1.) While some of you may feel that this topic belongs in the Ideas section, i do not. Now, I wish to present to you a case of Why Mechscape or stellar dawn should have a near complete player driven economy if not a totally player driven economy.

2.) For those of you familiar with basic economics and marketing and business management, one of the first things you learn in class is the Law of supply and demand. If Supply increases, demand goes down, if demand increases supply goes down. Basically, when supply is up, demand is down, price decreases. if Demand is up, supply goes down, price increases. However an Equilibrium can be reached when supply catches up with demand, or demand catches up with supply, i forget the exact equation and formula for Equilibrium.

3.) This is a theory that holds true in a free market capitalist society. But , when you instill certain obsessive market controls and restrictions, the entire law and theory effectively gets thrown out the window and some twisted perversion gets put in place. When you instill obsessive controls and restrictions, you make the economic system and trade easily corruptable and horribly abused. Not only is the flow of wealth and trade horribly disrupted and knocked off its balancing act, but it limits the amount of usable money that people can use and that gets distributed which drives up prices horribly high which is where corruption and abuse sets in, deliberate market manipulation occurs as a result of all this which really hurts the bulk of real consumers.

4.) Now i'm not trying to rant and rave on runescape's current economy but, everything i've mentioned has occured in runescape. And in all reality, its really the fault of the player community themselves, with all their crying and whining over the years of how they can't afford certain items because the prices get driven too high so they complain and complain, and, due to more real pressing issues, jagex decided to impose certain restrictions and controls which....had unintended consequences that in most people's opinions that actually practiced Arbitrage and business in runescape, proved disasterous to the economy.

5.) Now, Runescape has largely become a children's game, runescape used to have really good educational benefits, i myself learned quite a bit from my business practices in the game which i applied in my business class in both highschool and later college, and i've gotten high marks. But now there is virtually no educational benefit to the game, the only benefit you might gain now is knowing that 2+2 = 4, or if you train a certain amount of skill you will gain a level.

6.) For me and for alot of others, mostly, the more mature career minded individuals found the free trade merchanting aspect fun and enjoyable and educational.

7.) Now to back up to paragraph...4 (yes i deliberetly labeled them) and Paragraph 3. Before The existence of the GE and Trade restrictions, players largely had control over the economy, and really if you go back and look and think, you should come to the conclusion that Trade and the distribution of wealth in the game was really fair, despite the apparent overflow of bots and autoers and such. But Players, or organized communities such as runehq, zybez and others had established price checkers and such for items on their websites. Players largely determined the prices of items, and really for years prices were remarkably stable with the expected occasional increase in price and drop in price of certain items. The only items that skyrocketed in price were the rare items due to demand and lack of sufficient supply, which if you think about it, is perfectly fine and normal due to the existence of free trade and capitalism, and the great Law of Supply and Demand. There were very little abuses and manipulations in the system, more often then not, Prices and Items reached equilibriums and near equailibriums.

8.) All in all, Mature players who want to both have fun, and potentially learn something of value, would agree that the best economic system for an mmorpg is a capitalist free trade system with as little controls and restrictions as possible. If Jagex does indeed as they have said, wish to attract a mostly mature customer base for their games, then they should take a mature approach to the game, they should not baby and spoon feed medicine, bad medicine, towards the mistakes of equally bad or otherwise poor choice-making players. The players who make certain decisions should be made to deal with their decisions, they should not have their decisions corrected by a company which decides that the mistakes and crimes of a few must mean that they have to punish the many to placate or deal with the minority.

Maturer players do not want nor need to be babied, mature players do not need nor want to be spoon fed. Mature players want to have fun, some mature players, alot want to also have a certain experience in which they can learn something useful and build upon that.

9.) Finally, to end my argument, i want to end it on the educational benefits of online gaming, more so specifically, mmo gaming. As i mentioned in a few paragraphs, i've mentioned some of the educational aspects of MMO gaming. MMO's, specifically mmo's that have a very fluid, free, player driven economy that enables individuals to really build up their brain, their mental capacity among other things. Especially when your getting into the realm of personal finances and the build up of personal wealth and running businesses of some sort etc, it really teaches you alot of necessary concepts and mistakes and hopefully if you're smart enough, how not to repeat mistakes. But if you just go ahead and impose a bunch of trade restrictions and controls, you're destroying any educational benefit the game has.

You're not going to learn things like micromanagement and macro management, supply and demand, trading, arbitrage, ROI, etc if you have extremely limiting restrictions on how much you can trade and an extremely limiting venue on how you can go about trading with other players. There is just a huge benefit that Jagex can work on if they can work on a very appropriate system that benefits both them and their customer, more so their customer, because if their customer can benefit greatly from their product, then Jagex themselves will massively benefit even more from high accolades, industry awards, and higher profits.

Many study groups actually study games like Second Life and Eve Online and they used to study Runescape even on its economies and social interactions in comparison with real life and how the two benefit eachother. I have proposed several ideas dealing with Job Terminals, a concept from Star wars galaxies but even more laxxed and player controlled, and an ingame corporate model that enables players to actually setup their own ingame corporations with shareholders, certificates, how to manage and pay employees etc.

There are numerous player-driven systems that Jagex can and really should put in place in mechscape, this article of mine while it references runescape because its unavoidable, isn't really about runescape, its about Mechscape or Stellar Dawn or whatever it is to be called.

And, i'm all for constructive criticism, but please, i've gotta say, If you're just going to come on here and damn my idea, then don't be a child, take the time to actually write out either a counter argument, or find a way to add in a compromise something that you think will work in conjunction with my idea or equally well with my idea but not necessarily my idea.

FYI i've been writing this for hours (due to various breaks and interuptions), its 10:44PM or so here, i started writing this around 1pm-3pm i think. But really, if i can put this much dedication into this article as i hope you can all see, then you can take the time to write a mature, constructive and helpful response. If Not, then you have no business replying. This is an article written by a mature business minded person, for preferably mature individuals that can Atleast understand what i'm writing about, it doesn't matter if someone disagrees or agrees, thats all fine, but do not be an immature prick, be mature.

You've put a lot of thought into this situation, however I am fairly sure Jagex has a solid plan on their economic stance of Stellar Dawn. They've stated numerous times that with their system there will be absolutely no room for RWT, which in itself means they have perfected their idea of economics in Stellar Dawn.

Honestly, I do not see anything wrong with Runescape's current system. The grand exchange is driven by the player base, while issues of supply or demand drive or dive the current prices. There are a few limits, hindering you from trade, however all with perfectly reasonable assertions. If it weren't for the slightest of limitations things could blow up in your face quite easily. Remember, the country with the "stated" best economy in the world, America, is not a completely free market, as it is has mixes between different economic stand-points.



To be completely downright honest, the current economy in Runescape has a much higher learning curve than the old one. Before, all you had to do in order to be a merchant is buy something for one price, then spam it for a higher price. Certainly, you could have gotten yourself in the rares market, however that is quite easily the same concept with a highly elastic item that could jump in price in an hours time because of manipulators or frantic sellers. The current system employs researching an item's graph in the GE database, then studying the forums for days on how the said item is being marketed. Just because an item is rising, does not mean you will find yourself in free cash. If you don't know what you are doing you will not succeed.

If anything, most items in the current runescape are not restricted. Junk trading brings a whole new thought on trading in MMO's. It could even be comprised as a new system of trade. It is not at all kiddie, considering the amount of practice and research you need to junk trade and trade efficiently. So you can't buy a yellow partyhat on the GE? Check the forums: it is selling for 250m. Great, now I've got to figure out which items are rising, what edibles are bought out, how much junk I will need and then if I've figured out which items are what I can try to trade. Please tell me that is easier than the old RS. Which leads to a much more mature audience in the marketing croud, and a more mature player owned market; rather than the old, every little kid could spam world 2, market.

Oh, this is going to be something I'm going to look forward to tomorrow.

Just would like to add this to the mix. Please read it if you have large amounts of time or just skim through it. That is a little older understanding of the MMO economies that I never got around to finishing (because it is a never ending learning experience.)
http://www.mechscapeworld.com/forums/index...?showtopic=3767 (ha!)

_____________
MMOs in general...

For an MMO right now and how I would like to see the economy is probably similar to that of EVE but I haven't played it to really know. How the US government is pretty much free to do what you want with a few restrictions here and there. Also laws are enforced and made to help keep the economy at least realistically fair and prevent people from stealing every dime from someone to the point where they couldn't do anything about it. (Of course there are many exceptions.)

The MMO should provide a platform to which players can create items (which are unique to some aspect) and then be able to try and sell that item. "Sandbox" games such as Second Life actually sell virtual items for actual cash. Of course this is not the case for MechScape but you can see the value in being able to have control over being able to sell something unique. This is something that is very hard to do in MMOs and it is also equally as hard to code something that prevents users from making an item that isn't the same exactly but is so similar that it is considered different in the system.

So creating the economy to be self managing is a start. Of course there is countless things that could go wrong but the idea is that people will manage themselves. You have people who can set up businesses or sell 'blueprints' in which they can make so many copies of that item. Things like that.

Regulation is then done through a system that is coded into the game itself. They can use the tools of the game that are available to them to change laws and such in the game. Of course you would have to build it in a way that people have to be elected and go on from there... it's essentially a virtual government.

The problem with MMOs though, is that people can technically screw someone over and get away with it. You always have that option to quite or just start a new account but possibly still have the perks of the older one since you can simply give the stuff to your friends and them, some back to your old account. Basically countless ways that would make it practically impossible to enforce completely. This is where you have the problem of duel worlds in which one is inside the other.

________________
RuneScape vs MechScape vs New MMO...

I see MechScape either not having any currency system like we know it today or a free market design system. The idea is that there is no need to real world trade so that people will actually not start selling it for money. Of course if there is no 'things' to trade then you have the whole aspect where you cannot so there is no need or demand for it.

Until we know the actual engineering design behind the core game mechanics of this. There is no way to tell if one type of economic system will help or hurt the game. I'll argue that this is reasons why enforcing a Grand Exchange on RuneScape is important. The first aspect is that bots where seriously a problem. I could seriously pick out over 50 accounts in one area in the same screen which were bots.

The amount of items then coming in from the game then changes dramatically and effects the entire economy. Basically it was like adding a whole couple million more items to several areas and then the market trying to cope and keep up with the large supply. Basically some of the merchants who spent the time selling items for more could possibly buy from there botters and make millions upon millions in a single day yet sell at the regular price or maybe even higher if they were good enough and wanted to spend the time on it.

When Jagex put a stop of real world trading you have to consider a number of variables that have changed which don't just include the Grand Exchange alone. First which is probably the biggest factor is PvP changes. Staking is one such element of PvP and when the limit was enforced the entire economy was practically in chaos and was completely off the wall before the Grand Exchange came out. Rares would drop in a matter of five minutes several million and then go up twice that only to drop twice that again.

When the Grand Exchange entered into the realm everyone was mainly in panic and didn't know what they should do. People panicked even more when Jagex had to lock down the Grand Exchange when the first released it due to a price bug or something like that. I remember when I was experiencing the Grand Exchange for the first time. I didn't know what to expect nor did I understand that the prices would go up latter and eventually regain their value.

The economy was going under several shocks which was one right after another. The first shock was the removal of all the bots in the game. You didn't have the huge load of items coming into the game. You would of course expect the prices of the items to go up but they instead went down. This can easily be related to the fact that those successful at botting had so much amassed in items that they panicked and tried to sell practically everything they had then tried to run to sell this for actually cash while they can. Several websites had huge sales to try and get everything they had through and get something rather then nothing for all the hours their bots worked spending electricity.

Another shock is simple the players didn't know what to expect. First you have the stakers undergo a limit which they thought and still believe is entirely unfair. Secondly you had merchants who always try to predict everything but almost never can when something so drastically new is around the corner. Third you had regular players who didn't fully understand what was going on. Lastly, the whole mix made everyone panic and try to sell what they had, thus dropping the prices due to the demand practically halving and the supply practically double or triple.

Third shock has to do with the fact that so many methods of scaming someone stopped as well as being able to help a friend out or loan something to someone. Of course Jagex fixed this somewhat and now you can loan some items but it is still not the same. The fact that this didn't come out until so much later makes it to where it didn't really exist at all and wasn't thought of and whatnot. (Makes it where it was like it never was there in the first place.) So you have billions of coins which are loaned and are unable to get that back because of the trade restrictions.

Fourth shock is the fact Jagex did this and the state that people were in denial all around. No one thought Jagex would remove a free trade market and enforce something like the Grand Exchange upon it. I personally thought the Grand Exchange would have been a lot different and more complex. Due the simplicity of the Grand Exchange and the hundreds of limits they have on items and stop influencing of item prices. You have to go with the general consensus when you trade to consider making any money.

However there is many areas in which I have seen a single person completely drop an item price or influenced it. I don't think Jagex has implemented measures which limit the economy entirely from one person buying and selling. No doubt collaboration is needed for very often traded items over less traded but the idea of free trade is done automatically and within a formula which decided the demand and the supply. It then adjusts the price accordingly about once a day or even up to two times a day that I've seen.

I know that MechScape should have this same system as Jagex brought up several points that they had to do what they had to do for RuneScape because it wouldn't be RuneScape at all if they redid the entire core aspects of the game. My thinking is that MechScape is more collaborative in practically all levels. Because of that you have an older demographic which will take part in this because collaboration is known to be for older demographics in the first place. (Plus several of factors which I do not want to get into.)

When I read the ideas about the 4X Genres for real or turn based strategies games that got me thinking a lot. I don't know for sure and I could only imagine which is fine but I see a player being that one person in that strategy game. You may be the researcher or just fighting to protect the borders of your race. Things can bring new levels for the economy but at the same time you want to work with everyone which you are alliances with and make sure then benefit because you will when they do.

Of course this can be very hard to balance but then you have Olifers mentions this in his twitter which said, "Tip of the day: 'Never underestimate the mammoth task of balancing a game world with four opposed playable species in it'." This would be something that would be very hard to balance yet is something that really no MMO has touched. At the same time why would you hoard if it hurts your group who you are trying to work with and help?

I can draw several parallels between how an MMO is starting to go towards in design from year to year of new MMOs coming out. Each MMO inherently has that aspect where you want to interact and doing something like Google Wave collaboration aspects come into an MMO is something entirely done directly in the face of it. I would like to see that an then the economy based upon that as a free market or free trade with rules acting as guidlines.

What do you think?

Edit: This is a strait type and sort of a draft so try to work with me on points that don't make the best of sense.

thankyou max and iampliigi for responding very well.

Now.. lets tackle iampliigi first.

I understand where you're coming from. I admit i did not take into account the graph charts and such that jagex has put in place to track the flow of sales and purchases, supply and demand and such. Though i must say i never used them, i merely looked at the min, market, and max price of an item via the ge to make my buys and sales.

And you have a valid point, i agree that the charts are reasonably realistic and educational and useful.

But it really isn't so much the item being restricted as the price is restricted. Its the pricing that is the real issue. at the very least if they do include price limits they should increase the trade rate.

As for the constant spamming for sales and purchases back in the old days, it really was similar to trading floors in the real world, open outcry i believe its called. It's all about competition.

to Max - I would very much enjoy mechscape to be similar to star wars galaxies and eve, a sandbox style mmo. To be honest if the system worked or works for the makers of eve and swg, then it would work for jagex.

i will write more but due to the time 2:36am or so, i will write later.

I agree with your thoughts, i really enjoyed it when RS had no restrictions what so ever, it made the game fun, i remember selling dds ++p for about 160k worth of easy to sell items, i remember being scammed for the first and last time, i remember when i sold a lot of items just to get the few extra k i needed for whip, and i remember buying a christmas hat before summer holidays, coming back from holdaiys and selling it for 13 mil more then i bought it for.

GE allows you to sell and buy but with redicilous restrictions. I also really like WoW's system of free trading and has a Auction house which was done way more effective then GE.

The one thing i cannot understand is why Blizzard does not get bank threats for fraud credit cards while Jagex does? is it something to do with Uk banks being more secure then USA banks? ""thinks at credit crisis starting point"" <*_^)>


Edit: typos

Yea, when Jagex came out with the Grand Exchange my idea of it was a lot more complicated and complex. I was thinking something similar to StarWar Galaxies and WoW combination. I don't know why but the simplicity of it just makes it a little more 'meh.' You just feel nothing is going on while there may be a lot more then what meets the eye.

I also noticed another whole aspect which is somewhat weird how Jagex did the Grand Exchange. You have two access points. One is from the website and another is from the game itself. The game side basically is a less as great version as the website version. I think they should at least make consistency between the two. Lets see charts one one while the other doesn't? That doesn't make sense and at the same time isn't right.

Hopefully MechScape will be more consistent on what is on the website and what is on the game client. I feel that the most which is accessible for both the better but providing little consistency is a big problem.

I also doubt that much of the RuneScape population uses the Grand Exchange while buying too... that's making it a lot harder then what it could be.

Dude, I'll have to read this after school. I thought it would be a nice paragraph or two, nope. XD

We don't even know enough to presume that Game-Without-A-Name has an economy, so this is premature.

Furthermore, there are some factors that are very special with most MMORPG's. Then again, the Game-Without-A-Name isn't most MMORPG's That goes back to my previous point.

These factors throw the theory out the window anyway.

-Finished products costing less than raw materials
-Unlimited money
-Unlimited goods - ie, we can never run out of say, coal
-No service industry as we know it. Sure, there is in RS things like essence running, but still, it's a much smaller proportion of the economy than the real world economy.

As to your trading floors point, they're being used less and less. The big 800 pound gorillas in the field such as Barclays, Citigroup, etc. all use electronic systems. I should know, my mom works at a division of Bank of New York maintaining them and my dad was at Lehman. Fortunately he was considered valuable enough to be hired by Barclays lol.

And by the way, saying "Let's tackle iampliigi" sounds a bit weird, no?

i prefer to think of the economy now like the stock market. :]

I think the economy should be like Pokemon. You see something you like, you shoot the bastard selling it, then you steal his stuff.

Actually no, being realistic, I like economies with as little control as possible (when I think of economy I think of Free Market period. You either have Free Market or you have nothing, no trade, no commerce, no exchange of goods and services, of labor and value).

Anyways, this is a video game, not real life, so I would very much want it to be fun above all else. I don't care if they put limits on the economy so long as it all just comes together and keeps me entertained. So, I shall wait and see what they do.

I can see your points, and I agree with most of them. However, I did kinda lose like... My fortune by investing, back in the day...

Anyway, yeah, I agree with you, mostly. But a free market economy doesn't entirely work... It's not flawless, by any means, but it functions. Of course, a limited economy has less functionality, and therefore I tend to gravitate towards free market economies.

Anyway, if they can find a way to prevent RWT without turning it into a RuneScape trading system, and still maintain Free Market devices, I'll be happy.

Lmao! Good luck!

I don't see why Jagex has such a Huge problem with RWT, I know it's bad but it really hasn't done much... Up until the updates the market had no chaos, everyone still had fun. When they started this war against RWT they took out alot of fun aspects of the game, such as the wild (Pvp+bounty is not the same.) ALOT of people quit because of these updates all because of some people buying gold that no one really cared about, the only problem us members had with it was we couldnt get it as fast as they could, we didn't want them to just change the entire game.

The economy of an MMORPG isn't as unrealistic as you make it out to be.

First off, in Runescape, there will always be finished products that cost more than the raw materials, but require work to make them. Steel, Iron Bars, Strung Bows, Bowstrings, and many other Runescape goods cost more than their raw materials, but they require work to make them. In real life, there are many raw materials that are more expensive than the product made with them, but that doesn't mean you can't make a profit off of them. Companies in real life wait until they find a price that allows a profit margin, and then buy it, just as I can make money making prayer pots on Runescape if I wait to buy the raw materials low and sell the potions high. It's the same concept.

Second off, the real world has unlimited money, just as runescape does. Actually, Runescape has a max gold cap of about 3 Bil, while there is no such thing in real life. Inflation in real life makes governments print more money to support the population, so in real life, there really is unlimited money. There will never not be enough money to go around the human population if you distribute it, but of course we don't distribute it equally (at least not in a capitalist system)

Third off, there is pretty much unlimited goods in real life as well as MMORPG's. Has mankind used up all of a single resource over it's entire course of existance? If you can think of one resource, product, or service that cannot be harvested because we literally ran out, please tell me. Oil, undisputably the most used product of the last 100 years and most likely the most used resource on Earth, still has at least half of the world's supply. The world economy is endless if you compete, just like Runescape's economy.

Fourth off, the global economy didn't include service industries until about 1900, and even now, it isn't as major of an industry as people think it is (In any country other than America or Europe, service industries are almost non-existant). Runescape is a game set in the "middle ages", or at least a fantasy middle ages. Before there were service industries, there were just industries. People made money by creating products, not by offering services. Banking was the only major service industry of the 1800's, but it created wealth, which in turn created products, so is it really a service industry?

I stopped reading there.



It was losing them a lot of money. I suggest you read the "runescape vs rwt" developer diary on runescape.com

RWT is illegal activity. Just looking the other way would be sort of endorsing the matter.

Big companies like Blizzard don't do much to stop it so why should a smaller one like Jagex? All the prices on things look relatively the same since the updates other than stuff being merched..

If you stopped at 5 then you have no business replying at any other reply on this topic, otherwise if you do you simply won't get the jist and full understanding of what their replying about.

Don't go whining over a statement i made. In many ways, i can back up that snippet of a statement you qouted. For instance, take a child, when a child whines and cries, or something similar, a parent will typically try to make the child happy by effectively caving in, Jagex, has for years had a history of being being a picture perfect example of being one of the worst kinds of parents. when people cried and whined about how they didnt get party hats and santas, and crying how it wasnt fair, what'd jagex do? They caved in and stopped tradable holiday drops. What'd jagex do when people cried and cried and cried about the percieved unfairness of the old trading methods and the percieved hardships in making sales and purchases? What'd jagex do? They caved in and put in place a system with 2 sides to it, on one side its somewhat easy but a real pain in the ass to work due to excessive waiting, and then the other side its a pain in the ass due to its ease of mass manipulation and abusement.

Jagex needs to really back off, stop being a control freak and let people deal with their own mistakes, you don't teach someone something by giving them what they want. Fact of life.

So i implore you to NOT be a child, be mature, i don't care what your age is, and read my entire topic, Then and only then can you state sufficient reply going for, against, or some comprisal post.

Agreed.

Since when was RuneScape advertised as educational? I haven't seen any "Teaches Math Skills!" ads...

Really, games are supposed to be games, not Reader Rabbit software.

every game has education, just because it isnt advertised doesnt mean it lacks educational things.

It isn't reader rabbit software.

What educational tool is fun anyways?

In general, games help with many things and people aren't aware of it. Improves reflexes, ability to considerate excessively on more the one things, ability to see changes faster, coordination (certain areas), processing of puzzles, improved reading (mainly to younger players), ability to type faster, ability to hold online conversations and understand it, learning about how life really is, understand how an economy works, plus hundreds of other things... these are some I have learned or improved because of games.

Yes yes, I agree, but my point is that you can't argue that RS has lost its educational value when the educational value was just a minor side thing. Sure, puzzles in quests are good, but you can't say "OMG Rs has no more puzzles, it has no more educational value!!!! Now we can't use it as a teaching tool!1!!"

I don't know how long you've played, but let me say this. I've played RS for around 6 years, and after a while, you loose interest. Most players decide to do things like merchant, because of the way the human mind naturally matures. In other words, at one point it might have been fun to woodcut for three hours, but then you start to wonder "What happens if I do this?" This is what has made RS successful. How many times do you see someone saying "Yeah, I was playing Combat Arms last night..." or "On MapleStory I just finished my latest Machinima". The community and the way we naturally evolve, combined with how the RuneScape basic mechanics work allows for the game to expand many times over the actual, stock content.

Look at a community like that which exists in Half Life 2. How many mods have come out based on it's engine? More than I can count. The point is, there are around 5 main games released on the engine, yet half the userbase may have never played the original game for it's stock content. I'll be honest, I actually ran into someone playing Garry's Mod who had never played Half Life 2. Again, it's success is based on it's expandability.

For support, here are the following Half Life 2 modifications that are well known and played:

-Zombie Panic Source(http://www.zombiepanic.org/ is currently 500ing)
-Zombie Master(development stalled, however still 300+ servers http://www.zombiemaster.org/)
-Source Forts(http://www.sourcefortsmod.com/)
-Fortress Forever(http://www.fortress-forever.com/)

So, what type of expandability do you think we'll see in Stellar Scape Mech World Ultra II? Augh, Jagex has too many names...

What? Haven't you seen Jagex's latest item on the Jagex shop?


They used to have a "Runescape is educational because..." part of their Parent guide, but they have removed it, probably because they said it taught kids to manage money in a free market.

I found a new lol; While RuneScape is aimed at adult gamers, some younger players do enjoy the game. We encourage the parents of these younger players to supervise them while they play.
http://www.jagex.com/corporate/Parents_Guide/products.ws

Let me guess, you whipped that up in Photoshop in five minutes flat? I can do the same in GIMP...

To be honest, I have no idea how what you're saying is relevant to the paragraph you quoted from me... I was talking about educational value, you talk about community. Yeah, the community is good. No, not very many people talk about intellectually challenging activities as "educational". It can be expanded, and it probably could be expanded to be used as educational software, but I haven't seen that happening...

I've played since... let's see... since before the over 13 rule came out. I've been playing for 6 years methinks.

the fact is aves, a game does not have to be advertised as Educational to be educational.

RuneScape's current economic system is more corruptible than Jersey.

There aren't a few limits, there are a lot of limits. The RuneScape economy worked perfectly in a capitalistic economy - the players had complete control of the prices. The reason is the Invisible Hand; which, in simple terms, is what runs all capitalistic markets and keeps prices at an equilibrium.

And then we have interference from Jagex, which messes with everything. Players don't control the prices, because they are limited to a certain range - it's not driven by the player base if they are limited by Jagex.

The system is too easy to corrupt. Merchant clans are corrupting the market and nothing can be done to stop them with the current system.

Actually it was paint. You can congratulate me later for achieving such a fine work of art in such a primitive program.

Anyway, I agree with Mike. The current economy in Runescape is absolutely messed up. The GE is so easy to manipulate. The fact that if I buy 1k rune sets the GE thinks the demand has gone up and raises the price is absoultey stupid.

We've all seen the issues with Merch clans; that's what the restrictions do. It's now easier to make money than ever before with the GE. Besides, who knows? Jagex could easily manipulate the economy by fixing prices. (Which has been speculated about in the case of Party Hats, as billions rest on them. Their crash would screw the game up greatly.)

If they want the simple solution, return free trade. If the GE allowed you to input your own price for an item then it would function the same way but wouldn't screw up the game economy. (Much like the WoW auction house.)