Duke_Freedom

Maybe you misunderstood me because the word rarity has double meanings in this context - I actually ment to say that non-wearables are based more on their scarcity then wearables. Ofcourse if an item is scarcer then an other item it also has a lower (theoretical) supply then the other item, while the demand (in case of two similiar items) should stay equal. Lower supply and equal demand means higher prices. The more scarce, the more expensive. If we assume that there are just as many half wine's as there are crackers (not too unreasonable though there are probably slightly less crackers) and we see that half wine's are roughly 50mil while crackers are roughly 700mil, we can conclude that there is more of a 'price bubble' in the price of crackers then in the price of half wines. The crackers are based a lot less on their scarcity and a lot more on the fact that they go up in price. Now if this latter effect is gone, it's not unreasonable to say that they'll also go down in price faster. And although a lot of people buy rares for investement purposes, there are quite a few people who buy them because it are collector items as well - this is especially true for the non-wearable rares. Generally the collectors are also the people who will never resell their rares. Why would the players be interested to buy up materials now though? Rares are still growing at a rate of hundreds %'s per year in price. Besides how big are the possible changes we're talking about in the prices of materials and how fast could it go anyway? I'd say the price increases would be varying around a few hundred %'s, depending on the material and it's game-implemented high-alch value and use. Well right now there's nothing wrong with the rares market, so there is no bubble to burst either :? - the money supply is still growing at a high rate and so is the player population. The possible scenario's we're discussing here are probably still year(s?) away. Furthermore the main idea of the scenario's (extreme increases in the prices of materials) we're talking about here is not as much of an issue about whether it's possible - it's also an issue whether people can be convinced of it and believe in it. As long as people don't believe in it and as long as investors don't see the potention of materials (aka, they start buying materials as investement), it is unlikely that anything will happen yet. That's why I said hyper-inflation can hit unexpected - ofcourse, if it is inevitable, it will eventually happen, as the shortage of materials will force a price increase itself. However it will take longer before the prices are really affected and it would go a lot less gradually then when people believe in it and stock up materials for investement purposes. Well I definately wouldn't count on the player's solving it. For the rest it's really hard to say - there are a lot of factors in play. For example, if the player growth would only lower slowly, perhaps there would be no action needed as all the changes would / could (ideally) go gradually as well. However, if the player population peaks and then suddenly start diminishing like there is no tomorrow then we have a totally different story.

I can clearly see your attitude is really helping this forum. :roll: And if you're not browsing this forum anymore then I do wonder why I still see you post on every single thread that is ever created about this subject - which aren't that many. Sadly I do have to agree that the amount of interesting topics on tip.it hasn't been very high lately though...

Generally you add people to your friendslist when you buy something of them ;). That trade is also a year old. I made roughly 70mil+ instant profit on it back then. :)

Yes, that's a good way to put it. :) I believe it has actually happened to various mmorpg's that reached that state. I'd say no. If we assume that material supply is roughly proportional to the amount of new players entering the game, then we can easily see they are diverging. Looking at my own data and the P2P subscription numbers of RuneScape found on here then we can roughly say that the money supply has been increasing with 18% per month while the player population has only been growing with 6.5% per month over the past 15 months. O yes, that's the only real solution for RuneScape as we just can't go adjust high-alch values (as that would mean a total overhaul in the game). However, I do think new mmorpg's would be better off if they focussed more on having a healthy and controlled way in which money enters the economy rather then having to tweak it later with all kinds of money sinks. Don't know it too well either. I did see a post on the offical forums saying a person was buying dragon bones 7K each, but it's hard to say how reliable it all is - 80% of the posts made on the rsc market forums is made by rs2 players who are in the wrong market forum anyway :lol:. Furthermore, rsc had massive autoing problems as well, I checked it once before the massive bans (of autoers) on there and lobsters were about 50gp each, so what exactly happens there probably does not give us a very clear view on what might happen to rs2. :? Money supply decrease can eventually lead to a run on the bank (note: the money supply decrease won't be noticed quickly), which in RuneScape means a massive sale of rares and fast dropping prices of them. We have had that situation in RuneScape once before (edit: I mean long-term dropping rare prices, not money supply decrease). I'm still not totally convinced about the true reasons for it back then, but it was probably the result of a mixture of various factors, including the phat dupe that happened 4 months before this price drop started and the introduction of RS2. The prices of all phats and crackers halved in a downgoing market of 3 months back then though - no other rares were affected. Hm, I wouldn't be so sure about this. Non-wearable rares are based a lot more on their actual rarity then wearable rares. Also, non-wearable rares have been growing much slower then wearable rares, so it's not too unreasonable to expect that wearables would be dropping faster then non-wearable rares if we have a downgoing market instead. In the past this would not have been true, as people would just stash their gp away. However with the 2.1bil gp limit, the people who have a networth of higher then that (which are quite a lot people these days) would have to choose for other options, possibly causing the hyper-inflation in material prices, which might cause even more people to buy materials - etc. Without careful interference from Jagex I suppose it would be fore-ordained. It's funny when you think about it, as both of those actions work against each other as well. :P I suppose Jagex would be best off to await what happens and then act on that accordingly. Whatever your view is, I believe raising the 2.1bil cap is a lot smarter then leaving it the way it is now in any case. Aside from the fact that the cap won't stop the prices from going higher, it may even help them with going up or cause the hyper-inflation doom-scenario's we're talking about here. If I were still playing I'd have a bank value of above 25bil - that means I wouldn't even be able to sell 10% of my rares in cash. This means that I couldn't even sell my rares and thus my rares would basically be out of roulation, causing extra scarcity and thus driving up the prices of rares, or I would have had to use materials as currency instead.

Sure, the money supply should increase in RuneScape, but 500% per year seems a bit over the top? It's also far larger then the population growth of RuneScape. I find it questionable if we should use M0 or M2 data. With M2 data it would roughly be 76 ppm and the comparable rs price 135mil. But even 675mil, which is roughly the price of crackers currently, is too low. The cracker is not an unique item like the Mona Lisa is and an unique item would surely run into the billions in RuneScape. Also, in RuneScape there is quite a lot trade in the rares, while rare-like items in real life are rarely (:P) traded as far as I know. I really think M2 is a lot better for comparison though - all money in RuneScape is 'virtual' really, RuneScape's M0 is zero in my opinion. If your goal is to stop rares from rising then making them buyable at prices slightly higher then the current market value is probably the best and most healthy solution. This will drain quite some money from the game as well. I personally don't really see a problem with rares though - I see a problem with the inflation in this game and the possible risks for the rest of the game. That material prices haven't changed the past years does not necessarily mean the current money supply growth rate is healthy - hyperinflation can hit unexpected.

Well it's just not that easy. That's why I said that I tend to refer to inflation as an increase in money supply in my previous post. *All items except for rares are (or perhaps it's better to say seems to be) unaffected by the inflation though. *Actually this is not totally true either. Without the huge inflation in this game, pseudo-rare items would not enter the game with prices like 70mil, but much lower instead. Sorry, really nothing has changed in material prices for years. Yes, rares are collector / limited edition items and thus would go up (on the long-term at least) in any economic situation. The rate at which they currently rise cannot be explained otherwise then as a result of inflation though. In fact, according to this article I wrote they seem to be following the (estimated) total gp ingame almost exactly, which sounds a lot like basic inflation correction. To put that a bit more in perspection, the Dow Jones stock market index has risen 5.3% per year the past 100 year as well... I've had this arguement before, but you just can't deny the importancy and size of the rares market in RuneScape. All rare-like items like famous art and old coins in real life have nowhere near such a large total value in the real economy as they do in RuneScape. Also, I'm not trying to stop them from becomming more expensive as that will eventually lead to deflation. However that doesn't mean that their typical 500% price increase per year the past 3 years is normal. Surely most of that is driven by the large inflation that goes on in RuneScape. Not likely - both merchants and normal players have always prefered gp offers above any item offers. If rares go above the 2.1bil gp limit people will probably start trading cheaper rares + gp for the more expensive rares, something that people are already doing a lot by the way. Perhaps if they start reaching prices far above the 2.1bil limit that people start offering masses of materials for rares, as trading rares + gp for other rares is not even a feasible solution anymore. :? People don't smith or craft for the gp they get from high-alching the finished products though. Smithing makes a loss with the current prices of ores already anyway. The same goes for food really, with the difference that there is a small demand for the finished product at a price higher then the high-alch value. But I suppose raw lobs are a possibility as well, just like law runes.

:lol: Nope. ^^

It has been hard to sell them for 1K each in bulk for a long time...

Like? All materials have had stable prices for over 3 years, unless there was some game update that influenced their prices. All pseudo-rare items like whips have only and will only go down. Don't really agree with this. Plenty of people have been putting their money in rares for years already, in order to fight the inflation and they continue to do so. Furthermore - ask any of the richer merchants and they'll tell you that they prefer to express their richness in 'rares' rather than in gp's. Ofcourse rares can't possibly be a replacement of the currency as it's not liquid at all and has a high cost though. But still, people don't really have anything to do with the inflation as long as they don't want to participate in the rares market. As I said above, materials and pseudo-rares have been left untouched by inflation the past 3 years. However, the real question is whether this can go on forever though. If panic hits, materials really do have the potential to skyrocket at some point. The most likely time that such a panic would hit (if it will ever hit at all) would be when RuneScape's player population doesn't grow as fast as it did the past 3 years anymore. This will be a large cut on the supply of materials, which will eventually lead to higher prices, which in turn might lead to hyperinflation. Yeah, personally always had my bets on coal. It just seems to be the most stable and widely accepted commodity around.

The whole idea of people abandoning the game money because it has no real use is not as unreasonable as it may seem really. It actually happened in Diablo 2 for example... I think it's unlikely that it'll ever happen for RuneScape though. Runes, arrows, several dragon items can be bought in shops for 'static' gp prices. Furthermore, the addition of construction greatly enhanced the usefulness of gp as well.

Isn't it a lot easier to just use tele to your house nowadays and then tele to edge again? :anxious:

The article is more an introduction lesson to inflation rather then really discussing anything regarding RuneScape's economy. This is not really inflation in my opinion, but that may depend slightly on your definition of inflation. I usually refer to money supply increase when talking about inflation though. Selling to shops also takes the goods out of the game, as the shops remove them from their stocks slowly. Nevertheless, from an economic point of view, High Level Alchemy and selling to shops are practically the same - let's call it the NPC-buy value. It's really not that hard to design a MMORPG with massive repetition that doesn't have such an extreme inflation as RuneScape has. The whole issue lies mainly in the NPC-buy value. It basically serves as a price floor, with unlimited money creation to back-up the price floor. This in turn creates a situation where the creation of money is extremely uncontrolled. People need to make 100K's of bows, plates, etc to train their skills. The problem is that there is no real demand for all these items, so they are all "sold" for the game-implemented price floor. Point is that people aren't making those bows and plates for the money, but for the experience. Yet, billions of gp are created as a "side effect". So how could this work differently? Well the answer seems simple: remove the unnatural price floors. However this has large consequences for the skilling system: what to be done with the huge amount of demandless finished products? In my opinion the only viable solution for that is to allow for the 'detachment' of the finished products. Allow steel plates to be resmelted in bars again. Allow bows to be detached to logs again. And make it so that people get less materials back from the detachment of the finished products then it costs to make the finished products. In this way there is demand / use for the finished products and they'll also slowly leave the economy without introducing money. Furthermore the whole idea of monsters dropping gold should be reviewed. People mainly train on monsters to gain experience - again not for the money. Remove gold being dropped by monsters as well. Ok so by now you may wonder "uhh you just removed all money creation". Yes, that's why you'll also need to introduce a new way to create money. I'll refrain from describing it very detailed, but the idea is that there should be a way to gain money which does not gain you (much if at all) experience. The point is that people will only do this to gain the money (note the difference to all the current ways of money creation, where people gain money as a side-effect to their main goal, which is gaining experience!). This will ensure that the money is created in a controlled way. If the 'value of money' is too low, people will stop creating money, effectively increasing the value of money over time again.

:lol: I'm ok with useful chatspeak as long as it stays in chat places where typing something fast / short is important. Actually, I'm amazed that the words 'buying' and 'selling' haven't been abbreviated in RuneScape. In nearly all other MMO's people either say 'buy' or 'b>' when they want to buy something. But since you got all the time and space you need to write whatever you want on forums it shouldn't be used on there.

20 blue phats during the rock-bottom of the depression at the start of rs2. After blue phats had risen and all the other hats were still low I bought more phats, sold some blue's and ended up with 7-8 phat sets.

Never been possible.

Stake and runecraft are the other two options besides merchanting.

Well not everyone finds out about tip.it or other fansites till he gets a bit higher leveled, so you'll generally not run into really low leveled players on fansites in general. Furthermore I personally think tip.it acts the most professional of all fansites and thereby attracts the more hard-core / serious / older gamers to their forum, who are generally higher leveled. People also tend to stick to tip.it once they join it as it has a good community for most part.

It used to turn into the negative if you'd gain more then 2.1bil. I say used to because from what I heard of some people, it seems that you now get a warning message or something or at least it doesn't go into the negative anymore. Nevertheless, it really isn't hard to solve it. Either start using 64 bit variables for money only(!) or implement platinum pieces like r2pleasent suggests, which is even less work.

Long-term price development of rares is unaffected by price manipulation. Rares are bound to go up and the current prices of rares seem quite natural.

Crack is the most expensive atm. ^^

Nah, I'm sure that someone will create another topic about it within a year. :P But yeah, it never existed and never will. ^^

Step (1) is ineffective. Macroers can easily train their combat to level 4 or higher if you want. Step (2) is ineffective. It is comparable to the sleeping words that were implemented in the game back in RSC and the macroing community had found ways to solve that issue. So no, your suggestions are not going to do anything about the macroing problem.

The game is still a Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game.. Grouping people like the article suggests fits exactly in the category of egoistic-efficiency-training above anything else, which is what everyone already does. It's sad to see that tip.it even helps to justify that kind of attitude with this article, while they should try to promote the opposite IMO.

Well, if you make long posts it's handy for people that they can read who wrote it at the end of the post as well. But I don't get why people put it both in their signature and at the end of their posts either.