Duke_Freedom

If they'd really want to, I think implementing a fee of something like 1% is fine, but I would be cautious about putting it much higher then that as that would discourage people from using the system and thus break down its usefulness.

Hi Ego.... ;) Keeping it short here: - The Grand Exchange (Auction System) is the long required update to the formerly extremely primitive trading system in RuneScape. - I can only say well done to Jagex - they finally put their game on par with all the other trading systems used in other MMO's, perhaps they even surpass a few others by making the Auction System "World Wide" as well as "Server Wide". I would have LOVED this update back in the days... - Merchants should be able to adapt to the new and different situation that they will face. Various things will certainly change and profit margins are bound to become lower. - Those who can't adapt, are rubbish merchants and not worthy of the title merchant in the first place. Good merchants can make money in any market, no matter whether profit margins are large or small, whether prices are rising or falling, whether trade volume is high or low or whether the environment provides a stone-age primitive trading system or a more advanced, transparent, comfortable and easy to use Auction System. So again: well done Jagex. Enjoy it - I don't say that too often without attaching strings. ;) ~Duke Freedom

Sounds like the food market is going down the drain even further, like it wasn't "hurt" enough by all kinds of other updates that made food less and less necessary throughout the past years (i.e. guthan etc).

Just... WOW. So much for my long predicted material price rises for many materials. :? It's a shame that the "solution" to that has to come from an even less player based and more artificial based economic system though. Anyone willing to figure out the shop buy and sell prices of natures for me?

Except for your yellow one I hope. :lol: ;)

So theoretically there is infinite energy in the Omniverse then? I never know what I have to think about the theory of parallel universes... On one side, I find that the underlying idea sounds plausible, but on the other hand I have trouble believing in it all as my conscious mind is only observing / living in one for sure. ;)

Don't forget I wasn't around till later in the game... When I started, most rune items were only worth about 100K-200K anymore, soon to diminish to near their high alch values - so I don't know much about most of those people. ;) Anyway most people who have much more then those of which it is publically known usually have it from way back in the days when they were still relatively cheap. The person I ment is Manjagirl - she had been around in varrock world 1 / fally world 2 for ages as well.

She isn't that rich anymore, according to herself. :P When she came back in RS2 she sold several of her crackers... I was one of the buyers - although it somewhat disturbed me she only wanted to sell them for masses of materials, like she did with her runite items back in the days. ;) r2pleasent was rich at the time, but he was not among the richest yet. As 3 hit u said, there are several other people around noone really knows their wealth of and / or who simply don't get out in the public. There might be some guy with 4,000 santas who got them pretty much all around the time they were dropped for extremely cheap prices (which would represent a market value of ~88bil nowadays), although I never saw actual proof of it and thus remain to put question marks with the claim. And there is at least one other active merchant (although I think she's not active anymore) who is certainly up there in richness, yet noone knows how much she might really have. And then there is always the possibility of relatively unknown rich stakers as well.

Sorry I looked again at what you said, and obviously I agree that gold is essentially not "necessary", although the definition of "necessary" is not really set in stone either. I just wanted to point out that you can't just compare gold to printed money. Gold is actually scarce and fulfills many requirements that a "currency" should adhere to like printed money (i.e. its purpose is for trade as you pointed out (although it is actually used as jewelry and for high-tech purposes (luxury goods) as well). But even though gold and printed money both derive a significant portion of their value on the "faith" of being able to trade it for other products at a later time, the latter is only artificially scarce. The significant difference can easily be observed by the fact that the value of gold has proven to be quite 'tangible' in practice in situations where most normal currencies generally fail (i.e. world war, economic crises, political crises, hyperinflation, etc etc).

I can only state my opinion that people are extreme hypocrits and turn a blind eye considering everything they "supposively" 'don't know' and yet seem to make a huge issue out of things that are public knowledge. Furthermore, I want it to be clear that I never asked for compashion. Some people don't care so much about the RWIT rule and some people do and that's fine. I want to point out that I only provided the link for those who wanted to read what I posted at the time. Neither I nor probably tip.it's administration are looking for continued debate on the topic. The thread was locked for a reason. Move on.

Gold is scarce, printed money is not. Printed money is essentially not worth anything on itself. The dollar is bound to drop further anyway. The Fed lowered the interest rate by 0.5% because of panic about Sub-Prime Mortgages and to support the stock market and trust (among banks). Apparently the severe inflation America is bound to face is currently of less worry than the panic to the high chiefs around. While 'the war' costs some money, people greatly overuse it as argument for America's economic problems. There's a lot more going on - and the war is only a small part of it.

You can't just predict small rares will remain the same for a half year - year like that without offering a real explanation why. Do you even actively merchant them? If no, then how do you even determine increasing demand / declining demand and market sentiment then? Seems to me your predictions have no actual value. Christmas is comming up anyway, chances of santa's being hyped in anticipation of that is certainly existing.

Not going to happen. Anyway, high alching the crackers is completely unnecessary as well. IF you really want to prove to people that you are destroying them, open them instead and sell the phats you get out of it (which gives you more cash to buy more crackers again, easens the execution of "the plan"), plus it annoys phat holders if you do it on such a large scale, as phat prices may drop somewhat as a result. Anyway, it is bound to fail as clever merchants or rich skillers will always keep a few crackers behind, hence making it impossible to get all crackers. Lastly, the value of all crackers in the game add up to an extreme value that noone can afford anyway , especially as the prices will be rising as you buy more and more crackers of the market (and hence create scarcity). Reason more why you don't need to alch or open them, as the scarcity in the economy should already cause extreme rises in the price of the cracker. Merchanting is providing a service of fast trading (liquidity) and charging a commision for that.

Who wasn't when it happened? :lol: As for my best bank picture: Theoretical estimated value of around ~32.5bil these days. Agreed.

Trading and skilling of certain skills can easily go together. I had 99 firemaking, 87 smithing, 85 mining, 91 or so cooking too. And I know of gasheart that he spend about just as much time trading actively in varrock world 1 as I did in fallador world 2 - which is about 12 months non-stop. :lol: Gasheart and I traded a lot in the same sectors back in the days too.

Gasheart not a big trader?! :lol:

I always wondered whether he bought (some) rares back too. I never saw him do so and considering that prices were falling at the start of rs, I have some doubts he did, although that would have been a major mistake.

And you just don't want to know what a pain it was to withdraw and deposit such large amounts of money at 2500gp / click... *sighs at the thought of those "good" old times* :P A lot of comparing of apples to pears in this thread though. Depending on the way you look at it, both the people who claim it is easier to make 230mil now than 10mil back then and the people who say it was easier to make 10mil back then and 230mil back now are right. The point is, you shouldn't be comparing coal mining back in rsc to level 91 nature rune crafting now. Obviously, if you do that, the latter is easier. No - a better comparison would be, for example, rune miners versus nature rune crafters now. Making this comparison I'm quite sure the rune miners back could afford 10 mil much more easily then nature rune crafters now. An even fairer comparison may be rune miners back in the days versus the "abyssal daemon billionaires". The people who reached 85 slayer first probably had an equally easy time to get 230mil as those with 85 mining had to get 10 mil back in the days. This is not too strange, considering the exclusivity of 85 mining back in the time as well. In essence this simply means that rares prices adjust for the best money making opportunities that the highest level players have. Comparing coal mining now versus coal mining back in the days 10 mil was FAR easier to gather back then than 230 mil nowadays. Sure, back then we had certing, slower mining, carpal tunnel syndrome from all the clicking (;)) and what not, but the difference in mining speed is NOT a factor of 23x. I would be surprised if the objective factor difference would be more than 3x already. This DOES mean that rares, for the poorer / lower leveled portion of the game's population are way more out of reach nowadays than they were back in the days. Back in the days it was *possible* for people to buy rares by mining coal. That just isn't realistically possible anymore now though.

Yeah, nowadays we throw our morality out of the door for this mysterical thing we call "money", we make war and kill people over land area (just like animals do), power (just like animals do), for money (not what animals do), for fun (not what animals do), for oil (not what animals do) and for whatever else that floats our boat. Oh and we developped much more sophisticated technology so that we can more easily kill each other. Yeah, we certainly made progression and certainly have a better set of moral rules versus animals nowadays. Why people don't understand that there is nothing "civilized" about our "civilized" society? Don't ask me. Edit: I'm not saying we should go back to the stone age, because I don't believe technology has anything to do with morality or being "civilized" at all anyway. Since technology generally makes our lives easier, why not?

So how do you logically deduce from all this that that we can't look at animals of how we should act? Pointing out differences without any realization of whether they are really relevant at all is not "proving" anything. And the most likely explanation for that is that our natural resistance is extremely weak nowadays due to the high hygiene and wealth we have in our societies. Most of "us" humans are as arrogant to think that we are not "just like" animals. Whether that is an actual fact remains completely unproven, however, even though most people bring it as if it is a proven fact. The human race has written down a lot of moral guidelines which seem to be extremely subjective as many of them have no factual backing and can't be deduced from acceptable premises or logic. Many of these guidelines are based on "what the majority thinks is right". Yet, the majority of the people were raised and brainwashed with said moral guidelines and thus this an obvious loophole reasoning. Anyone claiming the opposite should be taking a look at evolution theory and do a check on its human-superiority-arrogance complex.

Dutch university pawns all. ;)

Effectively, all you're suggesting is to increase the already existing artificial high-alch values on specific uncommon drop items.

I don't see a difference at all. How do you define a good leader? As someone who does the best for humanity, as someone who only does good? How do you define a good person? As someone who does the best for humanity, as someone who only does good? In fact, if you don't consider ethics, I don't think it's even possible to talk about good / bad in such a sense. :roll: A good military leader is something different then a good overall leader, especially when it comes to defining the word "good". Plus, he made the same mistake as Napoleon so I don't know how you can call him a good military leader at all. Those guys saved a few hundred thousands if not millions of lives, they are heros. The whole problem with those who oppose(d) the use of nuclear bombs during world war II is that they can't do simple math and think that 1 million death more or less doesn't matter anymore or because they are too naive too realise that death count would have been much higher if the nukes were not dropped.

Ah, that was confusing the heck out of me. So it can go both ways? Interesting :-k . It pretty much depends on what economic school you believe in. I personally find the later definition much more useful and applicable to RuneScape though. One of the ideas of tracking a basket of items and determining inflation by that is that it would represent the general increase in "cost of living". However, there is no such thing in RuneScape. You don't have to eat food in order to survive, you don't have to drink either, etc. Therefore I don't think it is possible in any way to talk about "cost of living" - and thus inflation in the more widely accepted defintion - in the first place.

Somehow, people seem to love ideolizing the wrong people. Add on to that that getting into 'the news' doing something bad seems to be much easier than achieving the same amount of fame the long, but honest, road.