Why are your surprised item prices are rising?

[tommydgun]

as an economics major i can tell you that you are describing the market forces at play completely wrong. you are pretending there are only demand shifts, but there was also a supply shift as the total items in the server essentially also doubled with the merge aka "supply shift" which would at the same time as your "demand shifts" move prices down. you could try to argue that prices would rise in the future because the inflow of items is now reduced by half because there are half the spawns that two servers would produce, but this would also be a restriction on incoming platinum, which again would reduce buying power and price. so really, the net difference is ambiguous with both demand and supply shifts occurring simultaneously, but really prices probably shouldn't have changed.