Regarding the value of accounts, an interesting thing occurred today.
4 hours before the weekly lottery, doeboy put his 11-going-on-12 account, and a second level 8 account, up for auction, or attempted to. At first he said he would take the best offer no matter how low, and the auction would end at the weekly drawing. But a few minutes later he said that if the best offer wasn't high enough, he would wait till the monthly drawing, as he has 500 (or so) tickets. (Which suggests to me that he is busted, was waiting for the weekly lottery, and ready to bail)
He listed the assets.... two 100 btm ribbons, one 300 ribbon, access to Toa for both accounts, some unremembered value of DT, and I think that that was it, along with the 500 tickets.
So what is the value of the account really?
Well, there is nothing solid here, but it seems reasonable to value the ribbons at 500 btm - the 5% of the supposed house take on future ribbons wagers, or 475 btm.
(We don't know just how much the house takes with those, really. You win something when you grab one, but it has never been much more than the bet in my experience, so you have to survive two tries just to get your money back. But on every bet the house takes 50%, if I understand it rightly)
But we might reasonably say 475 btm.
as for the tickets, they are also questionable, but you could say that, based on last month's drawing having nearly 4000 tickets, his ticket package is worth 1/8 BTC or 125 btm.
The value of going to Toa seems to be entirely an intangible asset. I have never heard of Toa having anything that the other islands don't, so the only thing about going to Tao is that others can't. Which in reality is no value at all.
The level 8 account, if you have an 11, is no value at all except for what you might be able to sell it for, and as we see, account sales are pretty flat (I think LucyLuck recently sold hers, no idea for how much.)
So it seems like a reasonable value would be 600 btm if you wanted to risk the tickets. A reasonable auction bid (which itself is a gamble), would be 400 btm.
doeboy, I am sure, would think much differently. He went through a lot of BTC to get to that level. But what does not come with the account is the fun (and, more, the disappointment) he had going through those 11 levels.
A level 8 account is nice because you can go to Tiki and party with friends and not too many alts will show up. And it's the best bar in the game. But I have never heard of any advantage to being at levels beyond that. They can throw tourneys, but, you can get your mentor to do that for you if you care too.
Just some thoughts.
Totally separately, I wonder why so much of Tiki is undeveloped?
Also, X seems to be a total failure. You never see people hanging out there at the bar, which is pretty lame itself. They just go there to look for herbs. Same, really, at Xinren, except for the voting booth and the cows. Much of Xinren was never developed as well. It used to have a good bar I am told, but for some reason Di wanted to drive people to the 'governed' islands.
I get the impression that what ever else it may be, DT is an ongoing sociological experiment.
~All for tonight!
An interesting writeup, but I think one thing you're not really accounting for is the level of the buyer. You properly point out that if you have a level 11 account, then a level 8 account isn't really getting you anything you don't already have. But the reverse is true for someone bidding on the package. If you're a level 2 and you don't even collect DT yet then, if you're unlucky, you might lose 200-400BTM just trying to get to level 3 to get into the DT scheme. However, as you say, if you already have a high-level account, then this isn't really a factor. So, what i'd add to your analysis is that the delta between the level of a bidder and the level of the account to be sold has to be a factor in the value of the account.