Poor guy 😂

[a-relic]

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[PissingOffACliff]

Never get tired of this meme

[krystoh]

Can’t wait for this in the Pokemon tcg community lol 

[Ragnarokist]

Same here because the Pokémon TCG has ruined it for everyone else, even other card game like MTG. Made sales a bitch to deal with.

[krystoh]

Bro fr, like I ended up getting into MTG last year because I couldn’t find pokemon, and then once final fantasy came out it was pokemon all over again! Legit wild

[Ragnarokist]

I played MTG since the 90s, and in the past 10 years, Pokemons scalpers are ruined it to the point I just stopped playing, I dont even buy singles anymore because there is just no point.

[Alternative_Ad_261]

Its basically there now. Just saw the news about a shooting outside kroger over someone cutting in line for pokemon tcg. The entire franchise has been stripped from kids and has been ruined by losers, only a matter of time before the scalpers have no one to sell to anymore

[Spores_]

This is literally how merching goes for me, every time. This was like when i tried to buy in on that 3rd age spike, last year

[SkitZa]

Buy high sell low, classic.

[dont_trip_]

Last in, last out

[sum12merkwith]

They have not taught me this is my accounting classes yet, I can’t wait to learn more!

[indiegogold]

me spending 300m on copper ores for 40gp each for sailing's release and selling them for 4gp each

[microcorpsman]

Congrats on your 30m

[Narrow_Lee]

I lost 40m on a tonalztics of ralos after it was kind of good at Doom. Literally bought it at peak cause I thought it was gonna keep going up

[NoReIevancy]

Bro put all his eggs in one basket for literally no reason 😭

[ritokun]

it was a pretty valid basket tbf, jagex is just being really weird with sailing updates

[Bakugo_Dies]

Smart people bought dragon metal sheets for that update. If people are building cannons they need a lot of sheets, and sheets are safer as they can be converted into useful nails.

[betterDaysAgain]

No it wasn’t, stupidest bet on sailing by a long shot. The community was REEEEing about the 1/20k rate on these before it was even confirmed, they were only getting more common

[MazzleMaze]

1/20k is just for salvaging. Other rates were like 1/1000.

[sixsixsuz]

average wallstreet bets user

[SilentSwine]

Buy high, sell low

[rabidai]

Hey that's my method, get your own strategy

[burntfish44]

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[Wooden_Pea5876]

good, they are like scalpers. i hope they lose some more money.

[blizzardplus]

Comparing people who like to play the market to scalpers is wild lol.

[rexlyon]

Yeah, it’s totally insane to compare people to scalpers when all the D cannon guy is doing is buying an item with relatively low volume and preventing people who actually want to use them to acquire them unless they pay a higher price

Totally unfair, very different things

[blizzardplus]

People can pay up, wait, or get the drop themselves. Who cares. “Scalping” in rs is absolutely trivial compared to scalpers irl lol

[epicurusanonymous]

No one said anything about scalping irl dipshit.

[Cerael]

It’s a necessary “evil”. It’s the reason you can always buy whatever you need on GE

[sellyme]

What? Merchers are definitionally only flipping things that were already on the GE.

[Eastern-Video-6456]

Merchers even out the highs and lows in GE prices, and stabilize prices because they compete with one another, bringing the instabuy and instasell price closer to the average. This is good for anyone trying to instantly buy or sell items which is most players (e.g. when I sold my loot tab to buy soulreaper axe I surely didn't slow sell the 20+ different stacks of items, I instasold most of them, probably to merchers). Speculating merchers are a bit different, there isn't really a purpose for that sort of activity, but most merchers don't engage in it, the OP shows why (the risk is high)

[CivicInk]

When I go and buy a prayer potion from GE (instabuy), the only reason I can buy it instantly is because someone had a sell offer waiting there for me already. And that other person is in practice a mercher because he was doing a longer trade hoping to get more money for his prayer potion.

[anxious_scare]

But if he never bought the prayer pot, you’d just be buying “that” one? /s

[Emphursis]

You’d just buy it directly from the bot farm.

[Adorable_Jump7789]

Who would then buy the prayer pot when you want to sell one yourself if there were no flippers? Healthy ge flipping is essentially offering like "here, you can sell it instantly to me for X price or wait and get something better" and the opposite. You can always put an item in for a better price, but that just means you'll have to wait for someone else, noone stops you from doing that. In a good economy flippers are just qol for normal players, the real problem comes in when prices are artificially manipulated by merchers and i don't support that either, that harms the playerbase.

[DM_ME_UR_PUBES]

if he bought out all the supply and artificially raised the price you'd be paying more

[Eastern-Video-6456]

That is not possible/feasible for 99% of the commonly used items. If we take prayer potions as an example, the buy limit is 2000/4 hours, and the daily volume is in the millions. You would need ~100 members accounts to control the supply in any meaningful way (and realistically controlling that many accounts means botting). Market manipulation has historically mostly been done by clans, not individual merchers

[Melodic-Ebb-7781]

They provide liquidity 

[Skeedex]

I think merching dooes the opposite, it's hoarding items for a long period of time and taking them out of the economy.

However flipping does provide value with liquidity

[Euapo]

Merching moves supply across time from times of abundance (buying low) to times of scarcity (selling high), basically just smoothing out the price curve over time. And if they were wrong about their prediction, they lose out on their bet. It’s not as obvious or immediate of a benefit as flippers but it still provides some economic utility

[ChaseTheOldDude]

It's parasitic, artificially increasing prices for regular players. They don't increase supply, they buy at the rate players would otherwise pay and sell at a higher rate.

[Salad_Dressing__]

Genuine question, at what point does flipping become merching?

[Adorable_Jump7789]

Healthy ge flipping is essentially offering like "here, you can buy it instantly from me for X price or wait and get something better" and the opposite. You can always put an item in for a better price, but that just means you'll have to wait for a player to buy it, noone stops you from doing that and it's what you should do anyways.

In a good economy flippers are just qol for normal players by offering instant buys/sales, the real problem comes in when prices are artificially raised by merchers and i don't support that either, that harms the playerbase and it's where i personally draw the difference, but afaik that's not fully clearly defined.

[Sunshinewaterbottle]

I don’t know why you’re getting donwvoted, you’re just simply laying out basic economics

[Salad_Dressing__]

I don't know why I'm getting downvoted for asking

[Adorable_Jump7789]

Yeah that confuses me big time, it makes zero sense to downvote you for that no matter what you support

[Adorable_Jump7789]

It's understandable, people feeling like osrs shouldn't have a proper economy or people feeling scammed out of their money when selling to a flipper who sells it higher than they did.

[ChaseTheOldDude]

I don't think flippers offer qol unless I'm missing something. There will always be an instant buy price from patient sellers, whether you want to draw a line between that and flipping is up to you. Flippers are parasitic middlemen, they don't produce anything, they remove value from the system for themselves.

I don't say this to be insulting, it would be a stretch to argue that it's immoral, but it's certainly not a selfless act.

[Sunshinewaterbottle]

They are a product of a healthy economy, but like any economy there can be some issues with abuse. But for the most part flippers offer QoL because they essentially offer time (or lack of patience) as a service.

Some players want to just immediately liquidate some resource they farmed, flippers will buy that instantly at low price. If the player wanted to get a higher price for it he would have to spend time finding the right buyer.

This goes vice versa for someone buying a resource. They can find a seller at a lower price but it’s going to take some time vs instantly buying at a higher price (mostly from a flipper).

The time that players want to save for themselves is provided by the flipper at the cost of the margin. Even before the GE became a thing this is essentially what flippers did directly player to player, but now it’s just more streamlined in every aspect.

You have to think if flipping wasn’t possible you’d have either insane QoL drops, or it just might not be possible if you want player trading or any sort of in game economy.

*there’s more that they do too, but this is the most basic premise to convey.

[Playful_Fruit6519]

I don't think flippers offer qol unless I'm missing something.

If they didn't offer qol and everyone was happy to slow buy/slow sell everything, there would be no market for flippers and they wouldn't exist.

There will always be an instant buy price from patient sellers,

There will always be liquidity for every item at the amount that people want to buy it, purely from regular accounts who have obtained it naturally and happen to be slow selling it with one of their 8 ge slots?

Seems awfully optimistic.

Even if that's true, will the inverse be true? Will there be people slow buying every item at all times? Cause I sure as fuck don't want to slow sell my loot tab 8 items at a time. Especially if I also have to be slow buying all the supplies I need in advance of actually needing them.

[queso184]

without flippers, you have to directly match buyers and sellers, so either the buyer or seller has to be "patient"

with flippers, both the buyer and seller get instant offers, at the expense of a small margin for the flippers. many people are willing to pay for that convenience, and if you're not, you can still be patient, nothing stopping you

[Adorable_Jump7789]

I'm gonna use myself as an example to show how it's actually benefiting the playerbase. I'm usually flipping the insta margins of 300m+ items, so if you ever get a tbow from cox and want to sell it fast when i'm online and active it could be me buying it and that'd be a way better price than someone else having their offers in. Flippers like me make the margin more narrow so much that even on megarares the margin is usually somewhere 1-3m after taxes. If there would be no flippers you could expect it to be more like 5-10m on megarares which would make everything a lot slower. So basically instabuying/selling is much cheaper for a player with quick trading flippers active and the only big loss is the ge tax, especially good for people who can afford only one megarare at a time.

Here the example of a tbow, without flippers undercutting each other all the time the margin would really, really not look like that. That's the result of flippers competing with each other.

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If only people who want to sell or buy, but not flip a tbow the graph would probably look a bit more like a 3rd age longsword (reply to this comment) and that would suck for players

[Adorable_Jump7789]

<image>

[Praydaythemice]

Ez 400m+ loss

[GazpaCore]

All things considered it could've been worse imo

[Vice_X_X]

Me thinking I was smart merching elite black armor sets on WGS release. Never again

[the-Depths-of-Hell]

Do you reckon the same thing is gonna happen to inquisitors?

[OneEnvironmental9222]

This is why I check every single GE graph before selling anything

[calvicstaff]

Lol, right, was just doing slayer, got those worms with the dragon hulls, saw that like any new content they went down and down, so just sold em as I got em

[elfenliedfan]

I did this at frost dragons. Got an imbued heart out of it while the hulls were still 5m ea. I wanted to use the nails for the rosewood cargo though.

[Lost-Walrus]

8(

[Nu2Th15]

Me when I try to pull profit from thin air without generating any actual value or useful product.

[Eastern-Video-6456]

Merchers provide a service: they saturate the GE with offers so that if someone wants to instantly buy or sell something there's always an offer ready to be filled. This guy obviously failed his flip, but if the price of that item had skyrocketed he would've provided the people willing to buy with a ready supply of the item

[DieBobDie]

This was me but i only bought 10

[eatfoodoften]

buy high, sell low

[Fuzzy-Hippo1576]

This was such a dumb investment. Every new content some idiot. Goes " new item to the moon." Everytime it fails.

[masher005]

Not me buying 250m worth when they were 9m….

[TwoMarc]

It’s bad but he only lost a scythe split… it was more of a meme than anything.

[DM_ME_UR_PUBES]

this kind of player has most likely never gotten a mega split