Iantiger

As caldius said: Help and Advice board is for questions. ~Ian

I feel the need to rant here because I never really took the problem of autoers as being all that serious, until now. Yesterday I started levelling up my fishing. When I got to Catherby, I was shocked at the number of blatantly autoing accounts that I discovered. A friend had warned me when I said I was going to Catherby, but I was not expecting 50%+ of the fishers there to be running macros. It was an absolute disgrace. I started to report them one by one, until every level 3 account that I could see had been reported, and I have gotten into the habit of doing this every time I log in. Maybe not every single one of them was autoing, but I expect 99% of them were, and it is now Jagex's responsibility to sort that out. The problem is, there are just so many of them. I probably saw 20 autoers at Catherby beach at any one time that day. If there are 20 autoers on every single P2P world, that's around 1,000-1,500 people constantly raping resources from the game, considerably lowering the price of that resource, and devaluing the honest work that the rest of us put into this game. When you come to realise that there are JUST 1,000 autoers alone farming Catherby fishing spots, you start to realise just how big the problem is. F2P has twice as many worlds, so can we assume that there are 2,000 autoers at yews near Draynor, perhaps several thousand others scattered at various trees throughout Runescape. Then there's a host of other skills that you may find autoers at, and all the consequences of that. My guess is that there are around 10,000 autoers at any one point online, but this is just an educated estimation. That's every 1 in 10 players, although I'm surprised the figure is not even higher. The major problem is this vast number of autoers. It is now clear that reporting them does absolutely no good whatsoever. Most people, like I myself, have come to realise that for every reported autoer, and possible resultant ban, their space on the server will be occupied by another one within an hour or two. It's just an unscalable problem. On top of this, every time before an autoer logs out, I have no doubt that they trade, by drop trading or any other means, to another account so that in the event they get banned, their 'work' has not gone to waste and they still have all their resources to sell for real life cash. This gets us into another problem. It's not just people autoing their accounts because they're lazy, it's the Chinese farmers Jagex were talking about a couple of months back. These guys are the ones that are not bothered about the actual account being banned, but just want the resources to sell for gold. Then again they could be a mix of somebody who is lazy, found an autoing program, and is using the benefits to exchange for real world money. I became especially worried yesterday when I noticed that two players had the same four letters in front of their name followed by two different 3 digit numbers. Most likely I would expect these accounts to belong to two people working in the same sweatshop, with each person working on a similar account, and perhaps the rest of the sweatshop workers were scattered on all the other worlds. So what's the solution? Well Jagex need to crack down harder on the problem for sure. That goes without saying. Clearly banning 8,000 accounts a week is not enough. We need every one of those to be an IP ban, until these people get the message that it's just not worth the effort to farm our game for gold. If that doesn't work, I propose suspending access to the game, and limiting logins to countries which have a large base of players, such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Holland, Australia, Germany, France, Belgium and perhaps a number of other countries. It may seem drastic, but it will certainly drill home the message to the sweatshops, and the honest players in those countries will direct their anger at the sweatshops with any luck, drawing attention to the them, so their governments can tackle the issue. I admit it's not the most user-friendly idea, but something has to be done, and something this drastic may just be the solution. It's up to Jagex to keep these people from playing the game, and they have failed so far. It's clear their detection methods are not up to scratch, or able to keep up with the rate that people are creating autoing accounts, so something considerably more efficient needs to be enforced with immediate effect. ~Ian

mrmyk I want your babies <3 keep blogging baybeh, see you in game! ~Ian

Total Level: 1648 Post Count: 1665 So yeah my Post Count is (marginally) higher than my Total Level, and will probably get even further away since I don't really play on my main anymore :P ~Ian

Approx 1,080 results: 1. OddworldForums.net - Me participating in discussion about the old Oddworld game series <3 2. ZeldaUniverse.net - I think I joined these forums a couple of years ago just to get a signature because the guys on there are awesome artists 3. Runescapecommunity - Pretty much the only other RS fansite I frequent, if only to keep my Achievements thread updated 4. Red Vs Blue - My Roosterteeth Profile. God I love Red Vs Blue. 5. Populous Reincarnated Forums - Another oldskool game I like to keep in touch with 6. Tip It Forums - Was wondering when that would crop up! 7. Runescape Hiscores 8. Angelfire - My old RS noob-clan website 9. Runehead - They write some fantastic articles on all sorts 10. Whygoing.com - Some crazy profile of me, probably a fake I don't remember registering here, I don't speak the language for a start 11. Pokerhand.org - Another fake, I don't do online gambling 12. Talksoccer.net - Made a couple of posts here a year or 2 ago 13. Gamespy profile 14. Runevillage 15. Tip It staff list :) 16. Lionhead forums - From when I used to play Black and White 17. Chaotic Gaming - Don't even remember that website 18. Football Manager forums 19. A review for a Sum 41 Album that I vaguely remember writing! 20. System Of A Down Fansite Fin (minus the 'omitted results' stuff). A whole lot of scary Korean profile websites that I'm not sure I know anything about! ~Ian

I found my way into the Blogscape board eventualy :oops: Hot achievements ~Ian

Hmm I wouldn't personally use it because 99% of my facebook friends are real life friends and it wouldn't reflect well on me ^^ Still, nice find. I <3 Runesmithie :oops: ~Ian

I think the old ones will be automatically removed from the game as soon as the latest one is released. I don't think Jagex will make the mistake of accidentally creating a 'rare' item again, especially now you've made this topic which I'm sure has bought this to their attention if they haven't already thought about it. ~Ian

Fantastic find, and an interesting read. ~Ian

As others have said, there will never be anymore rares. Anything Jagex decide to get rid of completely (Bob's fliers for example), they will wipe from the game, and everyone's accounts, altogether. This will ensure it does not become an accidental rare. ~Ian

I wandered into the cow field. There was no tutorial island back then (it seems like only yesterday that was added), and I had to ask some other players how to cook meat, make a fire, chop a tree, etc. I also got lost frequently, wandered into Varrock, and some kind person gave me full iron! ~Ian

Joined the game initially in late 2001, not sure of the exact date, so that places me at around 5 and a half years. Not quite among the oldest of the old, but... I'm getting there :) ~Ian

It doesn't bother me, it's just another element of Jagex's humour that they have added into the game. I don't think it's going to affect people or young children who play the game and think that, because they find it fun to shoo away dogs in a game, they are going to take it up as a hobby in real life, much the same as I don't buy the connection between video game violence and real-life violence. I would suggest that if you find this offensive you should concentrate your efforts on campaigning against real life animal cruelty. ~Ian

I hardly think 20 seconds is anything to worry about. That's probably shorter than any normal game where you have to ESC through the logos/intro to get to the main menu. Have a scratch, blow your nose, I'm sure you can find something to do for 20 seconds. I don't think updates should be cut. I would still be content with 1-2 minutes loading time; time enough to go and make a quick coffee or something. ~Ian

I played WoW till level 20-something. I was a night-elf-druid (woot!). The game is fun, there are many quests, you could spend aaages just trying to do all the different things, but the concentration on combat drove me away in the end. I think RS has a longer life-span. It takes forever to get 99 in all stats, whereas getting to level 60 in WoW takes an incomparably short amount of time. Additionally RS offers such a wide range of things to do. Quests, mining, fishing, player owned houses. It's just got more diversity in my opinion. But of course it's personal preference, and if this topic were on a WoW forum, no doubt you'd have the opposite response. ~Ian

Hehe I'm sick to death of repeating this story but here goes: Used to play Black and White, was a member on the BWgame.com forums, and I couldn't think what to sign up as. I had a tiger for a creature, so I naturally amalgamated that with my real name, et voila, Iantiger was born. The name has kind of stuck even though I've tried changing it several times. Iantiger always shines through ~Ian

No way! I play euphonium too! Or did before I started uni, I'll take it up again when I graduate. I live in a student house so we pretty much have to have a life. We go out drinking regularly, go play snooker down at the local pool club, kick a football around outside in the summer, and most of the people in my house play a musical instrument or two ^^ *looks at guitar with pride* ~Ian

Somebody in my old clan was quite famous for being called "Imaketoilets" ~Ian

Most of the time: Runescape, Tip It / Runescape Community Some of the time: Windows Media Player, MSN, ImageForge, Youtube ~Ian

I love quests, but often the hints, or what you're supposed to do for the next part is so obscure, I end up using a guide. I can still enjoy the quest though and the great one-liners Jagex puts into some of the quests! ~Ian

I would pick the rare! Some sort of party hat or a cracker and you've got me drooling! ~Ian

I'm pretty sure I just dived in, and learnt them intuitively. I think most of them are common sense, but there are a couple (real world item trading for instance) that you learn from in the occasional "Banned Players" news updates, or from other players in game, etc. ~Ian

"At the start of RS2 you're going to buy a purple party hat, dirt cheap. FFS, don't sell it for 3 million a few months later, and then spend the rest of your RS career trying to work for the money to buy it back... oh ya, and you're a complete noob."

Oooh it's like a rollercoaster :-X If anybody's interested in seeing live server activity, this link was posted on the forums a few months back and I've had it in my favourites every since: http://www.rscommunity.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=348&Itemid=57 Great for Pest Control: The large increase in players on certain worlds indicate the big PC teams switching to that world, but that's all explained below the graph if you can read German :P ~Ian

I've played for 5, nearly 5 and a half years now. Makes me feel very old! I don't see myself quitting anytime soon, especially with my new character who is hopefully on his way to making Runescape history 8-) ~Ian