The Economics of Botting [Read me to turn a profit]

There is probably a post somewhere, deep down in the depths of this forum, that already covers the scope of this thread. Because I don't have the time to hunt for it, I'm going to touch base with a few topics that are floating around ALL forums that greatly concern me:

*Botting is NOT gone forever,
*Prices are going to skyrocket because of the lack of bots,
*Jagex NEEDS bots

The first, botting is gone forever. This has been touched upon everywhere. Botting isn't gone permanently. We will leave it at that.

On prices skyrocketing: the price rises right now are purely on speculation, but as everyone with any sense of business savvy knows, speculation drives the markets. There's a massive demand right now for "bot produced" goods, which is bleeding into non-botted goods. Rares are on the decline now as people are trying to liquidate their assets and buy raw materials. The market is volatile right now, and if you know how to play it, you will be successful.

The quick, risky bucks: all raw materials and commodities are going up (rocktails, oak planks, runes, herbs, seeds, etc.). If you want to turn a quick buck, buy these items up as you can, but BE WARNED, all items have a "ceiling" value, depending on the item. When it hits that ceiling, it can only decline in value. If you're trying to turn a quick profit, buy these items as you can and hold them until Tuesday night / Wednesday, post-patch. They will be sold off en-masse, meaning that you will have to jump into the fray to sell them.

If this bot-solution ends up being an actual slap to bots, and does considerable damage to botting clients for what could be weeks to resolve, hold your commodities for a few days after the mass sell-off. Post sell-off there will be a market starvation period, where a demand will exist, but the supply will be cut off. This is the best opportunity to make better money, but also the riskiest.

The low risk profit: Rares. Rares are on the decline right now due to the liquidation of banks for raw materials. THIS IS THE BEST TIME IN A LONG TIME TO BUY RARES. Rares will be declining a bit in the near future, but when the holiday season kicks in and after all of this market phooey passes, they will rise again. Santa hats are a good bet for money making, but party hats are known to be cash-cows. When they gain value, it is usually by the hundreds of millions.

The no-profit: Avoid, at all costs, armors and weapons that are "new and shiny." They almost NEVER turn a profit, and are known to actually decline at a much faster rate than anything else. Most new and shiny items hit equilibrium and don't decline in price, but rarely do you ever see them gain in price past the first two weeks of launch.

I'd also like to take a moment to remind everyone the reality of the economy and prices. Bots DID NOT drive prices down. The Grand Exchange did (this is due to everything becoming much more available to players). The only reason prices are skyrocketing is because of speculation. The ratio between bots to actual players is closer to 95% of players play legit, 5% bot.


On the order of Jagex needing bots to survive: this is absolutely untrue as well. Prior to the mass influx of bots, RuneScape had NO wilderness and NO free trade, and survived that way for a good three years. Bots are, at most, 5% of the total subscriptions of the game, so even if there are 1,000,000 players subscribed at any given time, 50,000 of those subscriptions are bots. Don't get me wrong, $250,000 per month from bots is a nice profit, but it is pennies compared to gross sum of subscriptions from the non-bots per month. I hate to say it, but bots really are an insignificant minority.


Tl;dr:
-Buy rares to really make a profit as a long term investment, everything else is volatile goods.
-Bots are insignificant to the RS economy
-Bots are insignificant compared to the legit player base
-The sky isn't falling.

 

Interesting post, rsbuddy staff has said that they will be able to change their bot to function after the update in 1 minute time.

 

RSBuddy is not a reflection bot, but it is injection. I know Arbiter is confident he can make his bot work immediately, but without knowing the scope of the changes Jagex is making, all he has are words of encouragement and not actual promises.

I have no doubt all the big bots will be back in time, but after 1 minute is very unlikely.

 

It won't be 1 minute but probably 1 day maximum, but it turns into people botting for 24/7 then transferring items, its not going to affect bots that much.

 

The people botting 24x7 right now are the people Jagex are looking for to ban. It was quite clever of them to announce this a few days in advance, because now all of the players who are online for 24/48/72 hours at a time doing the same things are obviously bots, and easily bannable.

 

Great post, had a nice read. Gonna transfer all my ores from bots and wait lil bit and sell

 

Do not have cash for rares.

 

More than 5% of the subscriptions are bots... just check after an update. 200k people playing before, 50k playing after...

 

yeah but how many of those accs are one off accounts people are botting.

alot of people bot more than one account.

look at goldfarms, aroudn 40 bots maybe and theres got to be loads of those going around.

that 150k drop is probably the 5% with their multiple accs.

 

Showing me 200k people playing right now. 200k before, 200k after. Seems to me it may be less than you think. The real test of time will be primetime on Tuesday, where I'm betting you won't see massive population dips.

 

I'm assuming you meant to say 50% not 5%. Majority of the players in p2p do bot, but 50% aren't bot farms. There are a lot of bot farms but if you think of it from jagex's perspective they know bots won't ever stop. This is just a scare tactic and they know if they can ban 1.5 million accounts in "bot farms" not the legit players those bot farmers can afford to come back meaning 750k- 1.5million more subscriptions if they ban majority of the bot farmers, at the same time attracting those who found rs fun before the bot takeover. I'm going to hold off selling my acconuts though for now as I know my accounts will fetch a lot more than normal once all the bots have been put offline.

 

Though the grand exchange did drop prices on the whole, shortly after its introduction, prices stabilized. Upon reintroduction of the wilderness and free trade, which enabled easy wealth transfer, the incentive to bot and thus the prevalence of bots skyrocketed. If you look at the six month activity for things like frost/regular dragon bones, yew logs, nature runes, and red chinchompas, you'll notice substantive and often steady declines in their value. This is almost certainly due to the prevalence of bots gathering those resources and drastically increasing their supply. A drastic increase in supply of these easily botted materials is going to reduce the price.

Clearly the increase in prices of raw materials in the last week is due to speculation and uncertainty in anticipation of Jagex's upcoming "nuke" of the bots. The sustained drop in the aforementioned items is almost certainly due to increased botting and not solely the grand exchange.

 

Untrue. The return of free trade and the wilderness also tripled the active population. With a new medium to get the products across, the supply AND demand stayed relatively the same. Pre free trade and wildy nature runes fell to 200 gp. They're at 100 now and climbing due to the scare.

Bots are a minority of the populous. Dragon bones used to be 2.5k per old-free trade, then they jumped to 5k per when free trade disappeared, and now they've re-stabilized at 2.5k. The correlation is pretty clear. Sure bots create a supply, but the supply has always been there, with or without bots.

To try and fool ourselves that bots are an integral part of the economics of the game is just silly. It's like saying mega-corporations and rich people create all the jobs, when statistically more jobs are created by middle class small-business employers (99.9% according to the US labor bureau). Both claims are fallacious, and both claims are merely that.

 

Interesting read, nice to see someone who knows what they're talking about give an estimation of the player/bot ratio. So many people around these days saying "bots make up half/two thirds of the rs population".

 

Well written, one of the more correct assessments on this board.

 

As in any economy, there are a multitude of factors affecting supply, demand, and willingness to trade over certain items. The presence, or lack thereof, of bots and free trade is one, but not the only, factor affecting supply and demand (and therefore price of RuneScape goods).

Using the example of nature runes, they hovered around 200 before the wilderness and free trade were re-introduced. In the eight months since then, they have dropped by about 50%. It's fairly safe to say that the largest factor in this price drop is the excess supply of nature runes due to botting. Whatever increase in demand that returned players created obviously did not compensate the oversupply from botting. Your example of dragon bones proves my point. When free trade is active, the price of dragon bones is lower as there is an incentive to bot them. I agree with you that the speculating of bones and ashes is caused by the uncertainty over the future status of bots, but the long term decline in dragon bones is clearly due to the excess supply created by botting.

I agree with you that bots are not an essential part of the economy, but as long as they exist, they will affect prices. Let not stability or rises in price caused by other factors obfuscate the fact that bots do exert a downward pressure on the price of collectible resources by increasing supply.

 

i liked the read, but will have to disagree with the fact you said 5% bot, 95% legit. Whenever theres a jagex update, around 70-80% of the players stay offline. Noone knows for sure how many people bot, so why do so many people say they do?

 

Nice guide, although its not 1/20 bots too legit accounts.

 

I'd be willing to bet the number is more 1/30 active accounts. As far as inactives go, 1/400 would be probably more correct. The only way we'll ever know the bot ratio would be to check the logged-in population wednesday, thursday, and friday, compared to the 200k that have been online the past few days.

Also, to comment on an earlier post, Law Runes used to be around 1k per pre-ge. Post GE they fell to 500 within three weeks, and then 200 within a year. As more and more people ran natures, and natures became more available from mob drops and runecrafting, more people bought them. Take earth runes for instance. Who bots earth runes? They're not cheap to make as you could make more from bloods or nats, and in order to make a really significant amount, you'd need to be very high levels of RCing.

Bots did affect the economy, but not dramatically, and not as much as the market rising would lead you to believe, which is why buying now when prices are rising in an attempt to flip is a horrible idea. Sure you can make a profit, but everyone else is also trying to do the same.

 

Thanks for writing this, was a good read and cleared things up alot for me.