Crafting for Profit
Yes, there are items that it is profitable to craft. One approach is to look for items with very high demand.
Like what? lol.
Food? Nope, better off selling mats.
JC? Nope, better off selling mats.
Any form of Armor? Nope, better off selling mats.
I have found all of 2 things that you can actually make 1-2 silver off of, but they cost 50s-1g to craft and even those items are starting to plummet in prices. There is just no real point in maxing a craft unless you’re going after the Legendary items as the mats sell for more. I’ve found several items where it’s actually a better deal to buy the crafted item, salvage it for the mats, then repost on the TC as you can actually make more money doing that. Hell, it’s really the only way I’ve made the gold I have.
almost everything.
it is better to craft and sell the crafted item than materials.
I’ve only just started crafting for profit so I’m not as knowledgeable as some but I’m able to make about 3 to 6 silver on a pretty fast selling item that costs me about 40 silver in materials, typically I’m able to make about 1 gold an hour on this item alone (though it only takes me 5 minutes to buy the materials and sell the item). But the trading post like a stock exchange destroys information, every time someone undercuts me usually my best strategy is to undercut them back to try and cycle my money as quickly as possible, even if that means my profit margin overtime will decrease. Overtime there will be less and less profit in this particular item and I’ll have find more alternatives.
I have found some very specific armor pieces that must be not represented well in their tier that sell well. I can sell 4-6 of them per day no issue.
It’s not like I’m making unlimited money doing it, but 20-30s profit doesn’t hurt.
Warning: Long Read
I’ve really been struggling with this myself. Yes… I’m one of those masochists that really likes crafting. But… I like to be rewarded by my efforts too. There are a few things related to the profitability of crafting that has thrown me off and makes me concerned.
The Economy
The scale of the economy is much different than other MMOs that I’ve played. The fact that A-net publicizes that they have an economist on staff tells me that they are closely controlling how the economy scales as well.
Personally, I’m not used to making an end game item (i.e. exotics) and making less than 50 silver of profit (profit after subtracting what you could have sold the materials for). Compared to the scale of the economy from other games, that amount of profit is small potatoes. That’s taking some getting used to. Then again… in other games, crafting took a substantial amount of time, effort, and money to max out… but the reward was being able to make decent money off of your wares since mastering a craft wasn’t something that everyone did. I know there are folks that may argue this, but in GW2, crafting is easy and attainable for anyone… so I’m assuming that’s one justification for smaller profits, to a certain degree.
If you actually try to farm most of your raw materials and sell what you make, you could’ve spent substantially less time to make the same amount of profit by just farming events and selling your drops. For me, the time invested to make a profit just isn’t worth it from a monetary standpoint.
The Future
I’m beginning to be concerned about the longevity of crafting as well. I’ve been watching very specific categories in the trading post over the last month. A little more specific… I’ve been watching the prices of exotic armor and weapons, plus the cost to purchase the materials to make them. A month ago, I could actually turn a 1-2 gold profit off of exotics. As of yesterday, there were many cases where I would be lucky to break even (in some cases items were selling for a loss).
I believe there are a few factors that are driving the costs down, making it less profitable to craft. First, most folks have purchased the armor/weapons that they want, so demand has gone down. Second, now that many people are hitting level 80, they’re finishing leveling their crafting skills and trying their hand at crafting exotics, so supply is going up. Those two combined should drive the price pretty low.
It’s possible there might be another surge for equipment when folks start getting alts to level 80. It’s possible that folks may look at putting together new sets of gear if they change their specs. Other than that, it’s hard to see what the sales future may look like.
Other Thoughts
I’d like to know what direction A-net plans on taking crafting in the future. I’m sure they’ll add new recipes and craftable skins at some point… which can temorarily boost the profitability of crafting. Many other MMOs put degradation on gear (meaning that eventually the item will permanently ‘break’). Though that feature is hated by most, it also kept the crafting community alive. That doesn’t really seem to work for GW2 though.
At this point, I’m going to continue to watch the market and look for targets of opportunity. Those moments of opportunity don’t seem to last long though. I swear other crafters are spying on me sometimes….lol.
I went ahead and maxed out my Tailoring as, at the time, I was able to make a slight profit off of some of the exotic armors. By the time I finished getting it to 400, started at 3, and crafted my first piece the profit had been undercut to a net loss of 20s per craft. Took less than a few hours for the 1 piece that I could find, where the math came out ahead, to drop to a loss.
Due to the node spawn change it’s next to impossible to make any coin with JC anymore as ore prices keep going higher and higher. Oddly enough the price of gems is going down since the change which baffles me as less nodes means less gems but for some reason ore is going up and the gems are going down.
You really can’t make money with cooking either due to prices already being next to rock bottom.
Sure, you may find a recipe that can make a few coin every now and then but undercutters just come and wipe out that profit margin in no time flat. In a few days, maybe weeks, there is going to be absolutely nothing that you can craft for profit.
Mostly I think making money from crafting is about watching for trends. For instance right now a lot of people ( chefs) are complaining about vanilla beans being unavailable or hard to get or w/e. I had a bunch of them so I sold them for a larger profit now then I probably will be able to in a week. Shrug.
Mostly I think making money from crafting is about watching for trends. For instance right now a lot of people ( chefs) are complaining about vanilla beans being unavailable or hard to get or w/e. I had a bunch of them so I sold them for a larger profit now then I probably will be able to in a week. Shrug.
Exactly my point. The cost for the crafting mats themselves was higher than the price you could sell the final product thus meaning you are losing money from crafting instead of just selling all the mats.
At first I loved the way the TC was across all servers and I loved the fact that you could drop any craft and pick it up again without losing any of the progress you made. However, after a month I can see it’s going to be horrible for the game economy in the long run.
People are getting undercut by a hell of a lot more players since they are shared across all servers, instead of just competing with the players on your own server. Most seem to not understand that they are selling for a loss instead because they just want that item sold.
Due to not losing any progress when swapping professions you won’t be able to make any money even if they add new recipes as everyone can master everything so all they have to do is swap, buy mats, craft, then swap back with no risk.
Having both systems in place ends up hurting the economy of the game a lot but I think having either a) server specific trading posts or b) losing all progress upon swapping professions, but not both, would actually help in the long run.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, making markets server-only will reduce demand approximately as much as it reduces supply, so it won’t have any overall average effect on prices. They might go up on some servers and down on others, but the average would likely be the same as it is now.
And crafting will not be profitable as long as such a large portion of the players can craft any given item, even without switching crafts. If 25% of real-world people could buy the materials needed for a Ferrari, press a few buttons, and suddenly have a finished Ferrari, making Ferraris would stop being profitable, too.
If a particular item became consistently profitable, it would soon stop being so. This is because people would learn that craft or make that item in order to make money, creating a higher demand for the relevant materials and a higher supply of the relevant item(s). They would undercut each other on sale listings, because that’s what happens when there’s a lot of supply. They would overcut each other on buy offers, because that’s what happens when there’s a lot of demand. And pretty soon, no more profit.
Welcome to economics!
Having both systems in place ends up hurting the economy of the game a lot but I think having either a) server specific trading posts or b) losing all progress upon swapping professions, but not both, would actually help in the long run.
The base game has 5 character slots, each character can do two crafting discipline and there are only 8 of those. Resetting progress would accomplish nothing.
And crafting will not be profitable as long as such a large portion of the players can craft any given item, even without switching crafts. If 25% of real-world people could buy the materials needed for a Ferrari, press a few buttons, and suddenly have a finished Ferrari, making Ferraris would stop being profitable, too.
Not quite, part of the cost is the brand. Look at the price of generic drugs vs. brand name ones.
It would be interesting if players could somehow establish a ‘brand’ but I doubt that can be implemented.
I don’t believe, even for a second, that the prices would sink to the same point if it was only server specific. I can’t think of a single MMO where that happens, excluding lower tier items as they almost always are crafted for a loss as the game goes on, but top tier items almost always make some form of profit.
Having both systems in place ends up hurting the economy of the game a lot but I think having either a) server specific trading posts or b) losing all progress upon swapping professions, but not both, would actually help in the long run.
The base game has 5 character slots, each character can do two crafting discipline and there are only 8 of those. Resetting progress would accomplish nothing.
Not everyone makes alts but what you’re talking about occurs in all MMO’s, yet only GW2 has it where virtually 0 items can be crafted for a profit. Give it a month and there will be even less, if any at all.
The only reason to take up crafting, as it stands now, is to get the gifts needed for a legendary. You spend money to get nothing in return. You would think as crafting mats decrease in price you would start to see some return on your investment, but that just doesn’t happen.
And crafting will not be profitable as long as such a large portion of the players can craft any given item, even without switching crafts. If 25% of real-world people could buy the materials needed for a Ferrari, press a few buttons, and suddenly have a finished Ferrari, making Ferraris would stop being profitable, too.
This was the point I was trying to make earlier. A-net has made crafting easy, so anyone (everyone) can do it. This set the stage for economic state that crafting is headed. I can’t figure out whether this outcome was intended or not by A-net. I’m sure A-net followed reasoning somewhere along the lines of making all content/gear more attainable to everyone… but that comes with a cost.
I honestly don’t think we’ll see any change in the immediate future. The changes I’ve seen suggested here would be major design changes, which would probably only be done with a major update or expansion.
In my opinion, they would have to introduce recipes for some sort of consumable item that everyone would want/need, but make it challenging enough to get the materials or the recipe itself in order to curb the likelihood of everyone producing said item themselves. Specializations in crafting professions may help the issue at hand too, but not to the extent that needs addressing.
Yeah, it’s not the TP that makes crafting unprofitable, it’s crafting.
Everyone can do every craft if they want (it’s not like anything is preventing anyone from rolling alts, after all), and there are reasons to level crafting apart from the items you create (namely xp). This means that every item discovered up to mastering the craft is worth a slight monetary loss, because that money is essentially exchanged for xp. Giving xp also provides an incentive for everyone to level up crafting, even if they don’t plan on using it heavily after they hit 400. Adding to that the fact that no recipe is particularly difficult to get, and you end up with way more supply than demand together with a large portion of suppliers willing to sell at a loss because they got non-monetary benefit from making the item in the first place.
I just think this is a byproduct of the leveling spree.
We are only 45 days in the game. People keep forgetting this, and starts thinking this game has been out for years like WoW.
It is perfectly normal you cannot craft for profit. All people which leveled crafting to 400 have to sell their crafted good one way or another, and most have found easier to put them in the Trading Post Bin, instead of salvaging or selling them to a vendor, because is faster and less time-consuming.
The real reason that we cannot make money on crafting is the “unlimited time posting” of the TP. People keep putting Buy orders within 1c of the vendor price because they can and is not costing anything to do it. The orders keep piling on, and price is “low”.
When “normal” sellers go see what their object is worth… they often go with the buy order price, because they (justly) think that if they put a “good” selling price they won’t sell them and they will lose even the 5% fee and have to relist.
It will be radically different if buy order would cost something. Even something that would be refunded upon completing them within, let’s say, 3 days?
We won’t see as much buy orders us before, because people won’t throw money out of the window only to “undercut for the sake of it”.
And basically, a TP reset could be useful. Will clean a lot of junk.
Guardian of Moonlight Shadow [MLS]
The primary difference here is that the crafting professions lack unique or difficult recipes. I suppose some would argue that the boxes and trays fill that gap, but I disagree. There are not enough items in the game that are “required” that are only made via crafting (i.e. the enchanting rods made by blacksmiths in WoW).
There should be recipes that are unique and difficult to obtain, and these should be added regularly, IMO.
I think its a combination of several factors;
1. As Hippocampus said, there are people willing to exchange in-game money for XPs. When someone has an 80 who can collect a gold a day farming, its a fairly rational decision to spend several gold to powerlevel an alt by crafting, and dumping whatever they make at a loss. It was clearly a design decision by ANet to do this, so I doubt they’ll change it.
2. ANet also wants people who hate the TP to have “decent” gear, so there is a high drop rate of gear that is just fine for playing most of the game. While they may tweak this, I’d be surprised if they drop it enough to force people to buy from crafters. And if they did, more people would learn to craft, still keeping margins tight.
3. ANet wants to keep the supply of gold low in the game. They had some issues with this with a few early bugs, but its pretty clear that is their intent. So I think they consider it just fine if a crafter invests 50 silver each in 10 items, and sells eight of them for a few silver profit and loses a few silver on the other two, because you won’t make much more per hour then someone else who is out there killing stuff. They risk loss if they die and have to repair their armor, you risk loss if someone undercuts you. Someone really good at fighting, or marketing, has less risk, but its never zero. Remember GW2 is a fairly PvP focused game, this is market PvP.
Your number 3 example kind of falls on it’s face. Regardless of what you are grinding on, you’re always going to make some coin, unless you’re just horrible and spend every waking second dying and having to spend your earnings repairing. There are very few recipes that make any coin at all now and the game is barely a month old. After another month, 2 if we are lucky, there will not be a single craftable item that actually has any margin for profit. As crafting mats decrease in price, so does the amount players are willing to undercut and they almost always get to the point where the crafted item is worth less than the mats required.
The real reason that we cannot make money on crafting is the “unlimited time posting” of the TP. People keep putting Buy orders within 1c of the vendor price because they can and is not costing anything to do it. The orders keep piling on, and price is “low”.
When “normal” sellers go see what their object is worth… they often go with the buy order price, because they (justly) think that if they put a “good” selling price they won’t sell them and they will lose even the 5% fee and have to relist.
This is only true for items sitting significantly above vendor price, and with a sizable gap between the highest buy order and the lowest sell listing. Quite a lot of the mid-level crafted items don’t have any (fulfillable) buy orders, because the only sell listings that move are the ones at vendor+1c, and so any buy order below that is meaningless.