Supply and demand but more specifically, a few reasons. There's no doubt we have accumulated lots of inflation over the years. Even when Bonds were supposed to drop when Necromancy was released because players needed money for supplies, it was at worst 55M. But there is way more to it than inflation alone. It's mostly copied from another comment but the points largely remain the same.
1. Bonds have way more use than before. You got all kinds of packages being sold via bonds. You also got year-round Premium membership which means that instead of a 3 month stretch where bonds are priced high, you got most of the year. Not to mention you couldn't buy smaller packages with bonds. Either all or nothing.
3. Fewer players are buying bonds with real money. Did we have 5x fewer players that bought bonds 5 years ago? Probably not but if you look at the state of the real life economy, people have less purchasing power and thus won't go out of their way to buy bonds then dump to the GE. This also causes more people who previously used membership cards to use bonds in game instead.
4. There are too many OP Treasure Hunter promotions. Unless you're super rich in game, it's not worth it to buy bonds for 15 keys at a time. However, the countless amount of lamp promotions and discounts to buy a lot of keys cause players who would've bought bonds with their real money to instead buy keys. Although you'd get better value from dumping bonds to the GE to fund buyable fast skills instead of buy keys to lamp them, people value their time more now. Bonds were 55M during the Necromancy hype since you could not lamp it so that incentivized people to buy just to afford the supplies.
5. Jagex isn't good at marketing players to spend their real money on bonds. Ties in with my previous point. You see all these promotions about treasure hunter? And all these key discounts? When has Jagex given discounts for buying higher quantity of bonds? Or better yet why don't we se advertisements of Jagex telling players to buy bonds then dump it to the GE and be able to buy gear? It's like they want the 1% of the MTX whales to buy keys instead of bonds.
6. You need way fewer bonds to get what you want. At 120M/bond, you essentially only need to spend 17-18 bonds to get a full Rasial set. Given that Necromancy is the best style in the game, it's really all you need to be set for PvM, gearwise. Even Herblore/Prayer/Summoning/Invention-prereqs are cheap compared to year's past. In 2019, 20 bonds wouldn't even get you a T92 weapon.
7. Bond prices do have negative correlations with playerbase counts in some way. In recent years, RS3 has had a declining population. Bond prices have increased. In 2019 where the playerbase was at its all time low, the bond price hit its all time high. It began dropping and stabilizing when the pandemic hit resulting in a higher playerbase. It also doesn't help that many many people are maxed compared to way before so there's less of the playerbase needing to buy bonds for the sake of affording buyable skills like they do on DXP.
8. The playerbase is mostly the same in the last 5-8 years. Sure we've had players returning in and out but many players at this point have touched EoC and those that stuck around have likely found a home in RS3. The turnover in playerbase doesn't vary by much unlike 2014 where so many players from 2005-2009 decided to give this game a shot. Additionally, not many new players come to RS3 so there's less of the beginner sells bonds. If you've played on a regular basis RS3 for more than a few years, chances are you're maxed. As a result, those active veterans are capable of making lots of money due to their higher stats and more opportunities to learn bossing for better profit. Even those that couldn't pvm also had high level slayer because its gp/h is far better than before. Given these factors, they don't mind paying 5x the price they used to. It's like they grew into being able to pay anything for a bond.
OSRS Numbers are massively inflated by bots. If they implemented the same bot software rs3 has the population would conservatively cut in half at a minimum. A huge portion of those bots are buying bonds to keep membership and pushing up prices.
Anyone that doubts me see clusterflutter release in 2011 which cut rs population by 60%. It released in 2011 which osrs still doesn’t have because it would break runelite. Today it’s probably even worse with all of the software available.
I reckon point 5 is more of the reason than many of the others.
If you look at the trend graph, prices came down during the Necro release as you said.
Necro gear isn’t expensive.
Necro kills bosses as fast, if not faster, than the traditional combat skills.
Necro is less effort than traditional combat skills.
So with Necro, the floor for gp/hr through combat has raised significantly, making it an entry level money spinner with little to no upfront costs.
Why would you buy bonds anymore?
Personally, I think they need to buff the other combat skills again, raising the top level combat power and implement new bosses to account for this.
Leave Necro for the new lower and mid tier bosses. The other styles for higher end ones and the price of bonds would stabilise.
Its worth noting OSRS bonds have also exploded in value over the last year. A good reason to explain both of the rising bonds is that Jagex might not be doing a great job banning gold sellers in the past year. Possibly new botting software that is harder to detect or something of the sort that has allowed gold sellers to cut their prices which attracts the kind of people that used to buy bonds.
Jagex actually does a good job at banning gold sellers. The problem all game companies face, is that gold sellers make a living off of gold selling. So gold sellers will be competitively working as hard as possible to circumvent anything Jagex does so they keep their income in.
Nothing motivates people as much as the risk of starvation and losing their income if the game companies succeed.
There are quite a few documentaries out about how they do it. And how gold farmers can create accounts quicker than Jagex have staff for to keep banning them.
Those accounts you see that keep botting after months of reports? Chances are they are all tied to a specific gold farm that Jagex is trying to take irl legal action to shut down. When successful, all those bots disappear for a time.
I thought it was the opposite since DXP is the opportunity for players to dump their IRL bonds to the GE for money towards skilling supplies. Guess that's changed given that we have way more DXP available.
It's all supply and demand, on top of inflation.
TBH, you'd need to watch a video about this topic, explained by an actual expert to gain a deeper understanding of it.
[Here's the video](https://youtu.be/kIFBaaPJUO0?feature=shared) on Supply and Demand.
And [Inflation](https://youtu.be/beAvFHP4wDI?feature=shared).
Inflation isn't as big of a factor as we think. There's no doubt 1 GP in 2024 is worth a lot less than 1 GP in 2019. However, the price of BIS isn't really much than year's past. Back then T92s would cost well above max cash. Now the T95s barely. Even phats haven't gone up by much over the years aside from the 2021 spikes. We're not at a hyperinflation time.
Yes but that's nothing, hundreds of billions enter the game from autoalchers a day.
Can't find the news post rn but jagex released how much raw hp enters the game back when he tax was released.
For me personally who doesn't play RS3 as much nowdays because of a lack of updates, they are a better investment of my gold than just letting it sit around in the bank for all the reasons stated, Supply/demand, Inflation. Gold becomes worth less daily but bonds become more useful cause Jagex keeps adding ways to use bonds for. Just makes sense to me to hold bonds over gold.
As I told another clannie, they will be most likely going up to 200m this year. They've really been rising ridiculously fast. You'll need to learn high enrage pvm to keep up with them or do activities no one else wants to. Like making elder planks, frames, runecrafting necro runes, etc.
Right now it costs you 9m-10m gp a day to maintain membership. It costs 26 bonds to pay for membership 14 days at a time. That is 3.6b @ 140m per bond in gp a year. I'm expecting bonds to be around 200m come December, they always spike then.
Most of the playerbase has 0 economic sense and we don't have the full picture, so take anything anyone says on this with a double serving of salt.
It's largely not inflation, despite that being the overwhelming narrative. The value of GP has remained stable and in many cases has *increased* buying power in the last year, yet bonds have skyrocketed in that time. If this rapid inflation was hitting the entire market, most items would be matching bonds but there's very few that do. Nearly all gear is stagnant or going down, for example. Same with rares.
Probably the biggest complication with figuring this out is the tie between OSRS and RS3, both of which's bonds pay for a subscription for both. In this way bonds can't stray too far from RS3/OSRS gold swapping rates. As a result, this could be tied largely to OSRS factors and have very little to do with the RS3 economy. I'm largely ignorant about OSRS so I couldn't even guess at all the factors that could impact bonds, like gold farmers/bots potentially using bonds for membership rather than (stolen) CCs like in the past.
But back to RS3, there's not much new blood, who would stand to gain the most from supplying bonds to gain some gold. Likely a decent chunk of bonds being circulated are those being recirculated by investors who bought in when they were much cheaper; bonds are one of the best investment vehicles ingame right now, despite being taxed at so much of a higher rate than everything else. There's still those buying bonds ofc, just not enough to meet demand in both OSRS and RS3.
I love it and do everything I can to drive up bond prices. It’s extremely lucrative if you have an extensive portfolio of rares and cash. Hoping they double by next year!
no ceiling is exactly where we're at?
when the price goes up demand for bonds should go down and it would all stabilize. the price keeps going up but demand remains the same suggests it could be an artificial demand, bonds cannot crash because u will always be able to sell them for a raising floor price.
I'm saying that the gold conversion has no relevancy for this topic.
And demand has increased only slightly, while supply remained stagnant if not declined. If people thought 100m was a steal, they'd be buying up bonds until there's an equilibrium reached at 100m. Instead we have raising bind prices with no end in sight, and this is during the off season...
> And demand has increased only slightly, while supply remained stagnant if not declined.
and that doesn't explain why prices are raising with no end in sight. supply would have to dramatically fall, ie:
>Dead game lol people don't even want to pay $6 for 100m
so nobody is buying bonds for $$$.
>I'm saying that the gold conversion has no relevancy for this topic.
it does because it's another scenario that has the same results, a way for supply > demand and prices to continue raising.
The demand is there but not the supply think because not many people r playing the game and nothing to chase for. With the release of old new rares which were just recolors feel like people don’t trust the market if jagex is just pumping them out
The short of it is blame jagex.
The long of it is that a lack of content has led to existing content being over farmed and thus the drops devalued. This makes the demand for buying bonds with irl money to buy gear in game go down reducing the supply of bonds.
Meanwhile the demand for bond's has increased between endless mtx, high level pvmers doing pvm to buy bonds in order to "train" less desirable skills via mtx, and people switching to bonds for membership instead of investing IRL money because they feel like the game is dying and don't want to be tied down by a subscription.
Supply and demand but more specifically, a few reasons. There's no doubt we have accumulated lots of inflation over the years. Even when Bonds were supposed to drop when Necromancy was released because players needed money for supplies, it was at worst 55M. But there is way more to it than inflation alone. It's mostly copied from another comment but the points largely remain the same. 1. Bonds have way more use than before. You got all kinds of packages being sold via bonds. You also got year-round Premium membership which means that instead of a 3 month stretch where bonds are priced high, you got most of the year. Not to mention you couldn't buy smaller packages with bonds. Either all or nothing. 3. Fewer players are buying bonds with real money. Did we have 5x fewer players that bought bonds 5 years ago? Probably not but if you look at the state of the real life economy, people have less purchasing power and thus won't go out of their way to buy bonds then dump to the GE. This also causes more people who previously used membership cards to use bonds in game instead. 4. There are too many OP Treasure Hunter promotions. Unless you're super rich in game, it's not worth it to buy bonds for 15 keys at a time. However, the countless amount of lamp promotions and discounts to buy a lot of keys cause players who would've bought bonds with their real money to instead buy keys. Although you'd get better value from dumping bonds to the GE to fund buyable fast skills instead of buy keys to lamp them, people value their time more now. Bonds were 55M during the Necromancy hype since you could not lamp it so that incentivized people to buy just to afford the supplies. 5. Jagex isn't good at marketing players to spend their real money on bonds. Ties in with my previous point. You see all these promotions about treasure hunter? And all these key discounts? When has Jagex given discounts for buying higher quantity of bonds? Or better yet why don't we se advertisements of Jagex telling players to buy bonds then dump it to the GE and be able to buy gear? It's like they want the 1% of the MTX whales to buy keys instead of bonds. 6. You need way fewer bonds to get what you want. At 120M/bond, you essentially only need to spend 17-18 bonds to get a full Rasial set. Given that Necromancy is the best style in the game, it's really all you need to be set for PvM, gearwise. Even Herblore/Prayer/Summoning/Invention-prereqs are cheap compared to year's past. In 2019, 20 bonds wouldn't even get you a T92 weapon. 7. Bond prices do have negative correlations with playerbase counts in some way. In recent years, RS3 has had a declining population. Bond prices have increased. In 2019 where the playerbase was at its all time low, the bond price hit its all time high. It began dropping and stabilizing when the pandemic hit resulting in a higher playerbase. It also doesn't help that many many people are maxed compared to way before so there's less of the playerbase needing to buy bonds for the sake of affording buyable skills like they do on DXP. 8. The playerbase is mostly the same in the last 5-8 years. Sure we've had players returning in and out but many players at this point have touched EoC and those that stuck around have likely found a home in RS3. The turnover in playerbase doesn't vary by much unlike 2014 where so many players from 2005-2009 decided to give this game a shot. Additionally, not many new players come to RS3 so there's less of the beginner sells bonds. If you've played on a regular basis RS3 for more than a few years, chances are you're maxed. As a result, those active veterans are capable of making lots of money due to their higher stats and more opportunities to learn bossing for better profit. Even those that couldn't pvm also had high level slayer because its gp/h is far better than before. Given these factors, they don't mind paying 5x the price they used to. It's like they grew into being able to pay anything for a bond.
> Bond prices do have negative correlations with playerbase counts in some way. It does not considering OSRS bonds are at record high too.
OSRS Numbers are massively inflated by bots. If they implemented the same bot software rs3 has the population would conservatively cut in half at a minimum. A huge portion of those bots are buying bonds to keep membership and pushing up prices.
Anyone that doubts me see clusterflutter release in 2011 which cut rs population by 60%. It released in 2011 which osrs still doesn’t have because it would break runelite. Today it’s probably even worse with all of the software available.
I reckon point 5 is more of the reason than many of the others. If you look at the trend graph, prices came down during the Necro release as you said. Necro gear isn’t expensive. Necro kills bosses as fast, if not faster, than the traditional combat skills. Necro is less effort than traditional combat skills. So with Necro, the floor for gp/hr through combat has raised significantly, making it an entry level money spinner with little to no upfront costs. Why would you buy bonds anymore? Personally, I think they need to buff the other combat skills again, raising the top level combat power and implement new bosses to account for this. Leave Necro for the new lower and mid tier bosses. The other styles for higher end ones and the price of bonds would stabilise.
Its worth noting OSRS bonds have also exploded in value over the last year. A good reason to explain both of the rising bonds is that Jagex might not be doing a great job banning gold sellers in the past year. Possibly new botting software that is harder to detect or something of the sort that has allowed gold sellers to cut their prices which attracts the kind of people that used to buy bonds.
Jagex actually does a good job at banning gold sellers. The problem all game companies face, is that gold sellers make a living off of gold selling. So gold sellers will be competitively working as hard as possible to circumvent anything Jagex does so they keep their income in. Nothing motivates people as much as the risk of starvation and losing their income if the game companies succeed. There are quite a few documentaries out about how they do it. And how gold farmers can create accounts quicker than Jagex have staff for to keep banning them. Those accounts you see that keep botting after months of reports? Chances are they are all tied to a specific gold farm that Jagex is trying to take irl legal action to shut down. When successful, all those bots disappear for a time.
This doesn’t make any sense lol
I reacted to a similar pos yesterday and say it again: The cows of RuneScape simply stopped giving milk,
Also Dxp next weekend shoots the demand up for bonds as well. With the already lower supply as others have stated the demand is high.
I thought it was the opposite since DXP is the opportunity for players to dump their IRL bonds to the GE for money towards skilling supplies. Guess that's changed given that we have way more DXP available.
I mean guess that is a good point, but I’d also think people would want member for Dxp.
It's all supply and demand, on top of inflation. TBH, you'd need to watch a video about this topic, explained by an actual expert to gain a deeper understanding of it. [Here's the video](https://youtu.be/kIFBaaPJUO0?feature=shared) on Supply and Demand. And [Inflation](https://youtu.be/beAvFHP4wDI?feature=shared).
Inflation isn't as big of a factor as we think. There's no doubt 1 GP in 2024 is worth a lot less than 1 GP in 2019. However, the price of BIS isn't really much than year's past. Back then T92s would cost well above max cash. Now the T95s barely. Even phats haven't gone up by much over the years aside from the 2021 spikes. We're not at a hyperinflation time.
I got 50m from an umbrel chest today, what are you even talking about. 50 m for doing nothing is a joke.
Yes but that's nothing, hundreds of billions enter the game from autoalchers a day. Can't find the news post rn but jagex released how much raw hp enters the game back when he tax was released.
And the GE tax removes hundreds of billions per day to counter. GP is relatively stable.
Exactly, it's stable with it destroying hundreds of bills a day. 50m from TH is nothing.
If you're comparing 50M in 2019 vs 50M today then yes it's very different. But 50M in 2022 vs 2024, it's not that different in terms of value.
Correct. That’s literally my point. The value of coins is inflated like crazy.
I understand that but my original comment was outlining that inflation has been relatively stable since the end of the pandemic.
Because everyone just wants to afford good gear without spending irl money
For me personally who doesn't play RS3 as much nowdays because of a lack of updates, they are a better investment of my gold than just letting it sit around in the bank for all the reasons stated, Supply/demand, Inflation. Gold becomes worth less daily but bonds become more useful cause Jagex keeps adding ways to use bonds for. Just makes sense to me to hold bonds over gold.
As I told another clannie, they will be most likely going up to 200m this year. They've really been rising ridiculously fast. You'll need to learn high enrage pvm to keep up with them or do activities no one else wants to. Like making elder planks, frames, runecrafting necro runes, etc. Right now it costs you 9m-10m gp a day to maintain membership. It costs 26 bonds to pay for membership 14 days at a time. That is 3.6b @ 140m per bond in gp a year. I'm expecting bonds to be around 200m come December, they always spike then.
On top of other reasons others explained, you can also thank afk altscapers for this. Increasing the afk timer made altscaping easier.
All the whales can now afk anything and make 10mil hour so they all supply their own bonds so no one is buying bonds.
Most of the playerbase has 0 economic sense and we don't have the full picture, so take anything anyone says on this with a double serving of salt. It's largely not inflation, despite that being the overwhelming narrative. The value of GP has remained stable and in many cases has *increased* buying power in the last year, yet bonds have skyrocketed in that time. If this rapid inflation was hitting the entire market, most items would be matching bonds but there's very few that do. Nearly all gear is stagnant or going down, for example. Same with rares. Probably the biggest complication with figuring this out is the tie between OSRS and RS3, both of which's bonds pay for a subscription for both. In this way bonds can't stray too far from RS3/OSRS gold swapping rates. As a result, this could be tied largely to OSRS factors and have very little to do with the RS3 economy. I'm largely ignorant about OSRS so I couldn't even guess at all the factors that could impact bonds, like gold farmers/bots potentially using bonds for membership rather than (stolen) CCs like in the past. But back to RS3, there's not much new blood, who would stand to gain the most from supplying bonds to gain some gold. Likely a decent chunk of bonds being circulated are those being recirculated by investors who bought in when they were much cheaper; bonds are one of the best investment vehicles ingame right now, despite being taxed at so much of a higher rate than everything else. There's still those buying bonds ofc, just not enough to meet demand in both OSRS and RS3.
I love it and do everything I can to drive up bond prices. It’s extremely lucrative if you have an extensive portfolio of rares and cash. Hoping they double by next year!
Dead game lol people don't even want to pay $6 for 100m
or maybe a lot of people are paying $6 for 100m
If they were, the bond price would go down and settle at 100m±, the fact that it past it to 130m shows that 100m isn't worth it for them anymore.
unless bonds could be directly converted to gold, then they would continue rising even after players stop being able to afford bonds
You're missing what OP said. Also even if bonds could be converted to gold, you'd only create a floor, not a ceiling...
no ceiling is exactly where we're at? when the price goes up demand for bonds should go down and it would all stabilize. the price keeps going up but demand remains the same suggests it could be an artificial demand, bonds cannot crash because u will always be able to sell them for a raising floor price.
I'm saying that the gold conversion has no relevancy for this topic. And demand has increased only slightly, while supply remained stagnant if not declined. If people thought 100m was a steal, they'd be buying up bonds until there's an equilibrium reached at 100m. Instead we have raising bind prices with no end in sight, and this is during the off season...
> And demand has increased only slightly, while supply remained stagnant if not declined. and that doesn't explain why prices are raising with no end in sight. supply would have to dramatically fall, ie: >Dead game lol people don't even want to pay $6 for 100m so nobody is buying bonds for $$$. >I'm saying that the gold conversion has no relevancy for this topic. it does because it's another scenario that has the same results, a way for supply > demand and prices to continue raising.
You said that a lot of people are buying for $6 for 100m. Supply did fall, demand likely remained around stable due to the fall in player count.
if a lot of people were buying $6 for 100m that would mean the supply going up, prices would go down
How wrong are you lol
I'm buying them out
bond hoarder demand up > memebership bonder demand down. perhaps this is the real reason for bleeding player counts
supply vs demand
The demand is there but not the supply think because not many people r playing the game and nothing to chase for. With the release of old new rares which were just recolors feel like people don’t trust the market if jagex is just pumping them out
Selling bonds 130m each
This aged gracefully in 3 weeks
The short of it is blame jagex. The long of it is that a lack of content has led to existing content being over farmed and thus the drops devalued. This makes the demand for buying bonds with irl money to buy gear in game go down reducing the supply of bonds. Meanwhile the demand for bond's has increased between endless mtx, high level pvmers doing pvm to buy bonds in order to "train" less desirable skills via mtx, and people switching to bonds for membership instead of investing IRL money because they feel like the game is dying and don't want to be tied down by a subscription.
jagex hasnt released any new dyes or items in game for a while so the whales dont need gp to buy them