The GE Website Update

Well, I have to say that todays update of the official GE website (oGE) is kind of making me nervous.  It not that the update effects anything about my webiste, the Grand Exchange Central, which is an investment website.  But many RuneScape members in the official forums are venting pretty hard about Fan sites like the GEC that provide price data and graphs. 

 There seems to be an overlly sensationalized belief that price data helps clan minipulation.  It may help a little, but not to the extent that people are suggesting.  My stand point is that price data and graphs are of little use to a large clan with a huge collective sum to play with.  A big clan with enough money can manipulate any item at any time with no price information at all.  You just get everyone to start buying at the same time and then tell people to stop at the same time (the last one to the party is screwed but the clan leader is good to go).

It is my firm belief that extended price data like that which is provided by the GEC actually helps the small time investor.  It makes it easier for us little people not in clans to spot items that are being manipulated.  We can avoid those things and find other more secure items. 

Anyway, here is what I posted on the official forums.  Let me know your thoughts.

I’ve been reading the comments concerning this “update” which are particularly frustrating.

First of all, I agree with most of the comments that removing the most valueable list is a big mistake. That was a very useful feature and should be brought back.

What frustrates me is that people think this “update” was done to curb clan market manipulation. I am very against clan market manipulation (it has cost me a lot of gp and prevented me from buying items I wanted or needed). But I see nothing in this update that will have any effect on market manipulation what-so-ever. A large clan with enough collective money can manipulate the market with no data at all. It is obvious that this “update” was intented to improve ease of use and better “regular Joe” understanding. It did neither of those things, but the intent was clear.

I am also frustrated by comments that suggest that fan sites that provide extended price data are somehow contributing to market manipulation. Those fan sites and the extended histories now available on the official GE site can allow individual investors not involved in clan manipulation to spot what items are being manipulated and avoid those items.

Anyway, if Jagex wanted to curb clan manipulation it would attack it from a different angle. Data really has no effect. And I think attacks on fan sites that provide price data are unfair and not well thought out. Better controls need to be implimented within the trade system itself to detect these patterns and block them. Data is not the answer.

In a Pickle with Sauerkraut!

I seem to be in quite a pickle (or sauerkraut may be a better word). The last time I played Runescape was during the April Fool’s event. When I logged out I was still holding onto a cabbage. Well, today (April 3) I logged back in and still have a cabbage. Obviously I can’t store it or sell it. And I’m fairly certain that if I remove it, the cabbage will disappear all together. It does look like I can still chuck it to other players, but of course I don’t want to try that. And for all I know chucking it will cause it to disappear also. Of course, having a cabbage in both my hands means I am very limited combat wise. I really can only use magic and I hate magic. But yet there is a morbid curiosity in my brain that wants to know exactly how long one of these April Fool’s cabbages can be kept “alive”. Then again, Jagex in a few days might make it go away without any action by me. So I am caught between a rock and a hard place. Do I limit my actions actions for a few days or do I just chuck it to another player and hope that it lives on through other people? Of course, if Jagex doesn’t spontaneously remove these April Fool’s cabbages then they will become untradeable rares. No real value but there will be that all important “cool” factor that seems to impress newbs and makes the rest of us roll our eyes.

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Cabbages

Okay, the cabbage April Fool’s event is cute. Not nearly as cute as my idea for a Runescape Rickroll, but it is cute. Oh well, maybe next year. Anyway, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet there a free roaming cabbages floating around Runescape. A good place to go is Lumbridge castle to see and play with them. You should have accept aid turned on and both hands empty. Then you can play catch with the cabbages. There are also kick and tap options available but I’m not sure what those do yet. I only looked around for a few minutes. I am also not sure if there is more to the April Fool’s event but if I see anything else I’ll report it here.

By the way, if you are looking for more April Fools day related events on the web check out April Fool’s Day On The Web for a list of this years and other past years. The upside down YouTube is also pretty funny.

In other related news: I didn’t get off my butt to do anything for April Fool’s concerning my blog or the GEC. So there are no jokes here, sorry. Maybe next year.  I am also working on a blog post about the new Magic Dragon Kite Shield wieldable only by Rangers with combat level 90 or higher that was introduced in last weeks update.  I personally am dissappointed because my character Absenm is a combat warrior and I won’t be able to utilized its considerable stat bonuses (+37 fishing and +15 farming).  But atleast it is tradeable on the GE for just 24.4m gp so it may prove to be a good investment item. Other restrictions are that it can only be wielded while also wielding a two handed iron longsword. It is a rare drop after barehanded fighting Olivia the seed stall girl in Draynor Village.

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Fairwell Ole Random Events

I’ll admit it. I am one of the very few who actually likes random events and was totally happy with how the old random event system worked. I thought the events were a charming little quirk of RuneScape life that interjected themselves into the sometimes mundane aspects of skilling. For the most part I found the events amusing, whether they happened to me or to other people. The one exception being when I once was fighting Chaos Druids in the Edgeville Dungeon and I ignored the Lunch Lady too long and got my sorry ass teleported way the hell over to White Wolf Mountain. But aside from that, I usually enjoyed being party or witness to random events. Of course it was also loads of fun to see bots get killed because they couldn’t respond to the events.

Do not get me wrong. I am not particularly disappointed in the recent random event update Jagex performed. I understand that Jagex wanted to cater to those players who found the events disruptive for one reason or another………

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Time To Do Some Weeding

After reading some of the feedback about the February 2009 minor update delay and the feedback to some of the Mark Gerhard’s posts about RWT I have come to the conclusion that the people at Jagex really do need to make a few separate areas for some “special” players. Most of the feedback was constructive and proper. But a lot was so mind numbingly idiotic I nearly had to scream.  And that is why I suggest the following separate and restricted Runescape Worlds.

Brat World: Let’s get the most needed world out there first. I think an easy way of getting a point across would be to restrict players who get mutes or temporary bans to a special type of “half-way-house” world to play on for a month of two. Of course those worlds would need to be quick chat only, and maybe even a more restrictive version of the current quick chat. If not quick chat only then at least filter out the word “noob.”  That would be traumatizing to most of the people sent to these worlds because they don’t know how to chat without using ”noob”  in every other sentence. There would only need to be two of these worlds, a free player world and a members world. If they are always full then too bad for people waiting to get connected. It isn’t supposed to be pleasant. Also maybe some other restrictions could be placed on these worlds. Like a two hour daily play limit. I would like to see such a world nice enough for “rule breakers” that they actually feel like they have been given a chance to redeem themselves and yet unpleasant enough so people won’t purposely try to get sent to one of these world.

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Summoning and hitting 1000

Wonderful news for those of you interested in the investment side of this website. The Grand Exchange Central has now surpassed the 1000 items mark. This exceeds how many items I thought the database would contain and is only half of what I expect to have entered into the database within the coming weeks. Each item is updated daily and we are now maintaining a 90 day history on all items (though because the GEC itself is not 90 days old it will take a little time to fill in the histories). I am kicking around keeping a year long history of weekly averages.

Another big news item is for those of you involved in Summoning. The GEC now contains a listing of all the summoning pouches and scrolls. But the best part about this is the “parts list” included on each item page. Now at a simple glance you can see exactly how much each pouch will cost to produce. This will let summoners out there see which pouches actually make a profit (sorry, most do not).

Even though the GEC is not as complete as I would like, to the best of my knowledge, I have all the headwear, bodywear, and handwear already entered. There is also a lot listed that is not included in those categories. I am diligently working on getting footwear, weapons, and legwear entered. And please remember that the GEC only lists tradeable items (it is an investment website after all).  Also, if you happen to spot something I may of forgotten please leave a comment here or on the GEC main page.

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Thoughts on Real World Trading

After reading the nice personal post by Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard I decided to read through many of the replies he received. I couldn’t read all of them because there were already 5000+ replies within the first day. But of the ones I read, most were well reasoned, well written, and well thought out. But I did read a few comments that made me want to reply but I didn’t want to waste the space on a 5000+ rely thread in the forums, so I will do it on my personal blog.

Real World Trading: Someone mentioned that real word trading doesn’t hurt anyone. I do take exception with this point, at least in part. I understand that a person selling a character or goods for real world money would still need to work to get that character to where it is valuable or get those items through various other means such as mining or what-not. In that respect it seems alright. Someone did the work. Why shouldn’t they get paid? In fact, that is how the internal Runescape economy works. Many people buy items they would rather not work on getting. I for one almost never cut down trees, I buy the logs. I buy the secondary ingredients for summoning pouches because I am not going to spend hours hunting around for those ingredients. That is what drives the internal Runescape economy.

But here is what people forget. Runescape is designed for everyone, no matter who they are in the real world. Remember that 80% of the people who play Runescape are free players…….

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Runescape and Windows 7

I am one of those impatient freaks who always has to have the latest updates for everything. I was part of the original beta test group for Windows95 and proceeded to beta test most of the following operating systems up to and including Windows2000. On my iGoogle homepage I have RSS feeds from FileHippo and other software update sites. When I download share/freeware I almost always exclusively download only packages that are a couple of months old. Current. Updated. Beta. For me it has to be new, better, faster, easier. So it is no surprised that I recently downloaded the Windows 7 beta.

Since this is a Runescape blog I will restrict most of my comments to Runescape on Windows 7. But I will make a couple of comments here about the OS in general. First of all, Windows 7 is Vista without all the problems and annoyances. Or maybe it is better stated as, Windows 7 is exactly what Vista should have been. It is clean, efficient, powerful, and stable even in its beta form. The security, at least in terms of the UAC and annoyance factors, is effective yet hardly intrusive at all. I have yet to run in to a significant application comparability problem with any of the software I use on my may XP machine (Dreamweaver, OpenOffice, PhotoImpact, etc.) Its boot and shutdown times are slightly faster than even WindowsXP. Provided Microsoft does not fugg things up between now and the eventual release of Windows 7, it should be the OS to bring respect back to Microsoft and even to bring back some of the lost customer base that Microsoft has sacrificed to Apple and other OS developers. As of right now I would be happy to have Windows 7 as a replacement to XP, even in its beta.

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A talk about Death

Here is a really random thought for the blog. As far as I can remember in my almost six years of playing Runescape I have only died six times. I am excluding any deaths during my first week or two. But even during my formative weeks I don’t think I got killed all that often. Now that I think about it, I may not have gotten killed at all so my original count of six may be very close for Absenm’s life. I also do not count deaths in “safe” minigames like Castle Wars. I am talking deaths where your actually lose stuff.

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Thoughts about PvP

 

Well, I must say that today is the day that many Runescape players have been looking forward to for months. The return of open PKing (player killing) and PvP (player vs player) worlds. Most dedicated readers of my blog will remember that I avoid PKing situations if at all possible. It just isn’t my thing. But I also believe that PKing is an important part of most Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and it should never have been as severely limited as it was last year. But now it’s back and I just have a couple of thoughts I’d like to share.

First of I want it clear that this blog will in the future deal very little with PKing and PvP worlds. Again, I am not interested in PKing and therefore will have little to no experience with it and therefore will not be able to provide much insight into this (re)new aspect of Runescape.

Second, just from a quick glance at one of the PvP worlds I visited I have to say it looks like it will be a hell of a lot of fun for those who are into such things. At Lumbridge Castle the court yard look more like a grave yard with all the skulled players. But I also think this will lead to a dark side of the Runescape universe. In the old days when PKing was allowed in the Wilderness there was still doubt as to what that other player near you had in mind. They may have need to be out in the Wilderness for many reasons other than PKing. But when you land on those PvP Worlds you pretty much know everyone there is out to kill other players and if they can take you down they will. Remember the old saying, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” That is one of the reasons why these world don’t appeal to me. I am more laid back, and PvP worlds are much more cut throat (no pun) than I like. But again, these worlds are very important to the Runescape universe and applaud Jagex for finally bringing them into existence.

Third, Woo Hoo! I’m gonna be rich! Why you ask? Ever since the Jagex announcement that this update would occur I have been hording swordfish. The food market is going to sky rocket! I truly believe you will see the price of the combat staples like swordfish and sharks to double! In fact, expect to see a slight inflation throughout the entire economy. Potions and lower level combat gear should see a steep price increase also. I say lower level gear because it is my assumption that many players will not risk their dragon or better armor and weapons on these PvP worlds. But rune gear is reasonably cheap. There should also be a good increase in the poisoned weapons market. [Don't forget that in the coming weeks I will be adding a whole new section that deals with the Runescape economy.]

Finally, I really hate the new combat level set up. I don’t exactly know why either. Maybe it is because now I need to modify my stat widget to the right. Or maybe it is because when I don’t have a pouch or a familiar that my level looks lower. But I think it is more because it just seems clumsy. If I have a pouch on me I’m combat level 93. If I don’t I’m 87 + 6. Huh? Once again freaking Summoning messing things up. Have I mentioned I hate that skill lately?

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