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Do you mean those items we can craft with zOMG recipes? The wheel in barton town (and in daily chances at different towns at game) in zOMG gives out crafted exclusive zOMG items. That's why their prices aren't going up but instead drops by a lot

And daily chance + Dumpster Dive have been handing out pretty nice aquarium items to all gaians for free for about 1 and a half month now, so the price of aquarium items have dropped (as long as those items are being given out as prizes)

Welcome back to Gaiaonline Timber Rook smile I am so amazed old MCs have dropped in value by a lot. Great that we can now spend less to buy more cool MCs

It may just be that. For examples, I just went through random items available on the marketplace and set the graph timeline to 1 year out. There are many items, especially those from older years, that have lost 25-50% of their value in the last year alone. You'd think say, CI's from 2007 might be worth more now than a year ago, but I guess that isn't the case.

Pretty much, go through the marketplace, find items between 50000-1000000, set to a year, harvest data, apply a simple moving average of between 15-50 data points and you'll see the downward trend.

There's something else I've noticed too: there's less activity in the marketplace compared to a year ago. Just looking at CIs, there's been a drop of 60% or more in the volume sold at release date. Being the most popular items on Gaia, that's massive. And it's not just the marketplace, but the Exchange as well: the forum moves like a turtle now. There are just less people selling items and less people buying them.

I think what's happening is that there aren't enough new users joining the site. I don't believe it's the only reason for this recession, but it definitely explains it. Gaia's already seen its boom of new users from 2007-2011, and now it's finally dying down. Thanks to Gaia's efforts to combat inflation, without any more new users joining there's just not enough gold being created to keep prices rising.

Just a side note: from what I've seen in the forums and with friends, older users are generally satisfied with their account on this site. Most of them don't really need to quest ambitiously for anything and when they do want something, it's easy for them to get it because they have the gold. And from what I've seen again, newer users are usually more excited about playing the game, earning gold and getting new items for their avatar because they haven't done it before. And that's why it kinda makes sense to me that the market dies without newer users.

@Not_That_Awesome
That's a really good analysis. Probably a good part of what is happening!

This.

For older items to keep rising in price, you need a continual supply of new people who want them, preferably more people than there are items. And Gaia keeps releasing a whole slew of (IMNSHO crappy) items, which keeps the new players' gold busy.

To digress somewhat, this is the same pattern that most hot collectible markets go through - comics, Barbies, Beanie Babies, action figures, to name a few. The market gets hot, with many new collectors clamoring for the "old rare" items, that the prices skyrocket - out of the range of what most people are willing to pay.

Manufacturers then notice how hot the market is, and respond by releasing a cubic blortload of new product to cash in on it (because, you know, they're not making any money off resales of old items). New collectors are able to find these items more easily AND can afford them, so that's where their money goes. So that $900 Chilly Beanie Baby drops in price like a rock.

Unfortunately, by the time it drops enough that it becomes affordable to enough collectors to have a market again, it's too late - usually the craze is over, and people are on to the next hot market. There are some who remain with the hobby, but it's never again like it was.

I was recently pointed at a web comic apparently written by a former action figure scalper: http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com/category/comics/dealers/. (That's the latest one...start from the beginning to, you know, start from the beginning.) The story arc isn't done yet, and it's kind of sad because I know how it's going to end, but the comics to date have done an admirable job of documenting the phenomenon.