TruthScape.com - The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #6

In my prior Soapbox article I expressed my concerns due to what I felt were excessively harsh actions that Jagex had taken to clean up the game, which could result in throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. While I do believe that Jagex still has much work to do in “saving the baby”, there’s also no doubt in my mind of the other side of these changes: the company is removing a very large amount of incredibly dirty bathwater from the game!

How dramatic are the improvements to the community? They are significant enough that I will have to substantially rewrite TruthScape, because a large percentage of the scams, lures and other problems I wrote about simply no longer apply. While that’s bad news for me, it’s good news for the game, and thus the sort of bad news I can live with!

The sheer noise level of the ranting about these changes means that it’s hard to hear those pointing out the positive aspects. And in fact, the volume of that noise is an indication of just how overdue some of these fixes were. In this article, which I am sure many will find controversial, I’ll take a look at how Jagex’s war on real world trading (RWT) is going to help improve the RuneScape community in many ways—largely by eliminating unsavory elements from it.

Of course we should start by talking about bots (and gold farmers), which were one of the primary motivations for Jagex’s recent changes. While the jury is obviously still out, I definitely agree with the company’s contentions that its focused and coordinated attack on all practical methods of transferring items and wealth will have a serious negative impact on RWT. As a result, it should also greatly reduce the incentive for players to run bots and gold farming sweatshops.

The benefits of removing these “players” from the game are obvious: less competition for resources; lower server load; less frustration from legitimate players; and even a reduction in the incidence of legitimate players being falsely accused. The changes will result in shifts in item values and even how skills are leveled, but on the whole, it will be positive for the community.

Note that some have expressed concern that the sweatshop workers will now just switch from farming gold to farming accounts for sale. I am sure there will be some of this—there has been all along, in fact—but I am skeptical that it will be nearly as big a problem as RWT has been. There are several reasons for this.

First, it’s much more difficult to securely arrange to transfer an account than it was to transfer gold; for one thing, recovery questions mean an account can be taken back. Second, most players who cheat don’t want to start a whole new account, they just want items. Third, it will be much easier to trace people who trade accounts than it was those who dropped gold.

Finally, account selling is much more risky for the farmers. Consider a Woodcutting bot/farmer. Someone starts an account, levels it up quickly and begins chopping yews. Every few hours the logs or money can be liquidated for cash and then that cash dropped to a central account or customer. In contrast, raising an account means that the account is the product; if at any time the farmer is caught, he loses everything.

Drop trading has always been against the rules in RuneScape, but despite that, it was carried out constantly—usually by players transferring items and gold to their “pures”. In fact, it was so common that many players just assumed it was legal; I routinely saw players openly admit doing it even on the RuneScape forums!

The new changes effectively put an end to this, which swings the pendulum back in the favor of honest players.

While I am not happy about the prospects of being forced to use the Grand Exchange, nor living with strict controls on item trades, I am pleased that this will also eliminate many of the remaining item scams in the game. It will no longer be possible to trick players into buying Barrows sets that have two skirts and no helm, nor to sell marrentill seeds as if they were ranarr seeds, nor to pawn off junk items like charcoal for a lot of money.

The new gravestone feature and the end of open PKing in the Wilderness remove the tangible rewards from luring, and thus effectively end it. Oh, I am sure that there will still be some idiots who do it just to be jerks, but most luring was done to get dropped items, and that’s no longer possible.

Honest players will now be freed of having to deal with lurers in the Wilderness, as well as while fighting difficult monsters like the Dagannoth Kings.

Merchants have always been reviled by the majority of the RuneScape community. Now, I personally was not one of those who thought all merchants were bad. Before the Grand Exchange, many of them performed a valuable service by smoothing out inefficient markets and allowing players to buy and sell more quickly. On the other hand, some were just opportunistic, dishonest people who who spent all their time trying to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.

The GE and trading changes will effectively remove most forms of merchanting from the game. The legitimate kind that was needed before really won’t be necessary now, and the scumbags who took advantage of others for their own gain are mostly out of business.

The new changes will even help legitimate players deal with beggars. Since player to player trades will be severely restricted, it won’t be so easy for lazy people to make a “living” by harassing those who work to earn what they own. Even though I do hope the trade limits are relaxed, any limitation will allow players an easy excuse to not give into begging: “sorry, I’m already at my trading cap”.

This is where I’m sure I’ll get most of my hate mail. Well, sorry, but I’m not saying anything here I haven’t said before, and it has to be said. So hate away!

The focus of much of the hysteria over yesterday’s changes is coming from those upset about the dramatic changes to PKing. While I agree that it’s unfortunate that legitimate, honest PKers have been harmed by the update, I believe that Wilderness PKing was long overdue to be overhauled anyway. Its removal from RuneScape will greatly improve the game in many ways.

Those who are whining about PKing “being destroyed” are conveniently forgetting that it was already destroyed a long time ago. Fair fights were nearly impossible due to cheating, backstabbing, tag teaming, pile jumping, “X-outers” and other nonsense. The dominance of pures also made a mockery of the combat level system and ensured that regular players never had a chance to win.

PKers have also been, for a very long time, easily the worst segment of the RuneScape community. Again, I am not saying all PKers were bad community members, but as a whole, PKing had far more problem players than any other segment of the game. If any group in the game needed a cleanup, it was PKers.

Over the last year or two, Jagex has been trying to solve two problems with one method. The first problem was declining participation in the Wilderness, and the second was difficulty in making monsters that could truly challenge good players. The solution Jagex used was to keep putting skill features and resources in the Wild, forcing skillers to confront PKers.

That was certainly nice for lazy PKers, who were ensured of having a steady supply of “fresh meat” without actually having to fight other PKers, but was a real problem for their victims. Yes, they went in knowing the risks, but that’s not my point, which is that PKing should be for those who want to PK—and now it is.

This is an improvement all around, as far as I am concerned. First, PKers who can really PK still have a way to do it. Second, PKers who couldn’t actually deal with fair fights and only wanted to pick off people running to do treasure trails and get to the Abyss will now find that they are out of luck. Finally, resources in the Wilderness may now actually get used a bit more.

While I think the Duel Arena staking limits are too low, I am glad that staking has been restricted, and not just because of RWT. There were far too many players who had developed serious, real world gambling addiction problems because of the Duel Arena, and many of those were minors. This change, too, was long overdue.

The existence of pures has always, in my mind, represented proof that Jagex’s combat level formula was broken. It never made sense to me that someone could have 60 Attack, 60 Strength, 80 Mage and 80 Ranged and yet have a lower combat level than a player whose highest combat skill was 45.

Pures were predominantly used for PKing and staking, and were the source of many of the biggest problems in the game: cheating (through drop trading), fighting over resources like easily killed monsters, scamming (at the Duel Arena and elsewhere), supporting bots through large purchases of “power training” supplies, and abusive and childish behavior in the Wilderness. The recent changes should return the game to a focus on balanced character creation, which is great news.

I’m sure that some people will take issue with my comments above about how the community is better off with the changes to PKing and the damage done to pures. Well, I’ll go one further: I will be very happy if all of the pures and PKers currently ranting and raving over these modifications quit the game.

Consider that the recent changes affect a lot of players; in fact, nearly all players—these range from brand new members to those who have played for seven years. The updates affect skillers, merchants, monster hunters, duelers, PKers, minigamers, social players and more. People from all of these groups are making their voices heard, generally in a reasonable way—except one. One group is instead overloading the RuneScape forums with childish rants, spamming sticky threads so they are unusable, and starting and participating in juvenile “riots”.

PKers and pures. The same groups who always engage in idiotic behavior any time a change is made that affects their gameplay.

What they don’t seem to realize is that their immature behavior is not going to convince Jagex’s leaders to change their minds. It is also not going to convince other players to have sympathy for them. What it mostly does is to prove that Jagex’s changes to the Wilderness were long overdue, and good for the game as a whole.

I doubt that many legitimate players will shed any tears if this big bunch of babies actually left the game for good. Of course, they threaten this every time they don’t like an update, yet they are right back at it the next time they don’t like one.

They’re lucky I don’t run RuneScape, or I’d send a team of J mods in there and ban the lot of them.

For those who won’t bother to read carefully, let me be clear in saying that I am not looking forward to legitimate players quitting—only those who engage in selfish, immature and childish behavior. Real PKers who want to continue PKing will learn the minigames that Jagex has implemented, and hopefully the company will listen to reasonable complaints about these replacement PKing methods and will adjust them.

As to those who keep flaming and rioting and posting stupid ASCII graphics and hysterically screaming “we pay we say” and other nonsense, I say simply this: “good riddance to bad rubbish”.

If you walk around constantly bleating out “taking free stuff from quitters”, guess what? You’re no better than a common beggar. (Heck, the new update should put a big dent in this sort of nonsense too!)