Runes of Magic US / AU

I like the idea of making diamonds bought from AH unable to be resold in AH. Another possibility is to bring back the diamond NPCs with the ability to gift disabled for those diamonds. Price and amount a day would take some consideration, but definitely a modest amount per day.

I meant to say unable to be sold in AH also. No, you couldn't solely exist on the NPC diamonds, nor would the company want that. More of a small inflation stopgap. Actually, nongiftable was my way of trying to stop the multiple account abuse which was rampant for the short time they were available on US servers. They also could price fix on AH diamond sales. Kind of a socialist action, but just throwing out ideas.

Quoted from "lesmceld"

No, you couldn't solely exist on the NPC diamonds...

I have a guildmate that managed to do that - farmed gold & traded for 15 diamonds each day.
I just didn't have the patience for it as I'm not much of a farmer. I prefer questing or running lower-level instances to see if the nice stuff will drop. (I have complete armor sets from Mystic Altar, for example.)
Actually, I suppose that counts as farming too!

What about adding another thing that will bust gs lazy asses. Like diamonds on AH can be only bought along with the gold you charge and with some extra like phirius tokens or honor points or honor badges, that will take them really off the market. Like most of gold sellers are toons recently created so no guild, no siege not even a drill ground, so if you're selling like 1000 dias charge the ammount of gold you wish and the AH will charge from the buyer 1000 honor points, let's say. End of gold spammers and the manipulation of AH.

btw, wtb dias 50K ea, pst

Quoted from "Murkalael"

What about adding another thing that will bust gs lazy asses. Like diamonds on AH can be only bought along with the gold you charge and with some extra like phirius tokens or honor points or honor badges, that will take them really off the market. Like most of gold sellers are toons recently created so no guild, no siege not even a drill ground, so if you're selling like 1000 dias charge the ammount of gold you wish and the AH will charge from the buyer 1000 honor points, let's say. End of gold spammers and the manipulation of AH.

btw, wtb dias 50K ea, pst

Sorry but requiring tokens or honor points to buy diamonds is just a completely dumb idea. It's already bad enough that you don't get any real amount of honor from anything. Tokens are limited from doing mini's daily (and even more so if you use them in the token shop). This will effectively put diamonds completely out of reach for a sizable segment of the player base.

The only real way to bring the prices down and bust the market cornering is to reduce dependance on those AH diamonds. Buying your own, even if it's only $10 a month and only on sale will do just that. Every diamond that is purchased by you for your own use helps to break the market cornering. If people stopped paying the stupid high prices in the AH, the prices would drop. Simple rule of economics, if product doesn't sell, lower the price point until it does. The reason diamonds are what they currently are is because players (yes gold bots too) buy at the posted prices. Players are solely responsible for the current state of diamond prices.

If they were to do this then any other piece of gear/stats/etc should also be bound and not able to be put back in the ah. Diamonds are NOT the only thing that people manipulate the market with. To try to address only the diamonds is plain and simply a selfish goal. The economy is NOT ruined by diamond prices alone... key word ALONE!.

People buy runes at cheap and resell high, people did it with PoMs, people do it with stats, I have seen people do it with gear and consumables too! So should they all be bound when bought in the AH? So you buy a piece of gear in the AH and you then cant resell it in the AH? Cause that is the same idea you are saying for diamond in the AH. Why are you only looking at one side of the coin?

OMG give it up already, the economy is bad because the massive influx of gold (as has been pointed out in MANY threads like this). This caused the inflation of EVERYTHING! It is not just diamond sellers. The only reason diamonds were so cheap before was cause of hackers putting up diamonds they got for free..... the ONLY reason diamonds were so low.

A diamond NPC would do NOTHING. I know this idea keeps coming up cause people keep going "I need to get diamonds cheap without spending $$". You all exploited the NPC to the point it got taken away!!!!! It is YOUR fault he is gone and not coming back. It has been said many times he was removed due to abuse of the mechanic and wont be coming back. LEAVE THE DEAD HORSE ALONE!

Diamond prices on Artemis finally hit critical mass and have been coming back down, slowly. The diamond sales, etc have been doing the job. If you server is not that way then no one is buying diamonds for cash.... and that is your fault. Gear prices have also leveled out to a more fair place.



If you don't like diamond prices DONT BUY THEM. Crack your wallet and spend some money. Quit crying that you think it is too hard to get diamonds without RL $$.

Ziav gets it! And hits the nail on the head. The community caused the problem. Don't then beg GF to fix it.

Quoted from "flatblack"

Really? Interesting, you're basing the statement off of what facts? Never once I have I ever seen anyone make the statement that diamond prices back in the day were simply because of hackers reselling free diamonds. I'm curious as to where you got/came up with this idea.

That part is true. I don't think he means "before" as in back in the Ch 1-2 days. I'm pretty sure he's referring to the relatively lower diamond prices before this wave of inflation after the Artemis duping incident.

People were duping even before everything went out of control, and that includes thousands of fake diamonds that were sold on the AH for several months. And yes, they admitted doing it. I remember there was big discussion on the forum during that time, debating whether they were duping for the greater benefit of the game, or destroying it. I think the second postulation eventually won out. I wonder if those threads got deleted.

Quoted from "flatblack"

So you assume anyone who complains about the economy or diamonds in general just can't afford it or is just cheap and won't open their wallet? I beg to differ. My wallet is wide open, and I spend plenty. You're trying to make this seem like a selfish venture when indeed it's not.

DK's assumption is not entirely fair, but not exactly unfounded for. I have seen many threads about diamond prices being too high in the game in the past few years - more than I can count. For the most part, diamond sellers seem content with the price. Diamond buyers, not so much.

Diamond buyers who sell on AH generally won't QQ about diamond prices, but will about gear and other AH prices. Plenty of threads about that, too. And his suggestion of making diamonds bound to account on purchasing them from AH doesn't affect people who buy diamonds in real life from selling them at whatever price they think they can get. I don't understand the anger his post generated. Most people don't like diamond resellers. Zidlef suggested making all diamonds bound and taking away AH diamonds. Seems that would have caused more anger than this suggestion. And if the greed of people who created multiple accounts was deplorable, then wouldn't the greed of reselling diamonds be deplorable also. Some greed is good and some is evil. It was/is just a discussion. The company will do what they think is in their best interests regardless of anything we think. As for resellers, yeah, I find them annoying. Plenty of diamond sellers themselves think the prices are plenty high or too high. With the reselling, just makes it more difficult for the prices to come down.

I totally agree that diamonds from ah should be bound. People that need diamonds Will buy them to use, then.

Well when diamonds could not be traded, items could only be gifted to other players, the economy and prices of diamonds were still very affordable. You have a few morons who can't play the game, don't care about the game, just want to control the monetary side of the game. Remove diamonds from AH, let people do it the old fashion way GIFT THE ITEMS as it was before.

I could buy out the AH of diamonds and repost them at 400K per easily, why don't i do it?? because it is moraly wrong. This is a game and so should be treated.

I am sitting on 10K diamons that i buy with my own money, i don't really buy them from AH. People will argue but i am F2P, this game is not worth for me to invest a dime in it, well you are part of the problem, you flat out said you do not care about the game so get out. The community doesn't need you, if you are not here for FUN go back to Wall Street and be a moron there. Control freaks are everywhere, they are losers in their own lives and come to a game to feel like winners, just because they can control one aspect of the game. I have tried every facets of this game, it has depth, fun, challenges etc overall a very well tought game, fix the bugs and problems and this game could be here for 20 years still.

The people that say otherwise should be here at all, go away, go play checkers or chess and leave the ones of us who are here for the FUN.

Also Lesmceld, i said either remove them from AH OR make them bound when you buy them off AH.

tyvm and keep this thread civil, altought you will see known endgamers come and derail it because they do not want discussions about this lol, sad people.

Quoted from "zidlef"

I am sitting on 10K diamonds that i buy with my own money, i don't really buy them from AH. People will argue but i am F2P, this game is not worth for me to invest a dime in it,

Say whaaaaaaaaat. You say you're F2P, with 10k diamonds, none of which are bought from the AH? What's your secret to getting all those diamonds?

Wall of text incoming, you've been warned.

I'd like to comment here but I'm going to lay down some ground rules for my comments:

1. I will be mainly discussing the situation on Osha, as this is my "home" server and I rarely play on the other US servers.
2. I will not name names, as that is a violation of the server rules.
3. I will offer opinions. MY opinions. And they will be marked as such.

Ahem. Diamond prices on Osha, over the past couple of months, have ranged between 110K each and around 280K each. This does NOT include spurious listings by imbeciles pricing single or low quantities of diamonds for between 1M-6M each. The price fluctuates within the range stated fairly often, but seems to have averaged around 200K per diamond for the period I mentioned.

Several servers (Reni, Palenque, and Artemis among them) were hit by hackers/dupers a few months ago. Many thousands of hacked/duped diamonds and probably BILLIONS of hacked/duped gold were dumped into their economies. That can help explain why diamonds have been reported recently on Palenque as selling for around 400K gold each. I haven't checked lately, but I will hazard a guess that diamonds are still selling for more on Reni and Artemis for much more than they are on Osha.

Osha didn't seem to have suffered from players who hacked or duped diamonds or gold several months ago, but we did have at least one player who CLAIMED to have duped gold. He shows up every so often and spams WC. Most of us ignore him, or troll him. And there were and are several players who joined his eponymous guild and, as such, are considered (by me) to have been tainted by it. They are no longer members of that guild, but have moved on to others.

There are a couple of other players who are self-admitted scammers. They appear on the server frequently, under several different character names, occasionally brag about their past scamming activities, and offer to sell or buy diamonds at "below market" prices. They also offer to sell gear items. Most people who have at least two brain cells to rub together will not traffic with them. I regularly troll them when they log in and begin their "advertising".

And then, there are a small handful of players on Osha who have systematically jacked prices on endgame gear on Osha to dizzying heights. This DOES have a relation to diamond prices, by the simple fact that those players who do buy diamonds from Gameforge but do not have hundreds of millions (or billions) of gold and cannot run endgame instances cannot also afford to buy that gear. One of these players, specifically, in a private channel discussion about Osha's economy, stated that his plan to "fix" the economy was to hike prices on EVERYTHING (gear, stats, crafted consumables, et cetera) astronomically. This would, as he stated, eventually REDUCE item prices across the board. It has not done so. If anything, average prices for all these things have gone up significantly over the past 3-4 months.

Opinion: You cannot fight inflation by raising prices and injecting even more money into an economy. Similarly, you cannot lower prices by raising them and then simply spreading gold around between the "haves". It does not work, and it does not REMOVE excess gold from said economy.

Question: Since when is an underdura lvl 75 Dim Light +16 with a US Flag agg worth 250 million gold? Some fool on Osha has been consistently listing one there in the AH for the past two months.

Question: Since when is an overdura (108/108, IIRC) lvl 80 Sandos Armor (chest piece) with the stat removed worth 250 million gold? Yet one of these is currently offered for sale in the Osha AH.

Opinion: Any server's economy can be damaged or ruined by "greedy" players who already have an abundance of gold, however they gained it (legally or not), and who have the ability to, along with their friends, "farm" endgame instances, strip the stats from the gear they acquire, then offer that gear for sale to the rest of the server at hideously expensive prices.

And, for your information, this kind of "inflation" has been going on since at least Chapter III, when Raksha Temple was released. I complained about it 'way back then.

Opinion: A strong gold sink of some kind would have REMOVED gold from every server's economy years ago, had it been implemented correctly. That didn't happen. And it is also my opinion that it is far too late to stick one into the game. There's too much gold floating around now.

Opinion: Removing diamonds/gold from the AH at this point would be counterproductive. People screamed for two years when money transactions were removed. Diamond sellers (gifters) charged high prices.

Opinion: Putting Owenstein back in the game would be useless, and players would abuse him again, as they did previously. Abuse? Yep. Create five new accounts, create eight toons per account, then send 2-5 million gold to each one. Have each one make daily diamond buys from the NPC for two weeks, or until the gold runs out. Have each one "gift" Item Shop stuff to the owner's main toon. There's your "abuse".

Fin: I can offer no "solutions", as I believe it is far too late for such to be effective now. I can only recommend that you neither buy nor sell diamonds or gold on your respective Auction Houses, and neither buy nor sell to acknowledged hackers, dupers (yes, several have returned from their bans) or acknowledged and known scammers. Urge your guildies and friends to avoid trafficking with them. And refuse to traffick with players who are selling gear and stats for hideous prices. If their market dries up, perhaps they'll "see the light" and do the right thing.

*standing applause*

I think you hit about everything on how I feel about the situation in a very concise, well throught out way. Far better than I think I could.


To go back to other points, Rui, thank you for jumping in on that. But ill extrapolate. Some of the people directly responsible (the hackers the themselves) came to the forums and admitted they were flooding the market with that purpose. I wont mention any names but it was openly admitted by the ones that did it, that they were doing it.

YOu are also right Rui... I did make an all statement instead of a most statement (which I normally don't do for the fact that it isn't fair unless it is truly an ALL statement). It is just that I get tired of hearing the same "diamonds are too expensive", "put the diamond NPC back in" and "Fix the economy GF!!" comments. If GF steps in and adjusts the economy in any way it will no longer be a player driven economy, which is the number 1 thing that MMOs brag about.

Zid, my love, also hitting nails on the head. You, me, nor GF can stop players who want to be... well... insert bad name here. It wont work. There will just be another .... insert bad name here.... that comes along and takes their place.


Pretty much if you don't like the in game gold price for diamonds... you have to stop buying them from them. Drive the demand down and prices will drop... Alternately as someone said, buy your own. Then you kill two birds with one stone.. prices will come down and you already have your diamonds.....

i get it Jester, the gold spammers buys them also anyways at any price, raising the diamond prices. Removing them from AH would fix that issue, no diamonds there, well no gold spammers. If a gold spammers does get diamonds, well ban the account and IP of the player who sold it to them. Cause and effect, you fix 2 problems at once.

Also on Mal, he is right on most of his post, too much gold on the servers that is not supposed to be there. I craft all type of stuff ingame and sell it, i sit on a nice stack of gold, but i buy my own diamonds and sell in guild only. Retracing huge sums of gold shouldn't be that hard, how many times have i called out in world : this person is selling stones in ammuniyion for 100M each and this player bought 20 stacks of them, or a level 35 UD weapon for 350M with chinese names on it. To have people come at me in world with shut up Zid, no one cares blablabla, well that tells me they were in on it.

We have a respectful guild, great guildies, get their own diamonds, work hard in guild to help whoever needs it, we might not be endgame guild, but damn we are honest, no botters, no hackers/dupers/cheaters etc

It'S just that people want the easy way to things all the time, they will cheat and use any means necessary, which is pretty sad and then complain: omg i got banned, LOL got what you deserve.

They shuld just have someone look into AH transaction and any transfer of gold over 50M between players to see the source of it. should not be that hard to do i would think. Have the cheaters shake in their boots a bit and ban them

Quoted from "zidlef"

Removing them from AH would fix that issue, no diamonds there, well no gold spammers.

RoM had tons of gold spammers even before you could trade diamonds in the AH... Unless we're not talking about the same RoM here lol.

Quoted from "Dkjester"

*standing applause*

Quoted from "Dkjester"

I think you hit about everything on how I feel about the situation in a very concise, well throught out way. Far better than I think I could.

I've been thinking about this issue for rather a long time. And it took me over an hour to write that last screed. And about as long to write this one, too.

I did come up with one VERY draconian solution to the "excess gold problem". But, it would have to be done by Gameforge and I guaran-damn-tee that the players it would affect would be EXTREMELY unhappy, likely to the point of ragequitting. I'm not making a recommendation that it be used, but here it is:

Scan all player accounts and characters, regardless of level or activity. This would be a long, tiresome, and tedious process. Gameforge might be able to write a script to semi-automate and speed it up. Tag each character on each account that has gold in excess of...let's say 200M gold. Write a script that would permanently remove from those toons any gold in excess of 200M.

At the same time, RW recodes the game so that 1.) no toon could hold more than 200M gold, and recode the AH so that the MAXIMUM selling price of ANY item is...let's say, 100M gold.

Implement the changes at essentially the same time, UNANNOUNCED (other than being a part of regular Maintenance), with the code patch coming first, then keep the servers down until the gold-removing script has been run. The character databases would have to be backed up prior to running the script and then the modified databases would have to be once again scanned to make sure that the modified character money inventories are correct and intact.

As a "kindness", include in the script (or perhaps use a second script) that would remove items from the AH with buyout prices above 100M and return them via game mail to their owners.

Additionally, place a gold sink, such as Owenstein, back in the game.
10 diamonds per day, per ACCOUNT, at 25K per diamond. He might not get
used a lot, but whatever customers he has will be permanently REMOVING
gold from the game. And he wouldn't be abused as badly as he was, or
probably was. At least, it would be more difficult and time-consuming
for a given player to approach that level of abuse.

Bring the servers back online. Depending on how quickly the scripts can run, the game might not be available for as much as a day, maybe a bit longer. Insufficient data. If it does run that long, deliver to every toon some sort of "compensation", such as a couple of DRTs, or other Item Shop goodie.

The Result:

An insane amount of gold gets permanently removed from each server and solves several problems. It would then be up to the players to redefine HOW they set prices for the items they want to sell, keeping in mind that their characters, ALL OF THEM, on EVERY game account, are now limited to holding a MAXIMUM of 200M gold. (it would be interesting if Gameforge would let us know afterwards just how much gold was removed from each server by this scheme, but I don't know if they'd be willing to do that, or if they actually could keep track of the amount.)

It might work.

But I'd imagine a large number of "Carlos Slim"-type players would leave the game in a snit and badmouth Gameforge and Runewaker for taking such a heavy-handed action for a "problem" they can't seem to comprehend.

You know, that might not bother me all that much. They're among the ones who caused this problem in the first damned place. And it's not as if many or most of them are spending RL money with Gameforge.

Cue the QQ.

Coo-coo cachoo.

Chooka-chooka-choo.

I am The Walrus.