RS & Gambling

Wanted to throw this question out there in this sea of knowledge on Sythe:

What makes gambling so popular in RS in comparison to other MMOs?

Would you say that it is in fact, the gambling component, which accounts for the large amount of RMT that happens in RS?

If there were an RMT friendly MMO, would RS users be interested in checking it out? What features/elements would need to be present, in order for a new MMO to be appealing to RS users?

Why is RS so big?

Very... very... interested to hear your thoughts on this ladies and gents.

jake

 

It's a combination of the demographics (teenage-young adult males) and the ease of the gambling itself. You can gamble on a level 3 brand new account, I'm sure there are people who are just gamblers and have no interest in runescape at all who login to dice or whatever. It also helps that Jagex introduced the duel arena a long time ago

 

Rs would be a lot more popular if gambling did still exist. A game that allows players to Pk/PVP/Group PK + Gamble + RWT would be very successful.

 

I can see a Private Server that would allow all of that become quite big, if they can fight off the copyright issues etc and make it seem like the owners arent going to flood the market with gold once it becomes pricey / well known.

EDIT: Aside of the gambling (afaik) isn't that Diablo's idea btw, as they allow rwting (from what I've heard)

 

probably because money is so hard to make on runescape, they want an easy way to earn which is by gambling.

 

The reason that dicing and its related activities make up a large part of your site's gold sales is because of:

1. Increased difficulty in botting
2. Continued Jagex updates that make fair PvP impossible
3. Game demographics

Right now, people use third parties for staking their gold on RS because the in-game pvp systems are completely broken. There is still a demand for risk based gaming, the game just doesn't sufficiently provide it.

Also, the RS userbase has plummeted as well, the only people who play the game now spend money on micro transactions regularly.

 

Private servers like SoulSplit, Ikov and Grinderscape are fine with gambling as they provide custom dice ranks and stuff. And yeah, that's how these servers got famous IMO.

 

Interesting. A followup question is then that, why is RS2007 so much more popular than RS3?

Diablo used to allow RWT, but it was removed in a patch, this past June if I remember correctly. Blizzard made huge profits with their own secondary market, but there were some problems:

1) Their reputation became sullied because players began to perceive Blizzard as supporting and profiting from botters/farmers, etc. which made inflation go out of control

2) The RWT component of the game was too successful. In that, they did not anticipate how to control the economics of the game, and failed to anticipate how a secondary market would result in accelerated progression in a "theme park" type game. (A secondary market really only works in sandboxes, or games with well developed, player driven economies). Diablo 3 was too "short" of a game. And the secondary market, made people progress faster than Blizzard was able to produce content.

They will be doing it again in the future, because they learned from this experience.

3) Blizzard's model drew attention to platforms like PlayerAuctions. We had an incredible influx of gamers go over to our platform, even after they released their RWT marketplace. Why did users come to PA? In short, Blizzard charged 15%, and paypal charged another 15%, which added to upwards of 30% fees for all transactions. When players are faced with 30% fees compared to PA's 10% fees, the choice is clear.

 

Isnt 07 like 15k ppl daily l.

 

I read its because of the age range, its also because of how much time is spent playing, if you spend 2 weeks to get 100m and you have the chance to instatnly double it and skip over another 2 weeks, you may just go for it

 

I think it's easy to get used to and doesn't take much effort to start gambling or staking etc.

 

http://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/

 

Just the ease of access to it and the fact you can do it with (nearly) even odds. Those who couldn't stake could dice which is where dicing took off as well.

I can't think of another game where it's so easy to access and so instantly rewarding if you get lucky.

 

EOC has more people online on average, but you have to wonder about the number of bots...

 

07 has bots too.

 

but they've gotten alot better with getting rid of bots.

 

When gambling was still in RS, that was me. Login in everyday only to gamble. I had no interest in playing RS.

 

I think what made it so popular was the current amount of players on runescape to begin with when all the gambling first started, and it just kinda took over from there.

It'll be hard to start a new game where one of your aims is just gambling, if that's what you plan to do.

 

Kids just love to gamble lol.

 

The demand for gold on RS is higher than any other game, more profit to be made.