Doubling

Okay, so I promised someone a look at dicing. However, I’ve been reading alot of material and think that I can do better than just dicing. I’m going to cover the major factors and issues on an individual and collective basis for the RuneScape economy. I will provide examples, mathematics and economic examples for each issue.

Topics to cover:

• Doubling
• Staking
• Dicing
• Macroing
• Real World-Item-Trading (RWIT)
• Deflation
• Jagex Game Actions

These topics are roughly, but not precisely in order of effect. Doubling is probably now dwarfed by staking and dicing. This is really based on percieved judgements. The top 4, macroing, RWIT, economic deflation and Jagex’s actions are by far the most powerful, resulting typically from external factors (often each other).

I think it’s important to define first what we mean by each activity. There are lots of differing terminology. Doubling, in the context of this article is the activity whereby Player A temporarily trades money to Player B after having been told Player B can increase the amount of cash they have, in the assumption they will be soon traded back more.

Now it’s important to realise one key point: No player currently has the ability to duplicate items. There are maybe 3 or four occasions in the past that item duplication has been possible. These bugs have been fixed.

So, given this, one of two things will happen:

a) Player B will give up some of their money for Player A

b) Player A will loose the money they gave to Player B

Now, in most cases, what happens in Player B doubles small amounts of money, encouraging players to trade more and more money before they keep the final larger sum.

In a very small number of cases, players are ‘legitimate’ and just give out money. However, this is the 1 in a million case. Most players are just gaining trust before they get all the money back and more in a large scam.

If you want to take part in this, note 2 things:

a) If you get scammed, all you can  do is report the other player immediately after the trade. Jagex won’t be refunding your money

b) Although doubling is currently on the grey side of the law, there is little to stop Jagex deciding at some point that actually this is a stupid system and deciding to up the ante in terms of offences (to the point of offending for even offering to double).

If you legitimately want to give money away, use the party room or just trade the money… Why use a trust trade?

The economic effect of doubling is tiny. Individual players are loosing money but the money is still in the economy. Those who gain the money can afford faster methods of training pushing up prices, those that loose money will be forced into less profitable methods and may indeed harvest the resources for those who gained the money.

The individual effect is to pool money towards the doublers and split it up for those solely doing it legitimately.

Staking

I cover this as a related phenomena to dicing and doubling. Staking is a legal gamble. Entirely above board in principle staking is the betting of gold (as well as items, but only as a less-liquid substitute in reality, it could be limited to gold with no real outcry I suspect) on the outcome of a duel subject to various optional conditions.

Much of the staking these days revolves around fights which are down to little more than luck. Players who are evenly matched in combat stats, with no items of any kind. These so called boxing matches are little more than gambles, assuming no player cheats (either by abusing a bug or changing a setting).

Again, this is neither a money sink or money flood. Generally it aids in the gradual concentration of money towards richer players – those who win keep playing and those who loose keeping playing until they have no money left (or ‘cleaned’ to use staking parlance).

Dicing

Dicing is the newest kid on the block of trade mechanisms designed to create the illusion of free money. Lets review the basics first.

Dice are an item programmed by Jagex which produce a number between 1 and 100. I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest the dice themselves are bias, so we can probably assume the pseudo-random number generator is good enough (I suspect it’s the same sort of number generator that decides on drops).

The player with the dice – the ‘dice-master’ or ‘dice-host’, advertises for players to bet on the outcome of the numbers. So essentially it’s an entirely luck based bet.

However, the dice-host has a couple of ways to influence the flow of money.

1) They decide whether to actually pay back the winnings

2) They decide the winning odds.

Commonly, the phrase used is 55×2.

I believe this means that two dice rolls are made and if one of them is > 55, they win (and get their stake and the same amount again as winnings). But I don’t dice myself (it would undoubtedly tar the silver sparkle ). Anyone who is more familiar, feel free to comment and correct me.

So firstly, the maths:

100-55 = 45 chances

So 0.45 per roll

Using a bit of statistics (binomial distribution):
P(X>= 1) = 0.6975

For 60 x 2, P(X>=1) is 0.64, so less good, but still in the player’s favour

So this implies that the player should win most of the time. However dice hosts are not rich.

Therefore either:

a) Dice hosts are being nice without realising it, slowly loosing money

b) or they are occasionally scamming, performing trust trades similar to doublers

I’d speculate it’s probably the latter, although many naive dice hosts likely think they gain money (few will do the maths).

Note that there are some variations – players some times bet money against items – you have to do some calculation to work out whether the bet is worth it (the odds of winning the rolls don’t change of course).

Next Time!

Part 2 will cover, when it’s posted, some of the more macro-economic factors as well as some history covering prices and so forth.

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