In the past week I've seen multiple huge items go up for sale like the 1150 mask, Markos' yew gate house, Halloween mask dye, etc. which makes me ask myself.. what are you guys saving up for? Is there some epic patch content coming that only the in-crowd knows about or what? I wouldn't expect any one of these items to go up for sale, not to mention multiple! So what's up?
Baine is right. Something smells fishy here (and it's not just the moat every ppl want in their castles/forts).
The house deco contest. Pretty sure that's why Lutz and Les sold their items; to buy more stuff to pimp out their homes with. I don't do the house deco deal. In my case, I always intended on selling the Halloween dye for a profit sometime down the road from the purchase. It's been about ~6 months, so the time seemed right.
Also, I think that TnT has single-handedly made the shard richer. After the Vella Harrowerfests, everyone has a lot of cash and I've seen sale prices reach heights that I never envisioned. Rather than inside knowledge, I think people realize that they can get a lot of value out of their items right now.
120 million gold worth of platinum added to the shard in one week: http://www.uorenaissance.com/itemgraph/EED/PlatinumCoin/single
I think the bigger issue was the red 33 deer mask that went for sale and made people realize that multiple people would pay 10M+ for that stuff. That, and since Christmas there has been a nonstop barrage of rare items being dropped in events. Christmas was insane, the usual nice stuff at valentine's and st patrick's (plus some new green halberds or something), Easter mask and sandals dropping for the first time, etc. It's also important to remember that a lot of this is just rich dudes moving piles of money around with each other. Some guy buys a mask for 10M and then sells one of their own for 10M, is really isolated from the broader economy IMO.
Honestly, letting go of the yew gate villa is something I've been contemplating since I aqcuired the marble patio behind yew bank. Really is just a coincidence with a lot of other high dollar items selling. I have no "insider" information about anything coming in the future.... Didn't you guys hear? Fully customizable housing is going to be implemented in a couple of weeks! We need cash for the trammel habits!
A lot of it is just "lemme cash out this old crap for things I might use", I'd wager. Masks look nice but ethereals and runebooks are more useful
Nothing is in the pipe that would be related to any trade forum threads. Even so the staff (in this situation me) would not share information on upcoming items with anyone until they are announced publicly. We also rarely re-use hues/items when we can help it so anything sold most likely will not be seen again. For instance the 1st year anniversary tribal mask, no more of those will ever be added to the world. I think a few players were accurate in their assessment as seeing one player sell an item for a high gold amount, it can encourage others to evaluate their items to be put up for sale.