either that or people bought so many herbs, your just in the low point of the cycle, and in time you will find yourself getting more orders than you can handle.

I'm perfectly happy with the situation..

After all, this whole topic is good advertising.

Hmm, let's consider this. You can get a powerstone nowaday for 500 gold, which contains 100% reserve, so 5 gold/1% reserve. You do an enchantment and charges for 25 gold per, so you're earning 20 gold per 1% reserve. That's a net profit of 400% for basically standing there enchanting. On the other hand, if you look at the other tradeskills.

Forging- expensive comms, random stats, not very many in demands.

Tailoring- not that high of a demand for clothings since cloth is hard to find.

Jewelry- randomed gems cut, hard to get specific ones.

Herbs- hibernation, tons of people harvesting, overharvesting, etc.

Alchemy- absurd numbers of herbs needed for potions

Poisons- laughable since only knights use venoms, and since they only hit 50% of the time, even worse.

Cooking- great skill, everyone eats.

Enchantment might not be that profitable, but it's incredibly easy to do, and takes no efforts whatsoever, only time.

I'd like to point out that this is a basic rule of economics. In a competitive market where goods are undifferentiated, prices will fall until costs are covered but no profit is made. To make a profit, you have to differentiate, advertise, or control the supply - with a cartel, for example. A while ago the jewelry cartels, at least, did control prices, and jewelers made lots of money. Eventually one of the cartels stopped enforcing prices and the monopoly fell apart.

I make an average 2K profit on forged goods, 4 times 500 is 2K... its about the same.

Economic profit. It's quite possible for a market like exists in Lusternia to make an accounting profit. It is true that this accounting profit will be the same as they would have doing other things, but it's still a source of income.

One word people: Barter.

Find someone who can supply you with the items you need, and needs items you can make. Trade for equal 'market' values. I forge items in trade for things like herbs. Cut out the money in the middle. Sadly, demand for forged goods is really low, and the people who need them most are often forgers in order to get full plate...but that's another point.

I have tons and tons of herbs, and I've bought very little of that with gold from an herbalist or store. 95% of it is in trade. If both people are making a sale where the equivalency of their 'market values' matches up, it's just like both of them made high profit sales, and then saved time on actually shopping as well.

On a side note, if you need items forged, and want to trade herbs, refills, extra comms, whatever in quantity that at 'fair market value' matches the cartel enforced minimum labor costs, contact me in game.

/Edit: I r a gud speler.

Perhaps one of the problems is 8 different Tradeskills for one hell of a lot of characters. Either more tradeskills or specialisations in tradeskills would help relieve the problem.

I think that'd be quite good actually. You can have different cuisines for different cooks, specialised herbalists for different environment, say forest herblore and grassland herblore, leather-and-woodworkers and metalsmiths in forging, gemstone-jewellers and metal-jewellers... I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.

It's not likely though, so maybe the cartels could just buy up ALL the commodities and sell them at higher rates so people have to charge a set price to make profits. But that is unlikely too.

Ah well. I tried.

Barter does shift the problem but it does not make it go away. If the things you make are not wanted by the people who sell the things you need, it's no help at all.