Player Vendors - high rent slow sales

[sudostahp]

Off the top of my head, I'd call leatherworking, carpentry, toolcrafting, tailoring, cooking, mushroom farming and transmutation all profitable. That's more fingers than most people have on one hand. Part of why I like the PG crafting system so much is that almost any trade skill can be profitable if you level it carefully. (Well, ok, I'd call brewing and cheese making fun money sinks at this point in time, but to me it feels that skills like that are more the exception than the rule).



We may be talking about different things, but in my opinion what makes an economy work well is having a strong demand for items that are in strong supply. PG accomplishes that quite nicely by supplementing player demand with game-generated work orders. I guess you could argue that non-player work orders will drive up inflation over time, but that's a somewhat different issue.

Leatherworking, toolcrafting, and tailoring aren't profitable if you account for the opportunity cost of the materials used to level them. Transmutation used to be a money maker, but since the nerf it's just a convenience. Cooking is questionably profitable, especially with the recent change to food costs.

Every crafting skill has fixed costs and variable costs.

Fixed costs are the training costs and recipe costs. To be profitable, the margin of the activity needs to compensate for the materials (variable costs) and the fixed costs. The problem with most crafting skills is that the margin is so thin that it's often negative. Cooking, for example, used to have decent margins. Now the only profit comes from work orders, and it just isn't worth the time compared to another activity. I say that it's arguably profitable since every character needs some level of cooking, so it's a skill that you're going to level anyway.

Toolcrafting and blacksmithing are perhaps the least profitable. Leathercrafting and tailoring benefits from some good-value work orders, but even then, the margins aren't great when you consider the alternative of just selling the raw goods. Even then, it'll take less than five minutes to find someone that will craft whatever you want, provided you have the materials -- you get the items for the work order, they get the xp, but you pay none of the fixed costs involved in that exchange. There are no leather or cloth goods that can be produced for less than what a vendor will pay, so work orders are the only choice.