The Runescape Climbing Boot Scandle

POST BY Mod Emilee
(mod emilee's runescape forum picture)


To say that this update provokes inflation is like saying that taking home a bucket of sand from the beach will make it disappear. The amount of GP that enter and leave the game on a daily basis is about 8 to 10 times as high as the amount that entered the game’s economy yesterday by increasing the value of the climbing boots. Basically, the same amount of money per person could be made by chopping yew logs for a couple of hours and then alching the bows made - a relatively small one-off addition to the coins going through the game.

Although there were occasional outliers, the distribution of the number of boots between players was pretty even. 55% of people had one pair of boots; 99 % of people had fewer than 50 pairs of boots (which if they sold to the shop for 45k would give 2.25 mil).


"Why would you give an item an increased value based on its bonuses and then let it be alched for more than boots with better bonuses, just because they cannot be bought from a shop?"

What we wanted to achieve is that players who use these boots for their bonuses, in particular on PvP and Bounty worlds, are risking an appropriate amount of GP that has a resemblance of the bonuses that they get from them. So far, it was very cheap to get good stats on the boots slot – too cheap.

We want the shop to provide a back-up supply of reasonable boots in the event that people aren’t fighting for good rune and dragon boots from drops, not to undermine the market for those rewards. So the price has to be fairly high to achieve this.


"Why only climbing boots? There are many items that have better bonuses. For example, a strength amulet has +10 Strength bonus, should we be expecting a huge rise in that item too?"

The aim of this change was not to re-value items based on their stats, but to deal with a huge number of people trying to buy these boots for such a low value that there was no supply.

The climbing boots were high on our list of items to re-evaluate due to the scale of imbalance in their supply and demand, and generally, other items don’t have the same problem so we wouldn’t expect to make a similar drastic change elsewhere.


"PLEASE, explain your logic behind this. Climbing boots high alch for 45k. Is there a reason for this? You're already raising an item by 74.8k (which nobody is going to buy now) and you've given it a huge alching price!

Dragon Boots high alch for 12k
Rune Boots high alch for 7.5k

Both of these boots have better stats. Why do climbing boots have such a high alch price?"

Dragon boots and rune boots are both more important items in the game than climbing boots. They are drops on specific NPCs that people can go out to get, and we want them to hold value. In re-valuing the climbing boots we tried to price them so that the armoured boots would generally be attractive in comparison.


"Other items change their price with supply and demand, why was this item manually changed?"

The boots were not changing in price with supply and demand, as the Grand Exchange was unable to raise the price sufficiently above the low shop price. So even though there were thousands of people wanting to buy the climbing boots, and prepared to pay a higher market price, unless we changed the intrinsic value of the boots, they could not go to the price which the market needed to balance supply and demand.



THIS IS MOD MARK'S (Mark Gerhard) ORIGINAL POST

(mod mark's runescape avatar)


Hi all,

We have recently made some changes to the price of climbing boots in the game, and changed the objects gained at the end of the Death Plateau quest to reflect these changes.

The recent change to the climbing boots was necessary to make: they weren’t designed well and did not fit in with the high standards we have regarding our equipment and prices. There are always thousands of accounts trying to buy these boots on the GE and very few trying to sell them, because they had low shop prices and complications to obtain in the first place. Rather than ‘nerf’ the boots or force players to buy other boots, we decided to raise the market price of the boots to reflect the price that players were actually paying in player-to-player trades. They also reflect the market price of other strength-boosting equipment.

We do not intend to rollback this change.

We researched this solution thoroughly before making the change. We knew that a few accounts would gain millions of gold from these changes. A tiny number of accounts had over 1000 of these boots, and have made a lot of cash in a very short period of time. Realistically, these accounts have always had the potential to make that sort of cash from the boots (based on what we know players were trading for outside of the GE), we have just made it easier for them to do so.

We made the call to allow everyone to benefit from this change, rather than for people to suffer from it as a nerf would have done. I am sorry if you feel you have suffered because you didn’t own any, but this is a short-term issue and is truly not as extreme as some individuals are making out.


Mod_Mark
RS Lead Designer


to read people's responses on this scandle click here.

Honestly if you want to hear my opinion this update was completely stupid and unnecessary like most of the public think of course. Which is leading to my new comment I am going to add into my signature.


It takes one person to change a light bulb, but it takes 350k+ people to complain how it was better before.