Talk:Bucket of milk

Supposed price manipulation by merch clan
An image showing an usual price drop in the Grand Exchange for this item has been asserted to be the result of price manipulation by a merchant clan.

Take a more careful look at this graph, and note that there was a steady rise in price of the price of this item for quite some time, and then a very sudden drop. This was a drop of 76% in the span of a single day. Think about that carefully. Supposedly, according to the rules of the Grand Exchange, the price of an item can only go up or down by 5% per day. You can only set an offer at 5% less than the current price (rounded up to the nearest coin). For this to have gone down 76% in value by players, it would have required a minimum of at least 15 days of concentrated and deliberate effort on the part of the players involved... both players selling in massive numbers and others buying this item to trigger the GE price change effects. 15 days... and that certainly doesn't show up in the price chart at all.

More significantly, even assuming this "evil" merchant clan was trying to do this, by lowering (not raising) the price here this clan obviously has an incredible stock of this item. You have to wonder how many billion buckets of milk this clan must have had in order to manipulate the market like this, and why they wasted their effort over the course of six months to keep the price down so low. Assuming that the price of the buckets of milk was at 50 coins each.... that is nearly 100 billion coins that this clan deliberately threw away to force the price of this item down. Not only that, but think of all of the people who due to the generosity of this merch clan who suddenly had a cheap supply of buckets of milk that is intentionally losing money to drive the price of a backwater commodity like milk buckets down.

The much better explanation is that somebody at Jagex with direct access to the grand exchange database intentionally lowered the price of this item, contrary to player demand or supply. In fact, with the price so low, nobody was willing to even sell this item at all, so the price simply languished at a pathetic 12 coins until somebody started to "test the market" again and push the price up.

Also, the two flat areas on this graph clearly show a price cap on the part of Jagex too, where they artificially forced the price to remain for some time at first 12 coins each then 22 coins for several months. Only very recently (September 2009) was the price cap lifted again to allow the price of this item to rise.

Don't blame merch clans on this price manipulation, blame Jagex. I don't know why they don't want buckets of milk to trade on the Grand Exchange, but it is pretty obvious that this item was deliberately set up so it couldn't trade on the GE. --Robert Horning 14:56, September 5, 2009 (UTC)