I know it’s been a while since i posted an article on TRB and i thought that this might be the right time. With the new HD graphics update and all the changes that Runescape has concured this year. As you guys might know, or maybe you probably dont. You probably don’t but yeah, im the creator of RuneSociety and as an admin, im really starting to get the impression that Jagex is slowly killing off RuneScape Help. Why? Well, im not completely certian of course, and this article is mostly alot of my opinion instead of fact, but i think it will really make you think. Over the course of the years, RuneScape Help has been a driving factor in the growth of RuneScape. Even if someone doesn’t play the game itself, they would join a forum like RuneSociety and just simply hang out with the crowd and eventually get into the game at least a bit. So lets talk about some of the actions Jagex has taken and are taking to try and possibly destroy 3rd party help.

The Grand Exchange – Database

Yeah, we all have our complaints about the in-game trading system now, but now lets talk about the tool they recently’ released, the Grand Exchange Database. For players, this is a miracle-ish type thing, you can easily check an items value and history and would kind of resemble a RuneScape wall-street tool. So in a sense, thats great and all right? Well yeah for the players of course, but with the coming of this also created the death of another. As some of us may know, Zybez was the first RuneScape helpsite to create such a tool, and many many players used it, they worked really hard to keep it up to date, seeing as they have to gather data manually rather than have it easily accessable like Jagex, its easy to say that Zybez put alot of work into their tool. Now this Grand Exchange DB came out, and i won’t deny that its more accurate and useful but it also is another major supporter of my theory. Now onto the next piece of evidence

The Knowledge Base

This was first introduced as a replacement for the game manual but this thing is slowly evolving in my opinion to a fully blown mini help site tool. To be really picky, they have their “Quest Help” tool, which supposedly helps players get past parts of quests that they find confusing, what does this remind you of? RuneScape Help of couse! Except this is Jagex’s version with a little kick to make sure that players play their game more instead of reading a guide and just completing the quest. Then they have their game manual that pretty much tells players anything they really need to know about the game.

So what is the point of this article you may think? Well, in a sense Jagex can really never shut down all the fansites but the things they are doing are helping to drive 3rd party help into extinction, afterall, when a new player signs up, and they need help, the first place their going to probably look now is the RuneScape website, and if jagex keeps on improving, the player will have everything they need at the Runescape website. Maybe this isn’t a loss, maybe its a gain, or it could be the other way around, but it depends on how you interpret these types of events.

We’d like to hear what you think.

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