Duke_Freedom

http://forum.tip.it/viewtopic.php?t=723933 As can be read there, the new item issue has been solved the only way it could: by allowing new items to temporarly be traded without price limitations. Instead of removing price floors Jagex seems to be going to implement even more price floors. Unlike what they claimed at first, the Grand Exchange is not going to be purely player based, and Jagex is more or less simply going to manipulate prices themself as they see fit. They are planning to enhance transparency by bringing out more information, graphs, etc over time, which is a plus.

Conform what I suggested. It seems they are also going to work to give the players a bit more transparency. Oh well looks good even though they don't adress: - Liqudity issues. People need to be able to place more orders than 2 as free player or 6 as member player. - The crappy Adaptive Pricing System behind the Grand Exchange - They actually plan on introducing more price floors instead of less. They break their promise that the Grand Exchange will be a purely player based trading system by buying items for these price floors. Oh and very funny: The mod actually succeeded in naming a resource that barely changed throughout the past 5 years and claims that it will rise in price. :lol:

Everything can be automated to do that quickly. And again, they did a complete overhaul of their game with RuneScape 2. Compared to that this programming issue, if it is worth referring to it as an issue in the first place, is peanuts. Jagex simply is not interested in changing peoples user names for some odd reason.

I know enough about programming to understand that this is utter nonsense. Besides, the issue of not being able to rename your character is as old as the game, which means this issue was around long before the update to RuneScape 2. Surely they could have changed their crappy programming then? Copy&Pasting what I wrote on another thread: All Jagex should have offered (and it is something that should have implemented years ago already), was to be able to change the names of offensively named characters. But Jagex clearly doesn't care if loyal players loose 5 years+ of game playing. The dictatorial Jagex only needs to consider someone's name offensive and they'll consider that to justify the loss of 5 years+ of game play. Seriously - anyone defending this ridiculous behaviour on Jagex part lost his mind and certainly lost track of the meaning of "fair" and "fun". In fact by now allowing people to transfer their items to a new character, they are even pretty much confirming the game is all about money and that skills are relatively meaningless - something I have never even claimed to that extent. The statement some people have made throughout the history, that skills are permanent while items were not, is being falsified in a matter of seconds here and the opposite is apparently true if you are having any trouble with Jagex. Nah. The self-righteous Jagex does not understand a single bit about ethics.

All Jagex should have offered (and it is something that should have implemented years ago already), was to be able to change the names of offensively named characters. But Jagex clearly doesn't care if loyal players loose 5 years+ of game playing. The dictatorial Jagex only needs to consider someone's name offensive and they'll consider that to justify the loss of 5 years+ of game play. Seriously - anyone defending this ridiculous behaviour on Jagex part lost his mind and certainly lost track of the meaning of "fair" and "fun". In fact by now allowing people to transfer their items to a new character, they are even pretty much confirming the game is all about money and that skills are relatively meaningless - something I have never even claimed to that extent. The statements some people have made throughout the history, that skills are permanent while items were not, is being falsified in a matter of seconds here and the opposite is apparently true if you are having any trouble with Jagex. Nah. The self-righteous Jagex does not understand a single bit about ethics.

They are still above 150mil, if they would be 100mil now then there would be some massive panic going on.

I try to avoid discussions about the pking / dueling changes as they are generally rather heated, plus I'm completely ignorant about pking anyway - never really participated in it. ;) One other problem that seems easy to solve is the sharing of rare boss monster drops that people fight with a team. Various good solutions to that have already been discussed. However, the solution I see is that Jagex could allow rare drops to be 'divided' in parts. For example: where people would originally drop one complete dragon chain (which only one person would get) when they fought the KQ with a group of 5 people, they would now each get two 1/10th parts of a dragon chain. Jagex could then reintroduce Thrander (yeah! :P) to reassemble ten 1/10th parts of a dragon chain into a full dragon chain. A rather straight forward solution. Each 1/10th part would be stackable and people would obviously be able to sell them individually on the Grand Exchange.

Well, they'll certainly have all the necessary tools to do so and we will barely have any way of detecting any of it. Only if we're going to see any strange price behaviour then we'll really know there's something going on. And yes, Jagex could make the rares pretty much untradable anytime they want now, let their prices devaluate by creating new rares for sale or just ensure that their prices remain stable by both buying/selling them according to player demand. As Ts Stormrage said, and as can be read in various threads around here as well, there is plenty of suspicious activity already. Is this really so surprising though? Most of the bots will be gone soon and the masses of materials they created will be used up by the players some time. A logical mid-term / long-term effect of this update would be higher prices for the materials that bots used to gather on a massive scale. However, perhaps we'll not be going to see that happen at all. Jagex could take over the role of the bots by providing the materials that the bots used to gather themselves, using the system that gave them the complete control over the price development of any item in the game. I have to say I'm not too proud of the conspiracy thinking here, but Jagex is crazy enough for it.

Hm. There are many ways of "legalizing" RWT, plenty of them don't necessarily include Jagex selling gold themselves, but pretty much all of them allow Jagex take a piece of the cake somehow. The actual mechanics don't really matter for the discussion here though... Fact is that Jagex could have developped a completely working RWT allowed system in the matter of just a few months, whereas they have now spent one and a half year working on tons of controversial and strongly disliked changes that don't even work correctly and create a huge uproar in the game's community.

Yeah, I don't understand Jagex philosophy behind these price floors. I don't get what they are trying to reach by adding them in the first place. As you already mentioned as well, all items already have some sort of price floor: their high alch values. Players will enforce these themselves when the price of an item drops too much below it. You're raising another interesting point here... The first few of a new item used to be sold at extraordinary prices, after which the prices plummet rapidly over the course of just a few days / weeks. Jagex will certainly have to look into this as well, because as it currently stands, the system will probably not be going to allow people to sell new items during this period and likely not even for quite a while thereafter. Furthermore, the issue of determing a "fair market value" price for new items is a very nasty one - I can't think of a suitable solution for this at the moment, other than temporary allowing complete free market trading (i.e. no pricing restrictions) at the Grand Exchange for new items. I just want to reiterate that I personally don't agree with the whole notion that RWT is so bad that it is worth all this effort. In fact, I would have long "legalized" RWT one way or another. The figures that Jagex has given us about the billions that were already being sold per year and the fact that players still barely notice any of this (disregarding bots), makes me think that if they would build a well-considered RWT environment they would be better (and easier?) off. However, I do believe Jagex is doing a fine job at what they are trying to reach: no more RWT at all, including (significantly?) less other rule-breaking (mostly less botting) as a by product. Jagex did some good research on how they could effectively and more or less permanently remove RWT from their game. They made the right conclusion that the only way of getting rid of RWT is to take away all possibilities that you could possibly "launder" gp from one character to another in a "secure" way. Jagex seems to understand well that if there any loopholes left, they can count on it that creative RWT'ers will be going to abuse them. What surprises me is that Jagex wasn't all that shocked about the amount of major changes that they would need to do, but apparently they consider it to be worth it. Looking at the big picture I believe they came up with excellent alternatives for former game content that had to be changed, but sadly they are now ending up implementing half of it in a rubbish manner in my opinion. So to conclude, I don't think there are any fundamental problems with Jagex proposed changes. However, they really need to spent more time on working out the (minor) details better, making some small changes to several parts of the new content and tweaking parameters around to ensure that, regarding the trading system for example, we won't be going to see a complete meltdown of trading activity in various items, just because the system works crappy. I don't believe that game companies should be interferring in their own game economies at all... Ever. Prices will adapt on their own over time. We're currently just seeing a short-term panic and that will pass by. Furthermore, from a theoretical point of view, one can argue that many items used to be consistently overpriced according to the real supply and demand of the item, based on the fact that the trading system was inefficient. Potions, for example, were a pain to sell in bulk. For many people the time it took (= opportunity cost) to sell the items was simply too high for them to go about to sell the items, this resulted in structural (but under perfect markt conditions, inefficient) higher valuation of potions than dictated by the real supply and demand equilibrium. The Grand Exchange largely ment the removal of the opportunity cost and thus the prices of potions and any such items were bound to fall down. I have a hard time really calling that a price drop, however, because one can argue that people "earn" back part of this loss by the fact that they don't have to spent the time selling the potions. Time is still money. Yeah, just not so much on MSN lately. From what I read around the forum and knowing Jagex for 5 years now, I wouldn't be surprised if Jagex actually ends up creating liquidity on the Grand Exchange by buying and selling items themselves, hence also creating price stability by doing so. Of course, it would be a huge loss for the game if they are going to do so though. Like you mentioned in your thread as well, they are taking out the M of Multiplayer in their Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Jagex once again underestimates the importance of a dynamic game environment, as they always have.

Nah it is just what I predicted beforehand about the GE. Most merchants don't have all that much skill and blow at adapting to new circumstances. The few skilled ones who could adapt quickly are now looking at a market without (m)any merchants and thus with huge profit margins, like the ones you apparently have been making. :)

Yup, Jagex sacrificed a lot in what they apparently want to reach so badly. The extrapolation is a joke IMO. It's not like their player base will continue to grow this exponentially, and the amount of RWT is obviously linked to the player population somehow. Actually, I don't think they took the "easy rout out", considering the massive effort and time that went into the updates that were all required to obtain the end result they want so desperately (= no RWT). They would have been much easier off "legalizing" RWT somehow.

Introduction It is clear that Jagex has decided on a total overhaul of nearly all major aspects of its game. Judging from the information given in the Development Diary, Jagex started to work about one and a half year ago on the various changes that are now implemented. Jagex is determined to bring the final death-blow to Real World Item Trading, no matter what it takes. Not minding the whole argument about whether Real World Item Trading is really so bad that it is worth going through all the effort Jagex has gone through, overall I have to say that they have thought well about the many sections of the game that would need to be changed and I am quite impressed by their ability to find more or less suitable alternatives to each of the affected game sections. However, despite the fact that they may have spent much thought about all the important matters involved at the top level, they seem to be making vital mistakes with the actual details of the changes. They forgot about the importance of working out the exact details right and tweaking them until they are perfect, while that might make the difference between whether the changes will actually be disastrous for the game in the end or whether all those who are currently spamming up the rants boards with ÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ãâ¦Ã¢â¬ÅI quitÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬ÃâÃ

Yup, had already made those conclusions somewhere else. It is ironic Jagex is claiming trading is not death. Ofcourse, theoretically they are correct, but with the 3,000gp limitation that will soon be imposed on normal trading, you won't see people use normal trading for real trading purposes anymore. Now that wouldn't be all THAT bad, if the Grand Exchange system actually worked well. However, it has so many issues right now that it is just not funny anymore.

Jagex has learned nothing throughout the years. They still believe that their artificially generated high alch values make any sense beyond having the effect of a government imposed price floor and they still believe they can force player values towards some artificial "market value" according to a crappy adaptive system, while all that will result in is less trade and an inefficient market system. Jagex, let a real economist take a look at it all. Let him propose a suitable and better adaptive system and stop thinking that your own imposed "market values" make any more sense than the ones determined by free market supply and demand. And just a thought, is it possible that the 280gp is equal to the GE market value of a nature? Would make "some" sense. Edit: ah it was already suggested - does seem logical though.

I don't think it's going to get worse. Account trading has many downsides for the RWT'ers and sweatshops. Accounts are generally sold at a huge discount when compared to the price of the virtual currency for a variety of reasons. Time/cost wise, training accounts for RWT purposes is not really efficient, i.e. the 'generated value' per hour is significantly lower. Furthermore, despite the general consensus, people who spend hundreds or thousands of $ on virtual currency / items / characters are the rare exception to the rule. Most transactions involve (much) smaller amounts of gp instead. I suppose there will be an increase of people who will be going to do that anyway, but it's probably not going to get anywhere near as big as RWT was.

Finally someone who looks for solutions instead of posting another rant. :D A nice solution by the way, not difficult on Jagex part to make. Ofcourse there are countless of solutions for the problem - as long as Jagex chooses one which has the bottomline that people can still fairly share the loot, they'll do just fine.

That's more a long-term effect anyway. But many people with rares already kept them on their accounts when they quit anyway. I don't think it really matters for that.

Which is enough of a con for it to be used for serious RWIT purposes. Furthermore, there may be other people who buy or sell their party hats, so that would make it even more difficult. But ofcourse it is still a potential loophole.

Ok. Party hats and other rares as well as most other expensive items will be going to be traded pretty much exclusively in the GE then.

I don't think anyone would. :P Perhaps I'll take the time to write a more detailed version on my thoughts here later on though. Plus, people know where I stand regarding RWT. I just find it ironic that people are now complaining about what they wanted to happen: the completely removal of RWT... Ofcourse, it comes at some significant costs, but what did you guys think? You're simply not going to get rid of RWT without changing the fundamentals of the game. As I said, with what Jagex wants to reach (= no RWT), they are doing just what was necessary and they are doing it just fine, although admittedly they do need to fine-tune a lot of the new content much better. As for monster shares and drop parties - I just named what Jagex considers the new alternatives to them. Indeed, I know they are not perfect so please don't flame me for mentioning it. ;)

Ok. I was wrong with my prediction that they would be going to remove trading soon once the GE came out, but looking at the mechanics they now suggest, I was close. :D LootShare? Party Pete? Yeah, this will be completely removed. Perhaps if Jagex put some thought in it, they could create some kind of collateral system, however. IMO people here are overreacting... Jagex seems to have putten a lot of thought into this and overall I have to say they seem to make the best out of it with what they want (= total removal of RWT). Perhaps they may need to do some better tweaking of parameters, but if you can look beyond that, the way they worked everything out is quite impressive. Edit: Oh I gotta love the irony of me being pro-Jagex for a change, once nearly everyone is anti-Jagex. :D

They will probably be negatively impacted. By the way, the grand exchange still allows trading within a 5% price range or will that be considered an "unbalanced trade" too?

Well as far as I know RuneCrafting is still one of the best money making skills around. :?

Good article, for a change. The Cooking skill is actually an interesting one as it has seen it all. When I started this game, people could pretty much double their money by buying raw lobsters a 200gp each, cooking them and then selling them to pk'ers for 400gp each. Over the time span of several months the actual profit margin slowly declined and it became harder to sell them, until the point was reached that cooked lobsters and raw lobsters were going for the same price. It remained in that state for quite a while and had a very thriving cooked-for-raw market. Eventually cooked declined further over the years, especially since RS2 due to the fact that food became less and less important (guthans, pest control, etc). Well yeah, that's why the saying that the skill doesn't make money isn't entirely true. It's just that the good ol' time=money factor makes skilling the fastest possible way the most expensive. Erm, (high level) RuneCrafting has certainly brought forth quite a few RS billionaires.