I. Introduction
First, I have to say the system is overall good. It rewards crafters, and allows all players to fill gaps in their gear. It’s way better than the old system where crafters had to list items in AH at a loss and where crafted items were limited to only few slots. Allowing item to be recrafted to higher item level, to change stats or to add or remove embellishments/safety is great.
However, there are some problems with the system that I am going to discuss.
II. Inspiration:
The main thing I have a problem with is inspiration. Inspiration is fine for crafting reagents. However, when crafting equipment it creates really weird interactions.
- Some players scam other players and lie about their proc chance.
- Sometimes I am lucky, I craft the item at maximum quality first time. The other player thanks me for my “great service”, even though it’s RNG that caused it to proc first time.
- Sometimes I am getting “WTF Dude? is your proc chance really 40%?” or whatever. I have to make screenshots to prove that I am not lying. In one case I was crafting an axe for a shaman with proc chance 43%, it didn’t proc after 16 times. We both wasted about 20 minutes. I ended up using my own Illustrious Insight to guarantee max rank. The interaction ended up a gold loss for both me and the shaman. I lost the Artisan’s mettle, and he lost a lot of mettle and gold for materials, and it was all for a 5K crafting fee.
So you see I am the same crafter in both cases, but I can provide a so called “Great service” or “bad service” even though in both cases it’s not up to me, it’s some RNG at the server. Also I value my time. How can I set a fair commission when I don’t know if the transaction between me and the other player will take a single attempt in 1 min or 20 minutes?
III. Public orders
As was mentioned many times in other threads, the inability to set min quality on the equipment makes players unwilling to use the public orders. Of course if they add that ability, everyone will request max quality.
IV. Complexity
The system is a bit difficult to understand for many players. I don’t blame them. It took me sometime and studying to understand it well enough. I usually take time to explain the rank of material needed, the proc chance, and still some players don’t understand. Some people send me orders with rank 2 materials and set min quality to rank 5. Others insist on sending me orders with rank 3 materials (thinking it increases their proc chance), even though I explain that it doesn’t and that only rank 2 is needed.
People don’t know how materials rank affect difficulty, minimum quality, maximum quality, etc. Some crafters ask for rank 3 mats regardless because they also don’t know how it works. It makes an addon like CraftSim absolutely necessary. I actually understood how the system works by studying the source code for that addon.
V. Leveling
It’s hard for new players to catchup to higher rank players. Levelling past 60 requires crafting orders, but no one will craft with a low level crafter who can’t make max quality. If a low skill crafter tries to use illustrious insight to offset the skill gap and it doesn’t proc maximum, and that would be a wasted illustrious insight which is frustrating as they are limited.
VI. Suggested Solutions:
- Remove inspiration chance for equipment. Keep it when crafting reagents, potions, phials, etc.
- Totally remove equipment qualities. So it’s just 392, 405, 418 and That’s it. When players make public order or personal order they know exactly what they are going to get, and what they are paying. No surprises. No lottery. No scams. No lies about proc chance. When crafters are offering to craft items, they know it won’t waste 10 minutes of their time trying proc 20 times.
- Make crafters with higher skill able to craft higher difficulties with lower rank materials. When crafter skill + skill from materials is lower than the difficulty of the recipe, then the crafter should not be able to craft the item. So a crafter can either craft the item using the given materials or can’t, and that’s it. No min quality and max quality shenanigans.
- Crafters with low skill would craft some items with rank 3 materials (depending on recipe difficulty and skill from materials + their skill). This will give them a chance to level up their professions and compete. They can offer to craft items for no fee or low fee since they can’t craft with cheap materials.
- Remove Illustrious insight, and make it possible to offset lack of skill needed to meet recipe difficulty with Artisan mettle from the crafter at 1 mettle per skill point. Again, this will help low skill crafters to level up their skill and fulfil public orders for high difficulty items, without making it too easy since Artisan mettle is a limited resource.
VII. Final thoughts:
I am aware that the changes I am suggesting are big, and may not be feasible in this expansion. And if done in this expansion would require a refund of knowledge points. But I think they are worth considering at least for a future expansion.