Duke_Freedom

Not true. Wrong assumption - they can't always rely on other people around them to help them with their confusion. I don't believe that this whole concept of "finding your identity", which is what you are more or less referring to with what you say there, even existed till the past few decades. I would say that the only people who were 'unsure' back then were the genuine homosexuals. In opposite to that, a big part of the youth is "in doubt about his sexuality" nowadays and people talk about them "searching for their identity". In reality, this is all random blabla made up to disguise the fact that these people have already been effected by the 'normality' of homosexuality these days.

again, in bold i think thats just what society has instilled upon us. If nature wanted that gay people could have kids then they would have allowed males to reproduce without needing a female and the other way around too.

I don't hear people who are physically / mentally handicapped in any way claim that it is natural. Taking the realistic stance you suggest I know that those people are being treated as lesser as well. What it really shows is that the anti-discrimination laws we have are not being obeyed, but this is NOT an arguement to consider homosexuality normal no matter whether you want me to be realistic or not. I want to make clear that I do think it is dangerous to accept is being normal - especially uncertain young people can be effected greatly by doing so.

Ofcourse they should have the same rights as everyone, I'm not arguing about that. However, IMO they should not be provocating it and make it look natural. Nor should they claim that it is discriminating to say that it is a genetic abnormality - something many of they DO claim. That are the only two issues I really have with homosexuality. Homosexuality itself can't be "morally wrong" for the simple fact that some people are born homosexual (and arguing that some people are born morally wrong seems rather ridiculous, not?). Still it is 'morally wrong' to accept it as being natural as I would say it is practically the same as being born with 1 leg or something like that: it is just not natural.

Every so many weeks/months I see a new thread about this. :P Oh well my list from rarest to least rare: Cracker Half wine Party hats - There are surely differences between the colors but it's hard to make any claims on which hat is really rarer then another. Disks Pumpkins Masks - Again hard to say whether red or blue mask is the rarest, IMO green is definately the least rare of them though Easters Santas

Both things are unnatural. Incest may be considered "morally wrong" / "dangerous" as the chances of having a child with physical or mental abnormalities is greatly increased. Then again, homosexuality can be considered "dangerous" as well. The way it is being 'accepted' right now, especially here in Holland, gives people the impression that it is completely natural - something I strongly disagree with.

People don't want a better world or at least don't care enough to create a better one.

They are stackable because the ability to stack them results in people thinking about it and creatings topics like these. Think about that. :P

Price manipulation has always been against the rules and, as I always pointed out, it simply falls under the section item scamming. When I was player mod, I was actually muting and reporting people for it and was nearly always backed up by Jagex in doing so. Anything from claiming that "SANTA'S WILL RISE BY X-MAS", "Santa's will be xxx MIL by xmas", fake buying, fake selling, "All sell your rares they are about to crash" is price manipulation (especially if it's spammed in chat) and thus a punishable offense. Sadly it was never enforced much and still isn't. People never even heard about price manipulation happening till I started mentioning it anyway and after that it still took ~1.5 year before an official rule against price manipulation was made on the official forums.

Heya r2. It's funny how the start of both our merchanting careers shows quite a bit of resemblence. I too started out with coal merchanting within my first week of playing and immediately fell in love with merchanting. :P The half wine price peak raises a lot of good old memories :)... Even though half wines were undervaluated at the time, it was pure insanity of people that drove the prices so high. Eventually the price bubble had to break and half wines never really recovered from it, but it was really interesting to see it all happen. Our personal contact wasn't very good for a very long time and we both had a serious hate for each other at some point. :P For me it was mostly because of your money making ways which I found pure price manipulation at the time, as you were using your reputation to create short-term [bleep]es in the prices of party hats. Anyway we talked about that way too often at the time and we still disagree on it - but that's fine. :) Because eventually the past became the past and things changed. We started talking to each other on a much more friendly basis and since then it only became better. It's cool to see that you're playing again, I personally lack the motivation and interest to make a new start. If you ever get absorbed as much by rs as you were back in the days then I'm sure that you'll be back among the richest merchants in no time again though. :)

Hey Adam, don't scare me like this and make sure it doesn't come back. :P

Whip is much faster. It's not that it's Damage Per Hit that is higher that people like about it... It's its significantly higher Damage Per Time that makes it popular.

It seems like a post on the forums.. :roll: 8000 a week.. Gosh.

I swear, we should get in touch. :P

http://www.rawprint.com/images/Iran07a.pdf Interesting research article by ING (bank) on the who, why, when and where there may be an attack on Iran. The article talks mainly about the economic consequences (which most of you won't interest at all :P) but it also writes about the various indications that a war on Iran is comming up.

Then I'll be 29 eh.. - Done with university. Got bachelor computer science and applied mathematics, master in financial engineering. - For a living I would probably be (day) trading stocks OR working for my own (software) company OR working for some company as economist / mathematician / software developper. I personally hope the first of all that these days though. - Probably would still be single too. - Even more cynical about the world than I already am today.

Sorry, but you guys just really don't read. Most people will still train the skill faster using normal training techniques opposed to 'buying exp' - the cost of exp should be high enough to ensure this. Charging costed people 200mil to get 99 magic, whereas people could train the skill virtually for free using high alching back then. If charging would still exist today it would have probably cost even more to 'buy' 99 magic now. I doubt you have got 200mil gp and / or will be able to get 200mil within a month - and remember that would only be enough to buy one skill!

As some other people already mentioned too - money takes time to get, it doesn't just fall out of the sky into people's pockets. And the option should not be interesting for most people, it should cost enough money to ensure that. I don't see how something wouldn't be respectable anymore if you gained it in a different way with hard work as well. One thing that I should have mentioned earlier is the magic spell Charge, which was basically the perfect example of buyable experience in practice. Various people (mainly stakers) used it to get 99 magic in under 4 hours back then and I must say that I saw very few people really complain about it when it was around. No large scales protests happened, no people quit the game due to it. Yes, it was eventually removed when Jagex found out about it, but that's more because Jagex themselves don't even like the idea of 'buyable exp'.

I've seen people play under the name 'duke freedom' in counterstrike - and it wasn't me.. :P Duh, ofcourse my name is original... Apart from the several impersonators that I've seen throughout the years then.

The high-cost items are far rarer than their low-cost alternatives that you mentioned. The high-cost items are also slightly better and thus in (much) higher demand (people always want to have the best of the best, even if the difference is minor). The low-cost alternatives are in heavy oversupply. The high-cost items generally do degrade (faster) in price over a long period though.

That things move faster has little to do with how many buying / selling threads and (lack off) offers on the threads that I see. The amount of pages is still limited to 50 for both boards. If they were really in high demand you'd see people bidding against each other in third age armour threads - I'm not seeing that happening at all. In fact, I find this very typifying: Apparently some stakers did buy it, but are selling it now... Not good enough for staking? Still, rich, good and active fally world 2 merchants would probably be best informed about this all and may also know best where the prices of third age armour will be going in the near future.

I know, but why did the one click full inventory have to make power training obsolete? Plenty of people liked power training and I said it was a pretty harmless type of emergent gameplay.

Something which Jagex has never been fond off and resulted in the untradability of holiday items? There were other solutions then making them untradable to reduce the amounts of complains which seemed to be the most important reason for the final decision on that. Only limiting it so that everyone could only obtain one from the event, but still allowing tradability for example. Either way - the untradability of holiday items was anything but supportive to the emergent playing created around the rares. That said, it is good that Jagex never removed the existing rares. I also don't fully comprehend why techniques like power fishing, power woodcutting and power mining were all removed at start of rs2 due to not being able to continue fishing, woodcutting, mining anymore when your inventory is full. It used to allow people to 'trade' the materials for faster experience and some players made eager use of that, whereas others were more than happy with being able to pick up the automatically dropped materials of such people. It was pretty harmless and a good example of emergent gameplay. For the rest... Emergent playing arises in all MMORPG's and I wouldn't say Jagex does more or less than other game companies to let emergent playing evolve. A lot of "emergent gameplay" also arises due to actual instabilities and inbalance in the game. Pures were a good example of the latter. And has the odd cabbage cult yet been mentioned? ;)

Well the fact that they remained pretty constant not, IMO. I'd have expected them to rise at least a bit if materials had been effected by the inflation throughout the years. The fact that they didn't / barely change at all makes me think they just haven't been effected at all. As I said, the soft cap only weakens price effects (both upwards and downwards) as does the substition ability of high alching with other ways of training magic. I am really not going to believe the mechanism is so strong that it is able to sustain through major numbers of inflation. The calculation I gave above don't point that out either and the substition effect is not going to be that great without leading into price rises of those other materials as well. I also disagree partly with this. I think this statement fails to observe that high alching is done only on items like yew longbows, steel plates, magic longbows, etc. The nature price is definately not the only factor in how much high alchs people do and, in fact, I believe it is by far the least significant factor in the whole scheme. After all the production levels of strung yew long bows, steel plates are the ones who decide how many items there need to be high alched in the first place and I'm not so sure if the production of such items really depends much on the prices of their finished products. There are few good substitues for yew logs for fletching that could be used on a large scale. For smithing it would be even worse as there just are just no realistic alternatives to smithing steel plates at all. But aren't the most expensive rares the wearable ones? That argues to me that the Veblen effect is very strong for rares. Hm. I think the fact that wearable rares are more expensive than the non-wearable ones is more because they have more 'use' (for as far as we can speak of 'use') as you can also wear them. On the other hand, you're right by saying that the most important reason people wear them is to show off and they can show off with the item because it's worth so much -> thus a Veblen effect. Anyway what I mean to say is that the Veblen effect is not a very important reason for why they rise in price. I don't think the Veblen effect in a blue phat between when it was ~100mil and now that it is ~430mil changed much. Prices rise mostly because of inflation & population growth (long-term) and future expectancy (short/intermediate-term) - what we called 'faith' earlier.

When they went up you said it ment a lot. :P Anyway I've been thinking a bit more about it and one of the other reasons I am sceptic against the idea that the new armour will rise in price for a long period is that it came in the game at such a relatively low price compared to the strong claims I have seen people make about "how rare it is" and "how good it is". I don't know much about the stats on the armour etc in comparison with other armour, but generally new good items enter the game at their highest price, crash during the first few days, possibly rise a bit back later again due to overreaction and then continue to drop slowly and gradually over time. Ok, the third age armour is much rarer so I would expect the sequence of events to take longer (which is why I'm saying that they are still in their stabilization period), but I would not expect the events to be different. The reason why new armour enters the game at it's peak price is simply because top stakers (who got PLENTY of cash to burden) are generally extremely interested in obtaining the new armour and using it to have a (significant) advantage over their opponents in staking. I know for a fact that this was a very strong reason that the first few whips in the game were sold at 50mil+, whereas a day later (or so) they were costing around ~15mil and another few days / week later they were down to ~8mil. Point is, I'm not seeing any of that happening now (or I am just unable to observe that solely by looking at the forums - if so tell me) and I'm strongly wondering why? I see extremely few buying threads in the official forums for an item so new, so rare and so 'great'. There are next to no offers on existing selling threads either, which I find unusual with all the extraordinary claims about the armour. For example there has been a guy selling the following items on the forum for at least 3 days now: Helm = 27M Body = 80M Legs = 28M I believe I could count the number of offers on his threads on one or at most two hands. Yet, the prices according to the price guide in the first post of this thread were more than reasonable, being on the low side of the given price ranges, which, again, makes me wonder why he hasn't sold them yet. I realize some of this is is actually basis for the opposite arguement of some of you that they are bound to go up, stating that people are currently waiting to buy in the hope that the prices drop and that these people will eventually be bored of waiting and will buy anyway, which will cause the eventual rise. Still, one of weak points in this arguement is that the more time passes the less rare they become, but we talked about that already. Another one is that I wonder how much you guys want the prices to rise too? Do realize that a full melee set with kite inclusive is already costing over 200mil. Sure, a blue party hat may still cost a little more than double of that, but how much higher do you want them to go? Also, I see various people claim that the new items are highly popular, yet my own observation are noticing absolutely nothing of that... What do you people base this on?