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

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #6 - Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #8 - A Lack of Communication, A Lack of Respect

Published: December 13, 2007

You’re 17, you’ve got a bit of a wild streak, and you just got your first car. Your state allows custom license plates, so you decide to register one that you think is cool, because it’s a bit risqué. You’re surprised when your local motor vehicles department approves it, but pleased. You spend thousands of dollars on enhancements for your car, drive it for a year or two, and then get a strange letter in the mail. It informs you that the agency has now decided that your license tag is “offensive”. Not only can you no longer use that plate any more, but the state will also be confiscating your car. They will, however, give you a small discount coupon you can use to buy a new car.. if you hurry up.

Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet this is pretty much exactly what Jagex is doing to some of its most loyal, long-term veteran players. While the company is in its legal right to do this, that doesn’t make it right. And if you’re not aware of this issue, that’s by design.

Estoppel is a legal term that refers to a set of rules designed to enforce basic fairness in the dealings between two parties. There are many different type of estoppel; describing them in detail is beyond what I’m after here, and I am not a lawyer. But if you boil things down, estoppel is all about protecting those who rely on the promises made by others from having those promises reneged upon.

Classic examples of estoppel usually involve landlords and tenants. For example, suppose a tenant had been paying $500 a month for an apartment (flat), and the rent is due to go up to $600 on January 1st. The new year comes and goes, but the landlord decides to just keep charging $500. Then, in October, the landlord goes back to the tenant and tells him that he not only must now pay $600 a month, but the landlord also wants $900 in back rent for the preceding months. The tenant could likely make a successful argument that the landlord is estopped from collecting that extra rent retroactively, because he made a representation to the tenant that $500 was enough.

Okay, but what does this have to do with Jagex and RuneScape? J The issue here is “offensive usernames”, which Jagex has decided to remove from the game, sometimes affecting players who’ve been using them for years.

We all know that while Jagex employs filters to prevent players from signing up with obviously offensive usernames, the company doesn’t screen each name to see if anyone has come up with misspellings or other ways to get around the system. And so, quite a few players try to be clever and make names that are obviously offensive to many people who see them in the game.

Jagex warns players not to use offensive names in its terms and conditions. And frankly, I have no problem with an account using an insulting username from being removed if it is discovered soon after creation.

Unfortunately, Jagex has also decided to suddenly crack down on players who have been using their names in RuneScape for three, four, or even five or more years, due to “receiving too many complaints” about them. I am told that many of these players signed up before there even was a rule against “offensive names”. And what’s worse is that in many cases, there’s really nothing “offensive” about the name at all.

This issue first came to light when word spread about a player named “Krazyfaken” who got a message within RuneScape from a Jagex mod telling him to check his message center. There he found a long, apologetic message informing him that Jagex “no longer had any choice” but to lock his account permanently.

For starters, if there’s anything offensive about “Krazyfaken” it certainly escapes me. Okay, it has a syllable that, if you tried really hard, you could make sound sort of like a swear word. Is someone’s overactive imagination really grounds for banning a longstanding member? This individual is apparently a high profile player and a clan leader; if his name is so “offensive” then how did it take Jagex five years to notice and then take action against it?

I’m sorry, but I find this sort of behavior offensive.

So, what does Jagex offer a long-standing player who’s suddenly informed that his username is “offensive”? Do they let him change his username? Nope. Do they offer to create a new account with the same stats and accomplishments instead? Nope. Jagex tells him that he can start a new account and transfer items from the old one. This would normally be against the rules, but the company doesn’t want to “see all of his hard work go to waste”. The message about not wasting his hard work ends with a winking smiley. How friendly.

So, basically, Jagex takes away a well-rounded, established account and replaces it with a brand new level 3, but allows the old player to effectively “drop trade” items to the new account.

It’s kind of hard to fathom exactly what sort of thinking goes into these sorts of policies—or, indeed, if there’s any thinking involved whatsoever. How can any person who knows anything about RuneScape seriously suggest that it’s okay to wipe out hundreds or even thousands of hours of work in leveling up an account, if the player is allowed to move items to the new one? Do they honestly believe that anyone who has been playing for five years wants to spend several hundred hours doing everything all over again?

Oh, I forgot one part. The player also gets offered a massive one whole free month of membership on the new account, and a refund of his last month’s membership on his old account too. Isn’t that generous compensation for being stripped of a long-standing account? Of course, Jagex accepts membership subscriptions for up to a year in many cases. What happens to all the extra credit on the existing file? Oopsie.

The obvious question that any reasonable person should ask at this point is: why the hell are they doing this instead of just renaming the “offensive” accounts? Good question. And if they can’t or won’t do that, then why not let the players affected create new accounts and then have Jagex edit in their old stats, completed quests and so forth? Another good question. Unfortunately, neither has a good answer.

I don’t believe Jagex has formally said anything about this issue—more on that in a moment—but my understanding through the grapevine is that they claim they are unable to change account names due to the way the game is programmed.

Okay, I have a programming and database background, and I can believe this. If the company hard-coded names into files instead of using player ID numbers as good design specifies, then I can see them being unable to change usernames. If this is the case, though, why does it state in the RuneScape terms and conditions that Jagex reserves the right to “change any username for any reason”?

But fine. If they can’t rename the accounts, why don’t they edit the new characters created by these players so they are similar to the ones they had to abandon? Some folks discussing the issue claim that they think Jagex can’t do that either. Sorry, but that I do not believe. There is simply no valid reason I can think of why the company should not be able to change player stats. I know they used to do it as a punishment (“stat wiping”), and I’m sure it is done for testing purposes.

If a gaming company really can’t edit the stats of its players, it is grossly incompetent. If it can but refuses to, then it is giving loyal players the shaft because it simply doesn’t care about them, or doesn’t want to devote a few minutes of time to these accounts to fix them properly.

Either way, it’s pretty shameful.

As I write this, RuneScape is in turmoil due to Jagex’s all-out war against real world trading. The company has also eliminated most of the features that involve large amounts of in-game money: high-level staking, PKing, merchanting and so forth. Supposedly, RuneScape is now moving back to being more about personal accomplishments and skills.

Yet in this context, Jagex approaches its long term customers and tells them that they want to preserve their “hard work” by letting them transfer over items—but not transferring their skill levels, completed quests, achievement diaries, minigames and so forth.

What sort of message does that send? That “hard work” and being a RuneScape player is really about gold pieces and weapons? Mind boggling.

If you had no idea about this entire issue before now, that’s no surprise. Jagex doesn’t want you to know about it. The company has deliberately not made any announcement or mention of the issue, and I also have been told that nobody is being allowed to discuss it on the RuneScape forums. The only way to find out is to be told privately, or to read about the problem on third party forums.

The excuse given for this is that it’s an “account matter” and so not something to be talked about in public. Isn’t that convenient. Might I suggest that perhaps the real reason Jagex doesn’t talk about this is that it’s rather bad PR for people find out that a company is shafting some of its most loyal customers?

If this whole “under the radar” routine sounds familiar, it’s because we went through it in February when Jagex tried to legalize luring. There too, the company made no formal announcement, and actively worked to shut up anyone who tried to discuss the matter on the forums. Only after much complaining did the company reverse its original poor decision.

And now, here we are with the same thing happening again.

Also, does anyone really think that it’s a coincidence that “offensive” names that have been in use for years are suddenly being purged while 90% of the RuneScape community is distracted over the radical changes being made to the game? Not me.

Jagex seems to be very fond of taking radical action while claiming that it had “no choice”. Well, this is a particularly ridiculous case of this claim being stretched far too far. In addition to the option above of editing the accounts of replacement characters, the company had another choice as well: tell the people who whine about very marginally “offensive” names to go pound sand.

It’s one thing for Jagex to take action against a name that is truly and obviously distasteful, and quite another for the company to go on a massive purge of any name that anyone could in any way construe as being the least bit offensive. I don’t want to see players in the game with names like “e4t_sh1t” any more than anyone else, but some of the names being targeted here are flatly ridiculous.

As mentioned above, “krazyfaken” is not offensive to anyone who isn’t trying to be offended. And those people shouldn’t have the power to destroy another’s hard work. Tell them “sorry, the name isn’t really offensive and the account has been in use for years, so please just deal with it.” There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

The political correctness being exercised in some of these cases borders on the insane. Jagex is starting to move into the same territory as those involved in the David Howard incident, where a civil servant was initially forced out of his job for using the word “niggardly”—which doesn’t mean the same thing as an offensive word it resembles.

Jagex seems to want to make a clean, fresh start in the new year. It is timing its big changes in trading to begin in the first week of 2008; real world trading and bots are on the way out; and an exciting new skill is coming. This is great, but something else has to start anew as well: a commitment to honesty and fairness.

What is being done to these players is flatly unfair. And it’s outrageous that they are being screwed over in this way when there are very likely other alternatives. Yes, I’m sure some will say that this issue only affects a small number of accounts, but that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the person whose hard work has been erased that not many others suffer along with him. In fact, the small number of affected people is all the more reason why others need to speak out on their behalf.

If Jagex wants to have a successful future, it needs to stop being willing to sacrifice loyal customers for the sake of expediency, and start being honest with its user base about what it is doing and the real reasons behind it.

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #6 - Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #8 - A Lack of Communication, A Lack of Respect