RuneScape talk:Grand Exchange Market Watch/Archive 1

Keeping up with the Exchange
I'm not sure this can realistically be kept up... JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot 12:06, 29 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not suggesting here that we are going to get all prices for every item updated every day. I'm not expecting that at all.  But what I'm trying to do is to set up a place that people can find out what the rough prices are for something they may be making, and get a pretty good idea on some ways they can make money by working some of the "in-between" steps for many of the skills.  This is particularly for things like bars, uncooked food, and other items that would be great for helping a skill to gain experience.


 * Also, we won't know if this can't be kept up if we don't try in the first place. I think we can get a huge response from the Runescape community if we get this "advertised" properly.  Word of mouth alone is likely to get many people coming here to help out.  --Robert Horning 21:48, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
 * It's going to be even harder than street prices. Blazel 19:53, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * How is this going to be harder than street prices? Street prices implies that you have actually performed the trade on that item regularly, and have a strong understanding of economics to identify supply and demand.  I was able to do that with gemstones and make a modest profit, but it was incredibly tough.  I never got into the ore market at all because I simply didn't have the cash to make it... and the street market was so tight that a wrong move and you could lose your shirt financially.  A little bit before the Grand Exchange I was making a very minor amount of money off of purchasing talismans from lvl-3 players, but it was more charity than actually trying to make a serious profit from them.  I bought body talismans for 10 coins each, and earned some modest money crafting them at the alter (good Runecrafting exp too!) and selling tiaras at the general store.
 * On the contrary, exchange prices are very easy to find, and can be verified by somebody who hasn't even been involved with trading that particular item. You just have to find an empty slot at the exchange and "buy" the item (but don't put any coins into the transaction) to get the price.  It took me all of about 5 minutes to update the entire Runecrafting price page... including editing the pages and putting the updated numbers in there.  This includes the talismans and tiaras... not just the runes themselves.  There is no way I could have possibly done this sort of price search on street prices before the grand exchange... and even now I think street prices that are substantially different from G.E. prices are just merchants who are scamming (for the most part... there are some valid exceptions).  Once the Grand Exchange settles down into some realistic price ranges for some of the wacked out prices (Body runes, for instance), you will only find a price difference due to "local" demand... such as selling air tiaras at Falador on world 16.  --Robert Horning 02:08, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Last Priced Date
Can I suggest including a 'last priced date' column somewhere in the tables which will let people know when each individual price was last updated. That will tell how fresh/stale a price is and roughly how accurate it is. It will also give a feel for how relevant the figures are as a whole and whether they are keeping up with the more dynamic nature of the exhange (as compared to street prices). Pointy 02:40, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm trying to think of a method we can use to put this date in easily and painlessly. I'll have to dig through the MediaWiki help pages to see how this could be done.  This is an excellent suggestion, however.  It would also help to identify what items perhaps would need a quick check in terms of updating to something more current.  --Robert Horning 03:12, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Five tildes gives you the date... JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  09:22, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * That "works" and does solve the immediate short term problem, but it makes updating the prices something much more complex. I'm trying to see how we can "automate" the process where the date of the last page edit will show up instead of forcing the people updating the prices to have to manually delete the previous date and add the five tildas, as you are suggesting here.  And not mess that up with four or six tildas by mistake.  The goal here is to simply type in the price with one quick edit and not make this any more complicated than that.  --Robert Horning 12:23, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * FYI, I got this featured added in (I hope... it still needs to be "tested" to see it works properly). Instead of the 5 tildas, I'm using the "Magic word" (A MediaWiki term) of "REVISIONMONTH", "REVISIONDAY", and "REVISIONYEAR" to calculate the date a page was last updated.  I tried to throw this formula into another template, but instead it grabbed the date of the last revision of the template rather than the date of the page it was included on.  Sometimes MediaWiki can be very frustrating.  I'm using the American standard of Month/Day/Year for the date, and this can be easily changed (well, sort of) if this should be updated to a more "British" standard.  How is this used in England anyway?  "Continential Europe" is Day/Month/Year, but I think English society does things a little different.  I do think this will help to note stale numbers.  Thanks for the excellent suggestion!  --Robert Horning 17:39, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * English is day month year. JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  19:03, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll try to switch it to that format.  I need to fix this problem anyway, as it seems to be now returning the date that the Market Watch page was last edited, and not when the actual price was changed.  Arrrrgh!  And the documentation on this stuff is about as terse as it gets!  --Robert Horning 19:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, the "REVISIONMONTH", "REVISIONDAY", and "REVISIONYEAR" return the month, day and year of the modification of the actual page being displayed, not the date of the included template page. For example, the price on the steel pickaxe was updated on Dec 3, but the Grand Exchange Market Watch/Mining page still shows Dec 1. This is because the Grand Exchange Market Watch/Mining page was last edited on Dec 1. I do not know of a way to get the last modification date of the template itself shown (I would love to know). 10:49, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I have an open request on the MediaWiki Support desk asking for some help on this. I think, unfortunately, this is going to turn into a low-priority bugzilla request (it happens), but it certainly would be cool to accomplish.  I'm going to try and work on some other parts of the items and do some more tweaking... and try to put the Market Watch prices into the item pages.  The goal here really is to edit once and update everywhere.  --Robert Horning 14:34, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
 * As a middle-ground you could consider using 'dd MMM yyyy' if the templates support it - e.g. '01 Dec 2007'. That will avoid confusion on both sides of the ocean :-). You might also want to check if the "wikitable sortable" javascript is able to sort rows in your chosen format before making a decision. Pointy 21:40, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Tasks to get this working
I'm trying to work on a generic "template" that can be used to help update this price throughout the whole wiki. Think of it this way: If you know that the price of air runes has changed, you can "edit" the information in one place, and all of the associated pages (including the "item" page in this wiki) where the G.E. price is going to be listed will update simultaneously.

There are a few ideas I'm working on, and borrowing heavily from Wikimedia projects on how some of the templates have been used to compartmentalize the information into a sort of database.

Mainly, it is trying to get this to be easily updated is why it is taking me a bit longer to get all of this put together. --Robert Horning 21:48, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Why would any page outside the item pages have the Exchange price? =/ JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  19:05, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I brought this up in the forums, asking if this was something that would be reasonable to include here on this Wiki. I got several supportive nods, and the only detractors were those who thought it was a waste of time.  Not one person thought this would be inappropriate for this Wiki... if you disagree, please note the reason why this shouldn't be here.
 * The purpose for doing all of this is to put all of the market information together in one neat package, so you can review pricing information efficiently. Jagex could do this as well, but they aren't for some reason or another... I'm just trying to fill an information niche that could also be used to help promote this Wiki as offering something unique that the other Runescape fansites currently don't offer.  I really believe this is something that is almost uniquely qualified as something a wiki does best... in terms of a collaboratively edited list that many people can update simultaneously.
 * If you don't think this information belongs outside of the item pages...please let me know now before I waste any more of my time when you are likely to get this all deleted. --Robert Horning 19:27, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I can't "get things deleted", nor did I ever say this was inappropriate. O.o I just think this won't get kept up. JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  19:32, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I see no reason why the prices should be anywhere but the item's infobox on its page. A user can simply go to the item's page and see the GE value there - there's no reason to make it more complicated. Oddlyoko talk 19:44, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * On second thought, seeing that the items are all grouped up into one page - not to mention I like how it's all presented - this has some potential. Perhaps updating every "grouping" every so often, but at different times than other "groupings" so there's not a ton of work on some price-update-day :P Oddlyoko talk 19:51, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Why this will be kept up
I understand Vimescarrot's skeptical view that this is something that won't be kept current on all of the items all of the time. That is certainly a strong opinion on the topic, and something that certainly has some justification for thinking this may be a serious problem.

First of all, I'd like to point out that this "project" is going to be used to keep the item pages current as well as setting up a page to scan for related items. Even if we just keep the information on the item pages alone, there still is going to be a need to update the value on the item pages from time to time. This way we can get the items updated quickly...and have those who like to concentrate on certain kinds of items to be able to help participate on keeping them current.

My experience in this matter is as a Wikibooks administrator, where I spent a small bit of time working on the Runescape Wikibook and keeping a close tab on the "street market" price page that was added. At the time (about 2 years ago) this was one of the busiest pages on all of Wikibooks, with updates to the prices coming about 100 times per day or more. And that was hardly what would be called a hot spot of activity for Runescape fan sites. Without going into the ugly details, the Runescape Wikibook was deleted from Wikibooks (along with all of the other game-related material), but it still gives me some knowledge that once word gets out that something like this exists... it will be used and will be kept current. Obscure items like a half an anchovy pizza may not get updated as often, but think it is reasonable to see things like runes, ores, and maybe even abyssal whips being tracked very closely.

The worst-case scenerio is that I put together all of these pages and they have very stale numbers. Nobody wants to come along and help update them, and they simply take up sever space on the Wikia webserver. IMHO that would also imply that nobody is reading these pages at all, and that they aren't really serving their purpose, but that is irrelevant to this discussion. If that is the case, it would be worth simply deleting all of these pages and be done with it.

I don't think these pages will be ignored, and on the contrary, I think it will actually bring people to this wiki that haven't been here before. But that is to be seen and isn't a sure thing. --Robert Horning 01:44, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Direction signs
Please help correcting the texts in "direction" column into the three icons. 15:10, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

General Information
Sorry to interrupt your project, I wanna ask what is meant by "direction" ? (and also I found that you've used both "Unch" and "Unchg" for "Unchange") Xdragonaite 14:00, 9 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Direction is supposed to mean how the market went from the previous update. If the price is lower than the older price, the market is "down" on that item.  Or "up" if the price is going higher.  I haven't standardized abbreviations on the exchange yet, and the word "unchanged" is IMHO just too big for that column for how little real information it sends.  A suggestion to have the old price and the new price used for calculating the price movement has been made, and that perhaps is the solution to making this more clear.
 * Please keep in mind that this is still at a beginning stage of development for this whole project, and nothing is set in stone on how this can be accomplished. Please help me out and make this something worth participating in.  --Robert Horning 16:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Combination Runes
I think you forgot the combination runes. I can't add them myself since I'm not p2p ATM. 23:02, 30 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I just added the combination runes, but like you, I'm generally not P2P, so I don't have some initial price values to put into these. --Robert Horning 13:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)


 * ELemental talisman? Rich Farmbrough, 03:20 16 December 2007 (GMT).


 * Added, although I don't have a price on it. --Robert Horning 05:10, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

great idea
this is a good idea, i use it a bit now. ps is the dow jones up or down? :P 11:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The Common Trade Index is definitely up. And has been climbing at a very steady pace.  In other words, fears of a "collapse" are completely unjustified... at least for commonly traded items.  Finished goods is another story, but I've covered that on the forums for this website and elsewhere... and talked about by even J-mods on the official forums (but in a state of denial on the official forums).


 * BTW, thanks for the endorsement. --Robert Horning 17:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)