I love the rhetorical gymnastics you guys keep doing to try and make a guy selling a purple fishsteak to some crazy rares collector sound somehow sinister. I mean it's seriously impressive, in a bizarre sort of way. You should be in politics. I mean just look at the way you use scary words to make mundane things sound evil.You are aware there are groups of people who attempt to participate in every EM event, right? At least one of these groups of people take the items they get, sell them at really high prices, and then turn that gold into cash. So you may be one of the majority of people who don't care as much, but there are people abusing EM events so that they can monopolize the economy in UO.
Some guy goes to lots and lots of EM events? That doesn't sound scary enough, so suddenly he's "abusing" them! By attending them!
At least one person or group among many is getting an item at each EM event that features one? That doesn't sound scary at all, so now they're "monopolizing" the economy! Even though multiple competing groups are like the exact opposite of a monopoly!
Some dude sold a recolored doohickey with no actual functional use to some crazy collector for some arbitrarily large amount of gold? Well that sounds like a zero-sum player-to-player transaction that nobody else should have any possible reason to care about, but hey let's throw "high prices" in there, as if the cost of purple fishsteaks really means squat to the world one way or another!
And while we're at it, let's randomly imply that they're then selling their gold for cash money! Scandalous!
If you had just taken that one extra step and implied that people were using their nefarious EM item cash to buy drugs or fund terrorism, this would have been a truly perfect post. Instead it's merely brilliant and awesome. I am seriously stopping in mid-post to go up and click like on yours. You earned it.
But seriously, I pretty much AM the guy who goes to every EM event and I've gotten like two items in a year for doing it. I have friends who do the same who've gotten less. This is nothing but the local PVP Guys mad that someone, somewhere, is making money without coming into their little Felucca playpen to do it.
Well your playpen smells like pee, sir.
Oh yeah, while I'm at it, counter-argument: EM event items being sold for large amounts are good for the economy. They encourage ultra-zillionaires sitting on huge dusty piles of gold to spread that gold around the economy buying up rare items. This puts gold into the hands of random people who aren't all zillionaires. These people will then run out and spend their newfound fortune on gear, and powerscrolls, and houses, and all the other things that make the UO economy go around.