Come back, n00b!

Do you  reminisce about the days when a player whose username consisted of several substitutions of English characters for numbers, in the "language" known as "1337," would pester you for stuff?  Do you miss the days when these players would eagerly type their unsolicited sob stories via private messaging or even public chat in the hope of earning your sympathy?  Do you recall fondly when seemingly an endless amount of people lost their stuff in the wilderness, and naturally, as the most experienced person on their friends list, they turned to you for financial aid?

All veteran players on RuneScape, even those who plead their innocence of committing the act firsthand, can distinctly recall a player recently engaged in the act of shooing a "n00b."  "N00b," or equivalently "noob," which technically refers to "A person who, regardless of experience, lacks the skill or [competence] to be competitive in a certain game" [2] is a derogatory term, despite its derivation from "newbie," which simply means "new player."  However, in RuneScape, and perhaps other games, this insult is overused.

Countless times, comments similar to "Go away, noob!" have been reiterated regardless of whether the player is requesting free items or money, or truly seeking advice in order to earn their own money independently.  Together with the inclusion of more higher level game content, the literal (and only) interpretation of these comments created a slow trickle of players who joined and shortly left.  This yielded to a mass exodus via the "snowball effect," effectively responsible for some of the unpleasant changes seen since Free Trade and the Wilderness were released. While song lyrics are hardly a repository for sound advice, they are often quite applicable (modulo a change of grammar), i.e. "Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you got 'till it's gone" [1].

These noobs, the influx of fresh players into RuneScape, were the foundation under which the RuneScape economy was set upon.  By performing remedial tasks they generated raw resources, which other players could not be bothered to collect themselves because they sought fast experience in comparison with the monetary gain that harvesting raw materials yielded.  For example, consider rune essence, which is required to train the Runecrafting skill, known for being one of the slowest and most tedious to train (at least prior to the advent of new minigames, teleport tabs, and various other rewards).  To obtain a high level, a player may feasibly have used hundreds of thousands of essence that they bought from the Grand Exchange.

Of course, someone had to mine that essence, a repetitive task which consists of mining one "inventory," or 28 essence at a time, at a rate of an inventory a minute or so.  Formerly, when the price of essence was higher, this provided substantial income (scaled to the needs of a new player), hence providing a good balance.  But as these new players slowed ceased to exist, the price of essence crept up-or at least, that would have been the natural conclusion.  However, some people began to see a way to enrich themselves by creating automated scripts called "bots" to mine the rune essence while paying little or no attention to the game themselves, with the idea of selling the gold for real money to other players.

At first this idea may have seemed preposterous-why would people trade their real cash for virtual currency?  But apparently some new players weighed the calculation and must have found that spending an hour working, or a week of their allowance, to buy their way into the game was more desirable than grinding out money for hours.  Encouraged by the revenue, the companies botting set up even more automated scripts and advertised in all places where players congregated: Lumbridge, the Grand Exchange, Edgeville, etc.  As more and more people bought gold, the market was flooded with the supply of raw commodities and their price dropped through the snowball effect.  Not only did the price of gold in dollars drop (at least according to the advertisers' quoted prices), but earning the same amount of gold as a noob became impossible.  Earning 10M would require 20 or 30 hours of mining rune essence, or less than one hour of wages at minimum wage.  All of this was due to the absence of noobs.

At first, the higher level players enjoying soaring profits from crafting a glut of these materials into more valuable end products, such as nature runes for alching.  But before long bots were also set up for those methods, to earn more gold to sell to customers.  Now, when entering the game surrounded by advertisements to buy 10M for a relatively trivial amount of real money and no other apparent way to make money, new players quickly bifurcate into two groups: they quit or buy money.

The economic stability and future of the RuneSacpe economy may be uncertain, but there is one thing I will declare with certitude: I miss the noobs.

Note: Buying RuneScape gold or items for real money or any other service outside of RuneScape constitutes "Real World Trading" and is a breach of RuneScape's Terms and conditions.  It is strongly recommended that you do NOT engage in such transactions.

References

[1] "Big Yellow Taxi Lyrics."  lyrics007.com.  N.p., 3 June 2010. Web.  21 October, 2011.  <http://www.lyrics007.com/Counting%20Crows%20Lyrics/Big%20Yellow%20Taxi%20Lyrics.html>;

[2] "Urban Dictionary: n00b"  Runescape.com.  N.p., 2 December 2003.  Web.  21 October, 2011.  <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=n00b>;