Crafting collaboration - personal 'shops'?

Is it possible to ease collaboration between craftsmen by creating storage or trade 'lockers' that allow transfer of materials without requiring both individuals to be in the same place at the same time? It would be great if we could trade more easily, and contract between craftsmen and with clients.

As an example, Windlash is willing and able to make cloth, provided you provide the ingredients. However, it is very difficult to coordinate delivery, because people are online at different times, and in different areas -- a craftsman isn't really going to sit in one spot when they need to level as much as anyone else.


What if we could set up 'stores' or 'lockers' in a central location like Stronham -- or a new crafting enclave -- where clients can leave materials, craftsmen can pick them up and process them, then store them for clients to pick up?

It could require levels in a new crafting skill, and/or a small fee.

Maybe a 'store' could be similar to the auction, with items still being in a specific town, but releasable to the other craftsman/client by use of a code, or tagged to their name. The finished product would post with the client name, the agreed price, and they get to own it upon paying. Just like an auction, they would go to the town to physically pick it up.

Obviously, there would have to be a way to tell the craftsman what you want to have done, but that could be worked out at least initially with forum PMs or chat.

Would anyone else find this useful, or have any ideas how it would work best? I'd like to be able to put dyes or other goods up for particular people to buy, and eventually take orders for weapons, etc., rather than just selling in auction.

I think this could fit in with the auction filters in some way; basically have a menu from the auction page with a different 'house' for each type of item sold (crafting resources, battle equipment, gems, crafting tools, recipes, pets, trophies, enchanting stones, misc. [potions/timecards]).

With orders, perhaps you could type the name of an item into a search bar or something, and it gives the closest possible results, so you can click the one you want, place a price and town, and submit it to the auctions and it will stay there for x amount of hours you choose, whether you're online or not.

That would be a nice feature.

[Hopilus]

i do believe something similar to that is on jeffs "todo" list. just like there is something about offline auction on it too.

@Rigger: I love that idea!

I just hope the economy matures soon...I'm sitting on some recipes I can't scribe thanks to the drought of higher level Sinews.

I'm working at raising my trapping skill just for that purpose -- but trapping is seriously time consuming, and it takes time from the other crafting skills I want to improve.

One hopeful note -- I've seen some of the sinews and threads finally showing up with reasonable pricing on auction, which at least brings the creation of consumable recipes within reach. It doesn't make much sense to go through the trouble of creating a grass sword if the ingredients cost 10 times what you can sell it for at auction. I'm interested in seeing what the final recipes will require.

I don't really understand having to make a consumable recipe each time though -- or did I read that wrong? Once you've gone through the creation of the consumable recipe, that recipe should be Learned and able to be recreated.