Crafting is far harder in 3.0 than 2.0. Trust me. Casuals aren't making it far at all.

Half of them are still struggling their way through blue scrips and they hear about red scrips and are just like "No thanks".

It is too hard for a casual player, at least on my server to make much ground. Now, Gatherers, man they are the golden child right now. Having a gatherer or 2 at Lv60 is the most profitable thing you could do. But leveling a crafter without having a gatherer and other crafters is just too hard and too expensive.

Say a casual has 500k. If it cost them 10k to do 1 Blue Scrip craft and get 150k exp, then at lv 58 when they need like 3M exp, they are gonna have to do 20 crafts. That's 200k Right there, now they can gather that instead if they have the gatherer's, but if they don't well then they are screwed.

Prices are not gonna go down anytime soon, they hit the base level. Previously when you got Lv50 on a class, you really didn't need to worry too much about making the Lv40 and Lv30 crafts and could focus on 1 and 2 star unhindered. But that is not the case now, now you have every from lv50 to 60 competing for the same mats, every week, and a lot of them. Gatherer's keeping their mats instead of unloading them, and gatherer's not having the time to collect the less worthwhile mats since there is always a node up that needs to be mined.