Armadyllo

Not that it's much of a bright side, but a lot of what they took out was imperfect in the first place. They may have chucked out the baby with the bathwater, but it wasn't a very healthy baby anyway, and they're trying to spawn us a new baby to replace it. (Sorry for the horrible mental image.) Wilderness pking: Huge area, most of which wasn't used, and you had to go very deep to have a decent clan-war without the level restrictions mucking you about. That's a poor design, and there had been complaints and constructive suggestions for Jagex to redesign the Wilderness for ages. I don't think many people would have expected THIS, but Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars might be quite good, in themselves. Unbalanced trading: It gave us flexibility and a free market. It also gave us scamming, and Jagex hadn't been having much success with trying to help with scamming by conventional means. Sadly we lose gift-giving and the chance for cooperation between players for skill-training, which is a big shame. Maybe they'll update the Assist system to help with some of this. So yes, the update may be mighty unpopular, but I don't see it as all doom+gloom. It's a pity about all the gameplay mechanics we lose, but they're at least making an effort to replace them. Over time, once the inane rant-fest subsides and constructive suggestions start showing through, I'd expect them to add more features to help replace the things we've lost. In the longer term, we should still be able to find ways to have fun in RS. (I'm still sulking about the update, but I haven't anything more useful to say about that than "waaaa". For the moment.)

I've never had any bad results from intercepting drop trades, other than being called a scammer by the drop-trader, and that's just funny. Still, it seems to be a moot point now, if I'm understanding their newsposts correctly. No more valuable items/stacks in drop-trades, right?

Just lately there's been quite a flow of suggestions from players about how Jagex could solve the RWT problem. Some of the smarter ones include intelligent IP filters, advanced random features to confuse the bots, etc. They certainly would work at first, if Jagex did a good job of it. (I'm feeling optimistic today.) However, after a while, the RWT merchants can learn and adapt. Take the rather simplistic example above. If you ban all level 3s with Chinese names - on the assumption that no innocent player ever creates an account with a Chinese name, and that RWT accounts can't level combat! - the RWT merchants would just have to work out that they needed to call their accounts Johnny111, Johnny112, Johnny113 instead. Then Jagex would have upset a load of innocent players again, and it'd have achieved no long-term effect. I don't believe Jagex is going to be able to release any successful anti-RWT feature that depends on blocking them heuristically, not if the feature's got to work for all future RWT accounts. In the same way, they blatantly aren't achieving anything by writing randomized features, if the existing random events are anything to go by. It's a classic arms race, where Jagex is constantly trying to develop something the RWT merchants can't work around, and Jagex's chances of winning would be zero. This leaves us with the unpleasant prospect of Jagex doing something far more extreme to try obliterating the problem once and for all.

Jagex wouldn't just have to ask nicely for the offending websites to be removed, they'd have to get some legal grounds for enforcing it. Legal systems can differ from country to country, making this kind of thing complicated. I've heard of websites being shut down successfully over this kind of thing in America and western Europe, but that doesn't necessarily meant it'd be so easy elsewhere. (I'd hope to be wrong about this! Anyone out there studied this sort of law at college?)

I'm not familiar with the laws that control this sort of thing, but I don't think it's very easy to delete someone else's website if its hosting company doesn't wish to cooperate. If they're hosted in a different country, Jagex could have a really complicated legal headache trying to make the sites go away.

We've already got randoms. Most of them don't seem to work on bots (I keep seeing bots wearing random event reward kit), and they annoy legitimate players all the time. It'd be lovely if Jagex will somehow manage to make the whole problem go away without disrupting the innocent players' gaming experience, but they've not managed it in the last 3 years, and I'll be impressed if they manage to wave a magic wand and achieve it now. Players keep suggesting practical solutions that might help from a technical end, such as random features to disrupt the bots (which we know to be failing), IP blocking with a learning algorithm for detecting RWT IPs, and stuff like that. Unfortunately all that stuff tends to be reactive, and the RWT merchants will just take a little time to work around it, such as by learning how to bot through a new random event. Jagex would have to be constantly developing new tricks, all of which would still affect the legitimate players in some negative way just like fatigue did, and all of which would eventually become useless just like the early random events did. Given that Jagex is openly damaging the game (i.e. high risk of loss of customers and money) to attack RWT, it's a pretty good guess that they've already been down the low-risk paths and come up blank.

(I did read the rest, honest, but I hate huge quotes.) TipIt Times doesn't tell the community what to think. The staff put up articles and letters that are - ideally - interesting, or informative, or controversial, or whatever, and we get to discuss them. We're free to compliment the author, and we're free to post reasons for disagreeing, and we're even free to find another fansite to read! Just at the moment, there are plenty of Jagex-bashing discussions dotted around the internet, and they've already got most of the good reasons for criticizing Jagex well covered. TipIt could certainly have decided to blindly go with the flow and dedicate its weekly feature-spot to yet another Jagex-bash, but how interesting would it have been?

seriously, it wouldnt take much to allow it. they are java gaming experts after all..... edit: they also have the source code for the game too.... not like they're trying to reverse engineer the game like so many of the private servers are doing. Sure, they COULD do it, from a technical point of view (although they'd have to do it better than the time they tried selling downloadable ringtones). I think Omali was saying that it'd muck up the economy if they did it. The economy in RuneScape is far from perfect, but introducing infinite supplies of gp isn't going to help. What would people want to spend it on? Rares aren't going to soak it all up! If Jagex then started supplying infinite quantities of raw materials for players to spend their infinite money on, there'd not be very much gameplay left in skill training. That's a finite quantity of items. Even if it happens the way you're predicting, a year later the effects would be long gone. Quite a lot of players would be gone as well, but Jagex seems to be okay with that. At the rate of newbies entering RuneScape, they'll probably make up the loss of customers quickly enough. (sulks)

Yes, it certainly looks like account trading will end up trying to be the new RWT! - People tend to prefer choosing their own character name. Now, unless people are going to create an account, send it to a sweatshop for intensive training, then trust that they'll get it back full of stats and items a week later in exchange for their money, that won't be possible. - Jagex does detect botting and ban botters, but they clearly can't do it quick enough to cope with the speed of RWT-merchants making new accounts. It can't take much more than 20 mins to bot an account through Tutorial Island and get it started on gold-farming. These accounts can currently transfer their wealth freely, so banning the new account achieves nothing. But if Jagex pushes ahead and blocks all wealth transfer - and it's looking like they will - the account will be banned along with all the stuff it's accumulated. They won't need to ban it quickly before it can trade its items off, they'll just need to ban it eventually, and that'll deter people from risking their cash on an account that may get banned. - Given how many people complain that their accounts get locked "for security" after they accessed them from a different city or country, it looks like Jagex has already become able to detect accounts that might have changed ownership. There may be a LOT of people mighty upset about what Jagex is doing to deal with RWT, but it might just work! Still, on the plus side, if they do install a trading cap like the staking cap, no more people getting scammed by item-switchers! Sure, we should be able to read the second trade screen, but even intelligent adults seem to fall for it occasionally.

If I played basketball all afternoon with my friends, joined a basketball team, stuck posters of Michael Jordan on my wall, dreamt of becoming a major-league basketball star, etc., I'd be seen having as a healthy interest in sports. If I played RuneScape all afternoon interacting with my friends, joined a clan, bought the RS poster, dreamt of getting a job with Jagex to help improve the game, etc., I'd be called a nerd. Of course, the exercise of the basketball would probably do me good, and I really prefer interacting with people face-to-face rather than over the net. On the other hand, RS fans seldom go ape and trash streets, whereas sports fans have been known to do this sort of thing! :-P

Many of us are paying customers. If the company no longer wishes to offer a service for which we were paying, we take our business elsewhere. It's up to Jagex to offer us something that we want; if they don't, there's no deal, and we find something else to entertain us on the internet. Hate doesn't come into it. If your local supermarket decides not to sell canned tuna fish because they're concerned about killing dolphins, you don't go hating the supermarket. You might tell them that the fuss over dolphins is overrated, or you might tell them to find a cleverer solution by selling tuna that was fished without risk to dolphins, and hopefully they'd listen and do what you asked. But you don't declare that you hate the supermarket staff, and it wouldn't help if you did. Eventually you'd shop elsewhere, and get your tuna fix! On a separate note, if Jagex did an update that upset even 1% of the total players, that'd be around 60k angry people, many of whom would post about it on forums, which would certainly look like "everyone" was furious about the update. Despite that, the majority of players would still be playing happily enough. The 1% figure is plucked out of thin air; I doubt there were so many high-stakes duelers, but December's BTS looks suspiciously like Jagex is about to do a lot more in the same direction, unless I'm misinterpreting the signs.

So far, there's no chance of the updates being effective. As people have pointed out, the RWT-merchants can still pass items through trading, drop-trading and rigged PKing, so nothing's changed yet. Now, if Jagex were to change all those things to attack RWT - plus all the other item-transfer methods I haven't thought about - it'd be pretty effective, but then would it justify the changes to RuneScape? I notice the party room's little update will have its own effects on anyone trying to do RWT in there. We can no longer try to drop valuable items via the chest without the drop party being advertized to everybody in every bank across the whole world. Still, that's the least of our worries.

I can see a slight benefit in having the GE respond slowly to price changes. Price manipulation seems to attract a fair few complaints, presumably from people who aren't making a profit from it. With the GE updating its prices so slowly, it'll be considerably harder for players to manipulate item prices in the same way because they'll need to make their trends far more significant and long-term before the GE will notice. 1. Of course, Jagex didn't need to discourage price manipulation. I miss their old "we don't get involved in item costs" policy. 2. It's a "slight" benefit, and it's only a benefit for players who like that sort of thing. 3. Just now, when the design of the GE requires it to correct its prices ASAP to what the players expect, it could do with being a bit more flexible.

There's one thing this thread doesn't seem to have covered yet: Jagex would have known that they'd be losing stakers over this. Imagine you're running RuneScape, such a pleasant dream. You've gotten it into your head that you're going to wipe out staking. Obvious question is - "Won't all the stakers quit?" Well, maybe not all of them, but you're still chucking away customers. So, you go and check out how many stakers you've got. That way you know the scale of the risk you're taking. You're running the game, so you can get real statistics on how many people are staking. Here on the fan-forums we can only guess at ballpark figures based on our experience and gut-level feelings, but Jagex should have the ability to count the stakers accurately. Apparently you find that stakers are not a very big proportion of the community, so you go ahead and kill staking, accepting that a proportion of your customers will leave, but believing - based on your research - that it's going to be okay in the long-term. We can tell Jagex that we hate what they're doing, but frankly this isn't going to surprize Jagex in the least. They clearly know that they're driving away a number of people, and they clearly reckon that it's worth the temporary loss. (This implies that there's little practical point in complaining about it, but I wasn't planning to stop.) PVP combat is, frankly, not RuneScape's greatest strength. RuneScape's best sellable features include its storylines, its humor, its simplicity and its low computer requirements. Those are things that will continue to bring in new players to replace the people who are quitting. There's been much talk about this sort of change being likely to kill RuneScape. I'm predicting that RuneScape won't die, it'll just change. Maybe it'll change into something that many of us don't enjoy so much, so people will go play other games. But it'll still have features that other people do like, so it'll continue running off those instead. For example, the tournaments, as a stand-alone feature, are a nice minigame. New players, and we know RuneScape has sooooo many new players, can enjoy the tournaments without caring about the loss of big stakes. The quests remain pretty decent, and there are still plenty of skills to train, with Summoning promised for 2008. We know that looks good, cos someone leaked a load of graphics for it. I'm fairly confident that there'll still be a RuneScape... for those of us who still want anything to do with it.

They were pretty dodgy for most of the first day, with tournaments simply failing to start once the countdown reached zero, but they've been better since then, barring the odd player getting put in a wall or not being able to click "attack" on other people. But there've been less new complaints since then. Which leaves Jagex to fix one or two of the weirder rules, such as the one where healing right at the end of the round makes them declare you the winner. There's a note on Jagex's knowledge base saying that the tournament registrars aren't supposed to open unless there are enough people in the waiting area who've got the right ranks to play. After people complained about it being broken, there was a Jagex mod looking at it on world 48 around 7pm Eastern time and afterwards the message changed to "We're closed, why not try a busier world?"

From a practical point of view, people are so often more happy to share training spots if your character is female.

Lovely article. I always enjoy reading these things. Just a few minor points...

Lol! The terms and conditions state that we're not allowed to use bots to play RuneScape, they don't say anything about what Jagex can or cannot do to make their service more efficient. Besides, many of the messages they need to send are going to be similar: how many ways are there of saying "we are denying your appeal"? I just wish they'd stop trying to be funny. When they write "Greetings, brave adventurer" at the top of a reply, or when they say they'll pass your message on to the team of goblins that deals with [insert-topic-here], it makes me want to hit someone.

Back in 2004, there were insane numbers of rants about Jagex ruining RuneScape by shelving the familiar RS-Classic and forcing everyone to play Rs2 (if they wanted updates). I had the fun of f-modding the RSOF Rants forum throughout most of the first night, and we all know how mature people can be in there when they're genuinely upset. Some of the themes are the same now. Players hope that by complaining loudly enough, Jagex will give in and reverse the update, or undo whatever change is causing the fuss. Many people seem to be under the impression that if they call Jagex rude names they'll make their point more clearly. (More likely it'll just put Jagex off reading anyone's feedback at all.) Anyway, it didn't really make much difference. They gave us a couple of chances to hop between Rs2 and RS-C, then they moved on to get on with running their game, which seems to have worked out pretty well in the long run. Of course, back then, I liked what Jagex had done. I still do like "Rs2"! I don't, however, like the new insanely low staking cap, and I wish to goodness they hadn't done it. But having watched people ranting about updates for a pretty long time, I don't believe the rants achieve much. Especially on this update - Jagex didn't kill staking by accident, and they must have known perfectly well what effect it would have.

Not so hidden. From their newspost: And where things aren't tradeable, they don't have certs. I guess there'll be no more "selling rare spinach roll" scams, if anyone was still falling for that one...

Lol. Well, we'll see. Whether they're after gambling or real-world trading, they've got a long way to go yet.

There've been "riots" over many issues in the past. I don't think they achieve very much, but the community spirit is probably a good thing!

Let's pray that you're right. I just don't see any point in them lying about their reasons for this. The reason you've postulated is far less controversial than the one they gave us, so it'd be a mighty silly lie!

In a complete rewrite of the Duel Arena, such as we've just had, if they wanted to get rid of one-on-one staking while introducing tournaments, they could have simply left out the staking altogether if they really wanted to be rid of it. Instead they've left in a crippled form of staking that's useless for big item transfers. (Pity it's not much fun for staking.) Anyway, we shall see. I've been following a few of those recent threads where they're speculating about Jagex needing to restrict item transfers - hence a Grand Exchange to control the trades - and I find them a bit more convincing.

I'm just not seeing it. They post about trying to get rid of real-world trading and bots, they change shops (relatively harmlessly) and say it's to get rid of bots, then they destroy staking and claim it's to get rid of real-world trading. It's horrible, but it fits what they've been doing. Now, there could be some hidden conspiracy on the part of Jagex to get rid of gambling from the game, but that's a pretty arbitrary theory. For a start, they've got very explicit gambling in the game (Barbarian Assault, Rat Pits and the Death Plateau dice game). Sure, it's not particularly high-stake gambling, but it's still clearly gambling. They've never shown any signs of wanting to get rid of it. If they did want to get rid of the nasty gambling from RuneScape, that's technically good PR - "game removes unsuitable content, send your kiddies to play it now" - and they could be expected to announce it loudly. Which we don't see. I don't like the staking cap, and I don't like where I think they're going with this, but I don't believe it's a dishonest conspiracy aimed at something else. I wish it were! I'd actually prefer for Jagex to get rid of gambling than to stop uncontrolled item transfers in order to take out real-world trading; gambling doesn't interest me, but a fight against real-world trading can have far more serious effects on my favorite game.