I checked how many people were selling loompoints against how many people were buying.
15 people had offers to buy a loompoint.
4 people had offers to sell a loompoint.
3 out of the 4 people selling were also buying loompoints for cheap.
So we have a lot of demand and 1 pristine loompoint entering the market via a sell offer. Prices are guaranteed to hike up until more people sell. Though the people with a lot of points might not want to sell their caches of loompoints for gold, with gold going rapidly down in real value.
Some factors for the gold going down in real value are:
- Upkeep not being a problem.
Light-to-medium armor agi builds are the favored playstyle by the current patch. Horse prices were halved too.
- A big increase in gold gain per time played.
Both DTV and battle are gold mines.
- Gold sinks are ineffective.
People trade with loompoints instead of gold to go around the tax. They don't play the lottery anymore. Free respecs took out the fight of training lessons auctions. The only sink still doing good is custom titles, with prices going up to 1 mil.
- Strat is dead.
No quick retirements with strat xp.
- The market is dying.
Gold is only useful if you can do something with it. With very few trades in the market, the potential of gold to actually do something goes down accordingly.
In my opinion, booths are in part guilty in killing the market as it allows a few privileged actors with enough capital to set prices as they wish. And we've had two actors buying up all the booths for some months now. And they aren't selling any of their loompoints, but they are too using them as a currency to buy up +3 items instead, with 2 LP + gold trades, almost exclusively. I guess they also think that gold will only reduce in real value in the future.
visitors can't see pics , please
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loginWhen this newest booth auction ends, I'm fairly certain no new booth user enters the fray to compete with prices. Again.
By the way, this was booth situation at the time of that screenshot, in case anyone wants to see if my prediction holds.
visitors can't see pics , please
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loginTL;DR Gold is just plain worth less and less.There are some things that could be done to remedy this situation:
- Fix strat so the XP and gold gain balance is restored somewhat. (You only get XP from strat, no gold.)
- Remove booths to even the market and add more competition to prices. (This removes a small goldsink but it would also remove a factor that is depressing the market, a big net positive.)
- Add more vanity gold sinks like the titles.
- Tweak the tax.
- Think up new things to do with gold.
And some more painful options:
- Reduce gold gain.
- Greatly increase upkeep.