qeltar

A lot of people are speculating about this. We'll see. I personally think the wilderness right now is such a disaster that it would be very difficult for Jagex to make it worse. Getting rid of the "death penalty" (losing items) would probably improve the wild substantially, drawing in many of the people who never go in now for fear of losing items. It would also get rid of PJers, looters and other people who have no business even being there.

Considering that PKing as it is right now is an unmitigated disaster, an end to it "as we know it" would probably be a good thing. Was discussing this on the RSOF.. I think the most likely change is to how drops work and/or the rewards for a kill. And long overdue, IMO.

I'd imagine many thousands of stakers and merchants said the same thing just a few short weeks ago. IMO, they are definitely going to be changing some fundamental mechanics in the wilderness. The updates coming this month just scream that this will happen.

It's not just you. I can't stand that whiny idiot either!

How? I fail to see how you read any of that quote as wildy is going to die.. They're gravestones, nothing more, nothing less, just gravestones. Decorative gravestones. EDIT: not just aimed at you but the other idiots that speculate wilderness is going to die too. Well, we have Jagex on anti-RWT crusade, and we know the Wild is one way of doing it. Now this month, *four* PvP-related updates? Something is going down with the wild this month, I'd bet on it.

I would have said the same about dueling two weeks ago. They've lost much of their former benefit of the doubt.

When I read that BTS what came to mind is.. the Wild is going "buh bye". Maybe not soon, but at some point. I could be wrong, of course.

Ironically enough, nearly every one of these "creative" ideas represents an example of people taking advantage of the ignorance of others, which if the GE worked properly, wouldn't be so easy to do.

Easy? Yes. Cheap? No. Never ever make potions into 4-doses. You waste your time and get less per dose than 3-dose.

Nope. Silly myth passed around from person to person. Markets don't behave like that.

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. Fair enough. But bear in mind that most people would not consider the current situation to be "stable". I have no idea why you brought up sealed bids at all -- it's a red herring. The GE is comparable to a stock or commodities market, and they don't use sealed bids. The simply reason why information is needed is that good information leads to good decisions, and bad information leads to bad decisions. The GE right now mostly provides bad information. Again, you're being pedantic. If I am in a bank and some guy offers to sell me a palm seed for 1k, does that make 1k the market price for palm seeds? No, it means some dude didn't know what they were worth. The same applies here. The GE is providing information about "average prices" that are flatly bogus, and people are making poor decisions based upon them. Well, that's part of it. "Justice delayed is justice denied" -- the same goes for markets. More to the point, though, I'd guess that up to 99% of the attempted transactions in this marketplace never go through. That's an inefficient market. My interest in raising it is more to dispel what I feel is the myth of "give it time and the market will adjust to the right prices". The point is that prices *change*. If Jagex comes to its senses tomorrow and ups the staking limit from 3k to 100k, what's going to happen to half the things nobody's been able to sell on the GE for the last week? Right, now nobody will be able to *buy* them for at least a week. Oh, and some merchants will make a fortune at the expense of producers and end consumers. That's good? I don't think so.

If you take a step back, what exactly is meant by "losing money" here anyway? If you have made or purchased items for your own use, does it matter if they are worth less now than they were before? It shouldn't. If you bought them for resale, then you were taking a risk. Just because prices usually go up doesn't mean they always will. It's a good thing for prices to go down sometimes, to shake out the people who think certain activities are "guaranteed no-brainers".

When something is so good that it replaces almost everything else, it's broken.

Valid point, but it really argues against the GE's mechanism. Because the GE has absolutely no way to account for these differences in motivations of buyers and sellers, and this means that those who want to pay more to buy or sell for less are effectively locked out. That's not something that can ever be corrected with time. Yes, the GE is good for some items that before one had to pay a lot for to get in small quantities. But MOST items are just as annoying to buy now as they ever were, if not worse, because the market is always locked up. The majority of items either have buyers and no sellers, or sellers and no buyers. There's little liquidity. Huh? They claimed to have done "extensive research" and this for a MAJOR update. They got not a few prices wrong but THOUSANDS of prices wrong. How exactly could this be anyone's fault other than Jagex's? What you're forgetting is that Jagex has a long history of putting out updates, paying attention to them for 2 weeks, and then never looking at them again. Consider, for example, that the Fishing Trawler net STILL dumps all your fish on the ground, and people can still freeload. How many months has it been? If Jagex couldn't get the prices right when it had months to research and prepare, what makes you think they will get them right when things are changing rapidly? They've had a sticky in the forums for price changes for what, 5 days now? I don't think any of the prices have been fixed. What really would happen in your scenario is this. As soon as the new update occurred, all the merchants would run to the GE and put in buy orders at the highest possible price. Anyone who had a sell order in would get ripped off. Anyone who wasn't paying close attention to prices and went to the GE would offer to sell, sell below market, and a merchant would get a steal. The merchants would then make millions selling at higher prices on the forums. That's not what I call a good outcome.

People have bemoaned inflation for years, yes, but they bemoan falsely. Except for Burger King hats -- which are a pocket economy that affects hardly anyone -- there really has always been more deflation than inflation in RS. The deflation we have now affects a lot of players, and that's why it matters. Furthermore, Jagex justified the controls on the basis of "economic stability", not just price manipulation. Not really relevant. We are mostly talking about frequently traded commodity items here; nobody uses sealed auctions for such. This is a valid point I hadn't considered. Though it's somewhat diffused itself by the fact that many people don't leave items just sitting there. They list them, and if they don't move, they remove them and try something else. You're indulging in pedantry here. I think you know what I mean. If the entire world outside the GE is paying one price and the GE has listed another, the GE is not at the market price. I'm not using the concept of efficiency in the economic sense, but just the simple sense of the word: "Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort." The GE is not efficient because it doesn't allow buyers and sellers to quickly and easily come together to transact at a mutually agreed-upon price. That's the bottom line.

Well, nobody replied directly to my long post on the RSOF thread explaining why the 5% limit may have actually made the price drops worse, so I'll repost it here in the chance that someone will find it useful. ~q -- "Fact is, if the limit was not in place the first day when there were a million sellers and few buyers to satisfy all those sellers the market price would go way down way to quickly. The 5% range forced GE bank sales to stop lowering their price at a certain point. This did lower prices, but it also stopped them from plummeting to the ground." I know you'll find this hard to believe -- because it's counter-intuitive -- but the price controls have likely *worsened* the price drops. The reason why this happens is that they drag price corrections out over such a long period of time that it allows far more "herd mentality" to become established in the market. Suppose, for example, that toadflax seeds were 1k each before the GE, and when the GE was established everyone went to it, cleaned a bunch of toadflax seeds out of the bank and decided to sell them. Now, suppose there were no restrictions. Some people would offer at 1k, but then others would offer at 900, then 800, then 700.. the price would continue to drop. Oh no, a crash! Well, yes and no. You see, people would be able to watch this happen in real time, and as the price dropped, more buyers would become interested in the market, and fewer sellers would feel like joining in. The guy who wanted to clear out 400 toadflax seeds to make 400k at the beginning, well, when he sees the price drop down quickly to say, 500, heÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢d become less interested. HeÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢d say ÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ãâ¦Ã¢â¬Åoh well, the GE is useful but thatÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢s too cheap, IÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢ll just hang onto themÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬ÃâÃ

I've done this to death here so I'll just continue with you over on the RSOF. :)

Heh.. I just replied to this on the RSOF and then found this here. C&P: Sorry, but the "give it time" argument entirely misses the point, which is that the GE is fundamentally flawed in ways that ensure it will never work, no matter how much time it is given. Just one example: for the first few days, nobody could sell raw sharks because the price was too high, so all the sellers offered at the lowest price and nobody would buy. Then yesterday things evened out finally, and now today it's reversed: I can't buy raw sharks at the HIGHEST price because the price has gone back up and nobody wants to sell. Most item prices vary by more than 5%. The price controls are choking and ruining what could have been a great update.

Yep. Stupid price controls like these don't take into account the fact that what's worth 3k to one person could be worth 1k or 10k to someone else. I'm particularly amused to continue to see more of my predictions for this fiasco coming true every day. There are lots of items that are still at the same wrong prices that they've been at since Monday -- no change. I am also now noticing items that for several days were locked at the low end of the range with tons of sellers and no buyers, now locked at the high end of the range with lots of buyers and no sellers. This system flatly doesn't work.

It's all worth it. I can remember many years ago when, here in the U.S. of A., we used to have a serious problem with illegal drugs. Fortunately, the government stepped in and instituted a set of increasingly tough anti-drug laws. People had their rights violated, small-time users were jailed, normal cold medications became difficult to buy, junkies turned to black markets, and innocent people had their doors kicked in. But it was all worth the cost, because now there are no more illegal drugs in the US!

:lol: Well, of COURSE they tell you that. What would you expect them to say, "gee, we have no clue so maybe you'll get banned, sorry about that!"? :) Ask the police and criminal investigators and they'll tell you all about how they can tell criminals apart from innocents. But everyone is human, even Jagex, and the more spurious reports sent in, the greater the chance of mistakes being made.

As much as I oppose cheating, we need to realize that the "laws" against RWT and so forth only apply to Jagex's little pocket world. It's not illegal anywhere in the world that I know of to choose to log into a game and play with an autoing program, or to sell virtual money for real money. Jagex can try to intimidate these sites into shutting down by, for example, threatening to make them waste a lot of money on lawyers, but there's nothing practical they can do. Add to that the fact that most of them are in overseas countries anyway.

Um, they said themselves that they are trying to control it. "Stabilize" is just one form of control.

There's not one single word in my article about people who "report in hopes of becoming a p mod". That was deliberate, because I don't have any evidence of that; I consider it a rumor. Maybe for once you could actually READ the article before you start passing judgments on it? :wall:

Please understand that my articles are more to prompt discussion and raise awareness of issues; it's not about me personally. As I said in the piece, at level 121, I don't have to worry much about being called a bot. I just think the overall culture where people report others all the time is a problem, especially for skillers.