magzar

This and, I love how this is all working out. Wish I knew what world the Goldmerch riot was going on in. It would be fun to see the manipulators cry over this. It was in world 2 and mods muted the rioters quickly for spamming. Basically a riot with about 20 mad ranked members of the cc it failed :-# Lulz gf noobs

I corrected your grammar. Don't use double negatives. On topic, there is never a specific rule saying "don't do this action which will benefit you greatly because it's a bug" even though everyone know jagex's opinion on bug abuse. some players do it anyway, and end up banned. Do you think they were justified? they simply exploited a flaw in the system as well. Um, ty for the correction? Prove that players have been banned using merch clans and prove that jagex's opinion on merch clans is bug abuse. I didn't say it was bug abuse. I compared it to bug abuse. Anyway if you read the Kb it says jagex may intervene on prices if manipulation is taking place, and mmg has confirmed that they see it as a problem.

I corrected your grammar. Don't use double negatives. On topic, there is never a specific rule saying "don't do this action which will benefit you greatly because it's a bug" even though everyone know jagex's opinion on bug abuse. some players do it anyway, and end up banned. Do you think they were justified? they simply exploited a flaw in the system as well.

Macroers, bug abusers, and people who are suspected of RWTing are very commonly banned. I think it would be even easier to catch clan manipulators that it would be to catch those people. If you see items beginning to be bought out, you check chatlogs for commonly mentioned usernames and the like. And I'm sure you're thinking "what about IRC." My answer to that is, with the bigger clans do you really expect that everyone in them is going to be smart enough to not talk about their buyouts and who's behind them in game? All it takes is a few people opening their mouths and it all comes crumbling down. On top of that, I agree it would be a good idea if Jagex intervened when prices were being manipulated. Causing these clan merchants to lose money instead of gaining it would be another great deterrent against them.

I think if they explicitly stated that organized price manipulation clans were against the rules, and that organizing them would be a bannable offense, then a lot of players would disassociate themselves from such behavior and move more towards Solo merchanting or other methods of money making. I actually suspect banning would be a last resort, reserved for the leaders of clans who refuse to shut down when the rule was announced. I don't think mass bannings would even be necessary. If you ban 5 or 6 of the most prominent clan leaders, the example might be enough to scare off a lot of players. I actually don't even think that they would have to change anything to combat price manipulation the way they did for RWT as it is much easier to go through logs of suspected manipulators and find proof, than it would be to find out if someone used a credit card to buy gold or items from someone else before the advent of trade limits. Rsw44: do you think it would be possible the next time MMG does one of his Q&A sessions to try to ask a couple questions about the G.E. and see what he'll tell us? If I'm not mistaken you're one of the people who are able to pose questions to him and it would certainly be nice to know how the queue functions, and to verify if 5% fluctuation is in fact the normal cap on how much an item can change in price each day. Edit: i'll admit I kinda want those questions answered so I can gloat a little if i was right. \

It's the summer, I wear Sandles, and Nike can produce more shoes. Oprahs money supply isn't unlimited, and sooner or later her empire will crumble. In the meantime I can make do with what I got or buy a substitute. magzar - you seem to gloss over the fact that the limp price changed at an odd time of the day. Jagex had to of intervened and I would be shocked if someone didn't have a GE feed that updates "live". Explain why that price changed no other major item did? Again, from the RSOF post, the limp supply was very low, some of these guys struggled to buy any on MAX. 3 Limps from 4 patches every 15 minutes is 12 limps per 15 minutes or 48 an hour. Not bad considering one limp buys your seed price and it's a limited good. American Gasoline, phone service (landline) and internet often fall into the monopoly category. So do most other utilities especially in the south of america. It's a flaw yes, but the economy would be very stale without it. It would be interesting to know the amount of limps collected and sold. Funny you mention addy ++ arrows, I found like 13 on the ground and haven't been able to sell them on min for 2+ months even though I update it daily and the price rises. Lol Das, I meant if she bought out every shoe, every shoe factory, and completely controlled the shoe market all together. (btw it doesn't matter if you wear sandals, they can break too) Please take this seriously and don't just dodge questions. Also, What proof do you have that Limpwurts are the only item that changed price? So far I've seen that said a lot, and not one single small-minded person has had the capability to produce a screenshot, or any other form of proof. As far as people struggling to buy on max, I've already explained that, so You must not have read it. Their higher, often updated offers were in line behind the lower, older offers made. Therefore when someone dumped at min, the high offers got nothing and didn't notice an increase in the supply. It makes perfect sense if you even bothered to consider the information that Mod Mat gave us. As far as what you said about monopolies, that's just stupid. Gasoline: Exxon, Mobile, BP, Chevron, Texaco, etc. Phone/internet: Sprint/embarq, At&T, Time Warner, Netscape, Cricket, Nextel, Altell, Etc. Not even close to a monopoly I'm afraid.

Das, yes it can be proven that it has a negative effect as it causes unnatural [bleep]es and dips in prices. Anyway I'm going to post the explanation I posted in the RSOF for what happened. Maybe that will open a few players eyes and make them realize that Mod Mat didn't touch prices. [hide=] [/hide] Sorry I know it's a bit of a long read, but I think you may find that it presents another option for what happened with prices. Anyway moving on, Merch clans are a problem for the average everyday scaper. Say for instance a player gets a slayer task of iron dragons. At that point in time, let's assume a major merch clan has decided to merch antifire pots for some odd reason. Now this clan buys out the entire stock of antifire pots. When that Player goes to the G.E. to buy enough for his task, he finds that he can't purchase a single pot, even at max. Now lets say this player is relatively low level, and doesn't have either the level to make his own antifires, or the money to train his level high enough to do so. Let's also assume that his melee combat stats are too low to make praying against them plausible. Is this player simply supposed to abandon his desire to complete his slayer task until the clan dumps the pots, which could be several days, or more? Considering the player pays to play runescape, I see it as his right as a customer to not have to wait simply because other players choose to manipulate the system to make extra money. You call people "whiners" for complaining about items being bought out, but have you even stopped to consider that maybe the real "whiners" are those who complain because they're not being allowed to use their in game wealth as a way to take advantage of the market and bend it to their will? Let's put forth a real world example, and before you say "you can't compare runescape to real life" shut the hell up because yes you can when it's the same exact principle. - one of your shoes gets somehow torn open and you need to buy a new pair. However, when you go to the local shoestore, you find out that oprah winfrey has decided to buy out every shoe in the country and none are available from anyone but her. You go to oprah's house in the hopes that she'll see you a pair of shoes, only to find out that she's now charging $10,000 a pair for shoes. You can't afford to pay that for shoes, and haven't even the slightest inkling of how to make your own. Would you consider that to be ok? on the topic of Das's modship, I was just poking a little fun guys, don't get your panties in a bunch. -one more thing : Das you talk about gathering limps from hobgoblins, what about skillers? they certainly can't gather them themselves, and farming would take longer than waiting for the merch clans to dump. Do you think they should give up days of membership fees, or abandon their way of playing the game just so merch clans are free to gouge prices at their leisure?

Wow there's actually an intelligent person on the RSOF, and a member of a merch clan no less. Strange I always thought of the RSOF like mars, completely devoid of any intelligent lifeforms.

Why do people believe G.E. prices can only fluctuate by 5% per day when if you look on the front page of the G.E. database there are a ton of items that change by more than 5% every single day? Edit: 600th post \

I believe 2lum is merching swamp lizards; I don't know about RoWs What? I didn't post that.

hey guys, if anyone is interested check out my thread on the RSOF about this subject. 74-75-14-58931157

I forgot that I don't "need" super restores at any God Wars except Bandos. And yes, God Wars is a "need" place for some. Some people do boss fights all the time. Not everyone plays the same way you do, and in return, not everyone has the same "needs" as you. The difficulty in quantifying runescape is that yes, some people need items for one event whereas a kid buying an item to do another is not a need. However people seem to it's control and risk free, it's far from it Overall, Finshed goods are dangerous to try to control, especially things like potions or let's say runes. Many people are probably sitting on millions and hundreds of thousands of runes and potions that they dont feel they should sell for the GE price range, an un-natural manipulation of them could cause people to dump the items in bulk. I dont really follow the potions trend, i'm sitting on a near liftime supply and wont ever need to sell mine to make ends meet, but I'd be surprised if people tried to control the potion market. Stuff like barrows and higher end armor (GWD) is more easy to control because it cannot be created, it must be killed for, which means in most likelyhood, no one is sitting on hundreds sets of varrock, bandos or the like. Rune Armor is very disposable, I know the big clans go through 50+ sets like candy in a few days sometimes, so it's going to be hard to maniup an item like rune because retired pkers like me, have 100+ sets they would dump for the right price but might hold incase they need them ;) Raw Materials are tricky, people mine and fish and the sort for money, so it's hard to control those. Never know what piles people are sitting on. Secondaries would be the most interesting. Most have to be gathered , farmed , and that can be numbingly slow (wines of zammy - eww) , so while they can, time is money so people like to buy them, since they cant be mass created/gathered for the most part, I can see where this has less risk. First come first serve does bother me. If i'm willing to spend more, I should get it before the kid who spends less. Especially if it's a limited good. First come first served is the only way the the G.E. can realistically work in my opinion. If the queue were based on best offers, then it would be impossible to ever buy anything for less than max because there's always going to be people like me who are willing to pay the higher prices for the convenience of the item buying instantly. This would leave poorer players who really can't afford to buy everything at max unable to get items they need. The way i see it, if a person has had an offer in at medium for a week, and another person has had an offer in for max for 2 days, then someone decides to sell for med, the person with the med offer should take priority. The way i think it works is that when an item is sold, the queue begins with the oldest offer that meets or exceeds the sellers price, which seems like a perfectly reasonable system to me. It also completely explains how limpwurt roots could drop during a buyout.

sorry to double post again but i just read this Mod Mat K Jagex Mod 05-Jun-2009 21:18:23 Last edited on 05-Jun-2009 21:22:06 by Mod Mat K Now, this is interesting: "Why not do this to swamp lizards or ring of wealths? Why did you single us out? " I am guessing that these are two other items being mechanted. So, from this I think you can deduce that we haven't been targeting merchanted items (otherwise these may have dropped) and that our policy towards merchanting clans hasn't changed. That confirmed what i was saying earlier about offers being first come first served. It seems most people thing that the highest offer gets priority, but from what he said there, the offer that has been up the longest gets it. The people who all had offers in at max wouldn't get any if other people had offers in for min since before the max offers were put in, so long as someone dumped at min. Everyone seems to assume that a dump would have been for max..... I think Mat really may be telling the truth that there was no intervention. Are we seeing merch clan wars starting?

No shame in having a fun time arguing. Life isn't fun if you read 900030303 posts of "LOL I WUB MOD MAT K" Listen to this man. The truth he speaks. Thanks. :-D You are right though, Was grasping for straws with the easter egg one :P. But saw a moment of opportunity for some fun so I went for it. I will say if he did edit that topic, as someone who runs a forum, if one of my moderators changed a topic to mock the posters regardless of what they were upset over, i'd be speaking with that mod in the morning. Lulz, as some of you may have noticed from some of my other posts, I've always up for a bit of argument. Tbh i was just poking a little fun at you Das. Still I'm totally against manipulation. The only reason I don't solo merch is that I don't really have the capital or the patience for it. I'm the type who buys at max and sells at min just to make things quicker.

Das Master smither just posted it in writing, from info on the G.E. that Jagex will intervene if they see Manipulation. So obviously it's against the rules. gf now be ashamed of yourself for your failure to to do your modly duty of providing a positive role model for the users on these forums. Edit: Also, what you consider a luxury, other people consider a necessity. I certainly wouldn't ever want to train prayer with normal bones. So for me Dragon bones are a necessity. Some people may prefer to train "old school" and consider them a luxury. It's all based on personal opinion.

he may actually be telling the truth though. The way I see it is, say players had offers in a med or even min before the buyout. Then some people dumped early, for min. Wouldn't it make sense that those older, lower offers would get served before the more recent ones, even though they are for max? Otherwise no one would ever be able to buy anything for below max. Obviously none of us know exactly how buying and selling is prioritized on the G.E. Couldn't this be a viable option?

I'm no expert, but the price in the Grand Exchange also plummets when clans merchant thus leaving everybody that wasn't taking part in the action at a big loss. For the uninformed sure, I do a large majority of my buying when an item crashes, raw armor and raw materials especially materials will almost always go up. That's great that you're informed and smart. But the average player isn't. I agree. Most players never look at the G.E. graphs. Those are solely for the benefit of merchants. what's unfortunate is that clan manipulators also use them to abuse the system.

OK then, go get 5k rannarr seeds, or 150 yew seeds, or 10k kwuarm seeds, or 5k maple seeds See how long it takes you to gather any of those things on your own. Sure you could farm allotments or hops or whatever, but good luck getting any decent amount of experience from that. The fact is snapdragons are the best xp out of herbs, and also the second best profit at average yield. It's not a luxury, it's a viable and widely used training method. To call it a luxury pretty much says anything above onion or potato seeds or whatever is a luxury for farming. on another note Mod Mat K Jagex Mod 05-Jun-2009 20:21:28 The only person who can make a promise like that Bla will be MMG or Andrew. As important as I like to think I am, I can't make Jagex policy up.. yet.... Mat. That made me chuckle. Climb that ladder Mat!

Nope, but rune armor is available in stores. You can buy a large majority of it for dirt cheap. Dragon armor, is a Luxury, not a need. If you get caught, In essence investment firms like the motley fool act as a merchant clan because lots of daily readers take their tips as the bible and buy stock. Some Investments, especially collectibles, do have a guaranteed return. Seeds - go thieve a master farmer. They got plenty, they dont run out. Unless you want wood trees, but any level player can woodcut for a nest. Kingdom also produces nests dragonstones - Can be killed from firegiants, or harvested through killing monsters from key halves (do randoms give key halves anymore?). Low level monsters do drop key halves, they can't be produced in mass but they are produced by using keys, but do you *need* a glory? Is it a need or a luxury? Please show it to me in writing. http://www.runescape.com/kbase/view.ws? ... of_conduct Don't see it on their offhand, do you? As someone with an economic interest who studies it for a hobby, I have no qualms with them in theory. Ever heard of a devils advocate? If I did merchant, I would probably own a godsword and not of had the same pile of GP for the last...7 months. But I dont, I can barely force myself to play currently. I don't have anything in writing i'm afraid. i've seen it posted before though so maybe someone can find it. And yes I have heard of the devils advocate.(which on an almost completely unrelated note there was also a pretty good movie by that name despite Keanu reeves being the star) Investment firms still aren't the same thing, they give suggestions on what to buy and sell by reading the current market trends, they don't start huge buying and selling waves regardless of how that stock is currently performing in the market. anyway, it's common knowledge that price manipulation is frowned upon, if not explicitly against the rules. As far as seeds go, Ok go out and thieve 2k snapdragon seeds for farming plz.

One other thing I just thought of. It's a fact that there have been statements by Jagex saying that price manipulation is against the rules. From what I understand Tip.it and its staff are supposed to abide by all RS rules. So Das, by saying that you're for price manipulation clans aren't you in essence breaking bot Runescape's and tip.it's rules? You should be ashamed of yourself, and as a mod no less.

which is still...Investing, A player still puts in a good or service in hopes to get out a higher return, The risk of the investment goes down more when you have more capital to "Control" the market. Except some people feel RWT is accomplished still with Junk trading, which basically skewed the prices of worthless items. In theory though, there are other clans as a major risk factor. It's not like one or two clans just exists, lots of big public ones and some very elite private ones as well. Most items people "need" can be obtained through other means. You can be self sufficient. An Investment isn't supposed to come with a guaranteed return. A clan buying out an item and forming a monopoly is a practice that Is completely Illegal in the real world. It doesn't take any intelligence or work at all to group together with a bunch of people and start buying out as much of a product as you can so that you can choose your own price for it. these people don't even have to use price trends, all they have to do is buy, hold the item for awhile while the price rises, and then sell. Junk trading really isn't a viable means of real world trading. If you saw my anti junking thread awhile back you'd see that what junk trading accomplishes isn't a net profit, but a simple liquidation of frozen assets. Either way junk trading still requires effort to gather the materials. (and to be honest if you gather junk you don't already have to "sell for higher" then i laugh at your stupidity because all you just did was sold an item for the same price as you would have without junk, in addition to a [cabbage] load of useless items that you just wasted time procuring) also das , a couple items you can't produce which could be merchanted: -Seeds -dragonstones

1. I believe there is a forum games section for things like this. 2. "If I feel you are worthy" Who the hell are you to decide? 3. Your name is damn stupid.

They can't without bringing back RWT. Besides, The old system sucked horribly when you needed an item that wasn't traded extensively. I used to hate standing around in banks trying to buy items i needed. The convenience of the G.E. really bettered the game for a lot of people.

Funny to you is not cool to me, What was done defies GE logic. Grand Exchange was put in place by Jagex not to be manipulated by a few to upset many. t was put into place to stop RWT. It achieved that. The irony is, it made it much easier for trading to be abused before as you couldn't facelessly buy out tons of one good and cause prices to skyrocket. However Capitalism was deemed inappropriate so I have no issues with people with money, using it to buy an item in hopes to resale it for a profit. I'm surprised a merchanting clan makes the secret investment public in the clan chat anyway. Now on a non related economics note, I miss the "Ruined" economy macro prices where everyone could level and profit by alching. But hey thats me I should be able to put my money into items with the sole intention of being able to sell them later for a profit. After all, If my GP is sitting in my bank, it's doing me no good. Do any of you guys sell/buy stocks who are complaining? Das, what you just described isn't price manipulation, it's investing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with buying items you suspect a future price rise in in order to make profit. It becomes wrong when players from into groups with the intention of buying out all of certain items in order to force the prices to rise. That's not playing the markets, it's controlling them. No one, either in the real world, or runescape, should be allowed to control prices of an item for their own gain. As to what you said about having a free market, That's all well and good, except the price caps are what prevents RWT. If all items were allowed to fluctuate without bounds, RWTer's could use that to manipulate prices and open new avenues for players to buy their game experience instead of earning it. Anyway, Solo merchants, I have absolutely no problems with. They earn their money by studying price trends and choosing when the best times to buy and sell would be. I actually consider that to be great practice for anyone interested in one day investing in the stock market. On top of that, there is a great deal of risk involved in solo merchanting if you make bad predictions. Manipulation clans however, require no intelligence, no actual work, nor anything else which could resemble earning their money. They blindly buy an item someone tells them to, and then sell it when someone tells them to. The only risk is that your clan leaders will dump early and screw you over.

You don't believe that an addiction can confuse a person's eating habits? You really don't think that an addiction to a game can make a person think that they're not hungry or thirsty when, in fact, they really are? Believe me, it can happen, and it's a decent warning sign when dealing with an addict. I've skipped meals and whatnot while playing games before. To not drink anything though? Just seems ridiculous to me. Anyway It doesn't change the fact that You couldn't sit at your computer until you literally keeled over dead. You would start to feel the symptoms of dehydration long before that, the person would get headaches, start getting nauseous, lightheaded, and disoriented. You wouldn't be able to continue playing through that.