WTF happened to the Economy?

Alright, so i haven't played RS in over 4 years. I decided to give it one last try and make a new account. I went on and started mining right off the start, it's an old favorite thing to do, for me. After about 10-20 minutes i took a few guesses at the account i had a while back and got into it.

I went into the bank and saw 500k.. Someone hacked me and took all my shit but chose to leave me 500k.. Obviously i didn't care, i haven't played in ages and this probably happened years ago. Anyway, i went to World 1 to buy myself some Black (g) for my new account, only to find out that it's now worth over 1.5mil!?

Black G used to be worth like 300-350k, i can't believe it climbed that much. That's not all, i used to have a Santa hat that i bought for 600k back in the day, which i did lose, and turn's out they're worth over 10mil!? I mean, if i hadn't have gotten hacked i would be loadeddd.

But seriously, what happened to everything? How did it get soo damn high?

 

A few reasons:
1. The Grand Exchange which allows people to buy and sell items in one place.
2. Trade limits which only allows a certain amount of wealth to be transferred. Meaning no trades are almost always balanced and you can't merch like you used to.
3. Merching clans which cause items like black g and santa hats to rise.
4. Santa hats are rares so once you lose it, you can't get it back from a drop or anything like that. Only way to get one now it to buy one.
Hope that helps.
If you need any further info, just pm me.

 

Merchanters are manpulating prices in the Grand Exchange so that they rise or fall also people are buying items with junk or buying that item (if its rare) for more than the normal price by using diffrent methods.

 

What exactly is merchanter's in this situation? They're basically buying items low selling high?

 

The insanely high prices are caused by inflation, not merchanting.

 

Inflation due to 76k trickers.

 

Yup the inflation has been caused by 76k tricking.

 

Its all because of the Grand Exchange, imo.

 

Most of the answers are vague, but true.

I'll give you an in-depth explanation.
If I believe, the items began to sky rocket somewhere back in early 2008 when Jagex decided to remove direct looting of a player's inventory from killing a player in the wilderness and the introduction of the Grand Exchange.

What the grand exchange does is allow you to search for an item and it will allow you to insert cash offers for the item you have searched. The Grand Exchange is basically internet shopping of Runescape, where you select the item you want to purchase, put it into your cart and pay the price for it. However, the Grand Exchange does not immediately update the item you have selected to buy. Because many people might have placed an offer for the same item in the Exchange before you have, any item that's in stock of the Grand Exchange will go to them first. You have to wait your turn to buy the item. Also, if many offers has been placed on an item, the person with the highest cash offer will get the item first when it's posted up for sales. Of course, when more than one person puts up the maximum offer for an item the Exchange allows, the person who posted up that maximum offer first will get the item once it's in the Exchange.

What this does is create lots of problems for merchants who did it the old fashioned way of merchanting, for example, getting law runes at a very cheap price from world 66 draynor bank, notorious for law running, and disposing these law runes for a much higher price in Free to play worlds where law runes are much harder to obtain without simply buying it off from other players.

When individual merchanting seems to impossible to do, ground merchanting came into play. Players who wanted to simply get rich and ignore the effects of a highly inflated economy banded together and put their focus on single items that might be highly profitable to them. After the Exchange was introduced, Jagex also made a page on their runescape.com website where it has graphs of every single item in the Grand Exchange and their prices each day for the past 30 days, 90 days or 180 days. The graphs will show whether the items will have a decreasing trend in value or a zig-zag, or perhaps an increasing trend in value. From this, group merchants had a simple job to do-- find an item that they can massively buy at a very low price until every stock of these items are sold out, then when that item skyrockets to a high value at some time, perhaps 2-3 weeks later, massively sell these items at a very high price since low item circulation bring more value to the item itself. And because many people are in need of these items, they HAVE to buy it at a very high price since every single item were bought out by these merchants.

Another thing that helped these merchants is the removal of unbalanced trade. Nowadays, when direct player to player trade occurs, there is a trade limit in balance, meaning that if a player wants to sell an item to another player, the other player's offer in return must be in the price range of the item being sold. Meaning that there will no longer be trades of a cabbage for one million gold and etc. This causes a lot of tension among players because many will now deploy item for item trades, where when one offer is put up, the second player will put up several items where their prices add up to the offer put up by the first player. As long as it sounds already, this discourages many players to use direct player to player trades for large items and resort to the Grand Exchange for a much faster and sound Cash transaction...Or at least this is what it had been in the first part of 2008.

You see, because people are able to tell the increasing or decreasing trends of items, many of these people in return like to trade for items....items with an increasing trend in price that is. If a santa hat is worth 33 million right now and still increasing, a person with a red partyhat will then want the santa hat and whatever the cash cost of a red phat minus the santa is along for his red phat. This way, since the santa will be increasing in price, the person selling the red phat will make even more money in time.

From this, the world of Grand Exchange is in control of group merchants, while the world of direct trades is in control of people who only want items that increase in value, trading itself in Runescape has become some what harder than previous years.


Trade, however, is not only the factor affecting this inflation in economy. Player killing is also another reason. In an effort to combat real world traders, Jagex decided to remove an essential part of pking... looting the exact items of your opponents when you kill them. Instead, the old form of player killing is substituted by two lackluster and imbecile attempts to replace the joy many players found back in the old days...Bounty Worlds and PVP Worlds.

Bounty worlds use to be fun where people would simply hunt others in a crater, but now, Jagex has changed it to nothing more than almost a brother of PVP worlds and instead of freely killing anyone in close combat to you, you'll be given a target like the old Bounty Hunter.

However, THE THING with Bounty worlds and PVP worlds is that both when drops occur in both these worlds, special "ancient artefacts" will also be included in drops when you kill an opponent. When you get the artefacts, you can go over to a designated NPC only located in the PVP worlds and switch these artefacts for cash only.

With thousands of players garnering huge heaps of cash bonuses from NPCS, over hundred millions of pure cash is pumped into the economy without an item of value to back them up. Again, what's the use of pumping more money when you don't have the resource to back up the money? The only outcome of this is inflation.

In addition to these items, another popular way to gain cash from rigging the drop system of PVP and Bounty worlds is 76k/26k-ing. PVP and Bounty worlds' drop system states that a minimum of 26k (76k on member's worlds) must be wagered by both you and your opponent when fighting in order to get a "decent" and randomized drop. Therefore, two players, Player A and Player B will devise a plan to rig the drop system in their favor. Player A will collect 76k while Player B will wear the richest items he has, and both of them will wait in hot zones for more than 30 minutes. Player B will then kill Player A, who is his friend, and then get whatever drop he gets after he kills player A. Because PVP worlds states that a minimum of 76k drop is needed for a decent drop, Player A loses 76k in order for Player B to get at least a 500k+ drop. After Player B picks up his items, Player A will then be the one to wear full armor and his richest items while Player B will take nothing more than 76k, and allow himself for Player A to get a decent drop. In the end, assuming events turn out all right and neither player betrays each other, both Player A and Player B will lose 76k respectively, but gain more than 500k+ respectively. Let me remind you that most of these drops also include a decent amount of cash in it, therefore, adding to the "more cash pumped into economy without items backing it up" factor.

In conclusion, these 4 factors (manipulation of GE by group merchants, only accepting increasing item offers in direct player to player trade, swapping "ancient artefacts" for pure cash, and 76k/26k tricking) is the reason why the Economy is so inflated as of now.

 

Not only tricking, but the fact that it's so easy to get cash now: god wars, tormented demons, etc.

and the extreme potion update quadrupled the price of herblore.

 

Merchanting and Merch clans became much more popular, so there's many more items being merched on a much larger scale than 4 years ago.

 

I know whips x 200% and furys gone through the roof.

 

lets not forget the "new" grave stones my friends. back in the day if you die, your fucked. back in the day your blood boils as you race to the place you died to get your items. now, you die and you think, its all good...oh, someone blessed my grave. i can walk around an hour before getting me items... AND if you die deep in some cave or something, your grave will be at the entrance at a much more "convienient" area. there is no longer any risk my friends. there is no loss of valuables and such in runescape. the only losses now are the small pvp trick, buying range, mage or foods/potions, and the occasional accident. I can't tell you how many times i died from revs, lag in dangerous areas, or just plan and simple getting pwned back in the day. and those deaths cost me money and was a loss in runescape economy.