TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About TruthScape - An Introduction

The Goals of TruthScape and Why I Created It Tips For Navigating TruthScape.com

We'll talk about scamming and luring in much more detail in other sections devoted to them. By way of summary for the purposes of this topic, these terms refer to players who use lies, tricks, bugs and dishonest tactics to cheat victims out of in-game items, to get them to go where they will die, or to steal their accounts.

Jagex gives very limited, generic information on how to avoid being cheated, but deliberately provides no specific details on common scams and lures. Their reasoning for this is that they feel describing these tactics will worsen the problem by telling more people how to do them. I and many other experienced players strongly disagree with this view, for three main reasons:

1. The Policy Simply Does Not Work: Scamming and luring have become rampant within RuneScape, getting worse every year. Jagex can suppress the information on their site, but they have no control over what happens in other places. Cheaters and scammers don’t operate out in the open—they scurry around in the shadows, sharing information through informal networks. As soon as a new exploit is discovered, it becomes common knowledge quickly.
   
   
2. The Policy is Grossly Unfair to New Players: Those who have been around RuneScape for a couple of years know that charcoal is worthless, or to watch out for commonly swapped items, or to never go upstairs in the Rangers Guild to do a trade. But unless you are a player yourself you probably have no idea what I was just talking about-and neither do new players! Jagex's policy sets these new players up to become victims, which is especially unfair given how many are kids and teens.
   
   
3. The Policy is a Self-Serving Cop-Out for Jagex: It seems to me that trying to keep quiet about scamming and other negative behavior helps Jagex present a more positive image of the game, to help the company's business. It also allows them to continue avoiding making necessary changes to eliminate scams and lures. Consider a software company that has a security flaw identified in its software. Does it try to prohibit discussion of the flaw, or blame those who found the flaw for the problem? No! The company acts swiftly and decisively to fix it. This is what Jagex should be doing: spending its resources to eliminate problems, not spending resources on hiding them.

It's time for some openness and some action.

As an added note, let me say that there are some scams where I do not provide all the details. The reason is that in some cases, the scammer needs to know more specifics about pulling off the scam than the victim needs to know in avoiding it. In those situations, I will omit the additional information that I feel is not required by the victims.

Finally, there are a couple of scams that I have learned about as I have written TruthScape that seem to have fallen out of favor - that is to say, they could still be done, but I've never heard of them being used recently. To avoid “reintroducing” these older scams, I do not describe them on this site.

The Goals of TruthScape and Why I Created It Tips For Navigating TruthScape.com