Cha-Ching

By Esker

Hello, welcome to this week’s herald. Yes, I am writing again until somebody decides to come back and start back up the press. But back to the herald, this week’s topic is RuneScape prices and what has effect on them.

RuneScape is filled with items, and will be hitting the 8000-item mark soon! Although a good majority of the items are non-tradable, we still have numerous other items that are popular and used quite often. The list of big shots in the market includes: Food, weapons, armor, accessories, rares, runes and arrows. And in each of these 7 categories there are ranging from 100 to 5 items to keep up with. Sounds like a large task to change, right? Well, no. The smallest imbalances can have a drastic effect on these items.

The most frequent cause is the stock of these items. You’ll often find that new items will be hefty in price then go down accordingly to how hard they are to get. So in a few weeks you’ll most likely find the item to be four times less, depending on how the item is obtained. There is always a steady increase in each item of RuneScape, which makes them easier and easier to get. But there are some items that can only slowly disappear, which brings me to rares.

Rare items, or also called discounted items, include Christmas crackers, Party hats, Santa hats, Halloween masks, Pumpkins, Easter eggs, and the Disk of returning. These items can go down in price but is usually the influence of popularity for the item. But usually doesn’t last long and basically have a 1 way of traveling into a higher price range. What makes these items rare is there is no longer any way to create more of these items, so they are slowly disappearing from the game and will eventually become “extinct”.

Another factor I mentioned above is popularity. Now, if JaGeX decided to make a new discount item called “brown rock” and did nothing but nothing then it would not only be nearly worthless but since you have a window to get many of them and also what’s the use for them? They would be worth millions eventually, but hey, not nearly as much if it was a white h’mask for instance. Same thing applies for items. Some items don’t quite make it to our wish list for what we need.

Another large factor in price is what I like to call “difficulty”. Wonder why 3rd age is worth so much? Because you can’t do a clue scroll then think to yourself “I wonder what 3rd age part I get!” but this isn’t realistic, I’ll use 3rd age for an example… not only are level 3 clue scrolls hard to come by, but there are numerous items you can get from them. It’s a game of chance. But what I’m basically trying to say to you is if there are not a lot of these items coming in then you can’t expect them to go down drastically.

The last and definitely not the least factor takes us to the outskirts of Draynor. There green…bald…and have a goatee. Yes, it is our worst nightmare, bots! These horrors are unfortunately widespread and many people use them. Not only are they at the outskirts of Draynor cutting down our favorite reading spot but they are also crowding the banks of Catherby and the dull field of flax. Why would level 3s have such a big impact, you ask? It’s because of the fact they’re relentless – unlike people, bots (or autoers/macros) don’t have the need to sleep or the need to open up another window to look at something interesting or to talk to a friend, they go at it 24/7 or how long the owner wants to keep them running. And since there are thousands of these bots, they will spit out more materials then any other source of yew logs, sharks or flax. An example of there effect can be easily seen when purchasing sharks. Back in the day they were 1k, now they’re what, roughly 400gp? But there is hope, Jagex makes a continuous effort to ban these bots and in extreme and repeating use of them IP bans. Not only are bots changing the prices but also our ability to efficiently do normal tasks in RuneScape.

Well that sums up another article of the Global RuneScape herald. Until next time, Esker.

Last update: 11-Sep-2007
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