When the shop update was first released I thought that the nat prices would skyrocket...

 

How wrong I was.

 

 

 

The price before was based on two things...

 

-the price in shops being about 280-300ea at decent stock keeping the price up to 300ea.

 

 

 

-The large surpluss of nats from runners keeping the price from going higher.

 

 

 

Now the shop update raised the price barrier up to 375ea, so theoreticaly the street priceprice HAS to EVENTUALY go up to 374ea, and I have yet to find someone with a decent arguement against that.

 

 

 

If everyone simotaniously changed thier prices to 374ea, buyers would be forced to pay 374ea unless they could make thier own. Now realisticly it would take a long time for the price to adapt and start rising due to the surpluss of runes from runners who only care to get 300ea.

 

 

 

Now I know that the price change would not be instant, far from it. I guessed that the price would adapt to about 350ea within two months, and here we are..neering the end of two months and the prices havent budged. I'm asking, WHY??

 

 

 

Is ther that large an ammount of runners, that do not relize everyone could be charging 374ea, that the price will not change for months, years?

 

 

 

Post your theorys/thoughts on this here.

 

 

 

*edit* maybey saying nats will eventualy go up to 375ea is a long shot..more like 370ea as 1gpea less even over 50k runes wouldnt make buyers buy from rcers

more nats get made than used tbh... tho just now i started rc'ing again and ive been doing alot of stuff in/around edge before it and ive noticed a decrease in runecrafters recently... not sure what the double nats world is like though, maybe nat running got more popular because it all went to the themed world... (best thing is it keeps rc pkers away from people who want to rc normally)... nats have gone up though from 280 ea or w/e they where (i remember afew weeks ago i wanted to get dfire shield so fast that i sold loads of nats 280 ea and bought the dfs for like 27.5 and now DFS is like 20m and nats have went up slightly :oops: )

if the price went any higher...there would be almost no market for them, they already pretty pricey. Would want to use nats if they were 350 ea...really. There are more efficient substitute like the humidify spell and junk like that.

 

 

 

honestly, i thought the same would happen when the shop update came out. When your dealing with an 'infinite' supply of something..its kinda tricky.

I'm not too updated with the current price of nature runes, so someone help me here.

nature rune prices are affected by more then just shop prices.

 

 

 

Nature runes are mostly consumed using High Alch. The easiest things to high alch are yew longbows, magic longbows, or steel plate bodies.

 

 

 

Yew log=350 gp ea

 

Bowstring=200 gp ea

 

Nature=300

 

 

 

Yew longbows high alch for 768 gp...that means that people are getting about 1 xp per gp plus having to make all the bows.(which they also get xp for).

 

 

 

Now yew logs have supposedly risen.. so don't use this as a "guide"...just as a mere example.

 

 

 

anyway, if you raise the price of the nature rune...a person will pay 900ish to make and high alch the bow...and receive 768 back...

 

 

 

which means they are getting about .5 xp per gp...might not seem like a big deal...but doing this would cause people to train magic in a different way...which would kill the nature market.

 

 

 

So in-other words...if nature prices raise to 350 ea...people will find another way to train magic and there will be no need for natures...which will inturn shove prices down.

I don't know if nats would still be popular with a price like that... paying 300 each barely breaks even on costs in most cases.

 

 

 

It's still fast exp, but the profit side is nice too :)

I have yet to find someone with a decent arguement against that.

 

 

 

Your search ends now

 

 

 

You are wrong to assume that the nat prices must rise to 1 gp less than whatever the store price offers. If the store price was 1k per nat, would nats be sold at 999 each? Obviously not.

 

 

 

This is because the supply of nats is almost entirely based on players competing amongst each other, not against the shop price. But that alone doesn't point out the tremendous flaw in your theory.

 

 

 

Your entire theory goes against the principle of economics. Price is not determined by people, it is determined by supply and demand. Therefore, the price of 300 each is the price at which rcers are willing to pay. There is absolutely nothing that you can do against this, if you shout "don't sell nats for 300 each, sell them for 374 each", the person who tries to do so will not get any offers because there are enough people who are selling nats for 300 each to satisfy the market for that current time.

 

 

 

This applies to real life with one major exception: monopoly. If there is ONE seller, that seller is going to be able to set the price higher because he is able to control how many are being produced (so he can choose either more for a lower price or less for a higher price). It is, however, completely impossible to form a monopoly over nat crating. Even if you could get all the nat crafters in the world to agree on a price (never going to happen), then plenty of people can just get 44 rcing and easily compete with the ridiculous prices.

 

 

 

You can even see that this will not work by looking at the suppliers. Take me, for example. I am willing to sell my nats for as low as 300 each. If people start selling for 374 gp each, I'll just sell my nats for 350 each and all the consumers will come to me instead of them. If people start lowering it to 345 (which would happen if many people did as I am doing), I'll lower my prices to 340. I will keep this up till I end up selling them for 300 gp. At 300 gp I refuse to go any lower because I am part of producer surplus until 300 gp.

 

 

 

Now I know that the price change would not be instant, far from it. I guessed that the price would adapt to about 350ea within two months, and here we are..neering the end of two months and the prices havent budged. I'm asking, WHY??

 

 

 

Because the suppliers themselves are willing to sell their nats for 300 each. It's as simple as that. They could get more, but all of that is just surplus and doesn't change the fact that they are willing to pay 300 each.

 

 

 

honestly, i thought the same would happen when the shop update came out. When your dealing with an 'infinite' supply of something..its kinda tricky.

 

 

 

It may or may not be tricky, it all depends on where the price is set. Clearly jagex knows a thing or two and set the price way above the market price. The only effect that infinite supply has on nats is to serve as a price ceiling, in other words, a price that nature runs will not go above (and it has no effect because the ceiling price is above the equilibrium price).

 

 

 

The only slight fluctuation is from people who use to buy nats from shops, however obviously their effect is extremely limited because there has been a very small effect.

That theory makes no sense at all... your theory would have some validity if shops were the #1 source of nats before the update, but obviously that was always far from the case. Most nats used for alching today come from Runecrafters like me and much of the high leveled community, not shops. Because the shops sell for such a high price they will never be able to compete with RCers.

Excellent post, Solidus_77.

 

 

 

/AGREE

I don't really care mind the prices of nats that much.. I craft my own if I need them and its still decent money running them. :?

Yes natures are very much used for alot of magic levels, im supprised the prices haven't budged alot. Then again, alot of people make them a day so no supprise there.

Nat prices are in direct relationship to the high alch value of items, specifically yew longs. It would take a lot for the price to change dramatically. But because of the fact that yew longs are the main source of high alchs, yew logs, bow strings and nature runes will all stay about the same price. Unless there is a major shift in some aspect of the game, directly linked with those items or steps.

I don't think the nature rune price was heavily impacted by the shop price in the first place.

 

 

 

If everyone sells natures runes 374 each, yes, people are going to have to pay 374 ea to buy them. But they always have the choice to buy them, or make them.

 

 

 

In reality, what people are paying for is for you to do the work to create these nature runes, so that they can use them for xp. The higher people charge for the nature runes, the more people are going to make their own or run them. As a result, all those people demanding 374 ea are gonna have a hell of a time selling them. The nature market is pretty much at equilibrium, meaning that the amount of nature runes wanted at 300-350 ea is the same as the amount of nature runes being made.

 

 

 

If 1,000,000 nature runes are made every day and placed on the market, and 1,000,000 nature runes are being sold for that price, it means that's the right price. People are willing to pay so much, and people are willing to sell their time for so much.

 

 

 

If the people who make these 1,000,000 runes suddenly demand an extra 75 gold pieces each, a LOT fewer people are going to pay for them and would find alternative means. If there are 1,000,000 runes for sale and only a quarter are purchased, that means the other 3/4 of the runes aren't being sold, and they just effectively wasted their time. What's their response? Undercutting. Telling the buyers that they'll sell their runes for less. End result is the price falls back to where there's an equal amount of people buying and selling at that price.

 

 

 

It is possible for nature rune price to increase, but it must be due to two reasons:

 

 

 

1) The major source is removed or substantially reduced. Something has to convince people they're not going to make nats for 300 each, and they stop making them.

 

 

 

2) A change in demand. People want XP bad enough that they are willing to pay more and more. And in order for that to happen, more money must come into the game. If you have 100 million, you'd be more likely to spend on nats for magic training than if you had 5 million. Now if EVERYONE suddenly found themselves with 5-10 times the money they had before, more are willing to pay for magic, and hence, since more people are willing to buy, the price rises to the point where again, the same amount of people are willing to buy for that price as produce for that price. Shops aren't a major source of runes. The Magic Guild and Mage Arena stores are pretty much the only shop source of nature runes.

 

 

 

They produce maybe 3 runes per minute. 2 stores per world, about 70 worlds, and 1440 minutes per day. That's only about 600,000 nature runes per day... assuming EVERY rune is purchased the moment it hit the store, never allowing the store to max out and not sell any.

 

 

 

A good runecrafter with 50-74 runecrafting produces 1.2k runes per hour. At 75+, you can probably produce about 1.5k due to an extra 11 per trip from giant pouch. Double crafters can produce 2.5k+ easily. There are thousands of runecrafters who spend hours crafting every day, making the runes supplied from stores seem insignificant.

 

 

 

Also, monsters tend to drop lots of nature runes as well. The Kalphite Queen drops them in 75s, and nowadays every other world is occupied with a pair of hunters. There are tons of other monsters that drop them as well, so easily as many come from monster drops as stores every day.

 

It may or may not be tricky, it all depends on where the price is set. Clearly jagex knows a thing or two and set the price way above the market price. The only effect that infinite supply has on nats is to serve as a price ceiling, in other words, a price that nature runs will not go above (and it has no effect because the ceiling price is above the equilibrium price).

 

 

 

Price Floor :) Price ceiling is a minimum value, floor is max.

 

It may or may not be tricky, it all depends on where the price is set. Clearly jagex knows a thing or two and set the price way above the market price. The only effect that infinite supply has on nats is to serve as a price ceiling, in other words, a price that nature runs will not go above (and it has no effect because the ceiling price is above the equilibrium price).

 

 

 

Price Floor :) Price ceiling is a minimum value, floor is max.

 

 

 

Huh? How does that make any sense at all?

 

 

 

BTW, wiki is telling me differently.

 

It may or may not be tricky, it all depends on where the price is set. Clearly jagex knows a thing or two and set the price way above the market price. The only effect that infinite supply has on nats is to serve as a price ceiling, in other words, a price that nature runs will not go above (and it has no effect because the ceiling price is above the equilibrium price).

 

 

 

Price Floor :) Price ceiling is a minimum value, floor is max.

 

 

 

Floor is lower limit, ceiling is upper limit. It's kind of obvious, it goes with the logic that above you there is a ceiling and below you there is a floor.

I don't know if nats would still be popular with a price like that... paying 300 each barely breaks even on costs in most cases.

 

 

 

It's still fast exp, but the profit side is nice too :)

 

 

 

Historically (in RS) nats have been higher priced and sold quite well. You only lose gp if you buy everything. For example if you wc or spin flax then you get a profit even if nats go up to 375.

You're correct in that two months already have gone and that it seems a little bit strange that the prize haven't rosen yet. But my theory is that this change need more time. Even though the nature runners could try to sell their runes for about 350 each, they would have a hard time doing that, since the buyers then just could buy from someone else. All the runners haven't noticed yet that the price of natures in shop are 375 each. But I think that they soon will, and then the prize will for sure rise.

 

I'm not an expert on the nature rune market, so don't give me to much critize if I'm wrong :P

Iv been thinking about this a little more and I would also like to add that the price of nats should theoretically be going down. Why? Because more and more people are getting the RC level to be able to make them, and more nats are comming into the market because of the ZMI alter. Why is the price of the whip dropping? Because more people have 85 slayer. This further proves my point that the price of nats is intrinsically linked to high alching yew longs.

Take into account that jagex was intending to stop auto buying bots.

 

By doing this, they drove up the price of runes at the store to a level that the market value would never reach. Also, buyers would never ever consider buying for 374 each, most would just click buy x for 375 if they ever got up that high, but there are loads of double nat crafters and lv 44+ crafters providing a massive supply every day. Even the merchants realize that there is no market in trying to raise nats super high because there will always be competition between sellers.

As i have said in my edit maybey 374ea was a log shot..consider it changed to 370ea.

 

 

 

From all the replys I think i have a conclustion that the main price cieling that's keeping the price from going up is the yew long alching market. In which the prices of bs and yew logs would have to drop to allow nats to rise.

 

 

 

so if nats are to go up one of two things must happen, the yew long materials must drop in value, or a cartell of rich merchants COULD change the price by all selling mass quantitys for a high price causing all the other people to say "hey look the top 10 threads are selling at 320ea..i think i'll seel for 315ea", I have seen it happen before for iron ore. A group of 6 merchants each put 200k+ iron ore on the market for 140ea and kept thier threads bumped well, for about 4 days they had the average iron price in world 1 and on the forums up to 120-130ea.

 

 

 

In conclusion either the price wont go up, of we'll have to wait a long time for it to do so.

 

Now the shop update raised the price barrier up to 375ea, so theoreticaly the street priceprice HAS to EVENTUALY go up to 374ea, and I have yet to find someone with a decent arguement against that.

 

 

Sorry, but you're a bit confused here.

 

 

 

Putting in an infinite supply of an item at a particular price doesn't create a *floor* in the price, it creates a *ceiling* in the price. Which means that a shop selling nats for 375 each will have no impact on making the price rise, it will only *cap* the price that anyone could reasonably sell for. Why? Because nobody will pay more than 375 when the shop has them for that price.

 

 

 

In order to have an impact on the selling price, there would have to be a shop that *buys* an infinite quantity of an item at a particular level. For example, if shops bought nature runes at 320 each, then that would be a floor in the price -- nobody would sell for less than 320 because they could sell for that to the shop.

 

 

 

Edit: Just realized that Solidus made much the same points. Sorry.

 

 

 

~q

As i have said in my edit maybey 374ea was a log shot..consider it changed to 370ea.

 

 

 

You don't get it do you. The price WILL NOT change, and if it does it WILL NOT be because of the shop update. There's no need to pull numbers out of a hat like you're doing now. That's such an innacurate way of estimating.

 

 

 

From all the replys I think i have a conclustion that the main price cieling that's keeping the price from going up is the yew long alching market. In which the prices of bs and yew logs would have to drop to allow nats to rise.

 

 

 

Yew logs do not act as a price ceiling in any way, clearly you have misunderstood the economic term.

 

 

 

 

so if nats are to go up one of two things must happen, the yew long materials must drop in value,

 

 

 

And considering that price of other yew long materials don't have anything to do with the store value of nats, and also has not increased/decreased as a result of the shop price, your theory is already completely disproved. This means that the shop price of nats of 375 will not cause nats to rise.

 

 

 

Some food for thought, even if the materials would fall in price, the change in price of nats will not necessarily be as significant.

 

 

 

or a cartell of rich merchants COULD change the price by all selling mass quantitys for a high price causing all the other people to say "hey look the top 10 threads are selling at 320ea..i think i'll seel for 315ea"

 

 

 

But if that does happened, it's exactly as I described. Someone can sell for LESS than the price that the "cartel" is attempting to enforce and they will get all the buyers. The cartel will ONLY work if a bunch of crafters get together which is simply not going to happen.

 

 

 

I have seen it happen before for iron ore. A group of 6 merchants each put 200k+ iron ore on the market for 140ea and kept thier threads bumped well, for about 4 days they had the average iron price in world 1 and on the forums up to 120-130ea.

 

 

 

A mere short term effect is nothing. That didn't change iron prices and besides, forming cartels is considered price manipulation and it is against the rules in this game.

 

 

 

Besides, the market for iron ore is far less abundant than the market for nature runes because nature runes are made at such a faster rate.

 

 

 

 

In conclusion either the price wont go up, of we'll have to wait a long time for it to do so.

 

 

 

No, in conclusion, nothing will happen as a result of the shop update. There was a slight effect at first, but it died almost immediately (within the first few hours, trust me I tried to sell overpriced and it simply could not be done because too many people were willing to sell already at 300 each)

 

 

 

Obviously nobody knows where the nat prices may be a year from now because plenty of updates in the future may have other other effects, but nats are fairly stable and besides, it should be pretty clear by now that the shop price hasn't had the slightest effect so we should be done here.

 

 

 

In the end, the effect of the shop prices could be described as "Now, nobody will buy nats for more than 375 gp each, but who cares because I'll gladly sell my nats for 300 each".

 

 

 

Edit: Just realized that Solidus made much the same points. Sorry.

 

 

 

Not a problem, great minds think alike. :

ok, I see you points.

 

 

 

after this and a thread on (other popular runescape website)I have a new thoery.

 

 

 

consider this hypothetical situation, if everyone simotaniously forgot all the prices is rs, and the market had to be reformed. In this situation the nat price would be based on the shop price...so around 350-370ea?

 

 

 

What i'm saying by that is that the price is kept down by the fact that poeple belive the price is what it is, and want to stick to the old way of doing things...not because the price logicaly makes sense.

 

 

 

In otherwards there is no logical reason why the price wont go up, simply that poeple are used to it being at 300ea.

 

 

 

Ps. sorry if i'm misuseing some economic terms and thoerys, i'm just going on what ive learned in rs and on these forums.

I still belive that the price will eventualy go up...but after all this ive decided it will take much longer time, arround a year. If it hasnt changed by then and this thread still exists...I stand corrected