It's for that reason that I voted don't mind. I'm cool with the wilderness being a pker haven, that was always kind of a fun risk. When I was a low level, mind, I didn't have anything to risk really. On the other hand free trade worries me a little. How would that work? How could the GE work with no market price? It is, after all, a sort of stock exchange market, where fixed prices are rather important.
If they're going to change it into something resembling an auction room, then perhaps they should have a guide price attached to each item, which should perhaps be chosen to match the price trend of the last few weeks of the GE price. So, say, if the Dragon Pickaxe is worth 9mil at the moment but is falling (and it actually is), then they might choose a "guide price" of 8.5mil.
But then how might trade work? If we're going to use the auction model, which seems to me the best way (not trying to turn things too much into Ebay, mind), then there'd have to be, for the seller, a reserve price and some sort of period to allow bids to be made. And for the buyer he'd have to be told that items were actually available, and maybe an idea of how successful his bid is likely to be. This is less important for commonly-traded items like dragon bones, herbs, logs and so on, but when you get to the rare items, they'd have their own market and surely need to be handled in this sort of manner.
All of this would seem to suggest that the release date of February 1st was already pencilled in, since I don't believe that it would be possible to make these changes in a fortnight. Unless, of course, they have another, simpler way of making free trade work with the GE.
For myself, I would have voted "YES" for a return of the old wilderness and an increase in the trade limit (to, say, 100,000 or 15%, whichever is higher) but I think that free trade is going to make it harder to buy items needed for skills such as prayer, herblore and so on.
