Sorator

My overall opinion on this month's planned updates: Hey, some kinda cool stuff coming. Nothing earth-shattering, fortunately. Loyalty points stuff - I'll probably get all the loyalty points I can from the twelve days of Christmas, especially since I won't have a ton to do at that time anyway (woo for long breaks from school). And I'm sure those new auras will be useful, and the wings sounds cool and all. But I'd still prefer the whole Loyalty Program to not exist. Moneypouch and toolbelt - They'll be useful, but I'm not entirely sure I like the idea... I think that's more me disliking change as opposed to any significant reason though, so I'll wait and see how it goes. It really doesn't matter much to me, though. Makes farming a bit easier, I suppose. Wilderness graphics update - this is one that I'm happy to see. The Wilderness should look properly DOOM-full, and right now it doesn't. Chat interface updates - WOOOOOO!!! Keyboard controls AT LAST! Rouges Den update - Glad to see that they're keeping the current stuff, after the mildly annoying removal of the old Gnome restaurant minigame. Could be interesting; I look forward to seeing what it's like. Bank space - Yay.

I'm still confused why it matters how Green plays. I mean, I get that she plays in an incredibly inefficient manner, and if she were recommending that others play the same way I could understand the criticism, but I haven't see her do that (at least here). Laugh at her if you like and then move on, lol, no need to get all worked up over it.

On which kind of achievement, 200m in all skills, 200m in Con in one day, or max gold? For the first, spending gold =/= max skills, or we'd have that already. For the second, it still takes a lot of effort beyond the mere gold involved. For the third, I wouldn't be surprised if a few people have done that already, but it would be pretty expensive...

Hahaha. Playing 16 hours a day, it'd take me 2.75 years to max out. Totally not happening. I'll probably stop playing after getting all 99s, or the completionist cape.

Well, I'm not sure if I like the graphical changes to the high scores or not (I'm still rather appalled that they removed F2P entirely). Takes up a lot of space, and doesn't seem entirely necessary... The rest of the site will take some getting used to, but it's growing on me. To me, at least, it's a fresh new look that fits a bit better with the whole 'you're a warrior in a Middle-Earth-esque realm, fighting goblins and protecting the land from nefarious evil-doers' theme than any of the old sites ever did. There's definitely some changes they'll need to make, and I agree that it was probably rushed through without as much checking as it should have gotten before being implemented (okay, so it looks like it wasn't beta-d at all), but I'd expect most of that to get fixed within the month if not sooner, and it is kinda cool. As to the new UI in-game... yeah, I kind of hate some of the new fonts and the new icons, and they do need to go through and make their borders consistent. I don't seem to have any click-through problems or trouble seeing all that I'm supposed to see in resizable mode, though. Overall, not perfect, but I like it.

I doubt bot using is a breach in copyright law. I guess that would depend on how the bot interacts with the game. And which exact copyright law you're referring to - some of em cover more than you might think, DMCA in particular.

Thanks very much for your feedback, Sorator, it was most helpful. It's true that, given the resources Jagex is currently expending on bot nuking, legal action and so on, I'm not sure they'd be able to maintain it (I worked on the presumption that Jagex would backdate code, out of sheer optimism). Out of interest, in what way do you expect people would get angry if the proposal were to become a reality? I'm sure there's a valid logic to it (RS players being the volatile creatures that they are), but I can't see one. As for the Construction question, see this article and then the associated discussion. Mm, well even beyond the whole group of people who like to rant about every single update (that's just a given for RS, it seems), I think that would attract a lot of flak from those who like the current game, specifically because it would take/would have taken a lot of resources to put up and then to maintain. After all, those are resources that could be going towards the current game. And it's not like Classic, where they just continued hosting the game when they made an upgrade - this would be going back and opening up something that until now had been closed completely. This would also weaken their standing as a company just a tad, since they'd effectively be saying 'we admit that some people really don't like the changes we've made, so here', and admitting something like that doesn't always work well. Also, while they might backdate their code, it's veeery unlikely that they would keep the player's logs from that far back - I'd give that a shelf life of 6 months or so, at most. Thus they'd probably either start everyone fresh and noobish again, or they'd carry over your current skills. If the former, I suspect there'd be a lot of people who would like to play the old game but don't want to grind their way to where they can do what they want - it's a pretty big setback, to have to start over again. If they simply carried over everyone's current levels, of course that's horribly polluting the system they just purified. (If they did manage to use everyone's '04 stats, that's still a fair bit of a setback, and everyone since then will have missed out entirely - I think that was their reasoning to offer the Classic Cape and also immediately open RS Classic for new registration, so that current players wouldn't complain about not having a chance to get the newfangled stuffs. Even if they had open registration for the new 'old RS', new accounts would start from scratch, which wouldn't exactly be fair either... though it might be the best solution.) No matter how they handled that, they'd get some angry commentary (though again, they'll get some of that regardless of what they do). I suppose that's all a lot of wishy-washy speculation; I just have a feeling it wouldn't be taken all too kindly. Also, thanks for satisfying my curiosity. Edit: Oh, and NukeMarine reminded me of another thing which would probably get angrily contested - exactly what the cutoff/changeover date would be for the RS2/RS3 switch. I'm sure many would want to have this or that thing which was released after whatever date Jagex picked to be included in the old version, or insist that some such feature that was included shouldn't have been.

I very much liked sees_all1's pointing out the contradiction between what MMG said when he took his job and what the unspecified JMod said at Runefest - there was a rather stark contrast there (and between MMG's past words and recent actions) that I would love to see addressed by Jagex or MMG himself. (And in general, I really think there's more to this latest update than we've been told, and I would love for them to actually tell us what's going on.) I'm not sure I agree that it's the end of everything for F2P/RS as a whole, though. It's a major step in that direction, but I don't think it's an irreversible or unsurpassable one. It is, though, the single hardest hit to F2P that I think I've seen in all my time here, and I've been in and out of RS for more than half of my life, I believe (there's a scary thought). The idea of a Dungeoneering-like version of every skill sounds, to me, absolutely horrible - I loathe Dungeoneering with a passion, though I'll admit it's primarily because I hate going at it with a group, and Dungeoneering is incredibly sucky solo. Once I actually read the article, it sounded like a much better idea, though we already have a bit of things like that in RS already. (Sorceress's Garden can net you herbs, Dorgesh-Kaan has the different and more interesting agility course, the Gnome Stronghold gives an alternative way to train Cooking by delivering the stuff you make, etc.) I wouldn't mind seeing more like that, so long as we keep the option to do well on our own instead of being forced to join with a group. At the very least, it's an interesting idea. I agree with Crocefisso that it's in large part my positive nostalgia, as he so aptly put it, which keeps me playing to this day, in addition to those personal goals I've set for myself that I have yet to actually achieve. And I mostly agree with the differences between the game of 2004 and 2011. However, I don't think I'd want to see a rerelease of the '04 version of the game - I think that would make more people angry than it would make happy, I doubt that many people would participate in it, and of course it would take a lot of resources on behalf of Jagex to manage that if it's possible at all. (while it would be good practice for Jagex to keep backlogs of old code, who knows if they actually do?) Out of curiosity, what trouble did Crocefisso get into with readers for having an affinity for Construction?

...no, that's not how statistics work... That's how cross tabulating works. I checked, and I'm pretty sure it's not. If you were taking two questions and showing how they interact, that would be cross tabulating (or at least it might be, depending how you did it). Blatantly ignoring one of the three options on a single question is not that. (If it is, mind explaining? I'd love to learn, honestly; I hadn't heard that term before.)

They're evidence that for someone who's been playing for a while already, it's still worth playing, but they may tell others that it may not be worth starting from scratch. Not a contradiction at all. Also, they don't need to tell others that it isn't worth playing - it doesn't have to be that explicit to cause a problem. Just talking with friends about the latest dumb thing that happened to their game would turn those friends off from playing it (or returning if they used to play and previously quit). Bad publicity is bad publicity. ...no, that's not how statistics work...

*sigh* Yes, people actively quitting in droves would be the strongest possible way for the playerbase to tell Jagex that we don't like what they're doing. That does not make it the only way to do so. Word of mouth advertising is what made Runescape successful, back in the day. That can go the other direction as well, and massively negative word of mouth ought to be almost as scary as people quitting in droves to Jagex. Just because someone isn't willing to quit over something doesn't mean their opinion against something should be ignored. (And after all, if they quit, why would Jagex care about what they think anyway? They aren't paying customers any more.)

I get you. I could invisibly have 203M xp while you have 202M, but we both appear to have 200M xp on highscores, with me having a rank higher than yours. Isn't this what they had before? I remember there were a few people who were maxed cooking (like 5) and the ranks were always interchanging. If they could have the invisible exp + removal of the obvious bots to clean up the highscore we may more competition. Or alternatively every 12 hours there will be a new rank 1 in each skill, giving everyone the chance to be rank one in a skill if they're 200M. No. The ranks changed in a set pattern every system update. Is the current 200M XP cap due to a programming restriction, or is that no longer the case? The max gold pile is... 2,147,483,647, and unless there's been a change, that's due to the programming language used to run the game - that's the highest value that can be kept for a single variable. XP also keeps track of one decimal, which means the game's max possible XP in a single skill is 214,748,364.7 due to the programming limitations - to exceed that, they'd have to make some significant changes in their coding. Trying to keep track of XP beyond the 200M cap to determine rankings would still require a raising of that limit, even if they didn't display anything beyond the 200M on the high scores - the game would still have to keep track in order to know how to display the high score rankings. Making it invisible doesn't get around that limit. (If that limit no longer exists, then this is a pretty good idea, but why not just take off the 200M cap entirely, instead of taking it off but making the excess invisible?)

Regarding your second bit (the part I quoted), while it is certainly the right of Jagex to try to push people towards members, including clans, that's not what they said this update is for. They said it's to clear bots out of the high scores. If they want this to be an additional incentive to buy members, they should say so, not give us crap reasons. I still wouldn't be okay with the idea, but I would be much less angry with them for insulting my intelligence by saying it's all about bots when it clearly isn't. (Or, they just fail at finding ways to deal with bots in the high scores. Either one. I'm honestly not sure which is the actual case.) In regards to what being done with the high scores (regardless of the reasoning behind it), as a member I'm not happy with it because I would like to compare myself to all the players in the game, not just the ones who have paid $X in the past month. Also, this isn't adding a new feature that is members-only from the start - it's actively taking away something that F2P has had for years, I believe ever since the high scores came out in the first place. If they want to add new members-only features I'm okay with that, but taking something away from F2P that they've had for the majority of the game's life? That doesn't sit well with me. And it does still negatively impact my own gameplay as a member as well. This is why I personally am not happy about this update. (Also the wiki, which is part of the same update - that feels like a knife in the back for RS fansites, especially RSWiki, but that's not getting much discussion.)

Yeah, didn't realize that's where you were aiming this. And my apologies for missing that; that was entirely my fault.

Very nice comparison, but you missed a few points. The problem here is that you still own a house and such in Tennessee. While you would have to specify whether your primary residence was in TN or in CA for the purpose of some voting rights, you would still retain property voting rights in both states - you still get a say in things like property tax increases, because it still directly affects you, though you can still only vote once in the presidential election. Likewise, even though our primary residence may be in members worlds, we still have the option of playing in free worlds - thus, we still get some say in how the free worlds operate. Even more importantly, both members and free players are currently/were previously listed on the same high scores list - thus, both free players and members get a say in how the high scores list operates. (While it might seem like members have nothing to lose by booting out countless free players from the high scores list, that really depends on the person - I personally would rather see how I rank among all players, not just members.) Ah, but if a significant amount of your customers dislike something that your business does, is it not worthwhile to reconsider? Certainly, pressure from investors will get a much faster result, but pressure from customers will often get a result as well - if no one's willing to pay for your product the way you're selling it now, then your investors won't be very happy. I doubt that enough people would quit to cause that kind of reconsideration on behalf of Jagex, but you'd still want to reconsider if your actions are generating a lot of bad publicity - and that's exactly what's happening here, I do believe. Again, I like your thoughts, I just think you missed a few points.

I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US, if someone asks a corporate officer a question, and the answer is proprietary corporate information, and by answering honestly you would damage the future profit earning potential of the company, you open yourself up to civil liability and possibly even criminal prosecution by answering honestly. If that bothers you, take it up with your elected representatives, not Jagex. Now, we don't know if that applies here or not, because most of what we have on this situation is Jagex's dishonest FAQ, but it might, right? Yes, but then they should have said that they couldn't specify why they were making this update, rather than giving a bogus reason - lying in response to such a question might be worse than answering it truthfully. Granted, doing so would have still resulted in a lot of criticism and flaming, but at least it wouldn't involve them having zero reading comprehension and a lack of ability to see that not everyone in F2P is a bot. I'd still be pretty angry over the update, but I wouldn't think they might just be hiring monkeys to type up their posts.

I like this. This preserves the legacy of inactives (and makes it easy to pick them back up if they start training again) while also showing top 15 people who are confirmed active. If it's too much work, you could cut it down to top 10 actives I suppose. How exactly are we/you going to keep track of folks who are F2P and active, or catch an inactive becoming active again but not getting membership? Or are we just hoping that someone will be in contact with them? So much love to you for this. So much. You win 5 interwebs.

The issue is that there are two viewpoints to answer that question from: The viewpoint of the individual says that it's not a waste at all (he's happy, isn't he? That's all that matters, right?), while the view of the community says that it's a horrible waste (Did he make the community any better? Unless they desperately needed such a log, definitely not, and bettering your community is all that matters, right?). I'm all for bettering the community and the advancement of human kind, but could you define this, in your own words? Would you say that all of the people that follow the set pattern that society has laid out for them really contribute to the advancement of human kind, or do they mindlessly follow orders to make the minority even richer? In my opinion, the people that feel that they have something to contribute will do so, the people who don't won't. Do you think people like machine line factory workers, right up to wealthy bankers do what they do to contribute to society, or do they do it to either scrape by in life/reach personal ambitions, respectively? Edit: This has gotten so far off topic that I am certain that the mods are going to swoop in within minutes. Oh, I definitely don't think following society's set pattern results in a bettering of overall community/human kind. I tend to side with the individual's point of view in my description above; I was mostly explaining the view of James2k06 as being loosely valid, even if he doesn't say it as such. I think most, if not all, people are motivated on an individual basis, and for the most part that winds up benefiting society in one way or another. ETA: Sorry, sometimes I forget that my vocal inflection and body language don't carry over well online; I've probably been misunderstood a bit in this thread. I'll try to be more clear.

If that's the case, then why not simply say so instead of trying to cover us in truckloads of manure about bots? This is honestly the biggest issue I have with them on this update, though removing a feature from F2P that has been integral to their community is a close second.

The issue is that there are two viewpoints to answer that question from: The viewpoint of the individual says that it's not a waste at all (he's happy, isn't he? That's all that matters, right?), while the view of the community says that it's a horrible waste (Did he make the community any better? Unless they desperately needed such a log, definitely not, and bettering your community is all that matters, right?).

Well, technically speaking, at that point you've stopped contributing to society, so by one definition you are indeed a leech (and a NEET). Now, if you consider that you can still contribute to society without attending school/job training/being active employed, then maybe not so much. Or if you take the view that once you've achieved a certain degree of success it is permissible to stop contributing to sciety, as you have reached your quota for life.

This is why you go to school and get a job in something you love, clearly. (I'm doing so - majoring in music and pre-law; I thoroughly enjoy doing both, and will be hard-pressed to decide between law school and getting a masters + doctorate in music to teach at a university.) So, if we're playing Runescape, we have no education and aren't going to school? Or are you specifying those who play Runescape for x hours a day? Either way, I think your reasoning is fairly flawed....

Why would you want to criticize others on an online forum rather than go out & find something to do in real life? That argument can easily apply to almost everything online, lol. :P

Yes, but what is being spun? What is the real reason for the update, if the stated reason is just spin? That's what no one is talking about, therefore the spin worked. Actually, I think several people have said that this is either a step towards removing F2P altogether, or another botched attempt at getting people to go from F2P to P2P. Sidenote: Between the removal of F2P highscores rendering fansite signatures and calculators much less useful and the introduction of an RS-official wiki, this leaves the door open for Jagex to create their own in-house 'fansite' and attempt to [rooster] existing ones entirely (host their own calcs and signatures and such, along with all the 'fansite' information on their wiki, and the existing game manual and Knowledge Base...). I don't think that's their intention, but it might be, or they could just decide to take advantage of the unexpected side-effect later on despite not intending it that way at the time.

Well sure, but that's not to say they didn't want the players to benefit from it - they *had* to do it because it was hurting their game, but maybe they also *wanted* to do it because the playerbase wanted them to do it. Doing things that your customers want you to do tends to be a good idea, with some exceptions. Yeah, I know, I tend to think the best of Jagex. *shrug* (That just makes it worse that I want to burn the computers of those who came up with this update.)