Travis_of_legend

Scamming is probably the only problem I ever encountered in the game. Somebody would do a price change or lure a Noob into the wild and kill them. That is a naughty thing to do and those evil people deserve to be banned or at least have some black marks put on their account. Merchantism however is a completely different realm. These players always played by the rules and showed discipline and professionalism in their business. Merchants are completely legal economists and rely on the concepts of supply and demand. They recognize and learn the trade of prices of all items in the game and learn also to avoid scammers. They buy an item for less and sell it to someone who has more demand for it than other players. The good people of runescape including merchants work hard for their money and should be able to do what they want with it as long as its not used to scam people. Merchants indeed play a huge part in stimulating the runescape economy. Merchants are based on the concept of mutualism. A merchant sells a player an item and makes a profit. Both the player and merchant benefit from each other. The other concept of the old capitalist system of runescape is that it allowed everybody to be equal. anybody could hold any sum of money and loan it to another player. The Grand Exchange is indeed a good idea and highlights the concept of an "in-game" forum but it is inferior in comparison to real humans who set the prices of items. That is what made the game the most fun and realistic. The prices were set by the people for the people and were very flexible. There was no "market price" or "minimum/maximum price." If somebody felt generous and wanted to sell a full barrows set for 30k then they could. With all these pluses in mind let us remember the negative side; scamming. Scammers are dishonest people only set out to make things better for themselves and in the end have no reason to be playing the game. This feud could very easily be solved if only Jagex would employ more in-game moderators and make moves to make getting away with scamming much harder. This is a common case of blaming the wrong system. It is true that merchanting and scamming go together, and it is also true that they are both arts. But one is for the good and one is for evil. I feel merchanting/free trade, has been associated with scamming and therefore one bad apple truly spoiled the whole bunch. Your humble gamer, sephi101