Artisans? What Level?Follow

The two are almost totally separate.

You could never leave your city after getting there and just work as an artisan. There is no need to level your character. This is ok if you have other characters who can fetch the materials you need.

The reason for the "almost" is twofold.
First that there is not only money but "status" to be gained from doing tasks for your tradeskill societies.

I have no idea what the value of this status is or what if anything it could ever be used for. It does appear that tradeskill societies themselves have levels and the more status earned for them by their members the higher they rise. Again what this means I do not know - and I'm not sure if it is even implemented.

If it turns out that this "status" is useful then you would need to complete tradeskill tasks collecting harvested materials. This necessarily means visiting places where things will be quite keen on eating you.

Second you do want to get to about 8 and become a citizen just to make sure you have access to all areas of the city. If that rare book is on sale cheap in an area you can't get to it might be gone before your alt can get logged in and back from wherever you left it.

One point worth thinking on.

If you decide to go artisan then you might want to turn off combat exp. Your wholesaler tasks are decided on your adventurer level. If you pass 10 then you get Tier 2 tasks needing harvests in Antonica or Commonlands. Personally I'd think that was worth it as they pay more. Maybe stop levelling around 15ish when most of Antonica/Commonlands is easy to wander around. However these are all things to think of when levelling an artisan.

Another point is that harvests in dangerous places get left. Harvesting in a zone that has gone grey to you means you can get to places that most of the adventurer-harvesters don't.

That is interesting to know. It does however affect the society as a whole unless those new things were only available to characters with sufficient status. Eg I could use a different "non-artisan" character to boost the society my artisan belongs to. Furthermore is it in the game or does it have an ETA?

Big Grey Area

An interesting thought there is that many societies will be sky high with status from people standing there with broker and task-giver on screen completing several tasks a minute. And this will be more so in Qeynos where the wholesaler societies have the two NPC near each other than in Freeport where they were three flights of stairs apart.

I wonder what would have happened if SoE had "fixed" this from the start. It makes me wonder if it was an intentional kickstart to the tradeskill environment.

Yes tradeskilling with your main character would probably be the way to go, the only reason many people have made alts for crafting is due to wanting to support their main or because they fealt they made a mistake with the craft they first went with.

So you should probably look into each of the crafts a bit and possibly try to ask crafters of the diffrent sorts how they feel about aspects that may concern you seeing as it is slightly unchanging once you make the decision.

Also a neat thing is that there are a few areas, enchanted lands and zek isle, which you supposedly gain automatic access to once your adventure or artisan level reaches level 32(which is why a number of people below the minumum adventure level to get the access quest for those areas can be found scurrying about every now and again there.