canadiansmurf

Your wrong plenty of people ride real market trends to make money. These people know what they are doing and study the market for trends and buy it when it's slow and sell as the real demand rises. The people who ride price manipulator's waves are manipulators themselves. ... Common sense? You are not alone in studying the trends, if anything these trends are not worth investing in anymore, items crash much faster following trends now. Unless you are deliberatly being stupid and hiding your head in the sand, trends are not the way to go to invest at the moment. Buying when prices are low? And praying that prices go up? Good luck. True merchanters are looking for profits in the millions and they don't want to wait months for it. "The people who ride price manipulator's waves are manipulators themselves." Some solo investors are doing this but aren't aware that they are doing this, some manipulators CAUSE trends. Where is the line drawn between the solo mercher and the clan mercher? How exactly would jagex be able to tell the difference it would be impossible. When they removed free trade and pking people swore they would quit and yet Jagex didn't take a huge impact or as much as those people claimed they would. Look around lots of people have quit, there was an impact, and Jagex has lost members. I remember when I used to play before trade restrictions it was rare to see a high level in F2P now it's rare not to see a high level in F2P or a pure with multiple accounts. What I do see is a lack of new players, who are truly new to the game. Most people just changed the way they play and the only people who will quit are the hardcore manipulators who have no merchanting skill and all they know how to do is manipulate. The real merchants will still be able to make money because they have some real skill. "Real merchanters" have more skill than you will ever have, the ones manipulating are the ones with true skill, by manipulating others they gain a guaranteed return, so why would they be patient and wait for the market to go up or why would they risk their gp when they can force it to go up and earn lots of money guaranteed. "Most people just changed the way they play" Yes players have been doing this since Runescape began, this game keeps changing but if the game became more restricted and had more rules, I doubt those who have stuck around will stay longer. There's only so much change someone can take, and the game you are playing for FUN shouldn't end up feeling like you are in school or supervised to the extent you can't do anything much.

"Do you understand the difference between price manipulating "merch" clans, and solo merchanting?" Do you understand that solo merchants usually ride the coat-tails of the merch clans? It stands to reason that even if you are oblivious to merch clans if you are solo merching, jagex just tweaking prices at whim will affect the solo merchanter as well. If clan merch is banned, than I don't see how solo merch will still be possible. They aren't the same but they are similar. These clans will just become smaller and more discrete and they will chat off of rs. How exactly will jagex be able to identify the solo merchanter vs the clan merchanter, if the solo merchanter is accidentally investing in the same item as some clan? Also this is a mmorpg, not a solo game. Yet.

Nailing their own coffin? :shame: If jagex decides to take on merch clans, I wonder how many players will be left. Pvp is okay but not a great money maker. Maybe that is their goal, to get rid of certain players and attract younger, casual players who won't whine or complain and are happy with basic items. I'm fascinated how this is all playing out in Jagex's timeline, the GE was introduced so long ago and the GE Exchange updates page of price rise and fall etc. is still labelled GE BETA. It's ironic that they let people artificially manipulate prices, these merch clan's are a result of Jagex's laziness. Also, from the beginning of the GE Jagex encouraged people to invest in the GE and take risk and profit from price rises. Jagex encouraged stock market-like investing in the GE. Jagex is smart enough to know that lots of people play just for gold pieces. If they start to minimize profits from GE and all, heaps of people will quit. For those of you posting on here laughing at merchers getting burned and losing GP, I wonder how much you'd laugh if Jagex started doing this more regularly. Prices being unstable or just flat will minimize profits for skillers and non-merchanting players as well.