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Part 1
This is a fairly long post but this is mainly my personal discussion in by head to understand why companies do what they do for their MMO. While I have not been apart of any other MMO as long as RuneScape I know I have little experience in these other MMOs but who does when it comes to comparing and contrasting each one.
Grand Exchange: RuneScape
While Jagex is showing new ways of creating and controlling MMO economies and providing unique ways of handling the ever present real life trading issues, there is little to no other companies looking towards Jagex and seeing what they did and why they did it or even how they did it. If you look at Jagex's game RuneScape, you see methods of preventing real life trading and scamming that are so effective they almost completely stop users to falling victim to this or cheating in these methods. I do agree that players had to give up a lot of what they were used to for something that is questionably better and usually worse for certain types of players who used the old way of trading and how the economy worked to make a lot of money.
The most difficult concept of these new methods which make items have a certain value based on the economy and that the value cannot be traded five percent greater or less then that value so difficult is that players are so used to having a completely free marketing style where the players get to choose their item value and can sell it for as much or little as they want. Now players much stick to a certain value range that is based upon the Grand Exchange, a central place of trading throughout all RuneScape worlds instantly. While this provides a way for players to trade a lot easier and more effectively it removes a lot of aspects that used to be present in RuneScape.
Simply interacting with players while trading is significantly reduced. I know that Jagex promotes the interaction with players but the simply removed the need for players to interact with players. This doesn't make sense to what they advertise but regardless it saves time for doing some else: maybe interacting with other players doing something other then trading?
Also, you have very very limited range of the values you can sell your item at. When the value of the item is below so far you can only trade it in a very short range but while it is up in a very high value you have a pretty nice range to choose from. Then again a value can only go so low before it cannot drop anymore because you cannot have it where shops buy items for more then you trade them to other people because you want to promote trading with others more then NPCs. Then yet again, they increased the competition of the shops and many of the items that are rendered useless to more experienced players are very unlikely to be bought. It used to be where low level armors such as iron, bronze, and steel used to be used a lot by players as well as bought and sold. Now you have only the very top range of items being used and if you need lower level armors you either make them yourself or buy it from a shop that is ripping you off to begin with. The main point here is that the economy isn't balanced and this change doesn't do anything about it but rather makes it more annoying to try and sell one or more items for several months because almost no one wants or even needs that item.
Time is one of the most beneficial aspects of the Grand Exchange and no doubt creates a scamless environment on its own. You simply put in the item name or at least part of it and set the price you want to buy or sell it. You have not idea who got your item or where it came from. On the downside this eliminates the need to create a small guild, clan, business, or group that has people that work together to benefit in the end. Now you have people that simply do their job independent and buy or sell whatever they need on the Grand Exchange.
Merchanting is one of the trivial things. Some people hate it and some people love it. I personally love it but that doesn't mean that we got everything when the Grand Exchange came out. My closest/oldest friend simply puts it that merchanting changed from where you could do it on a small scale to a very large scale similar to a silent auction. What that means is there is no repetitive typing or having to switch around on multiply words to buy and sell your goods. The Grand Exchange has officially made merchanting a rich sport that puts you in the billions easily and many people I have watched that use it now own so much money they are forced into buying items instead of just collecting money. Essentially making money to the point where it's just useless to collect.
Scamming is almost completely reduced to nothing, there is no doubt about that. And on top of that you have zero to little macroing now occurring in the game. Overall this will improve game performance on their server side because you have less 'people' using the same server. On top of that you have more space for people to spread out and makes it easier to get on worlds that were usually full because of so many macroers taking up the space. This is also probably one of the main reasons that they didn't have to add more worlds to the game and why people believe (sadly) that RuneScape has reduced in the amount of members and free players.
Change is hard and I admit that I didn't like the Grand Exchange update and couldn't believe that Jagex would do such a thing to its players. Jagex has mentioned that they were doing this update and have been planning to do this update for a very long time. Now that the update has been out for some time I do like the update but now find myself bored at the game since there isn't anything that makes you jump up and go "wow I didn't expect that". I had the gut feeling that this would be one of the only ways for Jagex to fix these main issues in the game but I never thought that Jagex had the guts to do that. The change was staggering and a lot of players hated that change but regardless Jagex stood up for an issue they knew they had to fix.
I can see that players a few years from now that have no idea about this update think that the update was the best update that ever happened. That is mainly because they never experienced the game before hand or became attracted to that style.
Real Exchange - Entropia Universe
I have played this game for less then a month and studied if for at least three months so don't expect something to good here but you will see the differences and similarities just as well.
Entropia Universe is run by Mind Ark and follows a system that looks similar but is actually almost completely opposite. In a sense this game is almost the complete opposite when it comes to certain things and almost the same on others. I suggest that you check the game out if you have the time.
The first difference is that Entorpia Universe is based on a real world currency: USD. It consistently has a trade value of 10PED, which is the in-game currency, to 1USD. You can spend no money to as much as you like. Of course spending money makes your game go a lot better entrainment wise.
Since the economy is purely based on a real world currency real world trading is not really an issue. Players retain property over what they own ingame. So effectively you are in control of your stuff and you can do whatever you want with it. In-game advertising related to the game is also and you spend your money for that.
Trading can be both player to player or through an auction. The auction is similar to RuneScape's but really isn't. There are many more options compared to the Grand Exchange to the point it makes it look super simplified version. The auction has options for how long you want the auction to go for, the price, amount, the buyout price, and starting bid, and a few more. The one big factor to why people still trade person to person is mainly because there is a small fee when using the auction. Of course everyone doesn't like to pay fees so there are people that yearn to find people that want to buy what they have so they can skip the fee. Every amount helps.
Now each item has a tt value that is lower then what the actual value it. The value that is shown in the game is considered the tt value or the trade terminal value. The trade terminal sells basic items and you can sell anything to it. The tt value is the value at which the trade terminal buys the items at.
Now consider that this economy has be to extremely balanced for the company to make any money and thus you are also having really money as the value. So if the economy goes sour in the game you will have everyone removing their money from the game to get out of loosing anything. So every item does have a use and there are still many items that are not used at all or are considered scam items because newer users buy these items that you either can't repair or is a worse version to another item in the same skill level. Or it is plain impractical because it costs to much to maintain.
Scamming is a lot different in this game then RuneScape by far. You do have people that go up to you and do trade at scam you but it is not usually by swapping items or anything but simply convincing the other players that this item is really the value you say it is when your selling or even buying that time. Still I would consider this a lot lower then RuneScape since if you simply know you item value (in tt) and what some recent auction trades were, you will never get scammed into buying or selling an item over/underpricing. Knowing you items that you can use is also another aspect. So essentially you need to know the game to just simply stay away from all the scams. This isn't anything more to it from my perspective.
Now consider updates. Of course like in RuneScape there are sometimes new items or older items are used in these update to help increase the usefulness of these items. Now since there are some items that have no apparent use to them you have people investing in these items for a change to get lucky and make some big numbers. This is part of the game and that is chance.
The main reason that this have a relatively strong economy is because it is very hard to get the currency without spending money or at least investing a good amount in it. For you to make a good amount of money you have to put a lot of money into your investment and on top of that you might not get anything or loose a large amount from it. This is a lot more gambling type methods to getting money then what I call guaranteed amounts. In RuneScape there is a lot more guaranteed amounts and it is not very risky for even the methods of creating a lot of money for your character.
Business are a lot different in Entropia Universe than RuneScape. The biggest difference is that your job is your business. You are your own boss and you have to go out and find people that want your goods and services. You can't just always simply make a living (a decent one for sure) by providing yourself with everything. It is possible but it would take several years to develop your character that far and by the time you do you could have capitalized on one or two primary skills and made a lot more. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you are forced to interact with people to make any good progress in the game or you will be spending thousands developing your character. The main idea is to make as much as you can or at least break even as much as you can. If your lucky and eventually, you will start making small amounts of money and the numbers continually grow.
Massive Exchange: Word of Warcraft
I haven't played too much with World of Warcraft but I have several friends that play this game a lot. While I'm pretty much an outsider to this game I know that this game is the top MMORPG and Blizzard makes very good games. I used to play countless hours on StarCraft and Diablo. While this is the top MMORPG out there I know this is also a huge problem that may not be able to destroy the economy but is basically against the game as a whole.
World of Warcraft is considered to have the biggest gold problem for any MMO out there. There are countless topics on why there is this problem and how someone might fix it. In reality there isn't a way to total remove it without control the economy in some way. If you were to remove this I doubt that many of the players will stay unless Blizzard does it right and effectively.
I know that Blizzard is serious about this issue but I don't think they are willing to realize the full need of their community and not everyone in their community is following their rules. It doesn't mean that these are bad people or anything like that. Some of the gold miners actually have to do this to make a living. That is how bad this is but while it is that bad it is providing jobs. So you have two very different sides on the matter and even a third side.
First you have the side of Blizzard. Obviously it is a business and they want to make money and they are, a lot of it actually. But then they have set up rules and see that gold mining is taking from their profits... but is it really?
From my understanding World of Warcraft is payed monthly via fifteen bucks a month. I don't see exactly how this is cutting into their profits. If gold mining is actually creating more accounts, you have income a month. So effectively this is a good thing!
From the honest players point of view this is totally unquestionably not right. They except the rules to be followed because they follow them. Why would you believe certain morals if you didn't support and expect other people to have the same or at least similar morals. I could go on an hour about this but really, if you except one person to follow this rules, everyone should. This is called being fair, not equal.
I have seen a few YouTube videos about World of Warcrafting gold mining and I can see their point of view a lot more. Yes, there are always the few that are taking advantage of this and are literally bad on the moral side. But for the people that work for them are people that are forced into it because they don't have any other skills or can't find a job that can pay as well. They play the game constantly and throughout the day. Some people would see this as fun but do you like doing the most boring activity in any game you can think of that long? This is usually what they are doing.
So now that we know these three points of views you can clearly see why Blizzard isn't going to completely stop this real life trading. The morals behind it are very questionable though. It mainly matters on your perspective and where your coming from. The main argument is mainly that if you except one person to follow a rule all of them should. This is no exception for the company Blizzard to turn a blind eye or do something that member might not like to stop it if it's out of workers keeping this under control.
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Part 2
While there are many MMO games out there is the of course just as many ways the economy could be designed. While some economies are strong it might not promote newer players to continue playing while others do but in the end they quite sooner because the economy is not very stable or is designed poorly. The flow of the currency is everything and you also have to keep in mind that a player might not work in the way that you would expect. One of the harder parts is designing it so that if a player quite with a huge amount of cash you don't have that money stuck. But then if you create that much amount of money and then the players decides to become active again you have just created an extreme amount of extra cash. Some methods that appear to work for a while include a faucet-and-drain but then in the end there is always something that is out of place or it makes it extremely hard to update without disrupting the balance of it. Then you have the a more realistic type called the macroeconomy which is essentially like the real world economy but has still some major setbacks that are extremely difficult to work out.
Faucet and Drain
The best way to describe this is that you have a player kill a monster. Then that monster dies and gives that player loot. That loot then is part of the player's owned things. That player then can spend this on many different things but ultimately goes down in the drain when the player buys something from an NPC, breaks it, or a number of other things.
The idea behind this is that it prevents the people that were hoarding cash or items can be overlooked and it doesn't hurt the economy as much when this occurs. RuneScape uses this style and it proves to be very effective and long lasting. On the downside you have people that can easily spend their money to effect prices of numerous items. While the Grand Exchange in this case can make it extremely hard for one person to do it, it's not that hard for several players to decide together that they want to inflate the price and in result you have other innocent players that can do nothing about it. In the end you have the inflators even more rich and able to influence more of the economy. While they cannot inflate a price for a very long time it still can be done. The more people what have that are active in the economy the harder it is for them to change it as well. So the larger the better.
The same downside could also turn into an upside since they can prevent an item from dropping below the average during tough times. Some of these merchants even have limited out the money you can get so they sit there and collect many of the same things to continue to build of their wealth. If it wasn't for this many of the prices would be a lot lower and the economy would be a lot different. This is acting as another drain from the economy and keeping everything in check.
This would be considered hoarding of course but not so much as the negative sense as the positive. With hoarding you can have healthy inflation of the economy. Inflation isn't all that bad like everyone makes it out to be but a small amount is very healthy. The reason why a small amount is healthy is because the people that do have items have their bank value increasing therefore when they sell the item you get more of another item but if they overall increase as the same amount you can just think of this as something indifferent. BUT you have more people having more money on an average. This could be caused of many things and as the fact that a players' goal is really to make money in the game and advance forward.
Inevitably you will have many players that are extremely rich and low to no players that are poor or will be poor for long. The faucet and drain method will last as long as players that have hoarded a good sum of the in-game currency quit or become significantly inactive. If all of the rich players continue to get richer the resulting value of items will continue to climb to the point that it becomes very hard for newer players to join the ranks. It basically comes down to when you start playing the game and how hard you worked at making money.
But of course there is always an exception to the obvious and that is if a consistent amount of newer players come into the game there will be no issues what-so-ever. How that is handled is by the fact that the prices will stay lower because you have the majority of players who need to buy these items and they outnumber the very rich merchants and since they want to make money they will sell at prices that others can afford. This will make inflation harder to occur but then this would throw out the window the idea that inflation is always healthy when it's increasing. Having deflation is very healthy and keeps everything from getting too expensive and at the same time makes it easier for newer members to join in on the game and start from ground zero.
This appears to happen almost once or twice a year (depending on what part of the economy you are talking about) and a lot of people freak out and think that the economy is going to crash. Obviously it will not just because you have all these people out there that want to hoard (unintentionally or intentionally) and would buy up the items when they drop so much. But then again people are hoarding so they don't want to loose their money. In result, they sell their item as the value drops at an alarming rate. Since in RuneScape they have a limit (not they just increased it so it might occur faster in the future) of a particular percentage. Since the item value cannot drop 50% in a few hours or even minutes it will take a very long time for the economy to crash and is even makes it more unlikely that it will crash because of this. It will give the majority of active merchants to see that the value of the item dropped a lot and can reach out an buy that much more.
If RuneScape's economy were to crash are become so hard much harder for new members to get into the game, it would have to take several years and most likely little to no growth. That is even throwing in that all the very rich players do not quit as well. So this makes it very hard for the economy to crash. I'm not sure what the state of RuneScape Classic's economy is in since I cannot go into that older version of the game but that would be the perfect example to explain what would happen if you had nothing but a whole lot of players together that played over several years and no new members came in. From what I understand, hoarding develops into a player just wanting to have a fun time and hanging out with other players.
Macro Economy
This is pretty much an economy that basis itself on our own real world economy but in a way that is extremely smaller. Hence macro economy. There isn't really a very good example for this that I know of so I'll make up an example for this. I know there has been several attempts for this but then it turned out be the faucet and drain method. While the macroeconomy is ideally what MMOs want to shoot for; it is incredibly hard for it to be designed out right and stay right while there is updates in the game. Since the flow of money needs to go throughout the whole circle of stages you have to think about how to overcome people who will hoard or take advantage of anything that will get them an extra advantage over other people. Then you have the players that started from the beginning and have a very developed account and can easily make a large amount of money and even hoard it to slow down the whole economy or even crash it. There has been several instances where the economy was very hard for a newer player to join into the game since it is more like a survival method and you have to be average or above average to exist or even consider thriving.
When a new player joins into the game it will be very hard to make any money since you have players want to make money but there is only a limited amount. And because there is a limited amount of money you have to have a limited amount of resources. Figuring out how much 'stuff' you should have available in the game is almost impossible since you will not know your growth of the economy. You could of course control how much flows into the game based on how much flows out. Then you create it where a certain percent extra can go in based upon several variables that you set. It would help promote a little inflation but then again it falls into the faucet and drain economy.
So how will you get this extra money without creating something from nothing? Well you could have it where the players can either make up their own currency like how it was during Medieval times. You sat there and anyone could sit there and make up any currency they want but the value of that currency was based on what it was made up of and how much demand there was for that currency. So if average Joe made his currency and made millions of copies of that currency that value would very based mainly on what that money was made up of, but if you have a very famous important king make up the currency and distribute it as someone does work for him so they could buy services from him at a later time. Then it turns out a little different. Then people have to work for that currency and people want that currency because other people have it and then it turns out be develop into a full fledged economy.
Of course you will have several of these such currencies start out in the beginning and then you will have major competitions for it and it will turn out extremely difficult for some game code it figure out the value of each currency. So you have to have players determine this themselves. This in a sense would make it harder for newer players because you could easily have someone create their own currency that really has no value and scam the newer player into thinking that that currency is worth a lot more then it really is.
So far we just created a big lob of a mess where people can create their own currencies and it isn't really governed. Along with that we probably have given rise to several scamming methods since you always have at least some players that do not want to be trustworthy or follow by honest business techniques. So what next? You set the requirements for people to have the skills even to make money. Ha, now we have to have it where the person has to gain skills before even starting this. Then you add in more like requiring that a certain amount of people having to be in your group, guild, or whatever you want to call it in you game. This makes it where at least a group of people have to be supporting this currency. Of course you can easily use someone else's currency and not even make your own. But regardless the option will be there. How high you make these requirements is completely up to the developer but you want to hit that sweet spot where the majority is happy about it.
Now that we have our currency portion figured out you will simply look at what types of resources you want to provide in your game. I highly recommend a very large range like we have in today's world. For instance we have dozens of metals and then we can even combine certain metals or other resources to make a increasing complex items such as a screw driver to a car. Both are tools but you need a screw driver to make a car and maybe you need a car to carry your goods to other places.
NPCs would be kept to a very low since you want you whole environment and economy be interacting with each other. If it were at all possible, you would want to make it where real players would have to sit there long hours at a bank serving as the person who withdraws and gives the person money. This would take some serious coding to figure out but then again you want to try and remove as much of the NPCs interactive with players. You don't want NPCs filling in the gap for hard work. With that in mind you would continue to do this with everything you can. At first you will have to make it where NPCs are in since your game will start slow at first and you want your first players to get a reasonable boost to step in the place of those NPCs.
Now lets take a step back, why would people want to play a game that makes work similar to everyday life? So really you can throw all of this out of the window, everything. This type of economy has not yet fully hit the board and we don't have ways of making this really possible. This is one of the main reasons that isn't to possible, especially when trying to pick this economy up from nothing and then making is last very long. Eventually you will be recycling everything several times and if you didn't create enough from the beginning players will have an extremely hard time getting even the basic items.
Comparing this to the real world everything is already created but there is so much that the human race will never use it all. I'm not talking about just Earth but if we ever reach to the point of traveling to space we will have thousands of times more resources to make goods from. So now lets go back. Maybe we can pull it off. We just need to have updates were there becomes technology that becomes available in the game where you can get more resources. Of course this will lead to things getting more expensive and the cycle becomes never ending, just like the real world.
The main idea is that we cannot create this type of economy until we have mastered our own. Yes, I have though a lot more about this and I didn't scratch the surface of developing an MMOs economy but if we were to create a perfect economy in a MMO why not the real world? Problem pop up everywhere and it just comes down to that you need everyone on the same page and working together in a Jesus Imaged environment. (Read the Christian Bible's New Testament and you'll figure it out from there.)
Real World Worth Economy
This is very similar to the macro economy but it really isn't. This combines both the faucet and drain method at a lot different scale and ties it into the real world economy. There is only a few MMOs that do this and it really affects the decisions that people do with their character. It is very hard to start of without putting money into your character and you loose a lot of that money trying to train your character up to even make money. Then on top of that you have other people doing the same thing so getting above the average gap gets harder and harder to stay on. It turns out that the players that started in the beginning have an easier time making money and in some rare cases make enough money in the game that they don't have to hold a job in the real world and just play this game full time. This then puts them up higher above the average range and they make even more money.
To even get there you will have to probably spend thousands of dollars or even more in some cases. A lot of people that play these games don't really pay the game so much as they can make money but to have fun. The overall social scale on this type of this economy is so drastically different people don't want to hoard as much as wanting to have a lot of fun. Some people might spend twenty bucks a month or just spend at little as possible a month or even thousand a month if they can afford it.
So far I see that all of the games that use this type of economy I don't see any issues with the actual economy other then if majority of players loose interest your whole game dies, very fast. Oddly enough this hasn't happened. I don't know why but that is something for you to figure out.
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Part 3
The one things that usually effects the economy that most companies really have to worry about are the updates. One update could effectively permanently alter the economy, good or bad; and since it effects that players interaction with the game on a very close level, you are also putting your companies reputation on the line with each update. Of course, certain updates more then others but that mainly depends specifically on the size and how closely it effects the economy.
Tweaking
Since updates can be in many different sizes, I will begin small since it is easier to understand and for me to write in this order. In this size of update it usually consists of small changes like updating small glitches and things that don't really effect the game much but are not supposed to be there. Essentially these updates are easy and it becomes obvious what the game should be changed to without much hesitation.
The problem about these update is that the only reason these small updates are necessary is because the larger sized updates did not work properly or were defective in some way. One example strait from RuneScape is the update to HD. While it was overall successful it has many tweaking updates that follow this update to fix what they though was complete. In this case it did not effect the market really at all except maybe indirectly though new players joining it.
The amount of tweaking update doesn't always necessarily say that the last update was bad in any way or that it didn't have the effect they wanted. Sometimes older updates need to be tweaked because a new update makes it less important in the game. An example for that would be the tutorial update for RuneScape. The update was pretty small where they just added a 'quest' entry for the tutorial island or even when they changed the combat level of the combat tutor to match the summoning update. Sometimes updates on other things will make tweaking to other parts of the game that was not update changed as well. Tweaking is small and can be done easily by one person in most cases.
Enhancements
While these are considered standard updates in most cases I would just call this size of updates enhancements instead. Things like this include new quests, items, npcs, mini-games, and way more. Just basically anything that doesn't effect the whole game in many different ways. Sometimes these enhancements could be considered like a big update or even altering when in combinations. These updates usually take months of planning and sometimes even longer simply because they can make another item obsolete or this form of training obsolete.
Mainly that is the part where it directly affects the economy. When it makes some other form that was in its place before this update like this item or that way of training. The hardest part is to make it where it improves the game but does not take away from another feature that might be popular. If you were to make something obsolete, you simple have the economic trading scale completely crash for that item. Sometimes there is so many different items like in the Word of Warcraft that this doesn't matter as much but you are still forcing the prices down regardless.
One of the worst things that could happen for an update like this is for glitches to happen. Maybe you wanted the players to get only a certain amount of experience from doing this activity but accidentally caused a glitch that players could easily get five or more times that amount. Glitches like these are usually not common or are fixed when the first couple of abusers find out about it and start cheating in the game like that. However, if these glitches are not fixed, many items in the market related to that glitch in some way will be either raised or lowered, aka funky and strange prices.
Expansions
This is one of the largest types of updates and there aren't too many of these that are done in a years time. Sometimes expansions are so large that they take a year to two to even develop one. On of the perfect examples about the size of this type of update is the Word of Warcraft expansion packs. It is exactly what I am talking about. These updates can really effect the game and sometimes alter how people play the game for the rest of the games life span or until another expansion comes out. These really effect the economy in every way and sometimes can really be a bumpy ride until a new average it hit. There is usuauly a large flow of new items and in a few cases a new skill.
For RuneScape this would be something like a new skill that is being released. Maybe not as large as a World of Warcraft expansion pack but it effects the games just as much. When the contruction update came out there were new items and some old items now had new uses. One item was clay. Overnight the price of clay soared to really high amounts and the demand for other things also raised up quite a bit. I couldn't stress enough about expansions effecting the economy in extreme ways.
Personal Reputation
I mentioned in the first paragraph that it would effect a companies reputation. While it is not much about the economics of the game it can be indirectly related and I feel that you would gain from what knowledge I have. Many RuneScape players that have played RuneScape before the Grand Exchange update will know exactly what I am talking about. Even further back in RuneScape history we had the banning of the SwiftSwitch client. That was a minor update that effected the companies PR.
Jagex is overall a very good company. I am not trying to start a war or anything for those who are really pissed at Jagex for changing the game to what it is today but in all honesty you cannot ignore that fact that they have gotten RuneScape community pretty strong. While RuneScape is questionably dying since the Grand Exchange update I feel that the game is built better then what it was. The thing is that even though the game is built better it does not mean that more people will play the game. Mainly, the things that attracted players was the free economy style. Many merchants left because of this update. Pkers left from this update. And many others. Essentially Jagex disrupted the game play by changing the reasons why a person would play RuneScape.
What they did is put a cap on trading. A little before that they put a very low cap on dueling. One of the more popular way of making large amounts of money in a short time. This was all in order to stop real world trading and it feel that it was needed to be done. While Jagex did hit a huge bump in the road for this they went through with it. I feel that they lacke follow up; this is where it really hurt them more. They took away pvp combat the way it was then it took an insain amount of time to get something back that was questionably better.
They did these updates in a small scale updates that I would call (questionably) enhancements. It should have been designed in an expansion pack form though. They needed to do this quickly and give something better in place of what they took away. I still feel that they have questionably gave something better. While they now have pvp worlds and several other updates that would be better then what you previously had it just doesn't make sense why you had to wait almost a year for this to be released. I just don't understand why they couldn't wait until they were actually were closer to having something better released before taking away from the game. They took parts of the gameplay that attracted most and didn't give it back for way to long. It actually led to me leaving the game. The one thing I loved was merchanting. They stripped the game and made it almost impossible to merchant the way I liked. I still could merchant but it was not personaly enough. It was a matter of guessing if an item was going up or down and not doing it where you actually had to go out and do something about merchanting. Call me person that doesn't like being lazy when it comes to wanting to do what they love. I would rather work harder and longer so I can enjoy it more.
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Part 4
I have been a merchant the majority... well almost the entire time I have played RuneScape. This will talk about the whole experience when I played RuneScape and how I developed what I have learned on mmo economic while playing RuneScape. I also will share a lot of what I know about Merchanting on RuneScape. Even though most of this will be older information considering that I haven't really actively merchanted much after the Grand Exchange update. One of my merchanting buddies have been really successful though has been very successful since the Grand Exchange update but he was in a better position the me as well. I am not very familiar to what he does and I don't feel like sharing this so almost all of this content will be informative but old.
Starting out...
When I started out on RuneScape I had no idea what merchants were doing of that merchating even existed. I had no previous knowledge about economics, supply and demand, or anything of the sort. I was around 13 at the time I got into this mechanting thing. I actually met my friend *insert name here* and we have then since been great friends. He introduced me to this idea and I have then since learned very much about merchanting. The majority of my knowledge at first was completely from him and we made lots of money.
Starting out merchanting from point zero is hard and this is where I got pretty lucky. I had around 300k to play with and make money though merchanting. My friend gave advise and I was pretty soon doing several trades every hour. Progress was slow but I was learning. I didn't make anything that was something to be proud of but I was happy with what I made. It was something. The item was merchanting in particular was iron.
Actually Making Something
When I actually started to make a decant amount of money is when I hit around a million in cash. This is where I upgraded to coal and iron ore. I made around a million in a good solid day. Unfortunately this was about the time where I was making trade so fast that I had was getting cheated on deals or I would have someone put up coal then switch it with iron ore right before I hit accept. This was unfortunate but I still made something.
My knowledge expanded and I continued to learn loads of thing. I learned about the concept of supply and demand. When the supply is low and the demand high the price will go up. When the supply is high and the demand low the price will drop. This is one of the first things I learned and it still applies to RuneScape today.
Another simple thing I learned was to know you prices. It would prove worthy to spend the first couple of hours learning about the nature of that item or group of items. Then you would then start to get into it by making a few trades at first then eventually building up to making several hundred trade in a day, literally.
One of the harder concepts I learned was where to merchant and when. Sometimes you wanted to be in a certain world at a certain time to sell your items are premium prices or buy in other world where the demand was lower and people were more willing to sell to you because you didn't have anyone else competition with you. I actually made several friends when I found competitors. Ironic how it turns out doesn't it? The location also mattered. You wanted to be relatively close to where the demand was either high or low.
For instance if you went to the Edgeville bank and tried selling lobsters in low bulk to people into player verse player combat you would get offers at prices that you couldn't beat anywhere else. I then would take the money I made and go to Varrock in one of the marketing worlds and buy it for significantly less in bulk. At this time there were also real world traders and you could even get even lower for you bought in extreme bulk. The problem with this is that you might be banned if you were associated with them too much.
Writing a Guide
This was where I spend a lot of my time after I got to be pretty successful in merchanting. I didn't make anything that would drop your jaws but I had the potential to do it very easily. My friend that I learned merchanting from would do just that, drop your jaw in amazement.
Writing this guide literally took forever and I tried really hard to make this guide as complete as possible. You can visit the most recent version here. I stopped trying to build the guide eventually because of the Grand Exchange update. I also was about to add in content from over ten other guides but my jaw dropped when Jagex announced the Grand Exchange update. I the content I had would beat any $5 merchanting guide and it was literally a poor to riches guide. Although, the majority was written from a free to play point of view and I had virtually only a months of membership experience with merchanting. Regardless, I had something going until Jagex change everything about it.
Change for the worst
The problem with the Grand Exchange update for me what that you lost almost everything that made merchanting fun. The skill involved also dropped and it became more strung out over time. Instead of making a million in a day you would make maybe 100 thousand if you were lucky. You really had to have money to make anything above a million and sometimes it would be only a hundred thousand on a good day.
The uniting of all the world's economies also hurt. Now instead of having variety you have sameness. What I mean by that is you can trade with someone in another world and not even worry about anything other then I'm getting exactly what I want for what I offered. Prices that were semi standard became officially standardized. The time and effort to put into each trade declined and you did not even have to make contact with that person. All this was offered for free and nothing in return. I would have been a lot happier if they made it where you at least had to pay something for this service but no, it was completely free and stripped merchants from their job.
Blaming Merchants
I have seen several hundred posts and mentions that merchants were ruining the economy and such. This is where I go off the wall and get pissed at everyone. The thing is that why do you point us out when you fail at it yourself? Who would be great at merchanting and say that it is ruining the game? Who would not say that merchanting is ruining the game if you do not understand it? About 99% of the cases are they either they do not understand what merchants do or they are very furious that they cannot do it themselves.
Being one of the better merchants in RuneScape I really enjoyed merchanting. I also found that merchanting is something that takes time. Some people would get frustrated and give up after only an hour. The thing is that it took me almost a full year to make anything that worth it. It was a slow learner but also more compelte then most from my point of view. I didn't give up when it was hard; I just stuck to it and kept on going.
No merchanting does not hurt the game at all but merely makes it more complex via the economic side of things. The service of a merchanting to buy from people that do not want their items or are looking to sell it. We might not need the item but maybe we can get that item so someone that needs it. Sometimes you might be trading or buying from merchants in the process but in the end result it will go from a person who is looking to sell it to someone who is looking to buy it. Merchanting made the time to buy and sell a little lower. It also also harder to bargain shop but hey, that's life. If you don't look hard for cheaper item, you are probably buying that item for more then what you could actually get it for. Heck, it's what that drug store down the road today even does. Now point out how this hurts the economy.
If you are still not convinced that merchants hurt the economy the look towards real life traders or should I say traitors. How RuneScape turned out today is almost in direct result to why it is there right now. People are arrogant to how serious this was. Of course there were some merchants that helped them but still, overall, the concept of merchanting is a good thing. It happens in all healthy mmos and it still happens today in RuneScape. Just less popular and more for the major merchants that made the necessary changes to keep going.
How do you do it?
This is probably one of the most common questions I've had through out my RuneScape career. I feel that I cannot explain it clear enough no matter how long I write. In summary, I follow the rules I described above for when I was first learning about merchants and what they do and how they do it. Experience is everything too. You can only read so much before you actually have to go out doing it. If you really want to learn about it a lot more you can probably learn a few things from this guide. It is not complete and never will be but, hey, it tells a lot and you can learn about that question.
