I'm not going to lie to you: this is a follow-up on my last article. I hope to address and recap certain issues that were brought to my attention on both Tip.it's and RuneScape's Official forums, as well as analyse the recent anti-76k measure.
Let's start with that last one.
The information given by Jagex states:
"Players who trade kills will find that the drop they receive is lessened in value. Legitimate PKers might find that some of their kills will result in smaller drops (e.g. when getting revenge on someone who has just killed you), but since you’ll still only lose as much Earning Potential as is used for the drop, your average drop will stay the same."
Basically this means that you should still get, on average, the same drops when depleting your EP by killing the same person over and over again. The difference is that per kill, you get fewer drops and lose less EP, meaning that this person has to sacrifice 76k a lot more often to get your EP back to zero.
I did not think it would make a dent in tricking at all; I would have expected clans to rise where people could alternate partners, or swarms of bots being created that run like 76k lemmings into the wilderness. But the number of people that use the 76k trick to make money has been decimated. Mod Fetzki was actually right for once when he made his statement that they have fixed 76k-ing (see last week's article by Racheya).
However, the core problem still exists, which is the massive influx of GP into the economy. I predicted that there would be a panic sell-off, and personally made a hefty chunk of cash for myself abusing this situation. It was also a good opportunity to get rid of my useless stuff. I also did not expect that the Armadyl Godsword would drop below 100m. It did, to a whopping 99.9m, after which it jumped back up the full 5%.
And this was not an isolated case, as nearly every item is continuing its happy upward spiral (except for the capped items). But its not as fast as it used to be, so making it slightly tougher did help. To keep in line with my old Titanic analogy; we've spotted the iceberg, we've made a hard left, but we have not thrown the engine in full reverse. We're still heading towards an economy with over-inflated prices kept aloft by the billions of GP earned in PVP worlds. And this ultimately ruins the game for newcomers.
As to my suggestions, only a few people managed to poke holes in it, and this was only with my second proposal (the Essence related one). Having every Pure Essence turned into Rune Essence will make people lose a lot of money, but someone suggested to turn every Pure Essence into 3 Rune Essence. This would solve a lot of problems except for those that have a lot of GOP tokens stored, and it is unfair towards those that have no Pure Essence stored (hence my 4th proposal of announcing everything in advance). There was also a complaint about F2P Runecrafting becoming a costly skill, and while I have always been an advocate of making Chaos Runes as well as Combination Runes craftable in F2P (the game is afterall RUNEscape), F2P Runecrafting was never profitable. The Shops update made getting Water Runes for example, impossible to get in any large amounts, which is the only reason why there is now some profit to be found.
I seriously do hope that Jagex issues a response this time (other then modding out an already starred out link). But as with any changes made, there will be complaints, rants and riots. Yet if the guys who overlook the entire game take a few economic guidelines at heart before starting to conceptualize a new update, I'm CONVINCED that in the long run, we'll all play a lot happier.
