Makoto_the_Phoenix

... Why aren't the Veteran/RSC available to everyone again? Even though I've been a paying member until the end of Spring Break (work + school)?

Two reasons, really. 1 - I fear that Jagex would have to search more memory than is allotted to Java to ensure that one is not running a botting program. And of course, there are false positives in this arena, too (take some existing assistive technology tools out there, like ZoomText - who's to say that the technology won't freak out over that?). 2 - I refuse to let Jagex scan any part of my memory if I am required to agree to do so in the ToS. I may have nothing to hide, but does that mean that I should just let them scan for the potential bad thing in their game? My guess is that this would get as much good press as Blizzard's attempt at stopping forum trolls. 60%, eh? But what about the 40%? And what of these random arbitrary statistics? TBH I don't much appreciate watchdog security systems in-game. To me, it screams out limitations and unnecessary PR spent dealing with the backlash of it all. But then again, maybe they have their value - the game will have 60% less bots, if I were to take your word as truth. Most of us want to see a real solution, though. So our resources become more expensive because automatons are no longer running the economy. Wait - I thought this was a player-driven economy. As for the browser part, I'd be willing to presume that the software implementation would be Warden-like (so it could run in a browser).

Yet you didn't answer the question. I asked what the benefit of that would be. Again, I've stated that I don't see a benefit to it; it's information that doesn't need to be in the public's eye. More tersely, I couldn't care less who was banned from TIF for what reason and when - it just doesn't benefit me to know this. And, more times than not, a player is banned from a forum for clear violation of a rule instead of on a whim - and that's what the majority of "posts" or "reports" or what have you would be like. I wasn't here for the falling out. I don't know what happened, and who did what. I do maintain though that if Mods/Admins disagreed with the way something was handled, then it should have been kept in a place that's exclusive to them (staff forums), and not in public.

If the system was more transparent, facts such as who did the banning wouln't need to be questioned, saving moderator time. The question I'd like answered is, what good would that do? Making the whole thing transparent actually sounds counterproductive, since now not only do you have to pass along information about a particular user's ban, you also have to deal with people who think/feel that it was unfair. This leads me to believe that, instead of transparency between staff->users, there should be more information available to admins about who was banned and for what reason. In my mind, moderators are free to disagree with the bannings, but doing so in a public forum usually leaves a black eye for the entire process. Kind of like this.

Correction, the player in question doesn't have a reputation of trying to make Jagex look bad, he has a reputation of making Jagex look bad. Second, I know you're one of the players who always adamantly defends Jagex regardless of the situation (you've proven that before), so I figure even if it was 100% not fake, you would doubt it, elsewise your precious rank might be in jeopardy. But it is true, I don't know if this is real or not, I don't claim to know jack about java. Still, whatever svew was trying to do with this video, reaction wise, or gameplay-affecting wise, it worked. Ah, don't you just love to bring that old fact up. Get with the times. I left MMG's clan chat 4 months ago. But that's neither here nor there; you just seem to love throwing that in my face every time I try to make a constructive point. Get. Over. It. Anyway. I'm not doubting it because I'm siding with Jagex. I'm doubting it because my instincts as both a Java programmer and Computer Science tutor are telling me otherwise. Not just that, but I can't trust anything that this person says due to his shady past. From what you're describing the attack sounds like it's coming in from the network side. So it's tangentially related to the JVM (Socket), and is running Java at this point - which is still a bounded language. So this makes the claim of a buffer overflow even less credible.

When buffer overflow was mentioned, I was highly skeptical. It's not possible to cause a buffer overflow through normal operation of the machine, but it may be possible through some tinkering with the underlying JVM. No guarantees, though. Also, I have to stop and consider the source. This player has had a reputation of trying to make Jagex look bad. Why should I believe anything that he's spouting off now? :| Third, I would presume that any stackable entity in-game would be enforced to be positive (so 231-1 max for any stack, of course). Making it register negative with both the client and the server sounds like a feat that's too good to be true.

I disagree. If the author wishes to have his guide removed from the site because of any reason (like Cowman said, it can be as simple as "Because I said so".), it should be removed. This is exactly the same case as the situation in the top 250 f2p hiscore list. If you don't want to be on the list, you can ask yourself to be removed. Shouldn't be too big of a deal. I disagree. There is a difference to a guide (something that is authored using a person's knowledge and experience) and information one could look up in another database. The author, at this point, has forfeit their rights to the guide (per the Copyright Policy - which surprisingly few people are aware of still), and shouldn't be privy to make a claim to remove their work. The fundamental thing is that they don't have the right to anymore. Whether or not it's ethical to honor such a request - still dodging the debate, but I will say this - is it even ethical to ask for such a thing in the first place, if they know they don't have the right to? Here's a for-instance. On the RSOF, I maintain the Linux Technical guide. The RuneScape site also comes with a clause that states that what's submitted to their forum/site belongs to Jagex ("By posting chat or other materials on any Jagex Product, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, royalty free, worldwide license to use and/or modify such materials on any Jagex Product as we see fit."). I wrote that guide with the full knowledge and intent that it would be out there and belong to Jagex, even though it was my hard work and endeavors that went into it. Now, recently, I've not been feeling very optimistic about Jagex or its direction, and in my disappointment and frustration, I should be able to demand that the guide be removed, right? Well, no - for two reasons. 1) The guide was written with the intent to help others - which is the whole point of writing anything, in my mind. Any guide that's out there just stroking someone's ego should be shot down in flames. 2) The guide is no longer my IP - I can't make a claim to something I don't own, after all. How this applies to this situation is pretty straightforward - even though the matter is now said and done, and I disagree with the end result, one cannot make a claim to something they do not own. This is how IP rights work in the real world, and this is where the line between ethics and law is the most clear. If the user didn't want Tip.it to have the guide, then they shouldn't have put it up. Or better yet, they would have familiarized themselves with the ToS of the site they were posting it to, to avoid potential fallout. --- To the hypothetical questions, in essence what is being argued is a slippery slope. If Tip.it allows it for one person for whatever reason, why not allow it for the next? And the next? One could see how this could get out of hand very rapidly, especially considering the volume of work the staff and ex-staff have put into whatever guides they've authored.

I'm just going to go ahead and mention this while we're on this subject. (Note I'm not complaining or anything) I was actually banned recently (one more mistake and I'm permanently banned) for making a post in Off-Topic in the thread about soldiers murdering civilians. In it, I was being sarcastic and made a comment along the lines of: "It appears these soldiers are brave and are serving our country." While it was obvious trolling (I even admitted this), I could see where it could potentially inhibit free speech. Of course it would be an absolutely ridiculous thing for someone to say, but what if they were being honest and were simply stating their views? Would they be banned or warned? What if someone with radical ideas wanted to create a discussion, and the mods locked the thread because they thought it was offensive? Typically the Rules of a fansite dictate what you can and cannot say, or what you can and cannot post. For the most part, TIF is pretty lenient on this, and it disallows the pretty obvious stuff (porn, major obscenities). But we've all got to take it with a grain of salt - free speech is free insofar as the rules of this website.

Terms of Agreement are thrown out in a court case, as they're generally stacked heavily in their favor making things unfair. Case in point, consider the case of the iphone jailbreak case. Basically, Apple's Terms of Use were thrown out regarding jailbreaking. They're thrown out only for valid reasoning. Hiding behind copyright law to prevent people from innovating on a product is a good reason to throw out those terms. Naturally this has nothing to do with online video games. Their ToS is more ironclad than not, and I can't recall a court case in which property rights were awarded to a user over pixels.

You're the only one discussing the ethics of the matter, from what I can see. Unless I've misconstrued the first post, the debate is strictly a matter of who holds the IP rights. In that vein, I've made my stance on the matter clear. One must always read the copyright provisions of any site (anywhere) and see which side of the line they stand on. No exceptions.

As an aside, the main point of the thread is to debate the feelings on IP. I have made my stance clear on that, in all regards. [i can take this as an "agree to disagree".] Whether or not it's ethical or "right" or disrespectful is a matter of opinion and is subject to bias, more times than not. I found myself getting into the nuances of "responsibilities", but I fear that'd bring the thread off-track...

So this is the "sticky" issue here - what warrants permission? The Tip.it copyright policy is clearly and standardly laid out in these sorts of cases, and as such, once it is submitted to Tip.it, it effectively becomes theirs, and the onus is on Tip.it to grant the permission. In all honestly, it seems to me that one would lose their rights to a work (e.g. guide, tip, etc) upon posting, per the agreement set forth by Tip.it, which I presume everyone has read. That's the only point I'm arguing - in the legal sense, Tip.it has every right to do whatever they want with the work. Whether or not that's ethical or "right", I'm simply not here to debate that.

Speaking only for myself, I'm not sure I agree with this reasoning. If someone cannot update something, then someone else makes a derivative of it - someone that is active and can actually keep it up-to-date - and that essentially becomes the new guide. It happens all the time (surprisingly enough) with guides on other forums, more so with programs and programming projects. Just because someone can't update it doesn't mean it should be removed. I just don't agree with that notion. *slinks back to corner*

No. Buying items undermines everyone's achievements that had actually worked for it. But everyone else before me has done a great job of blasting that point loud and clear, so... *ahem* Buying items in RuneScape would basically be equivalent to Jagex throwing in the towel, and surrendering to RWT. This would not only go back on their word which was given back in 2007, but also irreversibly destroy the trust with everyone who supported Jagex's anti-RWT measures. They would, essentially, bank on the 2-hour gamers who'd spend fistfuls of cash up front but refuse to stay for very long. So no, I don't think that buying items should be permitted. Personally speaking, I don't think I'd ever forgive Jagex for that.

...Hasn't it always been the case of a fansite (or any site, for that matter - even RuneScape's forums) to claim the ownership of anything willingly posted (e.g. guides, tips, articles, etc) as their own IP? Why should that change now that the user has had a less-than-pleasant experience with the site's administration? Admittedly I've submitted things for other websites with the full knowledge that they would become the property of the site that I submitted them to. For all I know, they don't even have to attribute it (but it's a civil/ethical thing to do anyway). But that's how it works. Reading the fine print is important, because it can avoid a lot of unnecessary stress and tension. Don't mind me, I'm just stating my opinion. It's too late for me to bother elaborating further on it at the moment.

So I seem to have missed the ensuing brouhaha that happened here while I was getting more important stuff squared away for the last few weeks. No bother. I'll keep my reply as egoless and as frank as possible -provided the earth I speak on is not scorched. Just keep in the back of your mind that I'm not talking about anyone or any group in particular. --- To be frank, the TIF moderation was lacking in some parts. It's a major reason why I stopped coming here extremely often a year or so ago. Some of the things that would be allowed (in-house trolling, bashing, etc) back then just didn't jive with me, so I split. Perhaps I should've brought it to their attention, but this had been going on with the same users for at least two or more years, and I thought that it'd be an obvious thing. My mistake. When I did ask for help or report an issue, the mods/admins were pretty quick to reply. No complaints there, really. Then again, I suppose I'm "thick-skinned" - I only really make use of the moderators/administrators when there's a major violation of the rules, or something is really offensive, or something from Tip.it causes Firefox/Chrome to have a fit. The nitpicky stuff - the level of trolling and general immaturity on the forums (in my opinion, mind you) - that's what caused me to go. This is the sort of thing that I felt the moderation didn't do a good job of handling - the trolls and the trolling, in its not-so-obvious ways. --- I'll sum up here, since I've rambled on too long. TIF isn't undermoderated, nor is it overmoderated. It's adequate in some spots, but the whole thing about dealing with trolls, in my mind, needs to be stepped up.

Yet at what point should one make the game inconvenient for users unable to afford either hardware, bandwidth, or both? There are still parts in the United States that only have access to either 56K or satellite (and some parts in the UK also don't have access to general internet, or it's very slow/metered), and cutting them out of the loop would be seen as unfair. Assume that at least one person in those rural areas is a paying member. Is it suddenly fair to cut them off from a resource they were [previously] paying for, all in the name of fixing a problem in an inconvenient way? Then what of the metered bandwidth issue? Compression may reduce the amount of video transferred in any one instance, but this doesn't take into account multiple players in one household, or the number of instances this would have to be displayed for it to be viable. Not bad, but I fear this harms the players more than it does the bots themselves. What about vision-impaired players (colorblind, low vision, partial vision, etc)? What about players that can't process that amount of visual information in a specific amount of time? This also doesn't take into account the large sample size of AME/random events in-game; how often would this appear to disrupt/break macros without really affecting legitimate players? ------ I'll be a bit more terse - if one seeks to break bots, be sure that all possible ways for it to disrupt legitimate players are taken into account. There's no point to an AME if it harms the players more than the bots.

Hmm. Admittedly streaming some sort of content in the form of a tutorial or something may hold some merit, but you've got to consider 56Kers (yes they still exist and yes Jagex still supports them) and those that have bandwidth caps in their country. I don't like the idea of streaming content to a user, for those reasons - if you have to "bite the bullet" and reduce how many people you can theoretically target with your product to barely save grace, then something's seriously wrong. I must reiterate myself here; I'm not convinced that any underlying software change would solve the problem of bots, but a major shift in gameplay - making the grind less rewarding or desirable as to actually playing for fun - has a chance, albeit slim. The whole reason that botting can be done is because it is a repeatable event. While you're not able to totally remove repeatable elements of games, you can certainly make them less desirable than events that take more effort and complexity overall. It's not an easy solution, of course. None of this is. Nothing's a silver bullet here folks.

I suppose we use the phrase "botting" differently. Here's what I mean: When I say "a skill that can be botted", I am implying that every facet of the skill is predictable enough to be automated over a long period of time. With all of the constraints you've listed, I'm pretty confident that Dungeoneering is untenable for botting. The beauty of Dungeoneering/Daemonheim is that it's so unpredictable, and that it changes every time a new door opens, lies in the simple nature of randomizing a door, and how each room and each door has a different orientation, shape, color, scheme, total number of monsters, total number of resources, etc. Writing a bot to encapsulate every single element of Dungeoneering would be the biggest waste of time ever, right next to building an entire Minecraft nation on a single player map. Don't have much of a problem with building one or two cities in Minecraft, really. Those take orders of orders of magnitude less time than an entire freaking nation. Quantify RuneScape, then. Is it just another MMO that's one big grind? There are other games out there that do the exact same thing. Naturally there had to be something to have drawn you to it... I don't even want to begin to approach Stellar Dawn. I sense platform-MMO hybrid, really. If you change ANYTHING in the game, the community couldn't handle it. C'mon, the community survived two major nukes - the removal and subsequent return of the Wilderness and Free Trade. I think they'd be able to handle something that'd make the game actually interesting...perhaps...Well, ya never know. The idea behind a random event though is that it becomes predictable. Eliminate predictability from a task and you eliminate the ability to automate it.

I think one may be mixing up what "illegal" and "unethical" mean. Depending on one's jurisdiction, one may be prosecuted for violating the ToS of a company. Depending on one's jurisdiction, one may be prosecuted for unauthorized access to a computer. Depending on one's jurisdiction, one may be prosecuted for the transfer of digital goods between accounts, again running afoul of the ToS. Looking at the legal precedent, Jagex can't sue someone for taking someone else's account and removing their items. Either the player or Jagex, though, may be able to prosecute based on unauthorized access to a computer. Of course, compromising one's account is certainly unethical, and should be severely frowned upon. The Terms and Conditions of a company, on the other hand...the saying goes in the IT world that it isn't legally binding until it's been tried in court. I believe one such trial was stalled/thrown out/dismissed with Jagex suing the creator of a bot, because their intellectual property wasn't properly secured in the United States, so depending on how that shook out, and depending on how Jagex decided to retry legal proceedings, violation of ToS may be a complicated ordeal. Legally speaking. Again, this particular issue depends both on the jurisdiction of the person being sued (some countries won't give a damn, no matter how hard you try), and if the IP of the plaintiff is secured within the country that's overseeing the case. Transferring digital goods in other games has always been a ticklish subject for many law professors and some CS students, myself included. In games such as Second Life, one can buy "virtual" property, and their currency [at one time or another] translates to real cash. To what measure, then, is it illegal to sell virtual land for real profit? Overgeneralization in this instance is dangerous since some games won't mind it - but in general, we "agree" that the items within the game are the sole property of Jagex, and it follows that we cannot sell what we don't own. Jagex has been litigating against bot makers for years now. It's not cheap. It's not quick, either. And I'd like to see them victorious in their cases. Do I think that they're going about it the wrong way ? Sometimes; it's cheaper to improve your systems at home than it is to try to play legal whack-a-mole. I don't think they're sending enough of a statement to the bot makers, or the players that would want to be lazy enough to use bots with lawsuits, though.

Yikes...talk about flogging a dead horse. I think we're going about breaking bots the wrong way, really. As a programmer myself, thinking of ways to implement bot breaking tactics would only lead me down that same ol' arms race. And they'd eventually win, too. What I'm thinking, personally, is that instead of trying to break the bots, making them pointless would be far easier to implement. The solution is not simple: Rewrite the game to make redundant, grindable tasks extremely unrewarding as opposed to tasks that aren't. To my understanding, Dungeoneering does something like this (although there are strong rumors of Dungeoneering bots, I don't believe they have the capability to predict every room with > 30% reliability), but it's possible it can be done on a much larger scale. Adding elements of the game that are repeatable in chunks, then change up depending on the region you're in, thus breaking predictability, would marginalize the efforts of bots. In addition, adding areas of the game that change depending on where you are, what time of day it is, what season it is in your region, what month it is, and what your individual levels are would also play havoc, provided the algorithm for that was never reverse engineered (or changed every other month). I suppose what I'm getting at - thinking about breaking bots on the lowest level is going to lead right back up to the arms race. Pioneering a way to randomize the rewards from skills we'd get, and making them fun at the same time (Dungeoneering did an alright job with this, then rushers came in - not that there's anything wrong with that, I just feel like those that rush through a dungeon are totally missing the point) would, in my mind, go a long way to resolve the botting issue. Oh, and reducing the dependency of GP wouldn't be a bad idea, either. Making all of the really good items and armor dependent on one's skills, and making the skills virtually unbuyable would further reduce the point of bots.

I would conjecture that the MA debacle disproves your claim, actually. The *only* way Jagex - or anyone for that matter - ever knew about it was the player coming forward with a claim about it themselves. I don't believe that they would've known about it otherwise. There's no doubt in my mind that they have limited capabilities to trace items, but the ultimate problem lies in the program itself. A program doesn't know if it's behaving bug-free unless it has some sort of error (SIGSEGV or something slightly less heinous). Even then, you'd have to determine *how* it went wrong, in what way, and if the player initiated it or if it was a random thing. I do say "limited tracking capabilities" because I can't make general assumptions about how deep their tracking system goes. But I do believe that the overhead based on database queries, investigation of the actual fault, and determining what items were potentially lost vs. the player's claim of lost items would just be too much for the QA team to handle, in terms of time spent per player per incident. I don't think on the scale of 10 or 100. I think on the scale of easily 5,000 or more players attempting to claim lost items due to a "bug". I don't think that the capabilities lie with Jagex - either technical or by personnel - to deal with the load. What compassion do you give someone that left a $150,000 Jaguar running in their parking lot, with the doors opened and the driver having a "quick" phone call inside the house? What compassion do you give a coworker that posts an inflammatory message about the company on Facebook, is fired the next day, and threatens to sue (either the company, Facebook, or both)? In all instances, it was the fault of the victim and the victim alone that these circumstances came to be. Honestly, when one says that it's "blaming the victim", it makes it sound like the victim was absolutely faultless in the manner, when that's really not the case here. There certainly are times that it applies (such as physical or sexual abuse), but this most certainly isn't one of those. If you value something, you PROTECT it. This means keeping information which has the potential to be used to recover your account secret. This also means keeping passwords and recovery questions difficult or impossible to guess unless you were the person. And if you get the feeling that this security may have been compromised: CHANGE it up. It's actually a good practice to change passwords and recovery questions to not just RS, but banks and important systems on a regular basis. Jagex has done WAY too much already to help us protect what we value - bank PINs, forbidding super weak passwords, email-based recoveries, and email-based logins (with new accounts). Had they went one step further and invested in RSA fobs, then there would be no denying who's at fault. But, at what point does Jagex get to draw the line and say, "Okay, it's in your hands now"?

I have always opposed this policy and will continue to do so. I was just as upset--if not more-- when it happened to the guy who lost his bank to the MA glitch, and I am similarly upset that this happened to a somewhat dubious character like Chessy018. I am of the opinion, that Jagex should refund items for *all* players whenever and wherever it can be proven some unintended mishap of this nature has occurred--and whenever and whereever it is viable/feasible to do so. Quite a few other companies do this, I hardly see why Jagex should be any different--especially considering this is relatively painless and inexpensive. I think if people have invested time and effort and emotion, and have subsequently suffered egregiously as in such cases, Jagex should honor that emotional investment and attachment--it seems the humane(I am aware of the irony of this term) thing to do. Now one could make the argument that isn't fair for Jagex to implement this policy change only in response to the misfortunes of an affluent and wealthy player--but I really don't see that as too much of a problem. Yes, it is somewhat unfair, but that is life for you, changes often come from the behests of elites--not from the plight of the helpless. I think the RS community should seize this opportunity to petition Jagex to implement the aforementioned policy change. It is in the best interests of everyone. I suppose I should quantify this more sufficiently. Items that are lost due to a fault in the game's software - something which we take to be "safe", for whatever value of safe you wish to use - I wouldn't mind seeing returned. The only problem is that it's neither painless nor inexpensive to implement something of this nature in the game, and development time could be better spent on other ventures, depending on the direction the designers choose to go. Returning items that are lost due to accounts being compromised or "hacked", as they say is something I am staunchly against. We must all be accountable unto ourselves to keep our valuables secure, and if one cannot do that, then perhaps they didn't value their valuables as highly as they thought.

Giving back lost items for any reason wouldn't be right, IMO. It's always been our burden to keep our accounts secure. No one said put any personally identifiable information on the Internet (FB, MySpace, forum profile, etc). You choose to do that, then you accept the potential consequence of having your account recoveries bruteforced. While the lawsuit may be one thing, it wouldn't get far. There's no sense in dragging litigation into this issue. Did the player lose tangible wealth? How would the courts relegate such a case? Would it open the floodgates for things to be returned on bugs (and a whole slew of players making claims)? The more ideal approach is to not return items, for any reason, and I wouldn't believe that the courts could force Jagex to give back the items. Not even for a popular player. [You'd like to think that one's security would increase tenfold if they were popular or well-known...]

Someone on page 6 got the main gist of the argument, which is a relief, but everyone else here should just stop bashing the player. It's clear that you don't give a damn about the player. That's fine; I don't either. What you should be paying attention to are the reasons. Players come and go all the time; they have their own personal reasons, and they have their own personal lives to attend to. It doesn't matter who the person was, who they knew, or how high they were ranked in the game - that fades away, and becomes more meaningless with the passage of time. However, if the reasons that the player had left were out of concern for the direction of the company, then that is indeed something to talk about. - especially considering the common trend of player opinion, both here and on the RSOF. Let's face it. A lot of us have our reservations or disagreement with some direction Jagex has taken. We're all entitled to that. We're also entitled to express that reasoning as well (provided that no information that was to be kept confidential was passed along in the process). While I don't fault Woox16 for quitting, I don't appreciate that he shared information that is not normally public knowledge. So he's leaving in ~5 days (at the time of writing). That's fine, hope he has fun in doing something else. --- When will Jagex cross the line? When haven't they crossed the line...I didn't really appreciate the Wilderness/FT polls, nor how they were handled, and that was a huge damper to what I thought the company had going for it. It's like they were making good progress in my mind, then decided to regress a few years to relive the "glory days". -.- There are other, lesser, issues that I've taken with content development and some interpersonal management schema on some ends, but I'd say the catalyst was when I felt that Jagex had thrown their integrity and progress under a bus. --- Ironic - Woox16 felt that Jagex had lost a lot of their integrity. He was also getting bored. So there you have it - the opinion of a player laid bare about a company that he once enjoyed, and a game that he had "beaten".