agamemnus

Here: http://forum.tip.it/viewtopic.php?t=725850

It's awesome, isn't it? \

That's their own damn fault. They're the ones who made the game appeal to whiny, stupid children/adolescents. I guess CS is another thing Jagex shouldn't be worried about when it comes to that customer group. \ I had been appealing my forum ban for over two years with dozens of messages to Jagex, with no personal response. They stopped sending me personal responses two and a half years ago, so it's not just that they have too many messages. They just don't give a DAMN about it!

Approximately two and a half years ago, I stopped receiving personal replies from Jagex. I've sent Jagex dozens of messages and I have never gotten a reply. Of late, I've received a few dozen of these each time I send them a communique: (emphasis mine) Being in a somewhat paranoid mood today, I think I've just now realized the reason. I've stopped receiving personal replies right after I argued with one of the mods on the wisdom of changing Jute seed exp. from ~73 to weeks after the farming came out on the basis that it was a bug. A bug, I argued, and still do, that they never discussed until weeks had passed. So, they were wrong, I publically stated, because if it was a bug that wasn't changed weeks after farming was released (and everyone knew about it) Jagex was incompetent. If it was changed for "balance", it was dishonest not to let players know about it. Jagex can't win any way, so what do they do? They silence me and cut off my CS... Anyone experience a drought like I did?

Qeltar is right, and you sheep are too stupid to understand it. In a free market, people are free to charge whatever price they want, and others are free to buy at whatever price they want. Feel free to bash me with an economics argument, and I will happily tell you why you are wrong.

I have a bit of a follow-up to Qeltar's "overshoot" comment. Qeltar started a thread in the Official Runescape Forum (Recent Updates about it) and tried to discuss pure essence -- quite a few people responded, including at least one Jagex employee several times. (Mod Mark H I believe) Jagex doesn't quite seem to understand Qeltar's argument, although it's economics 101: if you have price floors and price ceilings, you will have shortages. Some people will get more for their product than normal (case of price floor), and some less than normal (case of price ceiling). However, the vast majority of people will not get what they want -- it's just not available. One off the cuff real-world nice example of that is Venezuela -- they're awash in oil money but have for a while been plagued with supply problems in basic goods and food because of the government's (like Jagex's) moronic inability to grasp how price ceilings and price floors work. Expect many more of the rune essence type shortages in the future.

Flammacor, You make some interesting arguments, but... Yes. That's why I said the definition of instrinsic value is not enough to define a bubble market, because that alone will be unable to define "the rest", and the definition of "instrinsic" is too broad -- it would potentially preclude a bubble market. That's why people that argue under theories of efficient markets always disclaim that there are rare exceptions... because bubbles are historical fact. Right, but efficient markets never cause bubbles. Why? Without any sort of bubble market the price of phats will rise all the time, and the future earnings is guaranteed and can be estimated, given we know the growth of demand and supply. (which we do, if we are to work with the condition of ceteris paribus) It cannot. The paper you cited makes use of traders that assume irrationality where none exists if the market was efficient. In Runescape, there are/were very few irrational party hat traders because to earn this much money most players must be rational in the first place, and rationally assume this of everyone else. Again, my definition would even fit your cited paper. Those traders who assume some random percentage of others are acting irrationally are not rational themselves because they act on completely unknown values. Speculators, as I defined in somewhat casual terms, value an object at time t based on the demand of the object at time t-1. With a bit more mathematical magic, this will increase the value each tick until the demand goes lower due to fluctuations in the normal variance of the price (from actual rational non-speculative traders), sparking a re-valuation of the item for all speculative traders and driving the price down. Your irrational irrationality-sniffer traders believe the object is undervalued by other too cautious traders, so I see a parallel here. Based on panic, not always. Based on the closing-down of RS, definitely. It would definitely impede liquidity versus a more informative G.E, because you can't check the current price of a rare (at this time), but only the "average" last day's price. You can check the price with other items by selling/buying small quantities, but there is no way to do that with rares. Against forums/the old way? Even though the "old way" was quite inefficient (you never really knew supply and demand), the price band of price uncertainty was much more narrow (not 10%). Again, the price uncertainty only exists in the G.E. because of a lack of information about previous trades. Less information means that those with many rares will be able to find this information, so it will simply take away buying and selling power from the single rares traders and put it into the hands of the dozens-of-rares traders. I don't think it will make price crashes more common as the 10% band is still there with the remaining extremely wealthy merchants still controlling the huge majority of trades -- even more than before! Jagex has promised some changes to the GE. One change that can be made is to show the last 5 minute's 20 biggest trades (prices and quantities): trading transparency. Trading transparency will completely stabilize the rares market. However, Jagex has never promised trading transparency even after theoretically reading hundreds of pages of well-reasoned complaints in their own forums, and I doubt that will change. Instead, they opt to pile even more useless junk onto the GE: "a new web page is already in the works which will allow you to track item prices over a long period of time."... Note: "long" periods of time, not what is needed at all.

I don't accept that definition. If you refer back to my earlier posts, you see that I reference findings in which bubble-type activity was generated in experimental simulations without the influence of speculative interest. I'll give the citation here: Lei, Vivian, Charles N. Noussair, and Charles R. Plott. 2001. "Nonspeculative Bubbles in Experimental Asset Markets: Lack of Common Knowledge of Rationality Vs. Actual Irrationality." Econometrica 69:831 Well, that very same paper defines bubbles as "trade in high volumes at prices considerably at variance from intrinsic values." I couldn't find King's paper on JSTOR, google, or anywhere else, so I can't really say anything with 100% certainty on this, but: the "intrinsic" value is too broad a definition. Intrinsic value could simply be defined as the current market value, assuming market is efficient, so clearly there has to be some definition of what the difference between intrinsic values and market values is, and how it is caused. This is why my definition makes a lot more sense when trying to explain what a bubble is. And clearly, there are speculators: anyone who will sell the item above the price of the intrinsic value is a speculator. In summary, I said that the longer a potential bubble goes on, the likelier it doesn't exist. I am not saying it is zero or trying to force you to estimate anything... :-k Again, the two factors I cited: the intrinsic value due to increasing "immature little children" in the market being persuaded down, the intrinsic value due to decreasing supply being persuaded up. I agree, but you didn't say why, so I'll help. I suppose more people will want to have the super-expensive weapons to try them out instead of having rares that basically do nothing, so the rares price will plummet upon such an announcement. I also agree that it says nothing about whether there was a bubble -- the intrinsic price would simply fall way down in this case. Yes, it's possible and I would say probable if Jagex had released very good and very rare items (weapons/armor/etc.), as few people would have traded their rares even as prices fluctuated (at the time when the rares shot up), so basically the market was controlled by a few people who had been trading most of the rares that were in play. If, however, a lot of people had tried selling the rares at the same time (trying to get that extra special weapon), they would not have found buyers. It was almost a ridiculous exercise to trade rares on the forums, and world 2 offered a large buy/sell price difference. Lack of liquidity in a market is the first sign of a bubble bursting, but it didn't get so far because the intrinsic value was very high for a lot of players. Again, I think what was fueling the price rise was the fact that at the time the rares shot up, there was very little alternative to spending your cash on anything remotely as good. As my theory goes, now there are many things one can do with 300M instead of buying phats, but at the same time there are a lot fewer phats on the market, so still no bubble.

I think what Duke Freedom was trying to say is that, given no change in gameplay mechanics, the possibility that there was a bubble decreases over time, and over such a long timespan (in RS terms), it was not a bubble. Of course, we have to agree what a bubble is in the first place. I will define it as such: an interval of time throughout which the value of an item is largely based on the demand of those who want it solely because of its value (speculators). It's a recursive definition. Once confidence in the value of the item decreases, those who demand it solely for its value will start demanding it less and less, and the item's value becomes equal to that sans our speculators. The bubble "bursts". The first question is, how easy is it to burst the confidence of this bubble. The price (all other things equal-- gameplay mechanics, player base, etc.) apparently going down one day X percent, as happens in a normal market trading fluctuations might trigger player N to sell, lowering the price. If the price falls below X+Y percent, it triggers player N+1 to sell. It becomes a snowball once the price falls some percent in a certain interval. Duke Freedom's argument is therefore quite logical: the longer a price trades with normal price fluctuations (the fluctuation is a normal distribution), the more likely it is that an "unusual" day will occur that will trigger a bubble bursting. Since it hasn't for so long, it means that it is not likely (but not impossible) it will occur in the future. Your argument I think is a bit different, qeltar. Since a lot of players are constantly quitting for whom the intrinsic value (showing off) of a party hat is quite high (ironically, perhaps older, more mature players), the intrinsic value declines on average over time. Thus, the rares market becomes more and more of a bubble market over time. On the other hand, there are many other factors at work. Here's an example: fewer and fewer party hats and other rares are traded with each day. (Some people _do_ quit with rares and not just "gold" -- why would EVERYONE bother selling all their items when they quit?) That increases the intrinsic value of rares -- fewer people have them, so the "wow" factor of showing them off increases. In summary, it's mathematically valid that a bubble becomes less and less likely ceteris paribus, but on the other hand the system mechanics show that rares becomes more and more of a bubble over time. On the other other hand, for those players for whom rares are a method of "showing off", their value of rares goes up constantly. On the other other other hand, if rares become untradable or unwearable or deleted, then all this becomes a rather moot point. :XD:

Please, everyone. Jagex is killing trading in this game and there's nothing anyone can do about it (if they aren't members, that is). Let's stop bashing each other -- focus on the real enemy! :wall:

I'm surprised they didn't outsource it to rocks in India.. rocks are much cheaper there. #-o

Slick_cat, you (and the poster you "quoted" on the other site) are forgetting that Jagex can simply actually make the payment process take longer/use more checks to verify CC info, thus taking out both these stolen CC issues and the members bots that go with them. Instead, they choose to pwn their own game and use this as one reason why members should put up with Jagex's garbage.

\ \ \ \ \ ... For the past 2+ years, they weren't focused on us? Really? I didn't know. I thought they were always focused on us. For instance, I remember when two years ago, Jagex gave me black marks for advertising (talking about with a player mod) Guild Wars. So now that RWT is gone, they can start again to ban anyone who's left. Great. =D> :thumbdown:

Because... they are muppets. Actually, Jagex gives muppets a bad name.

If people wanted to play a grindfest, there are plenty of other games to choose from. And that, sir, is what this game is coming to.