The RuneScoop Soapbox

An Example of Price Manipulation

This 180-day history chart for super weapon poison (weapon poison++) shows a classic example of the sort of price manipulation undertaken routinely by clans. I noticed the dramatic price rise because I was working on my Herblore Optimization Guide, and could think of nothing that had occurred in the game itself to justify an increase in the price of this poison from around 7,000 gp to nearly triple that amount in only a few weeks. So I posted on the RuneScoop forums to see if anyone knew why this was happening. And I was told (unsurprisingly) that some merchanting clan had decided to run the price of poison up to 70k! Of course, it never got that high—but that’s all part of the game that the clan leaders play so they make money at the expense of everyone else. Note also the smaller spike in mid-November, possibly also a manipulation attempt.

These clans are loathed by regular players, because of the negative impact of this sort of manipulation. First of all, because of the trade restrictions on the Grand Exchange, whenever a large number of players are buying an item for its maximum price, they “absorb” most or all of the supply of that item, making it difficult for ordinary players to get it. Then, the reverse occurs when the item is being dumped. Even when trading can occur, it often is only possible to get the items in small quantities at the inflated prices that result from the clan’s activities.

Merchanting clans are also hated in RuneScape for the same reason that those who make money in this manner are widely reviled in the real world: they don’t engage in any sort of productive activity, rather just exploiting and profiting from the work of others. Making money by buying and selling items on an exchange is the classic example of a zero-sum activity: you only make money by someone else losing money. And people who lose money aren’t happy people.

Finally, merchanting clans often engage in deceptive advertising to try to lure new players into joining them. They also mercilessly spam busy areas—especially the Grand Exchange are in Varrock—trying to find new recruits.

Who’s Really Responsible?

Most serious RuneScape players want to know what enables merchanting clans to do what they do, and how they can be stopped. But there is no simple answer to this: they exist because of a confluence of various factors. Jagex is on the receiving end of the brunt of the complaints about these clans. And it is true that Jagex does bear much of the blame here. After all, it is the Grand Exchange’s tight trade limits and price restrictions that ironically enable the very sort of behavior they were ostensibly designed to prevent. Jagex has also been very slow to take any direct, proactive moves to stop merchanting clans. I’ll cover those issues and much more later in this series.

But it’s not Jagex that I want to focus on right now, because that’s really the easy way out for us as a community. The hard reality is that these clans are made up of players, and without those players, they could not exist. Even if you want to blame the leaders of the clans, the fact still remains that without a steady influx of new recruits, these clans would collapse.

The situation is, in many ways, comparable to any other illegal activity, whether it be illegal drug trafficking, modern slavery, forced child labor or the like. In each case, there are authorities that enable the situation to occur, be it via poor policy making or lax enforcement. But in each case it is also true that these things would not be occurring if there weren’t a market for what they produce. It is the demand for illegal items or services that causes them to be supplied.

And so it is with merchanting clans: the bottom line reason they exist is because of players who want to join them. And why do people want to join them? The answer to that question is simple: greed. Players sign up for these groups because they view them as an easy way to make money with little effort. They are drawn by the prospect of “guaranteed money while you sleep”—in fact, I’ve seen merchanting clan spammers use almost those exact words.

If you sign up to participate in a merchanting clan, you are part of the problem. You are trying to make money not through your own creativity or hard work, but simply by depriving others of the value of their thought and effort.

You’re the Perpetrator and the Victim

In addition to being unethical, joining merchanting clans is often very counterproductive: most players who join them do not get the results they are hoping for, or are promised. And that’s because it’s not just the general population that gets ripped off by these clans: some of their biggest victims are their own members. In many ways, these clans are little more than pyramid schemes that benefit those at the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.

Think about it. If everyone buys up an item for many days so that the price rises, what happens if they all decide to sell at the selected target price? The massive dumping of tons of players’ stock of that item will be too much for demand for the item to absorb. Since the price will have just risen (due to the clan’s manipulation) other players won’t be as interested in the item. With so many clan members trying to sell at once, many of the sell orders won’t be filled.

Well, the leaders of the clan certainly don’t want to be “stuck” like that! And they sure as hell don’t care about you. There’s a simple solution for the clan leaders, though: they simply lie to their members. They pick a “public” price that they claim they want to sell at, and then they dump their own holdings before that price is reached.

This works great for them! After all, at the time they decide to sell, it may have been many days in a row that people have been trying to buy these items at the maximum GE price. They know the loyal suckers, er, members of their clan won’t be selling yet. So they can get rid of everything they bought and make a nice profit.

What about everyone else in the clan—that is, people like you? Well, they are left holding the bag. Since the clan is “officially” still buying the item, the clan’s pawns end up in many cases buying items from their own leaders. If the target price is reached, all of these peons are left to fight for the scraps as the price drops every day. And in many cases, the leaders deciding to dump the item before the target price means that target is never reached at all.

Just Say No

I can sum up the point of this soapbox article very simply. The best thing you can do as a player to combat merchanting clans is not to participate in them. Without a steady stream of new victims, these clans cannot continue to exist—every time an item is run up in price and some members get stuck holding items they can’t sell, they get annoyed and leave. The leaders just get back to spamming some more, looking for new people whose greed they can exploit. If the supply of new victims dries up, so does the clan.

In addition to the ethical and practical reasons for avoiding merchanting clans, there’s another factor to take into consideration: it has never been easier to make money in RuneScape via legitimate activities. Gone are the days when only very high level or very skilled players could earn gold quickly. You can make money these days while having fun, while training skills, while engaging in socializing activities with friends, or even while doing other things on your computer.

It is easy to make 100k, 200k, 500k or more per hour now. This is not only because of how valuable many items are, but also because of the existence of resources to tell you how to make money. The best of these is in fact right here on RuneScoop: the Dynamic Moneymaking Guide can show you hundreds of ways to make money. All of them legit, reliable, and doable without enriching a dishonest clan leader or contributing to the decline of the economy.

Be part of the solution: refuse to be part of the problem.