quitthegame

But players have been selling directly to the general stores for years now... just to clear bank space usually, sometimes for items like oak and willow longs because there's nothing else to do with them. So why are you calling it absurd that they would continue to do so? "the constant amount of items in apparently all general stores." The amount of items in the player stock of general stores isn't constant... I'm looking at the amount in Varrock general store change as I type this sentence. It's all obviously stuff that people are selling to clear out space in their banks. Not to mention, that post above that mentions Jagex apparently clearly stated they were not taking items from the GE and putting them in stores. So, this assumption is clearly unfounded, and as your entire argument relied upon it, it's invalid. And what effect would a small number of buyers willing to buy at any price have on that graph? It would translate the entire demand curve a small amount to the right. How exactly is that throwing the regular graph out the window?

Do you have a source for this assumption? Unless Jagex said this was true, there's really no reason at all to make it. This assumption is the linchpin of your entire argument, and it seems rather absurd. If Jagex really did do this, it would be a horrible decision on their part. I'm not sure what you mean, there are already examples of goods with inflexible demand in the real world. Seems to me that adding some inflexibility to the demand in RS might make the curves more similar to the real world demand curves, not less. So, it is already obvious that there are preexisting gold sources and gold sinks. You imagine up that possibly there's a new gold source, present no proof that it exists, and openly state that you have no idea how large it may be. You then predict that this unlikely and unknown gold source, when added to the current gold sources and gold sinks, will produce massive and sustained positive effects on inflation. Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds? Seriously, either you have an overactive imagination or you are basing this on some information that you neglected to include.

Your example assumes that there are loads of sell orders in the GE, and that the buyer gets his goods instantly. Yes, in this example, the GE will send the price downwards. In an example where there are loads of buy orders in the GE, and a seller gets his money instantly, the GE will send the price upwards. This is supply and demand working as designed.

I'm pretty sure that would make everyone unhappy. That aside, it doesn't seem workable. How would you stop people from getting around it by trading 2 cheaper rares for 1 more expensive rare that's over the limit?

No. A = There are people who drive cars B = People who use drugs are breaking the law Some people who use drugs (B) also drive cars (A) Arguing fallacy: some B do A --> A breaks the law A = There are people who RWIT B = People who scam lead to people quiting Some people who scam (B) also RWIT (A) Arguing fallacy: some B do A --> A leads to people quiting The discussion here fails because we can't get beyond trivial things like this. If B and A are not just coexistant but causative in relationship, then that is not a fallacious syllogism. I.e. A= Some people smoke cigarettes. B= Smoking cigarettes has been shown to cause heart disease. Therefore, some people get heart disease from cigarettes. RWT and scamming/botting/owning rares have causation both ways, so it's not quite as simple as the above form, but it's simple enough. How am I to blame for that? You're the one who started the personal attacks on that topic, and kept enlarging the debate about it. I kept asking you to post about the other points I raised but you were obviously too hurt about your articles to think about anything else. i was counting them: 1)the analogy 2) how you are quoting your articles as an appeal to authority 3) how your articles are not scientific and therefore not inherently superior to qeltar's analysis solely by virtue of being mathematical 4) How rares and RWT are a problem because they cause Jagex to change the game adversely in response. 5) Changes in the value of rares due to reasons other than inflation. 6) Reasons why the activities with the most adherents also often have the most detractors. 7) Attempting to figure out why Jagex is against rares/rwt. 8) How you and Hohto are flaming instead of discussing 9) how qeltar's arguments can be repaired. A bubble collapse has happened at the start of rs2 during which rares prices lost half of their value within 2 months. Another one happened december 2004 with santa's when they were overhyped for christmas - they lost 40% of their value in a month time. Rare-wide bubble mid 2005, most rares loosing 40% of their value within 2 weeks time, half wines never recovered. End 2006, decrease of 30% of most rares in one month. More recently, some rares had lost 30% of their value during the panic-anticipation of the GE update. So yeah. In overall it's quite likely to happen some time, but those who are affraid of that still lost out of a 10000% increase in 4 years time. Eh, those aren't big enough/long lasting enough to be what I'm talking about, I suppose I should have made some condition about time to recover being over 6 months or something. Well, I've been saying for 3-4 years now that the housing market in the US was in a massive bubble, for example. It took longer than expected, but it finally started a massive correction this past year, I expect it to go down further. But there's a fundamental difference between houses and rares, people will always need to live in houses, but people could conceivably decide that they don't want rares and the price could drop by 99%. In the long run, rares in RS2 will be worthless. When they shut the servers down, rares = 0. The question is, at t-minus 24 hours to server shutdown, will rares still be worth 500 million gold? how about t-minus 2 weeks? t-minus 6 months? Historically, precious objects have experienced wild fluctuations in value in times of crisis, but how could rares function as a repository of value against crisis when the crisis is the end of RS? That doesn't make sense, which is why I believe rares will crash in value some substantial period of time before the end of RS. I would predict not long after player numbers start to go down substantially in RS(let's say, within 6 months of the player population = 50% of what it is now), rares will have a long term and severe drop in value. Time will tell.

I believe you missed my point. You claim a lot of people quit the game over scamming, botting, etc and you use that to justify your arguement that a lot of people quit the game because of RWT. Don't you see the how wrong that is at all? No. Don't put words in my mouth. I never stated that anywhere, I have just pointed out that you are rejecting my research without any good reason, probably because it does not fit in your line of thought. I never said I'm rejecting your research, don't put words in my mouth either. You said "At least all my research has actual backing using actual numbers. Science is about making premises." So, I should have said you "implied I was anti-mathematical" instead of using the word "think", this is true. BTW, science is not about MAKING premises, it's about TESTING them. A fact which you have yet to understand. It's up to you how to respond, but if you understood the scientific methodthen you'd already know the reasons why without me providing them. You might want to take another look at the graph again. It shows 3 actual data points and exponential interpolation and extrapolation. :roll: That may be true, but is completely irrelevant to what I said. Perhaps you should reread it. That makes no sense. Want what so badly? Why would I call the graphs that? Apparently I need to spell this out for you with references, here is a relevant section from the link I provided above: "As stated earlier, the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of the scientist's bias on the outcome of an experiment. That is, when testing an hypothesis or a theory, the scientist may have a preference for one outcome or another, and it is important that this preference not bias the results or their interpretation. The most fundamental error is to mistake the hypothesis for an explanation of a phenomenon, without performing experimental tests. Sometimes "common sense" and "logic" tempt us into believing that no test is needed. There are numerous examples of this, dating from the Greek philosophers to the present day. Another common mistake is to ignore or rule out data which do not support the hypothesis. Ideally, the experimenter is open to the possibility that the hypothesis is correct or incorrect. Sometimes, however, a scientist may have a strong belief that the hypothesis is true (or false), or feels internal or external pressure to get a specific result. In that case, there may be a psychological tendency to find "something wrong", such as systematic effects, with data which do not support the scientist's expectations, while data which do agree with those expectations may not be checked as carefully. The lesson is that all data must be handled in the same way." You believe that you have experimental data that confirms your hypothesis. But, since this experimental data was used to formulate your hypothesis, it is absolutely impermissible to use that data to test your hypothesis. You need to do additional testing, in the future, to test your hypothesis. It is obviously seen that it is not useful to use the same data to test your hypothesis as you used to formulate your hypothesis, by making the simple observation that it is impossible for a single set of data to contradict itself. Only when an experiment in constructed in such a way that there is a chance of falsifying the theory, is the experiment able to provide any support at all for the theory. It's possible to construct a hypothesis and test it, without ever doing a mathematical analysis at all. You seem to be confusing math with science, math is merely the most natural language for expressing science, nothing more. Again I will observe, in the hopes that through repetition you will understand, that your articles are praiseworthy examples of analysis leading to a hypothesis, and that my only quarrel with them is your practice of referring to them as established fact. I am saddened by the fact that you continue to insult me based on your misapprehension of this one position, and that you choose to ignore the multitude of other topics in which we may have engaged in productive discussion. You must realize by now how badly you are mangling this debate, and you claim in every one of your posts that it is your last, and yet you keep reposting your same incorrect interpretation of the issue. You will not impress me with invective about "all you do is talk." This is a forum, whose purpose is to be a place for people to write posts in. I am not ashamed of using a forum, to make posts. I will not believe that it is better to mindlessly accept wrong arguments than to be accused of "overcriticizing". Either read my replies more thoroughly and make more soundly logical arguments, or continue to be rebuked for your insulting and presumptuous replies. Let me be as clear as I possibly can. Even if you went back and conducted your analysis in a more scientific manner, you would still be wrong to cite your research in as absolute a fashion as you usually do. All you would accomplish would be to create an idea whose predictions would be reliably testable and who would have some claim to be answered with equal rigor. I am sorry that you are so defensive about your articles that you would choose to blow up one side point, of one of the eight or nine major points I made in my first reply to you, into a major fracas stretching out for many pages, when a more objective discussion could have settled all of the major points by now. I urge you to go back and reread my first two posts to you again, and realize that I really do agree with you more than I disagree with you, and that to focus on only the areas where we are not yet in agreement is to impede whatever benefits we might accrue from discussion. Perhaps you are inclined to disagree, to foment debate. But rares and RWT are a mixed blessing, and no matter who wins an artificially polarized debate, so they will remain.

Sony's experiment allowed transfering of characters from disabled servers to enabled servers, but not back. I didn't see that in the link you posted, but sure, that's close enough to not change my prediction. Which is a logical argumentation fallacy as I already pointed out in my previous post and you then agreed with me. Make up your mind and stop arguing that ALL RWT'ers are bad because they either bot, scam or duel cheat. People who do any of that already break other rules and people quit because they break those other rules, not because they break ONLY the RWT rule. You should know better. Wrong. I'm not making those claims, hence the only fallacy of argumentation here is your straw man fallacy. I'm not claiming that RWT is morally wrong, get that through your head already! I think you must have only read about half of my writing in this thread so far, because I've said that multiple times Then why are you still here discussing? Seriously. I've pointed out 5-6 fallacies in your logic, I've quoted a source from the internet, if you want more backing feel free to ask, if I think it's a reasonable request I'll provide more backing, although you're just as free to find evidence contradicting what I said, so I of course reserve the right not to waste my time refusing unreasonable requests. Lol. What authority was I claiming? I was just remarking on how funny it was that you think I'm anti-mathematical. You might want to continue your education, though, the number of fallacies you are propagating here is astounding. I don't find it ironic that people respond to your ad hominem attacks with derision and a little bit of self-justification, I find it sad that you see that as a victory on your part. I see that you've run out of anything to say except insults. It's really remarkable to me that you compare a careful philosophical discussion of the scientific method with looking like a politician-- how can I even respond to that? No. That's how. This is completely wrong. It's not about writing 10 pages. It's not about running statistical tests. It's about gathering data AFTER the formation of your hypothesis. Case closed. The process is gather data, form hypothesis, gather more data, use only that data to confirm your hypothesis. You are still at the form a hypothesis stage, which is completely fine, except that you swing your hypothesis like a baseball bat that brooks no discussion. That isn't fine. My math is just fine, thanks, anything else? You are completely missing the point. The problem is not that your math is not fine, the problem is that you are confusing math with scientific rigor, and missing the point that careful choice of assumptions can make the math say whatever you want it to. Only future testing can prove or disprove a hypothesis. If you want to admit that your articles are not rigorous, then by all means do so and that part of the discussion will be over. But then you'll have to cease linking to your articles as an authoritative source, which I've seen you love to do.

There is a bit of a confound there, in that #1 One might reasonably expect more more demand for RWT buying in that server, which would drive prices up, due to the self selection process of picking that server. #2 Gold sellers might avoid that server at first because they think it will be cheaper gold, and they are seeking to maximize their profits. Those confounds aside, I do believe that gold prices in RS would drop if RWT were legalized, I never played EQ 1 or 2 so I don't know if there are any relevant differences or not. If Jagex did something like Sony did, i.e. opened up 2 new worlds of RS that were completely separate from the current worlds of RS, in that you had to create a completely new character to play in the RWT enabled portion of RS and couldn't play it in the other RS servers, in that case I do NOT believe that the price of gold in those 2 servers would be cheaper than the current illicit gold buying prices on the old servers, at least not in the first year. That would be a true comparison to Sony's experiment. No one has ever quit because of botters, scammers, or duel cheaters? Those activities aren't done by RWT's? Are you serious? One is leaving the real world, the other is leaving the virtual world... it's an exact analogy. The ridiculousness you perceive comes from the ridiculousness of playing games in the first place, not from the analogy itself. I don't believe that my attitude is as hostile as you think, and if I see something that I want to come up with numbers for I certainly will. If you are claiming that only people that write articles based on mathematics are worthy to post in these forums, that's a fallacy-- although since I have a university degree in mathematics I'm certainly not against such articles, I just haven't found one I wanted to write yet. Until I do write such an article, I'll be careful to characterize my points as philosophical speculation and not numerical analysis, a fact which you seem to have missed. Everything has its own place, and what I object to is not that you don't subject your analysis to the scientific method, but that you act as if you had when you have not. I'm not saying that the bias does exist, I'm saying that it might exist, and if you are going to quote your research as "scientific" in nature then I'll demand you follow the scientific method of hypothesis-experiment-theory. If you don't follow that method than your math isn't really any more impressive than any other incisive analysis, mathematical or not, and you should stop quoting it as an authority. I don't want to come off wrong, I think all your articles are great pieces of analysis, I just object to the way you bring them up like they are the last word on the subject, when they still haven't gone through the method. Useful and practical are seldom heard in discussions about Runescape ~_~ Nonetheless, I strongly resent your allegations that I am doing the above, pointing out that numerical analysis is not enough to make an idea a reliable predictive tool without the use of the scientific method is far from simply waving away arguments and research done. First you resort to a misdirected tu quoque fallacy in response to me objecting to you using unscientific analysis as an unanswerable authority, now you are retreating to mere ad hominem attacks? I expected better from you. Since I was so careful in my post to point out how we agree on most fundamentals of this issue and yet you are still so hurt, I must conclude that either you are misunderstanding the import of my post, or that you are unable to be objective about your own articles. Either way, I am sorry that this is the case and that we can't achieve a mutually satisfactory end to the debate.

Then why have some prices gone up despite not being able to sell at the lowest price? And why are others not being adjusted at all? As just one example... raw chompies have been 1k+ for ages. When the GE came out they were priced at 79 gp. Why? Because the 'item researcher' who came up with that price clearly doesn't even play the game. So everyone wanted to buy raw chompies at 83 gp (max price) and nobody wanted to sell. Price should go up, right? Eight days later, raw chompies are STILL 79 gp. I've actually sold some yew longs at 704 gp each (minimum price), and yet the price hasn't changed in many days. I'm afraid that it looks like items have a fixed price range they can't go outside, or the GE price updating algorithms are very badly designed. I can live with the 5% caps per day, but this is much much worse.

RWIT is not illegal, but against Jagex rules, which are of very little value in actual courts. People still don't get the difference. RWT being against Jagex rules is the proper analogy to drugs being against the law, in the interests of conciseness I didn't spell that out because I thought it was obvious. If you really want the longwinded version, here it is: "Both drugs and RWT are usually against the rules in the world that they inhabit, but just as some countries have experimented with legalizing drug use, some games have experimented with legalizing RWT" Except that RWIT has no negative effects on the society at large. People are just brainwashed to think it does. Read the more extensive article on RWIT that I wrote on that while actually considering it objectively, something you somehow seem to accuse me of. I didn't say that RWT has negative effects on society at large, just as I didn't say that illicit drugs has negative effects on society at large. I said both have many detractors who argue that they have negative effects. BTW, the society at large in regards to RWT is the RS society, not RL society, I was being brief again. I was VERY careful to word my sentences in that fashion, because I read and agreed with your piece about RWT. Regardless of my beliefs though, the analogy remains a good one. Which is an argumentation fallacy if you use it to explain why RWIT is immoral. Luckily, I didn't. I mentioned that other people do... 95% of what I see other people say about morality is a fallacy, but that's the world we live in. Actually, I doubt making RWIT within the rules will change much to the price of RS gold. I disagree wholeheartedly, but it's not really worth arguing. If you want to look up the statistics on countries that have legalized drug use, you can, although the confounding effect of drug users immigrating to that country seems like it would be there. I know when the US ended the prohibition of alcohol, it's use doubled as it's price dropped. It is not. It means your defintion of "a game" and "real world" are being diluted so far that you can't even understand the difference between an act that is quite harmless (RWIT) versus one that actually leads to the death of many people (drugs). Everyone that quits a game because of cheaters is analogous to someone dying in the real world due to drug use. Both are quite common occurences, sadly. Again read another of my articles that I wrote here at tip.it. The amount of practical evidence is astounding, and I'm not going to argue about this point here. Yea, I already debated with you about that article a year or two ago. It doesn't seem like your predictions came true, although it's not like I've been following the price of rares. I keep saying people talking about stagnation of rare prices, though. The stagnation certainly accompanies a change in inflation if you know where to look. I looked into it and found out population growth (which is related to inflation, perhaps in a bit more complex way) is significantly lower nowadays. Population growth and money supply growth are the main drivers behind the development of rare prices, as I have always claimed. Yes, you can always fudge the numbers to make the past work out, but that's not how science works. You come up with a hypothesis, and test it in the FUTURE. Nice thought. Except that rares prices didn't go down when construction came out... :lol: Do I have a suitable explanation for that? No. Edit: Actually I do have a theory on that. Something along the lines of: while construction in general costs money and drains money, it also allowed for some massive and extremely profitable merchanting at the time, which may have allowed some formerly "poor" people to climb up the ladder at light speed, which in turn created an enormous new demand for rares. Apparently I misremembered that particular episode... well anyways moving on. People don't say famous real life paintings that cost (tens of) millions or special golden coin that was sold for over $7.5 million are price bubbels. Sure they do. Here's a quote from Money Week, which I found in 4 seconds by googling : "What's behind the art bubble? This bubble has got nothing to do with the paintings, of course. "Good business is the best art," as Warhol said, and the sharpest business minds in the auction room only come to look foolish if they can't settle up afterwards. Sotheby's and Christie's between them control nine-tenths of the world market in art, furniture and jewellery investment via live auctions.But even the business of helping Russian billionaires make newspaper headlines with their disdain for cash can be tough. That's why, following the slump in fine art sales that came with the collapse of Japanese real estate and equity prices in the early '90s, Christie's and Sotheby's colluded in what the European courts called "secretive meetings" to rig commission rates in their favour, replacing competition with inflated fees that defrauded vendors out of an estimated $450 million. Fair's fair, we all need to scratch a living, and between 1989 and 1991 ÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Ãâ when Tokyo's various asset bubbles burst and began dragging the whole Japanese nation into deflation ÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Ãâthe turnover in fine-art auctions worldwide sank by three-fifths. Things steadily improved as the S&P and then Nasdaq picked up where the Nikkei had left off. But gross sales slipped again as equity prices declined, down more than 25% between 1999 and 2003. " I'm sure if you researched it yourself you'd find hundreds more such articles in the same vein. We've both made our predictions for the future, so we'll just have to wait and see. If the rares markets ever loses 40-70% of it's value in a single month, I'll call that a bubble collapse, I'll be right. If it never does, I won't have been proven right. Fair enough? I wouldn't be particularly proud, as it's a weak claim. If I predicted a collapse in rares in a certain 4 month period, that would be a very strong claim, which I would be proud of making if it were true. The claim I'm actually making is not even falsifiable, with it's unlimited lifespan, and I wouldn't even bother talking about it if so many people didn't claim its negation. The debates we used to have were over whether rares would inevitably increase in value, not about how rares were bad for the game. I didn't miss the ad hominem arguments Q made, just as I didn't miss the ad hominems and appeals to authority from you and H. You guys were doing a better job at obscuring the arguments with fallacies, so I entered the fray. Actually I probably was just upset that you were trashing that genius analogy, I doubt I would have said anything without that. Comming up with random numbers that you pulled out of the air doesn't help your point of view to get any credit at all. Who wanted to discuss on a scientific level again? If you are going to quote an article as a theory supported by evidence, then the data sets you quote as evidence must date from AFTER the formation of your hypothesis. That doesn't apply to my paragraph above, which is a philosophical speculation about the future. Sadly, I don't have any hard evidence about RWT and their purposes in RS, do you? If not, we're stuck in this phase on this topic. Wow. You are more or less completely reiterating the whole point here, which is that there is no issue with rares at all, except of the jealousy / hate campagins that people run against them for whatever personal agenda they have. Personally I agree with that, sadly the jealousy/hate campaign run by Jagex is negatively affecting me. I think fundamentally I agree with you, I would like to see Jagex legalize RWT, make botting harder, make RS more free market than it is now. I think Q agrees with you on some current issues about RS too, but the divisive manner in which you guys flame each other obscures all of that. Another problem people continously seem to face is a huge lack of factual knowledge. Jagex has always hated rares inherently for what they represent, as can be figured out my favourite 2-3+ year old quote of Jagex: I actually remember that quote, I only play RS 4-5 months a year but I still read the updates when I'm not subscribed. I'd kinda let it slip from my mind though. Anyway, I still maintain that Jagex hates rares and high-staking more because of their involvement in RWT, even though they may have always hated them a little. That's what I thought 3 months ago, but I don't think that anymore. Jagex is on a crusade, and I don't know where it will end. Jagex are certainly on a holy crusade against RWT, I pointed that out on many threads already as well. Ofcourse, IMO it is based on wrong assumptions and invalid reasoning. I'd say it's based on raw emotion, which is very hard to argue with. Just like the War on Drugs is most fiercely driven by raw emotion... :P

Sorry, your analogy is absurd. Actually Duke, that's a pretty good analogy. Look at the similarities between illicit drugs and RWT. Both drug users and RWT's are stigmatized and ostracized. Both are usually illegal but have certain areas/markets that legalize them. Both are activities that are supported by moral arguments of personal liberty but have even more detractors with arguments that they have negative effects on society at large and lead to other categories of crime. Both have their price pushed up by their illegality, which actually increases the profit made by the lawbreakers. Really, it's a fantastic analogy, if you would just look at it objectively. I don't agree with this at all really. The stagnation of rare prices over the past year doesn't seem to me to accompany any change in inflation. The lowering of rare prices when construction came out is as easily explained by the increase in supply by people selling rares to pay for POH, as it is by deflation caused by a money sink. The massive increase in rare prices over the long term seems so likely to be largely due to bubble-type increases in perceived value + decrease in supply due to people quitting and people getting banned, that I would be surprised if those weren't more influential than inflation. I don't dispute that inflation has occurred, but to claim that inflation has tracked the price of rares neatly seems an unjustified claim. The scientific method is hypothesis, then test, then theory. You could make your inflationary data match the performance of rare prices by picking your assumptions properly. No matter how careful you were not to do that consciously, the human mind is well known to have a propensity to do that unconsciously. That is why the tests performed after the hypothesis are the telling tests.... and those tests didn't support your hypothesis, did they? The final point I have to make, is that I'm disappointed in the replies to qeltar you and hohto have made in this thread. If someone makes a point, an honest philosophical debate consists of construing your opponents remarks in the best possible form. If, with your superior knowledge of RWT, you guys know more about why and what RWT's do, it's your responsibility to reinterpret qeltar's theory in the best possible light, using what you know about RWT. Instead, you guys jumped on one little aspect of his argument, about the purpose/goals of RWT buyers, pronounced he was wrong with evident joy, and then spent paragraph after paragraph going on and on about how he was going against the experts, and then insulting him for not debating properly. That's not a debate, that's propaganda, and I expected better from you two. Let's say only 1% of RWT buyers buy gold to get rares. Well, rares are really expensive, so that's still like 40% of RWT transaction volume. And what about RWT sellers, it's a well known fact that a lot of RWT sellers made a bunch of money on rares. Plug in sellers instead of buyers and his argument is basically resurrected. His argument had some other weak points, I don't think he even mentioned bots and RWT in comparison to rares and RWT, but I'm sure he's mentioned that in other threads. The point is, if you don't give someone the benefit of the doubt, than you're not debating, you're flaming. People leave stuff out in one thread that they included in another thread, or they make a claim too strong when a less strong claim still makes their main point work, to point out every little thing is just flaming them. At least when I flame someone, I acknowledge that I'm doing it. edit: one more point... Instead of getting emotionally hurt by how some people think rares are bad for the game, try to understand how inevitable it is. Whatever is intensely valued is intensely hated, in life and in RS. The best things in life are inextricably linked with the greatest taboos, and it's not by accident. How many people think pking and staking are the only fun things in RS? How many people think pking and staking are not just not for them, but straight up wrong and immoral? edit2: OK tbh I don't really agree with any of qeltars 4 points. but let me quote his very first post in this thread again This post I do agree with. Jagex thinks that rares are a problem. This is because Jagex thinks RWT is a problem, and rares do contribute to RWT, undeniably so on the seller side. I highly doubt Jagex will make rares exchangeable for gold though, they will either make them untradeable or just further restrict player to player trading somehow. So, to answer your question of why rares are a problem duke, rares are a problem because Jagex thinks they are a problem, and the recent and upcoming changes they are taking as part of their war against RWT, bots, merchants, rares, stakers, etc, are a problem to me. If it weren't for Jagex's crusade, then I would think rares were kinda silly but I wouldn't care much one way or the other, but Jagex's War on RWT is changing everything. Man, that analogy to illicit drugs is sounding better and better isn't it?

These are really exceptions to the rule. How many more items have gotten more expensive? Not many. Now consider that nearly ALL equipment has gotten cheaper.. some of it substantially so. Whips, rune armor, Barrows set, dragon weapons, dragon chains, d meds, you name it -- pretty much everything has gotten not just cheaper but a LOT cheaper. This represents millions and millions in savings over a period of time. Come on, I specifically explained how those aren't deflation, but increases in supply, and then you omitted that part from what you quoted ~_~ You said open information flow is essential to the functioning of free markets. So, I brought up the fact that all free market economies in the real world use restricted information trading systems of many varieties. Your original statement about free markets that I responded to didn't mention the GE, so I didn't feel the need to only bring up markets that are analogous to the GE. I don't believe that good information leads to good decisions, sadly. If that were true, casinos would be empty and libraries would be full, but the opposite is true. Since people are irrational, the best way to achieve rational economic decisions in a commodities market is to design a computer operated agent to complete the transactions based on people's bids using a rational system, at least theoretically. The GE's agent is crippled to be painfully slow, and such computer agents in the real world have been plagued by price manipulation schemes. This is most probably why Jagex is so paranoid about price manipulation on the GE. I haven't mentioned this before as I was treating this on a more philosophical level, but I'm pretty sure that the reason Jagex isn't using a listing system similar to WoW's is because the computer load for a database goes up faster than linearly, my estimate is that it goes up as the square of the number of users. So, if WoW has server sizes of 5k and RS implements the GE to serve 200k simultaneous users logged on, then RS's GE server would need to be 8000 times as powerful as WoW's AH server. Of course wow has like 150 servers, but that's still over 50 times less efficient. Sadly, that's not the whole story, you can't just put 8000 servers together to make one 8000x as powerful server. Those servers would spend so much time making access requests to each other that nothing would get done. Eve online, which puts 20k users online concurrently in their one and only server, does that not with a wide network of cheap small servers, but with one giant supercomputer cluster with military spec flash hard drives and supercooled cpu units. Basically, the point I'm making is that Jagex had a choice... make the GE the way it is, without allowing database queries to display a list of prices, or not making it at all. Even if they made the GE work only within each world, instead of between all worlds, then everyone would flock world 2 to use the GE, crashing the GE instantly on that world. Eh, let's not argue semantics any more, at least on this topic :P. We agree on most of the basics philosophically, and we're not making any progress on the semantic points, so let's focus on the practical. Still, that only adds another week or two. How many other updates have we had in the past 2 years that would have a large effect on more than 1% of the currently traded items? Sure seems like the typical month has had zero updates of that kind. We'll see in a few weeks. If the GE establishes stability for a week or so, then we'll be able to expect stability for 98% of the time from then on. If it doesn't establish stability in 2-3 weeks from now, then it probably never will.

Nuke-marine-- I'm almost completely sure that Jagex isn't monitoring player trades to change the GE prices, and even if they were I'd have no confidence in them doing it in a helpful fashion. I know that since I started playing, bowstrings, logs(except maple), ores, have all gotten more expensive. Fish seem to have gotten cheaper over time. I would attribute that to botters deciding to start paying for memberships, though. I really don't understand how you say there's more deflation than inflation. Sure new items that come out decrease in price, but that's not deflation, that's just supply increasing. As to what Jagex meant by "economic stability", you may not agree with me that all they meant by it was 'prevent price manipulation', but I'm at a loss to see how you can interpret that to mean "prevent deflation". It's relevant in that you haven't given any reason why free information is needed for any kind of market-- even though commodity markets are different than constructions contracts it would still behoove you to explain how those differences make free information needed for commodities and not for sealed bids. As far as I can tell, the more knowledge people have about other offers on the market, the more people attempt to game the market, and the more people try to delay action until they see other people's offers so that they can game them better. I fail to see how these are improvements over a blind computer mediated system with less information given. I know you might be tempted to say "well, they're improvements over the GE", but that would end up being circular logic and also unfair, the GE is a deliberately crippled computer mediated system, it shouldnt' be held up as an example. Yea, I suppose if the prices floated faster, than people would start buying for bargains after selling 12-18 stacks of items quickly. It would have been chaotic but fun, might have crashed the system though. If, for some item, transactions are taking place in the GE, than the GE is by definition at the(a) market price. If no transactions are taking place, and you only have sellers or buyers listing, then the GE is by definition not at the(a) market price. If there are both sellers and buyers posting in the GE but they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, then the GE is at the market price but there isn't sufficient interest in the item to make transactions happen. I don't think that's pedantic, it's just obvious. It makes sense to me to define the market price, in respect to the GE, solely by the GE, since it is possible and simpler and more coherent to do so. If the market price differs from other markets, than arbitrage will happen. If the GE is not at the market price, then it will change it's price. Slowly. Your definition of efficient is the common definition, but your given reason for the GE not being efficient boils down to it being slow. That's why people are always using the phrase "quick and efficient", each does not include the other. To me, under your definition, the GE is very efficient, but currently very slow. This is vexing because the GE *should* be very fast, but perhaps it still will be, eventually. We should be discussing the items that seem to have overcorrected, like you mentioned sharks. Some reasons I might see why sharks would appear to overcorrect--some people are mainly finished with selling off their banks and starting to buy, many of them decided to buy sharks and the price went up by more than 5%. Another reason, that people have gone from the duel arena to the wildy due to the staking change, which made sharks go up in demand. I don't know what percentage of duels are fought without food, so I can't say how likely that is. An interesting observation: how many common goods will overcorrect before people on the buyers side see that as a reason to buy the other kinds of items quickly, before they also overcorrect?

Not that I'm conceding the point, but so what? People have been bemoaning inflation in RS for years, now we have a little deflation. The point of the 5% limits is not to make the price drop less, it's to prevent manipulation. I think it's disingenuous to use the word "worsened" instead of 'increased' without providing a reason why greater price drops are, in fact, worse. Do sealed auctions distort everything? Systems that hide the current prices of goods are actually quite common in the real world. When California deregulated their energy market, they used a system quite similar to the RS GE, where utilities would put up quotes to buy energy on a futures basis and suppliers would put up quotes to sell energy, and then an automated system would match them up just like the GE does. Of course that ended up being a total failure, due to collusion between the suppliers, but all the economists' theories predicted it would work great, and I know you love the theories ;) Anyways, that collusion seems a bit more difficult in RS. Do you think that construction projects in the real world should stop using sealed bids? What you are missing is that the downwards pressure on prices is diffused by the 6 item limit. I personally have 40 different things in my bank I'd have up for sale if the limit were that high. If prices were floated with very quick updates, like every 5 minutes for example, then it would be like I had all 40 of those things up for sale, since everything would sell so much faster I'd put them up bang bang bang. The combination of the 6 item limit with the 5% limit seems like it might give the market time to adjust without overcorrecting as much as a faster update might bring about. Again, it's not that an overcorrection would make me sad, I'm just kinda pointing this out. By definition, any transaction in the GE is market price. There may be other markets with different prices, but the GE is just as much of a market as the forums or world 2. False. It's hard to refute your claim when I don't know what you mean by efficient markets. Are those markets that benefit the economy the most, markets that cost the least to run, or markets that maximize both according to some efficiency function of multiple variables? In any case, I disagree. Let me not be misunderstood to imply that the GE is an efficient market. It is almost an efficient market, but what it lacks to make it efficient is not freedom and current information exchange. If it had no permanent price floors, and updated every 5 minutes, and people had an option to make their prices float with the market price changes, then it would be efficient. Probably. Of course, I believe that the GE in that scenario would cause more overcorrection, so if you include "prevents overcorrections' in your definition of efficient market, then maybe the current GE is efficient after all. Of course, overcorrections in the real world are rampant, on the large scale they cause the over/underproduction business cycle. Marxists constantly denounce this cycle, yet without it, bad businesses would not be weeded out so efficiently. Let that be a lesson to us all, to be careful what we wish for, and if you can't be careful, then make like a Marxist and take care to form too many committees to make your wishes reality.

Well the NYSE has a 30% index limit per day, which leads me to believe that there may be other such limits in other markets. Since the prices in RS are inherently much more stable than the prices in the real world, a 5% index limit for RS would really be plenty. However, the 5% per item limit is quite inflexible. I still believe that it would be enough for most of the items most of the time, but now that we're hearing talk of inflexible price floors that items can't go below, i'm losing some faith in the system. And why is that? Periodic daily fluctuations are because during some parts of the day there are more sellers--during other parts there are more buyers. I.e, it comes down to RWT, and which countries are on which ends of RWT. The GE could have damped those price fluctuations down, since people can leave items up while they sleep it would have minimized this influence. Nonperiodic fluctuations are usually due to updates, and while these can be large, they are infrequent and ... well amusing. I have not much reply to your next 6 paragraphs, I agree with it all. I suppose I will say that the point is , to ask why Jagex wants to prevent price manipulation using the GE with these strict limits, when every other MMO allows price manipulation using their AH. I've played personally 5-6 other MMO's recently with AH's, none had this system. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they think merching large amounts of money is too much temptation to RWT. What you say about merchants ripping ppl off after updates... I just can't get indignant about that, it's kinda funny. Don't leave stuff on the GE before update day? If you want to play it safe. I've always interpreted that to mean they don't want price manipulation. Perhaps Jagex really does feel the merching is immoral, hard to say. It's actually reasonable to suppose that since so many famous stakers/merchants have been busted for RWT, that Jagex has become quite disillusioned by both those activities. Guilt by association isn't just a fallacy, it's an emotional response hardwired into the human psyche.

Well I don't see how me railing against the use of diffy q's to model complex dynamics systems in a naive fashion gets you to ask me to help you do exactly that-- but I might as well try, see if I remember anything about them. 2.a) It's a decreasing return on capital because the function is Y = K^(1/2)*AN^(1/2) ... increasing return on capital would mean the exponent on K would be greater than 1. B) got the same as you c) My understanding is that you can't just add GsubA and GsubN like that, since the capital growth isn't keeping up with the effective workers. I get the growth rate of sqrt(12) / 100 ... yea steady state would require GsubK of .06 to match GsubA + GsubN. I just multiplied the growth rates through using the formula Y = (K)^(1/2) * (AN)^(1/2), seems like that should work but i'm not sure. d) this is a steady state question, and part d of question 1 is not a steady state question, so no, i wouldn't recommend just redoing your work from question 1 with added tech. progress.

It's not just that your facts are so obvious, it's that you present them as amazing pearls of wisdom, and in a context where they add nothing to the discussion as they aren't relevant. For example, your sentence above--"Anyone with an intro to economics would know that the Federal Reserve doesn't regulate the prices which a firm can and can't charge. " So what? It's certainly true, but no one said it wasn't, so who cares? You're just wasting everyone's time. "Anyway... I noticed how you didn't respond to anything I actually said, rather choosing to label whatever you can't refute as irrelevant." That's false, your obvious and irrelevant facts I label as such, your false statements I call false. See, I just called another of your statements false, whoop ti do. Well, actually that sentence is correct with the word baldly, and nonsensical if badly is inserted instead. Will you go look up the word 'baldly' or do I have to do that for you as well? I'm sorry, but you don't... let's wrap this up then, this isn't a fair fight. I do know, which is why I specifically mentioned that it's not appropriate for that use. Why don't you try reading my posts, instead of responding to them? If the industry isn't vital to national interests, then that's a bad argument. I would agree that's it's common though. Right, like how the countries in the past two world wars didn't engage in trade with each other. Or the hundreds of civil wars that have occurred in the past 500 years. It's in the dictionary, although I wouldn't use it in a paper. I already answered that question, try reading my posts instead of replying to them. The gist of my response is that the things that are being called price controls AREN'T ACTUALLY PRICE CONTROLS. Amazing how you still haven't gotten around to understanding that. I see you've missed that my entire point is Qeltar's point is wrong, but then again I'd already seen that. You'd know that idiot's back in style if you were a native speaker, so I'll cut you some slack on that one. Education and healthcare are big priorities, trying to privatize them that is. You're wrong about conservatives not supporting free trade, but that's such a messy topic let's just agree to disagree here, since I'm not responding again anyways. Mathematics is deductive and not subject to change from new information, so is a counterexample to your first claim above. Leaving that aside, your first sentence above doesn't support your second sentence, at all. Using your exact logical structure, I could say "No person is infallible, since each functions on induction and is subject to changes of opinion as new information is introduced. To call flammacor inane is just inane." Hoist on your own petard there, eh? The fact that nothing is perfect doesn't mean that it's absurd to make comparisons between imperfect things. It doesn't even come close to meaning that. It could hardly be farther from meaning that. Clear? I'm sure that you'll respond again with another round of badly written attempts of refutations, but since I learned you're not a native speaker the sport has gone out of it. Here, I'll respond in advance to however many posts you care to make. Your first paragraph is true but I never said anything to the contrary, your second paragraph is a grammatical attack but the word you said wasn't a word actually is a word, and the third paragraph is a response to something I said that I never actually said. For paragraphs 4 and onwards, just take the paragraph number modulo 3 and apply as above. Salutations and goodnight.

You are wrong. That isn't how it works. I'd tell you to go do some rudimentary research before posting misinformation like this, but then you'd chide me that's it's my responsibility to keep you informed before you post. So, you win. Don't look it up, don't believe me, and I'll hold up my end of the bargain and make fun of you every time you post. Deal?

Psh, what you call flustered, I call highly motivated. One time in a turn-based MMOG in a futuristic setting, I got so 'motivated' by a similar exchange that I wrote a 2 page satiric medieval fantasy to mock the other person's arguments. I'm pretty sure everyone would have thought I was crazy, but I'd won the previous two rounds, which meant I could only be eccentric. Personally, I think it's just getting funnier as it goes on, especially the conservatives being against free trade thing.

I wouldn't say the economy is dropping. I'd say the market prices are dropping, since supply has increased from people clearing out their banks. I'm not convinced that a slow drop in prices will result in a worse correction than a fast drop, not that I'd lose sleep either way. Heh. I'd just try to buy at the bottom, sounds kinda fun. 5% change per day isn't a noose. It's a speed limit. I personally don't like speed limits, but I'm certainly not going to die from one. We'll see in a month though. That's kinda weird... how could prices drop that low anyways? This seems lame and pointless but maybe I'm missing some exploit. Sure prices change every week, but the GE will theoretically allow prices to change by (1.05)^7 every week [1.41] How many items realistically vary by more than that every week? It's even possible that the GE will stabilize prices, by reducing arbitrage, and increasing the size of the market, we may see prices fluctuate less in the future. Eventually. But no one is claiming that Jagex wanted to prevent a market correction, so what's the purpose of disproving it? I mean, even if I missed someone claiming that, it wouldn't have struck me as worth refuting since it wouldn't have been credible. I mean, I wish RS had EVE online's AH system, which is super free and has a lot of nice features, but oh well. edit: These nutty fixed price floors are starting to look more and more likely. ~_~ What a loony idea to put those in :(

Oh, dear Gods and Goddesses. Since you're amazingly confused, let me call you the fool that you are. "The Federal Reserve regulates interest rates (The price of money) and controls the flow of money through an economy in an attempt to regulate inflation. " --Obvious fact that everyone knows and is irrelevant #1. "Contrary to what you believe, inflation isn't the price of goods and service." --Baldly unsupported lie #1, I never said that. "Inflation measures the change in a price index (Such as the CPI) from Year-X to Year-Y. " --Obvious fact that everyone knows and is irrelevant #2. I'm going to skip quoting your next 2 sentences and just note that they are obvious and irrelevant facts #3 and #4. Seriously, your lack of reading comprehension has got to be crippling--is English your second language? If so, can we please stop arguing, it's just not fair. Just so you know, cite is spelled with a 'c' not an 's'. Here's an example for you to learn from: "Wikipedia is a credible site to cite, as its review process has been shown under review by independent scholars to make it both more detailed and more accurate than other encyclopedias. Of course in a scholarly work Wikipedia isn't appropriate, but in that case no other encyclopedia is either." Get it? The most common argument for the existence of subsidies is to reduce dependence on foreign countries. Your paeans to free trade would seem pretty useless if the countries that we shipped all of our manufacturing industries to decided to go to war with us. There are about 20 more reasons, but I'll let you go look them up somewhere more reliable then wikipedia. Anyways, the WHOLE REASON they're irrelevant sentences is that I wasn't defending subsidies in my post, you have no idea what anything I've said means. Let's recap: A whole bunch of people say any government regulation of the economy is bad. I point out that all governments regulate their economy, so it's nuts to call Jagex communistic for doing so in a way that's not dissimilar to current capitalist practice. You post a bunch of stuff about how subsidies is bad. Your post is irrelevant, because it has nothing to do with the argument I'm actually making. In addition to being irrelevant, your points are also wrong, which is why no government in the actual real world follows your edicts, but that's getting offtopic. Of course you do. Amazing how long you've gone on about subsidies considering you have absolutely no idea why I mentioned them...eh? No, this is how I flame idiots. Good job not figuring that one out yet. (Hint for your research: Look up insurance and banking industries, focusing on heavy regulation, reasons for) Dang, you're still on about subsidies. Wow. I don't know what country you're in, in the U.S. where I live conservatives support free trade. It's been in the Republican Party platform at least since Goldwater. Check http://www.gop.com, supporting free markets is #2 on the list. What country are you from? Lol, wouldn't want to lose all credibility with you, would I? That would be horrendous. Considering your lack of ability to understand the simplest of things I've said, there's really no chance of me explaining how economics is a backwards field. If you go read up on complex dynamical systems, and the limitations of the attempts to model them with simple linear differential equations, then perhaps I could digress on how economics, with the most complicated dynamical systems, tried the hardest to believe that their simple diffy q's reflected some absolute truth, but until you did you'd have no idea what I was talking about. I will grant that it's catching up recently, the recent work on the irrationality of individual economic decision making processes is a sign that the last classicist generation has finally passed. However, I've seen no evidence that the economic theory you attempt to rely on is recent, so in that sense my earlier assertion was spot on. Do you ever get tired of spouting irrelevant and obvious facts? How have you not gathered by now that I know the basic theory much better than you do? What? No they're not. The whole point of this thread is about the GE prices being above the market price... sigh. That's funny. The transactional cost is time. GE sells in 5 seconds what would take longer that to sell over forums or in world 2, at least it will when the prices stabilize. Seriously, which items are underpriced in GE? I've seen people complain in these forums about 50-60 different items that are overpriced in GE, not a single item underpriced. So which are they? Some items have had their market price go down, true, but that's not the same as GE price < market price.

As soon as we saw that prices were only adjusting by 5% per day it was obvious that it would take weeks to reach any kind of equilibrium, so I'm not sure where your "Here we are three days later" point came from. Seriously, if you grow more impatient hourly for something that is clearly weeks away, how do you deal with real life? I'm seriously asking that. Let's say it's 2-3 weeks down the road, and items have achieved price equilibrium somewhat. I still think the GE will be screwed up, what we are seeing now with gold bars may be an indication of a problem, possibly. According to what I've read on this forum, they are stuck at 220 each and not moving downwards, when their price on forums is more like 110-150 each. Let's say that there are 4 million gold bars on offer for minimum price, and about 500 per day are being bought by people who just need 1 or 2 for a quest or one piece of jewelry. This is not that farfetched, as anyone needing any quantity would go to forums. Let's further imagine that near or over 50% of those ppl buying 1 gold bar are too lazy/ill-informed to hit the minimum offer button and offer the medium price. Would the GE algorithms take this data and keep the price of gold bars steady at 220 minimum each? It seems unlikely for a number of reasons, but it's one explanation for the purported behavior of GE gold bar prices over the past few days. If that's true, then obviously the GE algorithms need a lot of optimization. The other theory that's floated around is that possibly Jagex has set price minimums on some items in the GE, this seems very unlikely and undesirable, we shall see though. Anyways, I'll try my original post again with the seemingly unnecessary qualifications you clearly need: 4-5 weeks later when the GE is finally stabilized and handling most trade in RS, as it probably will be, will you make copious apologies equal to your current denunciations? Just curious. p.s. Why is it bad that prices are in a freefall? It was obvious that as people cleared out their banks that prices would go down, but why is that a problem? You cry out for market forces to be allowed to have free rein, and then when market forces send prices downwards you complain...

WoW is famous for making zero innovations but achieving mass success through using other people's ideas in a more polished format. To hold up WoW as a beacon of originality, as you are doing here is somewhat ridiculous. Indeed if WoW is your model for success then you should applaud any effort by Jagex to be less original.

They clearly did spend some time coming up with prices though, and most of the prices were high. This leads me to conclude that they intentionally erred high, I just don't understand why they would do that. I had no expectation that they would get every item right, but why err high? Or if you think it was unintentional, why did it happen? I mean, jagex has like 400 people working there, 5 minimum wage workers could have gotten every price within 10% in about 2 days of work-- but most prices were high. There's got to be a reason for that...

It's quite puzzling why Jagex put so many items over the current market prices, given how obvious it was that prices would be lower after the GE came out, not higher. If Jagex had just put items lower then previous prices to begin with, instead of higher, we'd already be at equilibrium for nearly all items. If anyone has a theory about that, let's hear it.