Since the last patch supposedly addressed problems with tskills and the game economy, I've made batches of 50 sepia dye, sepia ink, chloro wash, chloro oil and a few others used in making App3 & 4 scrolls. What I've seen is that it doesn't matter if you're there pressing buttons at the right time or not, the quantities produced are roughly the same no matter what.
In my crafting sessions (using 6 different toons starting at level 8 artisan each and using identical ingredients each time) I've returned the following average results :
Pristine Chloro Wash - 29/50 pressing no buttons (as if afk), 31/50 hitting appropriate skill when prompted (in attendance).
Pristine Chloro Oil - 22/50 afk, 19/50 in attendance.
Pristine Sepia Dye - 5/50 afk, 4/50 in attendance.
Pristine Sepia Ink - 3/50 afk, 2/50 in attendance.
I can't say whether or not this is true for higher level recipes but if it follows the same trend then why bother being there ? In my case it was favourable to be afk than actually crafting as success rate was slightly higher and failures that caused me damage were so few that I'd completely healed between each.
Has anyone else noticed similarly ? I can't believe that it was just down to outrageous luck on that quantity and if this is the case everywhere then the so called "fix" to the economy basically favours the afk macroer.