To answer your first question, I believe it was sometime in 2008 but I couldn't get more specific than that. Couldn't find the answer after 5 min of searching on Google lol. I'm afraid I can't answer the other questions either, but I will refer you back to the original article: http://rushprnews.com/2012/07/11/new...nomy-by-mmobux
The authors of the article might be able to respond with more specificity. As the article states, there's been a steady 14% drop in the prices of RMT'd currency in that game since 2007, which amounts to over 50% drop in value in 5 years on average. As the graph shows, there are random fluctuations so the actual impact ranges from 40-75%. Amusingly, there seems to be a "Chinese New Year's" price hike as all the RMT go on vacation (see 2nd graph in the article).
The paper was published fairly recently (July 2012), but their data only goes to October 2011, so it's likely that there is some kind of delay involved in processing the data.
