In the real world a pair of shoes costs more than the leather needed to produce it, because the shoemaker needs to make a living. In virtual worlds making a pair of shoes demands very little effort and rewards the crafter with a skill point. Thus very often the crafter is willing to sell the finished product for less than the cost of the raw materials. Yesterday the auction house of Guild Wars 2 was working more or less okay for the first time, and most crafted items could be bought for less than the cost of materials. Many low-level items were sold at 1 copper more than what a vendor would buy it for, due to an idiot-proof algorithm that prevents people from auctioning off goods for less than that.

A character in Guild Wars 2 can have two active craft skills out of 8 possible. He learn all 8 by switching, but every switch back to a skill you already leveled up costs money, up to 40 silver for 400 skill. Thus as the bank and crafting materials deposit is shared between your characters anyway, it is better to have crafting alts than to learn everything with one character. So I made my first alt, a sylvari hunter, and started making leather armor for use with my engineer. For the reasons mentioned above, there isn't much profit in that. I thought one could make money by crafting bags, but it turns out that everything but the most basic bags need vendor-bought "holding runes", and the bags sell for little more than the price of that rune.

For armor-crafting the discovery system is a sad joke. You always combine two crafted parts (like soles and boots upper part) with one insignia to craft something. "Discovery" consists of combining the two items for every possible slot with every possible insignias. No surprises there, if you want REAL discovery you need to learn cooking.

Thus my alt made it to character level 6, skill level 160, just by permuting those discoveries. Apparently many other players had given up before that, so the masterwork items level 30 I could make then actually sold for more than the cost of the materials, at least for now. Prices were all over the place, so in some cases I could buy up stuff for cheap and sell it for more, but I assume that state of affair won't last long. It was somewhat sad when I decided to deck out that hunter in level 5 crafted armor, and buying it from the AH was cheaper than making it myself as a leatherworker.

Unlike World of Warcraft, where many crafted items are not part of a set, in Guild Wars 2 the armor you can craft from trained or discovered recipes is always part of a set. If you can buy or make "strong outlaw boots", you know that "strong outlaw" equipment is also available for every other slot. Sets exist only for every 5 levels, but that might actually be an advantage, so you don't need to get new gear every level. In the end that causes the same problem as in Diablo 3, there is really no good reason to collect gear from looting, you can always get the ideal gear from the auction house, at least for fine and masterwork quality. Fortunately Guild Wars 2 isn't so much about loot gathering as Diablo is.

While I like the Guild Wars 2 crafting system and the auction house more than I like the World of Warcraft equivalents, I still don't consider them the best possible. I preferred crafting in Star Wars Galaxies, where raw materials had a quality score, and only by harvesting the best raw materials could you make the best armor and weapons. Good crafters had their own shops and were sought after. In WoW and GW2 crafted items are much more fungible, and there are often hundreds of the same piece listed on the auction house. Somebody who isn't naturally interested in crafting is better off buying the stuff from the AH than trying to make it himself.