The current imbalance market of COTO & IGG

It's pretty easy answer. You are better off buying gold. Assuming you bought 115 COTO for $100 during the Telethon, then turn around selling them for 4,500 each. You pocket the rest and use 3500 to pay property taxes. 4,500 gold x 115 COTO = 517,500 gold. Instead your $100 could have bought you 666,700 gold through other Players.

 

The property tax was never expected to be a limiter of the IGG value of COTOs. That was a scenario I remember being considered as possible back around R32 or so. It just means that if you buy COTOs from the store, it's better to sell them to other players than to use them for rent. I've been expecting all along that IGG could inflate just from normal economic activity, which would cause the COTO to be worth more of them.

IGG <-> RMT value is not fixed by anything, and will depend on how much IGG is available from players. COTO <-> RMT value is more or less fixed, with a little variation from the bulk purchase discounts. COTO <-> IGG will probably eventually more or less follow the IGG <-> RMT exchange rate.

I think that getting most of the store items into in-game vendors was what caused it to flip so fast, but it was going to end up there eventually. They seem to have ended up with a nice balance between three currencies, one play money, one real, and one halfway in between.

The game literally releases a pre-determined number of them every hour, at a rate chosen and updated by the devs. I think Chris basically looks at what they are being sold for on vendors to know when they can crank up the drop rate. Of course the drops are evenly spread among seven (?) types, and you can (somehow, I haven't learned exactly how yet) trade two to get the kind you want.

 

This thread is predicated on a few things.

1) That players will not buy COTOs from other players (you list RMT for gold or Direct from Port for COTOs)
2) Gold Price for RMT is static. It is not. (100k gold once went over 100$, fell slowly to 60, 50, 40, Stayed at 30$ for awhile, droppe as far as 10$ and then slowly back to 15$.)
3) That nobody is buying from Portalarium. They are! Portalarium is very much aware of their revenues. They increased the COTO price recently. This implies they do not feel that price is too high for people to purchase COTOs.
4) You are suggesting Portalarium undercut the players as one option. This is a losing battle, players will always sell below the store simply because they cannot sell above the store cost. Portalarium merely needs to create a demand for COTOs, this uses up COTOs in the supply and people buy more. The demand was created when they put the add-on store in-game. The COTOs come from somewhere. That somewhere is Portalarium.


PS> You stated that COTOs could not go above 6k. This is not true. A 6k gold cost for a COTO is the result of the 2nd hand costs for COTOs and 2nd hand costs for gold. ie. If the second-hand COTO market was, say, 75 cents and the IGG cost of a COTO is 6k then you have .75USD=6000 Gold. ie. 12.5$/100k. I know that can happen, because gold has traded below that before.