Forums

Okay, but this still doesn't answer the questions I have:

1. What goods are people buying and selling?
2. Who are the buyers and for what purpose do they buy the whatever goods people sell?
3. How is the difference between originals and replicas identified?

Thing is, this might go too much off-topic, so is it really worth it?

Pure corporate greed, that's why those rereleases happened. Jagex knows all too well that people desire to have exclusive stuff, so they keep trying to confuse people and make it uncertain whether an exclusive like one of those will come back or not. I don't know how good it is to them financially, but I do know it's a mistake from the player perspective: people who desire exclusives are taken advantage of and then thrown under the bus, while those who don't, have to keep constant attention to RS news to not miss out on rereleases that may or may not happen, and if they do, when.

It depends which lesson you're talking about: to not rerelease any discontinued stuff? No, they didn't learn that. To not rerelease discontinued holiday items? This doesn't disprove that. These cosmetics are MTX-related, Treasure Hunter to be exact. Real holiday items come from actual holiday events, not from MTX events.

Still, once again as with the previous exclusives you mentioned: it was still a mistake from the player perspective to rerelease these exclusives. In addition to taking advantage of those who desired exclusives, they ruined some people's banks just so they could pull a quick MTX cash grab. And for the others, those who haven't got the items, are left to wonder when another rerelease is going to happen, or if there's going to be one at all. Hell, even those who bought it without caring for the exclusivity, might be taken advantage of later with a free rerelease, which they might have waited for had they known of it in advance.

Sure. But so what? A mistake from the player perspective or a mistake from both perspectives makes no difference to players. When Jagex does something out of greed instead of what is right, only Jagex benefits from it.

If you want to argue about semantics (whether something can be called X or not), I'm gonna save time and let you win it if it really matters to you; far more important to me is the fact that when MTX is involved in something, it always causes the game development in that area to degenerate. Like for example, despite using words and wording that has made certain MTX cosmetics sound like discontinued, Jagex threw those people under the bus just to make more quick money.

The reason for that is simple: anything that involves MTX is designed with least effort possible to yield the best profit margin possible. When you don't give a damn in the first place when making the MTX, it's no surprise that you don't care to keep your word either when selling them, hence why so many MTX cosmetics have been rereleased.

When you compare that to holiday items like the Christmas wand, which were not involved in MTX, it's no surprise why it hasn't been rereleased: it'd yield no profit to do so, because it's just one tiny part of the whole game experience that you then hopefully buy membership for.

If you don't care about discontinuity on untradeables, that's fine, just as it is fine for someone to not care about monetary values if they don't care about money. Many people care about one or both, though. If nobody cared about the former, Jagex would've rereleased these holiday items already, all those people wouldn't have voted no on the loyalty point poll, and all those people wouldn't have voted in favor of untradeable discontinued items to OSRS. Belittling that value doesn't make it go away.

Besides, people losing their banks for a betrayal like that is reason enough alone for those rereleases to have been a mistake.

Well, I mean, they did stop doing it for years, so... eh?