[OSRS] The Grand Exchange 26 Feb 2015

The Grand Exchange


The day has finally come... The Grand Exchange is here! Grab your cash stacks and loot piles, it is time to get trading.


The Grand Exchange

The Grand Exchange is finally here. Head north-west of Varrock to get trading with your fellow Old School players.

We've kept everything about the Grand Exchange as close as possible to the version of the G.E. that most players will be familiar with (excluding a few additional features). In the coming weeks, we'll be polling a selection of your feedback requests. These might be extra buttons and features that we could adapt from RuneScape 3's G.E., or completely new ideas for Old School. So if there is an extra feature you'd really like to see, let us know.

Initial prices

The G.E. has initial prices for all items, largely taken from activity on the old Trading Post and from Zybez's excellent trading guide, among other sources. Players are free to ignore these prices completely, and to offer whatever they like. Over time, as you trade on the Exchange, the system will adjust its prices towards the true market values of the items. You should expect large changes in prices over the next few weeks; the Grand Exchange makes it much easier for buyers and sellers to find what they want, so there'll be less of a need to pay premium prices for obscure items. So if a guide price doesn't look right to you, please give it time to adjust.



Buy rate limit

The Grand Exchange has limits to the rate at which a player can buy items. These were introduced to discourage players from trying to mess around with the economy by monopolising critical items. Old School RuneScape has these limits too. For launch, we've deliberately kept them on the conservative side - with no limit on the prices players may offer, price manipulation is considerably easier here than it was in 2007. Over time we expect to be able to relax the limits.

Price manipulation

Players or groups of players should not attempt to manipulate the price of items through controlling their supply or demand. We are considering this to be a reportable offence under item scamming. We have multiple back-end systems that will allow us to identify manipulation proactively and will be keeping a very close eye on any attempts at price manipulation through the Grand Exchange.

Item sets

The Exchange clerks can pack items into sets, like the Trading Post used to do. For this update, we've added a few more sets to their list. There are a lot more we'd like to do in future updates, when time permits.



Grimy herbs

For our grimy herb graphic, we've currently preserved the Old School herb model, so the "cleaned" herbs look exactly like the identified herbs always did. However, we've had a few players saying they'd rather we changed the model to match what RuneScape 3's used over the years. If that's something you'd like, we'll put it in a poll forthwith.


In other news...

• Our 2nd birthday party has now come to an end. We've removed the leftover cake before it goes mouldy.
• Moved a Goblin near Lumbridge that spawned in a tree.
• Added some Guards to the roof of Varrock Palace.
• Increased the amount of Moss giants in Varrock sewers.

Discuss this update on our forums.

Special thanks to Mod James H for lending his time to help test the Grand Exchange.

Join us later today for the Old School developer Q&A on the RuneScape Twitch chanel. We'll be answering the most pressing questions from the Old School community live at 5pm GMT.

Mods Archie, Ash, Ghost, Ian, John C, Mat K, Reach, Ronan, Weath

Players or groups of players should not attempt to manipulate the price of items through controlling their supply or demand. We are considering this to be a reportable offence under item scamming. We have multiple back-end systems that will allow us to identify manipulation proactively and will be keeping a very close eye on any attempts at price manipulation through the Grand Exchange.

That's huge. I never thought I'd see the day where the economy would be defended by Jagex.

As for the state of the Grand Exchange right now, they did set the prices very high. Currently, a cut red topaz has a GE price of 21k. The in game economy has tanked at the moment, but it should settle out within a week or two.

Interesting that they implement this into OSRS, but not the main game. Granted, the main game economy is much larger and harder to manipulate, but still doable. This is a much smaller economy to work with, but why should it be treated differently? Also, why is price manipulation reportable? It's not the same as item scamming as they so claim. The economy is more like a stock market with the GE. No one said people have to buy anything at a given price. Prices almost always come down eventually, too.

We have actually (accidentally) influenced the market a few times. I remember a skill of the month (I think it was Herblore) where between the time of the announcement and the beginning of the month, the price of herbs and their secondaries shot up almost 25%.

Are you sure you're not giving yourself a little too much credit there ? I mean there could be other factors/merch clans/whatever going on simultaneously. It just doesn't feel like (no offense) ~10 people seriously competing for SOTM could drive up prices that much on their own buying up supplies.

In a way, price manipulation IS scamming. A group of players should not be able to buy up 95+% of an item, then sell it back to the player base at double or triple the price. What would you do if you had to buy something while the price tripled after a man made shortage? The prices only come down because the items are reintroduced into the market. Also, with the stock market analogy, you don't see a group of 5 people buy almost every stock for a company, that just doesn't happen.