This is a quality post on the beta forum, which many people may not read. http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/53955/leapfrog-smith-craft-leveling-system

Hi everyone! A team of Elder Moot members determined a workable way for 2 crafters to help each other level as quickly as possible for the three smith crafts, Blacksmithing, Clothier, and Woodworking. This is not the best and highest Inspiration Points (IP) you can earn in the game, but it is the second best and most convenient to work with. We also learned that each profession has one item in each Tier rank that gives the most IP earned per resource material used. So far, they are:

Blacksmith

Tier 1 Iron = L4 daggers

Tier 2 Steel = L16 daggers

Tier 3 Orichalc-Steel = ?

Tier 4 Dwarven = ?

Clothier

Tier 1 Jute/Rawhide = L14 boots, hoods, gloves, hat, shoulders, or belt

Woodworker

Tier 1 Maple = L4 Bows

HOW IT WORKS Each crafter creates a set of the recommended items. They trade their items to each other. They deconstruct the other person's crafted items. Rinse, Repeat until you reach the second Tier level of your craft rank where you can spend a skill point in the next level material. Now you make the next level recommended items, for example, they would be L16 daggers for the Tier 2 set of Blacksmithing. And so on through all the tiers over time.

When you deconstruct a player-made item, you are earning 800% more IP than if you crafted and deconstructed something all by yourself. The system works as a sort of leapfrog game, where each crafter is jumping over each other to go forward as they level up through the tiers. The beauty of the system is that it's mutually beneficial, because you both craft items for each other, it's a clean fair swap of raw materials used to craft them. Naturally higher level crafters can also mentor low level crafters, perhaps the low level crafter can simply give the mats needed to the higher level crafter to create items to be deconstructed for leveling.

THE MATHS BEHIND IT ALL

There are 4 major ways to earn IP, this is how they relate to each other for IP gain:

[0% Lowest Amount Earned (LAE)] Deconstruct your own crafted item

[+369% over LAE] Create an item

[+800% over LAE] Deconstruct another player's created item

[+1069% over LAE] Deconstruct a world drop green item

As you can see, the gain curve is pretty consistent. It's not been tested by our team but I think we can reasonably expect the trend to continue with a bonus IP gain of approximately 1200% for a blue drop, and 1400% for a purple drop, and so on. This curve has been tested across all three smith crafts and is consistent for all of them.

The best IP you can gain is to deconstruct world drop items of the highest level you can get. However, collecting enough of these to really power-level your crafter won't be viable, so the next-best solution is to deconstruct items made by another player (or an alt) for the 800% IP boost gain over the Lowest Amount Earned, which is what you deconstruct that you made yourself. This is why we created the Leapfrog Leveling system.

Each Craft has 1 Item that is Most Efficient for Leveling in each Tier Crafting tiers for the smiths are based on the raw crafting material you use. Each material is available in combat-level appropriate zones that sort of match the levels of the gear you can make for that Craft Tier. For example, Tier 1 for Woodworker uses Maple, for item levels 1-14, and Tier 2 uses Oak for item levels 16-25 and so on.

In order to determine which item is most efficient, we determined the IP gain for items which use the least amount of materials, based on IP earned per material. Here is a sample of some of the blacksmithing IP gains

To craft, then deconstruct your own L1 dagger = 30.5 IP / ingot

To craft, swap, then deconstruct someone else's L1 dagger = 76 IP / ingot

To craft, then deconstruct your own L4 dagger = 40.66 IP / ingot

To craft, swap, then deconstruct someone else's L4 dagger = 99.66 IP / ingot

As you can see, you get more IP per ingot working with a team mate, and you get more IP per ingot from the L4 dagger than you do from the L1 dagger. In this exact curve, the L6 dagger was infinitesimally better (+0.10 IP better) but we stuck with the level 4 so we could use lesser ingots per item.

Many special thanks to @McLeod25, @Repus , @decompiler , @Mordraig , and @steelpatch3050 for all their help in putting this together, as well as all of the Elder Moot guild for all the donations of materials and support in helping us to do this research!