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• The DM will give you treasure of that type, as an actual found object. This is usually best for when the player was investing in “a cool cloak” and the like, but the DM might also decide to shatter your magic sword but, nearby / soon / recently, he’ll have you find one that’s better.
• You may, in character, have the item enhanced… by a ritualist character, or by an occult or master blacksmith, or by using the Enchant Item ritual yourself, or whatever.
• An event may cause the item to simply become better than it was. Usually this should be attached to some kind of cool in-game event, like the example above with the black dragon. If you can’t provide such an event, then wait until you can, and in the meanwhile try to do cool stuff which might result in such a noteworthily awesome event.

The other element of the careful balancing is in item levels.

• You should never, under any normal circumstances, receive an item more powerful than your level + 4. And items of level + 4 should only be given out by the DM, according to the standard guidelines – which will result in only one PC getting an item this powerful during each level. In general, expect this to go to you if you’re one of the PCs with a large pool of unspent IXPs.
• Items at level + 3 are still potent, the kind of thing of which there are only 2-4 per party. In general the DM should only go here with signature items and cool events, or with distributed hand-picked loot, or with enchantments provided by powerful NPCs well above the party’s level – and even they will generally be disinclined to give this much power to someone of your reputation. Enchant Item rituals done by yourselves cannot generate these. You should generally have at most one item of this level or higher.
• Items at level + 2 or level + 1 are more common, but still above the curve. You can’t use Enchant Item or player-requested upgrading to acquire these. The DM can allow event-based upgrades or senior NPCs to make items of this level without worrying too overmuch about balance, though. If a character has an item of level + 3 or higher, then at most one level + 1-2 item is appropriate as well; otherwise you can let them have three to four items of this degree.
• Items at your level or below are the easiest category. You can use Enchant Item to make them, can get them from any appropriately-skilled NPC (possibly for a slight markup still), or can describe your own event-based upgrade which gets the item there.

Note that the artificer feats and paragon benefits in the Eberron Player’s Guide which allow you to exceed your level with magic item creation should still work just fine, and alter these rules of thumb appropriately. This is one of the benefits to your party of having an artificer.

9) For rituals, I chose to let those remain money-based, instead of IXP-based. In other words, do not mentally find-and-replace “gp worth of components” with IXP. The one exception being the rituals of creation, which make magic items or potions and so forth – those will be assigned a less substantial components cost (I’m using 10% of the IXP cost), but the real cost is the item’s value in IXP, and is paid by the item’s owner, not by the ritualist. Ditto Raise Dead – it should have a real cost associated, not just a flavour cost – it costs 500gp in diamonds and 500 IXP (paid by the recipient; this is waived if the death was done as a plot point).

Tentatively, Alchemy is purely money-based, even though it makes things similar to potions; I think this is a fair trade for it being so much more limited in scope than ritual magic. Certain alchemy recipes (such as if your DM allows you to alchemically replicate a potion) may have IXP costs associated at the DM’s discretion.

This makes ritual magic possible to access without cutting into peoples’ magic item budgets, yet keeps rituals limited by the secondary currency (real money). Yes, this will allow much more free use of most rituals; in my opinion this is a good thing, I never liked the fact that ritualists were burning “magic item credit” toward things which are, especially at low levels, generally mostly cosmetic or RP-based. The DM may choose to disallow certain rituals because of this, or alter their component costs, or assign them an IXP cost as well. (Note that things like Fool’s Gold become much less of an issue here, though… multiplying gold but not IXP means that Fool’s Gold is mostly only good for what it was supposed to be used for, deceit.)

10) There is no such thing as residuum. Anytime a ritual or event would provide residuum, it provides IXP instead, either to the item’s owner (in the case of Disenchant Magic Item or a rust monster or the like) or to the party’s pool. It has no in-character existence. Characters are unable to consciously perceive the existence, or lack thereof, of IXP.

11) In our campaign, where we trade off GMs, the GM’s PC simply receives IXP equal to the shares everybody else received, during the adventure they ran. Their share should not come out of the total, but it should instead be equal to the rest.

12) If an item is awarded but nobody in the party actually wants it, then nobody counts its IXP toward their share. It becomes purely a mundane bargaining chip or possible tribute/bribe/tithe, and no PC can access its enchanted item stats until they do choose to pay for it with IXP. If it is sold / lost / traded and no longer available to be invested in, 20% of its value goes back into the IXP pool, just as if it had been explicitly disenchanted..