Accounts banned for Real-World Trading

[Malakar]

I guess my point was that a lot of people (myself included) see the idea of going a production profession (other than Engineering for obvious reasons) is a waste of time and effort. I originally started out with Skinning/Leather Working on my Rogue but soon dropped it once I realized that the number of useful items created as I leveled it up was pitifully small. Many people then choose not to go production professions, pick up two gathering professions and therefore flood the market with raw materials, subsequently plummeting the prices.

Indeed, and I'd add a couple things.

In the beginning, many players came from other games where the crafting skills were the way to make money. So they assumed that investing money into their crafting skills would be a temporary sacrifice to make money in the end.

As far as leather goes, many people pick up skinning because it's an easy gathering skill. Unlike mining, you can simply skin stuff as you go along, given that there are tons of skinnable mobs spread throughout the game. In comparison to cloth, which is also easy to get, there's no skill like first aid that everyone can use to soak it up.

On my server, the high level leather is still pretty decently priced, though light/medium leather is pathetic. I guess what it is is that higher level players are realizing that skinning is a good and easy way to make money, so they switch professions and have to skin low level mobs to raise their skill. Meanwhile there aren't so many new leatherworkers; most of them have been doing it all along and are way past light/medium leather.