The Quick and Easy Way to Lose Gold

Do you keep running into the gold cap? Are you sick of making alts just to store piles of gold? Do the GMs whisper you for advice? We've all been in this situation where we buy out the entire auction house and yet just can't seem to get rid of gold fast enough. Even cross-faction auction houses aren't much help when you're inexplicably good at being fabulously wealthy.

Thankfully, I discovered a sure-fire way to not just waste gold, but get less of it in the first place! It's very simple; just follow these steps:
1) Have an item that can be disenchanted.
2) Look at what it disenchants into: both materials and quantity.
3) Compare the item vendor price and the auction value of the enchanting materials.
4) If the materials are worth less than the vendor, disenchant it!

Now you'll have stacks and stacks of materials and you can waste tons of time posting them on the auction house, keeping you from spending time getting gold.

Not to give away all my secrets at once, but here's a pretty reliable trick to waste gold: disenchant Pandaria greens. You'll get spirit dust that sells for less than 20s each, but it uses armor that costs 10g or more. If you're really unlucky and get 7 dust, you're still destroying at least 85% of the value of the item. Even better, the market is flooded with the stuff, so good luck ever selling it.

Feel free to use this for any gold-wasting guides you want, just a bit of credit where it's due, please.

At least Engineering is supposed to do that, but Blacksmithing is terrifying

Copper. Tin. Iron. So far, so good. These are all fairly safe things. What about mithril. Is it dangerous to smelt and work with it in an open setting in the middle of a major city? Or worse, an unventilated room?

Then there's thorium. That's a nuclear fuel. Can you imagine if people were commonly melting down uranium, purifying it, and then making armor with that? What happens to the slag? Do we purify it to get the more or less radioactive isotopes? What about the radium that is generated by decaying thorium? Powdered thorium can spontaneously burn in air at near-normal temperatures, though that's true of many metals. It should have no problem exploding in a forge.

Just to the next expansion and we're working with fel iron. Fel iron? As in, iron that has been corrupted by demonic energy? It's not as if we forge it into something that isn't demonic, making either fel iron bars or felsteel. That is followed by adamantium, which is likely mostly safe, and given the willingness of vendors to purchase it, seems to have some ability to be recycled. Due to its name and rarity, I'd guess that khorium is terribly radioactive or in some way unstable. Why we would then mix that with demon-tainted iron is anyone's guess.

Cobalt. Well cobalt doesn't sound so scary, right? It really isn't, except for cobalt-rich ores tending to produce arsenic when smelted. It is named from kobold (which means goblin). And for some reason, despite being commonly found as a by-product of copper production in real life, it is instead found in pure form and is never seen during copper production. Perhaps it isn't actually cobalt and we've been working with some terrifying other mineral. Or it comes from meteor impacts. But how often do we see meteors? How much more often do we see infernals crash down?

Saronite is the blood of an Old God.

Elementium and Obsidium don't sound like anything all that scary, though it is a little odd that we only discover the latter after Deathwing triggers the Cataclysm. The original elementium was also an extraordinarily rare and expensive alloy created from a variety of materials recovered from hostile elementals. The new version is much easier to find and smelt, but is entirely incompatible, suggesting that, despite having the same name, it is something different. What are we working with? Pyrite is a sulfur-iron compound, which seems dangerous to be smelting, and who knows how we're turning that into something other than poor-quality iron bars.

Ghost iron.

Kyparite, as best as I can tell, is fossilized amber. That's where you get transgender dinosaurs, a stirring soundtrack, and certain death.

Engineering is supposed to be horribly dangerous and irresponsible. But blacksmithing? No one said that it would be hammering radiation, demons, ghosts, and congealed madness into armor.

Cobalt: This one weird ore that can make you lose your mind in just a few minutes

Why it was okay that fel iron and cobalt were annoying to find

Once upon a time when leveling took a while, it was not unreasonable to need a lot of a crafting material to level the profession. You'd be out in the world so much that you were bound to get what you needed. Ores such as cobalt were widely-dispersed and tricky to gather without flying mounts. Yet you got them.

Upon hitting the cap, you likely needed the other ores more. So there were more of them. Saronite could come out the wazoo. Adamantium could also come out the wazoo. Meanwhile, fel iron would remain persistent even in higher level zones because it was still needed for high level items.

These are all fine and dandy when you're in a leveling-capping situation. These days, it becomes a problem. You may level out of the cobalt zones before you've naturally farmed enough. Then you're in the saronite-flooded zones for plenty long, a situation made especially noticeable thanks to the level 80 start on Cata, rather than the 58-60 or 68-70 that could fudge the starts and ends of continents a bit. So you have saronite out the wazoo, but there aren't capped crafters setting ten dozen stacks of saronite ore on fire to make a single "Boots of the Pretty Good That Can Get you Started on Raiding".

There are two ways to fix this. One way is to slow down leveling. The other is to replace some saronite with cobalt. My money is on the Third Way: ignore the problem.

If You Log On to an Alt

If you log on to an alt he's going to want to run the new content.
Before he moves on he's going to want to have his professions up to date.
To get his professions up to date he'll need to farm some materials.
While he farms some materials he's going to want a zapthrottle mote extractor.
The mote extractor requires a delicate arcanite converter.
Since no one makes many of those anymore, he's going to need to fly to Winterspring.
When he can make the converter he'll see that he needs an arcanite bar.
To make an arcanite bar you need to log on to your alchemist alt...

Can we get rid of the First Rule of MMO Crafting?

That rule of course being: "Don't make anything useful until the parts stop giving skill."

You start off making copper gizmos which are used to make copper widgets.  Both are guaranteed to give a skill boost.  So you do the sensible thing and make a few gizmos and turn them into widgets because widgets are pretty handy to have.  But now gizmos don't give any more skill and widgets are the only way to level.  So you're stuck making more gizmos for no skill to make widgets for skill and the overall result is that you used extra materials and made extra widgets (there are only so many you can use) for the same skill gain as if you'd made all the gizmos at the start and then the widgets afterward.  Of course to do that you'd need to have known that gizmos go grey very quickly and you should not make any widgets until then, which seems rather silly, since presumably one reason you're leveling widgetsmithing is because your class uses widgets and it makes quite a bit of sense to make a widget and use it right away to replace your terrible starting gear consisting of a stone widget with no stats.

I suggest this: crafting parts go grey at the same skill level as the devices they create.

Ah, but you're thinking that there is a problem.  Surely now this means that gizmos are the easy way to go, all the way, cheap and easy!  But you're wrong.  Why would I make nothing but gizmos?  They won't sell for much, not if they're supposedly the spam-crafting way to go and therefore in an abundant supply and utterly without demand. In fact, once I have a pile of gizmos, why would I not turn them into widgets?  I get a skill up without using any materials which I have no already spent, and given the tendency for gizmos to sell for very little to merchants and vendors, there is very little lost in the gizmo->widget conversion.

The net effect would be to make crafting guides a thing of the past.  No more "make 10 copper gizmos and then 10 copper doodads and then finally 5 copper widgets"  followed with "make 10 bronze gizmos..." and so on and so forth, the net effect being to convert a relaxing session of widgetlust gratification into another google search for a guide that isn't for the last expansion and therefore out of date.

The new crafting method would be to make what you want as soon as you have the skill for it, without needing to look up the exact moment that you're allowed to make a widget to use, which is, at times, never.

Ergo, engineering ruined WoW

Wednesday I suggested that adding gold to quests, and therefore the resulting daily quests, had created all manner of problems for WoW.  Rohan pointed out that there was another area to consider: the relative desirability of crafting and gathering professions.  In short, crafting professions got combat bonuses, making them more desirable for taking on challenges in raiding and PvP.  But two crafting professions are not profitable enough to sustain the player, so dailies were created so that combat bonuses would not ruin the economy and make players sad.  Sadly, dailies ruined the economy instead.

Now you might be wondering why Blizzard added combat bonuses to professions.  The reason: Engineering.  This profession was, and still is, filled with quirky devices that extend the flexibility and effectiveness of a player, assuming they do not backfire.  Long ago, they could use an inexpensive grenade over and over to stun players and deal damage, while moving.  Combined with a variety of useful tricks such as death rays, cloaking devices, and mind-control helmets, engineering was extremely powerful in PvP.  Beyond the usefulness of the devices was the fact that trinkets used to be hard to find and weaker than they are now (with some notable exceptions), and since engineering made a variety of trinkets, it was quite handy.

To balance this, because people whined incessantly, and because engineering never got an EMP to destroy the forums, Blizzard added combat bonuses to other crafting professions.  And also nerfed engineering.  Repeatedly.  This begins Rohan's suggested pattern of combat crafting causing dailies.

Of course gathering professions were then weaker in combat.  Sure they could get gold, but what's the use of gold if you're denied a raid spot for having the wrong profession?  So gathering got buffs too.  But then if those appear to powerful, crafting needs some benefit as well.  And so on and so forth.

My solution: remove all combat bonuses from non-awesome professions.  Bring back mob farming as a way that non-gathering players can contribute needed materials.  Bring back unusual materials and hard to find but powerful crafted items, which are not quickly made obsolete by LFR and badges.  Remove daily quests.  Increase the coin drops from latest-tier raid bosses if raiding drains too much gold.  Remove the many gold sinks which encourage obsessive daily farming.

I don't think it's asking too much that players never feel compelled to log in every day.  They should never feel like they're missing something just because they missed a completely random day, not a raiding day, not a guild event, not a holiday, but just some day, some utterly normal day.  I don't think there is anything wrong with playing every day, unless the player doesn't want to.

P.S. Bring back iron grenades. :P

Why you should use a boring mount

Turning into a dragon is definitely cool.  Carrying friends to great heights and dropping them is cool too.  Having friends is overrated.

What isn't cool, but is definitely valuable, is being able to land.  With the small, boring, basic mounts, landing is easy.  You know right away where the center is, where the feet are.  When you need to land on tiny outcroppings to get minerals, herbs, or just need a good spot from which to rain down terror on soon-to-be terrified enemies, having a small mount helps.

My own experience with landing the big mounts has shown that they are much trickier.  The worst may be the dragons, which always seem to be an inch away from landing but are still insistent on flapping their wings.

There is the option of dismounting before the mount has settled, but if it isn't landing, you're probably going to end up on a steady downward slope.

In most situations this all just means you waste a little bit of time moving around trying to get the unwieldy dragon to land.  But sometimes, it means someone else wins the race, to the ore, the herb, or the rare.  You can't have that.

Don't let vanity stand in the way of the pyrium vein that you've earned by flying in circle for hours!

P.S. I'm re-restarting my political blog over at Delusions of Truth.  This could result in 25% less randomly political posts here.  No promises.

What's the big deal with alts?

Syl has gone on an anti-alt rampage. You might think I agree, since I've unofficially added alts to my list of Things That Are Destroying WoW. But if there's one thing I love more than criticizing Blizzard with the power of hindsight and nostalgia, it's disagreeing with anyone.

So Syl, you're wrong.

And it's all your fault.

Within your personal complaints section you offered a few opinions, which I have interpreted as these:

• They cause problems with immersion and identification with a character
• Alts tend to be second-rate (poorly geared)
• They take too much time
• Excessive self-sufficiency through alts harms the player economy and the fun of it
• They're meaningless.

The immersion problem is due to a mental flaw: you're unable to properly create and segment personalities. Anyone with merely one personality is bound to have problems.

Second-rate alts are an insignificant problem which Blizzard has fixed by showering everyone and everything with gear. So thanks a lot, Syl, your endless (or one-time-only) whining about your terribly geared alts is responsible for the many loot pinatas.

The self-sufficiency bit has no obvious problems that I can blame you for.

Meaninglessness? Well thanks, because that got extended to everything. It's like when I'd complain that my brothers got more cake than me so my parents would throw away all the cake and makes us eat stale crackers instead. I was 15 before I learned that saltines are not cookies.

But you weren't done with it, were you? Then you go on to claim that playing alts doesn't make players better and in fact players tend to be good or bad (or somewhere in the middle) at the game as a whole rather than at individual aspects.

Playing alts can make players better. Can. Maybe. Possibly potentially it can happen in some circumstances. Alts can raise personal expectations. For example, when I played a paladin I learned to AoE tank (not that it was hard...) and when I made my warrior alt I decided that I would hold him to a similar standard, causing me to tank better than I would if I just said "oh well, I'm just a warrior and everyone knows warriors are stupid jerks." I suppose that example was reversed. And outdated, since it's been years since vanilla, during which every single warrior was a stupid jerk, much like in BC and LK when all moonkin were stupid jerks. But I digress.

Playing alts can help to see the game from other perspectives. While we can intellectually understand the mechanics, we don't fully understand how they affect people until we are in their shoes, literally virtually.

As for the "Good players are good players, no matter what toon they play and vice versa" claim, well that's utterly untrue. At least I hope it's untrue. I'm a terrible healer, or maybe not terrible, but not great, and easily stressed out and overwhelmed. If skill is consistent, that means I'm also bad at tanking and DPS, which would make me sad. So I think what this really comes down to is that Syl is a jerk.

But that doesn't mean alts are the greatest thing ever

What's so great about alts? It's nice to have something to tinker with and to learn a bit about how other classes see the game, but when and why did we get the idea that we must have max-level, max-profession, max-gear alts? That's not an alt, that's a second main! Is one main not good enough? Maybe we need more fun and more to do on our mains, rather than spamming alts and then getting sick of repeating quests.

-Me
In vanilla, the game of supposedly raid or die, if you aren't in a raid you might as well quit, a game where we might expect to have a ton of alts, I actually didn't have anywhere near as many as now. I had fewer and I had much different expectations for them. I expected to raid on my main (and I did) but my alts were not there to be part of some economic gaming powerhouse of achievements. They were to try out different ways to play. Some were short distractions: I'd wonder what a druid was like, play it briefly, and then know that I was much happier not playing a druid (early druids at early levels were a miserable experience).

I suppose they weren't alts at all, if we assume that "alt" is short for "alternative". They weren't alternatives. In fact, the closest thing was a warlock who, long story short, was not mine, and who briefly took the raiding spot from my shaman, since we needed a good warlock more than we need a bad healer. But the rogue, he was only around to play around a bit before I went back to playing a real class. None of the others ever got very high, since they were there for distraction rather than characters in which I would expect to invest any time or expect any achievement.

Somehow that changed. Why or when, I do not know. When I left WoW I had a plethora of alts. More than a handful of 80s, in various states of gear. None really got far since I'd quickly get sick of doing the same heroics as before, over and over, except with a longer queue time and more gear bashing. They all had maxed-out professions and functioned as a small economy unto themselves, which for the most part meant my rogue did all the money-making (JC is a bullshit profession), which the druid then stole for darkmoon decks, and then my paladin main turned them into reputation and eventually a title to reflect my insanity. In this my alts were not sources of great fun, but merely cogs in a machine. But cogs which I felt I must have.

The economic aspect makes sense to me. We gained to many more money sinks, resource sinks, that it is sensible to try to avoid them. And avoid the inconvenience. We once needed very little to get armor up and running, an enchant, maybe an armor patch at most, and it was ready to wear. Now we need gems, enchants, armor patches, glyphs (not part of gear, but part of the general theme of "you must take a dozen extra steps for no actual gain"), and now reforging. Maybe these were meant to spur the player economy. But as anyone can tell you, taxing too heavily only gives benefit until it starts to feed the black market, and alts are the black market. The analogy isn't perfect. How about how pushing someone on a swing makes them go higher, but if you push too hard they just fall off it on the ground and get mad?

In closing, I offer these insightful words:

What's so great about alts? It's nice to have something to tinker with and to learn a bit about how other classes see the game, but when and why did we get the idea that we must have max-level, max-profession, max-gear alts? That's not an alt, that's a second main! Is one main not good enough? Maybe we need more fun and more to do on our mains, rather than spamming alts and then getting sick of repeating quests.

-Me

Alternative Sources of Artifacts

I recently realized that digging is a pointlessly inefficient way of gathering artifacts. Or at least the random digging in the middle of nowhere. There are better ways!

For starters, there are more than a few animated fossils in Tanaris. These should be able to be surveyed. Kill them and pick out the bones that look the oldest. Or the ones that best fit your preexisting idea of how the world came to be. Fortunately we don't have carbon-dating, so this method still works. These can be called pre-dug, or self-digging fossils.

But these fossils are dirty. And besides, what if you want something other than fossil artifacts? That doesn't even make sense, since artifacts are artificial. Then again, so are our interpretations of fossils. But I digress. Let's see, where can we find dwarf and fossil artifacts, nicely dug up for us? Ironforge, of course. Yes, I propose that Horde in general, and Alliance rogues in specific, be able to rob the museum of Ironforge. For good measure, the Stormwind library as well.

To keep things balanced, the Alliance will have every opportunity to take any artifacts that the Horde trolls have managed to recover from their more savage cousins.

Of course Outland is a free-for-all of looting gravesites. Why bother with random artifact spawns when you can simply dig up everything and find something?

The night elves should not be left out, so I propose that players be able to simply dig up the many ruins scattered around the everywhere.

But let's face it, these are still all very inefficient. I mean, why wait for artifacts to get old before taking them? We have access to the Caverns of Time. While so far we've only gone as far back as the first invasion of the Orcs, I see no reason that we could not go further back. You might call it time travel and theft, but I call it preemptive archaeology.

The Imminent Death of Archaeology

I have a theory for you. It's not a particularly complex one, but it may make you try, just like I did. I'm exaggerating. Maybe.

Of course I'm not going to just tell you the theory. No, I have some talking to do. Let's start with a strange coincidence: getting two artifact spawns in exactly the same place. Last survey points to an artifact at (X,Y). Drop another survey and aha, an artifact at (X,Y). This is, of course, not impossible with random placement of the artifacts within the boundaries. But it's highly unlikely, especially if it happens multiple times. Clearly something is going on here, something more than random (X,Y) with a Z to match the elevation. For starters, certain areas are blocked: such as walls and deep water, as well as nothing else that I can think of. And yet when going from really tiny odds to three times as high as really tiny odds, well it makes me think of those studies that find that X causes a 200% increase in the rate of Y, only to find that the usual rate of Y is something like one in a hundred million, so who gives a shit?

I'm trying to suggest that artifacts, much like ore or herbs, are not random in an area, but random over certain spawns. Even further, said spawns may not even be all that numerous. See where I'm going with this?

Imagine that you have a small field with three artifact spawn locations. You know where they are, having dug them up, or looked online. Just by dropping the survey in the right location you can know exactly which artifact is there. Don't argue too much with the geometry and exceptions, it's beside the point, which is that if we know the spawn locations, we can very easily determine optimal surveying locations in order to test the limited number of possible spawn locations.

Currently archaeology is a bit of an Explorer activity. You don't know quite where the fields are, though someone will make that database soon enough. But you definitely don't know where the spawns are, though someone will make that database soon enough. But at least the actual finding isn't... oh hell, it's all over, we know the best places to drop a survey at a given field and that's that. Shit.

I'm not a perfect explorer. I've a bit of achiever in myself. A bit of killer. A bit of social. Depending on the situation, one may appear dominant. Do I explore the one tiny corner of the map that I've flown past but not quite looked at? (marginal gain) or do I go hang out at CoC and throw hammers at people wiping to bosses? (FREE XP WOO!) The achiever/killer wins that one. And so at some point the achiever may say "Hey, quit fucking around with the random surveys and put one here, here, and here so I can get my artifacts and make something cool. By make something cool I mean get more numbers. Do you see that number? Is it as big as it could be? No? Then start surveying in the right place!"

Well, on a more positive note, I'm very glad that Blizzard included the panel for what has already been created, including the flavor text. A pack rat like me would go insane having to throw away that precious, precious yellow text which may or may not contain a joke.

[edit] There's also the Imminent Death of Archaeologists.

Enchanters: The vendor sells vellum

Oh man, I got these great deals on enchanting vellum! The market price looked like 1g! Some guy had them up there fore 20s! I made off like a bandit. Oh, they're about 9s on the vendor? Oops.

In related news, I went from 130 to 175 with 3 stam to bracers. Only two soul dust each and for some reason it was extremely cheap, only about 10s each. From orange to green that gave only 5 failed skillups. 45 levels for only about 10g, pretty good in my book.

Redistributing the Wealth

What's the point of jewelcrafting?

It allows us to better use gear, giving more flexibility by not capping caps on gear, but with gems. So upgrades are upgrades rather than "well it's better but I'd lose the hit cap". That's nice. But we have way way more sockets than we'd need for that. Why not instead have more things like belt buckles and maybe have an item or two which always has sockets? Because that would accomplish this first goal with few negative effects.

As you can see, gemming based on blacksmights adding sockets and a handful already on gear would make a decent bit for blacksmithing and a decent bit for jewelcrafting. But jewelcrafting was supposed to be the great new profession, so it must be profitable. A handful of sockets is not enough!

The driving force behind gem and socket design was not to help players use a wider array of gear. It was to move gold. The goal was to move gold from you to jewelcrafters. This resulted in lots and lots of sockets. Those sockets would have to be filled. And not just filled, but filled quickly, since when an item has two or three sockets on it, particularly meta gem sockets, the upgrade isn't an upgrade until that socket is filled. This puts players in a rushed state, accelerating the natural desire for quick results, to the point where players will willingly pay for hugely profitable gems, and lots of them.

It's time to nerf jewelcrafting. Just give a little service to tailors, leatherworkers, and blacksmiths: ripping gems out of gear, destroying it in the process. Yes, that's another idea I ripped from Torchlight. One of the NPCs in the game can destroy a gem to free up a socket (a service that we don't need since new gems can do that) while another can tear apart an item to liberate the gems inside. That second one would be more than a little bit valuable, and would significantly reduce the need for new gems every time an item is upgraded. This would actually destroy the market entirely, meaning that players would only need a few dozen gems ever, which is perhaps excessive. So instead the gem recovery process could scratch them, meaning turning them into uncut gems which would need to be recut. This at least cuts out the perpetual prospecting gold mine. It also hurts mining. But there's an easy fix for that: buff engineering.

In fact, that might be the fix for everything.

Fishing as a stat

I want to be able to reforge weapons to make them usable as fishing poles. Or the reverse. Let's say 40% weapon DPS changes to fishing, though still usable for combat. On the reverse, a fishing pole can be reforged, gaining DPS (though not the inverse of 40%, since that would end up overpowered) and will no longer be usable as a fishing pole. But it looks like a fishing pole and is perfectly suitable for beating people to death.

After all, who doesn't want to use non-fishing pole items as fishing poles? Even the goblins get to use dynamite.

Do other players ruin all the fun?

25 man hardmode Lich King and he's at 11%, you've got this! Boom. Boom? Yes, boom. There's been a boom. Also something of a squawk.

You brought an engineer and let's just say you can spell engineering without r-e-l-i-a-b-i-l-i-t-y. So yes, your raid is all dead and/or chickens. No wait, that one's a duck.

What I'm trying to say is that your raid just wiped on an incredibly hard fight which you were about to win, in a hilarious manner, but perhaps not to the people who were really expecting that 1% to not be there in a few seconds. They're not happy about this.

What if there weren't 24 other people? I know I have few objections to killing myself in uncountable and unimaginable ways. I've had parachute cloak failures, rocket boot failures, backfiring lightning generators, and a mechanohog which suddenly ceased to make me immune to fall damage. I don't mind dying to strange new ways to die.

But I'm not a fan of wiping raids. I've done it more than a few times and I can't say I enjoy it. Sure, it was a bit funny when I got overeager with my rocket boots and repositioning and sprinted right into an exploding orb, knocking me, the second tank, far far away from the fight, and relatively speaking, the ground. But I'd have enjoyed that more if I hadn't wiped the raid.

A lot of potential fun ends up victim to not ruining the game for other players, or alternatively, is ruined by other players. Engineering could be so much more powerful, and less reliable. Blacksmiths could be crafting amazing weapons of unimaginable power, but then everyone would have one and that's just gear inflation. When it can kill the raid, it's not so fun anymore, so no more divine intervention.

On the other hand, what's a glorious wipe without other people? Where's the fun in being the only chicken bomb?

It's the spam, stupid

I've noticed a trend in discussions of crafting in relation to WoW: Any time a new system is suggested that is more interactive than auto-craft, someone argues that it is a terrible idea because we do so much crafting. That's all backward! If we can't have a fun crafting system because there's too much spam crafting, the problem is the spam crafting, not the fun.

That's all.

Would we want a player economy?

Yes the title implies an understatement of the player economy in WoW. But I didn't make this blog to be reasonable.

How much do crafters really matter in WoW?

With a very few exceptions, the gear we make is equivalent at best to NPC drops. In other words, our gear, in the grand scheme of things, isn't making us any more power. At best it speeds up our power gain early on, before we start getting marginal gains from raids.

Enchants, gems, and armor patches are all enhancements, and are important, but how much? These are rough calculations, but are close enough:
My paladin has 5175 AP, 589 from gems, enchants, and patches. This excludes NPC items such as my head and shoulder enchants. Berserking can be calculated to an average uptime of around 170 (numbers I found varied, this was highest, making i the most favorable to players). That makes players a total of 759/5175
1014 crit rating, about 123 from crit (I am rounding up to 1agi=1crit), and 3% crit damage, which I don't quite now how to factor in, but let's just call it 3% to crit, worth approximately 120 (1000 accounts for about half my crit chance, so I doubled and took 3%). That's a total of 243 from gems and enchants.

In total the player economy contributes about 10% of my AP and 25% of my crit. That's significant. And yet, less than a shouting orc in ICC does. Compare that to what I gaineded from leveling and getting gear from NPCs and players look well, not very significant. Consider also that there are some items which would have fewer gems slots in favor of more other stats, reducing the real contribution of gems.

Did anyone notice that I ignored the much harder to calculate glyphs? Even those probably wouldn't kill us. They're not game-changers.

If there were no player crafters of any sort, we could still down bosses. We'd go slower, we'd have to farm more gear, but the sad truth is, player crafters are a convenience and not much more.

But what if player crafters were essential?
Players could be responsible for much larger stat gains. Enchanting could be expending to cover everything rather than a select few slots. Gems could be stronger or we could add more sockets. But still, this is all surface area stuff. Unless normal bosses were as hard as hardmodes, we'd still get them down. We'd still get our gear and that gear would still account for the majority of our stats.

Let's start with a middle ground, in which players are essential, but not the total picture. Imagine needing an enchanter to remove the evil in looted gear. No stat gain, but you can't wear it otherwise. Or a blacksmith, leatherworkers, or tailor would need to refit the gear. An engineer would need to adjust the sights on guns and bows. NPCs would still provide the gear, but players would be essential. Would we actually enjoy this greater influence of other players?

I don't think so. WoW has gotten where it is, and the community has become what it is, based on other players being mostly irrelevant. We level up alone. We gear up anonymously. We might get loot in groups, but it is our loot and we need no one else to be able to use it. Once we get our hands on it, other players can go screw themselves. Thanks to scrolls we can even use our own enchanter alt to enchant our gear. Who needs a community when you have a lot of time? Needing people to make our gear usable would interfere with our independence.

Let's go even more extreme: Players as the primary source of gear. Think of EVE where players make the ships, weapons, even ammo. If you want a new chestpiece, you don't join the scheduled guild raid. Instead you hope that someone is crafting them, posting them, and not charging more than you're willing to pay. We'll overpay for a few gems, especially when dailies can feed us more than enough, but think of that crafted piece you recently bought and if it had cost twice as much, and you couldn't go to the raid and pray for a drop.

It's a strange thing that player crafting would seem to create a guarantee of gear and therefore be desirable, except it creates heavy dependence on players crafting. Whereas the RNG of a boss feels safer, because we know he's supposed to drop the item sometime and he won't charge us twice as much this week. We prefer our bubble of NPCs to protect us from other players.

Recrafting, the cause of, and solution to, all of loot's problems

Imagine a world where leather drops, a warrior rolls need, and no one calls ninja. Instead the blacksmith in the group sees gold coins falling before his eyes.

Let's imagine for a moment that armor is built up, not merely hammered into existence fully formed. Mail isn't merely metal, but is built upon a foundation of leather. Similarly, plate as well. This provides a bit more cushioning. And it allows the warrior to roll need.

Imagine if blacksmiths and leatherworkers could add, or remove, metal from armor. Using common materials and common training, they could add on sheets and links of metal, or take them off, allowing far greater flexibility in gear choices.

This brings in some work for LW and BS. It reduces wasted gear. It also gives a slight bias to mail and a higher one to plate. After all, they could just wear the gear without more armor, for no additional cost, while going the other direction requires pulling off the extra metal. They would get some bars from it, but I predict a lot of guilds would provide the upgrading metal by taking the downgrading metal.

Obviously this isn't going to happen. Blizzard has made its armor decisions for Cataclysm. Who knows what will come next, but I doubt a more active role for crafting fits into their vision for WoW.

Buy vendored gear from vendors

Just a quick idea: Make a random sample of recently vendored BoE gear appear on random vendors of the appropriate level range (based on the gear).

For example, someone leveling BS makes a bunch of thorium bracers. He doesn't put them on the AH for one reason or another (some sensible, some not), but instead sells them to a vendor. A level 50 player goes to repair, wishing he could ditch his stupid level 35 bracers, and there he sees it: thorium bracers for sale.

This helps leveling players with the frequent problem of huge gear gaps. It makes it more apparent that other players exist, and they do influence the world. Perhaps not in dramatic ways, but in a noticeable way.

Should leveling professions while leveling require farming?

Earlier I advocated activities being gold-neutral. Rep grinds would give enough gold to pay for rep items. Kills and quests while leveling would give enough gold to pay for repairs, training, and mounts (excluding epic flying). Profession training would be paid for by vendoring crafted items, or selling it and the gold coming from the buyer vendoring something else; the net effect is that the crafting doesn't create or destroy gold.

Somehow I missed the other, possibly more important, part of the economy: materials.

Should professions require farming to level? I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't require materials, but how should we get those materials? Farming in this case is a non-leveling activity. This doesn't mean it can't be something that gives XP; for skinners that's nearly inevitable. But it's something done with the intent of gathering materials first and leveling second. Leveling might involve stumbling across herbs. Farming might involve stumbling across mobs.

Are professions part of leveling or are they an activity of their own? If they are not part of leveling, then we should have to farm; how much is likely to depend on the mood of the devs the day they place herb spawns and skinning tables. But, if they are part of leveling, then we should, on average, get enough materials to level a crafting profession by a 'normal' leveling pattern; some mix of instances and quests and possibly a mob grind here and there.

Note that everything is on average across the playerbase in a small range of levels. So maybe one player picks up more gold and the other picks up more skins. The idea is that there is vertical independence but possibly horizontal dependence.

Obviously if professions are not leveled while characters are leveling, then the professions will require farming. Again, this is on average; so maybe you don't farm mats but you farm gold and buy from someone who farmed mats, or someone who ran dual gathering professions; meaning that on average you still have a profession leveled while leveling (just not by the same person) and a profession not leveled while leveling (the gatherer), so someone must still farm.

Bind on Guild Recipes

In yesterday's thread comments the idea came up of patterns being bound to guilds rather than players. This has all sorts of implications.

Drop rate
Would it go up or down? I have no clue! It probably comes down to the intended level of accessibility and how Blizzard expects BoG recipes to change it. I imagine the drop rate would be lower since the schematic is effectively unlimited, being able to enable many crafters per guild. It might get dropped even further if Blizzard found that all guilds were commonly getting all schematics.

Who can get the crafted goods?
It isn't unlikely that guild schematics would only make BoG items. It would be similar to profession-specific BoPs: they're a bonus intended to be only for those which are in the profession/guild.

If the creations were BoE, then guilds might attempt to control their production in order to maximize profits or to reduce the gear available to competing guilds.

Guild control of crafting
Would this cause crafted goods to be more or less accessible? It could be that this causes a single drop to enable dozens of crafters. That would cause prices to drop as they compete. Or it could be that where before a crafter owned his schematics and could use them however he wished, that power would be gone. Guild control could have all sorts of effects depending on how the mechanic of guild crafting works.

The schematic could be learned by the guild, meaning that any person in the guild with the profession skill can make it. This gives the guild no control of crafting except to remove those who they don't want to craft anymore. That's not a very good level of control. Even worse, for the guild, is that it could be nearly impossible to spot offenses, to spot people breaking any rules the guild tries to make for crafting.

Alternatively the crafting could taught through a non-consumed BoG recipe. This allows the guild to control who learns it but nothing past that.

The item could not teach the craft, but instead only grant the ability. That would allow the guild to control the location of the item and therefore who can craft and when. Guilds might just stick them in the bank and let them be traded and and moved in and out as people want to craft. More restrictive guilds might have one person control access to the item, trading it only for individual crafts approved by the guild. This would be pretty overbearing and most likely any guild that tried this would collapse. With a possible exception of guilds created purely for crafting.


Crafting guilds
If crafting is done with the non-consumable, guild-bound item which grants crafting, then guilds could potentially form entirely for crafting. Players would pay to get into the guild; perhaps a monthly amount to stay in or they might only rent the BoG crafting. These fees might be used to pay for raid runs to farm the schematics within.

Depending on the rarity of the drops, we might see the rise of cartels as players use guilds to monitor and control the crafting of others. Crafting alts will not be in the main's guild for familiarity but instead in the crafting guild for profit.

Are BoG recipes a step backward?
Dungeon finder helps to separate the guild from small group PvE. It makes it so guilds are not required for readily available heroics. This means guilds can exist more out of social connection, rather than the necessities of game mechanics. Presumably this would mean tighter-knit guilds. BoG recipes might reverse this. The low drop rate and guild necessity would tie people to guilds again, this time for crafting.