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Generally what I've seen from directly buying/selling from free economies (automatically excludes BDO, of course) in games for over a decade now is that price is determined by 3 things:
1. How hard the item being sold is to acquire.
2. How many buyers are trying to get ahold of the item.
3. How much money is in the economy.
For point one: difficulty of acquisition takes into account the combat involved (if any), how expensive your gear has to be for that combat, and the drop rate. The less people capable of getting a rare drop, the less supply and thus the higher value.
For point two: this probably does not need to be explained, for a relevant example you can take a look at the value of diamonds on the AH right now which jumped up about 10x their original value now that G23 wants you to get diamonds for it.
Point three is difficult to illustrate; it's very difficult to observe how much gold is in a game's economy and to observe the influences of it you would have to compare the game with how it was years prior. Basically though, prices do inflate as gold is introduced to the economy (I was nearly pulling my hair out the first time the Math Christmas Dungeon was introduced, frustrated that it would accelerate inflation in the game) but this generally does affect everything regarding the player-run economy of a game.
The higher prices frustrate buyers yes, but can also be overcome by becoming a competent seller yes. That said, this brings about what I consider to be a real issue for the game: The rewards for dungeons, SMs, commerce, etc. are growing relatively smaller compared to the prices in the player economy and leave less options for earning significant amounts of gold.
The last time I'd played WoW (back during Burning Legion pre-expansion events iirc) the prices of the player economy were significantly inflated over what I'd seen before (I made money during that short return the exact same way I'd made it during the Cataclysm expansion, but was still making significantly more gold), but this seemed to be working out fine in WoW because all the new expansions constantly presented gold sinks to the old players and increased gold rewards to help newer/returning players afford things. Mabi doesn't have expansions or updates to significantly influence the player economy and help provide players with a solid source of gold unless you consider shadow crystals a valid example. Instead we get commerce nerfs because making money off the making money life skill is a no-no.
We're starting to see a problem where the people holding the most gold don't really need or want a lot of things in the game anymore, so they're excluded from the "buyer competition" for a lot of items and do not influence those prices or redistribute their accumulated wealth downwards. In turn though, for the things they need or want they can afford to pay significantly more on them and drive the prices up significantly out of reach of others. People trying to make money generally have to resort to dealing in "lower economy" items while the people with a lot of money play around in the "higher economy".
In short I'm not convinced inflation is the real problem here because literally every healthy economy should experience inflation. I think the real problem is that Nexon's afraid to give us a good way to directly make gold outside of participating in the player economy, which leads to less influx of gold into the aforementioned "lower economy" to distribute between the sellers as inflation increases. The lash out against Nexon handing gold out as part of an event is justifiable though, as it raises the question of: "Gee, if you're so happy to hand all this gold out to us, why do you have to be stingy for the gold we actually have to work for?"
Edit: Edited to better organize my thoughts on this.
I also want to note after watching some AH behaviour this morning that used skillbooks posted at prices reasonable for a "collector" to purchase at ends up just permitting a scam seller to buy a cheap used skillbook to repost at a high price. Where normally they would have some difficulty in getting those used skillbooks, these "collector priced" used skillbooks give them a steady stream to fuel their scam postings.
If you use the Steam launcher for the game, it cannot connect to the server. The only workaround for this would be to download and install the normal version of the game instead.
Yeah I'm aware of that workaround, thank you. I'm hoping they see this post and fix the real problem though.
My post was for the benefit of the GMs who might come investigate, and other players who come here looking for a workaround.