Why is it so hard to find people selling hides?!

[Laz]

Ive been looking through forums and IRC to buy hides to work on my tailoring, and I havent found anyone selling any. Is there something I dont know? Is it still possible to get tanner NPCs up to 999 hides a trip? I thought the change to cut down vendor supply applied to all vendors.

There has to be something Im missing!

[mrbojangles]

1) It is possible to buy vendors up to 999, but this was made much more difficult following a recent patch. So there's a disconnect between what people can charge to actually make it worth their while (a lot more than +1gp/hide profit imo) and what people are willing to pay. The patch didn't hit reg-buyers as hard, because usually there's a good chance someone will buy-out the reg vendor if you accidentally miss a cycle, the chances of that happening with hides is much lower, so you really have to hit every vendor ever cycle or the task becomes impossible.

2) People now know that harvesting hides from animals is not the most efficient way of making making money as a noob, so they don't.