I stopped playing actively because there was no party hats, essentially. That may seem shallow, but you can't undervalue the significance of aesthetics and wearable prestige. Grinding is good and fun, but, without skill capes, high scores, or rare items, the levels and gainz ring a little hollow for me.
Let's think short-term a little bit, a lot of fun for a month is better than stagnation and mediocrity for another year.
I agree with that, we need to figure out a way to introduce these items ingame without significantly altering the economy.
That isn't going to happen, remember the chaos this Easter with the eggs? Everyone turned against each other and camped locations specifically so they could get more and make more money. Any attempt to introduce party hats with this method of bringing into the game will fail badly.
The only thing I can possibly imagine being a good idea, would be to make party hats so ridiculously rare that only the most loyal players can get them.
My suggestions?
Make party hats available to claim in game, after having voted 250 times on RuneLocus for RuneRebels.
Considering you can vote twice a day for RuneLocus, 250 x 12 / 24 = 125
It'd take 125 days for anyone to ever get a party hat, roughly 3 months of voting twice a day, thus dramatically increasing the amount of publicity on RuneLocus for the game, especially if people flock and stick to it. You can make it an unreadable cosmetic also, so the phat is un-tradable, at least until the game kicks off and it won't kill the economy by making them tradable.
With the votes for the server increasing popularity, as well as players motivated towards getting this extremely rare item, it'd be beneficial, and most players won't even sell their first phat due to the accomplishment they've had, meaning they'd go through another 3 months of voting before they get one to sell. Make the item available to choose in any colour on a page on the site, and just have it claimable ingame by doing something like
"::claimvote"
Sort of like other servers. You can make party hats the only cosmetic available by voting, making its rarity more obvious, players would get voting immediately, even I would and as of right now I'd rather vote for Ikov to get my daily 36m.
Just an idea though, but people have been talking about rates and vote rewards for months, with this they come hand in hand, and this was one of my ideas when I was applying for head of advertising a few months back.