Duke_Freedom

Please do not bump old topics. ~Locked

Please use the thread Bubsa mentioned. ~Locked

We have a price check sticky in the Falador Square market board. Anyway, air runes are 15-20gp each, though they can be hard to sell.

Hm I don't know how it is on AIM since I never used it :P, but I think it's generally true that people worry less about age difference in games then on messaging services.. Maybe because in the game you know that you both have a common interest (the game) while on messaging services people don't expect to have a common interest when the age difference is too large?

There we go again..

Yeah, it's been over a half year ago now so a lot changed in the meanwhile. I'm estimating the total gp at 800bil without doing calculations now. I've wanted to redo the calculations for some time already though. Regarding the game mechanics I expect the change in the effect of barrows to be the most important in the meanwhile. I can't remember any other major additions to the gameplay. Interesting (you never said or posted that I believe?). It's good that both estimates are quite 'near' to each other though.

It goes negative. When will you people just read my posts instead of guessing.. :P A friend of me had it happen to him over half a year ago and I've seen the evidence.

They really aren't going to notice the 4 bytes more or less memory per player ^^.

If Jagex continues to do nothing about it when it's becomming more important then yes, it will have a possitive effect on the prices of rares. I'm sure that, as it becomes an issue for more people, Jagex will do something about it though.

Thank you both for these two great quotes, allows me to say a bit more about merchants.. Albosky, why are you mad at that guy for wanting more profit? He's even being honest about it and, in fact, he's actually saying you could sell for more yourself, if you want to spend the time doing so! It's your choice to sell to him anyway (he offers you a quick sale and admits it's a low price) or try to sell for your own price and thus spend more time selling. Yes, he could buy at 1mil as well and still make profit, but apparently he doesn't want to do so as it's not worth his time. I think a lot of "merchants" can learn a lot of that example, lack of honesty is one of the greatest problems of merchanting and one of the biggest reasons why people hate merchants in the first place. Now one is being honest and you are still complaining. I quoted jessy87 as well, because the typical nowadays "merchant" would have been much more dishonest. Like jessy87 mentioned, he would have said that the flail is worth only 900K and that you won't ever sell for more, even though he just wants to buy it to sell it for 1.1mil. Or do you actually prefer this type of merchant above the one who is honest about his "need" to profit more, albosky? Is he "greedy" because he wants more profit though? Not necessarily. Let's take the hypothetical situation that I was in that merchants position. Let's say I could earn 300K / hour by using my skills. That means I would want to earn more then 300K / hour by merchanting, because if I do skills I also get experience. Now let's simplify the situation greatly by saying I make all my money from merchanting flails. Let's say that I know I can sell them quite easily for 1.1mil each, and that selling for higher is a pain. I go on and test a bit and seem to get the following numbers: - If I buy flails for 900K each I can buy 2 per hour - If I buy flails for 1mil each I can buy 3 per hour So if I would buy the flails at 900K each, that means I would make 2*200K profit = 400K / hour. If I would buy them at 1mil each I would be able to buy one more per hour, but I would make 3*100K profit = 300K / hour. Firstly, I wouldn't want to do that because it means I could make the same amount / hour by using skills and get exp in the meanwhile. Plus, I could also maximize my profits better by just buying for 100K less. In reality, noone is going to make these calculations ofcourse. But it is still that kind of thinking why people want to make more profit / item. It's either to maximize their profits better or to make merchanting even worthwhile for them. Your point that merchants do have influence on the market is true. If we exclude price manipulation and lying merchants, then their contribution to the economy is only positive in the way that in makes the price ranges of items smaller. This, in general, should ensure that "normal" buyers and sellers can buy and sell their items for a better price for themselves. Firstly, I only played 3 years and have been quite inactive in rs during the past year. My money comes solely from merchanting / investing in rares. My skills aren't all that bad if you stop focussing too much on combat skills as so many people do... I have over 2/3rds of your total exp. Still that doesn't really say much. Like I said, there is no set goal in this "game". People saying it's all about having good skills do not know what they are talking about... The game is about setting your own goals and working on them. Becomming rich is a common goal of many people and just because there is no highscores for it doesn't mean that it's a stupid goal. That doesn't sound all that objective to me :P. Oh well, I never expected to have the patience to actively merchant for a full year when I heard gasheart did that. I ended up doing the same thing as well :). What's the use of 99 skill's... That's my reply.

Without merchants, you would have ended up selling for 800K. Point is that merchants bring down the price ranges of items and make sure someone can easier buy / sell items quickly and in the amounts he wants to buy / sell them. Without merchants, trading would be a lot tougher and item prices would be less stable. Saying that merchants aren't "playing the game" is not realising MMO "games" / virtual worlds aren't "games" with a set goal... You can choose your own destiny and way of play in these games. :wink: Merchants don't change the prices because they don't produce nor use anything. They merely turn over materials, being on both the demand and the supply side of the market, which creates for more stable prices.

There have been various people who have reached the cap already, that is not including me as I don't keep much cash and actually expected the cap to be at 2.1bil before anyone reached it already (it's equal to 2^31 - 1). The money turns negative when you pass it. Jagex knows about it, but like I said in my earlier reply on this thread, they just don't seem to have it high on their priority list as the first time the cap was a problem is over a half year ago now... At least. They need to hit the "clear all accounts" button, then you'll see who the real players are after that. :roll: It's a shame the cap is public knowledge now :P.. It allowed me to laugh about fakers who claimed to own "5bil gp" or similiar things for quite a while :D. Oh and this thread is such a great example of the general hate of the public versus merchants... You gotta love it. :)

The problem with giving away free stuff as a good deed is that you shouldn't do it like this... This thread is likely to mostly attract the wrong kind of people who "need" free stuff; beggars. Beggars who know how to make their cash, but who are just too lazy to do so. I have absolutely no patience nor interest to talk to such people as they are the ones being greedy - not anyone else. They feel the whole world should be circling around them. Furthermore, anyone who uses these forums is likely to have passed the 'newbie' state already and know at least a slight bit about the game already.. Enough to make some gp. IMO there are no people who really "need" free stuff. Money making in this game is extremely easy, and even your average newbie 'Joe' should be able to afford full adamantite within a few hours of play. However, that doesn't mean you can't do anything good. You could add new players to your list when you see they are confused and need some help. Be wary when they start asking for free stuff though, like Lim_Dul said, you shouldn't feed that kind of attitude.

Yup, the cap has been there and a problem for a while already now. Doesn't seem like it is on Jagex priority list though. Nor is it that hard as von_Faust proposes. They don't need to increase the integer size of all items.. They only need to increase the integer size of the gp you can keep. Sure, they probably have to view gp as a special item as a result, but really it can't be that hard.

Actually, thats not totally true. Downwards price manipulation happens sometimes as well, though not as often and usually not as blatantly obviously as upward price manipulation.

Pink was turned purple with the change from runescape classic to runescape 2.. Probably mainly because Jagex didn't like to be remembered about the dupe of several months before rs2 too much, when pinks were massively created. Either that or they didn't even know their players referred to those colored phats as being pink. :roll: In fact, masks didn't had a color description till a half year or a year later in RuneScape 2, when I mentioned it to Jagex :P. Still don't get how false rumours about black party hats still float around after it has been posted multiple times by the people involved that it never existed... Oh well.

Very good article, and a very good description of what merchanting really is, as many people do not understand it nor use the right definition. Not only that, merchanting has gotten a bad name throughout the years, caused mainly by people I do not even consider to be "merchants", like price manipulators (which are just advanced scammers) and rip-off merchants, who are just that... Merchants who solely live from ripping people off - not using the natural price ranges that exist on each item, but using 'lucky' sales. These rip-off merchants usually have a bad habit of lying about an items market price, making them scammer-like people as well. Only small detail I disagree about is that investing (buying a rare with the intention to keep for some time to, hopefully, sell it for more later) is a form of merchanting. Strictly speaking, investing is a different form of making money from trading then merchanting is. You can think of merchanting being the active form of making money from trading while investing is the passive form of it. In RuneScape investing is usually referred to as merchanting as well though and it's no biggie anyway. I just like to make the difference, as I can't call people who gain their cash with skills and then invest it in rares, merchants. They are investors, and nothing more then that. :)

Oh I'm not saying you didn't have any evidence to make this thread. In opposite, I know what's going on and I've seen the (excessive?) price manipulation at both the recent mask rises and the santa rises myself. What I'm saying is that people are focussing on it too much though. Price manipulation is an on-going event nowadays, and the price manipulators seem to have noticed (or it's just coincidence?) that it has even more effect when the prices are bound to go up because of natural reasons. So when prices go up you tend to see a ton of price manipulation as well. But that does not mean that the whole rise is based on bs though. I expected both the mask rises as well as the santa rises, as the prices stayed behind a lot, relatively to phats, in the last 3-4 months. They were bound to go up, and bound to do it soon and swiftly, as people would suddenly realise that masks and santa's were undervaluated. On the other hand, I'm *not* saying people shouldn't watch out for the price manipulation.. Price manipulation could push the prices of masks and santa's too high which, as we all know, results in a smaller or bigger drop back, depending on the extremeness of the price manipulation. However, what I'm wary of is that these kind of threads are giving a quite one sided, negative point of view on markets which are developping as expected and, despite the price manipulation going on, seem healthy. The thread title alone scares people. This can, unintentionally, cause price manipulation on it's own, downwards. Note I said unintentionally, as I have no doubts about your good intentions to inform the people, but either way, I do think the story is too one-sided and negative.

Hm, in fact I think pumpkins and easters were collected way more then phats at the time. Pumpkins and easters were actually useful as they healed a lot of hp, so people collected massive amounts of them, with the intention to use it as training food. Phats, on the other hand, didn't have any use other then the way they looked, so people didn't collect them as massively. If we just compare the numbers and exclude the fact that you can't show off the small rares you'd say that they are greatly undervaluated. But the wearability is just a very important factor for their price, so we just can't reason like that.

I'm nowhere near as knowledgable as Duke in this field, but I would estimate that wearable rares are more valuable because you can actually show people you have them all the time (without trading). ~Ian Yep. The fact that you can't show them off or "use" (read: wear) them is the main cause why they are substantially lower in price. Still, there are times that unwearables are a great investement. However, they are just more speculative. Unwearables tend to go sidewards in price for long periods of time, but when they go up, noone is "surprised" if they go up 50-100% in price in a matter of days. Plus, somehow it seems that there are more pumpkins and especially much more easters then there are phats, and roughly equal amounts to the amount of mask sets.

w8! You said unwearables, right? I don't see a rise in prices from pumpkins, easters, disks or wines... Look again. Easters and pumpkins surely increased a bit. The fact that they went up slightly as well shows even more that the recent rises were natural, to a certain extent at least. The tough part about rises is determining when it's not natural anymore, but solely based on price manipulation.

Hmm. People are comparing price manipulation too oftenly with predicted and expected natural rises these days. Nowadays it seems that every time a rare rises, people will say that it is caused by price manipulation... I don't deny that price manipulation is problem... How could I? I was the first to point out that it's a huge problem RuneScape's economy. However, what I see is that people are focussing way too much on the price manipulation aspect of rares and, IMO, are exaggerating it's importance. You should not forget that it's a fact that rares will always go up on the long-term, with or without price manipulation. On the long-term, the effects of price manipulation are pretty unimportant. Price manipulation was definately not the cause of the recent rises in both masks, santas and small unwearables.

Till rank 1 million it's roughly 5000 - 6000 bil exp. Hmm.. If we assume the average players gets 50K exp / hour in a skill, which is high already, then that's 100 million hours or in other words 11500 full years (24/7) :shock:.

Yep, this is only gonna make rares rise even faster. :roll: The reason why rares are a good investement is because they don't suffer from the inflation rate, while gp does. What you suggest only makes the inflation rate higher, thus making rares even more interesting as investement.

People will cheat. Top merchants won't care. I know I don't, as it doesn't show any skill of being a good merchant. Being a good merchant takes more then being able to make 1K, 10K or full rune from 25gp, which really takes little skill at all and is mostly luck / time involved. Just my opinion ;).