TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - A General Guide to RuneScape Skills and Training            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - General Guide - The Economics of RuneScape Skills and Skill Training

Creativity and Innovation - The Keys to Making and Saving Money TruthScape Skill Secrets - General Guide - RuneScape Skill Training Speed and Powerleveling Issues

RuneScape is updated frequently, and many of these changes can have a huge impact on the profitability of training skills. Good players pay attention to the market, and look for shifts that can affect how they level.

Changes in the markets can go in either direction: sometimes they may cause renewed interest in an item or skill, giving you a new way to work a skill. Conversely, you may find that particular changes will “nerf” methods of leveling you’ve relied on in the past. Adapting to these changes is essential if you want to train efficiently without losing a lot of money.

And before I get hate mail, when I talk about taking advantage of market shifts, I am not saying you should exploit players by charging 20k for a raw herring if they are in a remote bank and need one to do a quest. I simply mean recognizing when there is new demand for certain products, and filling that demand using your skills to get both money and XP. This gives everyone what they want.

Incidentally, one good way of monitoring market trends is through the TruthScape TWIRP reports.

Simply put, when changes occur that create renewed interest in the output of a skill, this represents an opportunity for you to gain experience in that skill while also making some money at the same time. This is especially the case when it involves activities that require patience, which is not in abundant supply within RuneScape. J It will be easier to understand what I mean if I give you a few examples from my own past.

In February 2006 I was still a RuneScape “newb”, with relatively low levels and not much money. On the 20th of that month Jagex released its new pie update, including fish, admiral and wild pies. Thousands of players wanted to get into the Fishing Guild or to have a chance to get an abyssal whip with a Slayer level below 85, so the interest in these pies was immediate and dramatic. While most of the people around me stuck to fish (yawn), I switched to cooking pies, and raised my Cooking skill many levels while making a tidy sum.

When Construction was released in 2006, I made several thousand teleport tablets, gaining several magic levels and selling the tablets for a profit. I know some people who made millions from Bones to Peaches tablets in the same way (I couldn’t do these at first). I also made a lot of money brewing Chef’s Delight and selling both the beer glasses and flatpacked barrels for other people’s houses.

And my last example, also from 2006, is perhaps the best—would you believe I made a killing while gaining multiple levels from Herblore, without ever touching a vial? When Hunter came out, everyone wanted to use the new salamanders in combat, and the demand for herb tars was through the roof. I killed cave slime for the tar, mixed it with my own herbs, and sold the tar for millions to people who couldn’t get enough of it.

New updates can open doors for your skills, but they can also close them. Just as you must be aware of new opportunities, then, you also have to watch out for changing conditions that can obviate methods that worked in the past. Naturally, the big anti-RWT changes in late 2007 affected nearly everything, so that was hard to miss; I’ll give some examples that might be less obvious.

One good example would be in the Herblore skill, with Fishing potions. These had never been very popular to begin with, but the pie update that I mentioned above all but killed them off. Admiral pies were cheaper to make and provided a better Fishing bonus, so what little interest there was in Fishing pots declined drastically.

Another example really was the result of two unrelated changes: the introduction of Lunar Magicks, and the advent of gilded altars in player owned houses. The first update brought with it lunar armor that was nearly identical to splitbark armor but much cheaper; the second provided an easy way of getting lots of Prayer XP. Between them, these two updates took a big bite out of the value of the Shades of Mort’ton minigame, which previously had been considered a good way of getting Prayer XP and making money.

Most of the opportunities that arise when new features are added to the game are temporary, so you shouldn’t expect to be able to make money from them for long. Whenever a way to raise a skill profitably is found, more and more players eventually discover it and start doing the same thing. This inevitably leads to more demand for raw materials and more supply of finished goods. As the amount of completed product increases players start undercutting each other, and pretty soon it’s ballgame over.

The best example I can think of is with crossbow bolts, which were improved in 2007, leading to a big surge of interest. In the first week after the update, I can remember that adamantite bars were around 2k or so, and addy bolts sold for about 350 each; you get 10 bolts per bar, so this was a great moneymaker, as well as being decent Smithing and Fletching XP.

Well, the price of bars started to increase immediately, and the value of bolts started to drop a little while later. Over the course of several weeks the activity went from a great moneymaker to an “okay” one, to a poor one, and finally to a break-even proposition. And now? An addy bar is 2,361 gp while 10 addy bolts sell for 2,150.

This is a natural economic response and not something to get upset over—it’s perfectly expected that where there are profits to be made, more people will join the activity and drive the profits out. Just take advantage of things when you can, and then look for the next opportunity that presents itself.

Creativity and Innovation - The Keys to Making and Saving Money TruthScape Skill Secrets - General Guide - RuneScape Skill Training Speed and Powerleveling Issues