Comments on: The problem of finding crafters

By: Inquisitor

Inquisitor — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:55:04 +0000

The official forum has per-server subforums. There’s a ‘who can craft what?’ sticky on ours. The only time I ever had trouble with this (Blade Ward enchant, in 3.1), I looked up the only horde-side crafter who had listed themself with it on there, friended them, and whispered them when they were sitting in Org. Wasn’t too painful – and the fact that they’d listed themself on the forum meant I knew they were open to randoms whispering them.

By: spinks

spinks — Wed, 05 May 2010 06:43:51 +0000

Haha, both of those are probably true. But still, all I’m asking for is an in game search to make it easier for people to do that.

By: Archi

Archi — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:54:14 +0000

Don’t take it personally but i got only 2 conclusions:

1) You are lazy
2) You get upset too fast

If you cannot find crafter then go Armory and find biggest/most progressive guild on your server. Then find all the people with prof. you need. Takes 5-6 min max to find them all. And then occasionally look in “who” or add them all to friends.

By: Everblue

Everblue — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:11:11 +0000

Back in Vanilla we had a guy roll a whole new alt (he already played a warrior, and rolled a second warrior and levelled to 60) so that he could use an ultra rare crafted axe http://www.wowhead.com/item=19169 in our raids.

Slightly off topic, but crafting is more balanced but less epic these days.

By: Veneretio

Veneretio — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:28:31 +0000

Well to clarify my point, it’s cheaper today to find a random Blacksmith you don’t know and hand them the Primordial Saronite to make the Pillars of Might than it was to get me to make a Red Belt of Battle for you back in TBC.

By: spinks

spinks — Sun, 02 May 2010 05:01:43 +0000

Well, there’s an easy solution for me since I’m a blacksmith, yes. But I think the problem is that there’s a definite market for some of these goods and crafters have no motivation to advertise or go out of their way at all to make themselves available. It would be better if people wanting crafted goods could find crafters more easily.

In TBC, it just felt easier to find the crafter because any raider would probably know who they were.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 02 May 2010 02:57:50 +0000

I like the idea of ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ orders via the AH, as some sort of classified ad system (with 3, 7, 14 and maybe 30 day classified ads, cost based on length and size of ad). I also like the idea of having crafters opt-in (rather than opt-out) to a searchable database, whether armory or in-game.

By: pxib

pxib — Sat, 01 May 2010 23:16:31 +0000

Like Kring says, the problem is that crafting is not a profitable business. There is so much cash rolling around in these games that crafting has no measurable value. Crafters need materials to level up, and they’ve got plenty of money to buy them, so the market goes sky high. Then they turn around and make items for themselves and their friends, mostly for free or for “mats”, and that sets expectations:

When people make requests in the trade channel, their thought process is typically, “I could just get practically for free from a friend of mine, but I want it NOW so I’ll ask in trade and offer a tip for their trouble.” Crafters think, “I have to go through the hassle of finding this person and assembling materials so that they can hand me the amount of money they got running dungeons for a few minutes. I spent thousands of gold and hundreds of hours leveling up this skill. Screw ‘em.”

Even if there were buy orders on the auction house, for most of the game the prices would be driven down by folks skilling up, and unless every crafting material was cheaply available from NPC vendors, material costs will always outpace finished goods because the demand will always be higher.

Look at the only profitability exception in WoW: Inscription. All its materials are cheap and omnipresent, so vendors can afford to go wholesale. Every other profession is a hobby, not a business.

By: Veneretio

Veneretio — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:26:27 +0000

I don’t really see this as a problem. I think it’s more we’re used to how easy it was to find people that could craft stuff all expansion and now that there’s a pattern that’s a bit on the rare side… we don’t like it.

I remember TBC it was far more difficult to get a pattern than the Pillars. Some of the TK and SSC patterns were so rare that you had like 2 or 3 people on the whole server that could make it for a long time.

There’s no way that the Pillars situation is even close to that bad. I mean sure it sucks if you have to buy it, but just the fact that you can tells me that there’s already a solution to the problem. When you consider how much we charged to make old belt patterns in TBC (considering inflation), I bet that even if you handed a Blacksmith a saronite for the pattern, you’re still doing better than folks back in TBC price wise.

By: Kris

Kris — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:49:58 +0000

I suppose it depends on how busy your realm forums are. We have a few dudes that keep progression and rare crafting threads updated each and every day on my server.