Makoto_the_Phoenix

What is there to say? I mean, what the hell? I might make that poster a wallpaper on my computer.

Aha, there you go. You said they need to be mature and helpful. Unfortunately, both maturity and helpfulness are subjective to the beholder. I could define maturity in-game by not using so much if any "leet-speak", and I could define helpfulness as giving me 10M every time I needed a quick money boost. However, that view does not apply to each and every person that plays. Maturity is something acquired and not really seen on a one-time basis; it's something that constantly changes and stays with you no matter what the circumstance. Same with helpfulness; personally I sure wouldn't give 10M to everyone that asked me for it; does that make me not helpful? Of course, our views of helpfulness and maturity will differ. Someone might view someone else as both capable and willing to do the job, including being mature enough to handle the responsibilities and helpful all around the board, but another might view him as immature and question why Jagex placed him in power in the first place. Also, as implied before, there is no concrete proof that even if they meet all of the criteria that they will not abuse their power. I can't think of any way besides trial-and-error that power can be entrusted to that person. Besides, it's not really our decision as to whom gets power -- Jagex makes all the calls on maturity, helpfulness and capability of using that power for good; while we may disagree with Jagex in their [not-so] infinite wisdom, I for one will trust that they have at least enough sense to punish the ones that are not to be entrusted with power at all, and learn from their mistakes.

I'll also disagree with your logic, simply because being well-known does not always mean that they could be trusted, would uphold the rules no matter what (even with friends), and that they have friends who have the same standards of being a good RuneScape player. Even before that, would the players that are well-known throughout the community accept the responsibilities of modship in the first place? If they don't, then there's no real point. There's one aspect that we've all forgotten: "All power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely." I don't think that there is a definitive way to prove that anyone wouldn't go out on a power binge until things like players getting muted when they did nothing wrong happen. Regardless of what they have to lose or not, when a feeling of superiority and power comes over a person, there's no guarantee that they can control themselves long enough to avoid catastrophic results, such as their removal of power, banning, or both. I also don't feel that the people who are well known would be 100% mature 100% of the time; again there is no real way to measure that except through trial-and-error. The idea of having the well known players' friends only promote others into modship is a horrid idea. This can lead to favoritism and ultimately be the downfall of the Player Moderator system as we'd know it -- Imagine a world where only the few who know the ones with the crown gain the crown themselves, and imagine the aftermath of such a world. Most of this is based on premonition. It is presumed that players that are well-known will be loyal and good candidates for modship. It is presumed that these players will make coherent nominations for others when it comes to promotions of Player Moderator. Don't you think that if you're talking in-game integrity that you'd need something a little better than just a presumption?

It doesn't have to be officially enforced, hopefully it would just be self enforced. If you designate a world 18 or over, hopefully younger or less mature players will get bored and go to other worlds. It is really no different than any of the other theme worlds. For example, the Falador party room world ....go there and the party room is packed, where on other worlds it is nearly deserted ...that is not to say if you go to this world, you must go to the party room On an 18+ world, hopefully the majority of people would be over 18 and there can be intelligent chat at the mines, rather than just asking lvls? ....Maybe when I quote a funny line from a movie from the 80's , more than 1 person will get the joke. The part in bold declares your naivety. Self enforcement in this tense would be the same as the honor system at a high school's computer lab; there's no filter actively restricting access to pornographic sites or YouTube, but since everyone's on the honor system, they'll abide by it. WRONG. The parts in italics are what I'm getting at here. Even if Jagex were to implement such a ludicrous idea, you can only hope that people abide by the rules, you can only hope that people younger than 18 aren't going to see this as fun; you can only hope. Don't you think that if someone were going to go as extreme as an adults-only server, that hope would be just a little bit too weak?! One last thing: No, it wouldn't be like the designated activity worlds. Trust me when I tell you that the more forbidden something is, the more people want to see it, and that includes 18-only areas of whatever.

It's really not about if they should interfere, but if they could interfere in the first place. We all know and understand by now that prices for everything from ashes to Party Hats are set by us players, and that if the players feel that prices need to be lowered or raised, they will be. Jagex has very little say over this. The only thing they could do is figure out a way to buy all of the items in the game without causing too much disruption, kind of a 'stock exchange' if you will. Using only a theoretical "General Store"-type layout, they could directly control prices of various items by forcing players to use that and only that to trade. But, not only is that a theory, it's impractical -- no one's going to give away their freedom to set prices as they want just to bring balance to some 'economical system'. There's a multitude of ways to resolve the longstanding issues of the RS Economy, but getting Jagex involved is not one of them.

Did you know that on the Internet, you could lie about your age and there is no concrete way to prove how old you are (unless Jagex implements COPPA)? So this means that a 14 year old could come on one of these adult servers and see all kinds of stuff that he shouldn't. Ironically, that's around the same time his mom walks in to do the laundry and sees something flash across the screen that makes her blush. This leads to many an argument over the computer which will end up with a canceled subscription, broken modem, and a son that is completely upset. So in other words, no an adult server need not be created. If you guys really can't stand the children that play, then stop playing.

Six more days of waiting won't kill anyone. If you can't stand the wait, go outside and play with the neighborhood kids.

I'd use them because now, players have an actual (official) meeting place for these sorts of minigames. I recall a post in General that had Trouble brewing with about 94 people in it (~47 a side), and that's phenomenal. It's almost like these minigames get their purpose for being back, and these usually make for exciting player versus player combat. (Try going to the fight pits. Just *try* it.)

Life > RuneScape. It doesn't matter how you manage your time in life or whatever, life will always and forever come before some game that you can drop like a rock and pick up where you left off. With real life (especially school!), it's not so easy.

To me the icons look even better than they did before. It's always an improvement to update certain areas of the game that are (frequently) undernoticed. To everyone that complains: So what if they look childish or don't reallly appeal to you? In three weeks tops, none of you kids will even care what the interface looks like, so long as it works and you can understand it. Of course, those that don't understand it at first of course fear it, and out of that fear comes complaints and rants.

Would you be happier about your job if your paying customers didn't whine about every little change?

I'm wondering how many times people will have to tell you that the guide was NEVER published by Jagex. Seriously. Take a hint, man.

Do the words "recurring nightmare" come to anyone else's mind?

Yeah. And members are ten times better at gratefulness.

It honestly took me 3 hours to comphrehend where the author was coming from, and normally with articles I can get the point in less than five minutes. There's a number of things here that I disagree adamantly with you on, and I think I'll reference them by point instead of multiquoting. In the first paragraph, you go ahead and talk about the halcyon days of RuneScape. I don't know how you believe that there were nothing but teenagers and adults in the game; in truth I started playing when I was probably 14. My friends, who got me started into the game, were 14 and 11 at the time, if my memory serves correctly. Let me tell you that all of my youthful friends, who started playing around this time, were probably more mature than the community ever could have been. In the second paragraph, it is true that a game changes as it expands over time, and that a company must adapt to that change. I'd like to know, however, which way would have been best in your opinion, for RuneScape to change. What it did over time was replace the 2D sprites and 3D NPOs to a full 3D game, increase the room that members had, and give them a multitude of updates to play with, while at the same time giving freeplay a cookie out of the entire jar once or twice. Before, in RSC, I didn't have members simply because it didn't appeal to pay $5 for a 2D game with 3D NPOs, even though the community was fantastic. Now that I am a member, post RS2, I still don't think that RuneScape's updates or gameplay took a turn for the youth. Besides this, no one said that the largest slice of the community was children. I'd like to see you, the article writer, provide proof that children are the absolute majority. And no, Miniclip isn't enough proof. In your third paragraph, this is where it all comes undone. How do you correlate "free" to "for kids"? How do you blame Miniclip for the number of preteens in the game? Isn't RuneScape.com just as easy to visit as Miniclip.com? This paragraph is nothing but pure prejudice against a younger audience. I don't believe it's very fair to tell *all* of the players from Miniclip that they are immature and should go home, nor do I feel that it's right to say that they "flocked into its website like a stampede of deranged cattle thatÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢s been hyped up with Red Bull in their water troughs". For the fourth paragraph, I'll work my way up to the top with this one. Updates like the Wilderness Ditch, Town Crier, and Stronghold of Security didn't exist 3 years ago. If you wanted to learn about the gameplay, about the rules, and about the nature of the game itself, you had one of two choices: flip through a needlessly long website or trial and error. If those methods weren't enough, you had to go to a fansite to find out, and not all fansites are legit, fair, or helpful. The player-moderator debacle was an interesting one; at first I disagreed with the methods, but looking back at it, I can see that they were put in there to help sustain the community. Whether or not they're doing that job, that's in the air. On your note of the lack of blood and gore, why the hell does a game need to have blood in it at all? If you really get a kick out of that kind of stuff, then maybe your leaving the RuneScape community was for the up and up. In the fifth paragraph you go on a tangent about how simple the quests are to do. Have you ever tried to do Mournings' End II without a quest guide (or while writing a guide)? Have you tried Monkey Madness without a guide? Did you easily overcome Desert Treasure without anyone's help? Was it really easy to get past Legends for you? If you think that none of those quests require skill, you're dead wrong. Mournings' End II, which is a good example, requires a lot of puzzle-solving skill and patience. It honestly took me 17 inconsecutive hours to complete the quest from start to finish, and another 2 hours to compile the information I had into a guide. Besides this, what's wrong with a happy ending? Although DT didn't have one, Slug Menace didn't have one, and a few more didn't have a "happy ending". You also go on to insult the characters and how "goofy" they look, even when they die. Pardon me, but apparently you really haven't touched RSC if you think that those are goofy. Jagex is also working to improve how everything in the game looks, and they are doing a damn fine job by me. As far as the quest puns go, what's wrong with that? They're not so corny once you get a chuckle or two out of them, and that's all they really want. Sheesh man, get a sense of humor. In your sixth paragraph, you don't really provide any proof that RuneScape is being ruined with constant warning messages. The Wilderness ALWAYS had a warning message attached to it. Are you telling me that the Wilderness was made less scary with that message? Along with this, a recent update was released so that if you did something six times or more, you could toggle it off to never be warned by it again. In conclusion, I'm kind of glad you left the game - the community couldn't benefit really from a player that takes such a pessimistic view of the game. I'll admit that the community has changed, but so have I and all of my friends that still play. We view this game at a different age than we would when we were younger; we see things a lot differently than a child could. So, I don't think that the community is all that bad as far as your article goes. You also place the blame on the wrong person; Jagex can't do anything on how someone acts. It's up to each and every one of us to change the community for the better (or the worse), and players that constantly bash the game without providing any reason or rhyme behind it don't come off (to me) as trying to change the community for the better. It was an article that I feel should have never seen the light of day. If you're going to write something like that, try again with proof this time?

All that form does is provide fansites an easier way to query user stats, which of course is done in the background. From what I know, RuneWeb uses that stat query now. Most of the other fansites with stat signatures may use them, but I can only confirm RuneWeb as of right now.

Why the hell not? Chances are it'll be completely different, and we don't know if they will be using IRC or not. All I can say is let's wait and see what we see. :D

I could probably write an entry-level thesis on this, but I'll keep it as short and condensed as possible. I'm sure no one has the time to be reading through 25 pages, now do we? :D I'll debate these per point that comes up, since I don't like multi-quoting in a thread much. 1. I could very well do everything else that I can do on my main, but the only problem is that I am at 118 combat (at the time of writing). This means that in my league, I'll only face players that are probably at 123 and up, and I have no level 99 skill to attack with (most of which are in the high 90s). This means that not only am I easy prey, but I am taking a much larger risk with my items than I would be with my black pure; instead of losing a set of full Black and a rune scimitar, I'd be losing a whip, a set of either Rune or Barrows (most likely Karil), various tidbits of jewelery, and other things. For me, it's much easier to just PK on a much lower account, to reduce the earned risk therein. (No I did not drop-trade anything on my pure, so losing something would be a heavy blow to that file. However, I don't lose. :D) 2. I do not really seek a position to compete with 1 million players. The hell's the point in that? If you ask me, being 999,999th is far better than being ranked in the top 50, the top 20, or the top 5. Less people badger you, covet you, are jealous of you, or even try to hack you. You'd also be surprised that less people even try to hurl insults at you such as "noob" and "nerd" and "no-life", even when they have no foreknowledge of your life besides that you're substantially high ranked in RuneScape. I'll also be honest in saying that if I had the chance to hide my scores, I would. I'm not in it to compete, I'm in it to have fun. On the subject of having fun, a second account allows me to break free from the monotony of working on my main. If I'm bored with fishing or fletching or firemaking or even Slayer (God forbid!), I'll just log off, turn on the pure(s) and go a huntin'. 3. If two accounts with membership costs too much, then I don't see the point of ever getting members on the second account. I have probably three or four pures, and I see no need to get them on members, nor will I in the near future. What they can do on freeplay is just enough excitement for me; if I wanted to go gallivanting onto a members' server to prove that I was the baddest out there, then I don't have problems with using my main. There you have it.

Oh, so I see that you've encountered a "tank pure". /me opens a bit of RSC Pure history, Vol. 2 (revision) A tank pure is a pure that neglects all melee skills with the exception of Defense, and boosts another combat-specific skill, most commonly Magic. Ranged tank pures, while sporadic, were not unheard of entirely in RSC. These variety of pures could devastate even the most hardened of combatants while mostly remaining untouched. The most common stats for a tank pure (in order of Attack, Defense, Strength, Magic and/or Ranged) would be 1 40 1 60. In RuneScape 2, since magic was redefined to only be a more primary combat force, such as Ranged always was, Tank pures had little to no real purpose to serve. They could no longer wear full Rune (chain) or any real armor anymore while casting their devastating magic at a foe in combat, so it is very uncommon to see or note a tank pure in RuneScape at all, although that is not to say that they do not exist. ------ I don't know what function tank pures play in RS2 since the combat triangle has changed so much, but it is sure an interesting site.

If you've got a choice between ethics and putting food on the table for the family, the family will always take top priority, even if your sense of ethics are ironclad or not. These people have to work to get food on the table, and regardless of whether we like them or not, they're still quite hungry, and this job is in essence the best alternative to getting food for the kids (aside from prostitution and drug dealing). What can we do about it? Honestly, that's tough to say. Jagex shouldn't have announced that most of them were from Asian countries; sounds like more xenophobia to me, which is one less thing that the average agegroup of RuneScape needs. It also isn't like they are just going to magically go away, no matter what Jagex does; if someone is paying them to get this stuff, then by God they will get this stuff. The situation as it stands is one that Jagex alone can not combat, regardless of how hard they try. However, we as players are not completely helpless; we could begin in theory to harvest our own items for our own use to cut down on their market. Yet, the average 'Scaper here won't have enough patience to mine 10K coal or 2K mithril, or even kill 1,000 blue dragons. That is what they do; that is why they exist; that is why they will not go away, not until we get patient enough to do those menial tasks.

[hide=Quote box; for brevity read page 3] Depends on your definition on "noob". Besides that, not all freeplayers are insanely rich, so what they drop in there could very well be their life savings. How about you look past that part and see that freeplayers actually got something? On the entire topic of giving freeplay the Party Hall, all I can say is "more power to 'em". We weren't using it, so why the heck not? Let them have fun with it. Well, there's a lot of things we don't use. For example, why don't we give F2P's all the weapons we don't use? Like Spears and Hally's up to rune (I know some people use Rune Hallies, but still.), or maybe even claws? [/hide] You like it, I love it. Whatever the majority of members don't use on a normal basis is up for relocation in my book; if members can't find a valid use for it, them freeplayers most certainly will.

Depends on your definition on "noob". Besides that, not all freeplayers are insanely rich, so what they drop in there could very well be their life savings. How about you look past that part and see that freeplayers actually got something? On the entire topic of giving freeplay the Party Hall, all I can say is "more power to 'em". We weren't using it, so why the heck not? Let them have fun with it.

It's not really attacking pures, they're attacking themselves; they chose to neglect certain skills, so they chose to be excluded from a majority of updates (per Andrew, first page). Besides, even with these new quest requirements, the Quest Point cape falls way short of an Achievement Cape in terms of total experience. Last I checked it was around 6 million experience to earn one. If people don't like that, they can earn the other 7 million and get a cape that won't unequip every time they login on a quest update. (I know I don't have any 99s, but I still have my Fire Cape.)

Give 'em what we don't use and you'll have less complaints, that's my philosophy. :-w

I guess it was a bit presumptuous of me to assume you knew nothing since you consider bruteforcing and dictionary attacks to be primitive. For that I apologize. However, not to get off track, I'd like to know what you consider to be a real hack/crack, through Private Message. I'm already a sophomore in College. I only messed around with proxies/circumvention some 3 years ago. Having SSL enabled/disabled didn't really make much of a difference to the servers, as far as I knew, since we never used SSL to connect to RuneScape. In general, we used proxies and a circumvention tool (that port was eventually blocked). I don't recall it ever allowing us to connect to RuneScape through the circumventor, though. I also am quite aware about 128-bit encryption. It's generally a very bad idea to play RuneScape through one since it could be easily taken apart (server does stand in the middle/holds both public and private PGP keys). In effect, using a proxy to play RS would be even less secure than becoming infected. On topic (a bit more): Proxies do pass 90% of standard security measures. I don't think, however, that Jagex is just 'standard'.