This is a copy of a post i made on the original d3 forums. But i believe it would also have it's function on one of the largest d3 fan community sites.
The intro:
As all of you know, alot of people have begun crafting stuff for other people when they in some way or another get their hands on a rare craftable recipes. The items used are most obviously helm of command & Seven sins, but other stuff as well eg. the grand exalted armors/weapons. After patch 1.0.legendary buff, they will most certainly also start crafting the legendary weapons for you as well.
The method:
If you have not already realised by now. With all the the forum posts that has people selling quite hilarious amounts of these have started popping up. The scam goes as follows:
1) Crafter buy/finds the desired recipe or gets it from a friend
2) He (and possibly friends) pool their money and craft an arbitrary number here called X, where they don't have to care about stats.
,3) The crafter puts up a forum post where he for a very small fee (often 30-40k so it doesn't sound weird...) will craft it "especially" for you because he is such a nice guy. *gasp*!
4) Crafter crafts 1 or more items for people, always handing out from the worst of the total pool that he has previously crafted to the person paying, so he won't get "bad rep" for withholding an item.
5) Repeat 4 untill you have made X items with decent enough stats for Forum mass sale, good stats for GAH or godly stats for RMAH.
6) Sell all the items for new starting gold + real gold
7) Enourmous profit
8) Goto 1, but since you had profit in 7, x can be higher in the succeeding round
The arguments:
So how is this a "scam" you might ask, and your further response might be "because all i see is a smart guy making a profit", and yes to a degree you are correct. Except you did not get what you payed for, you did not get a fresh roll for your mats + your fee on the desired item. You got a badly rolled item (or atleast so bad that the crafter deems it not worth his time to sell it), and he gets a new roll + profit for his time! "But the fee is low, so you can't complain", oh yes i can because the deal was inherently broken. The deal was not "For fee + your mats, you get worst crafted item in my inventory", how many of you would do this deal?
Heck, me and my friends even thought about buying a recipe for the group, and do it because it is VERY easy to do once you got starting gold for it.
The solution:
Permanently:
So how to solve this so people won't be able to do this scam easily. Easy, make it so that whenever an item is crafted it is linked in the chat window to the players in the game you are currently in as "[playername] crafted [itemlink]" and the trader wont be able to hand you off his badly rolled items, since you can keep track of what your mats was actually used for.
The other solution and more secure solution is to make a specific trading window for crafting, where the buyer inputs the right mats + gold (minimum gold would need to be the amount needed for crafting with no upper limit) in the trading window, the crafter then selects which item and once both pushes accept the buyer gets the item rolled directly to his own inventory. (Think enchanting from WoW, but even more elaborate)
tempoary:
Untill blizzard fixes this blatant stupidity, the only solution would be to have the crafter be on a livestream so that you can monitor his crafting process.
Please do realise that the permanent solutions, most likely will make the crafting fee's rise to level's that are not "i am Mr. nice guy and i will scam you hard"-levels. Also this will most likely heighten the amount of "resource" scammers that just steal your mats outright, but then we can atleast give them bad rep and noone will trade them mats. As the problem with the current situation is that the scammers get good rep for perhaps handing out a decent/good item for every 100 sellable items he rolls.
The TL;DR:
Currently blacksmith crafting is a major albeit legal scam, where you for your mats and gold get a previously crafted items to allow the crafter to try for better rolls, which he will eventually sell for very high prices on forum, GAH or RMAH. Blizzard could easily solve it by adding all crafted items figure in the chatwindow, or do a specialized crafting trade window where only gold is transfered.
If you want you can go search on the EU forum for my post and uprate it so they might actually make a solution for this, or you can just consider yourself warned from this (although very obvious) scam.
I almost as bad as the "PAY ME TO CARRY YOU THROUGH A BOSS ONCE!" scams.
The second one being a scam because:
A: They would do it anyway, for their own profit.
B: Drop rates in the 5% range mean you're likely to find one item in the valuable ilvl range, and at that it's unlikely to benefit you very much. It's easy to post positive reviews because it only takes a few lucky people to ignore a dozen people who basically got ripped off.
The real "solution" (see: duh) is you buy and sell the items. You don't pay each other for the vague chance at getting an item that's out of your league. You just farm up some gold and then trade that way.
Of course, that's going to be a lot more practical in the coming months when these douchnozzles stop being able to charge 5-10mil for an "average" item because the number of players who reach the threshold jump up with the patch and so do the drop chances. 1.03 is going to throw a huge wrench into all these scumbag's schemes.
some people just stream it so you can watch them make the item
Well that's valiant of them, but at heart it's still the equivalent of a roadside shell game. Never mind the fact that if you trade gold to me for nothing in return, I'm just going to leave, ignore you, and laugh at your face.
I suppose you could call this a scam, but at the same time it's really not.
Yes, the huge pool of items could be created and then the worst ones handed out while the money obtained in exchange for services is then used to create (hopefully) better ones.
On the other hand, you could give Mr. 110% Honest the money and the mats and he creates it while on stream and you could still get an incredibly crappy item.
It really comes down to "buyer beware". Get people you trust to make your items or face uncertainty.
The streaming is indeed, one of the solutions. Albeit tempoary in nature and outside of the game, forcing players to log onto third party sites to make sure that what they get is legit, might lead to all other kinds of trouble.
Have you ever seen this text in modified form before, in some weird games;
Crafting XXX item just XX gold/moneyz
goto webpage to see stream of me making your item: ihackyounowforreal.jstream.org
after that add me to fwiends go into game
gief mats, watch stream be happy!
Enter "igothacked" Into discount box on stream site to get discount to fee!
*hint goldsellers...
@ blujay, i think you miss the whole point of crafting. Which is basically made to replace gambling from d2. as your suggestion totally misses the point.
"The real "solution" (see: duh) is you buy and sell the items. You don't pay each other for the vague chance at getting an item that's out of your league. You just farm up some gold and then trade that way."
D3 is a game about random items, and if you want to gamble on an item with saved up gold/mats and hope to get lucky you should be able to do so. Rare recipes was obviously implemented so people could craft for each other as well.
The "real" solution you incidently propose while still holding true to the gambling spirit, is the following:
"The real "solution" (see: duh) is that you only gamble on recipes that you, yourself have bought!You don't pay each other for the vague chance at getting an item that's out of your league. You just need to farm up the gold to buy the rare recipe first, and then you can farm the gold to gamble!"
@westingham one of the many definitions of a scam goes as follows "deprive somebody of something by deceit", you are deprived of a freshly rolled item (eg. unidentified) by them giving you a previously rolled and thus known item (eg itentified), because you can in no way see that it was not already in the persons inventory when you started the agreed upon and payed for activity. Therefore you have been swindled, ripped off or scammed by pure definition.
The scam is super easy and TBH I debated over a day or two if I should justhold on to all my crap rolls so that when people asked me to craft for them I would just always hand them a crap roll. But I just couldnt do it, even possibly being the first person (first week of play, lucky me) to have exualted grand doom caster (xbow) in the game...i couldnt bring myself to do it.
And ill be honest, im a good guy, i rage from time to time but i never fucked (over) no one. Treat as you would be treated. But the possible influx of cold hard gold was very tempting considering everyone on my friends list and randoms wanted me to craft that bow for them considering they had nothing better to spend mats on.
Simple enough...dont ever give anything to anyone that you wont miss or if you dont trust or cant trust the other indivdual.
You know I can also scam you by opening the trade window counting to 3 and then closing the window in hopes that your dumbass 'dragged and dropped' and now litterly dropped the item on the ground for me to ninja... again, just dont deal with people if you are gonna miss your funds or goods. There is always a safe and easy AH and RMAH for that/
I suppose you could call this a scam, but at the same time it's really not.
Yes, the huge pool of items could be created and then the worst ones handed out while the money obtained in exchange for services is then used to create (hopefully) better ones.
On the other hand, you could give Mr. 110% Honest the money and the mats and he creates it while on stream and you could still get an incredibly crappy item.
It really comes down to "buyer beware". Get people you trust to make your items or face uncertainty.
What are you even thinking? Of course it's a scam. You pay for an item with random stats. Not for an already crafted item with known bad stats.
Anyway, yeah just don't trade with people you don't trust. There's an AH for that.
The intro:
As all of you know, alot of people have begun crafting stuff for other people when they in some way or another get their hands on a rare craftable recipes. The items used are most obviously helm of command & Seven sins, but other stuff as well eg. the grand exalted armors/weapons. After patch 1.0.legendary buff, they will most certainly also start crafting the legendary weapons for you as well.
The method:
If you have not already realised by now. With all the the forum posts that has people selling quite hilarious amounts of these have started popping up. The scam goes as follows:
1) Crafter buy/finds the desired recipe or gets it from a friend
2) He (and possibly friends) pool their money and craft an arbitrary number here called X, where they don't have to care about stats.
,3) The crafter puts up a forum post where he for a very small fee (often 30-40k so it doesn't sound weird...) will craft it "especially" for you because he is such a nice guy. *gasp*!
4) Crafter crafts 1 or more items for people, always handing out from the worst of the total pool that he has previously crafted to the person paying, so he won't get "bad rep" for withholding an item.
5) Repeat 4 untill you have made X items with decent enough stats for Forum mass sale, good stats for GAH or godly stats for RMAH.
6) Sell all the items for new starting gold + real gold
7) Enourmous profit
8) Goto 1, but since you had profit in 7, x can be higher in the succeeding round
The arguments:
So how is this a "scam" you might ask, and your further response might be "because all i see is a smart guy making a profit", and yes to a degree you are correct. Except you did not get what you payed for, you did not get a fresh roll for your mats + your fee on the desired item. You got a badly rolled item (or atleast so bad that the crafter deems it not worth his time to sell it), and he gets a new roll + profit for his time! "But the fee is low, so you can't complain", oh yes i can because the deal was inherently broken. The deal was not "For fee + your mats, you get worst crafted item in my inventory", how many of you would do this deal?
Heck, me and my friends even thought about buying a recipe for the group, and do it because it is VERY easy to do once you got starting gold for it.
The solution:
Permanently:
So how to solve this so people won't be able to do this scam easily. Easy, make it so that whenever an item is crafted it is linked in the chat window to the players in the game you are currently in as "[playername] crafted [itemlink]" and the trader wont be able to hand you off his badly rolled items, since you can keep track of what your mats was actually used for.
The other solution and more secure solution is to make a specific trading window for crafting, where the buyer inputs the right mats + gold (minimum gold would need to be the amount needed for crafting with no upper limit) in the trading window, the crafter then selects which item and once both pushes accept the buyer gets the item rolled directly to his own inventory. (Think enchanting from WoW, but even more elaborate)
tempoary:
Untill blizzard fixes this blatant stupidity, the only solution would be to have the crafter be on a livestream so that you can monitor his crafting process.
Please do realise that the permanent solutions, most likely will make the crafting fee's rise to level's that are not "i am Mr. nice guy and i will scam you hard"-levels. Also this will most likely heighten the amount of "resource" scammers that just steal your mats outright, but then we can atleast give them bad rep and noone will trade them mats. As the problem with the current situation is that the scammers get good rep for perhaps handing out a decent/good item for every 100 sellable items he rolls.
The TL;DR:
Currently blacksmith crafting is a major albeit legal scam, where you for your mats and gold get a previously crafted items to allow the crafter to try for better rolls, which he will eventually sell for very high prices on forum, GAH or RMAH. Blizzard could easily solve it by adding all crafted items figure in the chatwindow, or do a specialized crafting trade window where only gold is transfered.
If you want you can go search on the EU forum for my post and uprate it so they might actually make a solution for this, or you can just consider yourself warned from this (although very obvious) scam.
I almost as bad as the "PAY ME TO CARRY YOU THROUGH A BOSS ONCE!" scams.
The second one being a scam because:
A: They would do it anyway, for their own profit.
B: Drop rates in the 5% range mean you're likely to find one item in the valuable ilvl range, and at that it's unlikely to benefit you very much. It's easy to post positive reviews because it only takes a few lucky people to ignore a dozen people who basically got ripped off.
The real "solution" (see: duh) is you buy and sell the items. You don't pay each other for the vague chance at getting an item that's out of your league. You just farm up some gold and then trade that way.
Of course, that's going to be a lot more practical in the coming months when these douchnozzles stop being able to charge 5-10mil for an "average" item because the number of players who reach the threshold jump up with the patch and so do the drop chances. 1.03 is going to throw a huge wrench into all these scumbag's schemes.
Well that's valiant of them, but at heart it's still the equivalent of a roadside shell game. Never mind the fact that if you trade gold to me for nothing in return, I'm just going to leave, ignore you, and laugh at your face.
Yes, the huge pool of items could be created and then the worst ones handed out while the money obtained in exchange for services is then used to create (hopefully) better ones.
On the other hand, you could give Mr. 110% Honest the money and the mats and he creates it while on stream and you could still get an incredibly crappy item.
It really comes down to "buyer beware". Get people you trust to make your items or face uncertainty.
Have you ever seen this text in modified form before, in some weird games;
Crafting XXX item just XX gold/moneyz
goto webpage to see stream of me making your item: ihackyounowforreal.jstream.org
after that add me to fwiends go into game
gief mats, watch stream be happy!
Enter "igothacked" Into discount box on stream site to get discount to fee!
*hint goldsellers...
@ blujay, i think you miss the whole point of crafting. Which is basically made to replace gambling from d2. as your suggestion totally misses the point.
"The real "solution" (see: duh) is you buy and sell the items. You don't pay each other for the vague chance at getting an item that's out of your league. You just farm up some gold and then trade that way."
D3 is a game about random items, and if you want to gamble on an item with saved up gold/mats and hope to get lucky you should be able to do so. Rare recipes was obviously implemented so people could craft for each other as well.
The "real" solution you incidently propose while still holding true to the gambling spirit, is the following:
"The real "solution" (see: duh) is that you only gamble on recipes that you, yourself have bought!You don't pay each other for the vague chance at getting an item that's out of your league. You just need to farm up the gold to buy the rare recipe first, and then you can farm the gold to gamble!"
@westingham one of the many definitions of a scam goes as follows "deprive somebody of something by deceit", you are deprived of a freshly rolled item (eg. unidentified) by them giving you a previously rolled and thus known item (eg itentified), because you can in no way see that it was not already in the persons inventory when you started the agreed upon and payed for activity. Therefore you have been swindled, ripped off or scammed by pure definition.
Is "douchenozzles" one word or two? Because I always understood it as "douche nozzles".
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
And ill be honest, im a good guy, i rage from time to time but i never fucked (over) no one. Treat as you would be treated. But the possible influx of cold hard gold was very tempting considering everyone on my friends list and randoms wanted me to craft that bow for them considering they had nothing better to spend mats on.
Simple enough...dont ever give anything to anyone that you wont miss or if you dont trust or cant trust the other indivdual.
You know I can also scam you by opening the trade window counting to 3 and then closing the window in hopes that your dumbass 'dragged and dropped' and now litterly dropped the item on the ground for me to ninja... again, just dont deal with people if you are gonna miss your funds or goods. There is always a safe and easy AH and RMAH for that/
PS: now crafting exaulted grand sov. gloves PST
Anyway, yeah just don't trade with people you don't trust. There's an AH for that.