Duke_Freedom

I have the question the intentions of the topic creator considering the quite negative attitude regarding rares in his posts. I doubt Hunting will be of much importance for rares, but to be honest, the effect of skills can't be predicted beforehand and somehow people always seem to speculate on downgoing prices when a new skill comes out. Personally, I don't really see much reason for rares to go down for much longer though - christmas is still comming up and that has always been a reason for increasing rare prices in the past.

Materials barely changed prices, rares dropped back a little because they rose too much the past few months. They are still higher then 2.5-3 months ago.

That's true, but the relevance of F2P for RuneScape's economy remains huge, because it are a lot more people. Especially for markets like coal, yew, iron, etc.

I believe coal, full rune and rares are quite F2P. :roll:

Ahaha. I would like to remind you that 75% of the players are F2P...

- Probably because coal has never been much more then 200gp each. :P - Full rune price hasn't changed in like forever. - Price of pure essence did go up, the result of the splitting of essence into pure and regular essence.

Getting a headache of this thread. :( - Total amount of gp in RuneScape is definately still growing at a fast pace. - There are plenty of completely comparable Real life "rares" which pretty much behave exactly like RuneScape's rares. - The christmas cracker has been (much) higher in price then the blue party hat for the past half year already. - Rares are totally uncomparable with pseudo-rare (treasure trails, dragonite items) in respect to their price behaviour. The first will only go up in price on the long-term while the latter will only go down in price on the long-term in the current situation. - Material prices have been (roughly) the same in bulk prices for a very long time already, I doubt anything has changed to that. - Rares have been going sideways (not up, nor down) the past 2 months, so an increase in price is rather expectable soon again. Especially with christmas comming up.

I personally always considered it as an aftermath result of the dupe that both the red and the white phats passed the green phat, but I have to admit that the dragon armour arguement is rather strong as well about that. Anyway, I doubt anything will happen to the price order of phats anymore. It's not completely impossible, but it's rather unlikely. People are used to the price order and because of that they also (unconsciously) try to keep the price order in place. When one specific hat color rises too much, the others will automitically rise too or the specific hat color will drop back in price again.

I find it ironic how you think to have all rights to call someone else a moron over something so small, yet get mad when other people call you that. Don't get me wrong, I do think you have a point that people who quit RuneScape generally see the need to trivalize it as "just pixels", which is a bit ridiculous ofcourse. Still no need to cause a flame war over it though. :roll:

I think this is the answer. 15K in 15 minutes isn't much. For some people it is even more efficient to not pick up the drops, not even nats.

Good to see you didn't get extremely mad at your brother for it. :(

Depending on your personality, being rich can or cannot improve your life. In any case I do think it makes your life 'easier', although, as many already pointed out, that does not necessarily mean that it makes your life 'better'. However, if I were to interpret the topic title more generally, I could also interpret it as "Life is unfair. Do people in western countries (disregarding the social inequalities within those countries) live a better life then those in extremely poor African countries?". My main point for mentioning this is that what people even consider "poverty" here would be considered "very rich" in such African countries. I'm sure that this more general question is a lot easier to answer for everyone too. Being born in richer (western) countries is definately an "advantage" over being born in countries where it is not unusual for people to starve from hunger. But the topic title can be taken a lot broader and extended to other contraversional statements like "Life is unfair. Do people who are born with a higher IQ live a better life?" too... Just some food for thought for you all. ;)

Disregarding prices, tradability and rarity, I've always liked the santa hat most.. Looks the best IMO.

But that still doesn't help much with getting you come more on msn though. :P Although it is rather questionable whether Jagex will really take it so seriously to actively catch people who break the rule, it certainly is worrying that they made the rule in the first place. Soon Jagex will introduce Rule 16: Supporting competition. You may not play any other mmorpg besides RuneScape as by doing so you would support our competitors and we cannot tolerate that. Breaking this rule is a serious offense and will lead to a permanent ban. :roll: While it is logical that Jagex wants to protect their add-income (although I'm sure that income is significantly smaller then their memberships income), I do think they are taking a step too far here. Furthermore, people who do all that effort to block adds aren't very likely to click on them in the first place, are they?

Fits right into the "we can do anything we want" attitude of Jagex these days.

I do believe a perm death system can work, but it requires a total overhaul in the game concept compared to most mmogs now and is not suitable at all for extremely skill-based (repetitive task based) games like RuneScape. Furthermore, for perm death to work, dying shouldn't be as 'normal' as it is in nearly all mmogs. Without an extremely cautious well-thought approach and throughoutly tested game, any mmog game with perm death is a recipe for failure.

Hm, very interesting question - don't think I can give any really in-depth answer (like rough price expectation of dragon chain) to it right now. Might be an interesting idea to devote an article to that some time, although it may be difficult to come up with reasonable answers. :? Pseudo-rare items like dragon chains would follow the same value trend that they do now: come into the game at a peak price, then drop quickly during the first few weeks and then continue to drop slowly on the long-term. The main difference without rares is that they would surely be valued higher then now at all times. Another, difficult-to-answer question is whether materials would show inflationary behaviour (and thus be priced higher then in the current situation) without rares. I personally always said they would, mainly because the total value of the rares market is so extremely large (I wrote about that in this article) and because I believe that rares keep material prices down as there are many people who gather materials to make money in order to buy rare.

Don't got much to add to this, I agree that it's unlikely that Jagex will be sold any time soon. Mainly because the Gower brothers have mentioned several times that they aren't tired of it yet and since Jagex is working on a new mmorpg too. Whether you can call RuneScape an innovative product (the idea of a mmorpg is far from "innovative" and the idea of "play anywhere" which seems to be the slogan of Jagex is not that unique either) or Jagex a 'small' company (with a market share of 6.3%+) is questionable though. :P Only thing I think is a bit ridiculous in the article is... As I said, there's nothing that amazing or innovative about RuneScape IMO.

The data was compiled from my own observation solely. From start 2003 till mid 2006 I was an active merchant in the game and dealed with rares almost every day. The prices I used for my data are low-side merchant reseller prices, which should roughly describe the average market price of a certain item the best. These days my data is a little bit less reliable as I don't play the game actively anymore and base the prices almost solely on forum posts on the official forums. Edit: I can see what you mean here. I can say that everyone who, objectively, does the same research on his own, should end up with the same conclusion about the periodical behaviour of rares.

Hm you're right - my own version didn't have it as exp though. :P Bad Editor! :anxious: Sounds creepy when you put it like that, but yes. :P The material price data I have is also of the past four years, but it has only been updated every so many months. Yeah, I will publish them some time too, but not soon I think. I would still like to add some important materials that I miss, and hopefully my memory can help me a bit to remember their prices in the past. :)

I was wondering if anyone was going to post that. Well done. :)

Hehe, I always appreciate seeing people make their first forum post on a tip.it times of me. :P I have already been keeping record of some (though not all :() important materials in the game for a while. :) Sadly, I find that there is not that much to say about the material market though. The prices of materials do not seem to change for any other reasons then important game-updates or anti-macroing measurements (or the lack of :P). Therefore, charts of material prices don't tell us much about the economy, but whether there has been some change in the game that effected a certain material. :? Most expensive pseudo-rare items only go down on the long-term and, occasionally, go up as the result of game-updates too. Not much more then that to say about pseudo-rares either, but it might be interesting to see exactly how their price drops with the time (although it is easy to predict that it would look a bit like y=1/x).

Thank you 123Yourgone for answering to that guy for me. :) Both functies keep growing less as x (time) grows larger. While that does fit for the current graph, I expect the graph to eventually start growing more lineair with the time or maybe even exponential as more and more people start to play RuneScape. I'll continue to update my data on it to see if that becomes true though. Yes every week the Editor could say at the end of his article "and now to the business news" with Duke Freedom :P Personally I wouldn't mind writing articles a bit more regularly or having a freelance section even, but you should realize that I am not the person deciding that. In fact, I had already written this article 5 weeks ago, but it was delayed by tip.it for publication till now.

P2P can use the official forums to buy and sell their items and the majority of the rares market also takes place in P2P. That should make a difference, no matter whether you are good or not... Besides, there are a lot of good merchantable P2P-only items.