Guild Wars 2

I would love to see crafting become account wide. Which would mean the limit on simultaneous crafting skills active would be removed, the highest skill level on an account would become the account level in that craft and recipes would work similar to the account wallet when it was introduced (as soon as you log in on any character they are added to the account, possibly, but not necessarily, refunding any duplicate recipes).

The only thing the current system accomplishes is that people have to switch characters to craft. With the account-bound ascended/celestial crafting (which I must state again I find a very bad choice mostly because it forces people that don’t want tocraft to craft and denies people who like crafting to make a bit of gold) even the possible incentive to trade for things the other skills make (the only possible reason I can come up with for limiting the number of simultaneous active crafts) is no longer relevant, everyone will need a number of crafts (probably 6 if you play at least 1 character of each armor class).

The possible downsides of this idea:
People use crafting to level: If you consider this a legitimate way to level (I don’t) it should easily be possible to make an item that costs roughly the same as leveling to 80 through crafting that instantly boosts a character to lvl 80. Alternatively make characters have to talk to a crafting trainer and choose to add that character to account crafting, those characters that haven’t yet chosen to access account crafting could then still be leveled through crafting.
The recently introduced 3 crafts on a character cash shop item: the item could be refunded.

The ability to craft account wide could even be sold for gems if absolutely necessary; I’d pay quite a few for it anyway. Although I believe fixes to bad design desicions (which I’d say the limit on active crafts is) shouldn’t be sold.

Summary:
The current system only forces people to switch characters to craft.
Account wide crafting would stop people having to switch characters to craft.
If you think leveling through crafting is desireable, alternatives could be implemented.
This could be sold though I think it should be free.

So the extra 10 seconds to switch is a big hassle?

It’s not that difficult to switch.

This is a solution looking for a problem. Requiring ANet to revamp the whole crafting professions to make them account wide and create a system to accommodate those who still want to craft to level, just so some people won’t have to go to character select and back to game, would be a waste of the Devs time and resources.

It can take quite a bit more than 10 seconds, loading screens can last quite a while, the character may need to be moved…

It’s not difficult at all. It is inconvenient though.
And in my opinion there’s no need to accomodate people who want to level useing crafing, just play the game to level.
It wasn’t difficult to switch characters to access other currencies either, we do have an account wallet now though.

It’s not that hard to switch characters.

I have a bad internet connection and it takes way more than 10 seconds to load.

I have to switch characters to get the crafting profession I want.

I have to usually switch maps and then run to the crafting site.

To ask the Devs to spend hours of their time remodeling crafting, to spend who knows how much money in payroll costs, to take people away from whatever they were working on before this, just so someone doesn’t have to spend a little bit of time switching characters is not an appropriate use of Dev time.

I’m sure they were well aware of character switching and loading time when the game was being designed as they would have had to character switch and load the game then as well.

Exactly. This is asking the devs to spend time redesigning the crafting system when they could be fixing bugs or creating “new” content. The account was different as players have a finite amount of inventory space and tokens/badges were taking up quite a lot of space.

I’d say this suggestion wouldn’t be anywhere close to redesigning.
You both seem to have a great knowledge of the time costs of different things the devs could do, I do not have any such knowledge but would think changing crafting to account bound would cost relatively little time, especially compared to making proper new content (stuff worth playing).
And if the time it takes is a problem they could put it in the cash shop, it’s got to be a better use of their time than the usual stuff they put in there.

Same amount of time as the wallet if not more. All of this so players can save themselves 10-30 seconds the very few times that they actually do craft.

What do you base that on?
And it’s not that relevant how long it’d take compared to the account wallet as that’s neither an absolute time nor a time relative to creating new content.
Switching characters can easily take minutes, it takes me at least about 30 seconds just to log into a city (so 30 seconds would be the lower estimate for a character logged out next to the crafting station).

And of course, like I stated multiple times they could (though I don’t think they should) put it in the cash shop.

But yes this would be a convenience thing and if you think it’s not worth it that’s fine. So far I haven’t seen any arguments actually against the idea just against the (unknown amount of) time it would take.

Figures were not made up. It takes me 10 seconds to relog a new character so it’s not far fetched that it could take up to 30 seconds for others. If it’s taking minutes then you’re likely running a computer that can barely run this game or that figure is a completely made up number.

Loading into Lion’s Arch costs me 30 seconds or so and my computer can easily run this game, at quite high graphics settings outside of large scale events. adding going to character select, loading into a random map, waypointing to Lion’s Arch and walking to the crafting table to that makes 2 minutes seem like a reasonable estimate to me. I’ll admit that assumption was unfair though, I should at least have given you the benefit of the doubt. Although I am still intersted where you get the certainty it would take at least as long as the account wallet.

We don’t know how long it took them. I was saying that based on what they’d have to do, it’d probably be similar to how long it took them do do the wallet. My point was the with how minimal of a benefit it would be, it likely would not be worth doing because of the time and resources it could take. It’s not something as simple as flipping a switch or modifying a little code here and there.