Could we have a more working suggestion for the crafting orders, then just submitting “an order for free” - I have 0 mats and I will tip 1s.
This is unhealthy, and now with the limit to 4 orders and people trying to scam crafters to give them items for free the situation is terrible.
My suggestion would be:
Make the free crafts targeted only - guild or personal.
“Hey Jessy, I need that belt for the raid/m+, to increase my efficiency, can you do that for me, please, I will pay up later.” case closed.
Connect the crafting orders with the AH.
Lets say I want the so sought after necklace for it’s gems. I don’t have the mats, I don’t want to bother looking for it through all ranks of materials etc.
I want it to be a public order
I want it to be a certain quality (select quality from dropdown)
The “Crafting Order Assistant” averages out (does not include inspiration) and includes the mats as per the AH availability and prices. say my Necklace will cost me 10k for 4 star craft. Because the system works automatically I have to pay those 10k to the AH (including the NPC’s traveling expenses to go bring my mats to the Crafting Order guy), and adds a minimum service fee for the crafter - 10% of the crafting order price - 10k price + 1k fee for the crafter - 11k total. For public order you still have to provide BoP reagents yourself
You shake hands with the NPC, it goes it’s way pays the crafter his fee. You get your item as desired minimum quality.
No cheating and scamming people in the public for free orders.
Let me know what you think or how it can be improved in the comment section below.
How often anyone really needs crafting order? Once a week, even less, unless new patch?
I dont think it is such a problem to get the mats the way it is now, walking to AH and finding right quality to buy.
The whole reason why blizzard killed public orders in latest patch is because "it is hard for players to understand this so they can just do an order without reagents but with commission (based on…???) so crafter would cover it). Imagine helping small population of players that are unable to google or watch video on how to do an order and killing public orders instead. And then instead of reverting the change saying something about their philosophy
There’s an add-on to allow you to filter out any orders that do not supply all the mats (it’s made by Teelo, so you might want to read the comments on Altoholic add-on first, but, given his add-on for SL worked fine I guess he’s learnt his lesson). It won’t filter from the main list - this would require a Blizzard change, so 1s orders with no mats will still waste some of your time clicking on every item you can craft (there’s a lot for Inscription on high-pop servers).
I agree that the long-term fix is integration with the AH. Three QoL things that would help set a fair commission are:
Retain the “memory” of commission fees for a longer time span (they seem to reset to “not found” every week)
Ignore orders from alts - I regularly do my own for the weekly with a 1s commission
Ignore orders with commission of less than 10% of the average sold-price for the materials
The latter would require a batch overnight integration of material price-sold data from the Auction House. This could then be used to give Customers a guide to the crafting price and a suggested commission, without them having to wait 48 hours and find their order is not fulfilled.
I’ve seen more scammers than genuine customers (who don’t realise that they’re not going to get, for example, a Drake tmog requiring 12 Runed Writhebark and 8 Awakened Order for 2,000g).
Either they need to:
Add Quality to Public Orders (and find another way to allow late-comers to level up from 50 to 100 skill, such as the weekly profession quests giving skill points, or adding a relatively expensive, but recraftable to 100 dummy item), or
Find a better, asynchronous (i.e. crafter & customer don’t have to be online at the same time) to enable people to find a crafter for upgrades. This could be a addition to the Blizzard armory, for example, showing known recipes, base quality craft level (1-4/5 and iLevel) and Inspiration chance to proc. the next level up.
I came back for this patch and just realized the public orders no longer require all the mats to be provided. Checked through a couple dozen orders and found one that had all the mats supplied. Just one. No system can survive this signal-to-noise ratio. At least it allows me to ignore those players directly from the crafting interface.
edit: to be clear, the comissions on each of the orders I checked was insufficient to even cover the cost of the missing materials. Something like 2500g comissions on orders with 4000g worth of missing materials, and that’s probably the better ones.
You can also check for mats being supplied or not, it takes few seconds or use an addon for that. Since vanilla, customers had to trade you mats and you had to check if they gave you all. Why is it so hard now?
Yes, I am a crafter on four different professions.
Yes, this would be nice to have. Trouble is there are different tool versions and inspiration cant be calculated that easy. There is no way to know if crafter has resourcefullness tool equipped or inspiration when actually crafting.
I think the AH connection is a very good idea, however that would almost retire the crafting order system for what it was intended to be. Instead of this, the connection could be done to provide a commission suggestion to the requestor, but a haggle option should be provided for the crafter.
At the moment I can’t haggle for more price if another player isn’t online and I can’t keep the order on me until he gets online and provides a response.
Provide crafters a haggle option in which the requestor can then agree or reject. Instead of waiting for them to be online to haggle
I often used to do manual trades in Retail, such as for the Twink market (when it resurfaces on our realm) as I have a lot (80-100% depending on profession) of old patterns. It’s the difference between doing this once a week and every single trade. It’s mainly applicable to non-armour items such as Treatises and drake tmogs. For Armour, I do most of my crafts for Guild (on my main’s realm) or via Trade Chat & personal orders. Inscription is the worst one for me.
The way the CO system is laid out, you have to select each pattern in turn, then see if the mats have been supplied. Even with the addon, you still have to do the first step, as even if there are zero orders with all the mats, or where all the orders are from players on your (almost full) Ignore list, it still shows in the Search overview. For Inscription that might be 20-40 different patterns you have to click through (all the treatises for all the professions, plus all the Drake tmogs). You then repeat an hour later to check any newly about-to-expire orders. Rinse and repeat until you switch characters. Often with no orders worth taking.
This all takes time. With better design it wouldn’t be such a time-waster.