TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About RuneScape Item Scams       9  The Keys to Dealing with RuneScape Item Scams

Activities that Seem Like Scams or Illegal Behavior but Aren't RuneScape Item Scams Using the Trade Window

The most frustrating thing about reading the countless stories from innocent victims who have been tricked out of their items, is knowing that most of these scams could have been prevented. Jagex claims that dealing with scammers is very important to them, but refuses to devote the resources necessary to stopping many common scams. I, like many other ethical players, have become quite annoyed watching as Jagex pours hundreds of hours into content updates—some of them very trivial—while not taking time to stop scammers.

Some people make excuses for Jagex, saying that making these changes is “hard work”. Well, sorry, but that's not the case. Most of the scams that people fall for every day could be stopped with minor code changes that would take far less time than coding even one quest. I am a trained computer engineer with a background in programming, and I know that most of these fixes would take a very small amount of time - some only a few minutes.

This is a matter of priorities. Jagex needs to make stopping scams a priority. In fact, as of July 2007 I am pleased to report that the company appears to be doing exactly that, which has allowed me to remove some of my complaints from this page.

Here are some of the ideas that Jagex really should be looking at. I've arranged them into the same four groups as the four subsections on scams that follow. Note that I am not taking credit for all of these ideas; some have been suggested by other players for months or even years.

You may also wish to review the companion topic to this one that covers common lures that could be stopped.

When I first wrote TruthScape I had listed here a number of suggestions to improve the trade window so that it would be far more noticeable when a scammer attempted to change or remove items from a trade. These ideas included adding a warning when items are removed from a trade offer, and disabling the “Accept” button for five seconds whenever anything is removed from a trade offer. This would be a formalization of my Five Second Rule and would get rid of last-second change scams.

Fortunately, Jagex has now implemented these suggestions, or at least fixes that are similar to them. You now get a warning when a trade offer is changed, and you also have to hit “Accept” a second time if a trade is changed after you hit it initially. There are still some more improvements I’d like to see, such as the ability to report those who attempt item scams from within the trade window. The lack of this ability makes it very hard to catch scammers. However, I give Jagex credit overall for its improvements her.

Jagex is also finally starting to do something about the commonly-confused items in the game. In particular, magic logs were finally changed so they no longer look anything like willow logs (or any other common type of log, for that matter.) There is still more to be done here, though: they could change the shape of dragon bones to make them more distinctive. The “arena book” should be made untradable, as it is offered for trade only by scammers. And why don't they finally rename the different mystic sets so blue, white/gold and red/black robe pieces don't have the same names? How can they tell people to use the second trade screen and then not write proper descriptive names? See Figure 89 for an example of what I mean.

Also, players should be able to examine items even when noted; this would eliminate unfinished potion scams and make trading them far easier.

There isn't a lot that Jagex can do about people who choose to overpay for items that they don't know much about. But they could at least make quest and specialty items that have no use (other than scamming) untradable. At the top of the list should be the following: the “arena book”, buttons and polished buttons, charcoal, machete, papyrus, rock hammers, skulls and spinach rolls. There's no need for any of these items to be tradable that I can see.

Changes to the game code can't stop most con games, because they rely on lies and persuasion by scammers. What Jagex could do to stop many of these is do a better job of monitoring and policing their game. That's especially true of the free servers, which are positively overrun with scammers.

For example, I believe that one reason why staff impersonation scams work is that most RuneScape players have never seen a real Jagex staff moderator with a gold crown in the game! I haven't, and I've been playing for ages. Likewise, scammers know that they will probably not be caught because Jagex mods aren't around.

A whole bunch of changes are desperately needed in the Duel Arena to deal with scams and deception there:

• Make a rule against item scamming through Duel Arena deception, just like there is one for item scamming.
  
  
• Implement the same changes already made to the trade interface in the dueling options screen as well, to make it less likely that scammers will change stakes or options at the last second.
  
  
• List which pieces of equipment have been disabled in the second dueling options screen, not just “some worn items will be taken off”.
  
  
• Show the name and combat level of the opponent in the second dueling options screen.
  
  
• Make a separate disabling option for shield slot items and two-handed weapons to get rid of the “shield slot scam”, probably the #1 cause of Duel Arena scams. (In July 2007 Jagex did add a warning about this, which helps a bit, but not entirely.)
  
  
• Get rid of the ridiculous prohibition on using ice spells in no-movement duels; it makes no sense at all.
  
  
• Make it easy for anyone in any duel to see all the combat levels of their opponent. This should ideally be shown right in the first dueling options window.
  
  
• Spread out players more when starting duels, so duelers don't end up stuck on top of other players in different duels. There is lots of space at the arena.

Activities that Seem Like Scams or Illegal Behavior but Aren't RuneScape Item Scams Using the Trade Window