I think most animal oil res is produced by gaining "cheap" crafting skills with stuff which is hard to sell and only at allmost none markup. When tt returns and skill prices suck those crafter may be out of that business very fast.
Doesn't matter if you look at animal oil res, metal res, muscle oil, eye oil or animal hides. They all show the exact same thing.
Money wasn't put in, it was just shifted away from actually playing the game.
Check sales, not markup. Animal hides hasn't been selling this badly since 2005, which says a lot about the current amount of skilling fashion designers. This goes for metal res (crafters) and animal res (hunters) as well. Essentially the introduction of CLDs pulled the regular activities to a grinding halt. How is this in any way beneficial to a game that already has such a low population that a single person easily can corner a section of the market?Actually, Animal Hide was at pretty much the same at the start of the year as it is now. That goes for several other materials and loots as well.
That people invested in CLDs instead of hunting, mining or crafting doesn't mean money was not put in, it simply means it was spent on something else, which may benefit us more in the long run.
Essentially the introduction of CLDs pulled the regular activities to a grinding halt. How is this in any way beneficial to a game that already has such a low population that a single person easily can corner a section of the market?
And I stand by the fact that there's just as many threads about worthless hunting returns, how EU is a pyramid scheme and countless tales of how awful MA is as there was 10 months ago.
But how are there going to be any new players when most CLD owners bought deeds because they were sick of the core components of the game?
I think also the sharp decline in the graph right at the end (ie. last change of direction of the rolling avg line) is not particularly meaningful. The rolling average looks like it moves to meet the shorter term line at the end, which is clearly very volatile.
Like others have said, activity has been perhaps a bit lower than usual recently because many have been turning their ped cards into CLD.
I'd be more worried if CLD revenue was tumbling down, that's the real indicator of activity.
That wasn't the concern of the OP as he already pointed out . The stuff always was mostly tt food unless you're ready to stock up a lot of it and it's tiny MU haven't changed much over time, but still we see significant ups and down in numbers of sales, which logically can be attributed to the shifts in the active userbase's size. Simply speaking, it's an altimeter of the falling sky, and lately it's falling unusually fastAnimal oil res is just getting TTed or animal oils are getting TTed so there's not as much oils available to be crafted into animal res.
That wasn't the concern of the OP as he already pointed out . The stuff always was mostly tt food unless you're ready to stock up a lot of it and it's tiny MU haven't changed much over time, but still we see significant ups and down in numbers of sales, which logically can be attributed to the shifts in the active userbase's size. Simply speaking, it's an altimeter of the falling sky, and lately it's falling unusually fast
Also compare the month volume of p4a vs the year. Please tell me that isn't an indication of activity.
Why look at auction sales of something that gets TT'ed. Why not look at auction sales of something that won't get TT'ed?
Check sales, not markup. Animal hides hasn't been selling this badly since 2005, which says a lot about the current amount of skilling fashion designers. This goes for metal res (crafters) and animal res (hunters) as well. Essentially the introduction of CLDs pulled the regular activities to a grinding halt. How is this in any way beneficial to a game that already has such a low population that a single person easily can corner a section of the market?
EDIT: Eye and muscle oil sales have also gone down while some other stuff like animal hides and paints have been sold more... Does anyone know what happened in 2007 btw, since there seems to be a peak for tailoring and coloring material sales back then?