Zibba
It's too soon to call it the Virtual Crash of '05, but new virtual economy site Game Money Price Research has an alarming set of charts up tracking the dive of almost all major MMORPG currencies against the U.S. dollar in the first half of this year. It may be made of pixels, but the sky certainly looks like it's falling.
While GMPR's methodology might be questionable, it seems there's a real trend being tracked here. What to ascribe it to is another question.
In plain numbers (calculated by the Walkering research staff, based on GMPR's charts), the first half of the year looks like this (compared to approximate age of world, in months):
Eq2 gold: down 89.58 % --23 months
Wow gold: down 83.33 % -- 8
Lineage 2 adena: down 64.91 % -- 36
Ffxi gil: down 52.94 % -- 40
Eve isk: down 51.51 % -- 28
Anarchy online credit: down 51.28 % -- 50
Daoc plat: down 50.00 % -- 48
Swg credit: down 38.09 % --26
UO gold: down 10.59 % -- 72
Second Life: down 4.19 % --28
Everquest Plat: down 3.0% -- 78
CoH Influence: up 9.0 % -- 15
The depreciation tracked by GMPR cuts across all ages of worlds and all population levels. With the exception of a few outliers, there does seem to be a slight correlation between age of world and fall in currency (i.e., most younger worlds have seen a bigger fall over the last six months than most older ones have), but I'm not handy enough with Excel to demonstrate that here. In any case, the two oldest worlds have the lowest recent depreciation, and two of the three youngest worlds have the highest.
More at the following link...