SRL Archive - RuneScape News and General

Some people look at Runescape rares and say "There aren't any more coming into the game, so they should just go up forever". I personally know this is definitely not true, although many will deny that. Let me explain.

What causes an items price to go up or down? Supply and demand not being at an equilibrium. If there is a high supply but low demand for an item, the price needs to fall so that buying the item becomes more attractive, thus increasing demand. And vice-versa.

So, considering the supply of rares is almost perfectly constant, the only thing that can affect the price of a rare is demand, and obviously inflation/deflation (but changes in the amount of gp in rs affects everything).



There is not close to enough gp in runescape to equal the amount of rares. Lets take santa hats as an example. They cost 62M each currently. Estimates say there are about 20k santa hats in the game (Which I believe to be true, considering Chessy098 owned 1k santas at a time and hardly made a dent in the market).

62M * 20000 = 1,240,000M = 1240B = 1.24T.

1.24 trillion dollars seems like a ton of gp. Considering like the most rich people in the game are maybe worth a few billion. And this is only accounting for one rare. The more expensive partyhats..etc. would add up to many trillions (considering partyhats have been duplicated in the past..etc.)


I just don't see how this is possibly sustainable, but people disagree with me saying they believe partyhats will all reach max cash pretty soon of 2.1B each.




Once rares reach a certain cash value, it becomes much more appealing to sell the rares and use the cash to merchant/invest/train skills with. So more and more people will start selling rares, there obviously won't be enough gp in circulation to buy them all, and they will be forced to crash hard.

What do you guys think about the rare market?

Though it's not a steady incline, the price of rares will always rise. You said supply and demand… well the demands half the other half is supply and supply is going to never stop going down, and as for demand it only has potential to increase from a rs population/rs wealthy population. If you think about it, 1 mil in today's money is like 100k from 2005. We can expect to see more inflation and it won't be long before jagex makes the jump from LongInt -> Int64.

afros will be the next rare item

From: J_Pizzle
afros will be the next rare item

why do you think that?

Duke_Freedom estimated that there was 6-7 net billion GP created every day in RS, in October 21st… 2006.

And blues might as well be 2.1b, only way you can get them is to trade multiple edibles or party hats.

On the 10th of June in 2006, Duke_Freedom estimated that there was 1780b GP in the game. Obviously things have changed since then, with the PvP drops and the GE which makes it easier to alch rune items which can alch for up to 30k or so. Before you only alched yew long bows and they made 768gp, but when you alch dragon shield alches you make 60k.

Edit: He also made a estimation to how many rares are left in the game. Obviously how much they were worth is meaningless now because the game has changed so much.

# 500 party hats sets * 660mil per set = ~330bil
# 2500 mask sets * 20mil per set = ~50bil
# 15000 santa hats * 4.5mil per hat = ~68bil
# 200 crackers * 150mil per cracker = ~30bil
# 200 half wines * 28mil per wine = ~6bil
# 1250 disks * 3.7mil per disk = ~5bil
# 2000 pumpkins * 2mil per pumpkin = ~4bil
# 3500 easter eggs * 1.8mil per easter = ~6bil

From: J_Pizzle
afros will be the next rare item

i LOL'ed when i read that =)

RS economy is really messed up. The amount of gp available increases all the time, and it gets easier and easier to make money too.. I made a new pure, made it member and got it's wealth from ~100k to ~20M in about 10 days or so.. Back in RSC when it was generally painful to make even 100k masks were going for ~50k (although they rised to ~300k during the end-times of RSC).

From: GoF
RS economy is really messed up. The amount of gp available increases all the time, and it gets easier and easier to make money too.. I made a new pure, made it member and got it's wealth from ~100k to ~20M in about 10 days or so.. Back in RSC when it was generally painful to make even 100k masks were going for ~50k (although they rised to ~300k during the end-times of RSC).

What did you do to make that money? I can't make that with my main…

I think all rares will drop quite a lot some day. But who knows…

From: antti mies
I think all rares will drop quite a lot some day. But who knows…

They will drop but only when a handfull of people can pay for them and the people selling will sell them as fast as they can so they don't lose too much money and they will be cheap but then sky rocket

From: IceFire908
Though it's not a steady incline, the price of rares will always rise. You said supply and demand… well the demands half the other half is supply and supply is going to never stop going down, and as for demand it only has potential to increase from a rs population/rs wealthy population. If you think about it, 1 mil in today's money is like 100k from 2005. We can expect to see more inflation and it won't be long before jagex makes the jump from LongInt -> Int64.

Ok, well if they're just going up this much because of inflation, what's the point of buying rares? In theory, if it really is mainly inflation, then everything (godswords..etc.) should be multiplying in price at this rate.

Just as money is entering the game, money is leaving the game. Think about sudoku. Every time somebody goes through 100M gp and converts it into runes, they profit because they get more gp from other people, but no gp has entered the game; it actually has left. Also players quitting rs with lots of gp create deflation.


Inflation and deflation aside, rares aren't always going to go down in supply and up in demand necessarily. That's like saying gold in real life is always going to go up in price because there's only a limited supply of it. Well gold is found every day and more is put into the economy. What about people who logged into really old accounts from long ago, discovered old rares, and sold in the ge? What about people who have duplicated rares (mainly partyhats) in the past? That must have at least slightly affected the supply.



My point is that there are a lot of factors that go into this, and it's not as simple as the gp in rs will always inflate, and rares will always become more in demand.

From: Capricorn

# 500 party hats sets * 660mil per set = ~330bil
# 2500 mask sets * 20mil per set = ~50bil
# 15000 santa hats * 4.5mil per hat = ~68bil
# 200 crackers * 150mil per cracker = ~30bil
# 200 half wines * 28mil per wine = ~6bil
# 1250 disks * 3.7mil per disk = ~5bil
# 2000 pumpkins * 2mil per pumpkin = ~4bil
# 3500 easter eggs * 1.8mil per easter = ~6bil

There's no way those numbers are even close to accurate in my opinion.








Anyways, rares never rose like this before. Why are they suddenly sky rocketing? Mainly talking about easters/disks/pumpkins. There is no use for them, so their price was very constant before. This demand is completely artificial, and unsustainable. It's price manipulation… That's all it is.

From: JAD
Ok, well if they're just going up this much because of inflation, what's the point of buying rares? In theory, if it really is mainly inflation, then everything (godswords..etc.) should be multiplying in price at this rate.

But it's not mainly inflation, it's just there is inflation in runescape as the past decade has shown.

From: JAD
Just as money is entering the game, money is leaving the game. Think about sudoku. Every time somebody goes through 100M gp and converts it into runes, they profit because they get more gp from other people, but no gp has entered the game; it actually has left. Also players quitting rs with lots of gp create deflation.

That's all indeterminable for us and cancels out… no use in estimating it.

The reason they are sky rocketing is because they are being hit hard right now by merchant clans, once they dump the price will go way down.

But as time progresses, the overall price of rares will always rise. Take a look at the yearly charts, if you buy at baseline (not during a spike like right now) the odds of it going down are low enough where I would say it's sustainable.

From: JAD

There's no way those numbers are even close to accurate in my opinion.

Why not? Duke_Freedom was a extremely successful merchant. That may be not even close to the amount of rares in the game, but you have to remember Duke was a major player and he has a great idea how many rares were in the game. Maybe they are a estimate, but its probably closer to how many rares were being traded seeing as how he'd know about those rares most.

Lol santas are crashing :D
http://services.runescape.com/m=forum/c=ZJsKjD-Ei2c/forums.ws?36,37

From: antti mies
Lol santas are crashing :D
http://services.runescape.com/m=forum/c=ZJsKjD-Ei2c/forums.ws?36,37

What you talking about?
http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_rs/Santa_hat/viewitem.ws?obj=1050
+2.7M today

who is Duke_Freedom?

also i think these will keep rising, just due to the fact that the numbers are limited, people will always pay more money to look good in rs

From: rya
What you talking about?
http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_rs/Santa_hat/viewitem.ws?obj=1050
+2.7M today

Just watch when it updates next time… ;)


Edit: -1.6m and masks are now crashing as well :D

From: Bonfield
who is Duke_Freedom?

also i think these will keep rising, just due to the fact that the numbers are limited, people will always pay more money to look good in rs

A very successful merchant back in the day, got banned for RWT :). I know for sure he had two party hat sets. Back in the day when merchanting was actually work :P

From: Capricorn
A very successful merchant back in the day, got banned for RWT :). I know for sure he had two party hat sets. Back in the day when merchanting was actually work :P

SHows party hats are being taken out of the market

From: Capricorn
A very successful merchant back in the day, got banned for RWT :). I know for sure he had two party hat sets. Back in the day when merchanting was actually work :P

The only way I would consider merchanting work would be the ludicrous amount of typing you one would have to do.

When I tried out merchanting for a brief period (back when I played 4 years ago ish) I just used SCAR to autotype "buying item x, xxxxxgp, Insert name here" and put all the pretty fonts and effects.
Change your chat to private only and the second you see pink, it's Ctrl+Alt+S and CLICK THAT PINK.

It was always exciting to see pink.

Then you'd simply change what you had scar autotyping to "Selling x, xgp, name"
And wait for the pink again.

Given the recent price trends for a lot of holiday rares, I think we're at the point where the majority of supply and demand are artificially manipulated by merchants rather than people who personally want a rare or want to sell one. Rares are still status symbols, but now that there are other ones out there, people have moved away. Plenty of people are keeping personal rares, but they won't sell. Those who do sell usually intended to from the start, when they bought many.

Lol i was lucky to swap my crashing raw materials to ags like 8 hours ago. Now ags is bought out and i saw someone at the forums buying it for 120m :)