Crafting Commissions Sell Bench Time
Most profession guides ask which goods are worth making and listing. There is a second income line on the same bench: the customer supplies every reagent, and the crafter is paid for the work alone. It has its own client search, its own way of quoting, and its own way of going wrong.
What the fee is actually paid for
A commission is the simplest arrangement at the bench and the hardest to price. The customer hands over every reagent the recipe calls for, the crafter presses the button, and the only thing moving the other way is a payment for the work. Nothing is bought in advance, nothing sits unsold, and no listing deposit is at risk. What the crafter sells is availability: being logged in, standing in the right city, and already holding a recipe the customer cannot train before the raid night.
The model exists because of binding rules more than because of convenience. A recipe whose output cannot be traded forces the customer to come to the bench, and which crafted items can be traded decides whether a trade has stock to sell or only hours. Where the output is bound to the maker, the whole value of the recipe has to be collected as a fee, because there is no shelf to put the item on afterwards.
There is a second return the customer never pays for. Every commission pushes the crafter's skill forward on somebody else's materials, which matters most while the list is still climbing and materials burned on skill points are the largest line in a profession's startup cost. Early in a realm that return is worth more than the fee, which is why experienced crafters take cheap orders in the first weeks and raise their asking price once the skill is already capped.
Finding the customer
Commissions do not arrive through the auction house, so the client search looks like a service trade rather than a goods trade. Orders come from 3 places in practice: public calls in the city channel, guild rosters that keep an internal list of who holds what, and direct whispers from people who saw an item linked once and remembered the name. The first is noisy and competitive, the second is quiet and steady, and the third only works after the first two have run for a while.
The guild channel is the one worth building. Inside a roster the materials usually already exist, the trust question is settled, and orders filled inside a guild are often paid in favours and raid supply rather than in coin. Public calls behave differently: they go to whoever answers first, which makes the city channel a volume market where services advertised in trade chat compete mostly on who is online at that minute.
How crowded the queue gets depends on how many other characters trained the same thing. A recipe held by half the realm is answered within seconds and priced accordingly, while a rare pattern keeps its asking price because the customer has nobody else to whisper. Tracking how many crafters trained a trade tells you which half of that market a recipe sits in before you advertise it.
Quoting the work
There is no posted rate for labour, so every quote is built from the same few components. Most crafters fold them into one number and name it in chat rather than itemising, but the components are visible once you have watched a few deals settle.
- the recipe itself: how rare it is and how many other people can fill the order;
- the vendor reagents the crafter supplies out of pocket, which the customer rarely thinks to count;
- travel, since the trade has to happen face to face when the item binds;
- timing, because an order wanted before a raid night is worth more than the same order wanted whenever.
Travel is the component most often forgotten by both sides. An order that pulls a crafter out of a farming route costs the session's income as well as the ride, and the hours lost crossing the map are the reason some crafters only fill orders in the city they are already standing in. From the buyer's side the same number looks like an unexplained markup, which is why fees quoted to the customer are easier to agree when the meeting point is named before the price is.
The other half of pricing is what the customer brings. If the materials are short, the crafter either refuses or buys the gap and bills it, and the quote stops being labour-only. Knowing what a recipe consumes per craft before accepting is the difference between a clean fee and an argument in the trade window.
Where the deal goes wrong, and what is not settled
The risky moment is the handover. Materials and payment and the finished item do not all fit in one trade window when the recipe takes time or when the customer wants to watch the result first, so one side is exposed for a few seconds. The common practice is to put reagents and fee into the same window, craft immediately, and hand the item back in a second trade. Orders arranged across time zones instead end up parked, and materials left in a guild bank sit with whoever has withdrawal rights rather than with the owner.
Disputes are usually about the specification rather than about theft: the wrong variant of a recipe, a missing optional reagent, or an item that binds to the crafter by mistake. None of that is recoverable through a trade log, so the fix is a written line in chat naming the exact item before anything changes hands.
What we do not know yet is larger than what we do. We have not seen a description of any in-client order interface for Forever, so every commission on the beta is arranged by hand in chat. We have not seen a published list of which of the new recipes produce bound output and which produce stock, which is the single fact that decides how big this market becomes. And we have no measured read on what commissions are being paid, on the beta or after the 4 November start, so we publish no rates here. If that changes, the figures will go on the professions overview first.
Questions
Why would a crafter work for a fee instead of selling the finished item?
Because in many cases there is no finished item to sell. When a recipe produces output bound to its maker, the only thing the crafter can trade is the act of making it for somebody standing next to them, so the whole value of the recipe has to be collected as a fee.
Who supplies the vendor reagents?
Usually the crafter, and usually without saying so. Flux, thread, vials and similar cheap components are easy for a customer to overlook when gathering materials, so most crafters keep a stock of them and fold the cost into the quoted fee rather than sending the customer back to a vendor.
Is a commission safer than buying the item on the auction house?
It is a different trade, not a safer one. The auction house settles instantly and anonymously, while a commission depends on 2 people meeting, agreeing on the exact item and completing 2 trade windows in order. The upside is that it reaches recipes the auction house can never list.
Do you publish going rates for commissioned crafting?
No. We have no measured read on what crafters are being paid in Forever, and any figure we invented would be out of date before it was useful. What we can describe is how the quote is built, which components it contains and where the deal tends to break.
Sources
- Blizzard's own profession material from the BlizzCon Deep Dive and the follow-up breakdowns, which is where the recipe and binding changes are described — World of Warcraft official news.