Tip.It Times - 27th June 2010

[Racheya]

Time for a new release of the: >>>Tip.It Times!<<<

 

When replying please make sure to clarify the article you are replying to! Thanks!

 

If you spot any typos or mistakes in the article then please PM them to me :)

 

Enjoy the articles!

[zotto]

article 1.

One of the biggest problems with this, aside from the ridiculous amounts of money to be gained through the price change, is that the economy does not need this influx of money at the moment. I dont pretend to be an expert on the Runescape economy but even I can understand that this amount of gp being flooded into the economy is not good. Many prices for items will change as more people can afford them thanks to the tidy little cash pile sitting in their bank from a few hundred alchs. How long the effects on the economy will last, nobody can quite say yet until we understand the true amount of gp that has inflated the system, but it is a fact that this will impact the economy at least in the short to medium term.

 

"One of the biggest problems with this is" that even I can see that this paragraph is merely speculation.

[AlexRose]

Regarding #1:

 

While Jagex's reaction to this situation is stubborn and even outright arrgoant, I think you are greatly exaggerating the overall effects on the economy. While there will be some reactionary panic buying and selling, the extra wealth created from this fiasco is not nearly enough to inflate the worth of objects.

 

To have a serious impact on the economy, let's say that climbing boots would have to introduce at least 10% more wealth into the game.

 

Jagex announced two years ago they had a million paying members and 15 million active accounts. I don't know the current numbers, but let's say they have 1.3 million members and 20 million active F2p users, roughly a 30% increase in two years.

 

As a VERY rough and conservative estimate, let's say that each member's account, on average, is worth about 2 million and that each F2p player is worth 100k. With 1.3 million members and 20 million F2p users, we come out with an economy worth 4.6 Trillion.

 

Creating an additional 10% wealth, 460 billion gp, from these climbing boots would require 10.2 Million Climbing boots in the game, or an average 8 pairs of spare climbing boots per member. Considering the advent of metal boots, and the fact that only one pair is required for any actual usage, the vast majority of members would not have more than one or two spare boots in their bank. Yes, a few will have more, such as one-defense pures and collectors, but they are far, far outnumbered by other members. Even if we assume that 1% of all members had 100 or more boots, which is dubious at best, they would still not make up much more than 10% of the boots required for the "10% mark". And with the vast majority of members only having three or less pairs, it's reasonable to assume that the total number of boots would fall far below the mark.

 

By no means does this excuse Jagex in anyway, but this update will not destablize or ruin the economy by itself.

[Racheya]

I tried not to go into the specifics of what might happen to the economy because I'm *not* up on the economic state of Runescape but let me use what you said:

 

If every member would need to have 8 pairs of boots, lets say that everyone had one pair for actual usage. Many people might have had 2 pairs, one to use as a placeholder and one for using. Then take into account that many PKers had many pairs of these. I've heard averages of 50 but hundreds, possibly thousands might be held by just one player. I know as a fact that a member here on Tip.It had 8k pairs of boots that they bought for merchanting purposes since they're an easy item to flip on the GE. I don't think it's *too* much of a stretch to think that the price changes will have an effect on the economy. EVEN if the effect only comes from players panicking thinking prices will go up, it is still caused by the boots.

[Diomedus]

The first article, I agree with the other responses. It is unfair for the few players who supposedly have thousands of climbing boots to suddenly become grossly rich from an update.

But, I have doubts that any one player had thousands of climbing boots. Maybe a few hundred.

 

As for a rollback, I thought of this: Is it really fair for Jagex to punish, probably under 50 players who got super rich so the rest of us consider it fair?

 

I do not know a lot about computer programming, but I would guess a rollback would take some serious effort. A rollback to punish the very few who may be super rich now, just to appease the hundreds of thousands.

 

I say, yes it does suck that I couldn't get rich too, but just move on. They got lucky

 

Second article

 

I definetly understand the plight of writing articles. I write for examiner.com and it can get difficult to keep coming up with new material every week.

[xpx]

A good article(the boots one) though i think the next one should concentrate on what happens if certain players get news about updates before those updates actually happen, since, as i've been told, it's not the first time this has happent, and those players have each time been given a clear, unfair advantage.

 

Also for those who underestimate the number of boots- climbing boots were released in 2004, almost 6 years ago, and until slayer they were the best boots in game, and only became clearly useless(atleast for most people) with the release of gwd(dragon boots). Thus, in 6 years time, of which for 3 years they were the best or one of the best boots in game, there were a very large dumber of those brought into the game(at 12 gp per pair). Furthermore, as of late, everyone who pk-ed at +1 worlds used these boots(as did i, with 143 boots) and we all died VERY often, usually 4 times an hour for more, so having a big stash wasn't anythig unusual. Not to mention those who merchanted these boots(and you could see the buyouts from the graph).

 

Also the did you know is incorrect, it's 30k experience per day, not per day per skill.

[AresArtemis]

Really, there are no players with 100k boots :shame:

 

People should stop whining about the climbing boots update and continue the game

[Serpent Eye]

In the case of the rollback issue, it would of course be fair to have done a rollback for the issue of Climbing boots; however, at this point, it's obviously been too long for a rollback to be warranted. In any business dealing with a large (or small) amount of people, it's important to remember that customer satisfaction should be a top-priority. Sure, those "50 players" who became insant mutli-millionaires would be robbed of their "hard earned" cash, but think of the thousands and thousands of other players who weren't given the same advantage.

 

This is very, very similar to the Dungeoneering/Runecrafting issue, as Rach mentions in the article. People were literally gaining THOUSANDS of Runecrafting experience in a matter of minutes due to Jagex's mistake. While only a handful of people may have benefited from this on a LARGE scale, the MAJORITY of players were upset by the unfair advantage; Jagex recognized that this was clearly a mistake and did a rollback.

 

And as I understand it, the actual process of doing a rollback isn't that hard. (I may be wrong here, but from what I've gathered--) Every 5 minutes or so, all of the data for ALL players is saved, think of it as "saving your game." Your current stats, experience points per skill, equipped items, items in your inventory, items in your bank, etc. etc. ALL of this information is saved down. So basically, if Jagex has to do a rollback, they just "reload" your character from the last "save point" they have for everyone.

 

- - -

 

At any rate, I really liked both of the articles this week!

 

And I PM'd someone about my DYK being incorrect. My bad. :twss:

[tonguetamer3]

In response to the first article, Jagex has already stated that the amount of cash brought into the game by this update was about 1/8 of the amount of cash brought in every single day. If this is true, this influx of cash into the game should have very little effect on the prices of anything, except initially while people panic buy (which will happen on a large scale for a bit).

 

While some people did become quite rich instantly, and this is unfair to those who didn't, it will really have little effect on the way those people who did not become rich play the game. I had 7 pairs of climbing boots, so this did not benefit me all that much. However, it also does not really hurt me (unless I need to buy climbing boots in the future and they're more expensive). People will be angry about this update, but I do not believe it will have much of a long-term effect on the game at all.

 

EDIT: After having just checked a few of the items that I have been watching since this update (AGS, SGS, Dragon Bones) it would appear that the panic buying is already over. AGS and Dragon Bones dropped in price on the last update, and SGS only rose .01% which is just about no change at all.

[Jonanananas]

While I am really opposed to the Climbing Boots update, and especially to the way Jagex handled it, the fear of inflation is ridiculous. Not only that Jagex does know how much money enters the game(8 to 10 times the cb money every day, according to mod emilee), there weren't so many players who had that many boots. Every, Every picture of more than 2k climbing boots I've seen(and I have seen rather a lot of them) was faked. The speculation about inflation caused more harm than the actual inflation did, because players bought items in panic of their gp devaluing. With the last Grand Exchange update, dragon bones(one of the items a lot of players would buy if they had a lot of spare money) went down. I think talking about inflation with this update takes away the focus from other, more important points like the needless favoring of some players.

[uath13]

The economy took quite a hit. The items the Pkers usually use ( Godswords & such ) have jumped in price dramatically since the Pkers who had stored up these boots now have a large influx of cash. I don't PK myself but must admit to having stored up a couple dozen to use in "High risk" situations. If I'm going somewhere where the chance of death was good ( godwars for example ) I'd don my good 3 items ( weapon , chest & legs ) a prayer book ( since it's replaced for free ) a cheap helm , amulet & climbing boots. Should I accidentally die my grave wouldn't even be worth recovering. If other players had similar tactics ( & we know all the PKers do ) that's a LOT of boots to be turned into GP & flood the economy. By now the extra cash may already be expended since I'm sure the ones who had a lot of those boots alkied them right away so they could buy the prized toy they hadn't been able to afford before. The economy should settle back down within a matter of days.

 

I ,at least for now, am not selling or alkieing mine. I'll hold on to them for now since GP isn't all THAT important to me.

[yuriqiu]

Being an avid Tip it times reader... I have to say recently the quality of articles have gone down greatly. Not only did the first article did not do any research before making an article like that (The screenies of all those boots have been proven to be faked. Mod MMG even confirmed it numerous times.) But it just seems like an extension of a rant as no viable solution have even been proposed nor has it provide any good alternatives.

 

Honestly after all this drama people are still making a big deal out of those boots. Even if you had 1k of them that's only 45m. Which is pretty much a little more than an Arma hilt split. Considering this is a one time event I don't think is is any problem at all. More GP gets introduced to rs via statuettes in a day than those boots added together. It's not the end of the world.

[Infi]

Being an avid Tip it times reader... I have to say recently the quality of articles have gone down greatly. Not only did the first article did not do any research before making an article like that (The screenies of all those boots have been proven to be faked. Mod MMG even confirmed it numerous times.) But it just seems like an extension of a rant as no viable solution have even been proposed nor has it provide any good alternatives.

 

Honestly after all this drama people are still making a big deal out of those boots. Even if you had 1k of them that's only 45m. Which is pretty much a little more than an Arma hilt split. Considering this is a one time event I don't think is is any problem at all. More GP gets introduced to rs via statuettes in a day than those boots added together. It's not the end of the world.

 

As many people have said numerous times, the problem in question isn't always necessarily inflation per se, but of another aspect. I've been stressing this point a lot, so if you'd allow me I'll just quote a post of mine from another thread. It's really becoming redundant for me to post the same and same things over again, so I think I'll just save some time by doing this :geek:

 

However, we can conclude that whichever individual had a large stockpile of boots, that they received GP that is disproportionate to the amount they should have received, which to be frank, isn't fair to the rest of the players and the spirit of the game.. something Jagex has been stressing for a while now. Although one of the main issues and concerns with this update is the amount of inflation, and how much of it will affect the economy, many players are forgetting the fact a few select players have received misconstrued and copious amounts of GP due to Jagex's inability to accurately place a proper price tag of the boots itself. Being a competitive game Runescape is, it's not right to turn a blind eye to it as it's money that should have never been. Quid Pro Quo is definitely not the case.

[Jonanananas]

Being an avid Tip it times reader... I have to say recently the quality of articles have gone down greatly. Not only did the first article did not do any research before making an article like that (The screenies of all those boots have been proven to be faked. Mod MMG even confirmed it numerous times.) But it just seems like an extension of a rant as no viable solution have even been proposed nor has it provide any good alternatives.

 

Honestly after all this drama people are still making a big deal out of those boots. Even if you had 1k of them that's only 45m. Which is pretty much a little more than an Arma hilt split. Considering this is a one time event I don't think is is any problem at all. More GP gets introduced to rs via statuettes in a day than those boots added together. It's not the end of the world.

 

Considering the inflation, you are definitely right. Items going up in prices was only due to panicking, and they are already going down again. 45m for the whole game is not much.

 

45m for a player, however is a lot, and considering how unfairly it was gained and how easily it could have be prevented...it saddens me, and also makes me a bit angry.

[Sir_Squab]

I tried not to go into the specifics of what might happen to the economy because I'm *not* up on the economic state of Runescape but let me use what you said:

 

If every member would need to have 8 pairs of boots, lets say that everyone had one pair for actual usage. Many people might have had 2 pairs, one to use as a placeholder and one for using. Then take into account that many PKers had many pairs of these. I've heard averages of 50 but hundreds, possibly thousands might be held by just one player. I know as a fact that a member here on Tip.It had 8k pairs of boots that they bought for merchanting purposes since they're an easy item to flip on the GE. I don't think it's *too* much of a stretch to think that the price changes will have an effect on the economy. EVEN if the effect only comes from players panicking thinking prices will go up, it is still caused by the boots.

 

Honestly, half of how an economy works is probably something worthy of study is a sociology class..... You could, quite justifiably, combine studying economics with studying of the human brain, and how we don't actually act as rationally as we think. And throw mod/herd mentality in there too...

 

Economics must be so much simpler on Vulcan.

 

Now, for the inflation caused by these boots....Bandos armour, except the boots ;) went down today. The Godsword Blade went up, but the ZGS, BGS and AGS (AGS being of particular value to PVP'ers) went down. The SGS went up 5k. A tiny change, and not an item PK'ers are known to spend money on. Armadyl top/bottom showed a slight increase, but not (in my opinion) a significant one.

 

The whip, a very commonly used item. rose 1%.

 

Where's this inflation on Godswords and stuff that the previous poster mentioned? If I simply missed this so-called "large/massive" inflation by waiting 3 days, then obviously it wasn't much inflation.

 

And honestly, if there was any inflation (I didn't look until today) it's just as likely that it was caused by people's emotional reaction and groundless speculation rather then by actual inflation due to all these boots.

 

As for some people getting rich, well, I just wish it was me lol. I'm really not concerned if people made 5mil off an update like this. Really not.

 

Pretty sure I have two pairs of boots that I'll just leave in my bank because I can't be bothered to do something with them.

[Racheya]

First, I'm sad to hear you say that the quality of the times has gone downhill and, interestingly enough, it is actually talked about in TS_Stormrage's accompanying article.

 

I was well aware that there was the possibility of fakes flying around so that's why I said that they were 'rumours' of such large amounts. At the time this was written, the day of the event, there had been no poof that any of the supposed screenshots were fake. I'm sure you can appreciate that an article has to be written earlier on in the week than Sunday afternoon. I'm afraid this is an issue with almost all publications.

 

Also a viable solution to the problem would have been to rollback immediately, however that is obviously not viable now. And, once the money is in the game, the damage has been done. There was a window of opportunity for Jagex to reverse this but that went past very quickly.

 

Also: only 45m? I hope you realise that the Tip.It forums are not representative of the whole Runescape population. There are a LOT more players out there that have never ever come near 45m in their entire Runescape lives. While that sort of money might be common on Tip.It - for an average player it is a lot of money and comes off as extremely unfair. Why am I having to work hard to make enough money for a set of Infinity robes when somebody just got enough money for four sets by doing absolutely nothing. As I mentioned in the article, this unfairness is what TRULY makes this a very bad update.

 

I'd like to see your figures that more money comes in through statuettes. Jagex are trying to downplay the fact that they made a big mistake. People who know me will know it isn't common for me to criticise Jagex, but this is clearly a very big mistake that they made. Not just in terms of the economy, which isn't the most important thing here, but in terms of player trust and integrity.

[Beaumonde]

As far as rock climbing boots go it's over and done with and Jagex isn't going to do anything about it; we just have to remember that most likely, in the long run, it wont have that big an affect on the economy.

 

I did love the second article though, nice little insight into the Times.

[xpx]

As far as rock climbing boots go it's over and done with and Jagex isn't going to do anything about it; we just have to remember that most likely, in the long run, it wont have that big an affect on the economy.

 

I did love the second article though, nice little insight into the Times.

It's not always about the update at hand. By showing that we(most of the players) aren't going to put up with s**t like this from jagex, they'll think twice before stepping into a bucket like this again. It's actually good for the game. If the players didn't care, neither would jagex, which wouldn't be good for the product we buy.

[yuriqiu]

First, I'm sad to hear you say that the quality of the times has gone downhill and, interestingly enough, it is actually talked about in TS_Stormrage's accompanying article.

 

I was well aware that there was the possibility of fakes flying around so that's why I said that they were 'rumours' of such large amounts. At the time this was written, the day of the event, there had been no poof that any of the supposed screenshots were fake. I'm sure you can appreciate that an article has to be written earlier on in the week than Sunday afternoon. I'm afraid this is an issue with almost all publications.

 

Also a viable solution to the problem would have been to rollback immediately, however that is obviously not viable now. And, once the money is in the game, the damage has been done. There was a window of opportunity for Jagex to reverse this but that went past very quickly.

 

Also: only 45m? I hope you realise that the Tip.It forums are not representative of the whole Runescape population. There are a LOT more players out there that have never ever come near 45m in their entire Runescape lives. While that sort of money might be common on Tip.It - for an average player it is a lot of money and comes off as extremely unfair. Why am I having to work hard to make enough money for a set of Infinity robes when somebody just got enough money for four sets by doing absolutely nothing. As I mentioned in the article, this unfairness is what TRULY makes this a very bad update.

 

I'd like to see your figures that more money comes in through statuettes. Jagex are trying to downplay the fact that they made a big mistake. People who know me will know it isn't common for me to criticise Jagex, but this is clearly a very big mistake that they made. Not just in terms of the economy, which isn't the most important thing here, but in terms of player trust and integrity.

Less than 100 people in a population of 135million+ RS players got 45m each is not a lot at all. Jagex made a mistake but it is neither worth a roll back nor any kind of panic. Those that gained money simply won a small lottery that will be erased within a week due to the influx of gp elsewhere. If you want to know how much money comes in from pvp, go to w137 bh crater and look at how bit the 76king population is, then go to +1 worlds and look at the edgeville rune pking population, finally taking into account that ROT, AF, Brut, DB, RP along with other pvp clans as well as JAJA and Welfarers from public pvp ccs are all getting statues and you'll figure out roughly how much gp is being generated on a per hour basis. I would say 100m/hr net being generated in pvp would still be a lower estimate.

 

Things people should be focusing on: The fact that GE mechanics does not allow Phats to EVER reach their true value. Merch clans are able to cause inconvenience to the population. (Both of above can be solved by more frequent GE updates incidentally) Those are honestly the 2 biggest problems that's within RS atm.

[Mdeoxys]

Thanks for that article TS, it really gives the reader a good insight on how difficult it actually is to write a good original article.

What I always do when I'm bored is walking around crowded places in RuneScape, and just 'listen' to what people say to each other. Sometimes it quite interesting and fun to do, and you might even bump into a nice topic to write about.

[Amethyst_Gem]

Why cite a screenshot that is known to be a fake?

[Ibcrootbeer]

(Refering to article on the boots) Rocky Situation

 

This is seriously the stupidest move Jagex has made since they removed pking, dueling, and capped trade.

 

The simplest move to prevent all of this from happening would have taken one more step, its sheep laziness and stupidity that caused this latest mess.

 

I'll try to explain.

 

This is what Jagex did.

 

1. Changed the name of climbing boots to Rock climbing boots.

 

2. Changed the GE price of rock climbing boots to 75k. (and alch/sell price)

 

3. Added a new item called Climbing boots, with no stats.

 

By doing this they changed all the existing items in players banks to the high priced, high alch item.

 

This is what they should have done.

 

1. Removed all stats from the Existing Item Climbing boots.

 

2. Added a new item, Rock Climbing Boots, with the previous stats, and higher price.

 

If they did this, all the items players had in their bank would remain LOW priced, and sure there would have been a few small complaints about their pking gear being worthless... but nothing near what happened now.

 

Jagex has lost its touch with the players of runescape. They know nothing of what is really happening within the game, and because of this, they can't fix any of the major problems.

 

75k for Climbing boots? rune boots are 100k, with better defensive values. Another solution would have been to make the shop price 10k-30k, and leave the GE price alone! The players would buy and sell and stabilize the price in the market, there is already a large number of boots in the community, so the price would probably stabilize around 1-2k, but over a period of time, not skyrocket to 75k overnight.

 

Rumors have it that some players who knew Jagex mods knew what the updates would be, which if a player had 300k of these boots I believe it, only because the only reason someone would stockpile so many of those boots, would be because they knew something. I only wish I bought me a few at 160GP :P 99 mage and billions of gp woo!

 

P.S. They should fire whoever came up with this Idea and put me in charge of researching the effects updates will have on the economy :D Cause its clear they have no one doing that job now.

 

P.S. To the person that said rollbacks take a huge amount of effort. No, all a rollback is would be to restore the game to a state before the update, and any programmer knows to save before adding something, to protect against problems the update might create. If they did their job and caught the problem on the day it happened, a few hours after the update, then they could easily have rolledback. But as I see it, they must have been late to discover the problem, and even rolling back 12 hours could result in many skillers and monster fighting and pvpers losing millions in profits, drops, and exp. So that is why they did not do a rollback.

[waheera1]

Article 1:

 

I agree with your basic principles on this matter, but I think you missed the real problems. Yes a lot of people got rich, and that's not necessarily "fair", but that is by no means the biggest problem. A friend of mine condensed the issues (as he saw them) into 3 very neat points, quoted below.

 

"1) It brought a fairly large amount of gold into the game, which will have at least some effect on the economy.

 

2) Nobody aside from really desperate people who pay an extreme opportunity cost by not wanting to hop worlds to a non-PvP world for the GE actually paid 75k for climbing boots. Therefore, this entire update was based on wrong information and therefore Jagex looks completely idiotic for refusing to make any changes to fix it.

 

3) It ruined the worth of climbing boots. For all purposes they were previously used for, they are now worthless. Because of the high shop price, they are no longer cheap throwaway gear, so welfare questers and PKers won't use them. Also, their 45k death price means they may actually protect over something more desirable (like a ****ing Fire Cape), so they're no longer good for using at Corporeal Beast or any other activity where you stand a decent chance of dying.

 

All-in-all, aside from the people who gained tens/hundreds of millions in gold overnight, this update benefits nobody and was completely worthless. Whomever thought it up needs to be re-assigned to Customer Support."

 

My own take on this:

To refute the arguments of some players stating that point number 1) as shown here is irrelevant. There need not be an overall 10% shift in the RS economy, since the climbing boot changes should theoretically only affect p2p items. As a result, this could quite easily see dragon bones rocket AGAIN to even more ridiculous prices, along with countless other member items. For this update to significantly affect p2p prices (at least on a short-term basis) would take far fewer than the 10m+ boots speculated at by another person on this forum.

 

2) As stated, 75k is ridiculously optimistic as a price margin for sales. With the 60k price restriction and previous G.E. prices of around 200gp per pair, 75k would have required junk trading for the boots. That is a ridiculous premise and I believe can almost be categorically denied as a regular occurance. While it was easy to buy the boots for 12gp and shift them for 200gp approx, notching up roughly 5.2k profit per inventory, I have never seen anything to suggest that Jagex's re-pricing is an accurate reflection of real market value.

 

3) Can't really elaborate on what was said above. Climbing boots are now virtually useless to all but the most ardent pures.

 

 

Article 2:

 

An enjoyable and accurate read. Even in the two short "letters to the editor" that I've submitted over the years, I've found myself often wandering away from the initial topic. Indeed several have been scrapped because I just couldn't make it a compelling enough read. We do understand your pain and in a way I guess this was an excellent article with which to remind the more vociferous critics to cut you some slack every once in a while! :P

[Ts_Stormrage]

Oh I don't need to be cut some slack...

 

I've held my own all these years and I'll probably continue to do so for years to come...

 

But people mostly speak out when they disagree with something, instead of when they like an article...

Not only do we want to know whats wrong, but also whats right :)

[waheera1]

Oh I don't need to be cut some slack...

 

I've held my own all these years and I'll probably continue to do so for years to come...

 

But people mostly speak out when they disagree with something, instead of when they like an article...

Not only do we want to know whats wrong, but also whats right :)

 

Haha of course, the indomitable Ts_Stormrage needs no slack, I was trying to make more of the point you made that it's nice to be told what's right too! But you got my point anyway.

 

Also as another point for article 1:

 

The Varrock Sword Shop recently got a monkey trader from whom Dragon Scimitars could be purchased. Why? Because nobody could be bothered with going to ape atoll to buy one and therefore they could not be purchased on G.E. This simply was not the case with boots, for which there was a comparatively steady supply. Even so, surely if climbing boot prices were so far off it would have been a simple matter to add a nepalese trader (:P) to the Varrock Armour Shop selling the boots?! Guaranteed that would have been met with much more favourable reviews than the current farce Jagex have created.