Well Jagex claims the main reason they shut these extremely popular aspects of the game so that they can make the game fair for everyone. Although this decision wasn’t welcomed by most players, this is something that jagex had planned to do for the sake of their company.
Yes, it was done indirectly to stop real world trading, but mostly it was done to protect their company and their game from dying out. Well Let me give you the example of a popular MMO in Asia called A3, who just terminated their server. That game died out mainly due to the corruption prevailing in that game. The High Leveled players quit and sold their accounts to complete newbies who had no idea how to play that game and that’s why the other player started quitting too. They couldn’t stand losing to players who weren’t the original owners of a high leveled account. Main problem was the Game Cash. The Game cash let people get extremely goods items. Players used to buy them and get great weapons that owned players of the same skill but of an inferior weapon. Now to enjoy the game, the other players had two options: Either spend money to buy items or quit the game. Most preferred the latter.
That’s why the Popular Game crashed and failed and recently the Server was terminated. This is exactly the reason why Jagex didn’t want real world trading to prevail in their MMO: To Prevent Players who didn’t buy stuff from getting fed up with the game and leaving. Now Jagex had just one way to prevent this from happening and that was by removing the two most popular ways of transferring money, Player Killing and Trading.
Another reason why Free trading was removed was that scammer scammed players. Now players might lose their best stuff in the process and since Jagex cant restore their lost items, they eventually quit runescape. Although the Grand Exchange was a perfect alternative to merchanting, a good alternative to Pking was yet to be found, Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars failed to rise to the players expectations. But now the Bounty Worlds are a good alternative.
People buying and selling runescape accounts were still a problem and that’s why jagex has made a special team that monitor accounts being sold and traded, and ban such accounts.
A contradiction to this article can be that if Jagex was trying to protect their game from losing players, why did they remove its most popular features that would inevitably lead to players quitting faster?
Well The Answer is: Jagex thought people will realize that Grand Exchange and Bounty Hunter were great alternatives; however the players didn’t realize this, which lead to the worst riots in runescape history.
However Jagex introduced many reforms to the Grand Exchange (which are secrets) and many many more to the Bounty Hunter Mini game which eventually lead to Pk worlds and then Bounty Worlds.
Grand Exchange has witnessed many, many, many reforms since its first launch, including but not limited to graphs sell buy limits price changes etc, and most of them weren’t released to the runescape players and I doubt that it would ever will. APISA But there are a few Secrets That I have discovered which I have revealed in my guide Mastering The Grand Exchange: RuneScape Investing and Merchanting Guide. This guide teaches how perfectly you can make millions of gold everyday using just two minutes of your time.