TruthScape.com  9  The TruthScape Soapbox - Opinion and Commentary on RuneScape and Beyond

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #1 - Words Can Kill The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #3 - Sorry, Comrade, but Price Controls Don’t Work

Published: November 21, 2007

With yesterday’s restrictions involving single player dueling, Jagex has confirmed its recent emphasis on getting tough on real world trading (RWT). This sounds good on paper, but the implementation has turned out to be rather unsavory. The debacle that has resulted from the company’s ham-fisted efforts show that it is set on continuing down a path that will do more harm than good to its customers.

This essay is not about the duel arena changes specifically, but more generally about how those changes represent a much larger problem at Jagex. The company appears to be determined to repeat every mistake made by every reactionary authority in history. As I will show, the predictable end result of misguided and ineffective efforts to stop crime is simply more harm and inconvenience to innocents, with little effect on the intended targets.

First, a quick recap for those of you who have been under a rock for the last 24 hours. (Or those who have a real life, unlike me.) J On November 20, 2007, Jagex made significant changes to the duel arena feature. One change was adding a new multi-player tournament option, an update that had been anticipated; what was not anticipated was an overhaul to the existing single player duel arena, the most important aspect of which is a limit on stakes of 3k per player over any 15 minute period. Yes, you heard that right: you can now stake no more than 12k of gold or items—based on player trade value, not shop value—in any given hour.

The tournament feature is an interesting one; though it has many flaws, it has the potential to be a successful minigame. That entire addition, however, has been completely overshadowed by the changes to single player dueling. As you might imagine, changing duels from unlimited stakes to a pittance has led to an enormous uproar, led by high-value stakers and those who were investing hours in building staking accounts. Opposition to the limits have also come from those who normally don’t object to updates, and even from people who never stake.

Jagex, for its part, maintains that the sole reason for this change was to stop RWT. Various employees have said that they felt they had no choice but to do this, because in the past gold sellers have used the arena to transfer gold to buyers by setting up fake duels and deliberately losing their stakes. They recognize that this change also effectively destroys staking, essentially removing any interest in the game on the part of many old-time and very successful players.

If the goal was to stop RWT, then the old expression that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” might come to mind. Well, there’s little doubt of the heat coming from the end of this particular road, but what really were the intentions? The choice to limit stakes to such an extreme, ridiculously low figure has opened up speculation as to what might be the real motivation for this move. I am normally not one for “conspiracy theories”, but given Jagex’s lack of transparency in other areas, and the fact that this change appears to be an obvious overreaction, even I have wondered if there might be more to this.

One possibility that immediately came to mind is that perhaps Jagex didn’t want high-level stakers in the game at all, regardless of the RWT issue. There is certainly a valid argument to be made that the rest of the game is cheapened when someone can make a billion gold in a few hours by staking when this takes months using skills. In fact, some of the (very few) supporters of this change have openly said that they approve because they like seeing stakers “go out of business”.

Was this really the goal behind the change, why didn’t Jagex just come clean and admit it? I brought up this very issue on the RuneScape forums and was pleased that a Jagex employee responded to me directly. He insisted that there was no ulterior motive, and that this is really only about RWT.

I cannot prove otherwise, so I will take him at his word (while maintaining some level of skepticism.) At the same time, though, this merely raises other big issues. Chief among them is the main puzzle: how could Jagex possibly have chosen to make a change to address cheating that destroys a big part of the game completely?

It has been stated repeatedly by Jagex employees that this change was necessary because there was no other way to combat the ill effects of RWT. Once again, though, the sheer magnitude of the reaction should make any rational player ponder: was there really no other way to deal with this issue?

Let’s start with the 3k per 15 minutes limit. In the current game of RuneScape, 3k is pocket change—strike that; it’s not even pocket change, it’s like the pennies that collect under the cushions of your sofa. When asked why this number was selected, a Jagex employee claimed that it was determined only after long and deliberate consideration. This claim, combined with how ridiculous the figure is, was part of why I wondered if there were something else going on.

Did Jagex not consider that there might be some intelligent middle ground between infinity (the old staking limit) and 3k every 15 minutes? Really? The simple facts are that RWT is conducted only with large amounts of money: millions, if not tens of millions of gold pieces. Even if we accept that Jagex needed to stop high level stakes for the sake of fighting RWT, they could have easily chosen a more reasonable limit. Couldn’t they?

Consider that the current “going rate” is about $4 per million; at that exchange rate, 3k of gold works out to a value of approximately one penny. Obviously, nobody is going to bother making a trade for so little value. But would they bother for a nickel? That’s 12.5k of gold. A dime? 25k. Even a single dollar? Highly doubtful, yet that would be 250k. Limiting stakes to 250k every 15 minutes would kill nearly all use of the duel arena for RWT while still allowing at least some of those who enjoyed staking to continue to use the arena.

Do you mean to tell me that there is nobody in Jagex Towers that was capable of coming up with this sort of compromise? Nobody?

Of course, there are also other ways that could be used to tackle the problem. Jagex has repeatedly claimed that it has sophisticated systems capable of tracking gold sales conducted by the trade interface, for example. As a programmer myself, I see no practical reason why these could not be similarly adapted for use with stakes. Simply log all stakes over a certain value and feed them into a program that searches for patterns of unbalanced stakes with the same people “losing” all the time. Then look at those people’s other information, such as logging patterns and IP addresses.

These are the ways that smart people search for, analyze and treat problems. They don’t just kill the patient off to get rid of the disease.

On September 11, 2001, a coordinated attack on the United States of America left the World Trade Center towers in ruins and the world in shock. The reaction of Americans, once they got over the horror, was I believe predictable: they rallied in unity, and proclaimed proudly that they would not be intimidated by cowardly terrorists. While clearly a day of infamy, it was also an opportunity for the ideals of freedom and national pride to shine through.

In the following months and years, though, many of these feelings of solidarity were quickly eroded. This was not accomplished through subsequent terror strikes, but rather through a series of draconian laws that were passed in an effort to prevent them. Limits on air travel devastated the airline industry; laws that allow the privacy of individual citizens to be violated were shuffled through Congress; and the United States now maintains an arguably illegal off-shore prison, something that would have made the Founding Fathers cringe. We are also involved in a disastrous war based in part on pretences associated with the original attacks, which is causing a severe drain on both our economy and our international standing.

Many commentators have noted—quite correctly in my view—that we have done far more damage to our nation in trying to “fight terrorism” than the terrorists themselves ever did, or ever could have done. I can only imagine Osama bin Laden, hiding in a cave somewhere in Pakistan, laughing at us as he sees us voluntarily destroy the precious freedoms and principles that we’ve always claimed to cherish, while doing in our children’s future simultaneously.

Things aren’t quite that bad when it comes to RWT in RuneScape—unlike al Qaeda, I don’t believe that RWT are trying to destroy the game. At the same time, though, I certainly don’t think they care what happens to it or its honest players as long as they can continue to profit. And the fact is that they are laughing at Jagex as the company persists with these heavy-handed efforts, which do not stop RWT, but only destroy various aspects of the game.

In one of the online discussions, a Jagex employee claimed that they are trying to “stop the problem at the source”. Well, sorry, but the duel arena was not the source; the use of that feature for cheating is a symptom of the problem, not its underlying cause. Trying to stop criminals by cutting off one avenue that they could potentially use for their crimes is always ineffective; they simply choose another. You cannot stop black markets by imposing rules and restrictions that can be easily circumvented.

What Jagex did to stakers yesterday wasn’t in fact like what the US government did to air travel after 9/11. A more apt analogy would be if the authorities had announced that they were permanently shutting down all air travel to ensure that no planes could be hijacked.

(Apologies in advance to my British readers for more American real world references!)

Whether we like it or not, the US has a gun culture. Guns go back to our foundation on the heels of a revolution, the glamorization of the Western shoot-out, and the never-ending argument over the second amendment. There are millions and millions of law-abiding gun owners in the US who never commit any crimes with them. They are used for hunting and for self-defence—not so much shooting back at criminals but preventing the crimes from happening in the first place.

Of course, there are also a few thousand criminals who do use guns to ply their trade. The public sees these guns being used in nefarious ways and clamors for “something to be done”. The oversimplified overreaction to this on the part of well-meaning politicians and law enforcement officials is to restrict the use of guns, then restrict their ownership, then restrict further, and restrict further still, and then finally to ban ownership entirely.

This has two effects. First, law-abiding citizens respect the new rules because—tada—they are law-abiding citizens! So they turn in their guns, and are left unable to protect themselves, and inconvenienced in terms of legitimate uses of fire arms. Second, criminals ignore the new rules because—tada—they are criminals! Banning guns forces those who want them into being law breakers, but naturally, those who plan to break the law anyway do not care. So they buy them all the same.

There’s another effect as well: banning guns means that they can only be purchased through the black market. The risk of importing and selling them means that costs go up until it is worthwhile for those who deal in illegal goods to sell them. This is simple market economics in action.

What you end up with is a scene played out in so many large cities in the US, including, sadly and ironically enough, our nation’s capital of Washington: a large population of disarmed victims who cannot buy guns, and a small population of predators who still can. Oh, and lots of crime, including terrible murder rates. Does this make any sense?

Back in RuneScape, we see Jagex following down this same disastrous, pointless path. The company eliminates the use of staking for RWT by killing off staking. Tens of thousands of legitimate players are deprived of what is, for them, a major part of the game. The cheaters, however, still have dozens of other ways that they can use to transfer gold among them, so they continue on unfazed.

The other effect also comes into play, though, as Jagex continues with this crackdown on RWT. The more difficult it is to conduct real world trades, and the greater the risk there is of being caught, the more the price goes up. And the more this happens, the more lucrative it is for people to cheat. Once again, this is simple economics, and why eradicating black markets is nearly impossible.

“He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.”
-- Muad’dib, Dune, Frank Herbert

This simple quote from one of my favorite books suggests another fundamental flaw in Jagex’s approach to eliminating cheaters from the game. By spending so much money and so much manpower on game changes to “fight RWT”, Jagex is allowing the cheaters to effectively control what happens with the game, and the community. The combatting of RWT seems to have been transformed from a necessary ongoing part of maintaining the game to an obsession that must be fed regardless of the consequences.

Some players claim that RWT doesn’t affect them, but I disagree with that. It does affect all of us, both in terms of individual annoyance at feeling cheated—like when you see someone who has bought his way to skills or riches using real dollars—and indirectly through the effect on item prices and so forth. However, these effects are subtle, and usually do not have a major impact on how we play the game. They have a limited effect that most people understand and can deal with.

In contrast, Jagex’s recent efforts to fix the problem are about as subtle as a sledgehammer. They can justify these changes any way they want, but the fact is that someone who has spent 500 hours building a high-level staking character is a lot more impacted by an arbitrary decision to remove staking from the game than he or she was ever affected by whatever the real world traders were doing before that decision.

The more Jagex insists on excessive measures to fight RWT, the more clear it becomes that the company is not in control of its own game. They are allowing the cheats to dictate the terms of the battle.

An important military principle states that while air power is important, you cannot win a war using it alone. What this means is that while you can certainly “soften up” your enemy using air strikes, cruise missiles and so forth, you must actually put boots on the ground and physically occupy territory in order to achieve victory.

Jagex’s equivalent of “air power” in the war on cheaters takes the form of automated systems and drastic measures. Here too, the war will never be won using these sorts of “hands off” approaches, and it’s a wonder that the company is unable to understand that this is the case, and why it is so.

If Jagex wants to win the battle against RWT, relying on automated systems that sometimes catch innocent people while allowing thousands of cheats to slip through the cracks will not work. Cherry-picking things like shops to “rework” them to the point where they barely resemble what they once were, will not work. And most importantly, completely destroying essential features of the game like staking in order to keep them cheats from using it, also will not work.

Once again, I am forced to fall back on what seems to be a recurring theme with Jagex: the company takes things “very seriously” right up to the point where it involves spending money. As a smart poster on the TruthScape forums said, for the amount of money that Jagex takes in every month, it could easily afford to hire a bunch of people to really fight this problem at its source: the people who contract to buy the money, the sellers who transact it, and the gold farmers who collect it.

But it’s a lot cheaper and easier to just get rid of staking.

One of the amusing subplots of the comedy classic Caddyshack is the ongoing battle between the golf course’s groundskeeper, Carl (played by Bill Murray) and a gopher who keeps digging up the turf. Carl tries various methods to try to get rid of the gopher, none with much success, and becomes more flustered with each failure. By the end of the movie, he has become so obsessed with getting rid of the gopher that he ends up setting explosive charges and blowing up half the course in an effort to stop the gopher from digging holes in it.

Despite all that, the gopher lives. The golf course is another matter…

It’s time for Jagex to stop pursuing a fundamentally flawed course of action that willingly sacrifices tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of innocent, paying customers in an ineffective effort to stop a few thousand cheaters. It is simply not fair to build a game with a set of rules that encourages people to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours paying to build specialty characters, and then to destroy the entire point of that work with a single, poorly considered, arbitrary decision.

Jagex, please rethink your recent approach. It’s not too late to put down the TNT.

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #1 - Words Can Kill The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #3 - Sorry, Comrade, but Price Controls Don’t Work