Duke_Freedom

I don't see how this is going to give you any more accurate or faster price checks then quick-checking the official forums. Doing a search on the official forums works the fastest anyway and is accurate enough. Just round down what people are selling for and round up what people are buying for and average that to decide your own buying / selling price. If you want to do more elaborate price research, open up a few threads and check what people actually bid for the item in threads.

Many players don't like the massive grinding and many players will disagree with this. Most players play for the friends they make, the community, the pking, the minigames, the trading, the quests and the ability to do a lot in the game world. Are you guys ever going to read what I actually say? Try to look at second bolded part, instead of staring yourself blind only on the first bolded part. Very few would buy anything ridiculous like 50K dragon bones. That's not a guess or a made up ideology, that are the facts as published by Sony. I'm not saying very few people (would) do it, I'm saying very few would do it on a large scale. You guys just don't even seem to be able to read what I actually say. The 6bil / week figure published by Jagex, divided by the 2300 accounts / week figure published by Jagex already shows us an average of 2.6mil per account. You can barely buy a whip with that. Let alone 50K dragon bones. :roll: You consider it competitive. The 'game' in itself is not - there is no "you must do this and that", so there is no "you must play it competitively" either. If you want complete equality and competitivity, go play StarCraft, Counter-Strike or whatever. Rest assured that everyone starts completely equal in those games. Again you overestimate how many people would spend so much on it and I think I'm gonna stop this discussing till you get your facts straight and read Sony's research I linked to. Also, there are multiple things that are unfair advantages in these games, including people who have more time, people who have played from start, etc. Unfairness arguements are quite pointless and irrelevant - you are not directly competiting with other players. You're playing in a Virtual World. There are no starting conditions, no winning conditions, nothing. The 'game' is what you make of it. Oh the joy of making up random numbers. You do realize that 200K is still a far minority? Certainly doesn't make up for 60-80%, but rather 10% at most, allowing me to use your own numbers against you. ;) I don't think I ever related my fun ingame to others in such a direct way as you say you do. In fact I don't believe Zezima, Novalyfe, etc do either - in the interviews Tip.It did with them they seem to say that they mostly play for themselves and not for the highscores too. ;)

There is no set "goal" of RuneScape. People play the game for different reasons, one person only does combat and loves pking, another one likes skilling and tries to have all his skills among the same level, the third person loves trading. They all play the game for different reasons. There is no "you should play the game this way". People play for fun, remember? I said few people spend much money on it - that's something completely different. Just read this: http://arden.blogs.com/swn/2007/02/sony_releases_v.html

Yup, writing 1-3 pages about that sounds difficult though. :o

nadir, you haven't done anything to show why it is immoral, in case you forgot what the debate was about. Your points 1) and 2) are merely technical issues, unrelated to this discussion. Enforcing rule 12 has it's own issues like that as well. However this is all quite unrelated to whether it is moral or not. If you read my article, you'd know that I consider the bolded and italic parts arguments for allowance rather than against. If you really believe in the bolded part, you'd actually agree with me. As I said in my article, the "need" for the RMT service comes from a fundamental aspect of these games: massive 'grinding'. A typical sentence written by those who oppose real money trading: stating that it is unfair, without providing actual arguements why it would be so unfair. I'm not impressed with the arguement that other players have to "work" for their stuff - as I pointed out in my own article, I disagree with the general thought that RuneScape is a competitive game. It is nothing like a game of chess, monopoly or whatever and essentially it doesn't matter at all what individual players do in the game world. It shouldn't matter to you whether Joe around the corner spend 10 hours RuneCrafting to afford his whip or bought it with real money. I'd also urge you to reread the results of Sony Entertainments research on this - there are very few players who would really spend masses of money on it, even if it were allowed. In what sense? You completely fail to mention why. Like 1) and 2), this is unrelated to whether it is moral or not. Anyway, if you really want to know, there are huge issues with game companies selling items or characters themselves. It causes inflation issues and highers the 'average standard of levels'. Do not forget that RMT is essentially zero-sum, it changes nothing to what exists in the game's economy. Game companies selling items and characters would be completely the opposite of that and would have an effect on the games economy, in opposite to players trading between each other. Why would I care how another person got his levels? Why do you care? And again, there are very few people who would spend so much on it that they'd gain such a fast progress in the game. How many people actually care so much about the highscores?

Because you'll be unable to defend your argument how real world trading is "immoral". There is nothing fundamentally wrong with it, if we disregard that it is against the rules.

Gotta laugh at some of the posts here. :P I myself bought 8-9 (can't remember exactly) crackers of one single person in one deal some time (sadly didn't take picture then) and I know there have been other top merchants who had such 'bulk' sellers a few times. Besides I've bought and sold enough crackers to different people to consider a number of 100-200 the most reasonable estimate I can come up with. The rarity of crackers is way overestimated and you having been a merchant I'd have expected you to be more realistic.

Just some simple and rather inaccurate calculation: 6bil gp banned / per week divided by 2300 accounts banned / per week = 2.6mil / account banned. That doesn't sound unreasonable at all though, gold buyers rarely buy really large amounts. Ofcourse noone can really check whether these numbers are just made up or not, but I'd say they fit.

It's about 232 rune ore per onyx, so it's worth it if you want to hop worlds 90 times, or wait for stock to go back down to 0. Okay - with all the actual data in this thread now, it seems their price is unable to go below ~3mil-3.5mil at this moment anyway. Things are not as bad as they seemed. :P

Sounds like the fury amulet is gonna half in price (or even worse) pretty soon with all this - actually, you may wonder why it hasn't already, especially if this is true as well. Sounds like there's a nice buck to be made for some fast merchants. :P

Those "macros" have a different meaning then what it means in RuneScape though - in fact I don't believe there is any game that allows you to automate the full game play, which is what autoing essentially is. Otherwise you could say RuneScape has it's own build in "macros" as well these days: think of fletch-x, cook-x, etc. Actually, ingame currency = real money there. Too bad the game is kind of rigged against the players.

I think Jagex will work on a new game rather then another huge overhaul of their current game. At least, Jagex has mentioned a few times that they are working on a new game on their corporate site, if I remember well.

Most producing skills in f2p (fishing, mining, etc) make around 40-50K gp per hour. F2p merchanting can make around 300-400K per hour with a low budget (around 2mil) already, perhaps if you are good, able to build up a contact list of sellers and buyers that you can top that quite a bit (if you also have more money) - but p2p merchanting beats f2p merchanting easily every day.

:( A good memory is what you need - to remember the prices of practically everything. :D

Yup and they gave him a ban. :lol:

Weird story, but you must be insane to leave kids so young in a room without anyone looking after them...

RuneScape has been in need of a better trading system (read: an auction system / player owned stores / whatever) for a long time... Compared to other MMO games, RuneScape's trading system is litterally still in the stone ages...

It's pound sterlin, which makes it $208mil what they own. :P

Inflation expresses itself in rs mostly in rising rares prices (which stopped the last 8 months) - that may move to raw materials some time though, especially with the much slower population growth these days. On the other hand, massive autoing (and Chinese farmers) currently prevent raw materials from rising anyway. Over the last 4 years, materials haven't risen though. That those items wouldn't have an use without high alchemy is a fundamental issue and economic blunder in the set-up of RuneScape's economy - it is not a good arguement to defend the existance of high alchemy. Jagex can't change the way how RuneScape's economy works anymore though. What they can do is keep an eye on the rares market and the material markets - even though materials never increased, that trend does not have to continue. High player population growth was one reason why material prices could stay low - but the population growth is lowering. Jagex has implemented quite a few money drains over the past year though.

Sure RuneScape can teach you a few things, although I'd say it depends a lot on yourself and how you play the game as well. Calling the game 'educational' may go a bit far though...

Capitalistic society gone mad - long live "the American dream". :roll:

I don't think I really care about people who supposively have studied economics, apparently learned nothing from it and aren't able to take me seriously. Nah, I don't even want you to be impressed.

Didn't know you were in the advertisement business and actually know the rates... Oh wait, you don't. Average amount of players simultaneously online lies below 200K - and roughly 25% of those are members too. Means max 150K free to players * 24 hours a day / 3 hours per f2p'er = 1.2million players playing 3 hours a day max. I don't see how you are able to make millions of that, since this simple calculation is already way on the high side. :roll: I would already be surprised if Jagex add income stream means more then 25% of their total income. If you actually read the article, you'd have read that paying the servers with advertisement only wasn't even possible when they started and basically breaks even nowadays, whereas with the introdcution of members they started making them money:

You gotta love people who make up random numbers. Interesting that RuneScape has reached the 1 million subscription mark now - finally a new number.

6bil a week.. Interesting.