I’ve been watching Colonello‘s videos on the history of OSRS (an MMORPG) and I find it funny how many of these stories boil down to

• Jagex introduced [some innocuous feature]
• players immediately found ways to exploit this to get fucktons of money at the expense of other players
• Jagex tried to fix the feature, but only made it worse. or they locked down the feature so tight that it wasn’t fun anymore. or they completely removed it. maybe all three, in that order

it reminds me of what happens IRL once you’ve got capitalism. like capitalism is an inherently adversarial system where people will find any possible way to make number go up at everyone else’s expense. and you can try to regulate it all you want but people will keep finding ways to exploit it

so yeah Jagex’s first mistake was giving OSRS capitalism and an actual in-game stock market. 95% of their problems followed from that

imagine: anarcho-communist Runescape

@kasdeya
I do not think there is such a thing as giving OSRS a stock market. The choice is between having a player made informal one or have a formal one.
I think capitalism is kinds fundamentally baked into games by the mere existence of a convinient inventory system.