[cynest]

Even though I had no clue about actual economics at the time, this is what I saw as so screwy in runescape. A lot of the ingame money came from alchemy. A few clever people had figured out that the two of the highest tier bows were easy to produce en masse and so created a market for their components. Since runescape does not have a shard system like WoW or other MMOs, this particular market was huge. RMT (real money traders) came in and automated the gathering of these components. Jagex tried numerous methods of eliminating RMT from the game, including fixing ingame prices to within a certain amount. Not sure what happened then, but I still can't figure out why they didn't simply fix the mechanic at the heart of it.

[kragniz]

Jagex eventually reversed it's decision on the fixing of prices and returned free trade. This had the effect of bringing back a large number of bots, causing huge inflation of certain items and a large devaluation of item which bots can produce easily.

The economy is now hugely imbalanced, so performing common actions such as crafting a sword from metal will cause you to lose a fair amount of money. There is also no real item sink because the consequence of death from npcs has been reduced (keeping most of the item you where holding when you died) and PvP (player versus player) has been neglected to the point where few players engage in the activity.

[cynest]

That's disappointing.