Anti-Merch Clan Solution

"So-called" merchant clans coordinate their efforts on a single item, totally clearing out the market and causing prices to skyrocket, all for profit. Well, profit for the leaders and the lucky ones who buy early at min and dump early before their goal price. Everyone else pays the consequences for high prices.

It doesn't take brains to get a manipulating clan going. Just a bunch of people with a bunch of money. This is all they do:

1. Pick an item that people are likely to buy and sell (triangle sandwiches lol) and put in offers for max.
2. Wait.
3. Repeat until desired price is reached.
4. Sell at min.
5. ????
6. Profit!

The clans are ridiculous because they interrupt the flow of play. If I want to train a skill by buying a certain raw material, I shouldn't have to stop because someone is messing up the market for that item. I shouldn't have to keep a stockpile of a certain item, just for a freak event caused by "merchant" clans. They shouldn't have control over what I do. That's just dumb.

If you have taken any sort of calculus class or a higher level econ class, you understand that the area under a curve is the money spent. So far, in the Grand exchange, we have exhibited countless versions of Graph B.



My simple solution to merchant clans and their max-manipulating effects is for RS to update less if the so-called price of a good goes up and update more if the price of a good goes down. Therefore, the people (mostly noobs) who join a merchant clan realizes that their combined efforts of raising the price of a good is futile and the price of an object would not rise on a day-to-day basis. Sooner or later the people involved would run out of money while the price stays stagnant, un-affecting other people. Then, their frustration and lack of money would make them to dump early. Since the price updates more if the "selling-price" were to plummet, the graph would look like A. The same amount of money would be used (area under curve); however, the equilibrium mid-price would not be affected as much if the price were to rise (say, update price every 3 days if an item were to rise). Updating more if the price goes down is a precautionary procedure so that a "merched" product wouldn't be at such a high equilibrium price for a long time when a "merch clan" tries to price-manipulate it's value. Therefore, less people who are actually buying the product out of necessity would not have to pay an extraordinary price, which transfers less money to the clan-leaders and the few "masterminds" who are actually profiting out of all this. This negative feedback would spawn less and less merchant clans and those remaining merchant clans would see less and less revenue. This solution procedure should be implemented on every item from "stronghold security-notes" to "Christmas crackers" because it's just a matter of time when merch clans masterminds gain enough money to merch those "unreachable" items.

EDIT: For those of you who have santas and long term investments: prices of those would still rise at the same rate. This solution just trumps those merch clan leaders: for example, merch clan leader buys out 10k yellow beads at 16ea (this actually happened) merch clans increased the price of yellow beads over summer to like 460ea. Profit = 460*10k - 16*10k = 450k. When this solution is implemented, the masterminds behind merch clans would have less profit, which depicts the negative feedback. The mis-informed people who are part of the "merch clan" would disappear because they just spent their "life savings" on an item that showed them no profit.

For those who still doubt this system and think that they would not be able to buy an item when it's merched: buy it overnight, trust me.

For those who think that single merching is over: look at these pictures:



They were bought at 440 overnight and sold at 465. You can do this math to see the profits.

To RS, who sometimes release new items: pick a higher starting price.

To anyone else who still doubt this system: reply.

good idea. though i think it would just slow down merch clans cause i beleive u said the item would just start to update every 3 days once it saw it was starting to skyrocket. well they'd keep merching that item for a month instead of the usual week. Might put a few merch clans off though so still grand idea

yeah this is a good idea. nice merch btw lolz

Interesting idea, i fear the effects on everything *but* items being merchanted by clans won't be desirable however.

Take for example, an invented new update that creates a large demand for some uncapped item, lets say Gold Ore. Suddenly, swathes of people have offers up for large quantities of Gold Ore, driving up the price - but now, it's happening ever-so-slowly, leaving the chances of actually getting some this half of the millenium very low. The prices simply won't reflect the demand. This already happens to some extent of course (anybody try buying vials before todays update recently? Ouch!), and your solution will just add to that problem even further.

As if GE caps on prices, slowly updating GE prices, and item purchase limits wen't enough!

Jagex could, of course, try to predict what items will be in demand and adjust for it like you mentioned in one reply, but i for one don't believe they will want to (or maybe are even capable of) predicting this accurately enough to stop the problem. For example, they could also follow what the merchanting clans are buying up and tweak the buys-per-hour rate on those items to help stop the problem, but they're not doing that for similar to reasons (Of course, they know who the big merchanting clans are, and could easily follow them - even i know a few of them and i've not even tried looking! As for smaller merchanting clans, i doubt they affect prices enough to worry the runescape community at large; maybe they make a small change, but the difference between that and simply item flipping probably isn't enough to warrant any concern).

Personally, i'd ban the practice of clan merchanting - it's easy enough to track as they work it right now, and just take out the clan leaders. It won't entirely fix the problem, but will certainly make a big difference unlike letting them have free reign as they currently do.

All that said, i don't think your idea is without merit. I'd perhaps change it from cutting off the raising-price rate of known bad items, to cutting the number it's possible to sell per hour however. This will not only leave their dumping far less successful, but will also make us regular player more able to buy the items we need - on world 2 isntead of the GE, thereby not affecting prices and circumventing the inflated prices and unbuyability on the GE until the merchanting clans give up on that item.

Interesting, it's an ok idea, but as was said before, it'll just make the clans work slower instead of stopping them completely. As long as a market is relatively free and people are greedy, value manipulation will exist. The same kind of thing happens in the real-world economy, someone even relatively well known says he thinks that the price will go up, and the PPS (price per share) sky-rockets. The person says that they don't think that the stock is going to do well, the PPS plummets. The PPS for most of the major banks plummeted a couple of weeks ago because an analyst said that he was expecting a loss from most of them.

nice thread yao, interesting ideea.

The Sulution has come!!! HUZZAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!