Tradeskill Writs Given Time Limit

In the latest set of patches, a time limit of 30 minutes was placed on tradeskill writs. Now you can not obtain more than one tradeskill writ per 30 minutes; at least 30 minutes must have expired since an artisan obtained a previous writ.

Anytime the game imposes an arbitrary limit on something like this, it chafes a bit, to be sure.

However, there is a natural limit on the speed you can do adventure writs. Travel time and spawn rate. This mostly counteracts the benefit of questing together, since multiple people can get credit for the same kill. A well-organized guild can crank 6 patrons through 4 writs and be back ready to get another writ in maybe 3 hours, if the writ is in Thundering Steppes. It might be less. It will be more as they level up and have more travel time. That's 24 writs in 3 hours, or 8 per hour. If you can get it down to 2 hours, that's 12 writs per hour.

Under the NEW rules, 6 crafters can produce 12 writs per hour, if they are well organized. Because the final combines will likely only take 10 of the 30 mins, there is time left over each half hour to produce the subcombines that were used up, and to walk over and get a new writ.

If adventurers can get their writ cycle time down to 2 hours, they will be doing about 12 writs per hour, too. This really doesn't seem broken to me. But I think 2 hours is pretty optimistic.

A single patron funnel can perhaps crank out final combines in 10 minutes, doing 6 per hour. That's not as good for the guild as the scheme described above. However, there's an issue with it. With only one patron doing the final combines for writs, the guild gets more benefit per writ than it would if there were 6 patrons. This is because the contribution to guild experience is divided by the total number of patrons. So each patron needs to be "pulling his weight".

So, it may be that this is the reason for this fix. But similar structures can be created outside of a guild, by use of money. When I've done a guild writ, it took a long time, preparing subcomponents. But I realized that if I wanted to spend less time, I could apply money to the problem, and just buy up subcomponents. I could keep an inventory of likely needs, and reel off the writs in basically the time needed to make the final combine. I'm not sure that using money to buy status really breaks the concept of status. But perhaps that's an issue.

In the end, I expect that the devs used statistical data that showed a few people cranking through tradeskills very fast, and they wanted to put a limit on it. However, most of the speed issues reported here are not an issue when the time spent preparing subcombines is amortized in. So a bit of reorganization of the work, and you will be able gain status at the same averaged rate.