Guild Wars 2

why are the ‘jobs’ of guild wars 2 about as profitable as investing with Bernie Madoff?
seriously anet, i love crafting…but not guild wars 2 crafting. put so much in to get so little out. Jeweler used to be profitable, but since everything can be obtained in open world pve(heck, even in wvw you can get exotic drops) why does it still cost a kittenload of mats to make the highest tier gear(some gear i understand, like destroyer and corrupted, but not basic exotics that sell for ~1-2g)? There’s not even a way to set your crafted gear aside from anyone else’s, thus taking any amount of achievement right out of it. there’s no ‘best’ armorsmith, jeweler, or chef. i imagine some players are even more bothered about it than i am.

While I do love a lot of the crafting in this game I do agree with what your saying here Bane. I do love how the crafting speeds up as I process a list of the same item, I love how I can store crafting items in a click of a button. The cooking also has so much imagination in its receipies, but…

Yes I was actually thinking this today, why does crafting exist in this game?

I do think about the engineer crafting in WoW and all the awesome things I could make. I remember jumping off Thuderbluff with my new parachute boots, just so awesome and don’t even get me started on the Gyro Copter

Bottom line, make it relevant ArenaNet and make it fun. Like the OP says, there is no reason for me to craft other than the sheer joy of crafting items (which I have to say I do love).

Here’s some ideas.

Tailors – can make tents to camp with (because camping is cool!)
Cooking – birthday cakes for guild members
Leather working – can make leather bound books which can be applied to your account page and put screenshots in (yes I know I’ve gone too far now right)

I’m sure every craft could have some amazing and fun items to make as well as the normal stuff.

glad to see i’m not the only one questioning the purpose of it.

Oh me too. And another thing that chaps my butt is the weapon skins for crafted weapons…

They all look like something a Mayan Indian would use…

I’ve personally made a good bunch of gold crafting and selling Explorer Gladiator gear :o …

razn.7160:

I’ve personally made a good bunch of gold crafting and selling Explorer Gladiator gear :o …

that’s one instance.

I really like WoW engineering profession, because you can make so much awesome items. In GW2 crafting I level-up, because its needed for legendary etc.. What I have craft I didn’t use on self. For stats I can buy with tokens, for skins I bought cultural.

The problem with Crafting in this game…
…and this is something I discovered when it launched and my “guild” was so hyped up get a foot hold in the game through crafting….
…Is that there’s really no “multiplayer Test” to it. No interactivity on a personal social level between people other that Farming Zergs.

IE: There’s nothing that gets people to spread out in smaller groups and cooperate sorta kinda almost like the Nicholas daily Scavenger used to have us doing.

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Now Lindsey did say they wanted to do a Scavenger type thing for Precursors and I’ll assume that b/c we haven’t heard from her in forever that she’s fallen back into that old pattern of all-work no-communication she fell into on GW1 before Stumme had to fill in. And don’t get me wrong, not putting her down for that. Hell I didn’t think Cooking was going to float at all in this game with the limitations that were put on it (only 1 food consumable at a time??? Were they MAD?) but I’m happy to say I was wrong and there’s LOTS of niches now in cooking that actually are profitable.

…but just being profitable isn’t what this thread is about. Day-Traders are a lot more profitable. And Long term investors can be even more profitable assuming they’re psychic and were hoarding stuff like Crystaline dust that we used to be able to make for a pittance 6 months ago…

No this is also about engaging means of casual PURPOSE I’m assuming.
For that, you really need interactivity on a personal level through shared goals.
…puzzles, clues, and the cumulative crafting specialties of your friends put to full use. NOT stuff that a single power-gamer or power-trader can do on their own 1000x a day. Something more like the dailies that brings people back every day that greatly narrows the scope of the RNG outputs based on where it happens.

We’ve never had a system that can do that in GW1. Zcoins Dailies were sort of in that spirit and they got people to PUG together… but they were limited in scope of activities. There’s Guild dailies & Laurels now too but those are pretty useless too when crafting itself is still at the mercy of both the Flippers and Anet’s own involvement in Shortages and GROSS price fluctuations.

It’s a really … really … really difficult conundrum. Even if they did something about the short-term flippers like soul-binding on a 3-day temporary span, every material that’s bought on the TP, it wouldn’t stop the long-term “Warehousing” hoarders have even more potential profit over the long term. And ultimately may not even be worth the wasted space on Anet’s Databases to accommodate a huge increase in “Hoarding-for-Profit”.

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This thread is really starting in the right direction through. It’s identifying why this is a problem that can’t just be solved with all the options already in Anet’s arsenal. And even if we knew where to start, bringing it all together might be too difficult.

I was about to post how easy it’s to make gold with crafting, but realized that’d be just shooting myself to leg.

Plenty of gold there. Rather easy to make over thousand gold from crafting (profit on monthly basis) when you know what you’re doing.

Cooking I don’t myself do since I know few people who do that and I don’t want to visit their turf. ^^ Weaponcrafts are overcompeted due existence of mystic toilet and thousands of people trying their luck with precursors.

I wanted to be a tailor to find hidden recipes and craft town clothes…too bad there’s virtually no tailoring recipe hidden in the world. There are 2 sets of low level skins, but unfortunately they didn’t continue to add recipes for higher skins. Even if they can be obtained somewhere else, it would have been nice to be able to craft them, for cosmetics.

I think folks are getting confused on making money crafting. Here’s an example:

Rare Level 80 Greatswords: 34.48 silver (nearly across the board on the TP)

Crafting these weapons requires:

24 mithril ore (blade, hilt, dowels): 10.08 silver (42c per)
6 elder wood logs (dowels): 2.64 silver (44c per)
15 T5 materials: varies, but a cheap on is Large Bones == 14.25 silver (95c per)

So if you would have just sold your mats you would have made 26.97 silver (in this example).

The net for making a lvl 80 Carrion Krait Slayer is really 6.38 silver (this includes the 15% fees between the two prices).

Now if you sell 100 of these you made 6.4gp — that’s not bad, but folks aren’t becoming rich overnight.

juno.1840:

15 T5 materials: varies, but a cheap on is Large Bones == 14.25 silver (95c per)

IIRC, blood and scales are “historically” cheaper than bones right now. Been stocking up on them myself right now since the only reason to ever make Carrion stuff in the past was for the Ecto salvage or Mystic Toilet gambling… It’s these other mats that people actually want for their gear rather than just the rough “equivalent values” in Ectos…

Someone who really plans ahead right now… could definitely be setting their future crafting Alts up for some much improved Profits (assuming they haven’t already grinded their way to Master Craftsman)