Armadyllo

If this was about stopping RL trading, no. They threw the baby out with the bathwater. If they really are going after RL trading, it'll become really obvious if they proceed to nerf the rest of the game to match this. They already changed shops to get at bots. What next? I can't think of any reason. Which is why I believe them when they say that's what they wanted to do, I guess.

Jagex certainly isn't afraid to make drastic changes to get rid of the real-world trading thing. So... anyone want to say thanks to them?

One of RuneScape's features is that we can develop our characters any way we like, without being restricted by a race or class we chose when we first signed up. That's a nice feature, and I'd be sorry to see it change.

On any forum, we see a lot of comments about how RuneScape was better a long time ago, or how Jagex ran it better in the past, or how updates used to be better, etc. It's strange that, no matter how much RuneScape may have "gone downhill", there's a growing number of people playing it and having a great time, including a lot of us. Indeed, maybe RuneScape hasn't been ruined at all!

I know Seers aren't a very exciting group of characters, but they SO need some improvement. They're a bunch of men with generic outfits and generic beards, and they're almost all completely identical! They don't even animate when they're using their mystic abilities. There's so much more Jagex could have done with that area when they redecorated the village this year, such as giving the seers some mystical apparatus and furniture or fancy seeing-beyond-human-ken expressions. They look more like a geology faculty than a group of eldritch magi. Redesigning the TzHaar just sounds like a waste of time. They're already pretty cool.

I don't believe for a minute that what I do is efficient, I just like doing it!

Does anyone else remember the two orks that were in the south end of the Tree Gnome Village maze? They were there in 2004 after the release of RS2, looking basically like chunky goblins in different armor. At some point before Fairy Tale II came out, they just disappeared from the game.

Basically, since their last update, the health bar has been hopping up and down like a yoyo whenever a fancy spell effect goes off around you. Like that Guthan's effect - the health bar is above the top of the Guthan's aura animation. It's particularly weird if you fight aberrants, where the green glow appears above your head whenever you get hit, and your health bar pops up to be above it. I wonder whether they meant it to happen.

5 years? That'll take us to 2012, by which time RuneScape would have been running for ~11 years, which is a very long time on the internet! How many of us will still be here to care in 5 years' time? Still, it's nice to see that Jagex is confident the game can keep going strong for such a long time. As for Jagex not advertising RS, they could certainly do it more than they have done. We don't see advert banners for RS on popular gaming or "cultural" websites, like we do for other MMORPGs. We can't even buy much merchandise, except for those ring-tones and that poster (only available in the UK). There's a strategy guide, but it's more like a welcome pack than a real strategy guide, and it's not very easy to find in shops. I think they're getting most publicity from kids playing it in schools, and from Miniclip.

Jagex only has one product earning them money. Online games come and go, and one day RuneScape will reach the end of its lifespan. It's natural that Jagex will want another leg to stand on, otherwise the end of RuneScape will bring the end of Jagex. So Jagex will want to get another product on the market, something new to pay the bills. Two sources of income are better than one; it doesn't mean that they've decided to wind up RuneScape. There is, of course, the risk that loads of RuneScapers will permanently abandon RuneScape to play MechScape. Jagex should be able to avoid that if they pitch MechScape differently enough. They could give it a higher censorship rating! Besides, a lot of people genuinely prefer classical fantasy to sci-fi.

As Solidus points out, a lot of the most common members' money-making activities center around fletching and alching bows. That's woodcutting and fletching. Mining and smithing are practically mirrors of woodcutting and fletching in terms of what the skills do, yet the cash rewards tend to be much lower until you get into the very high levels. It'd be nice if those skills could be used for profit in the same way as woodcutting and fletching.

If you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser (http://www.mozilla.com), you can install the "NoScript" add-on to prevent javascript running when you visit websites. This doesn't interfere with your use of RuneScape, and you can tell it to allow scripts from websites you trust (TipIt?!), but it does make you a bit safer from having random things done to your computer when you're browsing the web.

Nice. One day I'd love to see longer interviews with TipIt's crew, covering the things they like about RS (and TipIt), things they wish were different, that sort of thing.

When the system's out, I'm sure there will be claims about Jagex having used this trick to make the value of certain items go down. That'll achieve much the same effect - encouraging people to sell quickly or more cheaply, provoking whinging - without Jagex even lifting a finger to manipulate the economy themselves. (Unless they create a system that's not affected by anything other than a huge long-term trend, but how annoying would that be?) Running with that idea for a minute, anyone posting about such a rumor on the RSOF will probably be accused of price-manipulation, which will be interpreted as a government hush-up from the evil corporate Jagex...

I'm self-sufficient as far as buying stuff off other players is concerned. It may take absolutely ages to mine XXXX pure essence, craft it all to nats without runners, chop XXXX yew logs, pick XXXX flax and fletch XXXX yew longbows, and finally alch the lot with the nats... but you get a good pile of XP in all those skills and a huge pile of cash at the end. I find it a bit more interesting than working just towards a level in one skill.

If you can get hold of a halberd, you can have a wonderful time in the prison area of the Stronghold. There are two sleeping guards just outside the cages, and you can sit inside and poke them through the railings for free xp. Maging/ranging works too, although it's a bit less fun.

Quite a lot of the screenshots on the website, before the Knowledge Base really started, had Jmod names in the bottom left corners. I guess it's just the way their testing accounts work. I love those. But no, I'm guessing this one was just the result of using the wrong account for the screenie, not a sign of a future update.

On a practical note, I find it helps to do business with smaller companies. They have less customers so they tend to have more time to spare when I want something. The downside is that they might not have the resources to do the job, or they might fold up, or they might charge more. Jagex themselves used to be a smaller company, and people got to meet the programmers just chilling in the game, leading to many a funny screenshot of players being teleported into the water obelisk or onto Party Pete's table. A growing company has a problem brought on by hiring new staff. This isn't a defence of Jagex, nor is it intended as an excuse for anything. I, as Supreme Boss and Founder of my imaginary company, need to hire underlings to take on some of the work so that I can get on with running the company. I, the Supreme Boss and Founder, know perfectly well how things should be done, and I probably wrote the instruction manual for the newbie staff. Then they go off and read it, and start trying to do the job. Except they're not Me, and they don't think the same way as I do. No matter how thorough I make the instructions, they decide to enforce Company Policy rigidly where I might have been flexible, or they simply misunderstand something and do a whole load of harm before anyone realizes what's up. This calls for more supervision of the newbie staff, so maybe I try to keep a better eye on what they're doing. That doesn't work very well with Me trying to get my own work done, so I end up hiring a guy to act as a manager for my underlings. He can run their hiring, their training, their discipline, etc. Except he's still going to have the problem that the underlings don't think the same way that he does, and they still won't always do what he would have wanted, and by the time we've got a huge team of underlings, they're going to be mighty hard to check up on all the time. What I've got now is a dilemma. If my underlings are instructed to follow Company Policy at all times, they're inevitably going to hit a situation where it would have been better to be flexible. I could update the Company Policy to cover more situations, but it will now be so long and complicated that they'd have to be superhuman to remember it all and apply it correctly! Alternatively, if they're instructed to use their initiative instead, they might do absolutely anything. Unsurprisingly, and without any particular malice on my part, things go wrong. We don't know exactly how Jagex got from the small start-up to the behemoth it is today. It doesn't seem to have been planned in the usual way; it's generally known that Jagex didn't have a huge start-up loan and a team of entrepreneurs watching over their shoulders when they began. They seem to have simply evolved from that beginning, doing what they think needs doing, fixing problems as they come up. Perhaps a consultant or two would have helped. Perhaps they did get consultants - given that consultancy firms are hiring people fresh out of university [*] to go and give advice to experienced business-people, I'm a little sceptical about consultancy as a source of wisdom. [*] Including some of my friends. Lovely people, but not blessed with many years of experience yet. Sure, things could stand to be better. Little guidelines like "that's one of our longest-standing players, don't diss him", for a start. Although, if you tell a whole team of people that they should try to trust the word of people who've played since before dd/mm/yyyy, who knows what the instruction might get twisted into later... People I've seen posting about getting their accounts back on appeal had, in many cases, explained that their account had been stolen at the time of the offence. That's a claim that Jagex can check against their IP logs. An explanation about a random encounter with a real-life friend doesn't make the existing "evidence" of item-transferring go away. I don't like it at all, but one can see how the situation might arise. As for quick-replies... they claim to ban many thousands of accounts per week (newsposts about botting and real-world trading), and however much they dress up the wording, all those "You've been banned" messages are going to look pretty much the same. Except that they'd have spent a heck of a lot longer doing the work, which doesn't give much of a benefit for the time spent. Ok, cheers :-)

We have serious quests. There's precious little to laugh about in the Myreque storyline, which is one of the storylines that actually gets updates. Same for the Sea Slug / Slug Menace storyline. Morytania and Witchhaven have pretty decent atmosphere to them, and the Dorgeshuun storyline has some good climactic moments that are a shade more interesting than just confronting another generic boss monster. That said, I like a good laugh when I'm doing a quest as a break from training. I don't care much for puns, but some of the cleverer humor is very welcome.

Wear armour with a good magical defence. Pyrefiends, bloodvelds and (probably) jellies melee you, yet magical defence is more useful than melee defence when you're trying not to get hit.

I have yet to see a detailed plan for how a company is to process incredibly large numbers of queries per day without ever making a single mistake. Hiring an a few thousand more staff might be a promising start, provided every single one of them is capable of working at 100% accuracy at the speeds needed to keep on top of the queries. The accuracy must be maintained when answering questions such as "is this guy lying in his ban appeal?" which is notoriously hard to answer correctly if you're not willing to trust the guy's word. Now, we can probably trust the guy whose ban is mentioned above - and I'm disappointed that Jagex didn't - but what if the appeal were from someone who'd only got their stats into the 60s? Or the 50s? Or if they'd only played for 2 years rather than being around for much longer? At what do we stop automatically trusting them as a long-standing player? That's not going to be a sustainable solution to ban appeals, especially as it would implicitly give high-level players free rein to break any rule the like provided they can find a convincing explanation! No-one's claiming that Jagex always gets things right (and as time goes by I disagree with them more and more), but it's overreacting to call anyone a brown-noser for claiming that the company might be attempting to do a decent job of running RuneScape. c.f. The Editor's recent article entitled I could do that job so much better. Besides, if anyone wanted to brown-nose Jagex, they'd be well advised to go do it on the RSOF where Jagex might read it :-P

There used to be pentagrams all over RuneScape, scrawled on walls for a bit of sinister decoration. The chaos druid room in Taverley dungeon had loads of them. This attracted a bit of criticism on forums from people who argued "pentragram = witchcraft = bad influence on kids". Then they suddenly all got changed at once. A Jmod posted on the RSOF claiming that this was in response to complaints about the pentagrams. The new one looked a bit like a line-drawing of a RuneScape demon's head. You could mouse-over them to see that they were all called "Demonic Symbol". This attracted a load more criticism from forums from people who argued "demonic symbol = REAL demonic symbol = bad influence on kids". Not long later they all got changed again, being replaced with the colorful doodle that's being discussed in this thread. I don't know anything about real-world witchcraft - do pentagrams mean anything at all? - but I suspect the people doing the complaining didn't know much either. For that matter, I really think it's absurd that anyone would complain about a shape that's labelled "demonic symbol" while happily ignoring the great big monsters labelled "demon". It's a game set in a fictional world with fictional gods, demons, monsters, talking penguins, etc! Anyway, Jagex seems to have taken the complaints on board and obligingly changed the game to satisfy the paying parents. I thought this was a load of c---, but I suppose they can't risk RuneScape getting banned from schools by the overprotective parents that wanted Harry Potter books banned from schools in their States. Besides, the darn shapes don't do anything, and there's no great loss in having them changed to stop them upsetting people.

Nice! But when I have to deal with a big organization as a customer, I hardly ever come away impressed with the results. I get my payments mucked up and cancelled, auto-letters that don't suit the circumstances, and the phone lines put me on hold for hours before letting me talk to someone on a different continent who's desperate to sell me something expensive that I don't want. By comparison, Jagex's dealings with the average individual customer are mostly ok. We all have a load of friends who've had their accounts mucked up, to be sure, but accidents happen. If every person there got things right ~99% of the time, that's a very good strike rate, but over time they'd clock up a huge number of failures just because the numbers are so big. Suppose someone goofs up occasionally. It doesn't mean they did it out of malice, or because they didn't care about getting it right. It's just one of those things that we get when dealing with a bunch of humans. Of course, no-one's asking us to believe that Jagex is a bunch of self-financing saints who work all day and night out of love for the players of the game, paying their rent by offering free RS items to their landlords, etc. That's not something one could seriously expect to find in the commercial software industry!

I definitely had people moaning at me about it. (I didn't make it up!) The improved supply of battlestaves - which really are used for crafting training - came out a while later, after I wrote the article. Basic gameplay is unaffected, sure, apart from item prices and supplies of certain training items. It's still more controversial than another troll quest. If there's a leak and the janitor mops the floor, 'nuff said. If there's a leak and the janitor mops the floor, fixes the leak, installs a new drainage system and polishes the floor, it's understandable if someone says thanks. There's nothing unusual about praising someone for doing their job thoroughly, in a well-run workplace! The "Jagex doesn't care" whinge, which turns up plenty often on their official forums, didn't seem to fit. The flow of new characters into RS has been rapid (sadly the site that used to post membership figures for MMORPGs has stopped updating itself), and Jagex might be able to get away with churning out junk updates for a very long time, ignoring the game's problems, before the rate of people quitting outweighed the rate of new people joining. But they're not doing that, which is nice. Granted, they've got a very long way to go. Even if it's not worth mentioning that Jagex did something decent, undeserved praise is harmless enough, and this is the Internet, where pointless articles are 10 for a dime :-)

It's not that surprising that a fansite has people posting on it who like the company that made the game :-) Of course, we're here because we're interested in RuneScape, not for Jagex themselves, but there's going to be some overlap. My article argues against certain criticisms of Jagex that I see a lot on forums. I don't believe for a moment that Jagex should be immune to criticism on any other grounds, or that the only "educated" viewpoint is to defend them.