Curse

Talon one · Jan 10, 2009, 12:27 PM // 12:27

not all players use their zkeys as currency or to buy items. and if they did, the zkey price would go down.
my xunlai accounts go straight to the zchest and my ztitle, with very little influence on the economy

monthly zaishen keys may cause some temporary inflation to high value items such as rare skins or minipets, but on the other hand, each zkey used may spawn a rare item which will bring prices down again.

Daenara · Jan 10, 2009, 01:24 PM // 13:24

I'm sure there are more ectos floating around in the economy then zkeys, and ectos are maintaining a stable price (after the uw fiasco was fixed). I don't see them dropping in price unless something changes.

HawkofStorms · Jan 10, 2009, 05:00 PM // 17:00

But those 20 pennies for 5 nickels anaylsis only works if those nickels have a value. The fact is, if z-keys become used as currency too much and there becomes an oversupply of them in the economy (instead of them just being used instantly on the chest) then the price will go down (which was the original point of this thread).

But whatever. Clearly I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. This debate has been occuring only multiple threads over the past year, and the generally concenus is my view. So, I'm done.

Martin Alvito · Jan 10, 2009, 06:23 PM // 18:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by HawkofStorms

But those 20 pennies for 5 nickels anaylsis only works if those nickels have a value. The fact is, if z-keys become used as currency too much and there becomes an oversupply of them in the economy (instead of them just being used instantly on the chest) then the price will go down (which was the original point of this thread).

/facepalm

Look, what matters to market prices is the supply of the good on the MARKET relative to demand, and not the total supply in existence. If the ZKeys sit there in players' storages gathering dust, it has no effect on the price one way or the other. If fewer ZKeys are available on the secondary market than people want, the price goes up. The reverse happens if there are too many on the market. Since lots of people try to buy low and sell high, there's usually significant support for the prices of items like ZKeys .

However, once the price starts to adjust downward we tend to have crashes in things like ectos and ZKeys. If there are lots of an item in players' storages, rational expectation updating after a decline in price tends to lead to a flood of the item in the market (sell now before everyone else sells), resulting in further price declines.

Upshot: there are lots of forces that tend to produce equilibrium and stability in the markets for currency items, but once those forces are overwhelmed you usually see BIG moves up or down.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are a LOT more ZKeys kicking around since Wintersday than there used to be, but the price hasn't gone down much because people are using them as trade fodder or sitting on them waiting for a hot monthly tonic, rather than reselling them for cash on the secondary market. If the market price cracks, it will probably crack hard, but that scenario would likely require some unambiguous signal of a decrease in the value of ZKeys (such as a bad tonic in April) to cause that to happen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by HawkofStorms

But whatever. Clearly I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. This debate has been occuring only multiple threads over the past year, and the generally concenus is my view. So, I'm done.

This is a hand wave without evidence. Care to link your citations so we can evaluate the quality of this argument? Otherwise, this statement can and should be dismissed out of hand.

cthulhu reborn · Jan 11, 2009, 10:43 AM // 10:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by HawkofStorms

Another point to reemphize. It doesn't matter how much money YOU have, but the system as a whole. Even if you've gotten fithly rich off of selling z-keys, by definition, someone else (the guy buying from you) has gotten just as poor as you are rich. And if that guy who bought from you gets a super rare item, then the guy who buys that item from HIM becomes equally poor. There is no new money introduced. There is no inflation.

Well, when I use z-keys on the zaishen chest I get a lot of crap golds that I sell to the merchant. That generates money in game does it not? Now, normally when you do missions or farm you put time in for your drops. For the tournament rewards you do nothing of the sort. It takes 2 mins to do your predictions and you get keys. If you get 10 keys and you get 4 crap golds that you sell to the merchant for say 1k and 120000 people do that each month then you insert over a 100 million gold into the economy that came out of nowhere pretty much. If you sell the keys, then someone else gets the crap golds and will sell them to the merchant. In any case that sounds like inflation to me.