Hoet

The thing is, at 7M a pop, people are paying $0.714/M for gold. As time progresses, and the newness factor wears off from being able to buy gold directly from Jagex, people will start demanding more in return. The "money sink" created with the Bond market is essentially 0. No one is going to be paying 10% to re-trade them. 95% of people who buy a Bond in-game will be redeeming it themselves. Bonds last one trade, and they're eliminated. Gold continues circulating. People will not be buying as many Bonds in 2 weeks, 2 months, or 2 years as they are today. We are seeing the highest amounts of Bonds entering market right now. Supply will decrease, while demand should stay flat.

Bonds are so cheap right now it's unreal. They will almost definitely rise in price in the long run. Right now the supply of bonds is at an all-time high, since so many people are buying on release. The amount of bonds entering the market will soon diminish greatly. I foresee bonds being at least 10M each long-term. At rates right now - where 1 Bond costs ~7M, and at a market price of $0.4/M, people can buy members for about $6 per month. You can RWT with any tradeable item, it's irrelevant what you buy (GP, Bond, Party Hat) since all items can be exchanged in-game.

There is only one reason to buy Bonds for $5 each: to trade them for gold / items. The original purchaser of the Bond has no other incentive whatsoever to buy them. Membership, Runecoins, SoF spins are all cheaper if bought directly. 1 Bond = $5 each Redeemable for: - 14 days of membership ($0.35 / day) - 8 Squeal of Fortune spins ($0.63 / spin) - 160 RuneCoins ($0.03125 / Runecoin) Prices on Runescape.com: - 30 days of membership for $8 ($0.267 / day) - 10 Squeal of Fortune Spins ($0.5 / spin) - $5 for 200 Runecoins ($0.025 / Runecoin)

Although Jagex claims to know exactly who is buying/selling gold, this is not the case. Yes, they do detect it sometimes, and ban the dealers. They expend a ton of resources doing this, it's a very manual process. They have already done as much as they can in terms of banning dealers, there isn't some button they can press to increase the intensity. As for them banning buyers, once again, I highly doubt this will happen. As Jagex mentioned, a huge amount of their userbase partakes in RWT. They now even sell gold themselves through Bonds. There is no way they can afford to ban casual players who buy gold on websites. It's a horrible move business-wise. The game is losing enough of a userbase as it is without banning its longstanding customers. I believe Jagex is realizing that there is no way to reverse the trend of a decreasing population in Runescape. The game is not run by the original creators, management has been completely rehauled since RS1 and even RS2 launch. No one on the board has anything vested in the game beyond money. This isn't their baby that they've raised. It's an asset they accumulated. They've decided to extract as much revenue as possible from the current audience. This is an update motivated by short-term gains and nothing more. The game is shrinking and they may as well grab as much money as possible on the way out. But here is the thing: the stuff they are doing now is absolutely nothing new to the MMORPG worlds, some games (even ones going back a decade) is/was using this kind of system and have survived on that since its own beginning (Knight Online, Runes of Magic to name a few). Also, there is also this issue of declining MMORPG players in general, what if you were CEO and you saw that nothing you could do, no matter how much in player's favor, could revive the number of RS players simply because the industry is declining? Keep doing it until the game physically dies, and possibly go bankrupt, or, as you say, make as much money as possible on the way out? I suppose there are different ways to define success for this update. I agree that it will increase revenue for Jagex. Some may define that as a success. However, the video on Runescape.com's header describes this update as a dagger to off-site RWT. They claim that by Jagex selling Bonds, and allowing players to trade bonds, that it will somehow unhinge the secondary markets. If Jagex was just honest to the community about it, then I'd be fine with it. They created the game, they can do whatever they want really. As you said, they wouldn't be the first company to do something like this. They're a company with decreasing revenue and need to find a way to remain successful. We all got the impression that Jagex was willing to sacrifice the short terms gains available from selling in-game wealth to benefit the game over the long-term. This is the obvious signal that they are no longer thinking long-term, and are instead focusing purely on short term profit. Runescape is now a Pay-To-Win game.

Although Jagex claims to know exactly who is buying/selling gold, this is not the case. Yes, they do detect it sometimes, and ban the dealers. They expend a ton of resources doing this, it's a very manual process. They have already done as much as they can in terms of banning dealers, there isn't some button they can press to increase the intensity. As for them banning buyers, once again, I highly doubt this will happen. As Jagex mentioned, a huge amount of their userbase partakes in RWT. They now even sell gold themselves through Bonds. There is no way they can afford to ban casual players who buy gold on websites. It's a horrible move business-wise. The game is losing enough of a userbase as it is without banning its longstanding customers. I believe Jagex is realizing that there is no way to reverse the trend of a decreasing population in Runescape. The game is not run by the original creators, management has been completely rehauled since RS1 and even RS2 launch. No one on the board has anything vested in the game beyond money. This isn't their baby that they've raised. It's an asset they accumulated. They've decided to extract as much revenue as possible from the current audience. This is an update motivated by short-term gains and nothing more. The game is shrinking and they may as well grab as much money as possible on the way out.

Staking is a zero sum game, yes, but this also means there are winners and there are losers. For whatever reason, there are players who tend to win more than they lose. Some of them find an edge through PID (always getting first hit). Some of them just have better bankroll management. Regardless, these players will go on a hot streak, and sell off the winnings. They hold onto enough gold to continue their staking, and they'll sell again once they surpass the amount of gold they need to stake.

A player can be infinitely more effective than a bot at making money. Stakers can earn Billions daily. Dicers were making billions daily back at its peak as well. You are comparing apples to oranges. Bots make absolute peanuts when compared to real players. For a Gold-Farming company to see solid returns, they need to be running an insane amount of bots (we're taking hundreds to even thousands). This is an extremely technical business, and requires a very different skill-set than gold buying/selling. Most businesses see no need in setting up a gold farm. They can just buy from the gold farmers themselves, or other players, at the market rate. Unless the company is sure that they can produce gold for a lower cost than on the wholesale market, without compromising resources being used on other areas of the business, there is no reason to gold farm. Bots which advertise gold sites are definitely a different situation. These are certainly owned by the offending sites themselves.

The bond system as it is right now is destined to fail. It offers players the ability to buy gold (and membership / other Jagex pay-to-win stuff), but it offers no way for players to SELL gold. This means it will be impossible for bonds to find a long-term equilibrium price. They do not satisfy the solution which is provided by gold trading. The reason websites are able to sell gold to players is because they also buy gold from players. 99% of the RS Gold websites out there do NOT make their own gold. There is a misconception that these websites are gold farms; they are NOT. Gold farming and gold selling are completely separate businesses. It would be like saying Wal-Mart manufactures all of their own products. These websites buy from players at a lower rate and sell at a higher rate. Jagex states that 45-50% of the community currently partakes in RWT. Who knows how legitimate this number is, and how it was calculated, but the implied statement is that they wish to provide service to this 45-50% of the population. The fact is, the target customer-base for Jagex is the OTHER 50%, the ones who DO NOT currently buy gold. The portion of the community that already partakes on third party websites, etc. is very unlikely to switch over to buying / selling from Jagex unless the prices are competitive. Currently, the price for 1 bond is $5 USD. Their value on the Grand Exchange will be determined by supply/demand. They have no utility in-game beyond their membership value. They cannot be redeemed for real world cash (within game rules). Membership costs $8 per month on the site, and a bond provides 14 days of membership. If we count a month as 30 days on average, the value of a bond is (14 / 30 * $8) = $3.73. We see that bonds are already overpriced. So now, we see that a bond carries $3.73 in value in-game. If we consider current gold prices to be about $0.40/M, then we can assume a player will expect the GE price to be approximately 9.3M for a bond. The bond was originally purchased for $5, so this means the person who originally bought the bond has effectively paid ~$0.54/m or 34% extra just by purchasing a bond. Now, let's consider the assumption we made in this calculation: Membership $ and Real Life $ are equivalent REALITY: People certainly value real $ more than store credit on Runescape.com. This means that the GE price should actually be lower than 9.33M in the long run. Furthermore, the marginal value of a membership to one player falls as quantity increases. A player may want 2-3 Bonds for membership, but they likely don't need 10-20 Bonds for membership. With RL $, the first dollar is as useful as the last dollar. Now, back to the point that Jagex has not offered a way for players to cash out into RL $. This means there is still a massive hole in the economy. These players who wish to sell gold will have no choice but to undercut Jagex's prices on the Black Market. Jagex can cry all they want, but they even admitted this economy exists and is not going away. So they've made a major mistake by neglecting this portion of that market. By not allowing players to cash out Bonds / GP for RL $, they create a market outside the game. We will see gold prices drop quite quickly once these updates are implemented. The Black Market will find an equilibrium at a much lower rate for gold than the Bond market. The only players that will continue to buy gold with Bonds are the new customers who were afraid of transacting off-site. This update will only increase the amount of people RWT'ing, and will not stop any off-site activity. It's a complete money-grab in every sense of the term. It offers nothing to combat gold-farming, gold selling or RWT in general.

At what time of day (GMT) did the poll open?

This update will obviously have a huge following in the early stages. Runescape 2006-7 Private Servers were / are extremely popular, and this is Jagex attempting to capture this portion of the market which longs for the old style of Runescape. It should also bring back some retired players, initially. It will initially be a significant net boost in the amount of subscribers for Runescape as a whole, but will actually result in a decrease of activity on the main servers (EOC Servers) as people try out the 2007 ones. The problem I foresee occurs mid / long-term. The nostalgia wears off, people are sick of training skills they've already done on the main version, and old players get bored again. Some switch back to EOC, many of them quit / go back into retirement. A major portion of the population which were avid and active members on EOC have converted to 2007-scape players. The total population drops back down or near the levels we see today, yet the game population is now split between two games. To provide the same level of service to the same amount of players now costs Jagex considerably more. Plus, with the game split in two, neither are as strong as the original. This worries me, because Jagex must know these mid / long-term consequences. This is a decision which is fueled by short-run profit, and speaks volumes about the company's view on Runescape's longevity.