from love to pain
— Gaia should promise to never release any of the Flynn's Booty items or Flynn's chest again.
To me this is the single most important thing that needs to happen. As long as we have gold generators for sale for real life money, inflation will increase no matter how many gold sinks we have. It will ruin gaia for the people who enjoy using the marketplace, collecting items and decorating their avatars.
All the other things, specifically making the cash shop items more reasonably priced actually benefits gaia as much as the users. In economics theres this thing called price elasticity of demand (I'm actually taking a econ class right now, and I'm supposed to be studying, thats why the more proper terms) and basically this is how much the amount people buy is effected by the price of the good in question. Now, I've never actually looked at Gaia's sales data, and even if I did I don't know that I could make any sense of it but I am actually doing well in this class, so I can tell you that Gaia's products are probably pretty elastic, that is the amount people buy is strongly influenced by the price of the items. This means that up to a certain point gaia can actually make more money by dropping prices.
This is how. Say that a highly desirable item, like say backwings, is on sale in the cash shop for, say 500 in rl cash, which is far more than most people are willing to pay for it, that means that although demand for the item is very high, few people actually buy (out of the people who want the item). So say that at a price of $500 1000 backwings are sold. That means they made $500,000 from the sale, which is fairly good, considering that there is no additional cost to Gaia from having more copies of Backwings on the site. Now if backwings are elastic, which they should be unless my econ teacher has mislead me, then if gaia dropped prices from 500 to say, 400 then they would have sold 1500 backwings which would net them $600,000. Hence they make more money from lowering the price. This is literally a win-win. They get more money, we (individually) spend less money. Theoretically they could lower the price by a lot more than 100 dollars and still make far more profit. There is a point where they stop making more money by lowering the price, but that depends on how elastic the good is (there is a formula to figure it out, if I remember correctly it involves differentials and is way above my understanding) and what exactly the sales data is, how high the demand is ect.
I don't want anyone to misunderstand me so I want to be clear that my point is not that they should re-release backwings in the cash shop for a lower price, that was just a convenient example, but rather that it makes sense for them to lower prices
in general so more people can participate in sales. I don't know what the magic price that nets gaia the most profit is, but I don't think that high prices like the ones we've been seeing recently that exclude such a large percentage of Gaians are it.