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The Essential Skill Training Trade-off - Speed Versus Money
What does automobile racing have to do with training RuneScape skills? If you answered “nothing”, well, you’re mostly correct, but not entirely. J Just consider this famous adage from the world of motorsports, and how well it applies to leveling in RuneScape as well:
“Speed costs money—how fast do you want to go?”
In fact, not only is this true of skill leveling, I believe it is the fundamental truth about RuneScape skills. Over and over again, you will be forced to choose between training quickly and training cheaply. The degree to which this is true varies from one skill to the next, but on the whole, money is a significant issue in how fast skills can be leveled.
Let’s take a closer look at the two main reasons why the speed-money trade-off exists in RuneScape.
Jagex ultimately controls what every activity in the game costs, because it alone can decide how rare items are, how much work it takes to get them, what materials are necessary to raise skills, and how much end products are worth. In order to maintain game balance, the company will provide both slower and faster training alternatives, but generally adjusts them so that the faster alternatives cost more. This may be done either by building in higher costs to the speedier options, or making the necessary materials rare so that the costs go up due to scarcity.
An example of inherently high cost would be Ancient Magicks. You can use these spells to train Magic very quickly because they do a lot of damage to multiple targets, but at the cost of using up many expensive runes. The same is true of using a cannon for Ranged training: you can get lots of XP per hour this way, but it gets very expensive because Jagex made cannonballs disposable items that cannot be reused.
Rarity is more often Jagex’s tool of choice, though. For example, high-level tree seeds give lots of Farming XP, but getting them in quantity is difficult, so if you want to use them you will pay a lot for the privilege. And in Summoning, the pouches giving the best XP rewards use blue charms, which are by far the rarest of the four colors.
With all else equal, which would you prefer—a way of training a skill that gives 5,000 XP per hour, or one of that gives 20,000 XP an hour? Right—and the same goes for everyone else. Since players value XP highly, they are willing to make less money or even lose money to take advantage of skill activities that provide good XP. In contrast, activities that are poor for training require a financial incentive to be worthwhile.
We can see a couple of classic examples of this in the Smithing skill. On the bottom end, I mentioned above that cannonballs are expensive; one reason is that they take a long time to make and provide poor Smithing XP, so players won’t make them cheaply. Conversely, smelting gold ore into bars gives large amounts of Smithing XP when you wear goldsmithing gauntlets (a reward from the quest Family Crest). This is why gold ore is so expensive.
A related issue is that output products from high-XP activities will be produced in quantities far larger than the market can absorb, causing their value to drop. Let’s take the gold ore again: smiths who can afford to level up using this ore will crank out thousands and thousands of gold bars as a by-product of training—far more than crafters could ever possibly use up in making jewelry. And so the price of gold bars has been on the skids for a very long time now—it is stuck at a price floor of just 180 gp on the Grand Exchange, and the real market value is likely lower still.
Combine high demand for skill inputs and a huge supply of skill outputs, and you get the answer to why so many good training options are big money losers. So, while you can indeed get 56.25 easy Smithing XP for every gold ore you smelt while wearing those gauntlets, you are going to lose about 270 gold pieces per ore—and that adds up fast! (Figure 134)
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