The psychology behind what someone is willing to pay is very interesting. There is no one formula for judging prices except to take multiple possible reasons into consideration:
1. Quality/Quantity
2. The "must have" buyers. These are usually very wealthy players that don't want to play the auction or the waiting game and buys what they like as soon as it comes up for sale by offering over what it's worth. There are a dozen or so players who basically obtain 60-80% of all the rares each week. While some of them are strictly in it for the sale aspect and some of them collect and sell so you will almost always see new items for sale as soon as the event ends for that shard each week. It is because of that reason, these sellers basically dictates the initial pricing because the "must-have" crowds will continue to over pay for the item. I myself falls into the overpay category from time to time
(I know, its an addiction).
3. Shard pride. Larger shards with more collectors will compete more for items coming from their own shards which will in itself drive up the price. However, the larger the shard the drop quantity goes up as well. Study the event item list I created and you'll begin to see a pattern.
4. Timing, as I stated earlier, the "initial-hype" of the item usually is the result of the "must-have" crowd bidding. Prices usualy dips a bit then finds a steady level and is kept at that.
5. Overall inflation, as price of gold keeps dropping, naturally price of items keep rising. But don't let this fool you because this is a tactic practiced commonly by sellers to jack up the price while the natural inflation of the UO economy is not as fast as you may think.
So what is the true worth of this item? I always tell people whatever the highest that someone is willing to pay at any given time.
