Day 8: How Runescape Taught Me Economics

Alright so I'm gonna do my opinion of E3 in general without a lot of recapping. But first I had an idea about a topic. I bought a soda and was thinking about its value. I can pay $1 for a pint of soda and that's an acceptable value for what I'm getting. However, if I tried to make it it wouldn't be an acceptable value. It'd cost me much more than just $1 to recreate that pint of soda, let alone manufacture the bottle to distribute it in and the means of distributing it to others. But, if you have a lot of money to spend then your problems suddenly cost much lest per unit to develop. Basically, the more money you have the easier and faster it is to make more. This made me think of MMORPG economies.

MMORPG's are unique of typical games and it's not just the subscription fees and population of simultaneous players. MMO's reinterpret and reflect aspects of the real world in fairly predictable ways. Namely, for every persistent world there grows an economy system of barter, craft, trade and short cuts to get ahead not unlike organized crime.

The more your character ages the more you learn about how the world works and how to capitalize on it. While the nuts and bolts are unique to each game, underneath it all lies basic economic principles. Trying to make money in Runescape, particular the free version, is rough. Competition over valuable resources, such as coal, is fierce and populated by swarms of players much higher in level than you, guaranteed. Fighting rare enemies with valuable item drops are an option if you're really tough but again competition is usually fierce. There's always wandering into the Wilderness where player killing is allowed could be an option but chances are just as good that you'll run into very dangerous opponents and end up losing everything you own without means to flee.

What did I do? Mining coal is the most popular 'work' to make money because of its practical value but it takes a long time and is even harder to find an unclaimed source. I took the path of least resistance, mining runes. I'd mine hundreds of rune stones and craft them into Air runes, the most commonly used and lowest level rune. I'd take my hours of work to a trade market and offer a price 25%-50% lower than anyone else. Now, the way Runecrafting works is when you reach certain levels you multiply your crafting efficiency. Instead of getting 1 rune from a rune stone you'll get 2, or 3, or 11, etc. After working on this for awhile I'd leveled up substantially and started buying the rune stones instead of mining them. By buying the rune stones for the same price I was selling Air runes I was seriously cutting into my profits but I was vastly increasing my efficiency and I'd usually find a buyer/seller in seconds rather than minutes. By the time I finally quit the game and gave my account to a stranger I'd reach a runecrafting level of over 60 I think. With a relatively small amount of seed money I could turn around profits of 10x my investment without having to spend 2-3x as much time by obtaining the rune stones myself. It couldn't be much easier than that. I learned how to work the system to suit my needs despite being a 'free' member and having most of the game locked out for me.

I just thought it was a neat anecdote that can apply as well to real life business as it can to fantasy business.