What Tipping a Crafter Costs at Launch
A craft done for somebody else is not a sale, it is a service. The customer carries the materials, the crafter carries the skill, and the fee between them is agreed in a whisper rather than posted on a shelf. This is how that market behaves in the opening weeks.
A market with no listings in it
Most coin on a young realm moves through the auction house, where every trade leaves a visible price behind. A second market opens the moment a recipe exists that only a handful of characters have raised. Nothing in it is listed. The customer gathers or buys the materials, finds somebody with the skill, and the two agree on a payment for the work itself. The finished item never passes through a shelf, so the fee is invisible to anyone scanning prices, and every quote is effectively private.
That is why the same craft can cost one player a courtesy payment and another player a serious sum on the same evening. There is no reference price to argue against. The customer's only comparison is whatever other crafters quote in the next hour, which is why services advertised in trade chat set the going rate more than the auction house ever does. The mechanics of placing the order are a separate matter, and how a craft order is arranged covers the handover rather than the money.
What the fee is actually paying for
It helps to break the payment into parts, because customers often argue with the wrong one. The materials are not in dispute: the customer supplies them, or buys them, and what reagents cost by tier is the one line of the bill both sides can check. What is being paid for is everything the crafter spent before the order arrived - the ranks, the trainer visits, and above all the stacks burned on skill-ups that produced nothing sellable.
Scarcity does the rest. A recipe that every second crafter holds is worth a token payment, because the customer can ask the next person in the channel. A recipe taught by a rare drop, a reputation, or a long chain has a short supplier list, and that list knows it. Early in a realm's life almost every high rank is scarce, which is why fees are at their widest spread in the first weeks and narrow later as more crafters catch up.
Two smaller costs ride along and are easy to forget. The crafter usually has to be somewhere specific - an anvil, a forge, a fire - and time lost moving between zones is charged against their evening whether anyone pays for it or not. The second is the risk of holding somebody else's materials for the duration, which is a trust cost rather than a gold one.
How the handover actually runs
The usual order is simple and worth agreeing out loud before anything changes hands. Both parties meet, the customer puts materials and the agreed fee into the trade window, the crafter makes the item and trades it back. Doing it in one window where possible removes most of the argument, because nothing sits in a stranger's bags between steps. Where the craft takes more than a moment, splitting the payment - part up front, part on delivery - is the common compromise, and it is agreed in words rather than enforced by anything in the client.
Binding is the detail that ends some conversations before they start. If a crafted item binds to the person who makes it, no fee closes the gap, because the customer cannot receive the result at all. That is the line crafted gear that binds on pickup draws through the whole service market, and it is worth checking against the recipe before negotiating. Enchanting sits apart again, since the work is applied to an item rather than produced as one, and enchanting sold as a service is priced on a different logic.
What we cannot tell you here
We have no published figures for service fees on Forever, and we are not going to invent any. Blizzard does not set them, they do not appear in any interface, and they move with the hour, the realm and the recipe. Anyone quoting a precise standard rate for a launch realm is describing their own habit, not a market.
We also do not know how the norms will settle. On older Classic realms the convention varied by trade: some crafters worked for materials plus a small courtesy payment, others priced the job like a contract. Which of those becomes normal in Forever depends on how many characters raise the same trades, and what raising a trade burns is the input nobody can see from outside. Treat the structure in here as reliable and any number you hear in the channel as one person's opinion.
Questions
Who supplies the materials for a commissioned craft?
In the standard arrangement the customer does. The crafter is being paid for skill, recipe access and time, not for stock, which is why the fee is quoted on top of whatever the materials already cost the customer to gather or buy.
Is a tip expected even for a common recipe?
Expected is the wrong word, since nothing in the game enforces it. A payment is how a crafter is persuaded to stop what they are doing and travel to a station, so a craft done for free usually means the crafter was already standing there or knows the customer.
Can every crafted item be made for somebody else?
No. Some crafted gear binds to the character that produces it, which means the customer can never receive it regardless of what they offer. Check the binding on the recipe before negotiating, because that single property decides whether a commission is possible at all.
Why do two crafters quote completely different fees?
Because there is no listing to anchor against. Each crafter prices their own scarcity, the materials they burned raising the trade and how far they have to travel, so quotes spread widest in the opening weeks and narrow as more characters reach the same ranks.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news hub, where profession and crafting changes for Forever are announced — World of Warcraft news.