Making the money

The economy of WOW in Shadowlands has not been good to me.  When SL launched a lot of people talked about how Blizzard was making crafting powerful and important again because legendary items were going to require crafters in order to be made.  If you want a legendary ring you need a jewelcrafter, a legendary plate helm requires a blacksmith, etc.  These legendary pieces have 4 levels, and in order to learn to craft a level 2 you need to make 15 level 1s.  Then 15 level 2 pieces to learn 3, and 15 3s to learn 4.  These recipes cost a *lot* of gold to make.  For example, to get to max level making rings I will have to spend 1 million gold on materials.

This certainly makes crafting important, but it doesn't end up being good for crafters most of the time.  The trouble is that the endgame of this system is always degenerate.  Either you end up with only a tiny number of crafters who make the huge investment to get to max level and they get to gouge the server savagely, or you end up with a ton of people going broke trying to get there and then none of them can make back their investment at all and they all lose a truckload of money.

Fundamentally the issue is that one crafter can handily supply the entire server with gear.  The *only* incentive to being the second crafter in the market is to undercut other people.  You cannot increase supply or produce alternatives, you can only provide competition.  Unfortunately for every crafter who actually reaches level 4 there are 45 low level items to sell off, and there are not nearly enough buyers for that.  Most people only need one or two legendaries, and they can buy rings, necklaces, cloaks, and eight different armor slots.  All those crafters have way too much stock and not nearly enough customers.

A far better model for a crafting skill is alchemy.  You can make potions and such, like everyone can, but if you level up a particular reputation you get a daily cooldown to make a valuable resource.  Because it is only once a day you can't supply the whole server, so new people entering that market still have something to contribute.

All the legendary crafting doesn't work at all like that.  You have an enormous up front cost you may never be able to recover and what you get at the end is the privilege of fighting to undercut your rivals.  The people who camp the auction house win, and everyone else sells nothing.

Crafting systems that require camping the auction house *suck*.

WOW already rewards the auction house campers plenty, we didn't need more of that.

I got wrecked by this system.  I realized that there would be competition, but I figured I should level my ring and necklace production up to max so I could provide stuff for my guild.  I thought the auction house would be full of overpriced stuff and this would help people out.  That didn't happen though - the auction house is full of rings and necklaces priced at a fraction of the cost of materials.  I had guildies ask me to craft things for them and I told them they shouldn't get me to do it.  Buying materials for me to craft would cost them far more than simply buying the finished products.

Right now I am about halfway through level 3 on both rings and necklaces.  I have lost a good 300,000 gold so far trying to level my crafting and I have helped nobody in my guild in the process.  At this point I will probably finish up and get to level 4 in the hopes that at some point I will be able to make money from it.  I can't recover all of my losses so far, and I might as well slowly finish up my leel 3s any time the price of goods rises above the cost of materials.

It gets worse though.  I am on an extremely high population server with a massive economy.  On a small server the legendary recipes are going to be a disaster because nobody can afford to get all the way up.  The lack of customers will be crushing, and so lots of people will be locked into only getting level 1 legendary items.  There are so few buyers that crafters cannot afford to craft their way up, so everybody gets locked out of the market completely.

There are two fixes I can think of right away, but both would have needed to be in the game at launch - now is too late.  The first is to simply change that 15 to a 5.  Producing one third of the items to level up would make it an investment, but the markets would not be flooded.  Crafters who put in the time would be able to sell their goods, and competition would naturally control the prices to keep them a bit above material cost.  The other angle would be to change the system much more substantially and remove the learning system entirely.  Have a daily cooldown to product one resource, and have crafters have to use 1 of those resources for a rank 1 item, 2 for a 2, etc.  This would encourage crafters to do their cooldown and would work fine in markets of any size.  Want a plate hat?  Get a blacksmith to make their Special Bar of Ore for four days in a row and make it.  Profit for crafters, accessibility for buyers.  Best of all worlds.

Instead we are stuck with a mess of a system where a few people who gambled big get to gouge customers and the others lose their shirts, and people in small economies get screwed.  Not ideal.