TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Sneak Previews - Analysis of Upcoming RuneScape Features and Updates       9  TruthScape Sneak Previews - Why the Grand Exchange Could be RuneScape’s Most Important Update in Years

Preview of The Grand Exchange - What of the Other Marketplaces? Preview of The Grand Exchange - Does Jagex Learn From Its Mistakes? My Concerns Over Potential Abuses

Just as the Grand Exchange (GE) will affect certain items more than others, it will also impact certain types of players a lot more than others. Of course, this is partly because of a ripple effect—the players that use affected items will in turn be affected themselves the most. At the same time, there are other issues that will dictate who ends up liking the GE, who ends up hating it, and who doesn’t end caring about it much at all.

Here are my thoughts, based on my understanding of the different roles played by these groups and my expectations for how the GE will change the game.

I don’t mean just those training the Slayer skill here, but rather the large number of players who spend all or most of their time fighting monsters, especially high-level ones. While some do this to raise combat skills, I consider monster fighters to really be distinct from what we traditionally call “skillers”. Most monster slayers are doing it for some combination of leveling stats, rising to the challenge of beating the monster, and getting the drops from their kills. (Note that I also include here people who enjoy combat minigames like The Barrows.)

Overall, I believe that monster killers will be very happy with the Grand Exchange. Most of the trading done by monster hunters takes the form of buying supplies (food, potions and so forth) and selling drops. While getting supplies is pretty easy even now, selling drops often is not, and the GE will help tremendously.

Monster slayers also sometimes have to buy a specialty piece of equipment, or replace lost items if they die. Here too, the GE will be a godsend, as it will prevent monster killers from having to waste time trying to track down these items, or getting ripped off by merchants.

Skillers are people who spend a lot of time raising support skills like Cooking, Fishing, Crafting, Mining, Smithing and Woodcutting, whether or not they also engage in other activities. The degree of impact of the GE will depend mostly on the type of skill.

Resource-gathering skills, such as Fishing, Hunter, Mining, Thieving and Woodcutting, will be the least affected area of the game due to the GE. Skillers working in these areas don’t have to buy raw materials, and normally sell large volumes of the resources in busy markets. The GE will just make it take less time to sell logs, fish, ores and whatnot. It may also make it easier to sell some items that before were more difficult to sell, such as lower-level fish.

Transformation skills, such as Cooking, Crafting, Farming, Fletching, Herblore, Runecrafting and Smithing, will be mostly affected in a positive way by the GE. Getting raw material resources will become much easier, especially the less common ones, which will be helpful. It will also be easier now to find buyers for finished goods; the only danger here is that prices may go down if too many people try to sell the same goods at once.

PKers and duelers will be assisted by being able to more easily buy supplies they need for more reasonable prices. The biggest impact on them, though, is going to be in disposing of items they get from kills or wins. Right now, PKers and duelers often sell these for low prices just to get rid of them quickly, usually to merchants who then resell them. The GE will allow many PvP players to keep more of the proceeds from their victories.

Merchants, on the whole, are going to be among the biggest losers when the Grand Exchange is released. It’s pretty obvious why this is the case: the GE is specifically designed to improve the current inefficiencies that make most kinds of merchanting possible. There are several types of merchants, though, and some will be affected more than others.

The classical example of a merchant is someone who simply buys something cheap from one player and sells it to another for a higher price. This is sometimes done by going from one place to another, or simply by waiting for good deals to arrive either on the buying or selling end. These merchants are middlemen who really add nothing of value to a transaction; they are simply exploiting the inability of buyers and sellers to easily find each other. For that reason, they will be hit the hardest, because the GE will make them far less important as end buyers and sellers will be able to bypass them.

Many merchants will continue to ply their trade, but it will be more difficult to find people selling for below the market price, or buying above the market price. Sure, it will be possible to look for these “deals” on the GE itself, but there the merchants won’t have the “divide and conquer” advantage that they do with our present fragmented markets. In short, more merchants will be competing against each other, which will drive down profit margins.

Some merchants specialize in buying small quantities of items for low prices and then reselling them in bulk for high prices to skillers and others who don’t want to waste time collecting them. This type of merchant is providing a valuable service to players who understand that time is money and who would rather spend their time in other ways. The GE is going to result in some sort of impact here as well, though, because there are more skillers who are willing to buy herb seeds one at a time in the GE than are willing to buy them one at a time in World 2 Falador. Even so, people will always be willing to a premium for convenience.

Other types of merchants are really more speculators than what the name “merchant” implies. Some of these will actually find the GE makes the type of trading they do easier rather than more difficult, as long as they are careful about how they use it.

Does all of this mean that “merchanting is dead”? Hardly. I believe good merchants are among the smartest players in the game, and I have no doubt that these folks will quickly adapt to the changes, dropping old merchanting techniques that no longer work and developing new ones that do. For example, while it will now be much more difficult to make money by simply buying equipment and reselling it, there will also be new opportunities to exploit differences in prices between the GE and other markets. There will also be people who will underprice items, which merchants can then buy and relist.

Also remember that the GE is going to make life easier for merchants from a practical standpoint. There will be no more need to fight to get into World 2, or world hop all the time to meet people, or stand around in banks typing the same thing over and over.

You could say, then, that the GE will mean not the end of merchants, but the end of bad merchants. I personally hope that this is the case. I have no problem with a smart merchant who provides a useful service making money at it, but don’t mind seeing the people who just take advantage of others go out of business. It would also be nice to see the game change so that people who won’t work on skills are no longer able to automatically make millions any time they want just by standing in a bank buying and reselling things, which was never good for the game to begin with.

One added benefit of the Grand Exchange is that it will likely cut down on certain types of cheating and scamming in the game.

The exchange will make it much easier for Jagex to track down people who are “laundering” items or gold as a result of illegal activities, such as account hacking or real world trading. This will result in the stupid cheats getting caught, while the smarter cheats are forced off the GE and into secondary markets, where they will probably make less money.

Another nice side effect is that the GE will cut down on autotyping by a large amount. This will, in effect, get rid of many cheaters simply by giving them a better way of trading that doesn’t require them to cheat! (Of course autotyping really isn’t necessary even now, but many people think it is.)

Scammers will probably also be hurt by the GE. Since this is a new feature, I am assuming that Jagex will put anti-scamming measures into it that go beyond what is in the current trade interface. Also, people will have more time to think over and be sure of what they are doing, compared to say, the chaos of the current in-game marketplaces.

The few people in the game who really like to do everything themselves will be among the least affected players, simply because they do not trade that much. If you really do only eat food that you made or caught and then cooked, and if you get your own seeds to grow your own herbs to make your own potions, then you need the GE much less than people who prefer to be more specialized.

On the other hand, even self-sufficient players will like the GE. These folks really, really don’t like spending time selling items they don’t need, like drops, so they leave them behind or let them clog their banks. Now they will have a way of selling them with less hassle.

If the GE works in F2P, it will be even more important there than it is in P2P. The reason is obvious: F2P cannot use the RuneScape forums, so for them, the GE will open up a whole new world of trading. The change in how trading is done in F2P will be truly remarkable if they get access to this feature.

Preview of The Grand Exchange - What of the Other Marketplaces? Preview of The Grand Exchange - Does Jagex Learn From Its Mistakes? My Concerns Over Potential Abuses