The Failure of the Service Economy

[pxib]

There are rogues on the roof of the Orgrimmar bank. If you need your lockbox cracked, they are most often happy to oblige. My father (whose WoW habit will be the subject of a later post) notes that they could charge for the service, just as mages and warlocks might charge for their transportation services... but for the most part these things are free or donation oriented. Both usually within a guild framework. Quite coincidentally I have spotted the same thoughts on Terranova:

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/11/goods_and_servi.html

A few enchanters are out mongering their wares, but most of the role of the merchant has vanished from door-to-door and gone to the classified ad. Generally: if it can't be sold in the auction house, it doesn't get sold.

This is an issue besides the obvious failure of crafted goodies to be any better than the magic armor you discover stuck on local wildlife, and the difficulty potions have competing with players abilities. Where do I go if I need something done? Where is the bank roof for enchanters? Where is the bank roof for tailors? How do I identify people of those professions whom I might approach for help with my crafting needs.

So far as I can tell, the only outwardly identifiable trade skill is Engineering. Their goggles and gadgets give engineers away. Ironically, this is the ONE tradeskill that spends most of its time producing goods useless to anybody other than its own devotees. Engineers share the need for anvils with Blacksmiths, but unless you catch the latter at his work he could be any passing schmo. The goggles and gadgets not only allow identification of engineers, but with a little fore-knowledge they let one gauge the depth of their discipline: The color of goggles, complexity of device.

Would professional traders be well served by such arbitrary trappings? Elaborate aprons and hammers for blacksmiths? Stylish vests and scissors for tailors? Unusual hats and wands for enchanters?

Have other games tried this sort of thing?

[dusematic]

Why would you ever need anything from a crafter anyway?  It's practically all junk that is easily eclipsed by drops.  Sure, there are a few decent epic crafts, but those generally take a guild farming operation (or at the very least a world class pyscho) to obtain.

[Merusk]

This post would be better served in the Main board, since you're framing a larger canvas than just Warcraft.

In WoW, as bot you and Duse points out most crafted items are inferior to drops.  (There are a few items in each professioni throughout the levels that this isn't the case.  However, crafted stuff is only good for twinking, or if you've twinked money to skill-up as otherwise you're only able to make these items long after they're useful to you.)

However, in a 'world' (should one ever exsist again since UO and SWG are slipping far from this model) what you propose would work great.  Marking yourself with items that show not only your profession, but your skill.  You'd have a "masterpiece" in the traditional sense of the word (the piece you made to be granted the title 'Master' in a craft) a journeyman piece, etc.   It'd be great, and yes professional traders would be very well-served by this mechanic.

[Phred]

The biggest problem with most crafted gear, IMO, is that it was designed when spirit was a generally useful stat and not the waste of space on an item it is today. If all the crafted gear had it's spirit replaced with a similar amount of a more useful stat it might actually sell and be used by people. I generally find the leather items I can make with agi and sta and str sell well, while the ones with int and spirit generally don't, including some of the blue items I can make. Either druids are the world's cheapest class or they all want feral gear, I don't know which it is, but even a belt I can make with 23 int on it took forever and a couple of markdowns in the ah price to sell.

[Sky]

OMG CRATFERS SUX

KNOW WAY DEY BETTER DAN CAMPING MC 1600XX lolol

GOTTA CATHC EM ALL

[Merusk]

... druids ... all want feral gear ...

Yes.  For Every Restore Druid I can find 2-3 Balance Druids, and for every Balance Druid I can find 4-5 Feral Druids.  The same with Paladins and Fury/ Prot Warriors.

But that's for another thread.

[dusematic]

The biggest problem with most crafted gear, IMO, is that it was designed when spirit was a generally useful stat and not the waste of space on an item it is today. If all the crafted gear had it's spirit replaced with a similar amount of a more useful stat it might actually sell and be used by people. I generally find the leather items I can make with agi and sta and str sell well, while the ones with int and spirit generally don't, including some of the blue items I can make. Either druids are the world's cheapest class or they all want feral gear, I don't know which it is, but even a belt I can make with 23 int on it took forever and a couple of markdowns in the ah price to sell.

Spirit is good, just not for PvP.  You've obviously never been on a raid.

[SurfD]

It isnt so much that X trade skill is broken and does not sell, it is that, other than the odd special item in your crafting tree, no one really wants anything you make till you top out at 300 and start getting access to the "rare" and "leet" hard to get patterns.  Then they sell, and sell BIG.

I can only speak from prospectve of a few professions, but as a tailor, your biggest sellers (in order of pattern rarity) will probably be:
- Bags, through any level
- Robes of Arcana (warlocks love em), but may not be a highly regular seller
- Mooncloth
- Felcloth Gear / Mooncloth Gear / Robe of Winter Night (casters love their damage)
- Anythin Epic (Gloves of Spell mastery, Flarecore stuff, etc, etc)

The regular day to day stuff you grind tailoring points on is damn near useless.  Its really only the end game gear that is applicable.
And trust me, if you CAN make stuff like Flarecore or Spellmastery, you are set.  I know a guy in my guild that sells a pair of Flarecore Pants every week or so for 1500 g or more, usually makeing 4-600g profit off them.

As for alchemy, your big sellers will, again, be very specific  recipies:
- Fire and Shadow protection are big (molten core / Bwl guilds will snap these up)
- Health and Mana pots are always good sellers
- TRANSMUTE is where it is at.  Run scholo 5 man till you are done the initial quest line, Water -> air will ALWAYS net you a profit and ALWAYS sell (thats a guaranteed 4-10 gold profit every 24 hours, depending on the price of water and air on your server).
- Mongoose pots - Rogues drink that shit like water
- Free Action Pots
- Greater Stoneshield pots - Again, Raiding guilds go through the stuff like candy (My guild goes through about 500 eels a week as we get comfortable with damage levels in BWL encouters)
- Frost Oil, or anything used in popular Engineering recipies will do well

The problem with most tradeskills, as opposed to Rogue Lockpicking is that Tradeskills are most always a means to an end (the end being 300 skill and wat you can make when you get there).  Where as people will always need lockboxes opened and it takes minimal effort to do, most tradeskills never look back at lower level stuff after they stop getting skillups off of it cause it is just a pain to collect the ingredients and make the shit if you arent going to make a decent profit off of it..  It just isnt worth it most of the time.

[Fabricated]

Blacksmithing is great for warriors who don't have friends to twink them to hell and back, and even if they do it's still great for filling in gaps.

As for the AH...ehhh...a handful of items sell. At 300, unless you're making the the inane faction grind items, it's pretty much the Reaper or the Heartseeker. I'm at 286 right now and plan on being a hammersmith since there are plenty of people selling Reapers. That, and my guildmates have found every single droppable hammersmith plan for me.

[Phred]

Spirit is good, just not for PvP.  You've obviously never been on a raid.

Um, ok. I guess all our casters who go for mana/5 sec over spirit are just dumb then. And yes, I've been on a few raids. Does all of MC and BWL up to Vael count?

Back to the topic though, a piece of gear with int and spirit will languish unsold in the AH for weeks while a piece with int and sta will sell overnight. Most trade skill recipes for tailors feature int and spi.

[stray]

This post would be better served in the Main board, since you're framing a larger canvas than just Warcraft.

Nah, this actually should have stayed in the WoW section it seems. 

[Sairon]

There's still people buying the Reaper? Sounds like a MAJOR waste of cash.

[Phred]

There's still people buying the Reaper? Sounds like a MAJOR waste of cash.

It's still one of the most accessable, best mortal strike weapons around. Just not quite as good as it was pre-nerf.
The nerf to atk didn't have near the affect most of the whiners claimed. In our mc clears the rogues still hold the top slots in dps.
Just a few epic geared hunters are closer to them now.

[Merusk]

This post would be better served in the Main board, since you're framing a larger canvas than just Warcraft.

Nah, this actually should have stayed in the WoW section it seems. 

There I go thinking people will discuss larger issues and topics again.  Silly me.

[AOFanboi]

There I go thinking people will discuss larger issues and topics again.  Silly me.

Let's drag in EVE and Horizons, then. Both, as I remember, had a demand side as well as WoW's supply side: Where you stated you wanted to buy X of Y for the price of Z. This would speed up the economy and also normalize prices.

(I might be misremembering about Horizons, though, its traders were probably more or less like the WoW AH.)

[SurfD]

The problem with that is that WoW, at the moment, does not have an economy designed to support a "demand" model.

They are slowly working on getting it there (somewhat), but very fiew tradeskills have what could be considered "constant demand" items.

Skinning, Herbalism, Mining, and to a lesser extent, Alchemy and Enchanting, are what you would consider the "profit from demand" tradeskills.  All of these skills put out items that will always be in demand, and can usually net you a constant income.  Get your Mining up to harvesting Thorium and you are sitting on a literal goldmine.  Shit sells for 6g a stack on my server, and it usually isnt that hard to pack your inventory with the shit if you know where to look.

Most of the other tradeskills (Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing) dont really have a lot of items that continually sell, every day, all day.   Sure, leatherworkers might be able to sell stacks of Armor Kits, or Tailors can sell bags, but they dont have the same demand throughput that the "gatherer" skills have.

What wow really needs is more interdependance between the Armoring tradeskills.   Give tailors a "shirt base pattern" which produces a "Base Shirt", and then FORCE, Leatherworkers / Blacksmiths to use one every time they make a Brestplate of a certain difficullty.  Likewise, Tailoring patterns could use Metal Buckles or Clasps or something similar.  Sure, there are a few of these types of interactions between the tradeskills, but they are few and far between, whereas they should be almost constant.

[Phred]

What wow really needs is more interdependance between the Armoring tradeskills.   Give tailors a "shirt base pattern" which produces a "Base Shirt", and then FORCE, Leatherworkers / Blacksmiths to use one every time they make a Brestplate of a certain difficullty.  Likewise, Tailoring patterns could use Metal Buckles or Clasps or something similar.  Sure, there are a few of these types of interactions between the tradeskills, but they are few and far between, whereas they should be almost constant.

DAoC did this and people hated it. Maybe with the AH this would work better, as DAoC had no way to buy goods other than finding other crafters to make them for you but likely all that would happen is that people would use alts, just like they did in DAoC to supply themselves with materials.

Rather than annoy other crafters by making them dependent on each  other, I think it would be better to give each profession a "consumable" which would be always in demand.

Note that there already is some interdependance built into most of WoW's trades. Armorcrafters need leather items for green iron breastplates, most belts need iron buckles, etc.

[pxib]

Moreover crafters still aren't producing much that players want... and there's still no way (other than hollaring constantly in Ironforge or Orgrimmar) to let potential buyers who aren't interested in searching the auction house know that you have something that might even occasionally be worth their hard-earned cash. Even a player interested in a specific crafting item has trouble finding it because it's unlikely a crafter will simulatenously have the skill, the supplies, and the interest in producing it... even if that player knew where to find crafters in the first place.

A lot of crafter are out hunting for their own scales, furs, and McGuffins rather than buying them at the woefully inflated prices for which they're available at (again) the auction house.

If it weren't for players' desire to achieve high-end crafting abilities the economy would collapse. Nobody would buy weird crafting goods because nobody would be crafting because, seriously, there's little point to it.

Either players enjoy advancing skills for skill-advancing's sake (likely true, based on the popularity of MMORPGs as a whole), or the whole crafting infrastructure is just a dollop of ignorance away from total collapse. The crafting 'end game' is bound to be disappointing for those folks who have invested so much time and gold playing, and maybe once the word gets out, everybody but the newest of playersl stop playing.

Which all sounds vaguely familiar...

[SurfD]

I actually had a moderately interesting idea for at least one "always in demand" consumable that tailors could make:

"Treated Runecloth Bolts" which can be used to make Superior Runecloth Bandages.

Since no one in their right mind is going to make / add Mooncloth bandages to the game, and Hitpoint values are ever escalating, a new bandage type is eventually going to be needed.

2 heavy runecloth bandages = 4 runecloth.

Make a "Treated Runecloth Bolt" (requires 5 runecloth, and a minor health pot or low demand herb or something) create 2 Superior Runecloth bandages, which heal for x more per tick, and you would have something that all tailors could crank out and sell on a regular basis.

[Venkman]

I always felt there was a reason why you could max crafting in the mid-30s. Aside from some exceptions, there's really not much worth worrying about at the endgame. That's why I go the resource side. People always pay for consumables :)

[Evangolis]

One possibility would be to make lower end crafted stuff be usable to make higher end crafted stuff.  Thus, you might have a bandage line that would produce bandages which could be either used by players or used by crafters to make a higher grade bandage.  Indeed, one might extend this (I'm off in some unbuilt game now) to involve craftable buffs, which would build on the lower end buffs and a crafting skill to make materials to create the higher end buffs.

I would 'balance' this by making these buffs an independent buff line from any that adventuring buffers might have, and by building encounters with the assumption that players will buy said buffs.  There might also be a pet line usable by all, sort of 'fire and forget' critters that everyone could use.  The idea would be to create high demand, low cost products that could be sold in an auction house format, through private stores ala SWG, and in person; which products could build skill for a crafter, and yet make some income even when skill gain ceased to be a major value.  (I'd suggest a 'soft cap' approach, where even trivial products would produce skill gains, but much less frequently than more challenging products)

I'd also suggest that all such products have customizable aspects that did not change usability, but did allow the crafter to imprint some creativity on the product, possibly including emotes or effects that executed when the product was used.  On the other hand, users ought to have an ignore option, in case those effects were making them crazy.