Runescape gold more valuable than Venezuelan currency (2022)
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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.
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.
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)
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)
And no, not really.
One, it was a lot of fun. I guess I should clarify that I spent much of that playtime doing pvp of one sort or another and the stats were almost incidental. Mastery of one thing has always been more attractive than spreading time around a bunch of different games, and I have a lot of fond memories of what it was like to play that game at a high level and still have good friends from that time. So, from that angle I don't consider the time wasted any more than I'd consider time spent relaxing, playing any other games or reading a good book wasted. I was never a NEET and didn't really push it beyond what I'd call fairly typical entertainment hours per week, but those hours were just concentrated on this one thing over a long timeframe, and that adds up - especially when both leisure and competitive goals are satisfied by different aspects of the same thing. More a case of being unusually efficient in using my spare/entertainment time than of reshaping my life around it.
On that note, you develop some pretty intense split focus abilities regularly playing multiple accounts at once and/or doing high-intensity skilling. A lot of those hours were actually me, in some kind of zen robot state, bashing out actions while paying almost full attention to reading or watching something else. Read an awful lot of books while grinding, worked on my language, got some good treadmill/powerlifting time, that sort of stuff. I find that I'm more relaxed and creative when doing some kind of physical activity like running, and that same dynamic felt true of skilling. When not multilogging, skilling can be very meditative and relaxing. Something about having a task that takes some but not a ton of attention is just nice.
Two, I owe my professional tech career to it.
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.
[1]: I mean this literally: RuneScape is an addicting game, in a way that makes me a little sad.
I thought about getting into custom botting as a fun challenge but it’s still kinda pointless - even if I had a ton of gp and max levels there would not be much to do except all the quests. PvP in the contemporary scene seems way too complicated and difficult due to the reliance on quirks of the game engine.
Definitely an interesting and quirky game but can’t fathom spending days of RL time grinding levels to chop a different color tree.
If you're okay unethically and immorally deteriorating the game experience you can make a pretty penny operating a large bot farm.
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
Reasonable profit/hr from botting ≈ 4M/hr/account ≈ $1/hr/account ≈ $16
4M is actually relatively low endgame profit per hour. I haven’t touched the botting scene since 2012, but I run 9 merching accounts on the same box. I have a custom Runelite launcher to manage cache/windows/plugin data, and it’d still be under 20 lines of simple bash to add proxying.
Botters routinely run far more than 16 accounts on the same box by running the game in Android VMs with a lot of graphical rendering disabled. SOTA afaik is to pick up a few wireless hotspots with IPs behind CGNAT, and lock clusters of accounts to common IP pools.
Regarding SOTA: yes it's interesting seeing the mobile-based clients to overtake the scene due to lower detectability/enforcement and resources usage. But when I was in the scene a big question was on client detactability, which nudged some to employ computer vision and screen-scrapping as opposed to fiddling with client code and spoofing official client. I wonder if this question has been settled.
I assume one of the biggest challenges with scaling botting is that the traffic is really hard to conceal and sameish. You’d have a bunch of users either connecting from a fixed pool of IPs (and you can check where these are and if they belong to a cloud/datacenter pretty easily), sharing IPs, or swapping IPs much differently from how a human would. And even with noise injected, the high level behavior would be extremely similar across accounts. Plus with enough skills to work around all these things you are almost certainly better off doing better things to make money…
Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans?
You'd be correct. Bot farms often use human mules to pick up the gold, then they use human intermediaries to sold the gold to (who in turn operate gold selling operations, everything is pretty specialized).
> Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans?
From past experience, there are fully human gold farms since sometimes it has been cheaper for people to hire poor people from the third world for slave wages and it helps avoid bot detection. Most setups are hybrids, someone willing to run a gold farm is also likely running bots, humans, and hybrid as covered above.
Human beings are flawed, they are domineering.
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.
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.
Agreed. But until countries started to cease to exist, the reality is that anarchy is basically dead. Very dead. Because the government have more tools to control the people tightly and concisely. Look at China for example, there are cameras everywhere looking at your face and counting your every moves. You have nothing to hide from the government and you're still trying to fake a happy face.
The big government trend is not going to slow down unless we have a world-war scale catastrophe where the control of the government is severely impacted -- but this would imply infrastructures and livelihoods are also being killed
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?
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.
Some info here https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/grand-exchange-tax--item...
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.
I remember there were items which were intentionally mispriced in the grand exchange, and other items which were unsellable "junk" were used to pad trades. So if you had "junk" you could find "mints" (it was literally mints) and make an "equal value" trade that really isn't equal value, or it is but not because of the values the game expects. It was interesting watching how true economic value tries to wiggle its way through a dystopian all-seeing anti-money-laundering system.
They eventually killed that system because obviously it ruined the game, but it was interesting that even in a game someone tried to take absolute totalitarian measures to fight money laundering, despite the huge players backlash.
The only thing that seems even vaguely authoritarian (which is what I assume you mean by socialist, even though that's basically the opposite of the words meaning) was during the no-free-trade thing after their payment processor almost kicked them off due to chargebacks from botters using stolen credit cards to buy membership.
If anything, the original state of W2 was a lot more socialist than the GE is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect that machine learning might be the only path forward for tackling these issues but even then sophisticated bots will probably still exist.
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.
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!
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).
Did they make RS2 worse, or is Runelite just that good? I haven't played in literally 15 years.