Guild Wars 2

Because, yeah, I want to talk about cooking. I’d like to begin by saying that cooking, of all the crafts, is probably the most fun (thanks to the discovery system). It’s a great way to get xp, as well. The good points of cooking as a craft are not in dispute. I have leveled it on more than one character, so I absolutely understand the positives. The negatives, however, do warrant further inspection.

At the beginning, Lachaidh (or whoever you’re talking to) warns you that cheffery is not for the faint of heart – you’ll spend more money on it than on a typical craft, and it will take longer to gather the resources. What they fail to mention is that there is basically no chance to recoup your losses.

Let’s compare. The most expensive food item on the Trading Post (not counting Feasts) sells for 7 silver and 35 copper. The most expensive crafted Jeweling item on the Trading Post costs 66 GOLD. Most of what you’ll make while cooking sells for less than 8 copper a piece. Many of them sell for only 1 copper, or won’t sell at all. Because food items cannot be sold to a vendor, nor salvaged (which would be admittedly silly), you’ll end up having an inventory bloated with a LOT of food that’s not worth eating or selling. Even giving it away is difficult! Much of the time, I’ve just mailed it to random people in Lion’s Arch and hoped that they wouldn’t send it back.

ArenaNet, I know you’ve tried to combat this by making some ingredients, like vanilla beans and cinnamon, harder to find. The price of vanilla beans has adjusted accordingly…unfortunately, the price of foods with vanilla beans in them has, on the whole, not. Most cooking ingredients (harvested or crafted) sell for far more than the finished recipes.

The problem is that there’s no way to realistically cut down on the market bloat. The Trading Post is flooded with foods that people have made while leveling cooking. There’s a ridiculous amount of supply, and the amount of demand is nowhere near high enough to keep up. I could buy a lifetime’s supply of relevant foods for all of my characters for under one gold.

So, my suggestion. I think that making the ingredients harder to find was a good idea in theory (albeit a bit frustrating in practice – if we can buy milk and butter in bulk, I think eggs are a natural addition to that), but what we really need is a way to get rid of all this kittening food. Right now, our options are a) eat it, and b) destroy it, two options which give the crafter little benefit (an ephemeral stats boost quickly overwritten by the next food eaten, or nothing at all, respectively). Or you can donate it to the Lionguard, but even that is barely rewarding, considering the amount of food needed and the current inability to spend Commendations.

I suggest returning the ability to sell food to vendors. That would bring cooking more on a level with the other crafts. If you make a dagger that doesn’t sell for much on the Trading Post, you can salvage or vendor it, in both cases getting something useful in return for your effort, even if the value is diminished from what you put into it. Over time, this will cut the excess supply of unwanted foods, and the market will right itself.

My other suggestion, which is not mutually exclusive with the above, is to make food more worthwhile. Let us have more than one food effect at a time, for example (I’m not suggesting an unlimited amount, but more than one). Or, my favoured idea, increase the stat boost on some of the foods. Many of them are only helpful to low level characters, who, on the whole, aren’t consumers of food (aha, it is a pun). Low-leveled foods could be percentage-based to make them relevant to higher level characters without making them overpowered for the lower-level ones.

In any case, whatever the solution ends up being, it’s clear that something needs to be done about the value of food. It’s drastically out of line with the other crafts, which I highly doubt was your intention, ArenaNet. Thank you very much for your time.

I think the problem is as you said, cooking is a great way to get XP…. In turn you have people making food because of XP instead of profit, because the gold to XP conversion is better than other crafting professions. In turn you have people making all this food (on several characters) without profit in mind, thus flooding the market with supply while demand remains the same, bringing the price as low as it could go.

A merchant option would only add a floor not bring it up to the level of profit other classes can see, it would not increase demand, and would only give excess supply a place to go when price would normally fall below that floor. It was first removed because people were using it as a means to convert karma to gold at a economy breaking rate.

The cooking/food market would look much different if people could not get XP from crafting at a favorable gold to XP rate.

Cooking is basically a once-per-character way to spend $1 in order to gain ten levels.

I have just Mastered chef on one of my characters and it was pretty expensive to do so, but by the end of it, I was buying the in between stages rather than the raw ingredients, because it was cheaper, and most of the time I ended up eating it in bulk, as I didn’t have much space to store it on the low level character- that and half the stuff I couldn’t really use.
I do think that being able to sell it to merchants is a good idea- even if it’s only 50c or something, it still gives you a bit more money to put back into it.

Maybe in a similar way to the feast tables that guilds can have- put a table in Lion’s Arch and get players to drop excess food on it, as it’s free food to those that want or need it.

Salvaging would be a godsend especially with basic chillis going for stupid amounts and the ghost pepper going for pennies.

Some nice ideas in there

I’d personally want a title to work towards as a chef, ‘Buffet Bruiser’ or something like that along the GW1 vein of the eating and drinking titles.

No crafting profession has any significant profit margin. Cooking is no exception.

This isn’t the fault of the crafting skills however more than it is a side-effect of the “everyone can learn everything” stance they took on crafting skills. With so much competition there won’t ever be a significant profit to be made in crafting.

As for Cooking itself, my only major gripe with it is the amount of ingredients you have to juggle constantly.

We’re talking over 100 different raw ingredients and probably close to 40 produces here. Then add the stuff you need to buy from the vendor and you’re easily juggling 200 different things.

Very tedious.

I’d prefer it to be more streamlined.

Cooking profit margin is one of the worst compared to other profession.
And what is up w/ the unidentified dye craft? U gather like 3G of mats, just to get a lousy common dye?

well.. find some nice food niche and you can earn from it. if you try to earn from some overcooked stuff then you are going to have a bad time.

well.. find some nice food niche and you can earn from it. if you try to earn from some overcooked stuff then you are going to have a bad time.same like in other crafting professions u can earn ‘fast’ with small profit margins, say <5% profit from investment. and if you are not too lazy and haven’t lost your ability to think yet, you can easily earn a lot more. for some foods earning 200% from what they cost to make is normal.. as people are too lazy to craft them. but well then again, if you want make greedy bite , then it takes time.

well.. find some nice food niche and you can earn from it. if you try to earn from some overcooked stuff then you are going to have a bad time.same like in other crafting professions u can earn ‘fast’ with small profit margins, say <5% profit from investment. and if you are not too lazy and haven’t lost your ability to think yet, you can easily earn a lot more. for some foods earning 200% from what they cost to make is normal.. as people are too lazy to craft them. but well then again, if you want make greedy bite , then it takes time.crafting mid level foods and partial materials in most cases is a lot more profitable then making ‘final version’ of food. but takes longer to sell.

oh.. and if you expect that you can buy from sellers and sell to buyers to get profit – then you must be high (tho in rare cases there are opportunities to do so).

You would think they would add a collection spot for your Bakers Dry, Bakers Wet, Divinity Herbs stuff. Storage is finite…

The main reason supply is so great is that everyone can (almost) freely level all eight crafting disciplines. If they’d have limited us to two disciplines per character, then perhaps people might be forced to turn to the Trading Post for their consumables.

While we’re on the subject, I think there’s simply too many pointless foods. Why would anyone buy a “X% chance to gain Might for 30 seconds after a kill” food when they could simply buy “+X Power for 30 minutes” food.

The cooking profession was ruined right after the Chilli Peppers incident. Yes, I said incident because I don’t really see it as an exploit. You were using karma to get gold, but karma had to be earned so there wasn’t an infinite loop which could generate infinite gold. And because of that they removed the vendor price from all cooking ingredients and food recipes which is kind of stupid(reminds me of Smiter Boon nerf).

Also shortly after they removed a lot of items from karma vendors. Now most generic karma vendors only sell the same 3 cooking ingredient. They used to sell a lot more stuff closer to release.

So yeah, vendor price for food needs to be back.

Yea, as much as I enjoyed the discovery system, I just hit 400 cooking earlier today and immediately regretted it because:

- I don’t have any bag/bank space unless I just straight up delete stuff.

and

- There’s really nothing profitable. Almost everything I saw, including the famous Omnomberry bar sells for less than the price of the raw materials.

Bleh…I should have known better.

if you are looking at overcrafted food like omnomberry bars, then you are doing it wrong

Saulius.8430:

if you are looking at overcrafted food like omnomberry bars, then you are doing it wrong

The profit margin with food is small, so to be able to make any decent profit to offset the time/effort cost, you need to sell a sizeable quantity. High demand food like Omnomberry bars aren’t the only thing I’ve looked at, but low demand foods, even when profitable don’t look like they are worth the time I spent leveling 400 cooking.

The opportunity cost for this profession really looks to be too high in this current market to justify it.

cooking is fine 1g 30s for 10 levels? its a great deal

The reason the dishes cannot be sold to vendors was because originally we could, and a bit later on it turned into an exploit… people were making tons of money with little invest on their end.

There’s nothing that really needs to be changed, useless dishes sell for 1c since they were made to lvl alts, and everything that is really useful will be sold for its actual price

You know that you can dump stacks of food into the mystic forge for captain’s commendations, yes?

That’s basically vendoring them, but for a spiffy unique currency.

Nike.2631:

You know that you can dump stacks of food into the mystic forge for captain’s commendations, yes?

That’s basically vendoring them, but for a spiffy unique currency.

As frustrated as I am at cooking right now, the thought of flushing all this extra crap down the mystic toilet sounds rather appealing, regardless of what it throws back…

Selling it would help yes, but I think that’s not the primary reason most food is so cheap. The primary reason is you can only have one overall food effect active at a time, and everyone and their dolyak want magic find. That one is in some demand, so the price on the others has basically gone to zero. Food buffs are actually pretty good, but if it’s not magic find, people don’t want it.

Another thing that might help a little is a daily crafting quest mission to make certain items.

katubug.6378:

So, my suggestion. I think that making the ingredients harder to find was a good idea in theory (albeit a bit frustrating in practice – if we can buy milk and butter in bulk, I think eggs are a natural addition to that), but what we really need is a way to get rid of all this kittening food. Right now, our options are a) eat it, and b) destroy it, two options which give the crafter little benefit (an ephemeral stats boost quickly overwritten by the next food eaten, or nothing at all, respectively). Or you can donate it to the Lionguard, but even that is barely rewarding, considering the amount of food needed and the current inability to spend Commendations.

How was making food ingredients more rare a good idea?

All you did was screw over people trying to level cooking after the change and did nothing to help anyone else. And that was the obvious result of such a change. Anyone who got behind this idea either had no idea what they were really asking for or was trying to increase their own pocketbook at the expense of everyone who would come after.

I am not even sure what you thought this was going to accomplish because making food more expensive clearly was not going to be it. I am nearly certain that almost everyone has an alt who has cooking and the reason why food is so worthless is therefore related both to everyone being able to do their own cooking and tot he value of the product not being very desireable. If no one was purchasing food at the lower price why would they suddenly start purchasing it at the higher price?

The more likely repercussion to reducing the supply of cooking materials, which coincidentally is exactly what happened, would be making leveling cooking harder and requiring players to spend more time hunting for cooking mats without doing anything to increase the price people were willing to pay for something they already were unwilling to pay much for to begin with.

Perhaps you imagined that cooking produced items which had an inelastic demand? I am not sure why you left out the likelihood that everyone could cook for themselves that seems to have been your downfall.

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

You would think they would add a collection spot for your Bakers Dry, Bakers Wet, Divinity Herbs stuff. Storage is finite…

They are trying to force you to buy more space.

Ellisande.5218:

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

You would think they would add a collection spot for your Bakers Dry, Bakers Wet, Divinity Herbs stuff. Storage is finite…

They are trying to force you to buy more space.

I think they were just short sighted. Look at all the collections space they added over the holiday for things like ectos and loadstones.

darkace.8925:

While we’re on the subject, I think there’s simply too many pointless foods. Why would anyone buy a “X% chance to gain Might for 30 seconds after a kill” food when they could simply buy “+X Power for 30 minutes” food.

Many of the foods are interesting, but the effort/cost vs benefit is out of whack. If these low-benefit foods were very low cost relative to other valuable foods, people might use them. There are also plenty that have useful benefits currently, but they have unreasonable recipes relative to other useful foods.

For instance, I might use the Rare Veggie Pizza for the bonus condition duration and damage on my condition-build elementalist, but the total number of ingredients is simply ridiculous. It requires crafting 7 products with a total of 17 non-crafted ingredients, of which 9 are gathered. Compare that with the popular Omnomberry Tarts, which require only two products and a total of 6 ingredients, of which only one is gathered.

I have to agree, on the majority of the comments mainly being a cook i have discovered the prices in mats to buy from the tp is not worth buying to make the food. I mean i’ll give you an example to make a jar of mint sauce you will need a chili pepper those chili’s are selling for around 6 silver 30 copper each you can buy jars of mint sauce for around 2 silver. Now i know the reason why people are selling them for a high price, but taking into consideration by the time a cook buy’s the ingredients to make the food in order to sell it, it’s pointless. low level mats are not just used in level 400 cooking they are used for lower levels also, low level character food is made for the same purpose lvl 80 food is made for, so why have an ingredient so rare. If i could have a chance of getting back my chili pepper from salvaging the mint sauce i have made i could use this to make another food, so maybe anet could look in to this.

I must spend around 3 hours a day gathering due to the price of mats on the tp. We need a way to make back some of our losses. As for feasts used for wvw then people need to come together as a community and help towards the cost of making these as for a cook it’s very expensive, less people are making them so they become more expensive to buy. It seamed to work a bit on our sever then the interest kinda faded away, i made feasts for the wvw community which are like 60 silver or more to buy i made these for a few months and this was a non profit thing for me but now, i am unable to do this due to the mats and time spent to gather those. I’m hoping more ingredients become available either by karma or other means and food becomes less of an hassle to make, i can see a lot of people losing interest in cooking soon.