Choncel

I think Jagex is moving rapidly toward the abolishment of (or a major restriction on) person-to-person (p2p) trading. Consider: - The "assist" system negates the need for p2p trading when you need to take advantage of another player's higher skills. - The "lootshare" system negates the need for p2p trading when sharing drops among party members. - The "Grand Exchange" will negate the need for p2p trading with just about everything else, from the sound of it. Abolishing p2p trading makes a good deal of sense. After all, without p2p trading the real-world traders and commercial gold farmers will no longer be able to function. Who's going to pay $50 for a piece of RS equipment on E-Bay if there's no way to ensure receipt of that equipment in the game? (If not abolish, perhaps modify: Jagex may be considering a change to p2p trading so that noted items are no longer directly tradeable, thus eliminating bulk transactions for items like logs and pure essence.) One more comment: I think the GE will almost certainly lower prices for just about everything in RS, from herbs to logs to Barrows equipment. It's simple supply and demand: the lower the supply, the greater the demand, prices go up. With GE, the converse will be true; by simplifying the effort of bringing a product to market, there will be a greater supply of most things, therefore reducing the price.

If Jagex sold a snazzy client application for Runescape, with souped-up graphics and music and so on, would you buy it for $49.95 USD? In all other respects the gameplay for this hypothetical software would be identical to the web-based version, except that you would install it from CDs and it would live on your hard drive. You would still be able to play the web-based version from another computer if you wanted.