Guild Wars 2

I’ve been bothered for a while now by the fact that crafting, in GW2, just isn’t a viable way to make money. In the vast majority of cases, items aren’t worth the materials you’d use to make them.

I’m of the belief that crafting should be a way to make money, but to be honest I’m not sure what changes could be made in GW2 to ensure that that’s possible. Even if there were items that could only be crafted, the nature of the trading post would likely lead to the same situation we have now: materials being worth more than the item produced.

So what can be done to help make crafting profitable?

All top-tier equipment items require skill points to produce.

There ya go.

Long term, the money is in cooking and artificing. They produce the largest variety of consumables, which is the only market which will have a long-term demand.

Demand for weapons is driven by people hunting legendary precursors.

Demand for armor is driven by respeccing, not a common enough event.

Consumables also do not have competition from dropped items.

The number of people that practice any given craft (the lowest is something around 20%, I remember hearing) is so high, and a particular crafter has minimal value-added (anybody can procure the recipie easily) that the supply is high enough to keep prices down. In the long term, demand will fade as people are more content with what they have.

Don’t expect to make a fortune (or even waypoint fare) from crafting anytime soon—too many people can do it for themselves that the value of the service is effectively 0.

I made at least 7g from crafting last night.

Most crafting isn’t profitable because there is much more supply than demand. The trick is to craft things that are in high demand but not yet in high supply because they require recipes that are purchased with karma.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

I made at least 7g from crafting last night.

Most crafting isn’t profitable because there is much more supply than demand. The trick is to craft things that are in high demand but not yet in high supply because they require recipes that are purchased with karma.

And as more people discover those recipes you will notice fewer and fewer items that have any margin for profit. When a person discovers a new recipe, like the triforge amulet, there is an initial profit to be made but eventually the masses find it and everything plummits.

Recipes you actually have to put effort in obtaining. Imagine if precursors were crafted and the recipe came from the MF. Profitable? yes.

That’s an extreme example, but think Factions in Wow. The only way to get some of those patterns was to grind rep for a LONG time.

Even at 80 when I quit you could likely count the number of people with Exalted Thorium Brotherhood rep per server on one hand.

Think specialization paths. Do a quest or two, pvp whatever to get a rare discovery item. Once you unlock it you can buy it for karma or honor somewhere.

The skillpoint fix is a bandaid fix because it just makes skillpoints valuable to sell not the value add.

They need to add critical crafting, critical items would sell, yes there is still chance involved, but anything that is static will make nothing in the long run as everyone can do it too easily. e.g omniberry 30% magic find and 40% gold, critical does 60% magic find and 80% gold, the odds of critical are 10% with another 5% from consumables made by chefs. Check out lotro’s economy, they have criticals and crafting works.

Name one thing that is profitable. Berserker’s Exalted Coat was at a 30s profit margin this morning and by the time I had to go to work this evening it was undercut to right around -40s profit. Same for the Berserker jewelery. Hell, I even went with custom ordering everything for the least amount possible and still had people undercut my items to the point where it was not even close to profitable. I’ve checked every recipe I have for both Tailoring and JC and there isn’t a single thing that I can craft where I don’t end up having a loss from just selling the crafted mats instead.

The one thing I was using to make gold on was buying Mythril Ruby jewelry off the tc, salvaging it, then either selling the mats back on the tc or making ruby orbs or the exotic jewels. They are now not worth it as the prices of crystals/rubies have bottomed out and jewels have been undercut to the point of not being worth it. I would have thought these prices would have gone up with the mithril/ori node changes but they have gone down a huge amount since then.

I’ve also checked the price for all the weapons and food and there’s not one that can be crafted for a profit.

Omnomberry bars are still profitable, for one thing.

I doubt they will be for much longer.

Looking at things long term, most crafting professions won’t be profitable simply because the supply is way higher than the demand.

I believe that specialization is needed if we want the end product to be higher demand than the supply. Currently there’s just too much homogenization between the crafting professions that it’s hurting everyone more than helping. Take the bags for example- In GW2 tailoring, leatherworking and armorsmithing can make the same bags. Other games have it so that each profession could only make certain types of bags. While one person may pay for generic bags from a tailor, another would pay for a specialized bag from x profession that could hold materials.

The way the current system is overall, the mats cost more than the end product because the mats can be used to level a character- which is fine, but it hurts crafting in the long term since the way things are now, the mats are much higher demand than the end product. It really shouldn’t be this way.

Agent Noun.7350:

So what can be done to help make crafting profitable?

24 hour cooldowns on high end crafts to enforce scarcity.

Otherwise enough players value their time at zero that any unlimited use crafting will lose all profitability very quickly.

I was thinking about a system that could diversify materials a person obtains by gathering from those bought at TP. Something like a “gathered orichalcum ore” and “bought orichalcum ore” and the recipe could be:
“5 gathered orchalcum ore / 8 bought orichalcum ore”

Rare drop recipes with decent skins/different stat combos would probably do the trick.

I like the ideas of critical success (that results in higher stats instead of just giving you some mats back or whatever it apparently does now) and cooldowns on high-level stuff. Cooldowns would be a pain in the rear while you’re trying to level up crafting, but they could make sense for level 400 recipes.

The problem with most of the things I’ve thought about for reducing supply or increasing demand is that many of them would have the same effect on materials prices as on finished product prices, so profitability wouldn’t actually be improved.

Guild wars 2 doesn’t run on the idea of getting better stats from crafting or instance over any activity so that is automatically a horrible idea.

Short of making recipes that require a lot work like legendaries, there is no real way to make crafting worth making money off from. Also I doubt they will ever make legendary precursors craftable since that will effectively destroy the purpose of the Mystic forge.

The reason crafting is not profitable at all right now is that every single mat c an be bought in a world wide market. This means anyone can craft anything at any moment, instantly, which means crafted item price ~= material price.

The solution is simple. Add roaming rare mobs, spawning at random times in random places all over the world, dropping special soulbound mats required for best items. Impossible to farm and camp, you would have to wander the world of Tyria, hoping to meet one of these. The time investment to find these mats would transfer directly into high profit in crafting.

Right now crafting is more a source of XP every 15 levels or so than anything else. Anyone can craft anything at any time, and because it’s a great way to gain XP they do.

If we didn’t have easy(the fee is negligable considering the alternative would be to pay a premium buying the item) access to all crafting proffessions all the time there would be less supply and more demand..

The benifits and effort for doing it yourself rather than paying someone else to do it take away any market value.

As long as crafting is a source of exp it will not be profitable.

That is because the exp has a non zero value.

So the mats will always be worth more than the final product, because the mats turn into the final product + experience.

Mats are worth more than the final product because the act of combining them gives you experience.

The only POSSIBLE time crafting will be profitable is at the 400 level. That’s it.

Actually, yeah, having a soulbound random drop required for certain high-level items would likely have the same pricing effect as a cooldown, but would make more in-game sense (this thing required literally 2 seconds to make, and it used up all the materials needed to make it. What, exactly, needs to “cool down”?).

Lots of ways

1. Make gathering a profession. Right now everyone is a crafted, make crafted items less valuable.

2. Add a cool down on certain rare crafts. For example only 1 imbued orichalcum inscription can be made per day. Since everything can be crafted infinitely, crafted items go down to the material price.

3. Add hard to get recipes that are unqiue. Right now all the expensive/hard to get recipes are for bulk items, which are only a convenience not a special item you can’t get any other way. Since you can get recipes for non-bulk items for almost free and no effort, there is no added value to having a certain recipe, everyone has easy access to all recipes keeping prices low.

4. Add some better profession specific consumables. Most consumables are worthless and are stuck at vendor price or ingredient price.

Since skill crystals/scrolls/whatever are soulbound, “crafting” done with the mystic forge is actually profitable, this could also be applied to regular crafting.

They could start by raising the vendor price by quite a bit for crafted items, which seems like the simplest of things they could do.

it can.i been crafting rares and throwing them in the forge to try and get exotics.made about 3g net profit since i started yesterday

How about cut the amount of rares needed to create items up to level 80? I make far FAR FAR more money just selling the materials I gather and just BUY what I need than waste it leveling up a crafting skill.

Anet was warned throughout beta that the economy was going to be FUBAR right from the start, they didnt listen, enjoy the over use of rare items to level your crafting making a profit nothing but a dream.

raxx.8914:

They need to add critical crafting, critical items would sell, yes there is still chance involved, but anything that is static will make nothing in the long run as everyone can do it too easily. e.g omniberry 30% magic find and 40% gold, critical does 60% magic find and 80% gold, the odds of critical are 10% with another 5% from consumables made by chefs. Check out lotro’s economy, they have criticals and crafting works.

They had that in DAoC for MP items and basically you just vendored all the non criticals.

It was cheaper to buy lvl 50 armor for your level 30 guy than lvl 30 armor because of all the 99’s on people’s merchants.

Later on they gave you the ability to do quests to up your quality which made more sense rather than continuing to throw gallons of (vendor bought) mats down the drain.

The items right now are all vendor trash anyway, the only stuff selling are things people are throwing into the mystic forge. It also closes the gap between rich and poor.

raxx.8914:

The items right now are all vendor trash anyway, the only stuff selling are things people are throwing into the mystic forge. It also closes the gap between rich and poor.

I won an exotic ^_^ Though I’m still in my level 70 exotic because it’s power and precision instead of power, condition damage, and magic find (gag) like what I forged.

Anyway, I was going to mention precisely that. Try avoiding selling shaman stuff or anything with healing power or pure defensive stats since those get bought up cheaply.

Agent Noun.7350:

I’ve been bothered for a while now by the fact that crafting, in GW2, just isn’t a viable way to make money. In the vast majority of cases, items aren’t worth the materials you’d use to make them.

I’m of the belief that crafting should be a way to make money, but to be honest I’m not sure what changes could be made in GW2 to ensure that that’s possible. Even if there were items that could only be crafted, the nature of the trading post would likely lead to the same situation we have now: materials being worth more than the item produced.

So what can be done to help make crafting profitable?

Some rare items, to purchase the materials cost, as an example, 2g to make, whereas they are sold for 1g. That is a 1g loss. The reason? The ones selling for 1g probably went and mined the material themselves. So, unless you’re willing to go and mine the materials yourself to make that rare 1g worth item then don’t bother with trying to make crafting profitable when you buy the materials.

@Mok
Go check the cost of the materials needed to craft items then compare that to the minimum selling price. The price of the materials is higher than the cost of the final product. Even if you gather each and every mat needed, you make more selling those mats instead of crafting the item and selling it.

Everybody is talking about the supply side. So long as we’re talking supply, here’s an idea: make crafting cost skill points. It should be possible to do a lot of leveling through crafting (and, indeed, it is), and if one had to spend skill points to unlock crafting tiers, one would have to choose between speccing to fight and speccing to craft.

But what about the demand side? What if damaged gear wasn’t a simple, quick NPC fix, but rather had to be replaced? Suppose a crafter and a little materials was required to do repairs, and the common response to damaged gear was to sell the damaged gear at Black Lion, and buy a replacement, while a lot of crafter business was the buying of damaged gear and sale of repaired gear?

Engineers are potentially an enormous source of demand. What if gadgets and gear required bits and pieces from all the professions? Like a device needs a box built by an armorer, a covering made by a leatherworker, some tiny gears and focus gems made by a jeweler, little blades made by a weaponsmith, and finally a fuel box made by a huntsman. All the various crafts disciplines would feed into the engineer’s own unique crafting discipline.

quote: “Some rare items, to purchase the materials cost, as an example, 2g to make, whereas they are sold for 1g. That is a 1g loss. The reason? The ones selling for 1g probably went and mined the material themselves.”

The problem is people, exemplified by the quote above.

If the materials would sell for more than the price at which you list the item, then you are losing money, not making money. It doesn’t matter if you mined the materials yourself. It doesn’t matter if they fell from the sky with a love note from Zommoros. If you sell the assembled item for less than the sale price of the materials, you are losing money. Even worse, you’re taking us all down with you. You’re forcing everyone else to lose money by crafting.

Another responsible party is the guy who decides that his sword/ring/whatever just has to sell first, and lowers the price without giving any thought as to whether he’s making or losing money at that point. Not to mention everyone who piles on after he wrecks the value of that item. If you move a lot of big ticket items you’ll see this happen all the time.

Then you have the people who think that buy prices always reflect fair value. Wrong. If you’re selling ore and bone chips then yeah, typically the difference between the listed buy & sell price is accurately described as honest negotiation. But take a look at big ticket items. The margin there is often best described as the math literate taking advantage of the math challenged. You can wish, hope and even pray that I’ll sell you something that’s made of 1g worth of materials for 75s, but I won’t. Ever.

Unfortunately, others will. Do these people not understand that materials have value? Maybe they look in their inventory and see things, assemble those things into an item, and believe that they “made money” when they exchange that item for coin. Maybe they just don’t care about losing money. Either way the end result is the same; bad times for all of us.

Now, compounding the problem are those people who will come along, think shallowly about all this, and declare it to be “S&D in action”. As if S&D were a mystical force of nature beyond our own control. To those people I say: think more like OPEC and less like a crystal-clutching, new wave hippie. Suppliers control the supply. And if suppliers would exercise a little of that control, not to mention their brains, we wouldn’t have items selling for less than the value of their materials.

So given the system as-is — meaning not entertaining ideas about fundamental changes to how crafting works — the problem, the reason crafting isn’t as profitable as it should be is that people are dumb and/or lazy. It’s difficult to fix that.

i really do love video game economies. they help us all realize that capitalism is bad for most of us.

travis trout raises excellent points, but i don’t believe for a second that it’s impossible to engineer a system that corrects the problem. i’m not a huge fan of player handholding, but optimizing dollars is a complicated problem. to be honest, those of us concerned should be helping less economically savvy players balance their checkbooks, so to speak. if they see that proper income management (what to vendor, what to TP, what to salvage) can result in much higher profits than simply gathering, crafting, and selling materials. so far, all of the only craft able armorsets i’ve made have saved me a few gold each over having bought them in the trading post (rare travellers, knight’s draconic, and cleric’s draconic), but it’s entirely possible they are no longer cheaper. so let’s start assembling some data: what are still viable as profit? one or two crafting profs having profitable items while the others do not is, in my opinion, worse than all of them being useless. i think it’s safe to say that the amount of money or time necessary to level off crafting is either greater than or equal to the time-to-experience ratio found from just doing quests.

personally i’m fine with artificially inflating the value of high-level craft armors, or deflating other armors (or eliminating droppable exotics). but i think a lot of people would freak out about that. on the other hand, high level crafters have invested a lot of resources into something that is just not paying off like i’m sure it was intended. so let’s discuss other ways of raising the value of craftable armors without also raising the value of their component materials, and without resorting to “people are stupid.”

Here’s the problem: Items created in the game, for the most part, have an infinite lifetime. Let’s take armor as an example:

You buy one armor set you like, and you never need to buy another set again. It never permanently breaks, never wears out and you never misplace it.

Also, each armor set is identical to any armor set produced by another player. There is no branding in game products. Thus items are perfect substitutes for the same item produced by another person, and consequently no one can charge a profit for innovation or creativity.

To create a consistent demand for an item, you need to introduce these two concepts on some level.

The mystic forge acts reasonably well as a way to limit the lifetime of weapons, but since there is no real benefit of throwing thousands of any other type of gear into the forge in order to obtain a super-rare item, it is pretty useless for eliminating these items types from the market.

Where to start..
The system in which the items are sold is the biggest issue for crafted gear, its listed just like any other dropped item and put on a sheet so everyone can see lowest price first, which means the people who don’t value their time crafting or the gathered crafting materials for their actual value will always make the sale before the people who are charging a price more accurate to the value of the gathered materials. The second issue is exp for crafting, yes im sure lots of you love it as paying for 20 out of 80 levels is a pretty nice short cut to endgame but it takes the value out of the items created, why? because everyone can make it as standard as they got it from their leveling spree.

The only way crafting will become valuable/profitable is;
1. Remove exp gain from crafting so people are crafting for the purpose of having access to the high end crafted gear.
2. Make crafting more time consuming so people cant craft max gear after 1-2 hours of grinding the lower lvls.
3. Add a fail chance to crafting where u can loose one of the components used for failing to craft said item.
4. Critical Crafting chance which gives the item 2 upgrade slots instead of one or some extra visual on the item (or for food multiple use for one item, extended time or better stats).
All this would in theory increase the value of crafted items due to the mats list and outcome not being set in stone and the fact fewer people will have the skills to make them.

Additional thoughts;
1. Add a player to player trade window, >don’t allow crafted gear to be sold via the market<<< i am a bit sceptical about this part as its nice to have certain crated items such as from the chef profession easily available, but it would make crafting more of a service people would pay a fee for.
2. Make crafting more than just gear and item creation, give crafters the ability to repair gear specific to their craft or other services that could be potentially created on a player to player basis.

Man there’s a ton of bad ideas for the game here just to improve crafting.

Any type of “chance to crit” turns into “chance to fail” since you’re just going to want the better item and forgo the non critical one.

Forcing scarcity through randomness ruins the game.

It’s what makes KMMO crafting not fun.

I like how GW2 has “discover” recipes for the basic/master results, it adds a sense of accomplishment when you first figure out the system.

In other MMOs I’ve played, the crit system has worked well as a way to improve the profitability of crafted items, but there were also a lot more recipes/tier so that each person could specialize in a crafting tree. If I chose to focus on toughness/vitality, I could train to make the best at level gear for those specs. I didn’t have to learn every single recipe and gobble up all of the “small claws” just to level.

By best at level gear I mean: a crafted white > dropped white; crafted blue > dropped blue, etc.

Another issue is that everyone needs to use nearly all the same auxillary mats, and those mats drop at a very rare rate for even tier 1 materials. Thin blood, for example, drop only from some mobs and can also be found in goods bags (also relatively uncommon).

It cannot.

The only way people have ever made money from crafting is niche markets that are quickly mass-discovered and are no longer niche markets. Kudos to you if you’ve discovered one, but due to the way crafting works and the way the TP works, it will never be profitable for the masses.

Crafting, as far as I can tell, is meant to be an alternate way to gain XP – NOT gold.

TravisTrout.6803:

Then you have the people who think that buy prices always reflect fair value. Wrong. If you’re selling ore and bone chips then yeah, typically the difference between the listed buy & sell price is accurately described as honest negotiation. But take a look at big ticket items. The margin there is often best described as the math literate taking advantage of the math challenged. You can wish, hope and even pray that I’ll sell you something that’s made of 1g worth of materials for 75s, but I won’t. Ever.

Unfortunately, others will. Do these people not understand that materials have value? Maybe they look in their inventory and see things, assemble those things into an item, and believe that they “made money” when they exchange that item for coin. Maybe they just don’t care about losing money. Either way the end result is the same; bad times for all of us.

[snip]
So given the system as-is — meaning not entertaining ideas about fundamental changes to how crafting works — the problem, the reason crafting isn’t as profitable as it should be is that people are dumb and/or lazy. It’s difficult to fix that.

A buy price below the cost of materials may indeed be a fair value, if one person is willing to sell at that cost because the XPs + money they get is worth it to them, and one person is willing to buy at that price because the item is worth that to them. You are welcome to not consider it fair.

I’ve seen real life crafters who go broke because they place such a high value on their time nobody is willing to pay the prices they ask. But they have the right to do that. And a buyer has the right to not pay that price. I’ve also seen real life crafters (and other people like contractors) who were perennially overbooked, because they did good work at such a reasonable price that there was huge demand for their services. They could have raised their prices, but for whatever reason, they didn’t. So there are real life, real money examples of people who don’t act in their own economic interest.

Regarding your final point, is there any evidence from the developers of the game that they intend crafting to be a money making activity for the majority of its practitioners? If they really wanted that, simply cutting drop rates for useful gear to 1/5 of what it is now and removing XPs from crafting would probably ensure that. I suspect, though, that they will weigh the interests of the large part of the community that doesn’t craft and doesn’t want to craft against the interests of the crafting community and will not make those changes.

Kozai.8269:

Regarding your final point, is there any evidence from the developers of the game that they intend crafting to be a money making activity for the majority of its practitioners?

This is probably the most important question asked so far in this thread. Given that leveling a crafting profession provides the average player with 10-20 levels of XP plus the ability to make gear for themselves, the monetary value of the raw vs. crafted materials is irrelevant. The monetary value of the raw materials is only high because the average player purchases them for crafting instead of farming them. The crafted items will never achieve the value of the raw materials combined because players cannot craft new items with crafted items (not talking Forge here). There is no demand for an item you made because I can make it too. And it’s ridiculously easy to do so.

Not to mention the fact that as a player of a video game, I have no cost of living to consider. The average human being in the real world sets prices or value of their goods or services based on their inherent needs to provide food, clothing and shelter for their families. Paying for all these things forces a person to strive to make the most money possible from the goods or services they offer. In a video game, however, the average player has no real ‘cost’ of living within the game other than repair bills and WP’s which are pretty cheap in general.

If my average spend per day in game is about 20s for repairs & WP’s, if I sell something I make for 1g that pays for 5 days worth of my daily cost of living. I don’t need to eat food to survive, and I can wear the same armor every day for the rest of my gaming career, so there are no required ancillary costs to consider. The fact that the materials I used to create this item for 1g could have been sold for 2g total is irrelevant. If every 5 days I can farm my own materials to make an item worth 1g, I’m covering my average cost of living. There is no incentive to charge more for that item since I’m not spending any money to make it. If I also gain XP or crafting skill points in the process, that’s simply a bonus. If it takes me fewer than 5 days in game to farm the materials I need for said item, I’m already making a profit. It is a different profit than described by the “professional crafters” whining about the price of materials, but I’ve got more money coming in than going out, so I make money. For most players, that’s a successful transaction, and they’ve made more monetary profit than you because digital items in a fantasy world have no actual intrinsic value – only the value placed on them by other players.

So you can complain all you want about other people “being stupid” with their “money,” but for the players that focus on PvP, fighting monsters, exploring caves and teaming up in dungeons, the fake money they earn on the TP doesn’t matter very much to them and likely never will as long as they can cover their average cost of playing. Video game economics != real world economics due to the lack of scaling of cost of living. If you can make more money selling raw materials, and your primary goal in the game is to make money, use all your “business savvy” to realize you should be in the raw material business rather than complaining that your crafting business is not profitable. Or spend your time finding the few crafted items that ARE craftable and shift your focus there.

I’ve played a few MMOs and I’ve never seen crafting generate reliable profit. I’ve always seen the money in the materials, not in the finished product. This includes crafting systems that incorporate failures and criticals.

I also see, and respect, that GW2 is designed to consume in-game currency and not produce it. This encourages us to spend real money to buy in-game currency and it discourages inflation. More profit can mean more currency at work, which then can lead to higher prices for everything. This then creates an economic disparity between part-time and full-time players.

I also wonder why some want to try to replicate our modern economy in a fantasy world. Do we really want only ten percent owning ninety percent? Awesome model if you’re the in the ten-percent with the talent and the luck and the resources. I’m not, but I like crafting gear for my toons and my guild.

This is a game where EVERYONE can craft, as well as gather, as well as be heroes, which is a far more selective process…

The simplest solution is to create recipes(i mean the actual recipe itself not the materials needed once you have the reciple) that require time or effort to obtain, like a recipe that needs skill points, high amounts of materials, karma (although karma isnt the best currency since crafting gives no karma)

possibly they could set up a system for getting karma from crafting, possibly involving doing supply runs, whereby crafters can get karma for delivering materials to various places in the world (and they could make it so the items chosen use materials that are currently being over produced, or over stocked)

then in terms of the actual items required to make them, make some items be karma, or skill point related, i think this is better than a straight up limiter on production, because it allows people who enjoy crafting or making things to allot their resources, rather than simply saying you can only do something once a day.

(the problem with skill points, is i believe they are no longer awarded when you hit cap)

Of course, since the game is looks based, this would require that they produce a wealth of new visual appearances for gears, also, they would probably need to add a viewer to the tp.

Another possibility, is to give crafters the ability to alter item appearances (using some limited resource possibly from crafters destroying excess items) to allow them to sell what amounts to transmuted (excluding prestige armor sets of course) gear,

also a possibility is to have them be able to set the colors via their own dye, this way someone could buy an abyss black hood with exotic level stats. even if they dont have abyss dye, of course if the recolor it themselves they would have no access to get it back.

Thinking along some of the lines in my previous post, i have an ambitious idea;

it might involve a lot of work, but i think long term it will enrich the game greatly.

Essentially one of the big problems with crafting is that this is a looks based game, which means they have to create a lot of art assets.

So in terms of creating a lot of art assets, what they might be able to do is, create a system by which players, users, artists can create visual appearances of gear. Players can than vote, and in accordance with some judges from Anet select 1 new model for each craft a month (maybe one per item type)

this item recipe would be obtainable for skill points/karma/some crafted items/ gold. The creators would get a certain amount of gold/copper per from that purchase.

So essentially this would give crafters exclusive access to some very specific looks, it would enrich the game visually, basically giving some highly demanded new designs each month, Since it would an investment on the part of the crafters, it wouldnt simply be everyone with every recipe.

It would also give some players a means of making gold by contributing to the overall game content. If you make the next hit gear BAM your rich!

1. There’s already recipes that need skill points.
2. If there was a system to get karma from delivering materials, you’re effectively putting a market price on karma = bad idea.
3. Skill points continue to be awarded past 80, because you keep leveling up with experience. Case in point: I’m still at 60% world completion, but I have something like 100 skill points that I haven’t used, and I’ve already spent a good 30-40 points buying stuff from the MF vendor.

4. “Alter item appearances”
Actually, this might be rather interesting. Why not give crafters the ability to add special visual “modifiers” to their gear by consuming a number of resources? Something like, oh, say, extra shoulder spikes, or a small pennant you can fly from your backpack in WvW.

…Hm.

I’ve played MMOs since Asheron’s Call, and one of my passions is crafting and economics. I earned an economics undergraduate degree, and worked afterward as a financial analyst and as an accountant. (This stuff has fascinated me, both as a frivolous past-time and in real world life, both the theory and the nuts and bolts.)

TL,DR; Crafting is actually working as well as it theoretically can. There are some changes that can be made to improve crafting, though the things suggested so far will mostly not help.

"crafting, in GW2, just isn’t a viable way to make money."
False premise. I do make money crafting, and think you would make money if you crafted the same way. You may not enjoy it then, it might be difficult for you to make money crafting the way you like.

1. In economic theory, markets with good information are efficient. Opportunities to make more than a modest profit will be short-lived. That’s mainly true here -- a given item will not remain profitable for very long. I’ve made a decent gold by watching many markets, and making one or two items when I see short supply. A little later the shortage appears on the market tracking websites, the shortage disappears, and so does profit. Usually, I can sell my item before that happens, taking only a small loss when it does not.

We expect this from an efficient market economy with good information -- small or fleeting profits. Really profitable areas will disappear quickly. That’s just how a good market works.

Markets are dynamic. You won’t make a good amount of gold unless you are willing to be nimble and constantly search for market opportunities. Opportunities are not going to wait for you to get off of work, or for you to sleep. Your competitors in the market are nimble, and are constantly watching the shifts in the market. If this environment doesn’t suit you, then you shouldn’t expect to craft for money.

2. Parts of the GW2 market are not yet efficient. There are lots of places to save or make money while leveling up that are ignored. People leveling up may go for speed, and make batches of the least expensive thing. They dump the result on the market at a big loss, so those things (usually intermediate pieces that take one or two basic mats) are for sale far below manufacturing cost. This has persisted for a couple weeks, at most of the levels of the armor/weapons crafts (I don’t do jewelry), so the market definitely isn’t all working smoothly. As players recognize this, raw materials prices will drop and the dumped items will disappear.

3. Have you noticed that, as you level up, there is no market for fine and masterpiece items? A key raw material, the fine drop (bone, totem, etc), gets used to make rare items. The rare item market can be modestly profitable, and it is demand from that market that drives fine drop prices. Like many profitable markets in the real world, there’s a barrier to entry -- the recipes to make the rare part cost karma.

This is one place that ANet could put in a fix. Add fine/masterwork recipes that give a bonus combination not available from drops or similar level rares, or that uses a mix of fine drops rather than 3 or 8 of the same kind.

Let’s cover not-so-good suggestions next:
"1. Remove exp gain from crafting so people are crafting for the purpose of having access to the high end crafted gear."
ANet tries to balance XP/gold/time spent between PvP, PvE, and crafting. Taking XP off the reward side for crafting will increase the gold reward, but it will force PvE onto the people who want to mainly craft. That would be bad for the market success of the game.

"2. Make crafting more time consuming so people cant craft max gear after 1-2 hours of grinding the lower lvls."
A big goal of the game design is to remove or lessen grinding. ANet abandon one of their big selling points? Won’t happen.

"3. Add a fail chance to crafting where u can loose one of the components used for failing to craft said item."
This will raise the cost of crafting items, overall, but won’t change the profitability in any appreciable way. (study the concept of expected value in probability theory).

"4. Critical Crafting chance which gives the item 2 upgrade slots instead of one or some extra visual on the item (or for food multiple use for one item, extended time or better stats)."

This tends to introduce grinding; players generally don’t want to buy the non-critical items. Especially true in PvP games, where things like slots matter. An extra visual or alternate skin might be workable.

—continued—
“Not to mention the fact that as a player of a video game, I have no cost of living to consider.”and “If my average spend per day in game is about 20s for repairs & WP’s, if I sell something I make for 1g that pays for 5 days worth of my daily cost of living.”

ANet has done an impressive job of linking the in-game economy to real world money. Gold in the game can be traded for gems, which can be traded for bag slots, character slots, vault slots, and a host of other things. As of 11:35 PST on 11/08/2012, 6g 40s will by you $10.00 U.S. in gems, the 800 gems necessary for a new character slot.

The money you leave on the table when you don’t watch how you sell stuff on the GW2 market has a very real cost for you (if you would ever buy gems for real cash). I estimate that I’ve saved myself $20 by making money crafting (which is cash for having fun, can’t fault that!). Bought a character slot, bag slots, and vault space. (I hope I have not spoiled anyone’s fun by removing the illusion that this is a fictional, not a real, economy. )

[ Side note: the economies in GW2, WoW, EVE Online and many other MMOs are actually part of the real world economy. It’s a fascinating RW development — online economies are quite large, and the economic activities we indulge in here do replace economic activities we otherwise might be doing in meatspace. Crafting, especially. Gold farming is one sign of the fact, and has become a surprisingly large ( 3 billion) industry. Yes, with a B. See the report “Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy” published by the World Bank/International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in April 2011. ]

ANet could make some crafting more like real-world handcrafting and less like manufacturing. Other parts of the game require actual skill on the player’s part, why not crafting? The MMO “A Tale in the Desert” does this for some crafts, making the craft a kind of minigame.

This would be the only way I could see critical successes work as a mechanism for crafting profitability — higher skill at the minigame would improve your chance of critical success. It should give feedback on how you were doing through the minigame, reacting to mistakes or successes.

Because PvP balance is an issue, critical success should lower raw material use rather than improve stats. The key to profitability would be mastery of the minigame.

Different crafts might have different minigames, some might be twitch/reaction games, some kind of DDR or platforming, some might be mental puzzles.

Auvic.5679:

1. There’s already recipes that need skill points.
2. If there was a system to get karma from delivering materials, you’re effectively putting a market price on karma = bad idea.
3. Skill points continue to be awarded past 80, because you keep leveling up with experience. Case in point: I’m still at 60% world completion, but I have something like 100 skill points that I haven’t used, and I’ve already spent a good 30-40 points buying stuff from the MF vendor.

4. “Alter item appearances”
Actually, this might be rather interesting. Why not give crafters the ability to add special visual “modifiers” to their gear by consuming a number of resources? Something like, oh, say, extra shoulder spikes, or a small pennant you can fly from your backpack in WvW.

…Hm.

1)the recipes im aware of that need skill points dont actually offer anything really, except a bulk crafting formulas, but i may be missing some, i do think they make bulk crafting a choice, IE, should i get this one or this one? the problem is, it doesnt actually make anything you cant make in some other way, so its value is limited.

2)while putting a gold value on karma may something to watch, i dont think its really “bad” but even if they decide it is bad for karma they could use something else that requires you to get rid of valueless items. Essentially im looking at things that people can actually do involving crafting, that will allow them to make special items but not over produce them, without working hard

3) are you saying experience is awarded for crafting past 400? While i understand you can get skill points past level 80, i dont think you can get them from being good at a particular craft. The idea here is that people who put extra time and energy into say being an armorsmith, can make superior or rare, or custom/special armorsmithing things that will have value to people. By making it something that uses personal resources, like skill points or karma, you make it unlikely people will just get every recipe, and instead focus on the ones they feel have value, or that they like. Now, im not married to using karma or skill points for this stuff, but it would be best if it is an earnable resource that you can get by crafting. we cant make it gold, because the best way of getting gold is not through crafting.

Daulnay.4971:

—continued—
“Not to mention the fact that as a player of a video game, I have no cost of living to consider.”and “If my average spend per day in game is about 20s for repairs & WP’s, if I sell something I make for 1g that pays for 5 days worth of my daily cost of living.”

ANet has done an impressive job of linking the in-game economy to real world money. Gold in the game can be traded for gems, which can be traded for bag slots, character slots, vault slots, and a host of other things. As of 11:35 PST on 11/08/2012, 6g 40s will by you $10.00 U.S. in gems, the 800 gems necessary for a new character slot.

The money you leave on the table when you don’t watch how you sell stuff on the GW2 market has a very real cost for you (if you would ever buy gems for real cash). I estimate that I’ve saved myself $20 by making money crafting (which is cash for having fun, can’t fault that!). Bought a character slot, bag slots, and vault space. (I hope I have not spoiled anyone’s fun by removing the illusion that this is a fictional, not a real, economy. )

[ Side note: the economies in GW2, WoW, EVE Online and many other MMOs are actually part of the real world economy. It’s a fascinating RW development — online economies are quite large, and the economic activities we indulge in here do replace economic activities we otherwise might be doing in meatspace. Crafting, especially. Gold farming is one sign of the fact, and has become a surprisingly large ( 3 billion) industry. Yes, with a B. See the report “Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy” published by the World Bank/International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in April 2011. ]

daulnay, im not completely disagreeing with you here, but what you are making money off of here, is not so much crafting as much as playing the market. You make money of being a superior merchant, and use crafting as one of the tools.

Now im not exactly saying being a master craftsman should make you rich, but it should do something. Someone who truely is an expert at say making clothes, makes money because they are good at making clothes, the make cooler looking, higher quality clothes (in theory) How well they can be marketed is a different issue.

So possibly what they could also do… (i dont think they would do this though) is add a quality rating to items, the better its crafted (can be decided by number of materials, crafter level, special crafting goals achieved or whatever) effects its durability to repair cost.

So for example a extremely well crafted item is more valuable because it costs less to repair it. (this introduces quality variance based on crafter skill/ability/resource/whatever) now they just have to add the cool looking part to the equation

phys.7689:

daulnay, im not completely disagreeing with you here, but what you are making money off of here, is not so much crafting as much as playing the market. You make money of being a superior merchant, and use crafting as one of the tools.

If you want to make money in a market economy, you have to do finance. Period. If you don’t, someone else will, they’ll undercut your prices, and you won’t make money. That means you have to look for cheap sources of raw materials or intermediate materials and you have to adapt to market conditions as they change. You have to avoid making items that are in oversupply, and make the ones that are not.

That is not being a merchant. Being a merchant means buying and selling goods in order to make a profit — which you can also do in GW2.

phys.7689:

So possibly what they could also do… (i dont think they would do this though) is add a quality rating to items, the better its crafted (can be decided by number of materials, crafter level, special crafting goals achieved or whatever) effects its durability to repair cost.

Excellent idea!! I hope devs see this and adopt it.