Would this help with problems with the Grand Ex.?

[Ren]

~A Possible fix to what is wrong with the Grand Exchange~

 

!!!!!! This is a long read. If you do not wish to read it all, skip straight to the Problem and Solution parts of the thread, and the "Important things I forgot to post" section. I do suggest you read it all to get the full effect, though. !!!!!!

 

 

Flipper: Someone who buys an item, then sells it for a gain as quickly as possible.

 

Merch clan/cc: Group of players, that buy out a predetermined item, set a goal price, and then ask other players to help buy the item to make it rise quickly to that goal price, and sell it about 30-80% between the starting and goal price. Most of the random players that participate do not make much money because they cannot sell what they bought unless they 'dump' the item before the goal price.

 

Rise: When an item begins to gain price quickly

 

Crash: When an item begins to lose price quickly.

 

Dump: When a player/merch clan sells most/all their stock of an item, usually if it begins to crash, making it crash even faster, or if it rises and they assume it will crash not far later.

 

------Intro

 

Most of you may know that the majority of prices on the grand exchanged are being or have been manipulated once or more by a clan or player. Most people don't see how this affects items and the world around them. To understand everything fully, you have to know the history of item prices. Let's start with pre-G.E. and trade limits.

 

------History of Items and Item Prices

 

Back before trade limits and the G.E., You were able to make money via merchanting quicker and somewhat easier. This is, not entirely, because not everyone was able to merchant. Why? For the most part, they either didn't know how, got fed up with competition and stopped, didn't have enough money, or didn't care for it much. The other reasons were because item prices were never stable like how the G.E. currently is. The item prices were very liquid, they were able to be shifted based on what a player wanted to pay, could pay, or should pay.

 

Let's say an item price was 600k "street", what the average player would pay for it. This would mean that in most situations a player could buy for little under or sell for little over. The way merchanting worked was everyone was going to the same place (for this example, on World 2 it was Falador garden) to buy an item. If a player got impatient and wanted to sell their item more quickly they would lower what they wanted for it, or compromise with another player's buying price. A merchanter would want to buy as low as possible, in most cases it was still a reasonable price. Then they would want to sell for higher than what the current "street" price was, sometimes compromising for less if they were still making money, or for what they paid if the item wasn't in demand at that exact time. Item supply and demand back then was based more who had what and who wanted what right that minute/hour/day/etc. Then player-determined price would eventually be worked out with newer items and, as more items worked their way into the game, the price would gradually lower because more players would be with the item than without, thus making demand go down causing price drops until it was at that point where it was stable and never really changed much, but players were still able to buy for lower and/or higher by however much those players respectfully determined.

 

------The Grand Exchange

 

The way the G.E. works is that a player will put up an "offer" for an item they desire to sell/buy into the G.E. system and it will wait until it matched another player selling/buying that item for the same/lower/higher price and then exchange the two player's items and GP. The G.E. allows a 5% below mid-price or above mid-price. This causes players to make limited amounts of profit/loss on an item. The G.E. records item sales, quantity and price of sales, and changes the price accordingly every 12 or so hours if the item sold enough items respectfully. If an item did not sell/buy enough times the price will not change.

 

The way merch clans work with the G.E. is how I explained in the first post. This affects item prices obviously, and hiddenly too. When an item is given "fake demand" either buy or sell offers, it will cause the "true price" or "street price" to be false. This is caused by the wave of buys making the item to rise very quickly, and then crash when the merch cc plans to dump the item. Eventually the item will balance itself out, or so you think. The price can either be unusually high or low depending on the item itself, it's useage and real demand/supply, compared to what it was before it was merchanted. Flipping works the same way as merch clans do, just in a smaller amount, and more quickly. But since more players do this, as it's safer to invest this way than with merch clans, it does enough damage to item prices itself. New items would be given a set price by Jagex on the G.E., for instance I think that most Royal clothing items were 300k each. And the player-determined street price became somewhere betweem 5,000,000gp and 50,000,000gp depending on the item.

 

How do street prices work with the G.E.? Players will use stable items, or items able to be bought for lower than they are sellable for, or random items/junk they cannot sell easily to trade with the newer item or whichever item it is for the other player's pure cash, or whatever the two players compromised on. The reason "Street prices" exist with the G.E. is because the set price is far lower than the current real demand (or false for merch clans/flippers) set on the G.E.. Since an item can only rise or lower 5% per 12 hours/however long the G.E. takes to update prices, people use junk to trade with an item for mainly cash or a valuable item street price-wise, depending if the street price of that item is higher or lower than the G.E. price. Rarely does that apply to when it's lower, if it is ever. That is because most people will want to try and sell it on the G.E. for higher than it's street price. This causes the item to drop lower than it should.

 

 

------Problem(s) with the Grand Exchange

 

Because of merch clans, some items can be unbuyable or unsellable on it, causing the real supply and demand to dissapear, and the price being dictated by whatever damage the merch clan/flippers do. Then when it is able to be sold/bought, the price is usually higher/lower than the real price. Over time, usually, that price becomes the actual price, and the old one is lost. This causes fake and real inflation and deflation. To make things worse, Jagex thought of the whole "statuette" thing to add more straight gp to the economy, money created by just one part of the game. Seriously large amounts of gp at that. They had said that 10% of the RS population was PKers (2009). Now, trillions and trillions of GP being put into the economy by 10% of the game, not THAT important part of the game, too? Maybe it was because of the mass quitting from removing trade limits and Wilderness along with merch clans, and they figured it would help. I don't know. Whatever. This all stacks up to be one very very large mess of fake prices. This can dictate any and every player's gameplay for one simple reason: gold; money; $$$$; moolah; gp. Every player uses it, aside from newer players. It's the main trading component to anything. This can cause a player to not buy an item because its price is rising or u*buyable, stuck with gp, thus changing what they do/use in their gameplay time. This can cause a player to not sell an item because it's price is falling or is unsellable, possibly causing a person to not be able to buy that specific armor they wanted, or those supplies to their skill training that they wanted, and making their items devalue without them choosing to be.

 

 

------Possible Solutions to the Grand Exchange

 

You must look at what the difference between the G.E. and pre-G.E. trades are, first. Item prices before G.E. were more liquid and could be dictated more freely by players. They were able to choose more freely what price they wanted to buy/sell an item for. For most players it was a legitimate amount, not 1k for a 700k item, which is what the G.E. and trade limits were made to prevent (due to RWT and all the legal problems it brought..). The G.E. has a 5% increase/decrease limit to an item per update. It is not liquid because prices are updated only twice a day, as opposed to whenever demand/supply changed, and the G.E. prices are heavily based on quantity and not true demand/supply and what the average player wants to pay/get. The only thing keeping the G.E. alive is people compromising, merch clans moving on to the next item to manipulate, street trading higher priced/new items, and actual supply/demand slowly balancing an item out until it's overpowered by merch clans or flippers.

 

The first thing that I think can fix most problems with the G.E. is making item prices able to be more unique to the item/item type. Changing the way each type/each item updates will help tremendously. If there weren't set update times every day, and the updates were dependant on the item and its own quantity set for a random time + times based on quantity more times a day than currently (2), merch clans and flippers could not influence prices as easily. More than likely it would cause more players to buy/sell items and more likely be able to make money with these clans without disrupting actual gameplay.

 

The second thing I think would help would to make the min and max price %'s more dynamic to what the item is (or even also to how much is sold), MAYBE changing some to lower than 5% (perhaps as low as 2.5%), or more likely, to ~7.5% or higher. Each % would depend entirely on the item's statistics.

 

 

 

 

Now that I'm all done writing that dreadfully long post, you can comment now. I'm open to all arguements with information I've posted, needed corrections, questions about the information I've posted, support via bumping or telling your friends/clanmates/whatever about the thread/what you heard from it/where to find it. Please don't spam. Abide by the forum rules. And most importantly of all, try to learn something from all this.

 

Oh, and mods please move this to wherever it should be, if it isn't already.

 

 

---------Important things I forgot to post

 

 

--Since the G.E. updates every 12 hours or whatever, the prices are stuck at being changed slowly, so over a long period of time it will eventually settle down, but not change back to what it was (due to the bad system that the G.E. has). The game around the G.E. moves faster than the G.E. itself, which is why it isn't a very good system. The buy/sell aspect of it is good, but that too is quicker than how fast prices can change. Merch clans, or manip clans/scam gangs as you call them, would be able to do what they want, but I am pretty sure it would have less effect, and I don't think that players would be ripped out of money so easily, if at all.

 

--There is a main difference between trying to quickly buy/sell an item on the G.E. vs old trading. With old trading, you too would lower/raise your price from what the actual street price was to buy/sell faster. You can do this with the G.E., too, but the difference is that that price never changed the actual price of the item unless a lot of people started doing it. Of course the G.E. does that now, but since it updates way slower it can mistake real price lower/rises with fake buys and sells via flips/merch cc's.

 

 

A solution that would prevent Clans from price manipulating the GE as they do now? A simple practice of price culling would do that. Set the GE to ignore the highest and lowest sales, and factor in only the average sales after the culled prices are figured.

 

Clans that practice "buy Max!" to manipulate the GE will soon find that the price is not rising at all or very little from their efforts. The Culled min price will help protect the non merchanting players from "item dumps" that these clans also practice, since the min price is also ignored in the GE updates. This will prevent items from "crashing" in price since the lowest values are ignored.

 

Over all it would create a more stable buy/sell trend on the prices since it will be TRULY effected by the general population of buyers and sellers, not the price manipulating merchant clans. It would also encourage a more honest form of merchanting, which we know as the "flippers".

 

That could help the G.E. a lot but overall, doesn't change much. HOWEVER, it opened my eyes to perhaps an overall easier solution, or harder, I'm not sure which atm (cant think). If the G.E. recorded prices more frequently, perhaps not -as- frequently as I said before (simulating liquid prices), but make a dynamic/static hybrid updater. Whereas it would take old data of prices (from week-to-week maybe), use more frequent prices (4-hour updates or something) and then create more realistic 12-hour updates that would not change prices dramatically and nerf large fake price changes! This actually could work much better than my first thought!!! I'm pretty intrigued by this thought, actually, more than my original post.

[Ren]

Yes, I copy+pasted this from somewhere else. No, I don't feel like changing it much but I probably will later.

 

 

EDIT: I fixed my first post, looks all neat now.

 

Let's hope this gets some heat.

[Bladewing]

Yes, it would help.

 

No, it would not be implemented.

[Bladewing]

I'm willing to continue our debate here if you want to.

[Ren]

I'm willing to continue our debate here if you want to.

K, so you were saying that chessy values santas more than I do. Ok, obvious. But that's all opinion. I think all humans have morality and sympathy. That is why I think that it's messed up that she wants to keep 2.2k santas to herself..it's psychotic almost. Deep mental issues. If you ever watched criminal shows like law n order and the likes, where they talk about why a criminal/offender does things that way, it's because they're really messed up in the head. That's based off real-life stuff. Little things like that can show that you might have a mental disorder. It doesn't mean that it can't be fixed..unless you're that messed up. But people take it a lot more lightly than you think. Maybe it's just my observation skills and way with knowing people..I dont know. I just am positive that there is something more to it.

[Bladewing]

We should not mention player's names here, or this will get locked.

 

Every human has different tastes and preferences. The amount of utility she gets from a santa hat exceeds the current market price. Whether you call it opinion or preference, the fact of the matter is that she won't sell for the current market price. If the price rises high enough she will sell.

 

I think your personal attack on this player as being mentally insane is completely unfounded. It is completely logical to hold your wealth in something like santa hats. They will rise in price long term.

 

What would you have this player do, anyway? She's insane/immoral for "keeping them too herself." Do think that sticking them in the party room is logical? How is this any different than thinking that a person like Warren Buffet should give away all his money because it'd be insane to hoard all that money and stocks?

[Robert_R]

I'm willing to continue our debate here if you want to.

K, so you were saying that chessy values santas more than I do. Ok, obvious. But that's all opinion. I think all humans have morality and sympathy. That is why I think that it's messed up that she wants to keep 2.2k santas to herself..it's psychotic almost. Deep mental issues. If you ever watched criminal shows like law n order and the likes, where they talk about why a criminal/offender does things that way, it's because they're really messed up in the head. That's based off real-life stuff. Little things like that can show that you might have a mental disorder. It doesn't mean that it can't be fixed..unless you're that messed up. But people take it a lot more lightly than you think. Maybe it's just my observation skills and way with knowing people..I dont know. I just am positive that there is something more to it.

This is starting to sound like a rant about one person....

[Ren]

I'm willing to continue our debate here if you want to.

K, so you were saying that chessy values santas more than I do. Ok, obvious. But that's all opinion. I think all humans have morality and sympathy. That is why I think that it's messed up that she wants to keep 2.2k santas to herself..it's psychotic almost. Deep mental issues. If you ever watched criminal shows like law n order and the likes, where they talk about why a criminal/offender does things that way, it's because they're really messed up in the head. That's based off real-life stuff. Little things like that can show that you might have a mental disorder. It doesn't mean that it can't be fixed..unless you're that messed up. But people take it a lot more lightly than you think. Maybe it's just my observation skills and way with knowing people..I dont know. I just am positive that there is something more to it.

This is starting to sound like a rant about one person....

 

That's kind of funny because you don't even know what me and him were talking about, regardless of what my post was about. Get the [bleep] off my thread plz.