RSonomics

You could say that for any item with high value. The fact is, the reason these items hold their high value is because they are very difficult to obtain. If one person has seriously been playing the minigame 24/7, then he is simply an anomaly, and would still not have nearly enough impact to actually affect the item's price. That's the equivalent of saying one person doing Arma runs all day will hurt the prices of AGS's. As was said earlier on this thread, items like Disks / Easters / Pumpkins are already seen as a form of currency in the Rares market. However, their prices are high enough that they are only involved in very large trades. What exactly do you mean by that?I think what he means is that if one can buy the grimy torstol at 11k ea they can transfer that to another account which can clean it and sell it for 20k ea, thus doubling their money. Mind you its almost impossible to buy grimy torstols at the moment.Back on topic, I think the only reason mint cakes are so expensive is because stakers are using it extensively. When mints were under 30k, the price was ~ 4m each. Since the most you can stake is 60k, stakers could stake a max of 2 mints, which would be ~ 8m. Now that mints are over 30k, the price has suddenly shot up from 4m to 10m! Anyone else see a correlation between the number of stakeable mints and the increased price? You do raise an interesting point, that Mint Cakes are widely used by stakers. I did forget about this in my original post. It is an interesting situation; a Mint Cake is useful to Staking because it is in demand, and it is in demand because it is useful for Staking. This leads to an exponential increase in demand. Once again though, I am not saying Mint Cakes are the be all and end all currency on Runescape. It could be that the currency item changes once Mints break past 60k. It could be that the item changes once Mints pass 1M. What's important is that it seems to me that Runescape will always have a secondary currency now, as many trades rely on them.

For some reason, whenever the market deviates from the norm, people always blame merchants and call them "scammers". The thing is, Mint Cakes are not some item being merchanted by a clan. They are an item that has been adopted as currency. If you look at their price history on GE, they have NEVER dropped in price in the past 180 days. Artificial demand can be created by merchants, but not for 180 straight days. At that point you must realize that the item is undervalued. Its price pattern is very similar to items like Easter Eggs, Pumpkins and Disks right now. You seem to be going through the thought process that, seeing as Mint Cakes have no utility in the game, they cannot hold value. This is untrue, as I mentioned in other MMORPG's, players will and do adopt items as currency, which tends to be much more dependent on their scarcity than utility. For example, something like a Lobster could never be a true form of Currency on Runescape, because they are easily obtainable by any player. If demand raised on lobsters, supply would simply adjust. The same cannot be said for our item in question, Mint Cakes. They are still far too difficult to accumulate, and therefore supply cannot keep up with demand. If you look at the real world, you will see that paper currency is very similar to a Mint Cake (or any item-based currency). Its price is completely unrelated to its utility; the paper that a $20.00 note is printed on is worth maybe a few cents, whereas the bill itself has a value of $20. Currency is based completely on trust; trust that others will value it equally. People know that when they buy a Mint Cake, they are buying an item worth a certain amount to other Runescape players. Now, this does certainly mean that if players were to suddenly lose faith in Mint Cakes as currency, their value would plummet. However, for such a change to come about, there would need to be a change in the environment. As of right now, Mint Cakes are very stable. If Jagex were to implement an update making the accumulation of them much easier, then of course this would dramatically affect demand and prices. Should their price rise above 1 Mil cash, then this too would likely cause many problems. However, this is simply playing the "what if" game. Right now, it is impossible to deny that players view Mint Cakes as currency. Simply check any trading forum on Runescape.com. What is interesting is that right now, there are only a select handful of items which are traded with Mint Cakes. They are the items which are very rare; most items in Runescape can simply be bought and sold on the Grand Exchange. However, could we see a greater shift towards Mint Cakes as currency in the future? Perhaps one day even semi-rare items, like AGS / Whip will only be traded for Mint Cakes as well. Are we just seeing the tip of the iceberg right now?

My point is that if you remove wealth transfer on GP, people will migrate towards a new currency (like Mint Cakes).

Jagex has tried something very unheard of in MMORPG's. They have attempted to make wealth transfer impossible to the game, by placing set prices on all tradeable items, and restricting trades to be of equal value. Fast forward one year. The RS economy has changed drastically in direct result to the issue. Nearly a year has passed since BH was removed, and wealth transfer has indeed virtually disappeared. The game has changed, now many of the most popular items cannot be bought for purely GP. Mint Cakes are the item that stands out the most. The population of RS has gradually begun to accept these items as the new base currency for all highly demanded items. The most similar situation I could compare this to would be SOJ's (Stone Of Jordan) in Diablo2. For years, Diablo2 gold was virtually worthless, as the community rapidly adopted the SOJ as the main form of currency. This was not for the same reason, however. Gold on Diablo2 was valueless, as it was capped at certain levels, and was far too easy to obtain in high quantities. This led the community to adopt an item as its main form of currency. These items tend to be very difficult to accumulate, although their utility in-game is not the determinant of price. The Runescape population has adopted mint cakes as the main form of currency due to several reasons. 1) They are cheap (Mint Cakes = 29.6k market price) 2) They are hard to obtain 3) They are uniform (There is only one version of a mint cake) There are numerous items on Runescape that could fill these characteristics. Mint Cakes are just the ones that caught on. One year from now, we could see a change in this item, if Mint Cake prices rise too high on the Grand Exchange. In the end, this is obsolete, the real interesting point here is that this shows people's reaction towards the restriction of trade. They will simply adopt a new form of currency, which has no restrictions.