Blizzard on Work Orders & TSM Updates - Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 261

Live Posted 2023/01/15 at 1:18 PM by SamadanPlaysWoW

SamadanBlizzard on Crafting Works OrdersLast weekDrough

To speak a bit to the original question of this thread:

“Are the devs sure that the crafting order system is a success?”

The crafting order system is by no means perfect. There are many ways we would like to improve it over time. We have been having many of these discussions internally, as well as listening to feedback from all of you. Since this is such a new system though, we don’t want to make any snap-judgements and make big changes before giving things a chance to settle and seeing how it develops over time.

We do believe that the system has been successful in one of its core goal though - to enable crafters to make soulbound, useful gear for players at all levels of play. This elevates the overall value of professions within the game and helps to deliver on the fantasy of being a crafter creating valuables for yourself and others.

It has also been successful in providing a new way to for crafters and customers to interact, one which is inherently more social, and when you get to use it, hopefully more satisfying than previous ways to do so! But again, very much not perfect!

As far as the public order system goes, it seems to be working well as an easy way to get something crafted for yourself if you aren’t worried about getting the best quality and want it quickly. This was always its intent. We definitely wish that as crafters, it was easier to find public orders to fill. Unfortunately even though there are quite a few public orders going through the system, given the minimal effort it takes to fulfill a public order and the relative number of crafters around to fill those orders, there will almost never be many orders up an any given time with the way it currently works…they get filled too quickly and easily.

We are looking into ways to have more orders to fulfill though, because for most, we think it tends to be a pretty satisfying activity and a great way to earn skill and a bit of gold when you can find an order to fulfill.

We also think the guild / personal order side of things are working moderately well. These methods allow players to connect and get their items crafted with more control. There are several issues we would very much like to improve though, including:

Helping better connect customers and crafters. There is nothing wrong with a bit of effort to get the best gear, or to attract customers. This is currently mostly accomplished through trade chat though, which while it does have a nice social component to it (something we love to see more of), it is by no means an ideal way to find a crafter for a specific item, or a customer to craft for.
Helping better support interactions between players who are depending on inspiration to reach a higher quality level.

We suspect that as players finish getting their high end crafting gear and complete purchases of other one time uses for Artisan’s Mettle, players will be more willing to use Artisan’s Mettle to guarantee higher quality crafts. That will help, but even then, inspiration will always be a useful way to get max quality gear crafted. The crafting orders system is not supporting this as well as we would like it to, since as a customer, you cannot place an order and know exactly what you will get - you need to rely on a handshake deal that your crafter has the inspiration they promised when attempting to craft items for you.

In addition, there will be lots of other quality of life features we will be looking into to help making it smoother to use, easier to learn, and more.

As always, thank you for the feedback. We will continue working to improve professions in general and the crafting order system in specific! Meanwhile, happy gathering and crafting!

-Drough

ManthieusI have a feeling that they will reduce the amount of public crafting orders you can fulfill per day.

When less people are able to fulfill orders, then the commissions will be driven up. I don't think anyone really thinks that it is a good idea that there's so many <10g public orders up.
The problem is knowing where the balance will eventually be.

They built a UI that assumes there will be more crafting orders requested than crafted orders fulfilled. That people will have to wait to get crafting orders filled, and that crafters will be able to pick and choose what they want to fulfill. That's why you'd have a "search" button, because there are lots of things to search for.

Instead, right now, there are far more crafters filling orders than there are orders to fill. That means many crafters never get to fill any orders, and that the "search" almost always shows nothing to do.

But, is this going to be permanent? Maybe in a month crafters will have leveled up and not be trying to fill orders as much. Maybe they'll get bored. Maybe in a month it really will be mostly crafting orders and not very many crafters. OTOH, the current situation could continue. It could be that people just like crafting this way, and that there will always be near zero public orders in the search results.

They built a UI around a certain assumption (lots of orders, few crafters) that doesn't handle the opposite case. Can they build one that handles many crafters, few crafting orders? How about one that works in both situations?
(and suggested above) is to reduce the number of daily public work orders I wonder if this will raise commissions offered?

If there are only like 4 lariat crafters they are all going to pick the 4 highest they see- so if 16 have a higher commission than yours, better luck tomorrow?

When it was first available (but plans hadn’t dropped) there were 20-30 orders up. Maybe when sparks and chaos rain from the sky there will be lots of orders available.

I’ve only once seen more than 4 public orders I could do in a day- and that was the day I bought the plans for PvP boots because a bunch of orders were up.Sparks of IngenuityTaliesin suggestsThe Bracer Shuffle is Back!Penguin2gtTSM Updates for DragonflightTradeSkillMaster a post
Dragonflight Update

In this post, we’re going to dive into where we’re at, what’s coming soon, and where we’re going with regards to supporting gold making in Dragonflight. I’ll start things off here by apologizing for not being as active as I would have liked with communicating this information sooner. TSM was definitely not as ready as I would have hoped for the changes in Dragonflight. There are a variety of reasons for this, which mainly boil down to not having enough development hours to spend and underestimating just how much of TSM would need to change to support the new profession changes. I understand people’s frustration with the state of TSM in Dragonflight so far, and am committed to improving things going forward. However, this will take some time.

Current State of Things

With that said, let’s talk about what changes we’ve made so far, and where things are at as of the time of writing (v4.12.20). The following things are working today:

For crafted commodity items, the crafting cost and profit will accurately display in the tooltip, and be available for use in custom strings (i.e. in Auctioning operation prices).
Quality, optional, and finishing materials can all be added manually to a recipe within the Crafting UI and then either crafted directly or added to the queue. Gathering then supports collecting all the materials as normal.
Restocking your groups based on Crafting operations is fully supported for crafted commodity items.

Coming Next

Here’s a list of things that are actively being worked on and can be expected to be released in the very near future:

Crafting cost and restocking support for quality crafts which produce gear of varying item levels.
Updated Destroying data for DF Milling, Prospecting, and Disenchanting.
Crafting UI support for selecting materials for and crafting recipes that don’t have fixed materials. This includes things like Mass Milling, Mass Prospecting, Recrafting, etc.
Improved UI for manually selected the target item for a quality craft, and having TSM automatically populate the cheapest set of quality materials needed.
Improved UI for selecting optional materials (including quality mats and finishing mats).
Display of crafting stats for quality crafts such as expected quality, inspiration, multicraft.
Support for taking inspiration into account when calculating the crafting cost.

Longer-Term Roadmap

There are a few other areas of TSM which definitely need some love and will be revisited in the not-too-distant future, which I thought I’d also call out here:

Improvements to how TSM handles buying commodities from the AH.
Item cache rebuilding performance improvements.
Account syncing performance improvements.

Crafting Cost

I thought it would be helpful to give some details on how we’re approaching crafting costs in Dragonflight. As we all know, Dragonflight greatly expanded the complexity of crafting things with professions. At its core, each recipe has a difficulty which gets matched up against your skill level to determine the result. That skill can then be modified with higher quality materials and various optional materials, as well as by proc’ing inspiration. In order to calculate how much it costs to craft something, TSM currently considers all the potential qualities of materials which result in the desired item being crafted.

As a hypothetical example, let’s assume there’s a potion which takes 1 herb and 1 vial to craft, with each of the materials being 1 of 3 qualities, and the recipe producing up to quality 3 of the potion. Let’s assume that using quality 3 of both materials results in quality 2 of the potion being crafted, and any other combination of materials results in quality 1 of the potion being crafted. To determine the crafting cost of the quality 1 potion, TSM will determine that there are 4 possible ways you could craft this item, from the 4 possible combinations of quality 1/2 of the herb, and quality 1/2 of the vial. TSM will then pick the cheapest of these options and use that as your crafting cost. Going further, it’s impossible to craft quality 3 of the potion, so TSM will treat that as an item you don’t yet know how to craft, and not display a crafting cost. Similarly, if you weren’t able to get your skill low enough to craft quality 1 of the potion anymore, TSM would treat that as something you can no longer craft and not show a crafting cost.

Currently, inspiration is not taken into account. From the above example, it’s possible that you could craft quality 3 of the potion if you were inspired. It seems like this will be important for some recipes where it won’t be feasible to get your skill high enough to craft at the highest quality without an inspiration proc for some crafts. This is something that’s not yet taken into account, but is something that we will plan to support in a future update as mentioned above.

Also, the game allows you to mix and max different qualities of the same material to hyper-optimize your crafting cost. For example, a recipe may require 5 of an herb, but you may only need to supply 1 at quality 3 with the remaining 4 being quality 1 in order to craft the desired quality of the crafted item. This isn’t something TSM takes into account, and is not something we have plans to support, due to the exponential increase in computing resource it would require to consider all possible permutations. Calculating crafting costs is already an order of magnitude slower than any other price source in TSM, so we felt that requiring all of a given material to be at the same quality struck the right balance between maximizing profits and keeping things performant and manageable for the user (i.e. when listing materials needed to craft something and/or gathering them).
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Comment by wowheadrhino7Thank you Sapu for your time and dedication.Comment by DwarfatarmsIt might be a little late to start at this point. I think it was a huge issue allowing players to craft the max rank from first craft stopping people from using the public system all together. I would have thought the items would have had a bit of a forced progression tied to it. Hear me out, having to craft the first rank of an item and work your way up in ilvl and "rank" not allowing us to skip to the best rank just by using inspiration and rank 3 mats. but rather using the lesser rank item and higher rank materials as you work your way up in ilvl and ranks of an item. This would have been a better way to do it in my eyes. We could have increased our items as people leveled their professions as well. The spark could have still been tied to the first rank of the items to limit up on how many we can get. I think it would foster a strong public WO system feeling full and alive with many posted.

IDK just my thoughts. I'm sure they have a whole team working on this though, what do I know?...Comment by YodasEvilTwinwe don’t want to make any snap-judgements and make big changes before giving things a chance to settleI don't think anyone really thinks that it is a good idea that there's so many <10g public orders up.Comment by avm1997I will admit they are fixing issues a lot faster than they were during Shadowlands, but we are close to being halfway through the first season only now seeing this kind of change. Isn’t the point of beta testing to figure these kinds of things out? It seems a bit weird releasing systems that are extremely flawed.Comment by DaeverenI will admit they are fixing issues a lot faster than they were during Shadowlands, but we are close to being halfway through the first season only now seeing this kind of change. Isn’t the point of beta testing to figure these kinds of things out? It seems a bit weird releasing systems that are extremely flawed.asapjust design it properly from the startComment by laboitedechoco1°
give insentive to players to order public work
aka WQ with reput reward for instance (as in BFA)

2° especially for highend stuff
as customer, i should be able to see who are able to fulfil my order and what their stats are, then i pick the proposal which feet best (artisan should be able to note the miminal tip acceptedComment by KerathrasIt's still early days and the balance is yet to play out fully as the system matures.Comment by KnotsOwOPawsHow to fix a lot of things related to the AH and work orders: Disable TSM.Comment by Snowy6If people are largely doing work order in guild not sure how changing public orders helps much?Comment by TequimaIt would help if the developers clearly identified the different types of Crafter and Customer, and the different scenarios. If the system does not match THEIR purpose, it will have failed (at least partially). For example:

High-end crafter, willing to do everything possible to get to the top of their profession & dedicates 80% of their in-game time to this goal

High-end raider, willing to spend top dollar/Euro/etc (either through RL money > token, or through gold gathered in-game, to get BiS gear

Interested crafter, likes collecting all the patterns and making a bit of gold on the side to pay for a token each month

Semi-core raider/M+/PvPer who may only play at weekends or evenings. Wants to get gear to fill in a missing slot or two

Casual crafter, makes a bit of gear at weekends/evenings as one way to get some in-game gold for other items such as tmog or pets

Casual player, does World Quests & LfR, would like to get a high-end weapon & possibly some gear if they have the gold/resources.

Comment by tyr2009Nice idea, crafting BOP items for people, but with a flawed execution.

The first problem is I need a lucky world drop or rep grind to unlock recipes to craft above 55 for the most part. That severely limits the usefulness of people using alt crafters. The second problem is I cannot gear my alts through craft gear because of the BOP items I need to post to the board. Chances are, anyone with a plethora of alts, is going to skip crafted gear altogether. Instead of taking days and days of grinding out the BOP items, I'll just bang out a bunch of heroic dungeons/timewalking, then LFR, then normal/m+ in a far shorter time than it will be to craft one 80 primal item. Everything needs to go to BOA. I am soo tired of BOP items that are not shared between characters. Seems kind of pointless that my warrior has over 300 primal chaos when he doesn't need them and my warlock has 2 when I am trying to gear him.

Another flawed problem is introverts don't want to sit in trade chat posting over and over. The board needs to be changed for people to post their recipes. I should be able to see who has a max lariat and be able to sort by people with the highest inspiration, and then post a personal request that way.Comment by HumtolI dont believe public orders for gear crafters will be fixed with this approach. The demand isn't big enough and it is funneled in a few days every two weeks.

The issue are BoP ressources. The HC ingredient and primal chaos needs to be sharable between alts, with a malus of course. Crafted gear is an awesome tool to catchup or gearing in general, but I personally dont want to grind again, when my main has primal chaos and primal focus on masse and no way to spend them.Comment by ApollomantisThe core issue to the public system is the simple fact that you cannot set the quality at all. I get that their trying to make it new crafter friendly and all, yet at the same time it's made the public system fail. Comboed with you can literally send personal orders to your self using alts to do any of the quests or crafting needs you may have.

Then you have all the rare recipes that are very rare raid drops that further exclusivity issues and only serve to sell tokens. As I remember paying 80k I believe, might of been 60k, for my lariat which was about a third of a token at the time. Followed by inspiration that again only exists to act a a treadmill for the sake of selling tokens.

All in all like all other systems it has a lot of potential to be great, yet blizzard being blizzard means it won't be until it's too late. When they have dropped the ball, watched it roll down a steep hills then tumble done after it when their pushed down the hill to get it back.Comment by DrakknfyreIt's still early days and the balance is yet to play out fully as the system matures.Comment by ButMadNNWAnother flawed problem is introverts don't want to sit in trade chat posting over and over.for my jobComment by neuroxxIn the current crafting system you can only level by crafting orders. Or continously craft the one thing which does not need a spark but nobody needs or wants. So I'm stuck levelling my blacksmithing because of the choices I made with my knowledge points, and the fact there are no public orders 99% of the time. Even if an order shows up, it's probably something I don't have the recipe for or I don't have enough skill (yet) to create the requested version of that item. Kind of a vicious circle.
Sure some day I will have maxed out all specializations, but by that time my crafting will be totally irrelevant.
Would have been nice if crafting was BoE and you could still post it on AH, like a shop. While crafting you would gain experience and improve your crafting. And if a person wanted something special they could have it custom made.Comment by TequimaIn the current crafting system you can only level by crafting orders. Or continously craft the one thing which does not need a spark but nobody needs or wants. So I'm stuck levelling my blacksmithing because of the choices I made with my knowledge points, and the fact there are no public orders 99% of the time. Even if an order shows up, it's probably something I don't have the recipe for or I don't have enough skill (yet) to create the requested version of that item. Kind of a vicious circle.
Sure some day I will have maxed out all specializations, but by that time my crafting will be totally irrelevant.
Would have been nice if crafting was BoE and you could still post it on AH, like a shop. While crafting you would gain experience and improve your crafting. And if a person wanted something special they could have it custom made.Comment by EighjanWhy do I get the feeling that orders are rep. (Artisan's w/e they're called) gated or people are sitting in front of their screens fulfilling orders the second they get posted (bot's/scripts)...?

I can't remember seeing more than one order at any time, whether I could craft it or not...Comment by DaeverenWhy do I get the feeling that orders are rep. (Artisan's w/e they're called) gated or people are sitting in front of their screens fulfilling orders the second they get posted (bot's/scripts)...?

I can't remember seeing more than one order at any time, whether I could craft it or not...Comment by neuroxxDon't think I will ever be able to complete the quest for 3 crafting orders. I wonder what I'm missing out on because of that, any follow up quests? Rep with the artisans?