Road to Restoration - Grand Exchange Improvements

Today is the fifth entry in our blog series on the Road to Restoration, and we know it's something that many of you have been looking forward to for a while... a look at how we plan to improve the Grand Exchange!

The Background

Everyone will be familiar with the grand exchange and its fundamental purpose in RuneScape - to enable trading between players that doesn't require everyone to be standing outside of Varrock Bank hawking their wares at the top of their digital lungs while at the same time hoping that whoever they trade with won't pull that nasty "last-second-item-swap" scam.

However, since the Grand Exchange's first release back in 2007, this system has not received very many updates, making it a prime candidate for something we should address as part of our Road to Restoration.

Some of what we cover today may be familiar to you if you've kept track of JMod discussions over the past few years, including this thread from Mod Sukotto. The difference this time, however, is that this isn't a personal gamejam project with limited time and resources - this is a core part of our Road to Restoration.

How you can help today

This project is still in its early stages, and certain ideas mentioned here need to be properly investigated to ensure that we're not overinvesting time into one feature when we might be able to tackle two others in the same amount of time.

While we will want to improve as much as we can, we may need to focus on those features that offer the biggest "bang for buck". To be clear - it is probable that not everything we cover today may be feasible or released with this update.

With that in mind, please do join in the discussions this week and let us know:

• Which of the feature(s) we've covered are you most excited about?

• Which of the feature(s) we've covered are you not really that bothered about? They might be nice to have, but you wouldn't want us to prioritize them over others?

Additionally, do weigh in with your own thoughts in the places where we've missed something or haven't mentioned it. As was demonstrated with last week's Aura blog and using familiars to host some of the aura effects in future, the community hivemind is often able to come up with some interesting ideas that we haven't yet been able to consider.

Without further ado, let's get into it.

What we've heard you say

Here's a shortlist of the issues you've raised over the years with regards to the Grand Exchange's current functionality:

• Buying or selling items is a slow process that is not particularly transparent. Quite often, you may find yourself putting up offers multiple times before being successful.

• The Grand Exchange itself has performance issues when it comes to reflecting the most recent economy with a degree of accuracy. Quite often, there will be significant lag between what the GE tells you something is worth and what players are currently trading it for. We've seen cases where the displayed GE price could be off target by as much as 300%...!

• The GE's functionality is too basic. It lacks advanced features such as improved filters for new items, most traded items, price ranges and more.

Have we missed any pain points? Let us know!

What we want ensure we get right (Including thought starter example ideas)

• We want to ensure the Grand Exchange matches modern interface standards, but it's equally important we retain a