I'm kind of on the fence about this. On one hand, I've always seen phats and rares as some sort of mystical items which I will never acquire but gives me a reason to keep building a cash stack. Heck, I've never even seen a disc of returning and I've been playing since 2003! I'm not sure how I would feel if this 'holy grail' view was to be taken away after so many years. I also don't, and never will support Treasure Hunter in any way.
As for the reason why I partially support: to me this situation resembles the one in 2001 when rune 2h were monopolised by few individuals that had 99 smithing. I wasn't around back then but I heard they were sold for upwards of 1 million gp! Fortunately, these insane prices dropped by the time I started playing - thanks to more people achieving 99 smithing. However, the difference between rune 2h and phats/rares is that latter are discontinued items, meaning that monopoly is effectively immortal and cannot be disrupted by any means until the end of Runescape. The only way I see to correct this is what should've been done since 2003 when bunny ears came out:
make all rares untradable
. I believe that should've been the original purpose of phats and santa hats - to show that you were around back then. Sadly, due to this game of monopoly (which probably also led to rise of RWT and botting/alts) it's now impossible to tell if the person wearing phat is it's original owner.
So although I agree that it would be healthy and overdue for Runescape to collapse the discontinued rares market (like a tooth that's become more and more rotten over time), I don't support the use of TH to do it.
07-Jun-2020 10:32:53