Hey bro nice question and a good answer. Just wanted to add one piece of advice:
Give the spell crafter plenty of time to fill your order. Here's the scenario that happened to me about 15 times, then I took my spell crafting info off the game and pretty much refuse to do any orders except for my friends. Yes, I generally don't even do sc orders for guildies for the same following reasons.
Simply put, SC is a ****** lol. For you to do the research on a player's character, race, and get a list of all the items they have in inventory and calculate the exact sc job so that you get maximum utility for that player takes me quite a bit of time. Then if you are maxing out the amount of imbue points into armor (+5.5 overcharge) crating the order takes even longer. My point here is that to make a plat profit on most level 51 jobs (that's my standard even for friends), you have to spend more time than it's worth in my opinion, especially if you figure you can buy 20 plat online for $20 lol in 5 minutes flat. I won’t even consider a lower than level 51 job except for the closest of friends and for myself of course.
Remember, unless you find a sc'er with no life, they aren't on the game to sit around for hours at a time to make a plat. I only made my wiz a legendary sc'er so I could do it myself and know how the crafting trade affected all my toons. After many "customers" were rude as hell for me to "hurry up" the order, which again is a pure ****** in the first place, I took my name off. And yes I could have “hurried up” the order and not done as good a job, or left a few imbue points out for the sake of not taking so much time, but that’s not the way I wanted to do things. This isn't a pity party, just the way I had things happen to me.
Yes I'm jaded lol, but I don't care. If I get a customer, even a friend that pushes me too hard, I just hand the plat back to them and won't do the order, it's not worth the time in the first place and certainly isn't worth further aggravation.
And I try to do the same for other crafters. Last week I put in an order for a full set of MP leather armor. Lol I have a leg armorer, but didn't feel like doing it myself. The guy told me it would take 5 days to do the order, and I told him np. When 5 days were up, I didn't bug him. The next day he sent me a tell and told me it was done, so I went and paid for it. Because I know what it takes to do the crafting stuff, I'm fairly patient when it comes to this kind of thing.
Lastly, when your doing an order for MP crafted items or a large sc job, offer to pay half up front and half at the end. This will tell the sc'er you are serious and not just "shopping".
Edited, Thu Jul 21 07:59:45 2005 by stevenmeadows