qeltar

(Originally published on TruthScape and copied here in full for the benefit of the Tip.It community and to spur discussion.) The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #4 - I Have the Right to Remain Silent Published: November 30, 2007 RuneScape is a multiplayer game, and interaction between players is supposed to be one of its strengths. I very often enjoy meeting new people and discussing various aspects of the game with them, and firmly believe that people who never like to deal with others would probably be happier in a single player game rather than in a MMORPG. On the other hand, there are times when I really donÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢t feel like talking. Perhaps I am concentrating on what I am doing, I am multitasking, or I just am not in the mood. Or maybe I am in a place where a lot of other people are blabbering about something I just donÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢t want to listen to. Fortunately, the game allows us to turn off public chat and just play quietly if we want to, so thereÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢s no problem, right? Wrong, thanks to the ongoing obsession that some have with finding ÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ãâ¦Ã¢â¬ÅbotsÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬ÃâÃ

:lol: No, sorry, not even close. On eBay buyers and sellers are free to agree upon prices that they like. No Politburo stands around telling them what the "official price" is. On eBay you put items up and they sell. You offer to buy items and you get them. And for that reason, eBay works... And the Grand Excrement doesn't.

Yep.. PKing is next. And then hoo boy, you are going to hear a lot of hollering. And the price drops on skill outputs we see now will be nothing by comparison.

PKing will be next. Watch for it.

Have you spent much time in a bank lately? It's godawful annoying.

Wrong. Again. I am a passionate person with strong beliefs. When I feel something is wrong, I state my views clearly and loudly. When I feel something is right, I do the same. I have been one of Jagex's strongest supporters when I feel they have made updates that are high in quality, or changes that are good for the game. However, their recent features and changes have been poorly conceived, horribly implemented, often destructive to gameplay, and in many cases downright stupid. It is not my fault that Jagex has decided to ruin its own game with ridiculous updates, and I will not stop expressing my views to satisfy a small group of mindless fanboys who think Jagex can do no wrong. If you don't like it, I suggest you skip my posts.

I dunno, but you can be sure that it will be both ineffective and annoying as hell.

What, exactly, is the point of starting a thread whining about what you consider to be other people whining? If someone criticizes a recent update and you think that the criticism is off-base, why not engage your brain and reply with a post stating WHY you think the update is alright? Then maybe a useful discussion would ensue, and if you have a valid point, maybe you'd change some people's minds. This thread, however, is just insulting mularkey.

This exists because the market cannot stabilize, due to the price controls. The problem is that some items are so backed up with sellers that new sellers will never have a chance to move their items. Also, the advice about removing items doesn't work, because when prices change you have to relist items and then you're at the back of the line again.

My belief is that a slow drop is worse for three reasons. First, it prolongs the 'pain' of prices dropping for those who don't want to see them drop. Second, it gives more time for people to see the prices slowly dropping and to jump on the bandwagon, which makes the imbalance of supply and demand worse. Finally, the lack of responsiveness of the market will tend to lead to overcorrection and then oscillations. The speed limit you are seeing is manifesting itself in terms of a lack of volume. Most items just don't sell except in a trickle. A 5% price move limit is simply, flatly ridiculous. I've never seen or heard of such a thing in any market of any type anywhere in the real world OR the online world. Many items change in price by more than 5% during each DAY. Other items go up and down and the GE system cannot properly adjust for them. Another problem is that this fixed system can't take into account motivation levels. It is impossible for anyone to entice a seller to put something on the exchange by offering more than its 'fair market value'. It's ridiculous. There is also the matter of changes to the values of items when updates come out. Remember what happened to the prices of prayer pots when GWD came out? Or bolts when they fixed crossbows? How about the dragon axe when they made it cut faster? The price tripled in an hour. It would take the GE a month to catch up with that. What would have happened in the meantime? Merchants would have gone to the GE on the morning of the update and bought out every d axe for the highest price possible, and the people who had them listed for sale would log in to find out they got ripped off by 2 million. Remember when Hunter came out and suddenly swamp tar was valuable? It went from a value of basically nothing, maybe 5 gp, up to like 1k in 2 days. How long would the GE take to adjust to this change? Oh, three months. On the contrary. If the GE worked properly, it would have taken over from all the other markets, greatly reducing their volume. Almost everyone would be using it, and that would cut down on arbitrage. Now, since the prices in the GE are out of whack, arbitrage is very possible just by moving goods between the GE and other markets. They claimed that they wanted "market stability". I suppose one could argue about what exactly that's supposed to mean. Perhaps that just means they don't want prices swinging back and forth, and yeah, the GE as it is now will do that, but at what cost? A completely dysfunctional marketplace.

Flammacor, have you, uh, 'debated' with Sly Wizard before? This is what happens. Don't let him get you flustered. It's simply not worth it.

It was meant more as a comment on the "stability" goal. The economy is not stable; it is dropping. Now, one can rightly argue that it is dropping less quickly than it would have if Jagex had let the market float. At the same time, though, the price controls are almost certainly going to guarantee that the price corrections will overshoot where they would have gone otherwise, for a variety of reasons. I'm not impatient, because there's nothing I'm really waiting for. The problems with the GE are systemic, and it is not going to be a functional exchange in three weeks, three months or three years unless Jagex relaxes its noose on prices and lets buyers and sellers make their own choices. They've already said they won't let prices drop below what a shop would buy for. That in and of itself will cause problems, and also reflects a lack of understanding of the market. I have no problems with admitting when I am wrong. I've done so before. But again, understand that the problems here go far beyond just this initial adjustment period. Prices of items change every week, and the GE is not only going to not function well when this happens, it is going to directly lead to people getting ripped off. It's not "bad", it's simply confirmation of what I've been saying, which is that you cannot prevent a market correction with price controls. By dragging it out, Jagex is greatly INCREASING the chances of the prices falling further than they should, by giving people days and weeks to wring their hands over what should have been over with on Monday.

When prices settle down and the GE arrives at the new equilibrium prices, will you post apologies as vigorously as you're currently posting complaints? Just curious. Three days ago I said that Jagex's attempt at price controls would have no impact on "stabilizing the market", and said the system was way too slow to adjust to changes. Here we are three days later with prices of almost everything in a freefall, and the GE still deadlocked and useless on most items. I'm not expecting any apologies from all the people who flamed me on Monday.

For starters, they could try actually playing their own game. Every update in the last month or so, with maybe one or two exceptions, has had huge, gaping flaws in it that anyone who actually plays was able to point out within an hour. Yet Jagex developers and testers spend months on these features and don't notice them. Some of the prices aren't just little oopsies.. they make it very obvious that the people who chose them simply do not play this game.

Game needs a new tagline... "Stand around doing nothing with millions at the Grand Exchange!" :D

On the contrary. Getting rid of rares is an essential part of fighting money obsession, scamming, abusive merchanting (not ALL merchanting) and RWT. Rares are the ONLY thing that massive amounts of $ are needed for in this game, and pursuit of them is behind a huge host of the game's problems. They should have been taken out years ago, but later is better than never.

If Jagex is serious about its campaign to rid the game of money obsession, they MUST do something about rares. They are just a festering wound that gets worse every year.

I'm glad to see Jagex fixed the two most obvious problems, which never should have made it out of testing, if their QA people actually knew what they were doing. Now Jagex can wipe their hands of this and ignore all the other problems with tournaments that need fixing. :uhh:

If he was able to buy one instantly it means tons of sellers are trying to dump them with no buyers. So in theory, the price should drop. The high alch on gold bars is 180. Here's another snag with Jagex's little attempt at price controls -- high alch values only mean something if you take into account the price of a nat. Nobody is going to sit around high alching gold bars unless the price of nats REALLY drops.

I specifically asked about this on Monday and was told by a J mod that it wasn't true. Despite that, there are many items that are not changing in price. This system was, is and will continue to be a mess until Jagex stops mucking with market forces.

Same question I ask every time. If that was the real reason for this -- and it certainly makes much more sense than trying to claim that a 12k/hr staking limit is needed for "RWT" -- then why was Jagex not HONEST about it? Why not just come out and say "we've decided this is not what we want the game to be like so we're taking it out". Sure there would still be complaints, but they'd also be respected for taking a principled stance. Instead they make thousands of people feel like they were tossed on the dung heap as part of a ham-fisted security move.

Good lord. The issue of luring has nothing to do with forgiving, it has to do with credibility. It's only wise to assess honesty based on past history, and they were VERY deceptive in dealing with that issue. If a corporation has made its mind up to hide the true reason for doing something, they aren't going to provide you with direct and obvious contradictions to their positions on a silver platter. You have to use your brain, look at the clues and read between the lines. I am far from a conspiracy theorist, but everything about this update is starting to point VERY clearly towards this not being about RWT. I'll ask you this simple question. If RS gold is worth $3/mil, then if the cap on staking had been made 50k per 15 minutes, it would take 5 hours of staking to transfer $3 worth of gold. Do you think any RWTer would bother doing that? If the answer is "yes", I can only boggle. If it's "no", then can you please tell me why Jagex would set the dueling cap to less than 10% of that already low figure? The evidence is right in front of your nose. Here's more: What do you expect, for Andrew to come out and contradict every one of his employees in public? Well, he ended up doing EXACTLY that with the luring debacle, but it took a month, so there's still plenty of time.

:lol: It must be nice to be so naive that you will blindly believe anything that is spouted off at you by a billion dollar corporation. I'm sure they really appreciate having lots of fanboyz running interference for them. Because gee, we all know a corporation would never lie to its customers, right? :roll: The evidence that Jagex isn't being forthright has been provided by the update itself. There is no sane person who could possibly believe that staking had to be dropped all the way down to 12k per hour to stop RWT, when 10x that figure would have worked just as well. Blind trust of authority figures is for children and fools. Intelligent, wise individuals maintain a healthy skepticism in such matters. As for me personally, Jagex lost most of the benefit of the doubt that it previously had when it tried to legalize luring and then cover it up with a giant self-serving smokescreen. I still try to be fair when it is warranted, and to give credit where credit is due, but when it is obvious that something else is going on, you bet I'm going to call them on it. Yes, and some people swallow anything Jagex dangles in front of them -- hook, line and sinker.

It makes some things easier to sell IF you are lucky enough to hit the items that are not deadlocked. Most items are.

Pros: 1. A convenient way to buy and sell certain commodities, if you are lucky enough to want to buy what everyone is selling or vice-versa. 2. Elimination of the need for aggregation-merchandising (if prices ever settle). 3. Ability to quickly get certain oddball items that were a pain to get before but you can now buy fast. Cons: 1. Lack of free market due to price controls, which makes most items impossible to transact. 2. Very slow updates -- they don't appear to have changed prices on anything since YESTERDAY morning. 3. "Thoroughly researched" initial prices that indicate that most folks at Jagex know little about their own game. 4. Poorly designed user interfaces with lots of unnecessary clicking. 5. No browse feature, greatly reducing the system's usefulness. 6. Lots of potential for people to get ripped off when this system stabilizes, due to poor information. 7. Building is very large and unnecessarily far from the Varrock tele point. 8. Discovering just how incredibly poor a job our school system is doing of teaching about economic fundamentals.