I personally find the development of fresh economies in games fascinating, and had the pleasure of witnessing it in the new 2004 recreation release of Runescape.

I won't bore you with the details of Runescape, but the key thing to understand is you can interact with other players, train skills, and in general, being higher level means you can do more profitable content.

Sort of like real life.

A Futures Market Is Born

Runecrafting is extremely expensive skill to train, but becomes immensely profitable at a very high level. Since 2004scape just released, no one had the means to fund their Runecrafting grind. After the first week, some players had a modest amount of XP, but 2 weeks later, players such as Trisk, Nyaa and Cody Cigar's XPs exploded 10-20x out of nowhere:

Rank	February 8th (2025)	March 1st (2025)
1

Players weren't getting better at a 20 year old game, but instead a Futures Market had been created. Players began taking massive loans to reach level 91 Runecrafting, with the promise of paying back up to 3 months later.

(The Discord was nuked so I don't have a better screenshot than this, sorry!)

Unions Form

Essence, the resource used to train Runecraft, is obtained from Mining. It's a low barrier of entry money maker, and not terribly profitable. Nobody with high levels wastes their time mining essence.

Unions began as a joke, and some players were genuinely angry at the "trolls" who were offering to sell their essence at ridiculous prices - But trolling aside, what happens when the essence miners refuse to sell at the market price, but it's still not worthwhile for anyone else to take the job?

A Runecrafter getting pissed at the miners - "You get top 5 money per hour [...] Completely afk 0 effort"

The price of essence more than doubled, and when Runecrafting became more profitable, the union increased the price of their essence again:

If it's not worthwhile for anyone to do the work, the price will continue to rise.

Bonus: A Job Economy Created

Training Runecraft isn't only expensive, it's slow. Bringing the resources to and from the place you get XP takes up to 2 minutes a run. But what if you have other people run for you?

If you're already taking loans to train one of the most expensive, slow skills, you might as well start paying other players to run for you. The math checked out to take higher loans with higher interest rate, and a new meta was created.

The result from 4 weeks of 2004scape has so far been that those who grinded extremely hard are making the most GP, followed closely by those who serve them. The real suckers are the ones who don't make enough to out-compete the richest players for resources, so they continue to fall further behind and self-fund their training.