5641

I’m not ragging on DKP in the slightest, just to be clear. :)

5642

For fans of Oxhorn (or Lady Gaga):

5643

The last two weeks I seem to have won the Blizzard RNG lotto or something. After years, I finally won the STV derby, and got my Salty title. Then on a fluke, my other 85 won the Northrend derby the week after. Two Salty characters now. Then I went and cleared out Magister’s Terrace a few times as petty revenge for hating it in BC, and here is my new White Hawkstrider. Flew out to the Storm Peaks looking for the Time Lost Proto Drake, a total lost cause…so I stopped and did the daily in the village of the giant blue women…Polar Bear…what the heck.

And today I capped it off by actually finding, tagging, and killing the freaking Time Lost Drake. Something strange is going on, it’s like Blizzard really wants me to keep shelling out $15 by luring me with things I’ve always been trying to get but never could.

5644

So far this guild is doing pretty well… Heroic Maloriak down, to go with the Atramedes kill (I’d never even seen him on Heroic).

We had a beautiful transition into the burn phase, but it’s a crazy fight, so we barely pulled it all through. :)

5645

You get a fair bit of Embersilk, but I’m talking about the cost on the AH versus the cost of the finished good. It doesn’t matter if I can pick up 5 stacks on a single run through Deadmines - if I can put it on the AH and get the same effective price as I can crafting with it, than it essentially becomes just another pointless material to farm.

Plus, I do still have to do the runs to get it. The point I was making was that there is little to be gained in crafting the high end stuff versus the cost of the mats, not that farming is unprofitable.

You also cannot easily get fire and water at no cost. If that were the case, they wouldn’t cost anything on the AH. Again, you can’t factor out the cost of something for the purposes of this particular, specific discussion by saying that you can go farm the components. That’s not the point, the point is that the value of those components (on the “free market,” the AH) is pretty much equal to the value of the finished product using those components. There is no value add.

I understand why there is no value add (good reasons were pointed out above), I’m disappointed that is the case. I would rather see, for example, more of the time sink be in the actual crafting of the materials as opposed to the gathering of them.

5646

How many times do I have to show how wrong this is? It’s true in Tailoring because Blizzard has ruined both Tailoring and Enchanting for profit making. That doesn’t make it true of ‘crafting’.

Geez, dump the Tailoring and Enchanting and pick up Jewelcrafting and Alchemy, both of which have nice profit margins. It’ll take you less than a week to level both of them using stuff in the AH and if you don’t have that much gold, then farm for awhile until you do.

5647

Thanks a lot for the tips, very helpful!

5648

Yes, thanks RickH. And let me say that I’m glad you’re not on the same server as me or I’d have no chance to make any money.

5649

How would you suggest this be accomplished exactly?

5650

I refuse to make the same mistake I made with my Paladin (who out-levelled the Northrend Heroics before he was done with them) so I turned off XP on my 80 Rogue and am able to be as stabby as I want for as long as I want :)

5651

You’d just be changing where the value add is; it’d still just be players who are willing to spend time doing something.

Ways in which to make crafting take more time, off the top of my head:

  • gate everything on long ass cooldowns; e.g. you can only craft one 525 recipe per day.
  • make it all random. e.g. I can’t craft an Elementium Deathplate specifically; I can only craft “Elementium Armor” and it’s up to the RNG what I get. This is how Darkmoon cards work; it would suck. w/r/t Darkmoon cards the underlying recipe of final value = time + mats still holds true; it’s just you pay for all the time & mats that go into the Darkmoon cards that are dups / you can’t use / nobody wants.
  • Have crafting actually take forever. e.g. it takes 30 minutes to make Elementium Deathplate. People would just AFK through it though.
  • Have crafting take forever and require interaction; e.g. some stupid QTE. This would e awful, for obvious reasons.

I don’t think crafting will ever have serious value-add, except when long cooldowns / hard to acquire recipes are involved.

5652

MINIGAMES!

I liked Puzzle pirates briefly. Sue me.

P.S. And not like the lame EQ2 minigame either.

5653

It may not be true for crafting as a whole. Unfortunately, at this point I’m really not interested in dumping 525 points worth of each Tailoring and Enchanting to go find out for sure whether other professions are more viable and hope that they don’t gimp those professions too.

I understand what you are trying to say, but I hope you understand why I might not be excited about going off to find the couple of crafting professions that don’t suck after having gone down a lengthy road on these two that definitely do.

I think there could be ways to improve it, but I’d have to put a lot more thought into it than I’m willing to. That’s the job of the developers, not me. I just know that the current system (with a nod to Lorini, at least for Tailoring and Enchanting) seems pretty poor.

I actually am one of the people, for example, that thinks that EQ2 was a step in the right direction with having at least a minor skill based interactive system. It didn’t bother me nearly as much as it does other people for some reason. Though I think that there could be better systems. Increasing cool downs is really just substituting time cost for mats cost.

There are different things that could possibly be done. Not allowing characters to have different skills on all of their alts, for example, would be a start (so that there would not be such a plethora of, “Oh, you don’t need to buy that, let me get on my alt”).

Yes, I’m aware that there are “disadvantages” to some of those things, but I’m not sure they are totally disadvantages compared to just being “not how WoW does it now.”

A lot of the things that people think “suck” really turn out to be things that people just don’t want to do themselves, or that hinder them getting exactly the equipment they want. Which would simply increase the value of crafters if they went into effect.

It seems to me that there are at least three things in the world that cause value add from manufacturing: time spent producing that others are not willing to spend, or can more profitably spend doing other things, capital, and knowledge/technology. (I assume that things like specialized production equipment, etc. are subsets of the latter two.) Those would be the areas I would look to in figuring out how to add a value-add component to the game. Right now, it is pretty clear that the time needed is no sufficient to differentiate in price (people get to 525 so quickly, that there is no real reason to pay for the time grind). There is no knowledge/technology except for clicking a button, and some increasingly rare (by that I mean, fewer recipes are random drops) recipe drops.

5654

I think there could be ways to improve it, but I’d have to put a lot more thought into it than I’m willing to. That’s the job of the developers, not me. I just know that the current system (with a nod to Lorini, at least for Tailoring and Enchanting) seems pretty poor.

I actually am one of the people, for example, that thinks that EQ2 was a step in the right direction with having at least a minor skill based interactive system. It didn’t bother me nearly as much as it does other people for some reason. Though I think that there could be better systems. Increasing cool downs is really just substituting time cost for mats cost.

There are different things that could possibly be done. Not allowing characters to have different skills on all of their alts, for example, would be a start (so that there would not be such a plethora of, “Oh, you don’t need to buy that, let me get on my alt”).

Yes, I’m aware that there are “disadvantages” to some of those things, but I’m not sure they are totally disadvantages compared to just being “not how WoW does it now.”

A lot of the things that people think “suck” really turn out to be things that people just don’t want to do themselves, or that hinder them getting exactly the equipment they want. Which would simply increase the value of crafters if they went into effect.

5655

alchemy is profitable, especially transmuting…

5656

So if I’m understanding you correctly, Sly, you essentially want to limit the number of people crafting things.

5657

Blizzard has shown that they aren’t interested in limiting the ability for people to get to max crafting skill.

Their only intention with limiting crafting, are the recipes for the newest and best gear. They usually tie those to the newest raids in some manner (requiring rep only available in the raid, drops from bosses in those raids, etc.) They don’t want raid-quality gear too easily available. Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in making crafting either more difficult, or restrictive.

5658

It doesn’t have to be a limit to the number of crafting things. By definition, to make something valuable (here, the actual produce of crafting, as opposed to just the raw materials), there has to be some scarcity, whether it is in the number of products that can be produced, the skill it takes to make it, the number of people who are permitted to produce it, the amount of time it takes, etc.

In order to make crafting valuable, it stands to reason that there has to be some barrier to doing it.

5659

The barriers are time and knowledge, which is exactly how it should be. Not time to craft, but the amount of time spent researching and focusing on the AH and making gold in general.

5660

I’m not sure why you seem so strident, forceful, and angry about this. In any event, I frankly think we are talking past each other, as what you are saying doesn’t really seem to address my concerns. At this point, I don’t think another round of discussions or explanation is going to help anything for either of us though.