TruthScape.com - The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #8 - A Lack of Communication, A Lack of Respect

Today Jagex implemented the last and perhaps most significant of its major policy changes meant to combat real world trading (RWT): the elimination of “unbalanced” trades between players. The severe restrictions that this update imposes mean that most trading is now forced to use the Grand Exchange (GE). Unfortunately, and much to my unpleasant surprise, Jagex has done absolutely nothing to address the many flaws with the GE’s policies, user interfaces and prices. The net result is a hampering of the economy of the game, much as I predicted would happen several weeks ago.

Jagex seems determined to start off 2008 by making the same sorts of mistakes that plagued the company throughout 2007. There is no sign of any interest on Jagex’s part of openly and honestly communicating with users, an action that shows a distinct lack of respect on the part of the firm for its paying customers.

In the classic depiction of an old saw, a teacher writes the word “ASSUME” on a blackboard. He or she then draws vertical lines on either side of the letter “U”, and quips, “when you assume, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” Alright, I agree that it’s not particularly clever, but it does have some truth to it.

Well, I guess that I must be one of the biggest asses around. You see, I had just assumed that Jagex understood how important trade was in this game. I assumed that they knew how serious the problems were with the Grand Exchange—given that many people had described them, and I had even posted about them on the RuneScape forum and received a response from a J mod. I also assumed that Jagex was actually reading all of the feedback that players were giving about the bogus prices in the GE. Most of all, I assumed that the company realized that if they were going to effectively remove direct trade from the game with overly-restrictive trade limits, that they would be forcing people to use the GE, and so it had to be in tip top shape.

But apparently I gave the company far more credit than it deserved. Today, the company implemented its “unbalanced trade restrictions”, but did absolutely nothing to fix the many flaws with the Grand Exchange:

“Disappointment” doesn’t even begin to describe what most players are feeling, especially given that use of this system is now effectively mandatory.

When the Grand Exchange was first announced, Jagex made it sound like a panacea for players. We were told in the November Behind the Scenes that it would “allow you to spend more time on the things you enjoy, providing a less time-consuming alternative to selling your items on the Forums or amongst the crowds of Varrock Marketplace.”

Of course, it was only “less time-consuming” for certain players and products. If you wanted to buy or sell one of the items that had a stable price and one where Jagex had actually done its homework, the GE was great. But if you were trying to buy or sell items where Jagex had put in bogus prices, or where the prices were changing too rapidly, well, no problem—you could just use one of the “more time-consuming” alternatives, because at least it would work.

Well, now we know the truth, don’t we. As Jagex was writing this, they knew all along that it was only going to be an “alternative” for a few weeks, before direct player trading was effectively shut down. So the description was basically a deception aimed at misleading people into thinking positively about the GE before we had its use rammed straight down our throats.

Now we’re stuck with it. As bad as the 5% price ranges are, a hard limit of 3k to 30k is worse, so there is really no alternative to using the GE for trades of any significant volume. And since so many of the prices are bogus, this means that there are many items that can’t be bought or sold at all. This is an outcome that I predicted weeks ago.

The problems with the Grand Exchange were identified almost immediately; I personally had an earlier Soapbox article outlining initial GE concerns within hours of the feature being released. Literally thousands of other dedicated RuneScape players also spent many hours pointing out the flaws in this half-baked feature. Yet we sat there for three weeks with the GE barely even being touched.

On December 17, it seemed like maybe Jagex really was listening. An announcement was posted saying that the company was planning to make changes to the Grand Exchange to incorporate some of the recent feedback and fix problems. Yet now, another two and a half weeks have passed by with absolutely nothing being done. And yes, I know it was a holiday period, but in total it has been over a month with not so much as the smallest fixes being made to a system we are all now being forced to use.

Jagex originally told everyone that they had conducted “extensive research” in coming up with base prices for the Grand Exchange. Once it became patently obvious that this was not the case, the company put up a thread asking for players to post corrections to invalid prices. That too was about a month ago—since then that thread has been replaced by subsequent similar threads, yet a large number of the price corrections already identified to Jagex remain unmade. It’s almost as if the feedback gets sucked into a black hole, never to be seen again.

While some Jagex apologists are quick to go on about how “these things take time”, the truth is that they do not! This is not a situation that requires programming effort—it’s just a matter of tweaking numbers in a database. So why, now that we are forced to abide by the prices in the GE, are the incorrect ones not being fixed? And why should players bother providing feedback that’s going to be ignored?

I have to wonder why it is that third party web sites run by amateurs can accurately gauge proper approximate prices and keep the prices reasonably up to date, but Jagex cannot seem to make simple corrections even when they are handed them on a silver platter.

Here’s a particularly amusing example of Jagex’s “extensive price research” in action. A 2-dose super restore potion costs 5,005 gold pieces, and caviar costs 578. When you put the caviar into the potion you get a 2-dose super restore mix potion, which the GE says is worth… 400 gp. A price that, by the way, hasn’t changed by a nickel in the last five weeks, near as I can tell.

Jagex’s knowledge base page on the Grand Exchange has a description of its price setting mechanism that is flatly dishonest. It inaccurately portrays how the exchange really works, through lies of both commission and omission. In fact, there is so much bogosity on this page that I barely know where to begin with it, but I suppose this balderdash will do:

Gee, that’s funny. You see, yew longbows—one of the most important items in a particular segment of the RuneScape economy—have been trading in the 600 to 620 range in the game for years, yet on the GE they have always had a minimum price of 704 gold. Fletchers and mages have been complaining about this since the day the GE came out, and the price has been the same every day since the GE came out with no adjustment.

Is there a shop on RuneScape that is willing to buy strung yew longbows in volume for 704 gold pieces? If there is, I must have missed it. So where did this price come from? Well, it just so happens that it is exactly 11/12th of the alch value of a yew longbow. Does that seem like a coincidence? I don’t think so. No, someone at Jagex made up this hard price floor formula, with no justification to it whatsoever, and then blatantly refused to explain why it was in place.

So now, mages who want to alch bows have to pay an extra 100 gp each for them, while fletchers will have problems finding buyers because of the unnecessarily higher price. What happened to “prices are entirely set by players trading!”?

Now my old favorite, the raw chompy. This item has been hard-limited at 85 gp each since the day the GE came out. Why? The FAQ says that the price won’t “rise above a shop’s main stock price”. Where is the shop that sells raw chompies, exactly? With this ridiculous, also unjustified price cap, Jagex has completely destroyed the only financial incentive for chompy hunting, and made it much more difficult for wild pie makers who don’t want to hunt their own.

But wait, there’s more. Jagex is also now imposing trade volume restrictions on the exchange of certain items: this means you cannot buy more than 100 of some products at a time, even if people are willing to sell them in quantity! Try this experiment: go to the Grand Exchange, click to buy and search for “feather”. Now try to buy 500 of the colored feathers, say red or orange. You will immediately get exactly 100 colored feathers, no more, no less! Then many hours later, you may get more of your order filled.

Go look at Jagex’s Grand Exchange page and near the bottom there’s a list of “several reasons why an offer may not complete.” If you look closely, you’ll notice absolutely no mention of the GE deliberately restricting transaction volumes.

Why is this being done? And why weren’t we told about it? How many other little gimmicks have been put into this supposedly “player controlled” system that we haven’t discovered yet? Is a bit of honest communication and transparency too much to ask?

I have 177 mugs of Chef’s Delight in my bank. I’d like to sell them on the GE, but I can’t. The reason is that the price on Chef’s Delight in the GE has been wrong for exactly five weeks and three days, which not coincidentally is the amount of time that the GE has existed. Today, the minimum that the “player-controlled” (cough) GE will let me charge is 8,827 gold pieces. I know that this beer is worth less, and so does anyone who wants to buy a few glasses of it. But the GE says it is worth no less than 8,827, and that’s that.

What happens to someone who really need to buy a few glasses? Well, he’s either going to have to buy them one at a time to work around the ridiculous trade restrictions Jagex implemented today, or he’s simply going to overpay for his Chef’s Delight. He will have been, ironically, forced into an unfair trade, based on real underlying market values, by a system that was supposed to ensure fairness.

The same goes for the poor chompy hunters who will sell raw chompies for 85 each. And the yew long bow alchers who will buy them for 704. And the same goes for hundreds of other examples.

Well, based on today’s performance, it would appear that nothing much has improved at all.

If Jagex was truly too busy to implement the necessary changes to the GE at the same time as imposing its draconian trade limitations, would it really have killed them to have one employee take five minutes out of his or her busy day and give us a status update? To acknowledge that the GE issues are a problem and provide some idea of when they might actually be addressed?

Or are we mere paying customers just not important enough for Jagex to be bothered communicating with? Jagex wants respect from its customers—why can’t it show a basic amount of respect to us in return, in the form of even a token effort to keep us informed?

This is the crux of my point with this article. Why does a company as big and successful and profitable as Jagex refuse to take the small amount of time and money necessary to keep us up to date about matters that are important to us?

The same thing goes, to a lesser extent, for the other groups that have been impacted by all the recent changes. Big monster hunters have been crippled by the trade changes today, leaving them only with the near-useless “LootShare” system—a system, I’ll point out, that Jagex could have fixed months ago before the trade changes were implemented. But these high-level players sit around with no clue of if or when anything will be done.

PKers are having to deal with Wilderness replacements that are a sad joke, but all Jagex can say is “we may do something sometime in the next six months”. Is that seriously the best the company can do?

I’ll end by relating to you an amusing incident that illustrates just how messed up the state of communication is with Jagex right now. It is truly reminiscent of the old days when it was fairly common, in trying to make a long distance call, to just get a message that “all lines are busy”.

In my report card article, I gave Customer Service a big “F” due to the ridiculous lack of service most customers get. I also provided an example of my recent annoyances in this area:

Well, it seems someone at Jagex must have read my review (or someone told them about it) because I got a very nice note in my inbox from a J mod this morning. It apologized for the problems and said that to enable a more lengthy exchange, rather than replying back to that note, I should send yet another new query back to CS, this time clearly labeled “For the attention of the Forum Support Team”.

I was pleasantly surprised by this—honestly, it was nice for them to send such a long personalized message, and I didn’t expect any response at all—so I did as I was requested. And, you guessed it, I got back another automated message, the same as the one I had gotten before I published my report card!

If you’re starting to feel like you’ve seen this before, then you know how I feel too. The reply I got back was identical to the one I got last time, which had spurred someone at Jagex to write back to me in the first place (see Figure 71).

At this point all I can do is laugh, I suppose. J But the truth is that it’s more pathetic than funny that the lines of communication between this company and its customers are so dysfunctional that even when the company’s employees want to talk to someone, they can’t. While I know that the people who are trying to reach me are well-meaning folks, the overall attitude that comes across from Jagex Corporate is one of a simple lack of respect for its customers.