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

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #4 - I Have the Right to Remain Silent The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #6 - Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

Published: December 10, 2007

I wrote Curing the Disease by Killing the Patient in the wake of Jagex’s decision last month to restrict Duel Arena staking to 3,000 gold every 15 minutes. The main point of that editorial was not so much the staking change itself, but rather that it being destroyed showed that Jagex’s battle against real world trading (RWT) was greatly damaging the game and its enjoyment for thousands of players.

I ended my earlier article by mentioning a movie scene where a groundskeeper blows up a golf course trying to kill a gopher, and urging Jagex to “put down the TNT”. I wrote that because I had a feeling back then that the Duel Arena changes were just the start, and unfortunately, this morning’s updates and announcements have shown that I was correct. Jagex has now effectively removed player killing as it once was from the game, and has announced strict limitations on player trades and item dropping. One player quipped that Jagex had today decided to use the TNT…

These changes are likely to transform RuneScape entirely, in ways that many consider to be not for the better. Many players are complaining long and loud, threatening to quit, rioting and so forth. But it’s clear to me that Jagex feels very strongly about the anti-RWT changes they have made here, and I don’t see any point in joining in a chorus of noise and whining. It’s not going to accomplish a thing.

Instead, I am hoping that Jagex will listen to reason regarding the unnecessarily harsh changes that have been made. I am going to objectively discuss the problems these updates create for new players, and how Jagex can ameliorate some of the updates, so that the influence of RWT can be removed without making the game intolerable to its innocent customers.

Note that this article is mainly focused on the changes involving player interaction and not those affecting the Wilderness. The main reason is that I think the player interaction changes are far more serious and more important. There is so much to talk about with that aspect of today’s announcements that a PvP discussion will have to wait for another time.

For those who don’t know their Shakespeare, the heading is a little twist on a famous line from the play Julius Caesar, where Marc Antony announces: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”. My meaning in inverting that quote is that I am not here to launch into a ten-page tirade about the evils of Jagex, nor to hysterically declare that “RuneScape is dead” and start picking out cemetery plots for the game. Those who arrived here looking for a massive rant are going to be disappointed. (And I know there are a few, because I’ve had people looking forward to me ranting about this all day! J).

Now, I have to admit that when I first read about these updates, my reaction was swift and negative: I honestly felt that Jagex was making moves that would destroy the game. After reading Jagex’s comments on the “RWT war”, reviewing others’ comments and pondering the matter, I still think the approaches taken here were unnecessarily harsh, and truly lacking in consideration for the needs of RuneScape players everywhere. But at the same time, my negative views have been tempered by admiration and respect for the company for one simple reason: having the courage to stand on principle even when that means difficult choices that anger a lot of people.

Players disagree on how much of an issue autoers and RWT really are. Some think they are a big problem, while others don’t care and still others think they help the game. Some folks have made rather convincing arguments for solving this problem by legalizing real world trading, and even having Jagex sell items and gold in the game for real money. These varied opinions show that there is no right or wrong answer here; it’s more a matter of how you feel about what gold selling does to a game. And Jagex has come down solidly on the side of feeling that real money trading cheapens the game.

It’s very clear to me that simply allowing real world item trading would have been the easy way out. It would have likely led to fewer complaints and fewer people quitting the game, and could have resulted in Jagex profiting from item sales. Instead, Jagex took the hard route, by making substantial changes that have hurt the game and company in the short run. Whether you agree or not about the importance of RWT, or on how Jagex has gone about dealing with it, you have to give the company credit for having the courage to make a principled decision.

Personally, I agree with Jagex’s stance here, even if I don’t agree with its methods. Selling items for real world money would cause a lot of problems, especially in a game like RuneScape that specifically appeals to those without much real world cash to spend on gaming. The changes of the last few weeks will also certainly serve to reduce some of the “money money money” emphasis that had lately dominated the game.

Also, while the changes may be harsh, they really should take a bite out of real world trading and bots, and perhaps this will lead to further improvements—such as the elimination of randoms, which pretty much everyone would appreciate. The changes to trading also eliminate many types of scams, which is definitely nice.

Finally, I also have to give some kudos to the company for making an effort, through today’s development diary, to finally come clean about what the company is trying to do. It’s long overdue—especially to those of us who saw an end to old-style PKing and trading weeks ago and were annoyed by Jagex’s lack of candor—but as the saying goes, better late than never.

The centerpiece of today’s changes, as far as I’m concerned, is the announcement that starting in January it will no longer be possible to do “unbalanced” trades, which are defined as trades where one side receives in excess of 3,000 gp of value more than the other in a 15-minute period. The development diary says that this could have been done long ago, but Jagex wanted to wait until RuneScape had “new content to replace what would be lost.”

Only one problem. The new content doesn’t replace what will be lost!

The “new content” referred to here is the Grand Exchange (GE), but the many problems with that feature mean that it in no way replaces open player-to-player trading as it has existed since the game began. This is due to inherent limitations in the GE, problems with how it is implemented, and policies that Jagex has enacted and enforced in the feature.

I am one of several people who has highlighted many of the problems with the Grand Exchange over the last two weeks, virtually none of which has been addressed. During this time I have repeatedly heard from other players that the GE is optional, and that “if I don’t like it I don’t have to use it”. Well, since only balanced trades will be allowed, and the definition of a “balanced trade” is based on GE price levels, everyone does have to use the GE starting in January, like it or not. This lack of choice highlights some of the glaring problems of the GE and its price control system.

Open trade has always been a big part of the game for many players—and not just by “merchants”. The ability to buy supplies and sell finished goods is so fundamental that it has been taken for granted by players, and RuneScape’s dynamic economy has attracted many players to the game. If we are now forced to use the GE and the problems with it aren’t corrected, I quite honestly believe that the future of the game is at risk.

Here are some of the most important problems with respect to trade that I see occurring if the trading changes and the GE are not improved.

• Excessive Price Restriction: Suppose that the GE price for nature runes is 269 gold pieces. I’m alching at Castle Wars and need to get 5k more nats, which I offer to buy for 270 each. Oops, I can’t, because it would be an “unbalanced trade”. Isn’t that just a bit ridiculous?
  
  
• Incorrect Pricing: Bogus prices on the GE have been, are now and will continue to be the biggest problem with the feature. The strict price controls, floor prices, incorrect starting price values and inability to quickly adjust for supply and demand have until recently meant that players just chose to transact outside the GE, but in January they won’t be able to. Of course, players aren’t stupid, and they won’t make dumb trades because of artificial limits, so this just means that many items now will become effectively untradeable.
  
  As just one example, raw chompies have been under 90 gold pieces since the GE came out, and they are still under 90 gp. Nobody will sell them for that price, because it’s not worth hauling them to the bank for that. So, come January, wild pie makers won’t be able to buy them, and chompy hunters will lose the only tangible incentive for a rather unrewarding minigame. That’s not progress, in my opinion.
  
  
• Inability to Buy or Sell Items Quickly: The Grand Exchange average prices don’t take into account the fact that people are willing to pay more for convenience. Suppose I am in a bank far from Varrock and need blue dragonhide chaps to do a treasure trail clue. The GE says they are worth around 4k. Right now, I could say “buying blue dhide chaps 15k” and this would entice some player to make a set for me. In January, this won’t be possible. The same goes for quickly selling items for cash—it will be outlawed.
  
  
• Nickel and Diming: Say two high level players want to trade Weapon A, worth around 1.3 million, for Weapon B, also worth around 1.3 million. Well, now they have to worry about what the GE thinks each is worth. And if A costs 1,314,592 gold pieces on the exchange and B is worth 1,287,182 pieces, then B now has to add money, even if B wants A’s weapon more than A wants B’s.
  
  
• Inability to Cope with Change: Every time an update occurs in the game, some items go up greatly in value, and others go down. For example, if a good new Herblore potion is released that uses guam leaves, their value could quadruple instantly. The GE will only adjust prices 5% per day, and no other markets will be allowed. The end result is that nobody will be able to buy or sell guam leaves for weeks (unless they like getting ripped off.)
  
  The same thing applies to situations where new uses are discovered for existing items. For example, some folks remember that for the first few months that Hunter was out, red chinchompas sold in the 200-300 gold range, until someone found out a way to powertrain using them, when they shot up to 700 each. The GE would take weeks to compensate.
  
  
• Opportunities for Taking Advantage of Others: For a long while the dragon woodcutting axe was worth around 1.2 million or so—then Jagex improved it so it cut logs faster, and its price tripled in a day. If the current GE had been in place when this change had been made, those who made offers in the GE to sell axes at the old price would have been essentially ripping themselves off.
  
  
• New Item Chaos: Suppose that in April, Jagex finally releases its much anticipated dragon tinderbox, which lets you light fires 20% faster than using a regular tinderbox. So.. what’s it worth? 50k? 500k? 5 million? I have no idea. Do you? I doubt it. Does Jagex? How could they? Upon what information would they base a value?
  
  So what will it be listed for in the GE? What’s an “unbalanced trade” involving a dragon tinderbox, which nobody has owned before? Only free markets can fairly answer these questions, and we won’t have one.
  
  
• Lack of Market Reference: In response to my originally raising concerns over the GE’s lack of responsiveness, many people said that Jagex would watch the direct player markets for new or changed items and manually adjust GE prices to suit. Well, what are they going to do now?

What’s particularly bothersome is that the unintended consequence of many of these changes is a seizing up of what until now had been a liquid, dynamic economy, which encouraged specialization and player relations. While I am rather independent and appreciate its value, I also like not having to do everything myself. We’ve always been able to pick and choose what we enjoy doing, because we knew that in most cases we could buy items from others that represented the output from activities we didn’t like. This also encouraged teamplay and provided opportunities for lower-level players.

Unfortunately, the hard controls on trading and the hassle involved in buying and selling will remove much of the player interaction from the game, leading to everyone having to do things on their own. Consider the example of guam leaves becoming more valuable; only those who actually had guam leaves would benefit. If you want to make wild pies you will pretty much have to hunt your own chompies. Skill trades and assistance with skills will be greatly diminished, except for very short duration uses of the Assist System. There will also be other negative side-effects, which I’ll discuss in the next section.

As my boys and I were getting up and ready for school this morning, I briefly outlined to my oldest son the changes that had been announced. A few minutes later, his comment to me was that it seemed that “RuneScape is going to be a multiplayer game where players can’t interact”. The simplicity and astuteness of this statement really struck me, and the more I read various forums to discover all of the unintended consequences of the proposed changes, the more obvious its truth became.

I mentioned near the end of the last section that the trading restrictions will greatly curtail player exchanges of items, but the problems with the system go far beyond just raw material swaps or the impact on skills. They severely impact many of the activities that make a MMORPG multiplayer in the first place. It’s particularly ironic that so many of these problems are going to be caused at the end of a year in which Jagex was trying to emphasize teamwork, through updates like Barbarian Assault and the God Wars Dungeon, and useful features like clan chat.

Here are just a few of the big problem areas that have been identified so far in this respect:

• Sharing Loot in Fighting Tough Monsters: Teams that go to fight tough monsters like the Kalphite Queen or the God Wars bosses rely on “unbalanced trades” to share the wealth when they get a rare, valuable drop. The LootShare system is wholly insufficient because it only randomly gives the rare item to one player. Suppose a two-player team gets two kills and one walks away with an Armadyl hilt and the other 19k coins—that’s not sharing!
  
  
• Sharing Loot in Other Activities: My sons enjoy the Gnome Delivery minigame, which they play together. This is one of the good aspects of RuneScape, a reason why we let them play—because it allows two basically good kids who often fight with each other find ways to cooperate instead. Their system, which they developed themselves, has one player doing all the cooking and the other making the deliveries. If they get any good tips, they split their value.
  
  Now they are out of business.
  
  
• Skill Trades: I have 500 runite bars and need 5k bolts, but I don’t have level 88 Smithing. I take my bars and find a friend who has high Smithing and ask for his help. He doesn’t have time to make me bolts or stand around while I use the Assist System, but he’s happy to trade me some he already has for the bars and feathers.
  
  Oops, sorry. The Grand Exchange says that bars are worth 13,804 each, bolts are 1,197 and feathers are worth 4. To make the trade “balanced”, my friend—remember, the guy who’s doing me the favor—has to pay me almost one million gold. That’s not going to happen.
  
  
• Getting Paid for Services: The elimination of “unbalanced” trades and reliance on the Assist System means that it will no longer be possible for high-level players to be rewarded for their skills by charging modest fees for their services.
  
  
• “Running” and Other Time/Money Exchanges: The proposed changes will effectively destroy long-standing interplayer relationships that exchange time for money or items. High-level Runecrafters will no longer be able to use essence runners; power-miners won’t be able to employ ore runners to save time while giving the runners ores for smelting; similarly, those fishing cannot even give away loads of trout. It will also not be possible to pay people to tan hides or plank logs, and there are many other examples.
  
  
• Cooperative Training: One player wants to train Woodcutting and his friend wants to train Firemaking, so one cuts and gives the logs to the other to burn. Can’t do that any more either, sorry. Same for friends training Fishing and Cooking, and so forth.

The changes that discourage teamplay that I mentioned above seem bad enough, but the trading restrictions that are being introduced actually do something even worse. Incredible as it may seem, they impinge on social aspects of the game, and discourage helpful and generous behavior. They even make “random acts of kindness” next to impossible. In short, they will actually make the RuneScape community a worse place in many ways.

Here are just a few examples of some of the activities that will be affected:

• Sharing Equipment: It is extremely common for friends and family members to share expensive equipment items, such as a dragon woodcutting axe or a Barrows set. Now this will be impossible.
  
  
• Borrowing or Lending Equipment: When the God Wars Dungeon came out, I wrote about godswords, and a player I know in the game wanted to try one out. I didn’t want to trust trade the sword, so he gave me some collateral: full dragon, a dragonfire shield and some other stuff. It wasn’t quite the value of the sword but was all he had and was good enough for me. Now that won’t be possible either.
  
  
• Drop Parties: Recent changes will make most drop parties a thing of the past. The majority of players want to drop items for friends, not complete strangers.
  
  
• Assisting Other Players: On many occasions I have found myself with extra food while in a dungeon next to someone who had run out. In the past I would give the food away, but no longer—now I will effectively have to “charge” for it!
  
  
• Helping Newbies: I’ll never forget when, after playing RuneScape for around a week, a high-level player came up to me, traded me, and gave me 20k gold coins just to be nice. At the time this was a fortune to me and I was very grateful.
  
  Isn’t it a shame that in January, I’ll no longer be able to return the favor to some other new player?
  
  
• Gifts: Many people give gifts to friends, colleagues and family members, for occasions ranging from birthdays and Christmas to simple good fortune. Now that “good cheer” aspect will be ruined.

It should be obvious to anyone that penalizing or eliminating these sorts of behaviors is not in the best interests of the game.!

Many people say that it’s not right to complain about problems unless one also proposes solutions. Personally, I think that’s bunk—identifying problems has value in its own right—but I agree that identifying problems and proposing solutions is far better than just listing the problems alone. And that’s why I have decided to suggest a number of specific improvements and fixes that I feel Jagex should consider.

Note that these are not suggestions like “take out the new updates”. It’s rather obvious that the folks at Jagex would not have gone to the lengths they did unless they considered serious action necessary. They also appear to consider this a matter of principle, as I said before, and an issue that comes ahead of gameplay matters. For these reasons, insisting that they just undo what they’ve done wholesale would be naïve and pointless. Instead, I want to focus on simple changes that allow RuneScape to still win the “war on RWT”, but without killing so many innocent bystanders in the process.

Here are my proposals.

The ongoing price controls and other limits in the GE are greatly restricting its ability to function as the centralized player trading house it was meant to be. At the very minimum, the following modifications should be strongly considered:

1. The 5% price control ranges must be loosened so that they can better handle changes in item values, items that are mispriced, and buyers or sellers who are “motivated”. If we’re going to be forced to use the GE, then many changes to it must be made so that it operates efficiently and effectively. Here are a few specific modifications that should be considered:
   
   
2. The frequency of updates must be increased to at least several times a day. The current once daily system is not working.
   
   
3. Floor prices need to be removed. Let players sell maple logs for less than 44 gp or yew longs for under 700 gp if they want; this is hardly going to be exploited for RWT.
   
   
4. Jagex employees need to spend more time manually adjusting prices that are out-of-whack. Despite a sticky thread being in Recent Updates for two weeks, there are still many prices that are incorrect.
   
   
5. New items should be allowed to float on the exchange for at least one full week with no price controls, or their true values will take months to establish. Failing this, some other sensible strategy should be defined.

In addition to price and policy problems, the GE itself is clunky and difficult to use. If we’re going to use it for all of our item buying and selling, it needs many improvements:

1. There’s no practical reason that I can think of to force me to teleport to Varrock and then walk for 10 clicks to be able to buy and sell. If we must use the GE to trade, please let it be accessible from any bank (including bank chests). This cannot be difficult to implement and I see no drawbacks to it.
   
   
2. Make the default action for exchange clerks “Exchange” instead of “Talk”. 99.99% of the time players want to trade, not talk to the NPC.
   
   
3. In the main GE display, show the “buy box” and the “sell box” in empty slots immediately to save a pointless click—there’s nothing else you can do with the slot but click it anyway.
   
   
4. When buying, have the item search open automatically instead of forcing yet another click. There’s nothing else you can do after clicking “Buy” anyway, right?
   
   
5. Change the buy interface so that there’s a way to get back to the search results. Right now, suppose I want to see the prices of all four colors of dragonhide. I search for “dragonhide” and then choose “blue dragonhide”. If I want to see the other colors, I have to search three more times. This wastes player time and server resources.
   
   
6. Change the number boxes so instead of setting the quantity to 1, 10, 100 etc. it increments the quantities. So, for example, I should be able to click “100” three times to set a quantity of 300.
   
   
7. Add a 1000 quantity button, even if it means replacing the 500 button; it is used more often. Each click should increment quantity by 1000.
   
   
8. Automatically note all purchased items if they have a quantity of five or more. Don’t unnote items from cancelled sales if they were offered for sale in noted form.

When the Duel Arena changes came out I challenged anyone to tell me why a 3k limit was necessary, when a limit of 50k or 100k would have done just as good a job of stopping RWT. I have received not one good answer to this in two weeks, and now, the same question now applies to trading as well.

High-level players don’t seem capable of getting through to Jagex that 3k is a completely insignificant amount of money to anyone who’s been playing this game more than a month or two. Restrictions of that small an amount of money are unreasonable.

My idea is to change the trading cap so that it is a function of player levels. This reflects the fact that players with a great deal of experience are far less likely to engage in RWT, and far more likely to want to be able to engage in “unbalanced” trades, especially ones against their favor. My specific proposal is that each player be allowed a maximum net gain or loss on transactions of 100 times his or her total levels every 30 minutes.

For example, suppose that I, with a total level of 1,903, decide to do a trade with a newer player who has a total level of 705. The trade could result in a net loss to me of up to 190,300 gold, or a net loss to the other player of up to 70,500 gold. In the event that I did do an unbalanced trade and got a benefit of 70,500, I would then be able to get no more than 119,800 of “gain” in the same 30 minute span.

These figures are high enough to solve many of the problems with the proposed trading restrictions. They enable players to help newbies, assist players in trouble in a dungeon, give moderate-valued gifts, and lend and borrow moderate-valued items. They also make at least some types of skill exchanges more feasible. And these numbers are not so high as to make RWT using trades practical; even a very high level player would take about 2.5 hours just to trade 1 million worth of gold, which is hardly worth the effort.

The exact same idea as above could be applied to staking as well, except that it would be based on combat level with a multiplier of 1,000. For example, a player with combat level 75 could stake up to 75k per 30 minutes, while one with level 54 could stake 54k every half hour. This would revitalize staking—which is currently dead because of the silly 3k limit—and thus also revitalize all the other industries that have been hurt by staking’s demise. And again, it would not enable RWT at all.

If the changes to the GE and trading caps that I mentioned above aren’t satisfactory, consider the inequality of allowing a range of prices on the GE but not in direct player trades. At the very least, replace the 3k limit with something based on a percentage so you don’t end up in ridiculous situations where you can’t do trades for even one gold piece less than the GE average price.

Some sort of solution is needed for the problem of team loot. This could be implemented in various ways, but something must be done or a big part of RuneScape will be lost, and many months of emphasis on teamwork undone.

One option is to simply modify the Grand Exchange to permit group sales. Any player could choose to sell an item and indicate that the proceeds will be split among a group of other players that he or she specifies. This would be fairly simple to implement, and it would be easy enough for the system to flag suspicious activity. It also has the benefit of being very general, so it would work for situations like my sons doing Gnome Delivery together.

Another option is to change LootShare. When that feature was first introduced, no effort was being made to track item values, but since that’s possible now, that information should be used.

One idea I had suggested to me is called SplitTrade (credit for this goes to Fredz). In this idea, LootShare keeps track of the total value of all the drops on a particular monster hunting trip. After the trip is over, all the players who were on the trip stand in the same area and activate the feature, which allows all players to put up an amount of gold equal to the value of the items each player received in drops. That gold is then split evenly among the players.

For example, suppose that players A, B and C go to fight the Kalphite Queen; player A gets a rune bar (value 13k), player B gets 7 lobsters (value 1.4k) and player C gets a dragon chain (value 11 million). When they activate SplitTrade, player A would put up 13,000 gold pieces, player B 1,400 gold pieces and player C 11 million gold pieces. This gold would be added up and then split evenly.

Another idea is to change both LootShare and the GE. High value items could be sold by LootShare itself, and the proceeds split among the players automatically. This would solve the team loot problem with no risk of RWT issues (that I can think of at the moment, anyway.)

There are other ideas as well. It just takes a bit of imagination to solve these sorts of problems, and there’s plenty of that at Jagex.

I believe that removing the ability of friends and family members to loan and borrow items is an unacceptable price to pay for fighting RWT. There are many options for solving this problem, and I sincerely hope that Jagex chooses to implement one of them.

An obvious idea that has been suggested many times is to create an item loan exchange. Two players could use the exchange (accessible at any bank) to temporarily transfer an item from one to the other. After a certain period of time, the item would be transferred back automatically. Obviously more details would need to be fleshed out—such as what to do in special circumstances like the person who lends the item having a full bank or whatnot—but the general idea is sound.

In my earlier Soapbox article I mentioned the expression that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. Many RuneScapers are of the firm opinion that, even if there were valid reasons for today’s changes, they pushed us all collectively quite a few miles down that road. And it’s starting to get pretty hot in here…

Well, sure, melodrama on the part of players seems to be par for the course after updates these days, but I think this is different. I cannot ever before recall seeing so many unhappy comments from legitimate players, including some of the most experienced, long-tenured and intelligent players in the game. Jagex is at perhaps the last fork in the road to good-intentioned Hell; there is still time to ameliorate some of the problems, but if solid action to help innocent players is not taken soon, the damage to the game may be irreparable. I don’t think the game will die, but I do think that we will lose out on a lot if good players are forced to leave by a lack of responsiveness to valid complaints.

Again, I just want to be clear that what I am calling for here is not that Jagex stop fighting RWT or abandon its principles in that regard. It is perfectly reasonable for the firm to declare that it won’t tolerate what it considers to be cheating in its game. However, it is also perfectly unreasonable for Jagex to refuse to consider changes to its changes that preserve the goal of making life far more difficult for cheats, but simultaneously make life easier for paying customers.

All we can do now is wait, and hope that Andrew and company are listening, and that they take the immediate steps needed to save the patient we all love.

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #4 - I Have the Right to Remain Silent The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #6 - Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish