Duke_Freedom

Interesting approach of them to incorporate the no-exp system. It has actually been suggested for MMO's, and it probably has huge potential if done right. The ordinary exp-system is actually a let down for many people. Risky, but possibly very rewarding. At first glance, I have no idea what to expect from the game "being inspired by Master of Orion" though...

Yes, but our politicians won't be telling us that. The devaluation of the dollar throughout the past years has been one of the main reasons why countries are now diverging out of the dollar and oftenly into the euro. State owned investment vehicles are getting more popular with each day too. Your http://www.dictionary.com definition of "limited" still doesn't get me any further to comprehend what "limited America" is supposed to mean, considering the broad and vague nature of that statement. Nevertheless, you seem to be able to narrow it down to "limited overspending politicians". Now ironically, I don't see that as a bad thing at all. Politicians are only in the playfield for so many years. They don't really care what happens after they leave. Hence, they usually want to overspend as an attempt to become more popular (by lowering taxes, providing better health-care, social security or less crime.. you name it). However, what's important here is that they don't really have a long-term vision in mind by doing so and the price of this overspending is oftenly paid by future generations. This is also a good reason why I think that most socialist parties are not as "social" as they claim to be. What Ambassador mentions is just another point: governments are nearly always extremely inefficient with their spending.

Let's recall that time = money and continue to understand that time is always important or you can't have a discussion about anything at all. Since I haven't read up on anything regarding summoning so far I'm not going to comment on prices, but if most training methods will cost several hundreds of millions, then those materials are bound to rise in price excessively, if they are suitable (= similiar training speed) alternatives. Especially if those materials are a pain to collect. Erm less money supply still means lower prices, even in RuneScape. :roll: Economics 101 for the win... Anyway, Craven does have a point that the business surrounding high alching is probably not as thriving as it used to be due to the (ridiculous) price limitations set by the GE. However, I think many people will simply high alch their own yew longs now, given that they don't have that much choice. Perhaps total money creation caused by yew longs and steel plates may be a little lower now, because not everyone will be interested in this new side requirement of high alching one's own finished products. I don't really expect that effect to be all that significant though. Ofcourse, money supply changes are generally more long-term effects than short-term effects.

And I argued that it is and was a rubish theory, please read again. The fact that countries world wide keep such a large dollar reserves, has nothing to do with dollar-only-oil. In short the relevant history went more like this. Before countries world wide started to collect dollars as bank reserves, they used to keep huge amounts of gold. Now America proposed the following system: instead of keeping gold reserves, you could have dollars. America promised that dollars would always be "as good as gold" meaing that dollars would always be exchangable for gold at the ratio of $35 / ounce gold. The world liked the idea for a variety of reasons or were put under political pressure to like it. Either way, the world bought into America's dollar-hegemony scam and agreed to start accumulating dollars as bank reserves. After all, the dollar was as good as gold, what was there to worry about? Indeed, there was little to worry about, except for the treachorous behavior of America on this point. In 1971 they broke their promise that the dollar, by no longer backing it with gold. Many countries protested, but in the end they did nothing / did not dare to do anything. As a result, the gold price rose to a peak of $850 / ounce in 1980. If you compare that to the $35 / ounce America had promised, you should know there was something wrong and that the whole world was betrayed. Why countries still choose to maintain large dollar reserves after this is beyond my comprehension. Political pressure may, once again, have played a significant role. Furthermore, before the world was seduced into the dollar-system, many countries used to have gold standards on their own currencies. However, as part of the dollar-system, America forbid everyone from maintaining such a gold standard. Again, you didn't read my argumentation at all. I said 'problem of gold' lies in overspending politicians, who spend more money than they can afford. Obviously, that is not a 'problem of gold' at all, that is a 'problem of overspending politicians'. Clearly, someone has to pay that overspending anyway and it happens with the 'invisible' inflation tax. Gold simply disallows politicians to make use of the inflation tax - hence why they hate it. America was not "being limited" (what is that supposed to mean even... it sounds just as ridiculous as the statement "dollar is backed by oil") by anything. Gold fulfills the role of money quite well. Gold has ALWAYS remained a valid currency throughout all times. Gold has somehow always intrigued people too. I don't think that there's an answer to the why question regarding that.

I obviously agree with most of the headlines of the article. America has been living above its standards for decades and that is a situation that is unsustainable. It will end, sooner or later. America's housing market is already taking a significant hit over the last months, something which is likely to continue for quite a while still. A recession is ahead, banks are already estimating the chance of a recession hitting America this year at 50%. Heck, some banks even somewhat claim that America is in a recession already. BlueLancer, it somewhat surprises me to see you make such a ridiculous statement. Anyway, the dollar is not "backed by oil". The choice of words in stating that is already extremely poor. The dollar is not "backed" by anything and has not been since the one-sided cancellation of the gold standard by America in 1971. What IS argued here, is that "the dollar derives a significant portion of its value from the fact that oil is being traded only in dollars". Nevertheless, I still disagree. While I can "agree" that the fact that oil is being traded only in dollars implies a constant 'demand' for dollars, this arguement on its own is extremely fallacious. To start with the most obvious issue: it only looks at the demand side of dollars. What about those who supply the oil? They get dollars for their oil. Dollars they might not even want or need. Obviously, those who receive dollars for their oil while not being interested in keeping those dollars, still have all the abilities to sell these dollars back on the market. Hence, the 'artificial' dollar demand caused by dollar-only-oil is countered by the subsequent dollar supply of those who receive these unwanted 'artificial' dollars. The net result is barely any extra demand for dollars. That does not mean the dollar-only-oil does not contribute to the dollar-hegemony at all, however. The dollar-only-oil ensures increased trading volume of dollars (following from the fact that non-americans wanting to buy or sell oil HAVE to deal with dollars), clearly making the dollar a more liquid currency. The dollar-only-oil is certainly a factor, but just not the most important one and arguably not even a major one. If the dollar-hegemony was based on dollar-only-oil then the system would have long collapsed, right after the gold standard was removed. Dollar-only-oil does not explain why 65.7% of the worlds foreign exchange reserves are dollars. They certainly don't need such a huge dollar-reserves just to be able to buy oil. There's nothing wrong about the gold system. The issues from a gold system are generally derived from overspending politicians. Politicians always want to spend more than their budget allows them to. Debt financing allows for this, by letting the inflation tax do its work. A gold system prevents debt financing and inflation tax and is thus unwanted by most politicians. The gold standard disallowed America to continue its massive, yet unsustainable, money supply growth, which allowed America to live far above its standards. Thus it was removed. America backstabbed the whole world by breaking their promise that their "dollar is as good as gold". Their dollar is worthless paper or erasable electronic data. The whole world foolishly stepped into America's dollar-hegemony-system with both of their feet. Simply stated: gold = money. While regarding the dollar it's more like: dollar = faith. Essentially that goes for any non-backed currency by the way.

The US has been bankrupt for decades. Their "solution" to solving their extraordinary deficit is massive money supply growth resulting in a soaring inflation, which also leads to a strong devaluation of their dollar.

:P Yeah, 'normal' merchanting is obviously still possible too and probably the best with more "stable" items like you mentioned. Though I can imagine that the richer peeps are probably best off spending most of their time looking for undervaluated items and price trends. And indeed, there are many tricks with the GE that are vital to know, no matter how basic they may be. Knowledge of a trading system/environment already gets you halfway to the fortunes. :D

I believe that theory goes for quite idealized unrestricted markets though. I also think the price limitation we have here essentially prevents the increased volatility to occur. Besides, when I said "trading volume is likely to plumment" I did mean that those transactions that don't take place are probably post-poned to later, they don't just vanish. Furthermore, it is important to note that the GE system basically "delays" the price increase and spreads it out over the course of many days... I think you can agree that this will better allow people to react on the higher prices, in opposite to a situation where pure essence would have [bleep]ed up 100% within one day. There are other things that make it much more complex though. Liquidity with the GE would be a huge issue without the price restriction too, because of the 2 for f2p and 6 for p2p limitation on orders. Plus, the lack of transparency and inability to observe the highest bid and lowest sell orders would probably be rather desastrous and significantly increase volatility in an unrestricted GE market too...

Technically it's not a form of merchanting, but speculating / investing. Either way, it is indeed one of the neater aspects of the GE. Speculating in materials never used to be worthwhile before the GE, because buying and selling huge amounts of materials was impractical and too time-consuming. Since there seems to be some misconceptions on the effects of the restrictive 10% price range I guess I'll forward my thoughts on that here too... It surely does not cause the market to behave differently than it would have without the limitation. I'm confident that pure essence would have [bleep]ed up just like it did now without the limitation. At its peak it would have then reached similiar heights, probably even higher for a very short amount of time. However, without the restriction the price increase as well as the fallback would have taken place much faster. The downside of the price limitation is that the GE-price "lacks behind" the 'real' price based on 'real' demand and supply. When a (major) price change takes place, the GE does not accurately reflect 'real' demand and supply, mainly because the Adaptive Pricing System does not update the market price often enough. Some people might note that this seems desirable as it suggests that the market is more stable as price changes take place more gradually and that the real excesses don't happen. While that might be true to some extend, it ignores the fact that the restriction makes the market inefficient. Once the hype starts, trading volume is likely to plumment, because demand will exceed supply at the max price of the GE - there's a supply shortage which is not (immediately) corrected by a higher price. I think this situation remains till the peak price is reached, at which demand equals supply. However, at that point, it is likely that a fallback will follow, which will result in supply exceeding demand at the lowest price of the GE - leading to a situation of oversupply which is not (immediately) corrected by a lower price. In the worst case and depending on how well the Adaptive Pricing System works, the peak price situation may even result in a market failure where near to no trade takes place at all. I suppose the chances of that actually happening to materials (which have huge trading volumes) is nihil though - there will always be some people who will buy or sell at extremely high or low prices. As I already noted earlier: the price limitation also causes the hype to last longer. Ofcourse that also implies that it takes longer until the market equilibrium is reached. Anyway, I do think that alcoolj has a point in his posts. Formulated more in economical terms, he basically states that the price elasticity of demand and supply is quite inelastic. While I would strongly disagree with that on the long-term, I do think it has some credibility for the short-term environment that we are talking about here. It implies that the trading volume decline that the restricitive pricing causes is not as dramatic as would be expected otherwise.

You could manually interpolate the missing data as a sort of dirty fix (be sure to mark the interpolating data somehow (in excel not in the graphs), to differentiate it from "actual" data). Just a suggestion... Since so many people seem to be tracking the prices of various items - wouldn't it be a good idea if you joined forces to work on gathering the data together. That might save some time, prevent data gaps, and makes it easier to track more items. Either way, all this seems like something tip.it should be interested in, if you ask me. Ofcourse, Jagex promised to bring out more elaborate data too, but having the actual data ourself can never hurt either.

Just some thoughts on other interesting materials to follow (if anyone is interested): Big bones Dragon bones Bowstrings Blue dragonhide Yew tree seed Magic tree seed Raw lobs Raw sharks Cooked lobs Cooked sharks Steel arrows I would title all these materials as 'key' materials too, and they would roughly address the skills cooking, farming, prayer, crafting, range, fishing, fletching.

Your "obvious" explanation is flawed because (as far as I know) skillers are still making just as much as that they always did and good merchants are probably even making much more than ever before. Dueling is gone, indeed, but if we remember that dueling is essentially a zero-sum game, it is difficult enough to defend that as a loss of income already, let alone argue it as the main reason for the price decline of rares. Nah, rares are going down for plenty of reasons, but income elasticity of demand is certainly not among the most important ones, if it is even relevant at all. Mainly because of market failure due to Jagex' crappy system.

Market cornering at its best - Jagex idiotic 5% price ranges even help this somewhat. But pure essence was undervaluated before anyway, so I'm really not too surprised and believe a significant part of the price increase was more than reasonable. It seems to become a bit of an excess now though, especially considering the time span in which the price rose so fast and the fact that it's partially speculation-driven. Nevertheless, even if it drops back I don't really expect pure essence to drop anywhere below 100-120gp anymore - that has proven to be a solid bottom before, when botting wasn't too rampant. Heck, considering the extreme profitability of RuneCrafting before I would say 150gp each for pure essence isn't even that irrealistic. But it's too early to conclude whether it could possibly become a new market optimum. Besides, the pure essence price is related to nature and law rune prices anyway, which haven't been doing all that well lately as far as I know. I still wonder if we'll see normal essence go up in price some time soon too. I would really expect it to. All significant botting materials have seen price increases. Normal essence at 25gp makes it an inefficient material to harvest for players, IMO.

Assuming Jagex does not interfere and the GE continues to work well, it is quite likely that they will hit some rock bottom and [bleep]e upwards soon thereafter. The short-term future is difficult to predict though, especially as market sentiment has gotten much harder to determine in the new system. However, I'm already seeing market failures in all phats, the cracker and the half wine because Jagex set their initial prices too high.

Not true. In fact, if the Adaptive Pricing System proceeds to work ineffective then it is much more likely that rares will only be traded for the lowest or highest price within the range and that the trading volume will be much lower.

If what you're telling is true, then the system works even worse than expected. Jagex really doesn't seem to understand a single bit about how its trading system should work - they got an ineffective Adaptive Pricing System and now it seems they also have an illogical queueing system. And no, it is obviously not fair.

Jagex still doesn't get what "testing" means, but they sure do know how to give everyone a good laugh in the new year. :lol:

That wouldn't explain why pure essence dropped down to some 70gp before and rose back from that then too. Plus, yew logs had been going up for a long time already as well. I'm sure the RWT discouragement had influence, but pure essence was surely undervaluated as well. If I look at the armour that dropped in price, it is mostly armour that can be mass-made, but which used to be a pain to sell in mass on the market. However, thanks to the liquidity that is now available, this issue has been taken away and thus their prices could drop quite a bit. High level armour may have risen as a result of the lowering rares prices. Another explanation may be that they actually dropped in price the weeks before the GE (as a result of the change that was made to dueling) and that they only regained what was lost. I haven't actually tracked their prices to know that though. To make more useful index graphs we would actually need more information about the trading volume in specific materials, something we don't have. Without that, I suppose you could try to throw together a bunch of key materials as an index, like coal, iron, yew, maple, silver, gold, pure essence, normal essence, air runes and nature runes. Perhaps chaos, oak, mahagony and/or teak too. Some herbs in it would be necessary too. I'm not too well informed what the key (leveling) materials are, but I'd guess guam, harralander, tarromin, avantoe and/or irit. Best to choose 2 or 3 herbs (probably the first three), to have the exposure to each market similiarly. The index should give each material the same weight. As a whole the index would roughly show the (costs of the?) secondary skills smithing, fletching, crafting, runecrafting, magic, construction and herblore.

Yup, the GE is perfect for this. Nice graphs - keep up the work. :) Marrentil -80%, cadantine -70% and tarromin, dwarf weed, avantoe -50%? Any explanations? Is it because their potions (I'm guessing here) dropped much in price too? Teak and mahagony dropped -60% to -80% too, any thoughts on that? That pure essence went up by 55% is not too strange - it dropped quite a bit the past months and I already expected it to rise back, because the low prices simply do not make (pure) rune essence mining worth it. I think normal essence may be up for a rise as well.

If you say merchanting is doomed after the 3k update, then you are an idiot. People are making insane amounts of money by using the grand exchange. Though, some of these are also because of Jagex's mistakes (putting prices wrong, or flaws in the "adaption system". ) I think he talked about rare merchanting, which I have to agree on, as most merchants are now making insane profits trading normal materials and such, rather than trading rares. Merchants will probably place less focus on rares (they already do) and the limitation of only being able to have 6 outstanding orders at a time forces them to make decisions on which items these orders will be about. Thus liquidity of rares is likely to fall a bit, which generally has negative impact on its price. On the other side, it is very likely that the extreme profits merchants now make from trading other items will be invested in rares at some point, which will probably cause rares to bounce back up. Again, it remains difficult to predict this with confidence as this assumes the Adaptive Pricing System, etc will work appropriately, something I have to place huge question marks on.

I have to agree with Hohto here - I don't think it's wise to attempt to recreate parts of the game that were lost. You won't be able to simulate the old game mechanics in a similiar way and with a similiar feeling anyway. Instead, it is very likely that it will only open new loopholes, like your suggestions (2) and (3). Attempting to replace parts that were lost with NPC's shows to me you fail to recognize the importance of player-to-player interaction that actually made these game parts so popular. Instead, people would be much better off to think of new subgames that have a fun and foolproof player interaction. Lastly, can people who rarely ever merchanted stop claiming that merchanting is dead. It is not, it has changed. There are some huge new profit opportunities. Yes, there is a significant player-interaction loss for merchanting in the new system as well - but you are not going to be able to replace that with NPC's no matter how much you try.

I am glad we seem to be getting more on one line now, I suppose we should have started to make the distinction between short-term and long-term explicit much sooner already. Oh I can surely agree that unity of opinion on anything is generally a good reason to be cautious. However, as you already mentioned, it is not more than a warning signal, and in the case of rares it seems to give plenty of false alerts regarding long-term claims. Assuming the extremes indeed leads to contradictions, though the extremes are obviously not true anyway. Apart from there being a limited money supply at specific points of time, another indirect assumption you make here is the infinite investment horizon of potential rares buyers. In reality, investors don't buy to hold forever, but "plan" (which shouldn't be taken too literally) to sell it some time again. If they do hold forever then they are not really investors, but collectors (who actually drain the supply "on the market"). Either way, simple economic theory can already point out that (ceteris paribus) rares are bound to increase equally to the money supply growth / inflation as an upper bound on the long-term (under assumption of a positive or unchanging population base). If rares would increase faster in price than that, it can be proven that they will "outgrow" the total size of the economy at some point, which is impossible. (For completeness: this obviously does not forbid rares from increasing in price faster than the money supply growth / inflation during specific periods of time, although if they do so, that would - at the very least - point into the direction of bubble forming on short-term) We can turn that argumentation around as well, proving that rares can't grow slower than the money supply growth / inflation either though (again all of this on the long-term and using ceteris paribus). If we would assume that rares would grow slower than the money supply / inflation, then they would become "relatively" worthless over time - this would contradict with the assumption ceteris paribus, as a new valuation of rares to being "relatively" worthless would imply a (sudden) significant change in public opinion regarding the value of rares. Hence, rares have to grow equally to the money supply growth / inflation on the long-term. Ofcourse that is all nice theoretical talk, but it obviously shouldn't be taken too literally as the reality has many other factors that distort the idealized situation that is described above. Nevertheless, this theoretical approach does give an interesting insight of the situation. In fact, it is the basis of another statement I have made on many occasions, which is that rare prices roughly follow the money supply growth / inflation on the long-term. Perhaps you recall our other little discussion about that, but as you can see here: I already hypothesised that statement based on theory before making any observations at all. The actual observations I did on it were, to me, only to check whether this theory actually seemed to fit in reality or not, which I believe it did. I don't really want to restart that discussion here though. While many short-term crashes had external factors that caused them, there are certainly a few to name that were clearly based on overspeculation and market hype. Before I go further, I just want to point out that I believe the notion "short-term crash" is just as subjective as "short-term bubble", but I really don't want to get into such a debate (nor do I think it is useful to do so anyway) so I think we're better off intentionally keeping those notions vague. I just discovered that I forgot to mention the most evident real short-term bubbles, which were santa hats in december 2003 and in december 2004. In anticipation of christmas 2003, santa hats were overhyped extremely, reaching heights of a whooping 300K per hat (yeah, what a ridiculous price! :D). Many investors had actually stocked up santa hats in the month(s) before december 2003, hence creating an artifical supply of santas. Since many of these investors started to unload their hats around/after christmas and as the christmas market hype was over, they began to drop for 3 months, in which their prices were halved. It has to be said that all other rares were actually going up in price during this time. Once they reached rock-bottom, it still took them another 3 months before they bothered to start going up in price again. The santa hat bubble in 2004 went much more rapidly, and started much sooner as well. Prices peaked at 750K at the start of december that year instead of around christmas time and lost ~45% of their peak price within about one or one and a half month time, which was then followed by another one month sideways period after which they went back up again.

It matches reality as long as the assumptions are fulfilled. I think you are not too familiar with the procedures of applied mathematics, since you still want to place an "uncertainity probability" on the model as a whole, which is certainly not according to normal procedure. I also think we are still missing each other in the vague definition of a bubble as well. One of the things I am arguing against is those people that look at the price of a blue phat of 400mil now and then state that its "ridiculous" price tag must assert that it is a price bubble or that, because of the claim that rares will always go up on the long-term, they are bound to "become" a price bubble at some point in time. Sorry, but both of these arguementations are based on ignorance rather than any fundamental reasoning. And I have continously stated that your historic examples are uncomparable with rares. In fact, none of them even adhere to the indefinite limited supply requirement, which is rather important here. Reason why I have provided applicable historical examples that actually only support the theory to be true without attaching any strings at all. I came up with comparable items like a 1933 US golden coin, famous paintings, rare post stamps. Heck, I suppose to a limited extend even gold and silver are comparable (despite not being completely limited in supply, but having a relatively low new supply versus the amount already in roulation). I still want to be very clear that the statement that something will always go up on the long-term does not exclude it from experiencing extensive price loss in shorter periods of time. I think this may be our greatest miscommunication as well - I don't necessarily deny the possibility of a price bubble to "exist" on short-term periods, although I suppose that still depends on what people exactly consider a price bubble to be. Gold is a good example to use therefore (despite not completely adhering to the assumption of limited supply). Over long periods of time, it has simply tracked the inflation (as is my claim with rares), but in shorter periods it has experienced extremely booming times as well as periods that one, I suppose, may refer to as bubble forming. Once again - the dot-com bubble you talk about is therefore not relevant here. It was based on ridiculous profit expectations and even accounting scandals that included showing better results than that were actually made. It does not adhere to the limited supply requirement at all.

The analysis is correct within the validity of the assumptions and simplifications. There is no room for uncertainity within the model. If you are to challenge anything then you should point out what you consider to be wrong in the assumptions and simplifications instead of just baselessly claiming that there are uncertainities in my analysis. You have never done that so far. Then again your hostility is not too surprising, because you seem to be a purely theoretical mathematician who apparently does not understand the more practical approach of applied mathematics which oftenly requires the outlining of assumptions and simplifications to create a model that describes a (somewhat idealized) reality, but which is (hopefully) still applicable to analyze the reality. I find your "claim on victory" rather childish. In fact, it seems you accuse me of making assumptions that assert my analysis is right, while making various claims about "the complexity of the situation which makes it *unanalyzable" yourself, which is evidently an assumption on your part that asserts you are right about uncertainity regarding a possible price bubble. So pot please stop saying the kettle is black. * = In fact, if that claim would be true, then it would have extreme consequences in the sense that everyone could be right about any (ridiculous) statements they might make, as (according to the claim) the situation would be too complex to analyze whoever is right anyway. Hence, I think we are done with the discussion here.

They are a price bubble or they are not. Claiming anything else means you require external changes to them being a price bubble. Yes, the real market is complex - reason why you have to simplify concepts and analyze the simplified situation according to normal theory, which allows for much more definite statements than arbitrary "chances on price bubbles" that don't really give us any information other than that you admittedly don't know how the markets work. I also don't believe you're being consistent by first claiming that talking about "chances" of there being a bubble is relevant while later claiming against Agamemnus that it is not useful to discuss "probabilities" of there being a bubble - which is clearly one and the same thing. :roll: Because you are unable to proof that rares would crash without external events, while I am able to defend that they would not (under certain assumptions that were true for a long time, but are now no longer true hence me not making any definite long term statements at all at the moment). I'm seriously getting tired of this and would urge you to analyze the situation of a market that has: - rare items (which, if anything, only drop in supply) - a stable environment - steady population growth - steady money supply Under these circumstances, you simply can't come up with an argumentation that rares are a bubble (on the long-term), while that is exactly what you have been arguing continously everywhere.