Why prices in Runescape must rise

Why are all items in Runescape going up in price?

One word.

Deflation and money debasement. Actually thats three but maths was never really my strong point.

But this is not the only reason, for that we have to go way back to the beginning, to a beginning I can only surmise at and guess due to not being there. When Runescape was new it was a happy time, so many people were running around plucking chickens and fisting goblins and selling their ill-gotton gains to shops that there wasn't a problem. So many people were poor that it didn't really matter but even in these early days there was trouble brewing, staking you see had the potential to double ones money constantly and most have seen what happens when you start with the number 2 and keep doubling...

If you started at 2x2 and carried on, by the 19th time you would have 1M

By 30 strokes you have that magical 2.147B number

But normal people do not stake 2gp to start off do they? ;)

Within a short while it became obvious that somehow people would have to be able to carry items of great wealth in order to get around the 2.147bil limit and Jagex delivered in fine form.

They invented party hats which were finite by their very nature and some got many and some got none, but most got one.

What one man has another must want...

Anyway, back in the day you could probably pick up a party hat for 50k, which meant some hours chopping trees or killing cows but something happened a year or so later...someone did the seemingly impossible and got 99 smithing. And the whole world rejoiced.

What happened then can only be described as mass happiness on an epic scale, for merchants who had a rune platebody was had his ticket to billions because see, when everyone else is stuck on adamant, he who is harder to hit is he who has an advantage in staking. People would allegedly swap party hats for these early plates that gave them a distinct advantage in battle.

After a few weeks of this another would get 99 smithing due to seeing how well it worked for the other unnamed guy, and then another and yet another and in time the price for plate bodies has been done but now no one but a few rich merchants hold all the party hats...and much lamenting was going on with stakers who could see their plates were of little value really because anyone could make them.

But people would die to black dragons and demons and that wealth would disappear and they would need food and goods and other sundries....wealth came into the game for sure, but it was taken out in equal measure.

Jump forward a year or two and now partyhats are being traded for millions of gold pieces due to traders only allowing them to be sold for that price and no one wanting to spend millions on a hat just to turn around again and sell for 10gp so the price was kept high.

This worked well for a long time as stakers could now stake party hats which had an intrinsic value of only pennies that cost millions and that would help with the 2.147bil limit.

Roll forward another five years and now you have many hundreds of high class merchants who buy out everything, double the price and then sell it off but with millions more people to buy and sell to the issue has been compounded a hundred-fold, they need to be able to do something about this problematic issue of money and it is not easy now to get hold of party hats, in the beginning when clans first started out you could get an easter egg for 4M but as they became "rarer" the price quadrupled as more and more needed to exchange money.

But there is a problem, whereas before players could be relied upon to do the monumentally stupid and kill themselves we got gravestones, which cut the risk of loss by 95% if you ran fast or got a friend to bless your grave...



PvP made a comeback with items costing upto 5M each suddenly appearing from thin air for next to no risk with 76k tricking.

Now that hats are finite, they then turn to other high ticket items such as rune bars, logs, essense...pretty much anything they can get thier hands on except for spirit shards because they are not something that can be sold easily.

And the money keeps flowing in with nowhere to go...

There are a few things that can be done to stop this flow or at least curtail and divert it:

*Jagex could simply step in, cap all the prices but that has been tried with the GE previously and patently did not work and mass whining ensued. (check partyhat whine)

*Jagex could ban all trading completely and they game will die as not very many can be bothered collecting absolutely everything themselves.

*Bring in a new skill that costs a lot of money so only the very rich or those that can be bothered to collect 500,000 wines of Zamorak/ 2,000,000 oak planks can ever have a hope to be the best in, but they did that twice with construction and summoning didn't they?

Increase the price cap somehow or at least get around it, maybe make some kind of bearer bond which can be bought from an NPC for set prices of 10M to 100M (without having to speak to him multiple times) and sold back for the exact same value.

So there you are, what can be done to get around this inflation, as it is hard for us all to trade well or safely with items costing more and more all the time, if it carries on we could have the real life equivilent of hyperinflation some say.

Thoughts?

Comments?

*This post is a summation of what went on, since I was not here for the most part, and compes mentis for even less of it events may have worked out differently in some cases.

Poll at top of forum

I have added a small poll to the top of this blog, for reasons that may become clearer later.

When you buy items in the GE what system do you use?

Do you buy in round numbers such as 1800, 1900, 10k

Or do you randomise it by choosing prices such as 1876, 1937, 10834?

Or do you simply choose the highest or lowest and hope for the best and you don't pay too much?

Dragonhide or Not?

I am facing a difficult decision today, whether to buy dragonhide or not and it vexes me. I am vexed.

On the surface it should be an easy decision, the prices are primed to be able to make a predictive offer of min+5 at 1715 just in time for them to rise right back up to 1800-1830 for green dragonhide and get some early for when they jump up but people are hunting dragons en-mass for bones, what if they continue to drop?

This is the problem, right now people are hunting the dragons but what is happening to their hides, are they simply dropping them on the floor as worthless junk in order to get bones or are they still putting them in the bank?

Will they go to 1715 tomorrow then go back up as people buy or will there be a glut in the market? If there is, will they continue to slide down past 1650?

http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_rs/Green_dragonhide/viewitem.ws?obj=1753&scale=2

On the surface 3 things could happen:

Nothing at all and the price continues to flit as it has done for months bewteen two points.

Dragonhides fall as everyone panic sells in order to get bones. Even if this happens there will be a scarcity on them, as they are a primary resource in crafting, alching and freeplay rangers.

Dragonhides go to their usual price of 1750 tomorrow they shoot back up again.

Either way, having done the maths and seeing as I would only risk about 5M I will give it a shot...to buy dragonhides and have basically cornered the market for 1715 is too good an opportunity to miss! lol

On the plus side, whatever happens maple seeds are excellent to buy at mid+120...they should rise well tomorrow or the day after in their perpetual cycle :)

Making Easy Money In Runescape

The biggest problem people have with trading is first deciding how much they need, you can start with any amount usually but for beginners I would tend to say about 1M which can probably be claimed in a short while. This is in no way a definate sum, but just makes it easier to think about.



Even without the lines it just be fairly easy to see what is going on here, since the guide price has not dropped to the absolute minimum in 3 months it is not recomendded getting into a bidding war for 5gp as you will be queued for weeks, simply buy at mid price and then they should sell slowly off for the next few days as people are naturally impatient, even for the most common stuff and will place in an offer for maximum since it is only an extra 1k for 1000

This way does work and there is no risk unless Jagex again decide to drop the price caps and it falls further yet I doubt that will happen, they have the opportunity to go to 5gp yet they don't.

Much better instead is to go for something like adamant plates, legs, scimitars, kites and helms, there are a fair few up and coming pures now that PvP has made a come back and you will always be able to supply these with gear, lets just look at adamant chains:



The reason why chains are so much better here is because they are 3x as cheap and have 5x the movement of adamant platebodies in the GE. We could of course use the plates, but we would not nearly be as effective though the more people who do this, they slower chains will get as they find their equilibrium and something else will take its place as being the best.

So, we are limited to roughly 100 per four hours if we buy ourselves (more to follow to get around this later...someone remind me please lol), which means about 300/400 per 12/16 hours which is a nights trading while in bed and at school the following day depending on what price you actually pick them up for.

Lets say our sell price is 2800 for arguments sake, obviously it may be higher than that depending on the demand or lower but round numbers are always easier (more on this later)

Now, we have bought 400 adamant chains for 2700, and selling for 2800

You are crying to yourself that this is only 40k, but this is 40k you didn't have a day ago and it is 4% profit which is about as good as it gets with solo trading, you obviously do not have the buying power to manipulate prices on your own, and if you join such a clan there is next to no hope of you getting stock at the lowest price in order to make it worthwhile.

All you do now with your 1.04M is reinvest it back into something else or the chains again, predicting the price they will likely fall to and being there first to buy, this becomes 1.09M, 1.15M and it keeps rising in a geometric scale.

If you continue for a week or two you will have doubled your money with next to no effort and can concentrate on leveling your woodcutting skills :)

Once you have enough money such as 2.3M you can start on green d'hide chaps which I believe have a very high buying limit of 10,000 meaning this is almost the very pinnacle of freeplay trading:



Once you have done this a few times, then you can take those profits and move it onto jewelry, gems, scimitars...just because you may be freeplay it doesn't mean you cannot play with the big boys :D

To slide or not to slide when swinging should be better?

Basically the whole idea of sliding as opposed to flipping or swinging (snigger) is that instead of simply doing one trade once at the top and bottom, the price will rise and fall only a few gold pieces each day over the course of the week.

What this means is if you solely rely on buying for minimum and selling at max you will have a problem while you wait ages for the conditions to be met...sliding is the alternative.

[Insert random Numb3rs imagery here]

Imagine a nature rune starting at 200 gold and it rises 3 gp each day to 220 yet its max price is generally 10% over this...we can buy our nature rune for 203 (since we already know the most common buy price previously) and get them fairly fast and then simply sell at max-3 since because everyone now had to match your offer they have to offer more to buy...you simply sell it back to them.

So what you have is a system such as:

mid 200 buy 203 sell 220
mid 203 buy 206 sell 220
mid 206 buy 209 sell 220
mid 209 buy 212 sell 225
mid 212 buy 215 sell 223
mid 215 buy 218 sell 221

When the price starts to drop simply reverse it, buying at min and selling just under mid...this allows fantastic profits over time

Say you can buy 4x25k per day

Thats 100,000 x 17gp profit just on the first day for 1.7M profit!! 

Continue that over the week and though it is likely you will get shorter odds it will start to tell you when it is going to reverse simply due to this mechanism.

Of course the higher the price goes over time the shorter your profits will be as a result due to that line that everyone carries in their head telling them the price of a rune...however if you time and price it well you can get around this quite easily...all you need is luck at choosing the exact price to buy and sell at...

Of course the nature rune is simply an example, it works well with lower priced items that flow up and down regularly rather than those that bounce everywhere like a constipated camel on vindaloo...if you have the spare cash and can identify good buy and sell prices for a certain product, try it, you will not be disappointed :)