The Runescape 2 economy is quite a fascinating semi-simulation/semi-reality case study. It was originally a free market economy - players traded freely and advertised wares in public places, such as the incredibly busy server World 2 in Varrock. There was a backing of bots doing repetitive work, which was seemingly unofficially permitted (e.g. any player can disable their public chat, making a non-communicative player plausible) but not officially allowed. Virtual gold was also traded online for real cash. Then Jagex decided to go socialist, and brought in the grand exchange, which centralized and controlled prices.
I played before and after the GE was introduced. You're right, but it kind of leveled the playing field in a lame way. The GE made merchanting much more difficult.
Prior to GE, I'd buy as much as I could of an item in the morning in World 2 when the prices were lower but there were still plenty of people selling. Then in the evening, I'd sell and make large profits. I don't remember the details but the GE made the prices more stable and my World 2 merchanting scheme didn't work anywhere near as well.
It was much more fun to try and reign in the chaos of a live manual market than a corporate feeling GE. Maybe there's some relation to the old-school stock market floor where everyone was screaming and yelling to trade?
In its latest incarnation yes, but for a long time prices were locked always to 5% +- of a average value. I'm not sure why that was done, but it must have some article somewhere. They eventually reverted it (years after), now you can put the price you want to anything. When you are buying the lowest price offered get bought, when you are selling the highest bidder wins, given that the price you offer at least matches the other party
"Runescape 2" is doing a lot of work in the original comment.
The GE was originally introduced as a key aspect of restricted trade - the game system disallowing unbalanced exchanges of wealth, either through trade or PvP to combat goldfarming - along with the removal of the real wilderness. Trade value was calculated from GE value, so a trade would only go through if the GE value of the items on both side ~matched.
The +/- 5% thing was at least originally partially intended to prevent players pumping obscure items on the GE via wash trading, then using that inflated GE value to transfer gold through trades that look fair to the system but are unbalanced in actual economic reality.
That sort of unbalanced trade still ended up happening via "junk trading" - players would find items with fixed, high GE values (e.g. addy arrows p(++)) but low actual value, and conversely items with low, fixed GE values (e.g. mint cakes) but high actual values, and use those to circumvent the balanced trade systemm.
In OSRS, on the other hand, adding the GE was fairly uncontroversial because it wasn't introduced along with restricted trade, and because it replaced third-party marketplaces like the Zybez exchange that were shitshows most people disliked having to use. That version of the GE functions as you describe.
It wasn't socialist, it was the extreme case of anti-money-laundering.
In some way it was the most strict social-credit-supervisor sees all economy and prevents illegal dealings experiment in a game. You couldn't trade any value at all to other players above some low threshold, and everything was explicitly priced to prevent all transfer of value. If you tried to trade something whose grand-exchange price difference exceeded a limit, you'd be blocked.
I remember there were items which were intentionally mispriced in the grand exchange, and other items which were unsellable "junk" were used to pad trades. So if you had "junk" you could find "mints" (it was literally mints) and make an "equal value" trade that really isn't equal value, or it is but not because of the values the game expects. It was interesting watching how true economic value tries to wiggle its way through a dystopian all-seeing anti-money-laundering system.
They eventually killed that system because obviously it ruined the game, but it was interesting that even in a game someone tried to take absolute totalitarian measures to fight money laundering, despite the huge players backlash.
This is just comically wrong, I'm sorry. The grand exchange is literally one of the closest implementations of an in-game item exchange that I've seen that's similar to an actual stock exchange. It's a double sided market using a price-time order book. It's basically a dark pool. Jagex literally took one of the cornerstones of modern capitalism and copied it into their game for their commodities/item exchange.
The only thing that seems even vaguely authoritarian (which is what I assume you mean by socialist, even though that's basically the opposite of the words meaning) was during the no-free-trade thing after their payment processor almost kicked them off due to chargebacks from botters using stolen credit cards to buy membership.
If anything, the original state of W2 was a lot more socialist than the GE is.
Calling Jagex "socialist" for introducing the GE is more than a little ridiculous: they've always (and necessarily) regulated the game's economy via gold and other resource sinks.
My recollection (from 2007) is that they introduced the GE as a counterbalance to the PK/wilderness removal and the effect it had on the economy. Heavy handed, maybe, but not particularly ideological.
