This is what i posted on RSOF, no ones really payed attention with all the spam though So everyones heard about Bootgate, a few are making quite a bit of money off of this, but the basic economics of this means most people are going to get hurt from this. There are solutions and hopefully Jagex is willing to take them. Economies fluctuate based off of fear. I will bring up the perfect example from the DOW not too long ago. We recently had this awful oil spill, and I live on the gulf coast, it is terrible, and it will destroy where I live, but that is not the point so I will get back to the topic. After the oil spill, the DOW crashed 1000 points, from 11000 to 10000, BP (and all the damage done to fishing/tourism in Louisiana/BPs losses/the moratorium/effects on other oil companies) does not control 1/11 of the market share and wont cause that much of a loss, but the market still dropped. People panicked and sold once something set off the market. This will be important to understand later. Inflation is bad; this means GPs value decreases relative to the value of items, which means anyone who had GP, suddenly has to use much more of it to buy the same things. It means nothing to have a million dollars if the price of bread is two million. The Runescape economy has a problem with inflation that Jagex has not been able to combat effectively. More raw materials are coming into the economy than are used, prices are being manipulated by merchant clans, and more money is being produced. Jagex has just injected trillions, trillions more GP into the market which devalues it quite a bit more. It has also given merchant clans huge amounts of raw spending power on top of what they already have. Right now two things are going to happen, prices are going to rise quite a bit because of the sudden influx of GP into the economy, which is bad, and no one wants to suddenly spend 5k per shark. The other thing is the merchant clans suddenly have trillions more GP which they can use to manipulate the market with. They will buy raw materials, raising their price and creating an artificial demand. Then they will hoard them, causing a surplus of raw materials, especially since the demand will be so large. This will create a large amount potential GP which will be eventually converted into it, and all the time the prices are going to be rising and devaluing gold more. Once all these trillions of GP worth materials are dumped, everyone will dump, causing a panic. This will cause massive artificial deflation which gives even more buying power to merchant clans. Then the merchant clans which their deflated currency can afford a lot more of the crashed raw materials, driving up demand again, along with inflation, they will control even more of the market after that, and then the cycle repeats. This will also cause even more inflation because, people will hoard things like planks and fish and ores, rather than use them. This will remove large amounts of money being drained, which is a gigantic blow to the economy. Based on an estimate of 1000000 members (a better guess is 3000000, so the real problem might be 3 times as bad). 55% of 1 million is 550,000- had 1- 550,000 boots added to the economy- 24,750,000,000 GP added to the economy 1% of 1 million is 10,000 - had more than 50- 500,000 more boots- 22,500,000,000 GP added to the economy 0.1% of 1 million is 1,000 - had more than 500- 500,000 more boots- 22,500,000,000 GP added to the economy 0.01% of 1 million is 100 - had more than 5000- 500,000 more boots- 22,500,000,000 GP added to the economy 0.005% of 1 million is 50- had 10,000 boots- 500,000 more boots- 22,500,000,000 GP added to the economy There are a few outliers that had over 100000- adding 1500000 more boots- 67,500,000,000 more GP added to the economy This means that 4,050,000 boots are in the economy for a grand total of 182,250,000,000. It is likely that we should use at least 3000000 people in our estimation which mean 12,150,000 are in the economy, making this 542,750,000,000 GP, This is a conservative estimate, and it also assumes that there was no leaks, and only 5 people with 300,000 or more, I personally believe that there was more than this. That means the potential money in this crisis may be in the trillions. Credit to Elrond for many of these calculations, I used them to make my own, his thread is here. QFC: 15-16-272-61197061 That means This will hit Ftp especially badly, much worse than members, because Ftp does not have any big ticket items like godswords or whips that are going to inflate massively. They also do not have access to the climbing boots which means that the trillions being pumped into the economy are not going to touch the ftp economy making it much weaker. Also many Ftp have just started, which means they have less money, and most of it is in GP, the more money you have, the better you can deal with inflation, lets take a rune scimitar, if it suddenly jumps to 50000 GP, you can afford it with no problem if you have 10 million, but if you only have 100000, thats quite a hit. It is blatantly wrecking Ftp. There are 3 possible solutions. These are the solutions and their effects. Solution 1 The first and best solution is a simple rollback. Yes it will anger people who have played in the last day, but no one has leveled significantly in just one day and even the people who got GWD drops or claws are taking such a massive hit that they are better off without the drops and without this kind of inflation. Solution 2 Option two is to confiscate the money and items from the people who had massive amounts of boots. This would be ideal but it would cause such a political mess it wouldnt happen. (Everyone remembers Jagex apologizing to the kid who got his stuff stole after he used his Christmas money to buy items). Solution 3 They can attempt to counter the effects of the merchant clans by introducing new controls and messing around with material supply to fit the demand, and trying to catch the crash. Ideally, they do a rollback when the merchant clans sell and try and catch all the items, etc. They can try and balance it out by removing a lot of items from the Grand Exchange, but manipulating the market makes it go screwy and they have to get the timing right. And honestly Jagex isnt too good at that. Lastly between all the leaks that have come out and Jagexs censorship and arrogance, I dont expect this to get fixed. Infact it feels like they wanted this for some odd reason. It makes no sense at all, but they need to fix it and un-ban a few accounts who told the truth.
