I just need someone to possibly fill me in on updates as to any events that happened recently that made the price of codestones inflate up. I kinda lost touch with Neo for a while and am wondering about this.
Do you think that the introduction of cheaper, more powerful weapons have anything to do with the increasing rarity of stones, or isit just me?
For a few weeks at the end of feb and start of march, random events were not happening on neopets. Since they weren't being found on the floor, the supply of codestones shrank. Additionally there were two largish 2p tournaments (NCW and munsterpoos) run at the start of March, so that likely caused a small increase in demand.
That may account for the recent increase, but it doesn't account for the prices not falling after random events were fixed and as the tournaments conclude, that has to be chalked up to either continued inflation or rampant price speculation.
Codestones are a commodity, the demand for them is always high. When hoarders buy thousands of them and keep the price at around 5000, even when more codestones enter the market people have to sell them around that price or they lose a profit. Codestones have inflated in price every war and never settle back down to lows before the war. For example before the bfm war I believe codestones sold for around 1,500 np. Afteward they went for around 3,500. After the next war they rose in price to 4,000. The war after that 5,000. And it's settled at that somewhat but still rising slightly.
When I compare the current market to what it was three years ago, I don't see much of a difference in the weapons region. Of course, I wasn't around for the last three years, so I may be completely off during this entire post.
The number of icons for a price range has changed, but other then that the same philosophy used to price weapons seems to be intact. The per icon price jumps up more and more rapidly as the average number of icons on the weapon increases, blah blah blah.
A note on codestones, however. The "powerplayers" often tower a lot of their weapons. You know the people. They're sporting SoS, PCC, GShield, GBomb, PCH, and ECA on their 125 boost pet. They refrain from training until they have this godly set, and then blaze through the schools.
Combine the fact these guys are eating up a crapload of codestones in a short amount of time with the fact that codestones are expendible and always in high demand and you have a recipe for consistent and constant inflation.
Of course, everybody seems to hit the schools hard from time to time and train like there's no tomorrow, but they don't do it like those guys. Outside of the eight hours they sleep a night their pet probably doesn't stay on a completed course for more then thirty seconds.
These people can also afford the high end weapons, taking them out of the "under ten million" market. Those of us who don't yet have an SoS probably don't have the capacity to drop the NP needed on weapons to make their price rise. Thus the basic rules of supply and demand kick in.
Also, dare I say, the BD group of people on Neo seems to have tailed off a good bit over the last three years. IDB isn't hopping like it used to, BD items tend to generally move slower, and there just basically doesn't seem to be as many people active in the lower to intermediate BD levels. I suspect dealing with 85 boost pets with 50+ million in equipment probably deflects a lot of people away from it. If people just trained their pets normally (damn tanks) and bought good weapons without being completely obsessive it's be a lot funner.
Strategy goes out the window when I'm fighting another 125 boost pet with a weapon set that costs fifteen times the NP it took to train their stats. I only paid three and a half times my training cost for my set (closer to five now with the inflation of certain items) and I even think that's a little bit too much.
There will be always be high-end battlers though, those numbers will always grow. Once you hit that play level and have that much time and effort invested you're far less likely to quit.
I think part of the decline in the battler portion of Neopets relates to the lack of a real, traditional war. There have been plots (plots are for dead people and dead sites IMO), that have had battles as PART of the plot, but not a traditional war since HATIC, and that's an eternity in a short shelf-life entity like a site. Also I think Neopets itself may well have peaked, and there are fewer new people to whom it's new and exciting as its been around long enough that many people have already been exposed to it at one time or another, even if they're not active now. I also think with the creation of the "premium player" and the super shop wiz and such, the game is far less appealing to start in for someone who doesn't want to "pay to play".