[tduan]

It’s often associated in PoE that friction is what usually drives profits. Using a recent meta example, Graveyard crafting was extremely tedious while simultaneously being extremely lucrative. I am quite interested then to see what the implications on the economy are if adopted mainstream by the masses. People nowadays would rather pay 3x the prices of the craft rather than learning how to do it themselves, but if there was a convenient calculator that could derive the optimal algorithm I suspect we will see a different behavior emerge.

[redrobein]

I think most experienced players are already pretty optimal at crafting. There might be some rare case where it might save you a couple div at best. It's usually obvious by design how to achieve something. Of course there is a market because some part of the playerbase can't do this (which might become lower) and some part of the playerbase still sees it as time efficient to just buy it precrafted. Likely there's less incentive to craft in bulk, large bulk currency trades become more expensive, making the crafted items more expensive for the unkowing new player who doesn't use this tool. Personally, I don't think it would change the economy that much.

[tduan]

Agreed, and I think my point around adoption by the masses was made a little too lightly - as you mentioned there will always be a part of the player base who prefer buying and playing the game rather than spending time crafting (regardless of how trivial the craft is).

[22c]

It gets more interesting if you optimise for time instead of cost. If it takes you 15 minutes to craft something using 80c of currency, but you can instead run maps and average 300c an hour, then you still might prefer paying 100c for the guaranteed outcome (buying it already made) than going for "average" cost of 80c and having to craft it yourself.

Do it again, but optimise for fun instead of time and we've come full-circle :)