WowAce

With certain items (particularly transmutes), I find the estimated profit from LSW rather unreliable.

The problem comes from it trying to recurse down through the recipes for the cheapest way to make the final item. This doesn't work for transmutes that live on a cooldown.

I can't really be expected to transmute eternals 2-3 times and then transmute an epic gem. Majestic Zircon is currently telling me to spend 7 days for the estimated profit, which simply doesn't work. For the numbers to make more sense to me, some way to prevent recursion down these paths needs to be disabled as a user option of some kind.

yeah, it's a problem.  what needs to happen is to avoid recipes with cooldowns or to add a cooldown "cost" that gets factored in -- like every transmute cooldown adds 10g to the item cost (or whatever you select).

My only concern with the idea of associating a cost with a cooldown is that it could get tricky what to cost it as.

The catch here is that when delving through a single CD (with multiple recipes linked to it) multiple times, the actual cost is that of the highest estimated profit of all those recipes linked to the CD. Which can be calculated, but can get recursive on its own too. Total cost in this example is 6x188g, for 7 CDs.

With something like blacksmithing, the profit opportunity lost when smelting your own titansteel bars is simply time, and the end 'loss' is that you don't get to produce the item quickly (which with Blacksmithing, is rarely an issue, because it takes awhile to sell most epic level items anyways). Here, the total cost is closer to 0g, because the Titansteel bar doesn't actually share a cooldown with anything else, so there is no lost profit opportunity.

For it to be usable on a wider array of tradeskills, it needs to be able to see what each additional use of a cooldown (beyond the first) really costs the user rather than expecting the user to figure out a good value for it.

My own rant on the subject anyways.

there are a few different cooldowns, so if i could have a price system for one, i should be able to then let you price the different ones as you see fit.  it would be something the user would define for their own.

the "cost" of an item is rarely the cost, anyway -- at least, if you have time on your hands.  like how much did it cost you to farm mats instead of buying them at the ah?  putting a price on a cooldown is sort of the same theory.  this is a good estimate of what it's costing you, but if you can get it cheaper then more power to you.

I'm not disagreeing that putting a cost is probably not a bad idea. When I said it could get tricky, I was more referring to the amount of work involved.

That said, putting a user-configurable cost there and expecting the user to provide the value without something like an opportunity cost option to calculate that cost for the user and track market changes would make the fix an annoyance rather than a help, in my opinion.

It'd be one more value to tweak occasionally, that could get out of date, forgotten, and add some new level of frustration that would be similar in scale to what is already being seen. Sure, let the user override the value, but if a cost should be attached to these cooldowns, I'd rather have LSW figure out what the current opportunity cost from the AH data supplier (something like say the estimated profit assuming the user has the mats already gives you a good idea of the profit that just the cooldown is contributing).

i was thinking i could treat cooldowns as an additional reagent (like i do with vellums for enchants).  the problem, tho, is that it would make items with cooldowns looks less appealing -- as tho you could horde cooldowns or sell them on the open market.

so i'm thinking now it'd have to be something outside the normal system of value/cost in lsw...

a flag for cooldown consideration is sounding more and more straightforward.

probably would be something like:

ignore all cooldowns
ignore the first (shared) cooldown
don't use recipes with cooldowns at all

Well, I wouldn't penalize the first cooldown used in a recipe, myself. And the cost of using say, smelt titansteel is basically 0g... as you lose no opportunity for higher profit (no other recipes on the same cooldown).

You only really get into problems the second time you run into a cooldown on a recipe (with the final result's recipe also included in this count), which is shared, and one of those other recipes on the same cooldown is more profitable (that 'lost' profit is the cost of using that cooldown).

Again with the Majestic Zircon example here, the reason why the estimate is kinda misleading is that eternals and epic gems are on the same cooldown, yet, epic gem profit vastly outstrips eternals. Why spend 7 days building up to one gem, when I could produce that gem 7 times total in the same amount of time for vastly larger profit?