rainbowbody

This is a reply to "I Don't Care." What I found interesting about the war on bots is that many players became bot vigilantes. They tend to have no real clue and spend much time harassing other players just in case they are a bot. One of my member accounts is a P Mod and the other is not. The P Mod does not get as much of the "testing" by such players, but the one that is not a mod often gets hassled. One of the worst spots that happened is any of the red chin trapping areas. That acct always has to put up with it. Also, calling people a bot seems to be the new pejorative to call other players, replacing noob for some. Red chins have been quite overcrowded for a while, but yesterday I wanted to do that last push to 72 hunting with that acct by doing red chins. I was shocked to find the spot nearest the AKS ring to have only one player in it on the world I was on. So I went about getting my rocks and getting to 72. The other player eventually left. No one else came to share the spot. But there was this one guy who came with a butterfly net and started killing the chins with it. I figured it was another demented bot vigilante, but I razzed them about being an idiot who did not know the difference between a butterfly and a chin. They shortly seemed to exit the world. It is so tiring for honest players to be continually harassed by such vigilantes. It really hurts the game's longer term prospects.

I was trying to find stuff containing a phrase, "bronze dragon" in this case, and could not get any likely guess to work. I then tried to search for dragon in the titles and got no matches. I looked in help and it mentioned "advanced" as a clickable that I never have found. I eventually found this thread. The update has not been made yet, I guess, but you need more fixes I think.

Price manipulation and the merchant clans: One advantage the clans have is that they can watch for the moment of price changes on selected items better than ordinary players and take advantage of the change timing by selling at the moment the change happens before most correct their offers that have gone out of range. You only need one to watch and then trigger the behavior that triggers the manipulation while keeping it mostly between clan members for the ramp up for a sell off at peak. This part of it could be mostly eliminated if Jagex would implement something I have asked for ever since the GE came out. There should be a way to make offers that stay current because they are relative offers pinned to the actual minimum, market and maximum prices plus an offset calculation in the mx + b form, mb giving a percentage offset and b giving a constant offset. Such offers would keep their place in the offer queue. It has always seemed obvious to me that not doing that creates special manipulation conditions that need not be there. But Jagex has never shown any interest in closing this one.

When my grandchildren talked me into playing this back in 2004, I never even turned public chat (only friends) on (nor trade) for several months. Though I had private chat set to friends, only my grandchildren were on the list. I wanted to figure it all out for myself as see how far I could go just making all the stuff I used or getting drops. Eventually I figured out it was too slow that way and that I had to buy some things from others of sell to them some stuff and turned public chat on. I still emphasized doing most myself and working skills together. I chose combat for drops to support skill work. I explored to find good sources and ways to do things together. It was all about the most important experience: knowledge of the game. But things changed in ways that kept invalidating old knowledge, and usually in ways that degraded the game results and invalidated plans. Some things were for genuine reasons such as real world trading and its associated criminal behavior. But most was not. And of course, Jagex played it all very close to the vest. Having to re-explore to find out how we got messed over lately was a real negative influence style of playing. Most recently, they have started another wave of game changes, but they seem to be motivated on reducing the hassle component and there is much more visibility from Jagex about it. Maybe exploring will again become a worthwhile activity.

But I am curious as to what people use as their junk.

I really don't care to play with supposed junk. I have enough trouble with a near full bank all the time as it is. I am disgusted yet again with the design of stuff.

LOL And I was dumb enough to think you could get rental fees straight, right up to the trade limit per hour. I should stop giving Jagex the benefit of the doubt.

Is the junk needed only to get past the hourly trade limit, i.e., to ask for more than that per hour? Or do they apply the 15 minute trade limit to all of a 24 loan, instead of 96 times the 15 minute limit? (one last try to give Jagex the benefit of the doubt)

Oh my. What a hack. I guess I should have expected such a hack. But I gave Jagex the benefit of the doubt.

Also, do you lose the junk to the borrower?

I have a feeling the Jagex manual is woefully inadequate on covering how this works, LOL. Based on what is said above, the trade limit does come into play here. Since the trade limit seems to be for 15 minutes, it is 4 times that per hour. But trade (balance) limits of both players likely affect this. For loans, do they allow an unbalance based on the total length of the loan? That is, is it based on n hours times the hourly trade limit? Jagex has said that loans do not affect the trade limit, but the trade limit does seem to affect loaning. Do you need junk only if you exceed the hourly trade limit? Or is this really strange?

That does not parse, at least not for me.

The lender puts junk in the window? Now I am confused.

Can you get coin, or do people always try to trade junk?

Is there a guide to lending rates for items? I have avoided lending as I have no information on fair pricing. It seems this could be abused easily, even used for wealth transfer. I cannot find any useful guidelines for what to charge or how that works and the manual also seems uninformative. I suspect that you can pay in items or cash, or the lender can demand cash, which may affect the pricing. I do not care to rip off people nor be ripped off, but I have found it hard to do the due diligence that my ethical tendencies require. This could even be something to add to the item database for lendable items. I am more likely to be a lender than a borrower.

Runescape Name: p2p great_garuda

The rules need to be clear to all and not involve any judgement in application and lead to desired properties in the game. We always get hung up over intent which is almost impossible to know for sure. A well designed game makes desirable stuff happen normally independent of intent of the players. There are examples of this from other game-like contexts. Sports come to mind. So let me examine one such professional sport: baseball. In Major League Baseball (USA), a couple of issues come to mind that may help illustrate this. One is fan interference: fans trying to get a ball from their seats. The other is batters getting hit by pitches. Fans are generally charged a lot more money to be in seats next to the field, and are allowed to bring in gloves. But if they try too hard to get a ball that a fielder might get, they get punished. This is a ballpark design issue. If the ballparks were designed so the the fans could reach into the field area from their seats in any way that could interfere, then this would never happen. And that is doable without excessive cost. So I place the blame on the club and ballpark owners and the rule making organization. If a fan does something unusual to circumvent that design then, intent is clear and not a fuzzy judgement issue. That fits well in computer game design situations as well. When a batter gets hit with a pitch, it becomes a judgement call to determine if it was intended. That is very uneven, but is there because there is this bit of managerial insanity in the baseball culture of needing to retaliate. Some pitchers also are higher on intimidation as a style than are other pitchers. The batter gets a free pass to first base, but the judgement comes in as to whether the pitcher should be ejected. If the rule were set to be that if the pitch is inside and hits the batter, the pitcher is ejected, then the judgement factor is removed, and ejection is just a situational rule with no judgmental aspect to it. They could even use replay to help determine the case or even one of those computer determinations of ball flight versus the strike zone. The rule would be clear and known and not have any judgement needed. This shows that clear public rules that really fit can make things much easier. This is where Jagex needs to go with how they do this game. It applies to the GE cases in particular.

Another area that needs to be covered is how the rules to control abusive merchanting fit the life cycle of expensive items. The rules likely need to change over the life cycle in a known way as there are clear stages in it. When an item is introduced to the game, it fits into a collection of existing items of related game purpose and values and affects all of them in some direct or indirect way. Some items fit in the middle and seem to have less impact. It is the high end items that seem to have large impact. If it is a new high end weapon, shield or armor, then it has an interesting impact. Generally, it changes the pricing of other high end stuff of similar purpose over time. It is initially scarce, making a sellers market. It stays that way for a while. During this phase, buying several of such an item (counting already owned items) should get reduced priority (and possibly limits) over new buys. This is the only way to keep the merchants from going wild in the initial phase. Getting items to those wanting to use them should have priority always and it is particularly important in the beginning. But such reductions should only affect the exchange and never affect drops as a player should always be encouraged to try to get the items through other game activity. When items become established, pricing stabilized over a decent period and the supply/demand becoming more normal for rarer useful stuff, the limits and priority behaviors should be less onerous, though should still be there. When items become very mature, newer high end stuff having affected their value for a while, then there should be less constraints, though there still needs to be some to insure normal needs get met without manipulation. If this is done well, it does not prevent merchanting (buying low, holding, and selling high), but it means it has to contend with normal item life cycle properties without dominating it. Merchanting even has a good aspect in that it allows there to be a more continual demand, that a big ticket item can be sold quickly most of the time and allows items to be available more quickly during the ebb and flow of drops. The idea is to allow this aspect without merchanting becoming the dominant factor.

Well, there are competing needs and rights and some behaviors are problems because of the interference with those of others. But humankind has troubles in sorting that out in the real world so it is not too surprising that it is hard to sort out in the design and implementation of this game. Some people try to maximize their own profit or do their thing without any concern for the effects on others, and some even actively try to interfere with the needs of others. Most are just trying to to get along and do what they can to play the game and sell what they get or make in the course of the game and buy what they need to continue. Some aspects of the game lead readily to abuse and others are less inherently unfriendly, though it is always possible to play the game in ways that are actively discourteous and disrespectful of others and actively interfere with others and what they are trying to do in the normal course of the game. The underlying contention here is whether the economics is considered a competitive sport where interfering with others and their ability to play the game is part of playing the game well or is it just behaving badly. I think it is more the latter and that the economics is more a supportive role to developing and playing. But this needs to be made more clear by Jagex and they need to make it publicly clear and stick to the principles they lay out. Much like many other parts of the game, they need to make the economic rules as intended, designed, and as implemented more clear. Hidden rules and behavior allows constant changes and mostly harms the ordinary player. The ones who try to take advantage thrive in a hidden (as opposed to an open/visible) environment. Yet keeping a lot of stuff hidden is how Jagex works. It allows them to invalidate player experience by continual nerfing or at least changing behaviors and results of activities. As far as the GE is concerned, it has several flaws in how it works. The price change mechanism versus price setting for buying or selling by a player interact poorly because of the forced hard min/max. There are valid reasons for the min/max, but they fail to see that the having no mechanism to allow a buy or sell offer stay in range is essential when there are hard range limits. This interferes with the pecking order of buying and selling in ways that can be manipulated. Limits on buying and selling counts on some items seem to be part of trying to keep down the level of interference with normal play that is not so trading oriented. Such may be valid, but since it is all so hidden it is hard to tell if any of it is fair. The key thing here is interference with others as I see it. Buying and selling is part of the game. But if they want to insure that merchants do not dominate the market with their manipulations, then they need to have advertised detection rules that lower their priority in fully advertised rules for resolving buying and selling. Limiting rates is not enough.