first to see first to fulfill system.
To avoid dead crafter characters in the list add crafter registration with the service as a single click of “I want to craft” and thi should expire if they don’t access work orders at all it in a 7 day period, automatically resetting every time the check for orders.
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Are work orders cross-realm or same realm only?
Work orders work cross-realm and cross-faction, but what worked for me twice (cross-shard) seems to no longer function, throwing an error about being maxxed on orders.
The whole system is confusing me. I got a titan training matrix iv and wanted gloves made at 382. I couldn’t do it myself and no one in my guild could so I had to put in a public work order. There was no option to select the quality so I added a note. Person didn’t even read it so now I have useless 375 gloves that I cant have re-crafted because its guild only for that option, which no-one in my guild can do. I’m already done with the craziness of leveling professions myself and now this is the last straw. They whole thing feels like a frustrating game separate to the actual game.
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It’s cross-realm but as far as I can tell only within the realms in your server group (if that makes sense). For example, I’m on Medivh and see (or more accurately don’t see because public work orders are mostly dead) orders from people on my realm and on Alleria, Exodar, and Khadgar. I don’t see orders from Illidan or Area-52, etc.
Personal orders are cross faction, not sure about public ones but I’d assume they are.
Yeah. I put a ton of gold into currently rare and expensive recipes, but Im fulfilling craft orders that lets the buyer determine the price so the items are affordable for everyone. Most pay a couple thousand, some pay 50 - 100k to be very generous, and one or two do 1 gold. I still do it because the generous people make up for it but it still annoys me.
I’ve been finding more and more orders as of late. The last 2-3 days I’ve pulled in close to 200k in orders. What annoys me the most, is when I get personal order requests where I have to supply my own materials, and they only put down 1-3k commission. The mats alone are usually in the 25-40k range. Not going to happen. Or even better when I get orders that require the Alter of Decay to craft and they put down a 500g commission.
I have yet to see a single order on Maelstrom across blacksmithing, engineering, jc, enchant, or tailoring.
All my crafting toons are locked at 60 ish skill as a result. I’ve had to send myself work order to do the quest.
Honestly very little discussion takes place on this forum . Professions are such niche gameplay and have been ignored for so long by Blizzard as a more meaningful method of gameplay up until this expansion that most players who enjoy it have long since left the official forums and taken their discussion to enthusiast run avenues since at least there, someone else is listening to you.
Gotta get them voices heard until the problem is addressed.
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They clearly think the system is a big sucess considering “the huge volume of orders going through the system” as it was written on the patch notes.
Just give up on it. They will die on this hill. The system is crap and they will never fix it
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That’s why I encourage people to actually talk with one another and use the personal order system. Sparks are also limiting people so they focus on the best items first and this hurts the system.
I craft the Elemental Lariat necklace that everyone wants right now and many of the other people on my server are crafting it for more of a commission, worse quality, and an extra 37k in material costs. If people are more willing to look around, they could get things of better quality.
I do think Blizzard needs to make it so when people send in a personal order or look at a crafters page they have the option to see what their inspiration, skill, and talents are.