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What to Do If You Are Lured Illegal Wilderness Lures and Scams

Edit (April 24, 2007): I want to express my thanks to Jagex for implementing the Wilderness ditch, which also included several other fixes I mentioned in this section, such as getting rid of popular Wilderness luring hotspots. I have changed this page accordingly.

Just as I expressed my annoyance at Jagex's slow pace of eliminating common item scams, I must unfortunately do the same when it comes to lures. (Note that I have not leveled this criticism with respect to account scamming, where Jagex does a pretty good job.) The company did score a lot of points with me for making luring into the Wilderness under false pretences illegal—even though it took a lot of pressure to convince them of the error of their ways—and for implementing the Wilderness ditch, but there is still much more work to be done.

Many of the changes that need to be made would take only a little effort, while some would take more. Regardless, just like fixing item scams, this needs to be made a higher priority. Jagex cannot, in good conscience, devote countless hours to content updates while not spending at least as much time on helping customers who fall into luring traps. And that is especially the case with lures that use bugs in the game, many of which have existed for months and need to be fixed—now.

Here are some of the ideas that Jagex really should be looking at. I've arranged them into the same three groups as the three subsections on lures that follow.

As mentioned above, Jagex has directly addressed many of my concerns with the implementation of the Wilderness ditch, which is one of the mechanisms I had specifically asked for here. This also makes it clear where the Wilderness begins, and gets rid of luring hotspots such as the ridge between Edgeville and the Monastery (see Figure 119), which were two other items on my “request list”.

There is still more that can be done, however:

• Increase the reporting window to longer than 60 seconds, to facilitate reporting trade scams.
  
  
• Either change the Ice Plateau tele group spell so it cannot be so easily abused, or educate players better about its dangers.
  
  
• Fix the bugs that allow players to be dragged against their will into the Wild. Despite the ditch, I believe this still needs to be done
  

  Figure 119: “Lurer’s Ridge” Eliminated

  One of the most notorious luring areas in RuneScape used to be a ridge between Edgeville and the Monastery, which forced people who wanted to go quickly between the two to take a shortcut through the Wilderness. This is shown in Frame #1. When the Wilderness ditch was implemented, this feature of the terrain was changed so that you can now travel between Edgeville and the Monastery while remaining safe, as shown in Frame #2. (Compare the terrain in the minimap on the two frames.)

  
  

While I personally find these behaviors detestable, I also recognize that the victim bears some responsibility for choosing to enter the Wild himself. It would probably destroy PKing to eliminate these actions, and I am not suggesting that this should be done. Rather, Jagex needs to work more on education and clarification in this area.

Players need to understand better the distinction between legal PKing behavior and illegal luring. There are people who believe that the “legal” lures I have described are still illegal, and to be honest, I can't guarantee that they are wrong. As long as people are getting conflicting answers from Jagex and are not certain of what is allowed and what is not, chaos will reign.

These lures vary greatly in their operation, and so several different approaches are needed to address them:

• Immediately post a public notice to all players, warning them that player owned houses have bugs that make combat in them unsafe. Then make fixing those bugs a top priority!
  
  
• Consider changing houses so you are healed, at least partially, if you are kicked out by the owner. This will stop the “poisoned food” types of scams.
  
  
• Get rid of the archery tower in the Rangers' Guild, which seems to be useless for anything but scamming. Alternately, improve it and put a warning on it for players who go up for the first time, or make the player actively request for the attacking to start before the arrows start flying.
  
  
• Put a warning the first time someone tries to take Wine of Zamorak from the Chaos Temple.
  
  
• Clarify the legality of Dagannoth King luring.
  
  
• Make the abuse of tele-other spells reportable as illegal behavior.
  
  
• Change doors so that the same person cannot open or close a door more than twice every 30 seconds. This will eliminate abuse without stopping the legitimate use of doors.

What to Do If You Are Lured Illegal Wilderness Lures and Scams