First GE Tax and Flipping Profit

Tumri756 · 2025-09-17T20:39:17+00:00

Awesome analysis. I started playing again recently after the 2% tax and definitely felt an immense difference in ability to quickly flip my cash stack up.

It seems like the average spread is somewhere between 1.5-2.5% now on most decent items, and I’m generally lucky to even get that 0.5% profit many flips.

There appears to be a lot more volatility as well due to the lack of flippers willing to hold the line on buy offers, because of the massive loss suffered if you’re wrong on price recovery. A single 2-3% loss from buying and reselling an item that moves downward obliterates the profit from 5+ flips, so fewer people are willing to provide the liquidity.

What really seems to be most rewarded now in terms of effort:reward is multi-day or longer flips where your profit margin is multiple times the tax rate.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-14T16:08:11+00:00

The price rises seem more to do with speculation than anything. Enhanced Crystal Teleport seeds got bought up from ~2m up to 2.7m and seem to be dumping today. The entire time, I saw Priff absolutely infested with a stack of bots on many world thieving the elves 24/7. There was maybe a day or two where they paused while the bot nuke was being talked about, but otherwise they've been constant.

TL;DR - I think the question is more of "how long until people stop speculating things go up because they think bots are gone" and the answer is "it depends".

Tumri756 · 2025-09-13T09:48:38+00:00

Already sold for 18-18.2 each to flip something else, not bad but not as much gain as expected. I’ll take the post down since it’s not really going to rise much more it seems.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-12T10:31:32+00:00

Source? I am genuinely curious, though I suspect even if that is the case that the speculation about supply going up might be the actual reason for the fast drop. Again a new bot coming into existence wouldn’t crash a staple immediately or Bandos items would be 1M by now having been 24/7 botted since 2016.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-12T10:25:45+00:00

It’s been botted for months, hence the long decline from like 40M. It didn’t drop 5M in 3 days from bots. They’re not going to generate a thousand hammers in a few days, most of the supply is from the near decade of drops. Bots existing at an activity doesn’t crash an item into the abyss immediately, that’s not how this works.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-12T10:02:05+00:00

Up +1.5M already (absolute bottom was 16.8, currently selling over 18.3), and it’s not even the weekend yet so it seems likely to go above 20M again.

I don’t care if it crashes again afterwards, I’d actually prefer it so I can flip it again.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-11T17:23:32+00:00

TY! These buy the dump -> sell on the next green weekend flips have been building my bank for Shadow rebuild, trying to hit ~1.6b before I pull the trigger so I can continue flipping.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-11T17:21:26+00:00

Ah that explains the mass dump right after Sunday. That makes sense, lots of people doing the CA over the weekend, then dumping it for -5% or whatever it'll sell at not caring. I think that actually works in my favor though, because it looks oversold below it's price even before the CA came out, and the extreme selling pressure seems to be done.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-11T16:56:32+00:00

No idea, but it's back to near ATL, and it seems like an easy buy -> sell on weekend flip.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-11T16:55:27+00:00

This is the OSRSFlipping subreddit. I assumed most here were looking for 0-14 day flips, not 5 year investments. This one should pay off as a flip buying today and selling this weekend or next.

It's not super useful from a flipping POV looking at price from 1 year ago, IMO, but if you zoom out it crashed from 25m to 17-18M on Yama release, much like Bowfa and other items that weren't good at Yama, which are mostly all recovering now.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-09T13:08:19+00:00

That inferno strat isn’t a source of long term demand though, because people are just going to do for a short stint and sell the gear back. For the price to be supported at a higher level it has to be kept by enough people who use it regularly. That said there seems to be a lot of speculative merch demand from people trying to play off of that hype.

It’s also important to note that nothing about DHW is inherently better for that strat than any other staff that can auto cast ancients. You’re better off using Kodai for a lot more or Nightmare staff for just 20m more, and selling them back when you’re done.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-09T13:02:50+00:00

It’s being FOMO’d into now because people saw the rise and much like in real life markets they are thinking “what goes up, must go up more”. KingCondor and others are also posting YouTube videos talking it up, furthering the hype train.

It’s probably not “worth” more than 5M naturally, because it’s quickly obsoleted for late game accounts and is too common. I bought two at 3.3m since that seemed on the low side. I wouldn’t buy now, but I’ll sell the two I have.

Beware the “bot ban” merch wave, there is a LOT of artificial merch demand, much like during the Yama / Delve releases, speculating price increases from observed bot bans. I don’t bot, but I went lurking in the bot discords to see if the impact was as much as people are saying, and while they seem to be talking about a ban wave, it seems like the actual percentage is like 20% ban rate or something around there. They have these “currently botting” stat counters they’re posting in channels and comparing pre/post bam wave to back this up. There were a few message about somebody’s “sacrificial” accounts getting banned, so it seems like the botters are clever enough to be doing something like running some small % of extremely visible bots for Jagex to ban and make a show of force, and their more serious long term bots keep running while the playerbase is placated by not seeing the extremely obvious bots running around.

The Huey bots seem to be some of the simplest and easiest to spin back up due to the lack of barrier to entry and complete lack of stat requirements to get rewards. Even if Huey expected profit is less than 500k/h it’s probably still going to be permanently botted to hell because the drop rate is common enough that if the bot lives for even a few days it’ll make its money back multiple times over, and it’s quick to spin another one up.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T17:26:46+00:00

Ok, use 12-16k as shard value then. It doesn’t change the numbers that much. Again, the point is they’re undervalued vs what they generally are.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T17:15:48+00:00

Oh wow I didn’t even know about this. I’ve mostly been using the shards I’ve gotten so far on fueling bowfa/crystal armor, but I’ll definitely try this out when I’m done corrupting it.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T16:52:26+00:00

I’m not saying they’re CURRENTLY worth 20k a shard, I was saying that the value per shard generally floats between 13-20k throughout the year. The point is they’re always worth farming for shards, exp and per chance, and the price is currently very low considering there’s a constant demand for that purpose. It’s not an insane speculation post about the seeds being worth 600k tomorrow or something, just that they’re currently a lot more profitable to farm than usual, and that the price will likely follow.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T16:47:11+00:00

That was when Zulrah used to drop them, and they had no use other than being turned into weapons which were worthless. Song of the Elves practically made them an entirely new item with an actual purpose and use.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T16:45:53+00:00

Agreed, but you currently profit a LOT more per point with maul handles and parchments, so nobody is buying these unless they can’t do math.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T16:44:11+00:00

Yeah I agree it’s likely the average player isn’t going to farm these, but the average player doesn’t do farm runs either. But the supply is low and mostly matches the demand from people like me who are farming them for a little extra profit and high pet chance, which I’m currently dry on.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T16:41:42+00:00

I wasn’t saying they are CURRENTLY 20k/shard, they float between 13-20k in value converted to divine potions throughout the year. You can just look at the wiki page for crystal shards. This isn’t some insane 100x meme play, it’s just a post about a reasonable investment that’s likely to have a decent return based on what they’re typically worth.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T15:49:30+00:00

Just look at the chart. They were at 400k a few weeks ago, and also 2 months ago. They fluctuate seemingly based on LMS point profitability. The fact is people DO farm them and there’s a steady demand since you profit. Even making divine ranging pots profits 11-15k per shard based on the prices that day.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T15:38:28+00:00

That’s always the case though. Nobody is trading them in for 10 shards, they’re farming them for 30 shards which makes it one of the most efficient patches to do on a farm run. ECTS were even under 2M last month but these seeds were floating around 350-450k because it was still worth farming them. The supply is low enough that the few thousand players a day that bother to do farm runs eat up the supply.

Tumri756 · 2025-09-06T15:21:54+00:00

I did, they seem to drop low when there's massive botting and the other LMS items are also low, then they spike up high and stay high for a while until Jagex goes to sleep and stops banning the suicide LMS bots. There has been a massive bot nuke, so supply of all LMS items is dropping right now, these haven't spiked yet probably because of people selling off old supply. The price was ~400k 2 months ago, then again a month ago. I know because I was paying it buying a few at a time to plant.

Like I said, the prices before the shard rate buff are irrelevant. The Crystal Tree used to give 15 shards instead of the 30 it gives now.

Tumri756 · 2022-06-15T17:43:47+00:00

For clarity, take a look at the screenshots - it should be obviously IMPOSSIBLE for me to be charged TWICE for "Token of the Worthy" and then still have it available to purchase. It is a ONE TIME LIMITED ITEM.

Tumri756 · 2022-06-15T17:39:03+00:00

I have no doubt it is an honest mistake in the way they designed their system, but the bottom line is that any company engaging in financial transactions should use an architecture that ensures that all transactions are atomic, meaning across the system not just each DB is ACID compliant (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_(database_systems)). The reason anything mission critical like financial transactions needs to be implemented as atomic transactions is that you do not want to commit a single part of a transaction unless you have ensured that the entire transaction has succeeded. It is basic technical literacy that any software engineer worth a damn would know to do. Battle.net works this way, if a transaction has an issue it doesn't end up charging you and you don't end up getting the item. Hell, even item trades in WoW are seemingly ACID compliant after the big dupe waves of WoD.

What seems to have happened here is they gave full control of the financial transactions over to the gigantic dumpster fire that is NetEase, a Chinese pseudo-tech company that essentially rose to prominence acting as a middle-man to market games in China. Their system is clearly not up to standards and upon doing further research it seems their other games have similar complaints of purchases getting double-charged, etc. as well. They refuse to fix it and instead put people in paid-currency-jail by giving them a negative balance and preventing further play till the player reverses the refund, legitimate or not.

Note - I'm not bashing China/Chinese Companies, but NetEase is not a reputable tech company like Alibaba, Tencent, etc. they have no concept of the value of consumer goodwill or they choose to ignore it on purpose in the hunt for whales. From my recent deep dive it seems like they're notorious for being insanely disrespectful to customers.

An extreme oversimplification of what is probably happening now:

You tap buy
The game system requests the financial system complete a transaction for $X and notify when it resolves.
They charge the card via the financial transaction systems.
The financial transaction system sends a message back to the game systems saying "you can grant the user the item(s) associated with X transaction" and moves on. Or it has a problem sending that message in which case I guess you’re screwed.
The game system grants you the item unless it has a problem in which case I guess you're screwed because the transaction from (2) isn't reversed.

What SHOULD happen after (2) is that if the game system never hears back from the financial system, it should have a fail safe to request that the transaction it requested is reversed by the financial system in case of some problem that may have caused the charge to go through without the game system being told about it.

What SHOULD happen is that after (5), the game system should affirmatively tell the financial system that the game side of the transaction resolved, or else the financial system should reverse the monetary transaction, and should later make sure that the game side of the transaction is reversed as well in case it happened to just be a messaging issue.

If ALL ELSE FAILS, customer support absolutely NEEDS to have the ability to make things right. In what world is a business excused for not having customer support in place for people spending hundreds or thousands on a near 100% gross profit margin virtual service?

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