I agree that the lottery has pooched things up somthin' fierce. However things will eventually return back to relatively normal. Once the novelty wears off, and the paypal'ers run out of real money (and/or reach the quotas) things will shift back down. People will remember the need for db's outside of the lottery and the prices will go back down. People will run low on ingame cash and stop buying the few db's that come around and that will drop the price. It may take a few weeks or a couple months, but it will.
On my server (Dreams:Faith) the average db price was 6.5kk before the lottery. Anything that I have put up for sale on my merch for cp's was at a 1cp:30k exchange rate, and I won't up that. (6.5kk/215=~30k) If more people were to follow suit it would restablize the economy much faster. It'll settle down again, but it's gonna take some time.
At least TQ did *one* thing right with this : they waited until well after the Christmas paypal rush to release the lottery. Had they done so before Xmas... well, things would be alot worse. At least at present people already used many of the paypal db's and were past their quota for the month. I'm not defending TQ, as it may have been something they didn't intend or want to do, but for us it's a tiny bit of fortune if we intend to stay in this game.
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