In response to someone...you can still call it a donation even if you are being rewarded for it. It's just like "Donating Plasma" at a BioLife center. They pay you for your time, but it's still considered a donation. The payment, as someone else stated, is an incentive.
I completely agree with the existence of EDs. It allows people who don't have insane amounts of time to devote to the game to stay on-par with other players. Some of us have sixteen hours a day to sit in Doom leveling a weapon, but most of us have lives outside of the game which require our more immediate attention, and I think EDs are a great way to keep that balance in check. Beekeeping is definitely out for people who can't devote a significant amount of time to it, since the time at which beehives refresh has that floating effect that we never really discovered the cause of. For the record, beekeeping was one of the reasons I took off for six months from UOEX...I simply couldn't justify the amount of focus it was taking to keep those hives up. Waking up at 6am to feed my bees is not my idea of fun.
Personally I think there are a great many issues that affect prices, but the simple fact is that there is too much gold floating around. And since gold is free to generate, I don't see that problem solving itself. When people have lots of money, and want things badly, they will agree to much more ridiculous prices, which in the mind of the person charging that price validates the price they are charging. If the person publicizes their price well enough, it can affect the prices of the entire server. When I got back from vacation EDs were still 35-40k, but then people started advertising in global about being willing to pay 45k, 50k, etc. And once everyone on the shard saw those messages, they adjusted their prices accordingly. And don't think there aren't people on the shard who know this and use it to their advantage. Make something scarce, publicly post a higher price for it, and wait for the ripple effect. I don't know who was responsible for the changes to GoCs (but I have a pretty good idea), but whoever it was knew they could exploit the system and made a ton of money doing it, and then ruined it for everyone else. I was never really interested in doing the Mage Quest until recently, and now it will take me twenty times as long to get the pieces as it did people who have already done it. If this wasn't a brilliant piece of economy engineering, I don't know what is.
So...for now I guess the answer is just keep on working.
