Duke_Freedom

wachtwoord, any company that focuses too much on gaining money is set up to die. 'Nuff said. There is nothing wrong with a company focussing on gaining money, as long as it keeps a long-term vision in mind.

Considering he talks about the market size and compares it to pc/internet bubble of 2001 I'm fairly sure that he means that the market is saturated in that it is no longer growing as a whole and as far as I know that is not the case at all.

My observation on the article: - Jagex decision to focus more on younger players was made longer ago and has in fact been a good decission as that market was/is less saturated than that of older players. When focussing on the older players they'd have to compete more with other leading games, like WoW, where the average player age is generally much higher. - I wonder what the Editor bases his statement that the online games market is starting to become saturated on.. All academic research I have read on it still refers to it as exponentially growing. Claiming such things without sources is rather amateuristic considering the topic IMO. - Between the lines, the Editor seems to vent 'frustration' against the younger players 'ruining it all' in the game. Always popular to do that eh? :roll: - Considering Jagex is already working on new games I somewhat doubt that Andrew and Paul would 'need' to move away from Jagex in order to start something new. Whether they'll leave the company (read: sell it) or not probably depends mostly on whether they can still see substantial growth for Jagex in the future though.

Three words eh? Power through balance! :P *Duke is avid follower of Guthix :P

It is just as legal in WoW as it is in RuneScape... Half a million chinese people are doing it - it is 'normal' there.

- Disallowing or allowing Real Money Trading has little or even no influence on the actual amount of RMTing taking place. Even if the game company allows RMTing and provides a completely safe trading system for the virtual this does not change the amount of RMTing in any way. - Ebay no longer allowing virtual currency trading has little to no influence on the amount of RMTing that takes place. If anything, it indeed increases the amount of people who end up scammed when pursuading in RMTing. - RMTing itself does not ruin, change or otherwise (negatively) effect a games economy. Reasons why RMTing should be allowed: - As said, disallowing it does not prevent it from happening. Allowing it does not increase it. - The academic world is quite sure that the future is heading to RMT allowed in all games anyway. - It is not effectively and especially not easily enforcable. Having unenforcable rules is a waste of (costumer support) time that could be better used on more important issues. This also includes (naive) people who complain to the game company that they were scammed out of their bought virtual currency *yes, despite it being against the rules, this does happen*. - The game company can provide people with a 100% secure system to trade the virtual currency. The game company can even profit from listing fees in its own system, which can be a nice extra source of income. - The secure trading system and allowance of RMTing can go hand in hand with the intellectual property rights staying in the hands of the game company. Most of the points I am raising here are not just my personal opinion, but they are actually based on the results of Sony's one year research project on the game companies allowance of RMTing on specific Everquest II servers: http://arden.blogs.com/swn/2007/02/sony_releases_v.html

Rares used to be more important for the games economy in the past, but they still play a big role. They are a good and interesting addition to the games economy and have been great as an investement opportunity.

Effects of game companies selling: Experience: Material prices probably drop, price of ingame gold in general may drop as well. Prices of end-game equipment and rares rises as a result. More high leveled players as well. Gold: Inflation issues. Not recommendable for that reason IMO. Tradable existing items: Negative effect on the ingame prices of the items. Untradable copies of existing items: Negative effect on the ingame prices of the tradable items, less severe. Tradable new items: Negative price effects on substitute goods. Untradable new items: Negative price effects on substitute goods, less severe. General effects: - Basically one-sided allowance of real world trading (the buying part allowed only). - Becomming high-leveled more reachable / easier (for people who have less time to play the game). May make the game more attractable for older people. - Nice extra income for the game company.

Teh Unseen = Unseen Snipr = Old school merchant who was banned.

I've always been pro-recycling, mainly because I'm also against the artificial high-alch values. Removing high-alch values and, instead, allowing recycling creates a much more realistic and player-based economy.

Judging from the amount of negative threads regarding the short-term future of rares, that may very well be(come) the most important reason for their price drop in the short-term future soon either way: a negative market sentiment is never good for the prices of rares. For the rest - I personally do not believe there is one single good reason why rares have been going sideways / dropping over the past 6 months. I suppose it's more a combination of factors, varying from construction, third age, skill capes, the sideways fluctuation of rares itself, lower population growth and probably some other factors that I am forgetting as well.

Not true. The gold standard has been abandoned for quite some while now. Yes, most central banks of countries do keep a certain amount of gold still, but it's not a "must have". That is not necessary. There is no economic theory stating that this has to be true as far as I know. Well as you said, there are no basic needs, so 'poverty' does not really exist. I guess seasoned players may consider anyone who can't afford full rune to be 'living in poverty', but that's a weird way of defining poverty IMO.

A huge money-consuming, time-wasting, typical political gibberish and mess. Does that describe it well enough in one sentence?

Judging solely by their rarity you'd say that green masks are undervaluated, but because they are just much less popular their price relative to their rarity is much lower which is why they probably have roughly the same price as santa hats indeed. 200

They have currently "risen" to the same prices they had when the Cook x option and the Fletch x came out... A logical question is why they dropped compared to those prices in the first place, which was probably the massive macroing - I believe you always agreed with that too. From what I heard from various people, macroing has been becomming less lately though which would logically push the prices back up again.

My estimates of a year ago: 500 party hats sets 2500 mask sets 15000 santa hats 200 crackers 200 half wines 1250 disks 2000 pumpkins 3500 easter eggs Lordjake is right, there are various people who own ~500 santa's. I personally have owned such amounts at various times in history too. Those people did buy them up though. Laikrob is right about the easters too.

Quit fooling yourself and quit talking for the public. You can't loose respect for someone you never had any respect for in the first place. This goes for anyone who stated something like this. The few people who said that they 'lost respect for me' already disliked me for one reason or another anyway - so I don't care what any of you think.

Well you should better start believing it, because it is the reality. The world is a crazy place.

I see you have a lot to learn about politics and statistics yet. :D Oh I'm sure that they think that the chance is rather small, just as I'm sure that they can't give an actual estimate for how small it really is, considering they have no clue what may happen at all. In the end it either goes wrong or not anyway. ;)

How can you estimate something of which you barely even understand anything? They falsely try to create credit for their guess by saying they did calculations on it. And theism predicts it to happen every so many years? :D

The "risk calculation" is a good example of pure random guessing and then saying that the number actually represents something. Ah well, humanity will destroy itself sooner or later anyway.

Depends on what you want to know. What it shows is that the current prices of those three items, raw lobs, yew logs and yew longs (s), are not that extremely high historically speaking. Besides, for all other items I did compare to October. I don't think I need to justify my own credibility and observations considering you don't either. I asked you if you actually wrote down the prices before october and considering you gave no answer on that, I'll assume that you did not. I am disagreeing with the overusage of the arguement "skill capes caused it all" as the cause of everything currently and I believe I have every right to voice that opinion whether you like it or not. Nor am I claiming that it is natural fluctuation - I'm just pointing out that is a great possibilty too. You - and r2 who made a post on this which is why it suddenly a hype to mention it anywhere - are claiming way too quickly that skill capes causes it all, without any strong evidence backing you up.

Let's make that 200 million shall we - big difference. And what it shows is that people can believe anything when there are few sources for info.

It's funny how difficult it can be to agree about what the prices were at one point. I wonder if you actually wrote down the prices though. To my records, iron, coal, steel bars (50gp is not a change on a 600gp item - steel bars have been 650gp plenty of times before - like exactly a year ago), natures, laws, bloods, bow strings and pure essence didn't change at all. Raw lobs did indeed change, but their prices right now are in fact exactly the same as a year ago too. Only yew logs rose significantly since then and they are also 10% higher than a year ago - but it's rather questionable whether skill capes played any role in that at all. My bet would be that there's a lot less autoing now than back then. It is probably of no use to continue arguing about the actual prices though since we'll continue to disagree anyway.

To Ramps_Kill: - Such a small price drop / price fluctuation is not called a crash. - Especially if yew logs didn't even drop and are still being sold ~350 each at the moment. - Yew logs, bow strings and yew longs (s) do have effects on each other prices. A rise in the price of yew logs like we are observing now, generally works positively on the price of yew longs (s) as well. To PhelimReagh: - The skill cape arguement is extremely flawed considering yew logs are about the only resource that changed in price since the introduction of skill capes. To JFonseka: - Saying runescape's economy is "simple to predict" means you have no idea what predicting means. Predicting is not yelling random future price estimates for items without any facts backing you up. To Kewl_Sabre: - I'm sure that rune armour didn't change in price at all, since you're about the 38952934 person to claim they dropped in price over the last 4 years, while they never changed in price. Observing one person selling lower then average is not a price drop and rune items can't drop anymore as their high alch values prevent this. Don't got much else to say on this topic.