pal2002

http://www.develop-online.net/news/36967/Jagex-announces-surprise-investment-round Here's a 2nd article that reveals that Jagex had gotten 4 new board of directors, all from some random invest firm who knows nothing about RuneScape. If I keep down this slipptery slope, next thing Anrew will quit and the Gowers will no longer be a part of RS at all....

http://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/article/default.aspx?objid=78922 Date: 08/02/11 Jagex Limited receives growth investment from new investors Jagex Limited, a leading independent developer and publisher of online games, today announced it has accepted a new investment from Insight Venture Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors and The Raine Group. The investment will enable Jagex to accelerate growth of its development and publishing capabilities in support of continued enhancement of the Studio’s portfolio of award-winning games. “Insight has been part of the Jagex family for a number of years and it has been a real pleasure to serve alongside them on the Jagex board," said Mark Gerhard, Chief Executive Officer of Jagex, who will continue to lead the company following the investment. “Both Spectrum and Raine bring a wealth of expertise and it gives me great delight to be able to welcome them to the Jagex team. It’s a great privilege to serve alongside such esteemed individuals and their wider organizations. This investment will hugely benefit both the Jagex team and our loyal community and I’m confident that Jagex will continue to go from strength to strength. I fully expect that the collective experience of the shareholder base will be highly advantageous as we embark on our next chapter of growth.” Jagex is the UK’s largest independent games developer and publisher, with dedicated user base of millions playing Jagex’s games worldwide. The Company’s flagship game, RuneScape, holds numerous Guinness World Records, including that of the world’s most popular free-to-play massively multi-player online game (MMOG). In addition to Jagex’s in-house development, the company also acts as a 3rd party publisher for developers of great content. Jagex recently published its first 3rd party title, War of Legends, and the company intends to release numerous 3rd party games throughout the next 12 months. “Jagex has long held a leadership position in bringing to market innovative, entertaining and sophisticated online games”, said Jeff Horing, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners. “Jagex’s team has been developing several new games in the same tradition; our new investment will help accelerate their successful launch.” Brandon Gardner, a Partner at Raine, commented, “Jagex is the standout player in one of the most attractive and fastest growing segments of the games industry. We are excited with both the near- and long-term growth opportunities at the company, and look forward to working with Jagex’s founders and management team to continue to develop their industry-leading MMOG platform.” Jim Quagliaroli, Managing Director of Spectrum Equity Investors, further noted, “We are very pleased to support Jagex’s growth. RuneScape is a highly successful free-to-play and subscription-based online game with an enormous community of virally-generated players. We look forward to supporting new growth initiatives as the Jagex team builds on RuneScape’s global franchise.” As part of the investment, Chris Mitchell and Jim Quagliaroli of Spectrum Equity, and Brandon Gardner and John Salter of Raine, will join Jagex’s board of Directors. Mark Gerhard, along with Jeff Horing and Alex Crisses from Insight Venture Partners, will continue to serve as Directors of the company. About Insight Venture Partners Founded in 1995 Insight Venture Partners is a leading growth oriented, entrepreneur focused venture capital and private equity firm focused on expansion and late stage investments in the global software, Internet, and data services industries. Insight’s team is composed of experienced investors and operating executives with more than 150 years of collective experience in its focal industries. With almost $5 billion raised since inception and a large network of technology industry experts, Insight provides strong support to its portfolio companies. In 2009 Insight was named among the Top Ten VC’s Globally by Red Herring Magazine. www.insightpartners.com About The Raine Group The Raine Group is a boutique merchant bank focused exclusively on entertainment, digital media and sports. Founded in 2009 by Joseph Ravitch and Jeffrey Sine, in partnership with WME Entertainment, Raine has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Palo Alto and Beijing. With a global reach, Raine focuses on growth equity investments where its deep industry experience and unique network of strategic relationships, limited partners and advisory board members can create value for portfolio companies. About Spectrum Equity Investors Spectrum Equity Investors is a private equity firm focused on investing in profitable, growing businesses. Founded in 1994 with offices in Boston and California, Spectrum manages over $4.7 billion in capital across six funds. Spectrum has been an active investor in online media franchises including Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM), Demand Media (NYSE: DMD), and SurveyMonkey, as well as electronic information service providers such as iPay Technologies (acquired by Jack Henry & Associates), Passport Health Communications, RiskMetrics Group (acquired by MSCI), Seisint (acquired by LexisNexis/Reed Elsevier), and World-Check. About Jagex Limited Jagex Games Studio is a multi-award winning games developer and publisher based in Cambridge, England. Jagex specializes in the development of high quality online games and is the largest independent games developer and publisher in the UK. Jagex has a long-standing reputation for creating the world’s best online games and for developing hugely popular, fun, high quality, compelling, accessible, free games and for its passion to provide an awesome social community experience for hundreds of millions of players around the world. Jagex has developed and self-published over 40 online titles including the world’s most popular free online multiplayer game, www.RuneScape.com. ******* PR Contacts Jagex: Adam Tuckwell ([email protected]) Insight Venture Partners: Erica Harris ([email protected]) Spectrum Equity Investors: Kathy Yager ([email protected]) The Raine Group: Mary Beth Grover / Brendan McManus ([email protected] / [email protected]) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So basically even less of Jagex is independently owned now (only about 50% of jagex is not owned by investors at last check in 2009http://forum.tip.it/topic/256788-jagex-financial-report-2008-09/), and now the Gower brothers own even less of Jagex in exchange for more $. Thanks MMG. ... .. . Profit is fine, but Jagex is already profiting no matter what. They made $32.9 MILLION dollars in 2009. (see link below) Selling out to investors means huge lump sum cash in exchange for less leadership. This is mostly fine for things like General Motors but in the history of gaming studios, this does not bode well. Quite a few gaming studios just DIED completely after being sold to another company or investors. ie. once Andrew feels like he's rich enough from all the selling-outs, what's to stop him from just taking the cash and have a nice life in the Tahiti's and leave who-knows-what left to run RuneScape? Not banning bots, bring back wildy PR campaign (including T-shirts!), buy back a banned account... FFS what is next? Selling level 99 for $2000? Jagex is not a failing company by any means and I just don't get why the greed never ends.

I would have guessed it at around 20,000 bots on at anytime but I guess your estimate is more accurate. So, at any time 15-20% of the online accounts are bots.... I don't even know what to say more. And Jagex is not even admitting that there is a problem.

Says the person who have more 99's and xp than I can count.... I don't know how you see that I somehow don't for 'for fun' at all, but I can definitely say I have a stronger sense of justice and fairness than you do.

All I can say at this point, 9 years into my rs career is ....and very regretfully, that I CHOSE THE WRONG GAME.... Jagex is seriously becoming the most shameless and greedy gaming company out there who does not care at all for their players. There were quite a few times I could've went to greener pastures, especially to WOW and FF11. Now I see that I clearly made the wrong choice in putting my blind faith in Jagex and trusting that they would not become something as disgusting as this. I should've seen this coming, really.

This is basicallly one RWT sites hacking its competitor. And for what it's worth, they did a much BETTER job than Jagex in punishing those cheaters. It's too bad that the hack only affeted maybe a small (but significant) portion of the botters. I personally hope this hacking war continues between the 2 bot/rwt providers. If this continues, it's a better cheating deterrant than whatever Jagex is offering. (BUY YOUR BANNED ACCOUNT BACK?? WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!)

My god.... The corporate greed of the only-for-profit new Jagex Ltd. really comes through. First we have rollbacks (covered up for a good 3 months as 'bugs') to prevent them bans to increase subscription $ from bots, and now if we really ban you, you can just buy your account back. There is litearlly NO OTHER MMO I know out there that have this kind of ridiculous policy. It is digusting and unethical, and a complete slap in the face for legit players. Bots already rarely get reported, rarely get caught, rarely banned if caught (most get rollback), and now if they actually do get banned they can just fork out more cash buy their account back. This is the biggest load of rubbish Jagex had ever come with for money; they might as well sell the bots themselves next. I hope whoever came up with this BURN IN HELL for their greed.

Torstol is a seed that if even one patch dies, you will LOSE no matter what. And also, you will also lose on not getting 6+ herb per patch. Generally, torstols are very overrated for farming. You could've made more farming just about any other high level herb. If you still insist on famring torstols, planting it just in the Trollheim patch would be your best bet on not losing.

there is a fishing trawler world that usually have enough people (or bots...) on it.

I'm glad there are good people like OP out there. However, the rs community has pretty much always been what you described due to the inherent gameplay mechanics that has no healing class and discourages co-op, leading to pretty much rewarding selfish and eventually cheating behavior. Not to have say that I've never met good players. There are lMMO's out there that have NO PVP but just as successful as RS because they reward players for co-op behavior rather than PvP. Unfortunately and regretably, I don't think RS can become one of those games.

Do you want ice cream? YES NO DON'T CARE About ice cream: Ice cream comes in many flavors and is delicious. Ice cream is awesome. By voting yes, you have unlimited ice cream But wait, we're not gonna mention that ice cream have high saturated fat and cholesterol levels and directly cause heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. You can imagine the outcome of the poll I just described. That is just the fairest poll ever. And now just one day after the poll closes we're announcing that ice cream is to everyone in 2 weeks. Make sure to grab those "I bought back ice cream!" back T-shirts. Nowhere does the referendum, poll, any wildy/trade adverstisements, and now this thread mention that RWT'ers, botters, and scammers, WHY free trade and wild was removed in the 1st place. We got those explanations back in 2007. Now we get nothing. Nothing even in the FAQ about how Jagex is going to deal with the initial problem - rwting and cheating. In the past year botting have become worse than ever before. (it's very simple to see...go to every world Varrock Aubury. Tell me what you see there. ) Personally, between the first botted petition, the 2nd terribly biased poll, the 'vote now!' banner everywhere, the "I bought back wildy" T-shirts, and now official forum threads that does yet more PR, I've seen ENOUGH PR for wild/free trade. There are at least 7% of the rs population (84,000) who were not influenced by the terribly biased poll (and much higher here on tip.it) and are forced to live with it. I really don't need (or want) people telling me how great free trade is. I've lived through it and I know, but I've also lived through hoardes of gold farmers at every resource spot. All I want now is just an answer from Jagex on how exactly did they manage to solve the whole RWT/cheating problem. Enough with the PR. Jagex needs to be candid now and just tell us openly how they're going to work with the gigantic can of worms they re-opened.

This "vote" is the biggest marketing scheme ever. Whether you vote or not, it won't matter at all. From Mod Mark's statements it seems they had this thing planned out long ago and the "vote" is just a publicity stunt. By Jan 14th, there will be a newspost saying what huge response there were and how Jagex listens to the players. To me, Jan 14th sounds like the update release date than anything else. Having free trade and wildy back is nice, but this is a complete green light for RWT and botting. O hooray back to days of 20 gold farmers on a green dragon/yew tree. Jagex is just getting more tolerant of cheaters than ever...

From all that I can dig out of (unnamed sources), the bots keep everything. Even the 99 capes. They become un-wieldable but will be kept on if it's already equipped.

After weeks of covering up stat rollbacks/resets as 'bugs' with JMods posting on RSOF telling players to report it as a bug while giving us no real confirmation of it as a botting punishment, this little snippet slipped through off a JMod Post on RSOF. QFC 250-251-387-61995403 I doubt the thread will be there for long since all threads on rsof on the subject are instantly locked/hidden/Soviet Russia away'ed to oblivion. This here is the exact problem. This huge cover up operation seems to tell me that Jagex is now more tolerable to bots than EVER before. For a long open look at the how Jagex promised us on how they would deal with bots, I point to my thread on rsof again 74-75-611-61883784 (Sorry hardcore TIFers; I'm not really that active here anymore. But at least the Jagex cover-up machine can't reach here I hope) The short summary of my long analysis is that Jagex had promised us since 2001 and many more times since then that they deal with cheaters harshly and will always PERM BAN them. But look what's happening now? It should be obvious that bots have penetrated all aspects of RS. The typical classic 'yew bot' just isn't accurate anymore. There are now bots at so many minigames/activiteis/skills that you'd think a bot could never do before. And yet, at the same time, we have a response from Jagex they're now only resetting a few levels here and there (knowing completely well that they were in fact guilty) for these cheaters and letting them keep all the illgotten gains. This also ofc, create things like lvl 10 with fre cape or a lvl 10 firemaker with the firemaking cape equipped. What is that supposed to be? You now get a chance to get a super rare REWARD out of cheating too? The worst thing out of all of this to me, is how Jagex had tried to hide this change of attitude toward botters from all of us. there is no annoucement, there is forum post, there is only hiding of threads trying to discuss the issue. The runescape rules still states today that cheaters are banned. But here we have a JMod confirming that at their discretion, they will just reset some levels and continue to charge the bot for membership. This is far from the moral, upright Jagex I knew back in 2002. I'm saddened to see Jagex become a silent and immoral profit machine humming away off its hypocrisies. (Quoted from Mod Jon H; I hope this guy doesn't lose his job for this) I do have the page archived in case this post gets sent to neverland too... In addition to replying here, there is a semi-clandestine thread going on in rsof too on the issue. Feel free to take a look there too. QFC 74-75-863-61930064

Why are there 2 people playing throughout this entire update when we can't even get to the login page?... And why did they make 3 news posts, other than shattered heart, all the other 'changes' aren't that substantial. Boohoo, so every thing hp gets multipled by 10. And iron?... Iron itself really doesn't deserve a whole newspost, just be just 1 more line in the main newspost or even patch notes.

Talk about limiting supplies of the staff of light....wtf...you need 93 slay, a fire cape, AND assigned a freaking task to kill it. It better be a 1 in 50 drop or this things gonna become a new sigil drop ffs.

nope..did some googling and stryke really is just a misspelling of strike...so it's probably just a name.

This hint is painfully obvious that it's gonna be Fairy Tale part 3. Don't read that deeply into twtter hints, not every word has to mean something. I bet Stryke will turn out to be something like a new fairy or the new boss for ftp3.

I would go with piety here, leeching is too slow to activate fully and your probably want to deal the most damage at the beginning when you're not madly clicking brews/rocktails.

No, it doesn't. Totally did in my opinion, set a new standard for quests which beats the usual "stick up protection prayers and hack away at it." Well, Nomad pretty much came down to tanking him with a ton of food/pots. So instead of 'stick up pro prayers til it's dead' you get 'stuff yourself with tons of food til it's dead.' Doesn't really sound like an improvement to me. I like the daggnanoth mother quest boss though, bosses that have random weakbesses you need to exploit instead of just, oh, let me tank the thing to death.

I feel for you man, don't give up on it. I think you're trying too many things here. I kind of just stuck with 1 strategy (which was arma + gs) since my ranged sucks and that worked out for me. Try sticking with the 1 that got you the closest and just try again. This fight takes some luck if you don't have things like soul split, overloads or a yak (none of which I had) but it's doable.

I think Nomad might be harder than corp in a lot of ways.. 1. corp don't have a freaking attack that hits you for 98 that you have no way of dodging or praying against 2. corp doesn't lay landmines that hits 40s around you 3. corp doesn't make clones of itself -.- 4. corp doesn't magically heal 1/4 of its hp 5. you can actually run from corp, there is just no way out of the boss room after you start the battle. 6. corp doesn't go berserk and hits like nuts with 1/4 of its hp left

I just killed that awful boss after quite some tries. I wore full arma +bgs, and inventory + turtle full of brews and restores (not super restores). bascially tanked the thing to death. took 40 brews and managed to get the last hit in with 9 hp...but w00t, it's done. For lower levels, from my exp at so many tries at the thing, there is hope for you all. Since I was brewing so much most of the time my maxed out melee stats were around the 80s or lower. I think it is definitely possible for you guys. If you have high range (my 83 ranged + pot didnt work too well..), ruby e seems to do wonders. Also, a whip + defender would prob be a better choice than a gs because of the speed and the fact that you can get your defender back from the grave. There is also a lot of luck factor involved in this particular boss, ie. a huge fluctuation on how many brews I was burning to get say 1/2 of Nomad's hp down just based on how lucky your hit gets. So if you fail the first time, definitely try try again! And for the last part where he just madly melees you, remember to keep at least 1 pray pot/super restore for that because at that point prayer WILL do you good. Bascially, if a ~lvl 110 player with at least a terrorbird or better gets very efficient at clicking brews and restores without panicking, they can definitely do it. oh yeah, keep a calm head in this battle is the key. gl to all.

okay, 1st sensible reply I've seen in a while and I agree with you for the most part. I write about this because I think it's time to really stand up to the 99 everything people who cries endlessly for higher and higher level content AND jagex actually listens to them. Extremely high levels should really know that they do not make a majority in this game and it's really the influx of new player's support that keeps a game like rs financially viable. I think you put it well, it's a "truly incomprehensibly rare occasion" and in the end I will probably probably look for those 10k crimsons that will take me to 93 summon, but not because I think it's right to set it that high, but to me the game more about quests and tasks like the diaries rather than grinding and more grinding for a higher number and some fancy cape. I can only hope for the future. The difference I see here between a high level reward for a diary is very different from 92+ high level content. In fact, I support 92+ content. Smithing actually, while unpopular, have a very complete set of new things to do even to 99 on the dot. The only reason they can't add anymore new content is because it would destroy other aspects of the game. (ie. if whips and mauls were smithable, what's the point of slayer?) But a one time reward, from doing the same once to unlock an achievement, is hardly real high level content. Unless you like burning money and smith that rune cbow over and over again from scratch. For your last question, for me it's quite simple, a diary turns green only once. Even if you hit 99, nothing turns green and you can still level for 187M for xp. Hardly possible for me.

You people running around with 10+ 99's should really just quit commenting. Does it prove how 'elite' you are? All past updates this year were geared to mid lvls? Are you kidding me? just look at the last couple of updates: within the light - master quest living rock caverns - high level mining/fishing area herblore update - obviously woodcutting rebalance - more high level stuff to do Those are high level updates. But none of them have level reqs like 93 summon and 91 smithing. Yes you invested a heck a lot of time to get those skills, but you got them because you wanted the 99s or a higher total level. Achievement diaries should be something "fun" to spend my time on, get a better knowledge about the area I'm exploring and grab some rewards in the end, NOT something for you to show off your random skills; you have your fancy capes to show them off with. I do see many people's points that it is meant to stimulate training and that even it is a good strategy for jagex financially because having high lvl req's keep high levels paying for members because there will be something to complete other than going for 99s or max cash at the end of the day. But again, I don't think a lot of people realize how amazingly hard it is to get 93 summoning or 91 smithing. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that these requirements would be fine for say, a new high level gadget like the adze, but it's not suitable for a diary. I doubt jagex would release a quest anytime soon with 90+ requirements (esp. on summoning) because few people would be able to enjoy the quest. I guess at least for me, achievement diaries are the same thing (esp. when they shared a tab for so long) and they should be at least completable by suffiently high level players without putting in an extraordinary effort. (a very rough estimate..1-93 summoning will take 20k+ crimsons + $ burned to use them) So I guess in conclusion, diaries should be different from other high level content; elite diaries would work, if the definition of elite is lowered just enough to be in the 'possible' range for us high level but 'not elite enough' players. I haven't posted in tip it in a long time and it's really been thoroughly disappointing. Just because you have 99s does not give you right to disrespect others. Most of my posts in the times of yonder (aww, good ol scapeboard..) when jagex still had sane ideas about what requirements to set and before most of you 99 capers even registered for rs.