What a Crafter Charges for Labour
A crafted item that binds the moment it is made cannot be posted on the auction house, so the crafter sells an arrangement instead: you bring the materials, they run the bench, and the fee covers the part that cannot be shipped. This is how that trade is priced, which parts of it are ordinary profession income, and what is still unknown about it before 4 November.
Binding decides whether a commission exists at all
The first question about any recipe is not what it sells for but whether it can change hands. In the original line, a large share of the strongest crafted pieces bound when they were made, which meant the crafter finished the work wearing it. Nothing about that output reaches a shelf, and no amount of demand creates a listing for it. Which entries in the reworked Forever recipe lists fall into that category is the part we have not seen published, so the split between stock and personal gear is a shape rather than a table.
That split turns one profession into 2 different businesses. Tradeable output is ordinary stock: it is made in batches, posted, undercut and restocked, and it competes with every other crafter holding the same recipe. Bound output is equipment the crafter earns for a character rather than income, which is why which recipes bind on pickup changes the value of a trade before a single bar is smelted. A profession list heavy with bound entries pays in gear and light in coin.
Between those 2 there is a third case, and it is where commissions live. If the game provides a way for one player to run a bench on another player's materials, then a bound item can still be made for somebody else, and the thing being sold is access to the recipe rather than the item. That is the mechanic behind an order placed with a crafter, and whether Forever ships anything resembling it is the single detail that decides how large this market gets.
The fee pays for the bench, not for the item
In a commission the customer supplies the materials. That is the normal arrangement for a reason: reagents are the larger half of the bill, and the crafter has no interest in fronting a stack for a buyer who may not return. What remains is the labour line, and it covers things that never appear in the item's tooltip, such as the hours spent getting the recipe, the trip to a bench that is not in a capital, and the slot on a cooldown that can only be used once in a period.
None of that has a shelf price to anchor on. An auction house tells you what a stack of cloth cleared for yesterday; nothing tells you what a stranger's time at an anvil is worth, so quotes vary between crafters on the same realm by more than most buyers expect. The same problem is solved the same way one trade over, where paying an enchanter to attend is priced in chat rather than listed, and the going rate is whatever the last 3 people in the channel agreed to.
Where that negotiation happens matters as much as the number. A commission is arranged, confirmed and paid in a window, usually after a conversation in the channel where services are advertised or inside a guild, and the handover is the whole transaction. A crafter who takes materials and logs off has sold nothing and will not be hired again on a realm where names are remembered, which is why most of this trade runs on repeat customers and guild contacts rather than on cold calls.
What sets the going rate
Scarcity of the recipe does most of the work. A pattern that drops rarely, or sits behind a long reputation grind, is held by a handful of players, and the fee reflects how far down the list a buyer has to go to find the next holder. Once a recipe is common the labour line collapses toward nothing, because somebody in the buyer's own guild has it and will run the craft for the cost of a thank you. That is the whole curve: fees are high while access is narrow and fall as the realm catches up.
The second input is the materials bill the customer is already carrying. When reagents dominate the total, a buyer who has spent an evening on what the materials cost to assemble is price-sensitive about the last line and will shop it. When the recipe is gated by a cooldown, the arithmetic flips: the crafter is not selling an hour but one of a fixed number of uses in a period, and the fee is quoted per slot regardless of how long the craft itself takes.
Demand is not flat across the calendar either. Interest in bound gear concentrates around the point where people are assembling a set for a specific date, and goes quiet afterwards. That is the same pattern that shows up elsewhere on the realm when work sold to other players spikes before a content opening and thins out once the first wave has what it needed. A crafter who treats commissions as steady weekly income is usually describing 2 busy weeks and a long tail.
What we do not know yet
Three things are open, and we would rather name them than fill them in. We have not seen a per-recipe list showing which of the new Forever entries bind when crafted, so nobody can say yet how large the bound share of a profession list is. We have not seen confirmation of an in-game interface for placing an order with another player, which means the commission trade may run entirely on manual arrangements. And we have no fee figures at all, because none have been published and quoting a number we invented would be worse than leaving the line blank.
What is settled is the direction. Forever has widened the recipe lists and changed what each trade produces, which is covered in what Forever changed about professions, and a wider list means more entries whose binding rules matter to somebody. If an order mechanic exists, the crafters holding scarce patterns are selling access and the fee behaves like any other scarce service; if it does not, bound recipes remain private gear and the coin stays with tradeable stock. We will write the detail in when it is confirmed rather than before.
Questions
Can a crafter make a bound item for somebody else?
Only if the game provides a mechanism for it. When a recipe produces an item that binds the moment it is created, the item belongs to whoever ran the bench unless there is a system that lets one player craft on another player's behalf. We have not seen confirmation of such a system in Forever, so treat a bound recipe as personal gear until that is settled.
Who pays for the materials in a commission?
Almost always the customer. Reagents are the larger half of the total bill, and a crafter who buys them up front is lending gold to a stranger as well as doing the work. The usual arrangement is that the buyer hands over a full stack of materials in the trade window and pays a separate fee for the craft itself.
Why is none of this on the auction house?
Because there is no item to post. A commission is an agreement to run a bench, and the auction house only handles goods that can sit in a mailbox. The same applies to enchanting and to most other work sold between players, which is why these trades live in chat channels, guild rosters and repeat contacts instead of on a listing.
How do buyers avoid losing their materials?
Mostly through reputation rather than mechanics. Commissions run on names people recognise: guild members, regular raid contacts, and crafters who advertise in the same channel every week. Splitting the fee into a part paid before and a part paid after is common, and so is asking in a guild first, where the work is often done for nothing more than the materials.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news feed for the Classic line, where profession and recipe changes are announced — World of Warcraft news.