Xeen

I wasn't around before they originally removed PvP, so I didn't see any of the market back then. But I've definitely always thought it was a very strange economy where the raw materials were almost universally more expensive than crafted/smithed/fletched/whatnot goods. I would expect that in lower levels where you don't have the skill to make an item that isn't easily found killing a low level monster, but I would have expected the scales to start tipping towards the player as their skill level got higher, and so far in Runescape I haven't seen that. I raise my skills at the expense of making money, and being a gatherer is far more profitable. I've always been given the impression that WC/Fletch is *the* way to make money. My farming is less than my wc/fletch, and I've made far far more money on Farming.

As a resident old-man (comparatively to most Runescape players) with ~10 years in Software Development, I can't help but speak up for a moment after reading this. First, the comparisons to World of Warcraft. It's completely Apples to Oranges. They both qualify as games that a lot of people play. After that, there's almost nothing similar. The type of client, the update release cycles, the philosophy behind how the game is ran, the resources available to work with. It's all completely different. WoW will release a major patch at varying amounts of time, but it's always months in between each releases. Sorry, but the Tuesday nightly maintenance is generally just downtime. The occasional 'hotfix' is employed at that point if necessary, but the argument that they take the servers down weekly to do these things is actually a point against the WoW comparison, considering they're fixing bugs that made it past QA. WoW also uses a Public Test Realm, where normal players go on and test new patches. The players do it because they can learn new bosses and tricks without risk to their real character, get a feel for changes to classes, or sometimes maliciously learn about bugs that they can profit from in case they make it to live. Their slow release cycle allows this, Jagex's does not. The frequent updates by Jagex keep the game much fresher, but at a cost of, as pointed out, more potential bugs. But WoW's not exactly bug free. There's been item duping bugs, and in the original release of the new dungeon BWL, it had a bug where you couldn't get past the first boss. The door to move on literally didn't work. It was hotfixed that night. "Here's a new dungeon we worked on for 4 months. Yay team! What's that? You can't get past the first boss? Oops, we should have probably tried that." So WoW aside, seriously, the presumption that because bugs get introduced means that their QA department is inadequate is so wrong on so many levels. I know this article is more about people wanting to vent that their favorite bugs were fixed and people are more interested in brandishing pitch forks and complaining at the top of their lungs, so I don't want to make an already long post longer by detailing all the different challenges too much. But really, life happens. When my developer team publishes a software release, we release, we fix the bugs that were missed by us and QA as they're reported, and then when the dust has settled we sit down and categorize the bugs that made it through. We categorize under 3 columns: "Life", "Preventable", and "Bonehead". Life happens. We can try to minimize it, but the complexities of software development means that there's always something. Preventable is something we should have thought of and we need to figure out why it was missed and make notes/update processes to prevent that in the future. Bonehead is when Larry in the back cubicle completely ignores our already documented quality standards and does something so stupid that the QA team doesn't even think to test it because it's obvious. You never want something in that column, but things still end up there. They end up there for my team, they end up there for the WoW team, they end up there for the Jagex team, and they'll continue ending up there for every single development team on the planet. So yeah. I give more slack because I understand what's involved. That doesn't mean they're not boneheads on occasion. But by everything I've seen from Jagex, they're doing their best not to be. But I suppose if we have it on authority from the author's cousin that Blizzard's "rooms of people play" is a far better model and not in any way vague second-hand hearsay, and that there's a handful of high profile bonehead bugs to use as examples, then I need to reevaluate my opinion of their quality. Clearly, the author's conclusion that Jagex's testing is terrible after an article whose premise is based more on what qualifies as a bug to a play, trumps all other reason. :thumbdown: