Diablo 3 Crafting: Inefficient and Stupid
When Blizzard calls something a "gold sink",
that's code for "don't fucking do this, ever."
Diablo 3 offers players the opportunity to craft items. One may salvage useless magical and rare
items into crafting materials that are then recombined to form new items.
I initially declared crafting to be inefficient just by looking at the numbers.
Some other players, however, maintained that crafting is a sensible
investment that can pay off over the long run.
They would post pictures of the spectacular items they had crafted and
the astronomical amounts of gold they made doing so. Yet when I asked how much of that was profit,
and how much of that covered their expenses, they were speechless and incapable
of discerning the meaning of the question asked.
So, I decided to toss a few million gold down the sink in
order to compile the data required to:
1) Show people how to
fucking play Diablo 3.
2) Declare crafting
to be inefficient and stupid.
Here's the spreadsheet:
On the left is a list of my total expenses. I recorded the gold I spent leveling
Blacksmithing, the gold I spent on a pattern, and the gold I spent crafting
items.
The middle column under "glove construction" is
used to discern the cost of every pair of gloves. I input the daily Auction House list price of
essences, tears, and tomes, and the spreadsheet calculates the cost of one pair
of gloves. Below that (not pictured) is
a cell where I input the number of gloves I made, and below that is a cell that
displays the amount of gold I spent.
Moving to the right we see the Gloves Sold column. I record the name of every item, and if you
mouse over the cell an image of the item pops up (so I know exactly what the
item is). Then we have the price each
glove sold for.
Finally, we see the total profits and losses.
Let's look at the numbers.
Total Expenses:
4,025,503
These expenses include:
- Leveling the Blacksmith:
You have to factor in the gold you spend to be able to craft in the fist
place.
- Pattern price:
Since I had previously sold all the crafting patterns I obtained, I had
to buy a +5 affix glove pattern.
- Crafting 38 gloves.
Overall, I spent 4,025,503 on crafting. If we remove the cost of the BS leveling and
the pattern, I spent 3,023,248 just on crafting gloves. Those are the expenses, let's now look at the
sales:
Sales: 1,912,500
My total "profit" from selling 5 pairs of gloves
is 1,912,500. Only one pair sold for
over 1M, so the rest are 100K - 300K sales.
Now, if you look at just those sales, crafting seems to be
profitable. After all, I made 1,912,500
gold from selling gloves. Not bad,
right? Woo crafting!
As with any other business, though, you have to compare your
expenses with your sales. So, let's do
that.
Total expenses:
4,025,503
Total Sales:
1,912,500
Total Profit:
-2,113,003
My total profit is a loss of 2.1 million gold.
Just to rub some salt in the wound, let's look at some more
numbers. Suppose that I had never
leveled my BS or bought that pattern.
Suppose I had never crafted those gloves. Finally, suppose that I had just sold the
crafting mats on the Auction House, rather than use them to make shitty
gloves. How much would I have made in
that world?
To figure that out, we take the number of each crafting
material and multiply it by its sell value.
Essences: 760 * 1600 = 1,216,000
Tears: 152 * 170 =
25,840
Tomes: 228 * 1100 =
250,800
If I had just sold the crafting mats, I would have made
1,492,640 gold.
Granted, that 1,492,640 is less than the 1,912,500 I made by
selling gloves. However, once we factor
in the crafting expenses, we discern that selling the crafting mats is a far
safer investment that always pays off.
So, TL;DR:
Total Expenses:
4,025,503
Glove Crafting Expenses:
3,023,248
Total Sales:
1,912,500
Total Profit:
-2,113,003
Crafting Mat Sell Value:
1,492,640
I've heard tell that persons who stumble upon +6 affix
crafting patterns and craft hundreds if not thousands of items can eventually
turn a profit. You craft 100 +6 hats,
and maybe generate one that sells for 20M+.
If you do that enough, you can start to make some money.
However, most people do not have the venture capital
required to make that initial crafting investment. Moreover, the market is constantly changing
with a wide disparity between the price of ideal items and the price of shitty
items. The vast majority of your crafted
items will list for 5,000 gold, and no one will buy them.
If you got into the crafting market during the first weeks
of the game, then you could have made some money. If you're sitting on a pile of hundreds of
millions of gold, and want to take the risk, you might be able to turn a profit
after you grind out a thousand or so items.
But for most players, if you actually look at the math,
crafting is completely inefficient and stupid.
