Andrew

Ooh a post about me. :) You could have used more up to date (and less awful :) pictures, those are 10 years old! I'm not too bothered about not being on the credits list. I was never big on the whole fame thing, and lots of people know what I have contributed anyway. (and yes my chin and neck are as one, bah!)

You want a more fun example of emergent gameplay? There's lots of those too. One of my favourites is the way a whole chain of people can follow each other and form conga lines. Which wasn't an "intended" feature. Even more fun when everyone dresses up the same. Or my personal favourite, when you form such a chain around an object like a tree and everyone whizzes round in circles :) Suffice to say I didn't expect that to happen at all, but it is cool. Synchronized dancing with emotes is rather cool too, although quite hard to pull off. Perhaps that's another example where in the future we could add features to try to further support an emergent gameplay (no plans to do this at the moment though as we've got so many projects already on the go!).

I feel this a little one-sided. To say we try to stop all emergent gameplay isn't true. We love emergent gameplay; there's emergent gameplay all over the place in RuneScape. In fact (unlikely many other developers) when we see players doing something cool we hadn't thought of, not only do we think "cool!", we also often go out of our way to make that cool thing work even better or build it in as an intended part of the game. How many developers do that? Examples of emergent gameplay: Law running on world 66. Players using shops as temporary banks when nature running (risk of losing your runes, vs slight speed boost! cool trade off!). The bizarrely high value of party hats. The huge player 'market place' which has emerged on worlds 1 and 2 in varrock. Examples of emergent gameplay, where we've even tried to support it further. Players having drop parties, something we never originally thought of, but we added the drop party room to support it further. Of course you can still have a drop party the old way too. Clan wars in the wilderness - never a designed part of the game but we added in (optional) multi-way combat wilderness areas, and (optional) clan capes to try and make them more fun and are currently working on further clan related stuff to support this emergent gameplay further. There are countless examples once you sit down and think about it. There are also lots (and lots) of small ones you wouldn't even realize are there because they emerged so quickly and so widespread they have just become part of the game and everyone (including many of our own staff) just assumes we intended it to work that way. I haven't been keeping a list of all the emergent things that have happened but if I had I'm pretty sure it would be truly enormous. I actually find these "accidental features" one of the coolest things about developing a game like RuneScape, it's always great to see players making their own fun. Also don't confuse balancing the game with trying to kill emergent gameplay. They aren't the same thing. All decent MMORPGS try to ensure their game is balanced and for example if one weapon/character-class turns out to be totally overpowered compared to all others they will rebalance it to stop the game being ruined. There's a subtle difference between "emergent gameplay" and "finding the fastest way of levelling at any one moment in time". If the fastest way of levelling changes nothing has been spoilt, you just have to find the new fastest way! I think you also need to make the distinction between emergent gameplay that improves the game (cool - leave it in, even support it in some cases), and emergent gameplay that actually totally spoils/unbalances it (best to be fixed). I would have thought this distinction a key part of any article on the subject. And as for the "banning" accusation. I would like to point out that we didn't ban people who made pure characters in rs-classic (your own example of emergent gameplay!), we don't ban all the people law running on world 66. Neither of these is against the rules. Lets not start with the banning accusations all over again. Our policy is "if in doubt DONT ban". It's a great topic for an article, but it's a shame you didn't also think about all the cool emergent things in the game, and try to consider both sides of the topic. More research next time please! ;)

On behalf of the entire Tip.it staff, allow me to offer our apologies to Jagex. Andrew raises some very valid points here. ~Newptor Don't believe everything you read. This articles appears to be EXTREMELY innaccurate/biased. It talks about countless cases of unjust banning, but only seems to give 2 actual examples, both of which were actually just human error, and both of which were corrected and unbanned long before the article was published. When dealing with thousands of cases a very occasional mistake is inevitable, That's the whole reason we have a ban appeal system, so we can correct it. Pointing at a MISTAKE and claiming it's our policy to behave that way just isn't true! It is NOT our policy to ban players unfairly as this article seems to claim. Our policy is NOT to ban players for mentioning a fansite in passing. Our policy is that action should only be taken if despite repeated warnings, they continue to blatantly advertise. Our policy is NOT to wait for players to gain experience before banning them for a dodgy name. We've actually programmed systems and employed resources specifically to pick bad names up early on. Our policy is unless a name is outrageously offense then unless we spot early on to give the benefit of the doubt. Our policy is NOT to ban players for trading with family members, if even says this on the rules section of our websites. All of our customer service team is focussed on educating players, and giving players a 2nd chance, and only banning as an absolute last resort when there is no alternative, or when the offense is extreme (such as password scamming) Posting untruths about our policies does not make us happy. We are considering legal action against the author of this article on the basis of libel. It would be within the author of this articles interest to remove it and contact us immediately.