This is not a rant about how manipulation clans effect the economy. This is a rant about how manipulation clans can negatively effect the real lives of people who are unfortunate enough to be sucked into them. i.e. young players who don't know enough to avoid these scams. I took the time to write all of it, please to the time to read all of it. Today I was looking at the money in my bank; A measly million. I was thinking of ways to boost this amount, when an idea popped into my head. Something along the lines of "I know that people get scammed by manipulation clans, but maybe i could try to find an item that looks merch-able, and buy some before a manipulation clan does. Then I will sell early after a clan picks it up and make about 20% profit." In essence, I wanted to manipulated the manipulators. So to start my immersion into the world of manipulation clans, i visited world 1 GE. Immediately after logging in, I was bombarded with a wall of M.C. (I will now refer to manipulation clans as M.C. to save time.) spammers, and must admit, I laughed to myself. I noted to myself that many of the spammers had regualar usernames. While there were still many auto spammers with names such as "Huge Merch2", there were also players whos names were original, suggesting they were main accounts. Then another thought crept into my head. Either they are using auto typers, or they arn't. Either is scary. If they are using auto typers, then those main accounts may very well be banned should jagex decide to take action. Thats somebodies hours of game time possibly down the drain b/c they are advertising for somebody who is scamming them. If those arn't autotypers, then those are real people sitting at a computer screen, typing line after line in hopes of getting ranked, so that maybe they can make a little extra money. These people are wasting their lives! Playing Runescape, with connection to the real world is useless. Spamming, within Runescape, is useless as far as the point of the game goes. What if you are being useless, inside the thing that in reality is useless? Thats just sad! These people are going on a game, to work, and the worst part, are not getting paid for it. Imagine how these people must feel after their hours of sitting hunched over a computer, getting carpel tunnel, rewards them with losing large sums of their in game wealth? So now, feeling curious, I joined one of these clans. The cc title was set as "announced soon", so I set public to hide and waited a few mins. I sat back and watched as the leader of the cc pumped propaganda into the minds of these people. People who were of ignorant just how complex the methods clan leaders were using in order to drill the "Wow im going to be so rich" mentality into their sponge-like minds. Some methods that are used by the M.C. to keep its members believing in the clan: -To prevent people joining these clans and spamming things like "Your all being scammed! don't buy anything!", the only person who can talk in the cc is the leader, and ranked members on occasion(such as question time, see below). -Leader places dump prices sometimes up to 2 times or more than the price that they will actually be dumping at. -Leader says things such as "This merch is going to be the best we've ever had!" -Ploys to make members believe that leaders do not already have the item pre-bought This got me feeling slightly irritated, and I began to make some real-world connections. Dictatorship Country: High censorship High amount of propaganda Sweatshop Companies: Taking advantage of groups of people Having people do menial tasks for little/no reward One owner/ group of owners make large profits My conclusion: What these people are doing is terrible! So I sat and watched for a little longer, anger brewing. Eventually, the leader called everyone to pay attention, they were going to have a vote on what item should be merched. "That seems a little odd" I thought. "This is one of those rare honest M.C. clan leaders? Who buys at the same time as all the lower members of his clan?". Oh wait. Hes lying. So for about 2 minutes the leader opened up his private chat so he could receive votes for which item we should pick. "So mister leader guy, who's confirming the actual results of the "votes" you received?" Oh wait. Your lying. To prove it, I sent him my vote. Maybe he missed my vote? or maybe he wasnt even looking when people poured in their suggetions. Im guessing the later, because I was neither kicked nor replied to. Either way, through the honest system of democracy, we found our merch item; amulet of defense. Now the leader opened up clan chat for all ranked members, and "question time" began, where regular members were free to pm questions to ranked members. By this time it was fair to say I was pretty pissed off. Me and a ranked member had this chat. To make things easier, this is the order of how things went: (RM = ranked member I was talking to) Me: How many thousands of defense ammys did you already have Me: before you told us to buy them out? RM: Game I had non Me: How can anyone believe that? RM: (silence) Me: I have another question Me: Whats the number of people who are in on the Me: "actual" dump price? RM: Game Sock--4k Me: You didnt answer my question you idiot Me: I asked you, how many people are in on the "actual" dump price (1.5k?ish) RM: Game Sock--i told u the dump price is 4k Me: Im not asking you the dump price you idiot! Im asking how many people Me: Are going to dump at 1.5k? Like all the people in kahoots Me: Can your small mind fit around that simple question? RM: (No response) Of course this convo didn't accomplish anything, I was just trying to blow off some steam. At this time I left the clan chat, and took a break from Runescape for a while. Conclusion I came in hopes of manipulating the manipulators, and maybe stealing a few gp from the owners of merchanting clans. While I may infact take money from a few clan leaders, I am mostly taking money from A LOT of innocent players. You must realize that most of the people who fall into these tricks are gullible and young players. For some of you, think back to when you were twelve/ thirteen and playing the game. Remember how much it meant to you. Back then, having all that youve worked for in runescape taken away from you could be devastating. However, I don't care about the prices being manipulated, I care about the people being manipulated. Kids come onto Runescape to have fun, and they are prime victims for this scam. Being tricked into wasting your time, (time that is meant to be fun, hell! your playing a video game!) is what makes me so damn angry at manipulators. Be it the time you take to spam, the time lost when you are banned for auto-spamming, or the time lost when you lose the money you worked for hours to get. Our lives are short. Our time as children is shorter. Please support and raise any and all conflict with Price Manipulators as much as you possibly can. Thanks for reading.
