[HN Gopher] Runescape gold more valuable than Venezuelan currenc...
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Runescape gold more valuable than Venezuelan currency (2022)
Author : kykeonaut
Score : 76 points
Date : 2023-04-28 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sites.psu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sites.psu.edu)
| thinking001001 wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Calling Jagex "socialist" for introducing the GE is more than a
| little ridiculous: they've always (and necessarily) regulated
| the game's economy via gold and other resource sinks.
|
| My recollection (from 2007) is that they introduced the GE as a
| counterbalance to the PK/wilderness removal and the effect it
| had on the economy. Heavy handed, maybe, but not particularly
| ideological.
| andai wrote:
| Aren't grand exchange prices based on the buy/sell price set by
| other users?
| chelmzy wrote:
| 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.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| 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
| livueta wrote:
| "Runescape 2" is doing a lot of work in the original
| comment.
|
| The GE was originally introduced as a key aspect of
| restricted trade - the game system disallowing unbalanced
| exchanges of wealth, either through trade or PvP to combat
| goldfarming - along with the removal of the real
| wilderness. Trade value was calculated from GE value, so a
| trade would only go through if the GE value of the items on
| both side ~matched.
|
| The +/- 5% thing was at least originally partially intended
| to prevent players pumping obscure items on the GE via wash
| trading, then using that inflated GE value to transfer gold
| through trades that look fair to the system but are
| unbalanced in actual economic reality.
|
| That sort of unbalanced trade still ended up happening via
| "junk trading" - players would find items with fixed, high
| GE values (e.g. addy arrows p(++)) but low actual value,
| and conversely items with low, fixed GE values (e.g. mint
| cakes) but high actual values, and use those to circumvent
| the balanced trade systemm.
|
| In OSRS, on the other hand, adding the GE was fairly
| uncontroversial because it wasn't introduced along with
| restricted trade, and because it replaced third-party
| marketplaces like the Zybez exchange that were shitshows
| most people disliked having to use. That version of the GE
| functions as you describe.
| sidfthec wrote:
| 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?
| graevy wrote:
| a virtual commodities market isn't socialism. they haven't even
| collectivized the bots, let alone the currency
| basementcat wrote:
| This is in reference to a 2021 "Planet Money" podcast.
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121
| yevpats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We got to a centralized fiat currency, sort of (USD), albeit
| by undeniable hyperpower supremacy rather than reasoned
| consensus.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| ianburrell wrote:
| There are territories that aren't recognized countries
| that have own currencies. For example, Somaliland has the
| Somaliland shilling. Also, there are oversea territories
| that have own currency. Like Bermuda has the Bermuda
| dollar.
|
| Also, there are only 130 currencies that are independent.
| The rest are pegged to other currencies.
|
| There are couple other shared currencies, like West
| African CFA franc, Central African CFA franc, and Eastern
| Caribbean dollar.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like between Hacker News
| readers and Runescape players. I loved playing the Ironman game
| mode.
| friendlyHornet wrote:
| Even though I played many games in the 2000s, I actually never
| played Runescape, even though it sounds like something teenage
| me would have absolutely loved. I feel like I really missed out
| on a part of many people's childhoods
| sph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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, gingbino and other hexis people worked in
| tech.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I played RuneScape compulsively[1] from about 2005 to about
| 2013, but haven't really played it since (besides trying OSRS a
| bit). It's probably the original reason I was interested in
| programming (I fondly remember poking the client's memory in a
| debugger to make my local GP seem higher than it actually was).
|
| [1]: I mean this literally: RuneScape is an addicting game, in
| a way that makes me a little sad.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| I played RuneScape daily from 2005 - 2009 (I started playing
| with a friend after school every day when I was in 2nd grade).
|
| Definitely gave me a leg up on things like spelling, social
| interaction, learning not to trust strangers who promise to
| guard you through the wilderness, etc. Arguably guided,
| subconsciously, some much later intuitions I had about
| psychology / economics / game theory. And it was probably also
| responsible in getting me interested in computers.
|
| I could see it being part of a funnel that makes people more
| likely to wind up on HN.
| voz_ wrote:
| 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]
| sosodev wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sidvit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| voz_ wrote:
| > 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!
| andai wrote:
| >client side botting detection (since currently its all
| server side)
|
| My first thought was, well anything Jagex does is going to
| have to be server side, right? But I just remembered I
| recently watched a video on anti-cheat software (i.e.
| spyware).
| sosodev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| soared wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| neurobama wrote:
| Don't know if they're Venezuelan, but some botters are now
| using LLMs to simulate human conversation in-game and avoid
| bans:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbTsHEPMQoo
| throwaway33381 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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? ;)
| robby_w_g wrote:
| 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.
| rot13xor wrote:
| Real life money for gold is sanctioned by Jagex if done
| through bonds. Bonds are about 3x more expensive than the
| black market but bonds can't get you banned because Jagex
| gets a cut.
| [deleted]
| wswope wrote:
| Power draw from a desktop running 16 RuneScape clients [?]
| 500W @ $0.13/kW h [?] $0.07
|
| Reasonable profit/hr from botting [?] 4M/hr/account [?]
| $1/hr/account [?] $16
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| 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...
|
| [2]
| https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Grand_Exchange_Market_Wat...
|
| [3] https://runescape.wiki/w/Economy_guide
| tornato7 wrote:
| RuneScape rare items were the original NFTs
| onei wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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?
| sidvit wrote:
| Yeah sorry, that's what I'm getting at. The most optimal
| way to get many supplies now is solely through bossing
| rather than actually doing the skills. These bosses also
| drop huge piles of them so their prices have crashed like
| crazy (herb seeds are one big example)
|
| Runes _were_ the outlier before the rc minigame was added.
| Bloods have crashed like crazy the past year, nature runes
| are almost at alch value, which is kinda funny
| kevviiinn wrote:
| Resource inflation means too much of a resource, not too
| much of a price per resource
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