Thursday, May 24, 2007

Resource Prices Bouncing Back

As previously mentioned, runescape price stability is likely to return due to Jagex having banned almost 30,000 accounts in recent weeks. The main bulk of banned accounts were bot accounts that were created with the sole purpose of harvesting resources to sell for runescape gold that was later sold for real cash.

Prices for sharks had dropped down to 500gp just before the large scale banning of bot accounts. Gradually, the price has risen and is now at around 700-800gp range. This has come due to the market being less flooded and demand still remaining constant.

Other affected goods have also seen their prices rise slightly - although not quite back to the pre-bot problem era, it does help people make a better return for the time they invested in gathering the resources.

In addition, merchanting items has gained due to more price stability - many merchants could have lost millions due to panic and selling when prices had bottomed out. With price stability returning to more expected levels, merchants have been buying up stocks ready to cash in at a later date when price rise back to their original trading price.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Market Price Stability to Return

After Jagex wielded their mighty sword and banned over 19,000 runescape bot accounts and banned a further 2,300 players who bought runescape gold online, there is hope that price stability will make a return to the market sooner rather than later.

If price stability returns, merchanting will become a more reliable and less risky method of making money on runescape. However, if price fluctuations continue with the uncertainty in the marketplace, merchanting will retain a high risk.

It is assumed that 19,000 or so of the banned accounts were simply money farms - gathering resources to sell ingame for gold that was later sold via websites. The 19,000 bots caused 2,300 further players to be banned due to having been guilty of buying runescape gold for cash.

I can understand players wanting to get things within the game, however, buying runescape gold is really defeating the point of the achievement - it is wrong, it wasn't earned it was bought.

Hopefully prices within runescape do return to normal levels where skill based players can be rewarded for having high skills and merchanters can be rewarded for their patience in gathering up resources from a string of suppliers.

Overall, the amount of accounts banned is likely to increase over the next few weeks and until the bot users move to a different game, there will still be some instability and uncertainty in the runescape marketplace.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Runescape Shark Prices Crash

Shark prices in runescape took a massive dive recently as the market became flooded. Speculation was rife was to the reason for such a sharp reduction in price - almost 50% reduction on the price of raw sharks. An unprecedented fall in prices and one that shook the merchanting world.

Today, 1st May 2006, Jagex make a post about bots and real world item trading and the fact that they banned 8000+ accounts last week. The reason for the bans was centered around bots and the fact that 6billion runescape gold was confiscated and taken out of circulation.

6billion gold from the proceeds of selling materials collected up by bots. In this case it looks like the shark market got affected quite badly and put many honest players effort of accumulating the sharks via traditional fishing pretty much to waste.

The fact that 8000 or more account were banned should be good news, alas, that is not the case. The 8000 appears to be only a fraction of the bot infestion that has laboured over runescape for a good few months now. Though Jagex have now publicly announced the impact these bot users are having on the overall runescape economy.

In the short term, as many 1000s more accounts will be banned for similar bot abuse, my advice is to not be too hasty in selling off your shark stockpiles just yet. Jagex need some time to clear out more of the cheat accounts and may well find a way to prevent the serial abusers from infecting the overall runescape economy. Shark prices may recover, but they will not recover overnigt - it will take time.

Eventually, when the bot abuse is curbed and the damage reversed, the runescape economy will start to revert back to market forces rather than bot abuse distorting things.