Netherweave is dead! Long live netherweave!
After the success and attention that yesterday’s post brought, I am encouraged to keep posting. In fact, Markco dedicated a whole post to telling me and all other readers, in so many words, to keep writing. (Thanks for the feedback and encouragement Markco. It is very good advice.)
With that said, there is a specific market that simultaneously manages to fascinate me, frustrate me, and leave me totally confused. The market, of course, is the market for Netherweave Cloth. I am confused because netherweave market was supposed to die. It was one of the first things I predicted here. Before me, Zekta predicted it here. I’m sure I cribbed the idea from Gevlon, who wrote a post in August 2009. (A post that I now can’t find, but if I could, I’d link to it. My google-fu is weak today.) Zekta, in the comments to my first post, even backed up the logic when questioned by Dacheng. Rather than restate, allow me to just put their own words here.
Dacheng: “‘Netherweave is drying up because everyone in the Outland is flying’”, said BigJimm. I’m afraid I don’t see much evidence of this. There’s just no shortage of netherweave on my server, and the prices reported on http://www.wowecon.com don’t show any sign of inflation. Bigjimm also says “I mean, you all know that netherweave cloth is going to skyrocket, right?” Well, I would think that the future tense is wrong here. Either Netherweave cloth already has skyrocketed, or it isn’t going to. This is not news. On my server, this isn’t even history!”
Zekta: “The reason we(I) predict a short supply on August is that.: People is flying instead of walking on outland, the major supply of the Nether weave is not from farmer (You’ll make far more gold by farming other thing than Nether weave cloth), but from Leveling player.”
So, there’s the logic. It seemed totally sound at the time, and even now seems solid in retrospect: people leveling their alts will be able to fly, and therefore won’t kill as many mobs that drop cloth. Unfortunately for my theory, the reports of netherweave’s death were greatly exaggerated. Here is some of my data for netherweave cloth:
And here is what it looks like on the bag market:
This is from today. I buy about 3-30 stacks of netherweave a day. I sell 6-25 bags a day. There’s a lot of fluctuation in this market in terms of volume, and I KILL it on the weekend. But… why?!?!?!?!
Why?!
WHY does this still work?!
This strategy has been beaten to death. It’s the first one that I heard of when I was a broke AH n00b. I clean up in this market and I don’t even have a tailor- a friend of mine makes bags for me in the morning when she’s drinking coffee. I send her 25g every time I have her make me bags (12-50 bags at a time, generally), but she’d do it for free if I needed her to. I also send her other things as thanks: and extra 200g here, the occasional toad, etc.
Yes, I understand that netherweave is a commodity. We’re not talking about a rare enchant mat that’s kept artificially high by a few niche AH marketers (yeah, I’m looking at you Euripides*). Anyone can go get netherweave, but who’s doing it? Where is the cloth coming from? Who is supplying it? And why are they selling it at 5g/stack in stead of making into bags and selling it for 9g-12g/stack (minus the 50s cost for Rune Thread, of course). Are people farming it? Are that many people leveling? Is it just people doing TBC content (ie: Isle Dailies, old heroics, etc.) for achievements? Is it just Adam Smith’s invisible hand, working the price down to the norm that the market remembers? I have no idea.
This market isn’t one that I care about- it’s a relatively small volume of money, and I’m personally more interested in Jewelcrafting. But I can’t believe that this still works. The predicted spikes in netherweave just never happened. Dacheng was right, and again, I was wrong. I would love it if anyone could explain why.
*And as a final note, I’d like to say that I was also particularly gratified personally to see that Euripides took the time to comment in the JMTC post. He, along with Markco and Faeghleis, makes up one third of the trio at the excellent Call to Aution podcast. He also writes Wow.com’s “Goldcapped” article and hosts the Hunting Party Podcast. I have gushed about Markco already, but Euripides is equally skilled, thoughtful, and entertaining. I consistently enjoy his work, to the extent that I, a warrior tank, actually started listening to the Hunting Party Podcast (mostly just to laugh at you silly hunters and your adorable ability to train warm fuzzies and inability to stay alive, but I digress…). I think the word he used in his comment, “tenacity,” is particularly appropriate. We’re not talking Wintergrasp tenacity, we’re talking about tenacity to keep posting after making a public gaffe. Tenacity is the best single word that I can think of to describe the success of JMTC and it’s related other content, and I’m flattered that Euripides too the time to type it out.
GL! /bow
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 5:48 amand is filed under Wow Econ Research Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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March 11th, 2010 at 9:44 am
I expect the death come sooner, and surprised it hadn’t been replaced by Frostweave Bags yet.
Good review post
I Still believe the price of outland did raised, Maybe, people are still needy on the bags.
(And may be relatively few people are preying on the market in your server)
The selling price of Netherweave Bag will be like
[Price of Netherweave] + [Thread Cost] + [Profit Margin] (Which determined by how heat the Competition are)
May be I’ll need some refinement on the prediction on Netherweave Bag’s death, when it’s price is comparable to the Frostweave bag (Which is keep up with the vendor price of Frostweave and Inf. Dust, since we had too many Frostweave now right?)
Here’s another post on the subject on Oct
http://phase3profit.net/2009/10/netherweave-bag-shatter/
Ps.
Nice Post Jimm, really appreciate it
Ps.2
And yeah, I’ve got a bad habit that used the word “We” when I mean “I”. As in the quote “The reason we(I) ” . Bad business speech habit…
March 12th, 2010 at 12:22 am
“We” is just fine with me. You can speak for me anytime- you’re usually right about this sort of stuff, and I’m not, so please speak for me!
March 11th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Answers to your questions,
Where is the NW cloth coming from. everyone like to dungeon, everytime i am in a BC dungeon i get approx 2-3 stacks of NW… say i do 50 dungeons in my 10 level time in outland thats a lot of cloth…
Why can i still sell NW bags???
1 stack of NW is 1xbag at 16 slots. Next best bag is your FW bag and thats at about 50g on most servers… people leveling in the first 60 levels (or those not with a lot of money) see the value in 12g = 16 slot, 50g = 20 slot…
March 11th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Just a thought… maybe all this netherweave is coming from all the people who are no longer leveling through quests, but through dungeons via the LFG tool. When I leveled my rogue to 68 so I could get the alchemy transmute mastery, that’s how I leveled, and it seemed to both level me quickly and provide me with plenty of netherweave cloth from all the humanoid mobs we were killing.
March 12th, 2010 at 12:20 am
Zekta lives! It’s great to see that things have settled down enough in your life that you can think about WoW a little bit! I wonder if you think that the predictions in WoWecon that you put in that post have borne out?
As for the LFD tool… that’s as good a suggestion (certainly the best I’ve seen. It still rings a little hollow with me, but I’m not sure why. I’ll think about it for a while, and if I come up with it, I’ll post/comment about it.
March 12th, 2010 at 4:40 am
Alot of people have shifted to leveling through the instances, the ones filled with humanoids drop a crazy amount of cloth so the market will not die.
March 12th, 2010 at 6:05 am
I’d have to agree with the posters here that the source is almost certainly the lfg tool. That feature has had the biggest single effect I’ve seen on the game since I started playing just a year and a few months ago. Don’t underestimate its effect on large swaths of the wow economy. I think everyone is using lfg so much because (1) it’s more fun than questing and (2) it’s faster to level with it than questing. Enchanting is probably the profession it affects most because of the abundance of mats with all the easy de’ing going on. Also, I would expect many more toons are learning enchanting since everyone loves an enchanter in a dungeon with them. I’d love to see a post on what other effects lfg might be having on the wow economy.
March 12th, 2010 at 6:15 am
Hate to be a me too, but the LFD was my thought as well. The prices on my server have been amazingly low, its like a bunch of people think” now what do I do with all this stuff? ” and just dump it on the AH. Im not complaining about that
as I make bags, but the shortage and high prices ( we did experience that for a while) are gone.
Periluna
March 18th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
On my server, prices for netherweave are dropping. I don’t think it’s mostly coming from questers or dungeon adventurers. It looks like the netherweave is being farmed, and farmed in large quantities. Maybe 50 stacks each from the same handful of sellers with names like “Zyl” or “Qud”. Actually, it’s probably 1 backpack + 4 netherweave bags full of stacks = 80 stacks!
At 2-3g a stack, that’s 160g-240g, which doesn’t seem like a huge profit for the work it entails.
I have a theory, which I have no evidence for: the farmers are botting. The fact that Outland is emptier than ever it has been makes it more attractive to botters, as they are less likely to be found out. That also makes the profit/hour much more acceptable. I might actually try doing a few patrols to see if I can spot any of the farmers at work!
Anyway, I can’t keep up with them. The netherweave is so cheap and plentiful that if I bought all the cheap stuff on any given day, I’d be spending the whole of that day crafting and posting bags, to the exclusion of any actual fun!
March 19th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
@ Dàchéng
They’re probably bank alts buying low, selling high.
March 27th, 2010 at 5:29 am
I didn’t read all the comments above, so please forgive me if I repeat what others have said, but, it is that the demand for netherweave has correlated with the supply. People are no longer making cloth gear except for leveling their craft, they are not wearing it. Less demand = lower prices. Less supply = higher prices. Less demand & less supply = same prices. Thats all there is to it.