Armadyllo

It's only available in hardback at the moment. Hardback books are almost always expensive. After a few months the publishers re-release them in paperback at a much lower price. I think they should do that soon for this book. Assuming the book's aimed at teenagers, few of the target audience will be interested in paying the hardback price. Paperback books are more likely to be in the right price range for the market.

Oh? I guess someone will lock this if it's a problem.

Lol at how many threads turned up on the RSOF saying "the bank's glitched, i have 2 deposit 10 options". You'd think Jagex would have set the initial value to something that wasn't already there, though!

Okay, so we can now lend out items. And people are charging rent for it, and sometimes they keep the money and don't go through with the loan, or they do a "just until we log out loan" and take the item straight back. There are plenty of rants about item lending, and quite a few of them focus on the potential for scamming. Thing is, RuneScape's had scamming for years and years. Until the RWT updates, people were regularly tricked out of vast sums of money by item switchers and lurers. The scammers could be reported, but we all still played the game at our own risk, knowing that we might lose our stuff if we weren't careful. As experienced players, we all knew that it wasn't safe to do a trust game, or a drop trade, or an items-for-info/assistance deal, and we knew that if we didn't read the trade screen carefully we might lose our stuff. And it'd be our own fault if we fell for these tricks. The RWT updates drastically reduced the potential for scamming. Indeed, they reduced the potential for lots of things! That said, it's still very easy to have a deal go bad, especially if you're asking for payment in return for your help via the Assist system, or trying to sell information. Plus there have been the various lure tricks in BH, although I wouldn't necessarily class them as scams. Now that we've got this lending system, and within the first few hours people were complaining about it leading to scams. Yet these scams are no bigger than anything else that's currently possible in the game. All the "renting" of items is done at the players' own risk, just like cash-for-assistance deals. People often complain that the game's getting dumbed down or noobified. Well, this might just be the exception to that trend! If players want to borrow items from a lender who's demanding payment, they're going to have to take the risk themselves, since Jagex hasn't provided any "safe" mechanism for it. I wonder if they will? Or maybe they'll take the easy way out and forbid us to do anything that's got the slightest potential for scamming. I'd find that patronising. So... what's the big deal with the return of scamming? Scamming never went away, and it never will. (Not unless Jagex blocks all item transfers, and we don't want that.) Item renting doesn't help the situation, but I think there's been some serious over-reaction to it. On a practical note, if you're really desperate to borrow that item in exchange for your hard-earned gp, make REALLY sure the offer screen says "it will be returned to its owner's Returned Items box in 24 hours" rather than "... it will be returned to its owner's Returned Items box immediately if either of you logs out". Otherwise you're just asking for trouble! :-)

Ah, right. I envy your knowledge of the workings of Jagex :-)

I'm confused. Are you saying that it COULD be dismantled, or that it COULDN'T? If it's got a "Dismantle" option, but you get a message saying "This isn't your property", and it doesn't actually come apart, surely that would mean that there's nothing wrong?

In Britain, around the time the Hunter skill came out, there was a big debate going on in the media about whether the government should outlaw the hunting of foxes with horses and hounds. The popular opinion was that hunting was cruel and pointless. So it'd have been a bit silly for Jagex to proudly launch a feature called Hunting. Renaming it to Hunter wasn't much of an improvement, but it probably made them feel better about it.

People often claim that Jagex should pay more attention to veterans. Of course, it tends to be the veterans who say that! The RWT updates weren't about Jagex not knowing what the community wanted. They knew perfectly well that they were alienating a vast proportion of their customers. That's not something a business will do unless it REALLY has to, so we can only conclude that Jagex thought they had no alternative. Apart from the trouble with Jagex-vs-player relations, I think there might be a growing problem with Jagex-vs-Jagex relations. They're not a single hive-mind composed of 300/400 bodies all working in perfect harmony under the direction of Mr Gower. They're 300/400 individual people working in separate teams. There've been enough issues in the past where one Jmod's posted a definitive statement, such as "Dust devils do NOT drop dragon chains", only to be contradicted by another Jmod posting the complete opposite a moment later. It'd only get worse if they tried doubling the size of the company to give us more Jmods to chat to! We know that Jagex does seem to absorb some ideas eventually, even if they don't reply much. Their announcements about Item Lending have changed over the last few months, implementing suggestions players had made on the forums before. One of their programmers posted a great long pile of stuff on the RSOF about how Clan Wars could be updated, mirroring an article that had been published here on TipIt a week previously. The time they reversed their decision about banning Swiftswitch, the newspost explained that they'd been in touch with the guy who wrote it, and he'd agreed to make changes to it. What they don't do is implement requests like "fix the lag" or "ffs bring back the Wilderness". Or "stop doing pointless updates and fix the combat system". Even if they know what players want - or at least what the nearby ranters want - they can't always wave the magic wand to make it happen. I'm pretty sure that if there was a simple way of making everyone's computer talk smoothly to their servers across thousands of miles of internet simultaneously, they'd have tried it by now. And I'd be terrified of Jagex making a vast change to combat unless they've got a REALLY good plan. So Jagex does appear to be listening, and taking a few ideas from players, and even talking directly when they can. It's just not something we can see happening on a daily basis. And it does end up being impersonal, which is a shame, but that's not the end of the world. I would far rather have the Jmods focus their attention on ban appeals, game maintenance and stuff like that rather than sitting in the game surrounded by people who want a screenshot of a Jmod saying "Orange Ownage FTW".

Back in December 2006, Jagex picked up on this problem too, and slapped a big newpost on the front of the RuneScape site: They didn't bother posting one for Christmas 2007, given what they'd done earlier in December. You can see why a parent might make that mistake if their kid asks really nicely and assures them that it's safe and that people do it all the time. The internet's an utter minefield of rules that people don't know until they break them and suffer the consequences. I saw one account run into trouble on the RSOF because the player's mother had "borrowed" the account to post in Compliments. The RSOF being what it is, she promptly got overwhelmed with people flaming her for account-sharing, after which she got flamed for attempting to discuss the rules of the forums. Sad...

Second letter is BRILLIANT. The COPPA legislation in the USA insists that children under the age of 13 must be handled in a certain way, so Jagex is going to have to obey the rules. Jagex could hardly pretend that they'd never noticed any under-13s in RuneScape. (COPPA = Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) It's clear that people under 13 want to play RS, and we all probably know one or two people in the game who lied about their age to create the account. I suppose it's better to have them playing "officially". Besides, there's always TS or MSM :-)

Not that the running of the [bleep] is any of my business, but this thread's a bit of an exception. They launched this thread a long time after the letters were published (when the forums were brought back online), so there was a lot less drive for people to come and post on it. The more recent article by Das seems to have got far more attention. And disagreement.

I see it's now possible to create an account if you're under 13 (without lying about your age). And if you do, you're restricted to quickchat regardless of which world you're on. The terms & conditions for under-13s state that you will be prevented from submitting any personal details through the website. And, thanks to quickchat, you're prevented from submitting any personal details through the game too. Perhaps this is what the whole quickchat system is for? Jagex decides to allow younger players in, on condition that they can't talk in case they say their personal details? It seems reasonable enough that there should be QC-only worlds in that case. (Given that there've been people under 13 playing for years, I'm surprised Jagex bothered with this. But it doesn't harm the rest of us.)

Barrows? Barrows was HATED when it first came out! That was before the armour started degrading, and the common opinion was that Jagex had completely screwed over anyone who'd spent millions on dragon kit that was now going to be obsolete and impossible to sell... The next week, they made Barrows kit wear out and break. NOW Barrows appears on the list of "perfect" updates. But it definitely didn't when they first released it. It's nice to see Jagex responding promptly to urgent concerns from the players, of course.

Interesting bit of the article here... Unnecessary change is not a good thing! The Fishing Trawler might need some tweaking, but I don't want to see Jagex changing monster drops or combat without a solid tactical reason. They can do a big update to gameplay if they've got something worth doing, but that doesn't mean we should be complaining if they make a purely cosmetic change to an old feature of the game. Ideally I'd like the game to have functionality AND flash. It's got enough functionality to keep me - and a few million others - entertained. It's getting more functionality, as witnessed by the promises for Clan Wars, Item Lending, and whatever the BTS documents trot out. Now they're improving the flashness too. This is a thing to be happy about! A common criticism of any RuneScape update is "That's all very well, but we wanted an update to XXX instead." So we criticise Jagex's updates, not for being poor updates, but for being the wrong updates! That's not much good as criticism. And, with so many people wanting different things as their top priority, that attitude is demanding to be disappointed.

Jagex KNEW they were going to upset a lot of people, and they knew they'd lose incredible numbers of players (and therefore money). They did the RWT changes anyway because they thought it'd be far worse for the game (i.e. its remaining players) if they didn't do it. Which means there's not much point in telling them that lots of people didn't like it; they knew that already. They'll even know how many people quit, which we don't. Jagex: "We've got to make these changes, even if you all get very angry." Rioter: "But we're all very angry. Undo the changes!" Jagex: "See above." The best thing about the riots is that they let all the upset players know they're not alone in feeling as they do. That's kinda nice.

Think about it... If you manage to arrange a huge riot on one server, it'll lag like crazy for the people who are in the crowded riot zone, and no-one else will be able to chat. That's a pain for players who wanted to be in that place on that server. But it doesn't make the server go offline, so it doesn't bother Jagex in the slightest. That makes it pretty useless as a form of protest. I do like riots for the community spirit, though. They're better than most minigames for that.

Turtlefemm's quite a moving writer. I don't normally enjoy reading passionate laments, but this one's a good read. We've lost a lot of opportunity for multiplayer cooperation in RuneScape over the RWT updates. The first article's a nice reminder that there are still things in the game that are more fun with friends / clanmates. Hopefully whatever expansions Jagex makes to PVP combat in future will give clans even more to do.

As a silly idea, I was thinking it'd be a rather nice gesture if Jagex would help fund subscriptions to other online games for the redundant RS goldfarmers.

Interesting. He's not just paying Jagex, he's got to pay some agency. Which means that whatever income he gets from RWT is being "taxed" by the middle-men. I wonder what proportion of the cash reaches him and his family? I don't want to see people starve to death either, but I seriously doubt RWT is a practical and effective method of helping.

They make a kind of sense, though. Jagex obliterates PKing -> no more ways to have a small one-on-one fight outside the Duel Arena. Except the Duel Arena was members-only. So they make that part of the Duel Arena available to F2p. Jagex releases Clan Wars. Identifying team-mates in the arena can be difficult, so they recommend using "wildy" capes. F2p didn't have those -> Jagex makes them available to F2p and dumps a cape seller in the Clan Wars waiting area. It's not exactly a bad thing if Jagex tries to improve the situation for F2p by making useful changes! The real way they're trying to mitigate the negative response is by waving the prospect of Summoning at us. The message was "Okay, we're doing some mighty unpopular things in December, but January's going to be AWESOME, so stick around." That's not exactly a sneaky attempt to deceive us into staying with RuneScape. It's a perfectly normal advertising campaign. We're just not used to seeing Jagex advertise their future updates (except by accidentally leaking images through their website, like with Construction).

My apologies, it's been a long time since RSC, and I mostly just remember there being a lot of pures in the Wildy in those days too. This is why I don't write articles about the history of pking. O:)

The "new engine feature" used for those satchels could be quite handy. The problem is that the things don't stack in banks, but there are any number of items in the game where you can only get one copy of the item at a time. Quest items tend to be like that. If Jagex started creating quest items that used that feature, we'd probably never notice because we wouldn't have multiple copies of them in our banks. I'd hope for Summoning to be a bit more interesting than simply spawning monsters for me to kill.

Indeed! RuneScape's got quite a few old issues like this, but I'd hate to see the repercussions if they got changed. The fact that so many of the skills consist of endlessly clicking on scenery, monsters and items is itself a legacy of the game's simpler origins; Jagex mostly avoids releasing such simple mechanics these days. I was wondering if anyone would bring that up. RSC had a combat system with an even more extreme balance problem, before Jagex tried to create the triangle. This didn't stop players from having a wonderful time with it, but it was ridiculous that a serious PVP combat player would have to ignore certain skills completely.

You're not exactly gaining majorly unfair benefits through the bug.

The more complicated features, i.e. the more recent skills, are mostly members-only features. F2p, where newbies start, is still pretty straightforward. You get more and more level 3s in P2p, but they tend to be pures or bots, and those can look after themselves. I agree about the gravestone being hard to get your head around, but a newbie player doesn't need to understand all the details and inner workings of the features. They'd be able to walk around the world and do some simple stuff - there's still plenty of simple stuff - and they can work out the rest gradually.