As the year comes to a close and we prepare for the holiday season, we look back the the economy in Runescape this year. Many of the updates Jagex made this year had a profound effect on the games economy. Many updates did this, but only the most important ones of the year are listed below.

We will work backwards and begin with the Potions, Spells and Runes update. This update included an update to Runecrafting, which now allowd a player with lower Runecrafting than needed to have a change at making double runes. This put more runes into the game, and brought some of the prices to different highs and lows. Nature runes were expected to crash, but not much of a crash happened right away. Next up is the Anti-76king Measures. This was an issue Jagex addressed the issue, saying “‘76k’ing has become a very common practice. We’ve never been happy about this as we believe it spoils the game experience for players who want to play on PvP. . . ” The update they released worked not in stopping 76king, but slowing it down. It was soon found out shortly after the update that players could still do the trick, with three people instead of two people. This issue is still big in creating inflation, along with PvP itself, by the worth of the drops players receive.

To many people, the High-level Herblore update was one in which players with high Herblore benefited. This update released new potions, which were more powerful than the super potions, which are tradable. These new potions are not tradable, making the herbs that make these potions increase in price at the time. As always, the herbs returned to their original price once the rush for these new potions came about. One of the things that made a lot of players happy was the Personalized Shops. This update made the amount of stock in each shop particular to your account, not affected by other players. This allowed the prices on common items such as runes to be relaxed on the Grand Exchange- that is the minimum price decreased and the maximum price increased. This also took away unlimited stocks on all items, so now players cannot buy large amounts of runes from the shop. Ever been cleaning out your bank and selling junk to the general store? Well, because of this update, other players junk is not sitting in the general store, so you may sell your junk to it.

One of the biggest updates of the year was the PvP Updates The Bounty Craters were temporarily closed, where monsters were put in later. Jagex added the Bounty Hunter Wilderness worlds, where the entire wilderness is PvP. The Changes to PvP, Bounty Hunter, and gravestones update was added shortly after. All of these updates contributed to the huge amount of money that is made in PvP. The “loot drops”, some worth upwards of 5m gp, give huge amounts of money to pkers. This drove inflation through the roof, and began the upward trend on the price of items through the rest of 2009.

Our last updates are the Random Events update, and the Bank update. Obviously, the bank update had no profound effect on the economy, but it did help us organize our banks more, and keeps our money safe. However, the Random Events update was possibly the best update through the year. It not only made events more entertaining, but made the reward worth it. The new rewards can be worth a fine amount of gp, especially with the price of some herbs.

That would be all for this week. I would like to wish everyone Happy Holidays, and Happy New Years.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future Economy-related articles, please PM me on the forums, or leave a comment.