Daily Discussion of DailyScape #2: Shop Runs

Previous discussions: [1 - Shooting Stars and Evil Trees] (https://old.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1qjcxs6/daily_discussion_of_dailyscape_1_shooting_stars/)

What is it? Most shops have limited stock that is individualized so there is no competition with other players. Fun fact, the Milk Shop stock is NOT individualized! Many items will gradually restore their stock over time, but some will only refill upon the daily reset, such as runes and arrowheads. There are many useful items that are convenient to get from shops than to make yourself, such as runes for magic or raw meat for farm animals. Given that each shop only has so much stock, players will perform 'shop runs' where they travel throughout Gielinor buying out the stock of desired items from all the places that sell it.

How frequent is it? As many items refresh very slowly or not at all until the following day, you can effectively only perform this once per day, thus fitting under the umbrella of 'daily'.

How good is the XP? No direct XP. Calculating the xp you would get from purchased resources depends on what resource it is - broad arrowheads are very easily calculated, using runes for magic or meat for animals has many more variables.

How good are the other rewards? Shop runs are sort of required for some things. How else were you planning on obtaining tens of thousands of feathers, killing chickens? Farm animal food in particular is difficult or inconvenient to obtain in bulk in other methods, such as insects for frogs or raw meat for dinosaurs.

A lot of shop runs are optional - you don't HAVE to train fletching with broad arrows, but it is an effective and simple method. You could craft your own elemental runes, but that's far less XP than high level runes. Some items are particularly annoying to have to obtain via shops - such as bomb vials, which only have 3 shops with a stock of 100 each or 1000 feathers of Ma'at if you wanted to heavily farm the Sophanem Slayer Dungeon.

How much pressure is there to not miss out? Depends heavily on what you're looking to stock up on. If you're very well supplied you might not feel any need, if you're actively training specific skills you essentially have to do at least some shop runs. This pressure is significantly reduced for main accounts that can simply buy what they are looking for on the Grand Exchange, but also opens the possibility of doing these runs just to sell the resources for profit.

What kind of interactivity is there with other players? Minimal. You don't need information from other players to know where shops are, what they sell, or when they refresh. There is almost no competition or interaction with others.

How could it improve? Having individualized stocks is already a massive improvement over how most of OSRS's shops work, having fierce competition with other players and having to world hop over and over to buy what you need. Stocks could be increased further, shops could all refresh on a faster rate rather than being gated behind the daily reset. Stock could even be made infinite, or more items being purchasable in noted or 'pack' form.

How could this be changed away from a daily activity? See above, if stocks were larger or shopping was more convenient via purchasing packs/banknotes, players could buy more in bulk and then not need to make a run to the shop again for a longer period.

Do you think it SHOULD be changed away from a daily activity? I think the need should at least be decreased. Certain commodities with few to no other viable sources should have larger stocks - like pet shop insects or Feathers of Ma'at. Being able to source raw meat packs via thieving the Darkmeyer meat stall (recent 120 thieving update addition) is a great solution to this kind of problem.

I don't think shops should be made infinite - that's a kind of thing you only really want in limited game modes like Leagues. Infinite runes would make anima catalysts a useless item, for example.

Ultimately, I think shops have their place and should remain a useful source of items or daily profit. But they should never be so efficient as to be required. Ideally, the best source of items should be from some form of gameplay. One example I really like in Old School is the Scarred Essence mine. Basically, you offer up money and a trivial amount of mining time to purchase runecrafting output modifiers, like our anima stones but to a much higher degree. This is effectively a shop purchase with extra steps - trading money for resources - but involves some gameplay and actually using the relevant skill, if only briefly.

I'm a big fan of that kind of a system and hope we can see more like it. What are your thoughts?