8 ms·

Runescape gold more valuable than Venezuelan currency (2022)

126 points by kykeonaut 3y ago

basementcat 3y ago
This is in reference to a 2021 "Planet Money" podcast. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121
voz_ 3y ago
An important point is that Jagex has no ability to deal with bots. The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all. This story misses that, because an important followup to the point above is that these are not 1player:1charcter types making gold, but owners of bots and bot farms, associated with gold selling farms. If botting was less prevalent, this would be a non story, and I suspect the reason RuneScape is even in the picture at all, as opposed to some other MMO.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sosodev 3y ago
  > The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? My understanding is that they have plenty of basic barriers in place but bots have become sophisticated enough that they're no longer able to prevent/detect them with the simple stuff. Also, the community seems to believe that Venezuelan gold farmers are typically not bots but instead real people doing simple tasks on multiple accounts at the same time.
  - vesrah 3y ago
    While not directly related to your question, back in the day (like 2002-2003 or something) Jagex added fatigue in attempt to combat botting. The solution was an addition to the botting client that encoded the captcha image and dumped it into an IRC channel. There was a second client called Sleepwalker, iirc, that read the encoded captcha images from IRC, a user would type the captcha text, and the client would put the decoded text back into the IRC channel for the bot client to pick up and use. There was basically a credit system so you had to spend some time typing others captchas so yours would be decoded by others.
  - TheFreim 3y ago
    > Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? Anyone whose looked into OSRS botting from the perspective of the botters knows that the "Jagex isn't doing anything" meme is not actually true. It's very easy to get banned and bots have to go to all sorts of absurd means to not get banned quickly and emulate human behavior. Botting tutorial island can even get you banned, which is saying something since bot scripts have had over a decade to evolve. Now, could it be better? Definitely. But ultimately without locking down the game client more, which would alienate the majority of the playerbase who uses third party clients, it is very difficult to effectively ban bots at a scale that would be appreciated by the playerbase. In just a couple days you can implement some botting capabilities through client plugins, popular bot software has years of manipulating the client, so without a major change to the client it's very hard to ban bots.
- sidvit 3y ago
  Most of the gold farmers for osrs are just people manually playing the game, especially WRT Venezuela. There's bots for sure, and jagex has come up with good ways to combat some of them, but with gold farmers they can't really do anything about it until they sell the gold.
- soared 3y ago
  Most venezulean golf farms are actually humans, rather than the bots. But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult. A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it). Jagex is working hard to improve their launcher to the level of Runelite, and then they'll be able to implement much better client side botting detection (since currently its all server side). But agreed, their bot detection is horrible. I was botting 1+ action per second for 12+ hours a day for months and was only caught when I made a dumb mistake. Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits.
  - sosodev 3y ago
    Yeah, that's the tricky part. There are some unbelievably dedicated OSRS players that will do high intensity (1+ action per second) stuff for several hours a day. So how do you differentiate those from bots? I suspect that machine learning might be the only path forward for tackling these issues but even then sophisticated bots will probably still exist.
    - throwaway33381 3y ago
      This problem was researched over a decade ago. It's not really complicated, human interactions are different from bots you can't really create human like responses and for botters there is no incentive to really do so. Jagex just doesn't really ban them because there isn't really a point, people bot for a variety of reasons. Some have played their entire life and bot because they want to get ahead. Others bot because they don't have the freetime. It's complicated. As long as you don't really abuse it, Jagex has never really banned for this stuff. The idea here is that you don't get banned because it means losing a potential life long customer, sometimes they subscribe for a few months on and off but they eventually usually come back. There's a lot to it, in reality it's really obvious. Most of the more advanced ones just send packets, though that's another story and it's very obvious. Jagex just doesn't immediately ban them because well, there's not really a point.
  - voz_ 3y ago
    > But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult Not even close to that difficult. > A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it) This is a non-point? Bot detection should be serverside. > Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits. Bring back aggresive/violent random events. Evil chicken, come back!
- TZubiri 3y ago
  Fun fact. Most botters use http/tcp proxies, but the game runs as a process, which means jagex could just send an ip packet along an http packet to detect ip diffs and detect botters. More solid proxy tech like ipsec vpns are expensive, so people just use the cheap proxies.
  - costco 3y ago
    I'm surprised that from the discussion here it seems like there's no clientless bots in Runescape. Is it one of those games where they change the protocol up every week to prevent that kind of thing? Also if they used plain IP like you said couldn't botters just spoof the source header to whatever the proxy address is instead of their actual address?
- qumpis 3y ago
  More sophisticated bots at scale exploit weaknesses of the anti-cheating system, such as running bots on mobile devices, which helped to get around their detectikn. But otherwise botting is not trivial if you run more than a few accounts.
soared 3y ago
Its always surprised me that software engineering hasn't been an outcome of the venny/rs situation. OSRS is incredibly easy to write complicated bots for, but the vast vast majority of gold farms are still just humans playing accounts. Seemingly it would make sense to have one of your farmers learning software/automation, as with not very much software experience I had a bot doing a top 10 moneymaker in the game, making the equivalent of ~3 Venezuelan farmers.
- sosodev 3y ago
  I'm sure plenty of Venezuelans are running bots. It seems that manual gold farming is done because it's less likely to result in bans. If they're patient enough to make it to end game content before selling the gold they might actually make way more than the bots would just due to the crazy exponential scaling of profit rates.
  - throwaway33381 3y ago
    No that's not it. There's a limited number of servers or worlds, the profitability for certain things doesn't scale when you're competing with other players. Writing bots doesn't work because the cost of electricity soon outscales profits for many things. You'll often see certain bot farms running doing specific tasks that the game needs to run the economy, in a sense Jagex uses them to save on labor costs.
    - andai 3y ago
      Wait, are you implying Jagex itself is using bot farms? Couldn't they just change a line of code in the game, or are they that committed to realism? ;)
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - robby_w_g 3y ago
        Jagex is not using bot farms, they’re relying on gold farmers to produce in game resources. The Old School RuneScape economy relies on these gold farmers because most players don’t want to take the time to gather the resources themselves. Most players purchase resources from the games global market, the grand exchange, with the money going to both gold farmers and regular players. Theres another aspect though, and this is where the gold farmers make their real life money: They sell their in game gold to players who are essentially cheating by trading real life money in exchange for large sums of in game money. These players then use this in game money to more quickly level up skills. I’m not sure Jagex can clamp down on this cheating without breaking their in game economy. As a side note, there’s a fairly popular game mode in OSRS called Iron Man where you’re forced to acquire resources purely via the tedious game mechanics instead of purchasing via the grand exchange. It’s a bit masochistic, but I enjoy it personally.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
This is interesting, because back when I was still playing one of the frequent topics of discussion[1] on the RS3 side was the rampant in-game inflation. It's interesting to see an alternate explanation for it. The Runescape economy is pretty interesting in general, in part because the community maintains such an extensive price history of every item, including commodity price indexes[2]. The wiki even has a page that gives a basic economics lesson[3], including supply/demand curves, arbitrage, and price controls. (And there's also the constant accusations of discontinued rare prices being artificially inflated through insider wash trading) [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/maohi7/the_cause_of_this_rapid_inflation/ https://old.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/maohi7/the_cause... [2] https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Grand_Exchange_Market_Watch https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Grand_Exchange_Market_Wat... [3] https://runescape.wiki/w/Economy_guide https://runescape.wiki/w/Economy_guide
- onei 3y ago
  I'd treat those price indexes with a pinch of salt, especially the common trade index. They've been left alone for many years and so track items that are perhaps not quite true indicators of inflation.
- sidvit 3y ago
  In the past couple years they added a tax to all GE trades that adds gold to a pool. Part of the pool is deleted and the other part is used to buy back items from players on the market which then also deletes them. This has helped with some rarer boss/raid items but the game still has a real issue with base resource inflation (runes/logs/etc) because the trend recently has been adding these drops to boss tables.
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    >base resource inflation (runes/logs/etc) because the trend recently has been adding these drops to boss tables. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't that lead to price deflation? I definitely remember skillers complaining about the price deflation effect that the huge quantities of boss drops had on the price of logs and herbs. And runes were/are the outlier, because everyone hates runecrafting and Jagex kept pumping demand with FSOA and arch ancients (smoke cloud?) making other combat styles obsolete, or at least making magic a mandatory switch for top level PVM?
thinking001001 3y ago
The Runescape 2 economy is quite a fascinating semi-simulation/semi-reality case study. It was originally a free market economy - players traded freely and advertised wares in public places, such as the incredibly busy server World 2 in Varrock. There was a backing of bots doing repetitive work, which was seemingly unofficially permitted (e.g. any player can disable their public chat, making a non-communicative player plausible) but not officially allowed. Virtual gold was also traded online for real cash. Then Jagex decided to go socialist, and brought in the grand exchange, which centralized and controlled prices.
- andai 3y ago
  Aren't grand exchange prices based on the buy/sell price set by other users?
- chelmzy 3y ago
  GE is centralized but is still free market no? Players set the prices.This brought on the whole concept of merch clans that would pump and dump items.
  - sidfthec 3y ago
    I played before and after the GE was introduced. You're right, but it kind of leveled the playing field in a lame way. The GE made merchanting much more difficult. Prior to GE, I'd buy as much as I could of an item in the morning in World 2 when the prices were lower but there were still plenty of people selling. Then in the evening, I'd sell and make large profits. I don't remember the details but the GE made the prices more stable and my World 2 merchanting scheme didn't work anywhere near as well. It was much more fun to try and reign in the chaos of a live manual market than a corporate feeling GE. Maybe there's some relation to the old-school stock market floor where everyone was screaming and yelling to trade?
  - augusto-moura 3y ago
    In its latest incarnation yes, but for a long time prices were locked always to 5% +- of a average value. I'm not sure why that was done, but it must have some article somewhere. They eventually reverted it (years after), now you can put the price you want to anything. When you are buying the lowest price offered get bought, when you are selling the highest bidder wins, given that the price you offer at least matches the other party
yevpats 3y ago
Quite interesting. It's basically like a centralized digital currency which is legal. most of the time folks think Fiat vs Crypto because it's de-centralized and it kinda promise the promise land but I wonder if we will be moving to just a world with centralized central bank currency and no banks.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Look at the conflict with Russia and tension with China. Look at Sudan. Do you really think humanity is ever going to reach a point where everyone gets along well enough with everyone that we have one kind of centralized digital currency? We're still arguing over borders and religion, mate. Human beings are flawed, they are domineering.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    We got to a centralized fiat currency, sort of (USD), albeit by undeniable hyperpower supremacy rather than reasoned consensus.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      There are 180 currencies in 197 countries. Forex exists because other currencies exist. Yes, dealing with USD values is relatively common, but it's not really the same thing as what was posited with a single centralized currency.
      - red_trumpet 3y ago
        Wait, really? As there are 20 countries in the euro zone, that means some countries have more than one currency? And don't forget about the West African CFA Franc, which is used by 8 countries. Are there other currencies which are shared between countries?
        hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Yes, plenty of countries have multiple currencies accepted as official legal tender. E.g., Jamaica has both Jamaican dollars and US dollars. Poland uses zloty, but euros aren't uncommon tender, despite not officially being a member of the Eurozone.
ditto664 3y ago
I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like between Hacker News readers and Runescape players. I loved playing the Ironman game mode.
- sph 3y ago
  Ironman here btw. I started playing Old School Runescape in 2018 in my 30s because of the swamp man. I fucking love this game. I take frequent breaks from the grind, but I keep seeing a parallel with real life effort: nothing worthwhile is achievable unless you put your back and a LOT of time into it. Like the meme says, Runescape players either are basement dwelling NEETs, or accomplished people with families, going to the gym every day. There's no in between. (Grinding OSRS a couple hours a week is the only thing keeping me sane while trying to bootstrap a business)
  - livueta 3y ago
    I haven't played since maxing and finishing my 200ms circa 2016, but at least at that point your meme was pretty true of the efficient skilling community. A surprising number of high-ehp players held down professional jobs while legitimately competing with the NEETs for highscore ranks by pushing the envelope on high efficiency skilling methods like tick fishing. Iirc, a number of fairly prominent skillers like autumn elegy, mazhar, gingbino and other hexis people worked in tech.
    - TZubiri 3y ago
      200m in all skills without botting? Don't you deeply regret all that time wasted?
      - sph 3y ago
        Wasted doing what instead? We all die, become dust and soon forgotten, whether your time is spent maxing RS or achieving world peace. The only judge will be yourself in your deathbed. (It might now be obvious I was not raised Protestant nor Calvinist)
      - 3y ago
jongjong 3y ago
I played it for a few months just for the economics of it. This is how I learned what it means to 'corner the market'. I was trading water runes. It was a resource that had a niche usage for high-level wizards, when people wanted to sell it, (e.g. when they changed battle strategy), they usually wanted to sell them quickly, when they wanted to buy them, they also wanted to have them quickly. Also it was required for some more advanced spells so the people who bought them had been playing the game a while and had a lot of gold coins. Also because it was for such a niche use, substantial sales didn't occur very often. At one point, I had enough Runescape gold to buy up every offer that came up on the market for a low price, then I just waited for a desperate rich person to buy them all in bulk at a much higher price. Nobody else could provide them in bulk because I bought up all the smaller offers and big players who were engaged in high-stakes battles and had a lot of gold coins didn't want to run around buying up small amounts from a lot of different people. Eventually, I had enough gold coins to buy a rare purple partyhat which already cost like 50 million gps at that time. I quit the game when I went to university, sold the partyhat and gave away all the gps to some in-game friends. I regret doing that haha becuase now they're worth billions today and you can sell them for real money for thousands of dollars.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jongjong 3y ago
  In retrospect, I feel silly for having missed out on the Bitcoin trend in real life given my experience. I didn't see these virtual currencies as having real value. I think maybe because selling in-game items for real money is technically against the rules of most games.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > This is how I learned what it means to 'corner the market'. That’s similar to my experience in WoW. I custom wrote an add on to buy all glyphs below a certain price. It also spit out a list of all glyphs that were above that price. When I started I would craft missing glyphs (above the price), but eventually ended up with enough gold that I could just buy out the bottom of the market and re-list with higher prices. I made tons of gold with almost no effort. There were a couple others that did it too. I didn’t know them, but we never undercut each other by more than 1 copper. It was a nice little oligopoly and I was in-game rich. Lol.
drumhead 3y ago
Bottle caps are probably more valuable than the Venezuelan currency at the moment.

126 points by kykeonaut 3y ago

This is in reference to a 2021 "Planet Money" podcast. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121

voz_ 3y ago

An important point is that Jagex has no ability to deal with bots. The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all. This story misses that, because an important followup to the point above is that these are not 1player:1charcter types making gold, but owners of bots and bot farms, associated with gold selling farms. If botting was less prevalent, this would be a non story, and I suspect the reason RuneScape is even in the picture at all, as opposed to some other MMO.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sosodev 3y ago
> The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? My understanding is that they have plenty of basic barriers in place but bots have become sophisticated enough that they're no longer able to prevent/detect them with the simple stuff. Also, the community seems to believe that Venezuelan gold farmers are typically not bots but instead real people doing simple tasks on multiple accounts at the same time.
- vesrah 3y ago
  While not directly related to your question, back in the day (like 2002-2003 or something) Jagex added fatigue in attempt to combat botting. The solution was an addition to the botting client that encoded the captcha image and dumped it into an IRC channel. There was a second client called Sleepwalker, iirc, that read the encoded captcha images from IRC, a user would type the captcha text, and the client would put the decoded text back into the IRC channel for the bot client to pick up and use. There was basically a credit system so you had to spend some time typing others captchas so yours would be decoded by others.
- TheFreim 3y ago
  > Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? Anyone whose looked into OSRS botting from the perspective of the botters knows that the "Jagex isn't doing anything" meme is not actually true. It's very easy to get banned and bots have to go to all sorts of absurd means to not get banned quickly and emulate human behavior. Botting tutorial island can even get you banned, which is saying something since bot scripts have had over a decade to evolve. Now, could it be better? Definitely. But ultimately without locking down the game client more, which would alienate the majority of the playerbase who uses third party clients, it is very difficult to effectively ban bots at a scale that would be appreciated by the playerbase. In just a couple days you can implement some botting capabilities through client plugins, popular bot software has years of manipulating the client, so without a major change to the client it's very hard to ban bots.
sidvit 3y ago
Most of the gold farmers for osrs are just people manually playing the game, especially WRT Venezuela. There's bots for sure, and jagex has come up with good ways to combat some of them, but with gold farmers they can't really do anything about it until they sell the gold.
soared 3y ago
Most venezulean golf farms are actually humans, rather than the bots. But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult. A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it). Jagex is working hard to improve their launcher to the level of Runelite, and then they'll be able to implement much better client side botting detection (since currently its all server side). But agreed, their bot detection is horrible. I was botting 1+ action per second for 12+ hours a day for months and was only caught when I made a dumb mistake. Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits.
- sosodev 3y ago
  Yeah, that's the tricky part. There are some unbelievably dedicated OSRS players that will do high intensity (1+ action per second) stuff for several hours a day. So how do you differentiate those from bots? I suspect that machine learning might be the only path forward for tackling these issues but even then sophisticated bots will probably still exist.
  - throwaway33381 3y ago
    This problem was researched over a decade ago. It's not really complicated, human interactions are different from bots you can't really create human like responses and for botters there is no incentive to really do so. Jagex just doesn't really ban them because there isn't really a point, people bot for a variety of reasons. Some have played their entire life and bot because they want to get ahead. Others bot because they don't have the freetime. It's complicated. As long as you don't really abuse it, Jagex has never really banned for this stuff. The idea here is that you don't get banned because it means losing a potential life long customer, sometimes they subscribe for a few months on and off but they eventually usually come back. There's a lot to it, in reality it's really obvious. Most of the more advanced ones just send packets, though that's another story and it's very obvious. Jagex just doesn't immediately ban them because well, there's not really a point.
- voz_ 3y ago
  > But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult Not even close to that difficult. > A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it) This is a non-point? Bot detection should be serverside. > Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits. Bring back aggresive/violent random events. Evil chicken, come back!
TZubiri 3y ago
Fun fact. Most botters use http/tcp proxies, but the game runs as a process, which means jagex could just send an ip packet along an http packet to detect ip diffs and detect botters. More solid proxy tech like ipsec vpns are expensive, so people just use the cheap proxies.
- costco 3y ago
  I'm surprised that from the discussion here it seems like there's no clientless bots in Runescape. Is it one of those games where they change the protocol up every week to prevent that kind of thing? Also if they used plain IP like you said couldn't botters just spoof the source header to whatever the proxy address is instead of their actual address?
qumpis 3y ago
More sophisticated bots at scale exploit weaknesses of the anti-cheating system, such as running bots on mobile devices, which helped to get around their detectikn. But otherwise botting is not trivial if you run more than a few accounts.

soared 3y ago

Its always surprised me that software engineering hasn't been an outcome of the venny/rs situation. OSRS is incredibly easy to write complicated bots for, but the vast vast majority of gold farms are still just humans playing accounts. Seemingly it would make sense to have one of your farmers learning software/automation, as with not very much software experience I had a bot doing a top 10 moneymaker in the game, making the equivalent of ~3 Venezuelan farmers.

sosodev 3y ago
I'm sure plenty of Venezuelans are running bots. It seems that manual gold farming is done because it's less likely to result in bans. If they're patient enough to make it to end game content before selling the gold they might actually make way more than the bots would just due to the crazy exponential scaling of profit rates.
- throwaway33381 3y ago
  No that's not it. There's a limited number of servers or worlds, the profitability for certain things doesn't scale when you're competing with other players. Writing bots doesn't work because the cost of electricity soon outscales profits for many things. You'll often see certain bot farms running doing specific tasks that the game needs to run the economy, in a sense Jagex uses them to save on labor costs.
  - andai 3y ago
    Wait, are you implying Jagex itself is using bot farms? Couldn't they just change a line of code in the game, or are they that committed to realism? ;)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - robby_w_g 3y ago
      Jagex is not using bot farms, they’re relying on gold farmers to produce in game resources. The Old School RuneScape economy relies on these gold farmers because most players don’t want to take the time to gather the resources themselves. Most players purchase resources from the games global market, the grand exchange, with the money going to both gold farmers and regular players. Theres another aspect though, and this is where the gold farmers make their real life money: They sell their in game gold to players who are essentially cheating by trading real life money in exchange for large sums of in game money. These players then use this in game money to more quickly level up skills. I’m not sure Jagex can clamp down on this cheating without breaking their in game economy. As a side note, there’s a fairly popular game mode in OSRS called Iron Man where you’re forced to acquire resources purely via the tedious game mechanics instead of purchasing via the grand exchange. It’s a bit masochistic, but I enjoy it personally.

LordDragonfang 3y ago

This is interesting, because back when I was still playing one of the frequent topics of discussion[1] on the RS3 side was the rampant in-game inflation. It's interesting to see an alternate explanation for it. The Runescape economy is pretty interesting in general, in part because the community maintains such an extensive price history of every item, including commodity price indexes[2]. The wiki even has a page that gives a basic economics lesson[3], including supply/demand curves, arbitrage, and price controls. (And there's also the constant accusations of discontinued rare prices being artificially inflated through insider wash trading) [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/maohi7/the_cause_of_this_rapid_inflation/ https://old.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/maohi7/the_cause... [2] https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Grand_Exchange_Market_Watch https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Grand_Exchange_Market_Wat... [3] https://runescape.wiki/w/Economy_guide https://runescape.wiki/w/Economy_guide

onei 3y ago
I'd treat those price indexes with a pinch of salt, especially the common trade index. They've been left alone for many years and so track items that are perhaps not quite true indicators of inflation.
sidvit 3y ago
In the past couple years they added a tax to all GE trades that adds gold to a pool. Part of the pool is deleted and the other part is used to buy back items from players on the market which then also deletes them. This has helped with some rarer boss/raid items but the game still has a real issue with base resource inflation (runes/logs/etc) because the trend recently has been adding these drops to boss tables.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  >base resource inflation (runes/logs/etc) because the trend recently has been adding these drops to boss tables. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't that lead to price deflation? I definitely remember skillers complaining about the price deflation effect that the huge quantities of boss drops had on the price of logs and herbs. And runes were/are the outlier, because everyone hates runecrafting and Jagex kept pumping demand with FSOA and arch ancients (smoke cloud?) making other combat styles obsolete, or at least making magic a mandatory switch for top level PVM?

thinking001001 3y ago

The Runescape 2 economy is quite a fascinating semi-simulation/semi-reality case study. It was originally a free market economy - players traded freely and advertised wares in public places, such as the incredibly busy server World 2 in Varrock. There was a backing of bots doing repetitive work, which was seemingly unofficially permitted (e.g. any player can disable their public chat, making a non-communicative player plausible) but not officially allowed. Virtual gold was also traded online for real cash. Then Jagex decided to go socialist, and brought in the grand exchange, which centralized and controlled prices.

andai 3y ago
Aren't grand exchange prices based on the buy/sell price set by other users?
chelmzy 3y ago
GE is centralized but is still free market no? Players set the prices.This brought on the whole concept of merch clans that would pump and dump items.
- sidfthec 3y ago
  I played before and after the GE was introduced. You're right, but it kind of leveled the playing field in a lame way. The GE made merchanting much more difficult. Prior to GE, I'd buy as much as I could of an item in the morning in World 2 when the prices were lower but there were still plenty of people selling. Then in the evening, I'd sell and make large profits. I don't remember the details but the GE made the prices more stable and my World 2 merchanting scheme didn't work anywhere near as well. It was much more fun to try and reign in the chaos of a live manual market than a corporate feeling GE. Maybe there's some relation to the old-school stock market floor where everyone was screaming and yelling to trade?
- augusto-moura 3y ago
  In its latest incarnation yes, but for a long time prices were locked always to 5% +- of a average value. I'm not sure why that was done, but it must have some article somewhere. They eventually reverted it (years after), now you can put the price you want to anything. When you are buying the lowest price offered get bought, when you are selling the highest bidder wins, given that the price you offer at least matches the other party

yevpats 3y ago

Quite interesting. It's basically like a centralized digital currency which is legal. most of the time folks think Fiat vs Crypto because it's de-centralized and it kinda promise the promise land but I wonder if we will be moving to just a world with centralized central bank currency and no banks.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Look at the conflict with Russia and tension with China. Look at Sudan. Do you really think humanity is ever going to reach a point where everyone gets along well enough with everyone that we have one kind of centralized digital currency? We're still arguing over borders and religion, mate. Human beings are flawed, they are domineering.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  We got to a centralized fiat currency, sort of (USD), albeit by undeniable hyperpower supremacy rather than reasoned consensus.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    There are 180 currencies in 197 countries. Forex exists because other currencies exist. Yes, dealing with USD values is relatively common, but it's not really the same thing as what was posited with a single centralized currency.
    - red_trumpet 3y ago
      Wait, really? As there are 20 countries in the euro zone, that means some countries have more than one currency? And don't forget about the West African CFA Franc, which is used by 8 countries. Are there other currencies which are shared between countries?
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Yes, plenty of countries have multiple currencies accepted as official legal tender. E.g., Jamaica has both Jamaican dollars and US dollars. Poland uses zloty, but euros aren't uncommon tender, despite not officially being a member of the Eurozone.

ditto664 3y ago

I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like between Hacker News readers and Runescape players. I loved playing the Ironman game mode.

sph 3y ago
Ironman here btw. I started playing Old School Runescape in 2018 in my 30s because of the swamp man. I fucking love this game. I take frequent breaks from the grind, but I keep seeing a parallel with real life effort: nothing worthwhile is achievable unless you put your back and a LOT of time into it. Like the meme says, Runescape players either are basement dwelling NEETs, or accomplished people with families, going to the gym every day. There's no in between. (Grinding OSRS a couple hours a week is the only thing keeping me sane while trying to bootstrap a business)
- livueta 3y ago
  I haven't played since maxing and finishing my 200ms circa 2016, but at least at that point your meme was pretty true of the efficient skilling community. A surprising number of high-ehp players held down professional jobs while legitimately competing with the NEETs for highscore ranks by pushing the envelope on high efficiency skilling methods like tick fishing. Iirc, a number of fairly prominent skillers like autumn elegy, mazhar, gingbino and other hexis people worked in tech.
  - TZubiri 3y ago
    200m in all skills without botting? Don't you deeply regret all that time wasted?
    - sph 3y ago
      Wasted doing what instead? We all die, become dust and soon forgotten, whether your time is spent maxing RS or achieving world peace. The only judge will be yourself in your deathbed. (It might now be obvious I was not raised Protestant nor Calvinist)
    - 3y ago

jongjong 3y ago

I played it for a few months just for the economics of it. This is how I learned what it means to 'corner the market'. I was trading water runes. It was a resource that had a niche usage for high-level wizards, when people wanted to sell it, (e.g. when they changed battle strategy), they usually wanted to sell them quickly, when they wanted to buy them, they also wanted to have them quickly. Also it was required for some more advanced spells so the people who bought them had been playing the game a while and had a lot of gold coins. Also because it was for such a niche use, substantial sales didn't occur very often. At one point, I had enough Runescape gold to buy up every offer that came up on the market for a low price, then I just waited for a desperate rich person to buy them all in bulk at a much higher price. Nobody else could provide them in bulk because I bought up all the smaller offers and big players who were engaged in high-stakes battles and had a lot of gold coins didn't want to run around buying up small amounts from a lot of different people. Eventually, I had enough gold coins to buy a rare purple partyhat which already cost like 50 million gps at that time. I quit the game when I went to university, sold the partyhat and gave away all the gps to some in-game friends. I regret doing that haha becuase now they're worth billions today and you can sell them for real money for thousands of dollars.

deleted 3y ago
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jongjong 3y ago
In retrospect, I feel silly for having missed out on the Bitcoin trend in real life given my experience. I didn't see these virtual currencies as having real value. I think maybe because selling in-game items for real money is technically against the rules of most games.
donmcronald 3y ago
> This is how I learned what it means to 'corner the market'. That’s similar to my experience in WoW. I custom wrote an add on to buy all glyphs below a certain price. It also spit out a list of all glyphs that were above that price. When I started I would craft missing glyphs (above the price), but eventually ended up with enough gold that I could just buy out the bottom of the market and re-list with higher prices. I made tons of gold with almost no effort. There were a couple others that did it too. I didn’t know them, but we never undercut each other by more than 1 copper. It was a nice little oligopoly and I was in-game rich. Lol.

drumhead 3y ago

Bottle caps are probably more valuable than the Venezuelan currency at the moment.