Recently I was trading some unstrung magic bows in for cash at the Grand Exchange and I over heard a fellow member of the fine Runescape game speaking about getting a name change. I inquired as to what he meant exactly and he went on to explain that JaGex is considering implimenting a system which will allow for players to change their in-game-name. Now, we won’t be able to change the name we use to log in… but our character name will be able to be changed.

I am very interested to see how this will play out – considering that many of the popular names are either already taken/banned there may not be much room to move in terms of acquiring a new and unique name. However I am sure that somebody will find a way around this somehow.

Veritas Odium Parit

11

As Real World Economy retreats, so does Membership and P2P items

GRAND EXCHANGE, VARROCK, WORLD 2- It was just 1 year ago that the life of a P2P player seemed perfect. Cash was flowing freely, and member items were stable. And with the creation of the Grand Exchange,  the wealth of investors soared tremendously. Now, both Members and Free Players are bracing for a serious shock to hit the Exchange market. Most are expecting many member objects to crash, and many F2P objects to rise. Why? It’s simple: Less members are subscribed currently, meaning less members are buying. Some players have even cut their Internet subscription. This creates less demand, and a possible massive shock to the RuneScape Economy.

         There have always been more Free-to-Play players than members, meaning that some items are more valuable if they are Free-to-Play. For example, players will pay almost 10 times the amount of a Dragon weapon for a Corrupt Dragon weapon that degrades. Why? Because Corrupt Dragon is Free-to-Play, but plain Dragon isn’t. However, with even less members placing orders in the Grand Exchange, we might well see prices sink incredibly for member objects. But with Non-member objects, investors are holding their breath, hoping for an increase in valuable Free-to-Play items like swordfish, lobster, etc. These will become the Manta Ray and Shark of RuneScape, as members switch to Free-to-Play worlds. Other items that require to be made or aquired in Member worlds may also rise, such as Green Dragonhide.

         Wealth has also been decreasing for members, as they either cannot make money on Members’ servers or cannot sell their items for higher prices. One former member, Hulpul, commented on the matter. “My membership expired about a week and a half ago,” says Mr. Hulpul. “I just didn’t want to renew it. When I was a member, though, I made my 1 million gold in about 3 days off of slaying dragons. Now, I pretty much can’t do anything as profitable.” What this RuneScape millionaire  says is true. Very few things in Free-to-Play worlds are as profitable as things in member worlds. A drop in total wealth is expected greatly.

         However, many players doubt that membership decreases will harm the RuneScape economy. One player, Blaze1982, claims that General

Stores and monster drops will keep the Economy afloat. For instance, Rune Platebodies and Green Dragonhide Armour may be obtained from Oziarch, who has an unlimited supply. The same goes with arrows, which can be bought from a range store. But whether or not these unlimited general stores are a lifeline to the RuneScape economy entirely depends upon whether or not players buy or sell on the Grand Exchange. Most players do all their shopping at the Grand Exchange, and few are loyal to the specialty shops located around RuneScape. An entire merchanting clan, efd923, has been investing in Member objects despite the current situation.

         However, one thing is for certain: during these tough times, RuneScape WILL change, and there WILL be a drop in membership subscriptions. And member items probably WILL NOT rise; most have been dropping already. Most Grand Exchange analysts are advising players not keep their investments in member objects, and are suggesting to buy stock in top-of-the-line non-member objects like Rune armour, Food, Corrupt Dragon, etc. A word to the wise: If you’re an investor, watch out for the possibility of a crash in the market

I have gone through a clue combination consisting of 3 Saradomin Mages and then a Zamorak Mage followed by a puzzle box, receiving next to nothing for my work. I just finished a clue this evening consisting of 2 puzzle boxes, 2 emote clues, 2 Saradomin Mages and several anagram/speak to/riddle clues. My reward for a half hour to 45 minutes of work? 14 Lobsters, a pair of Black D’hide Chaps, a Magic Shortbow and some Nature Runes.

What solutions could be implemented to fix this frustrating problem? There are several possible ways to fix the issue:

Solution #1 - Tie specific clues to specific rewards. This is probably the worst solution, seeing as the goal of Treasure Trails is to be random. To implement this system would mean if you got a clue you could check what you would get and decide based on that whether to do the clue or not. Prices would become screwed up as a result of the excess/scarcity of certain items, which Jagex certainly doesn’t want.

Solution #2 - Eliminate Treasure Trails. Instead, give monsters that previously dropped Treasure Trails level appropriate drops. Level 3 clue droppers would instead drop Level 3 rewards. Again the issue with solution, as with solution #1, is that people would kill only the monsters that gave the best rewards, causing prices to fluctuate.

Solution #3 - Leave it. People get rich all the time, and the economy stays balanced out. Self-explanatory, but I’m obviously not in favor of this solution. Jagex probably is however, seeing as it requires the least bit of work on their part to keep the system running.

Solution #4 - A complete overhaul of the system. Change the way the clues work, add new levels of rewards (because honestly, Ranger Boots should not be a level 2 clue), and change the difficulty level in each level and lessen the amounts of monsters that drop clues. That way the rarest items would be the hardest to obtain, and the more common items would be easier to obtain. Obviously there would be some price fluctuation, but overall it would be minimal compared to the any other solution besides #3.

Now, is it likely that solutions #1, 2, and 4 will happen? Probably not. As I stated in Solution #3, Jagex seems happy with doing the least amount of work to keep the (flawed) system running, and what Jagex wants goes. If we’re lucky something will change, but hell, thats how Treasure Trails work, and we all know how that has worked out for me.

Now, its been almost a month since the full edition of High Detail has come into play and i must say. Its amazing. For once, i will fully say that jagex has pleased a great deal of the RuneScape community. The real thing that impresses me is that they managed to do all of this with java. So such a great looking game loads up fully in your web browser and requires absolutely no installation. That’s simply awesome. So lets go ahead and break down some of the main things that RuneScape HD has introduced.

Full Screen Mode

This is arguably the coolest and long expected feature for RuneScape. Sure, it requires players to subscribe to RuneScape. But seriously, this is the type of game-play that is worth the 6 dollars a month. ( Yes, i know its 5 right now, but they will be increasing it to 6 soon, if not already. ). Below is a screenshot of the new full screen interface.

At the top right corner, you can see the new RuneScape Map. It has a few enhancements too, they’ve added a few useful things on the side such as your HP, Prayer points, run meter, and summoning skill. This should be alot more efficient then having your skill menu open! Plus, it looks 10x cooler. Lastly, they even built in the world map which you can directly use within the game now.

As you can see, the whole interface has gotten a face-lift. The chat area is pretty similar to the old interface, but it is now transparent, and in my opinion, it feels alot faster and smoother than the old chat. Plus, you can view older messages and fit more messages into that box. The private message category on the other hand hasn’t received much attention from jagex, you can still recieve messages ontop of the chat box or within the chat box. I guess that really seems like the easiest way to go about it, but it would have been nice if they added a separate tab for private. So above the chatbox, they would have a public/private toggle. Maybe they plan to introduce this in the future.

The other tools that we are used to toggling, such as the friends list have gone onto the corner on the right hand side. Most of the interfaces will be easy to learn, such as in the screenshot, the friends list pretty much looks identical to what you have become used to. The length of the actual row depends on the size of your screen i believe, because on my screen that whole row was on one line instead of 2 as dipicted on the screenshot. They’ve also left one of the boxes empty, so as an educated guess, i think they plan to add something there soon .

Graphics Update:

Well, this is probably the most obvious thing about this update. No one can now say, “RUNESCAPES GRAPHICS SUCK! WHAT A $#$ GAME”, yeah we’ve all heard that from at least one negative runescape player. But guess what? Now you can tell them about RuneScape HD .

All the textures have been revamped, even the movement of the characters has been improved. No more will you see those nasty box like character movements, the characters actually walk and run more realistically. In overall, everything from monsters, all the way down to trees has been redone graphically, without a single sacrafice to performance.

Final Thoughts:

Theres not really much to say other than the fact that this was probably the result of all those RuneScape 3 rumors from previous years. Boy, we’ve gotten far from RuneScape Classic haven’t we? Cheers to Jagex and the whole RuneScape community.

Now go whip up some HD.

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.

In a small unknown town a young computer nerd sat and waited for his teacher to arrive to class. What another kid in this young, future Runescape addict’s class said next, would be the birth of an addiction causing loss of time, life, money, and energy.

“Runescape is so cool. I reached level 15 yesterday.”

“Level 15? My mom could reach that in 5 minutes” K13, the nerd, was overhearing a conversation similar to the one above. He had no idea that the fact that he was eavesdropping on his classmates conversation, would have such a huge impact of his computer gaming life.

Him being the conversation joining person he was, asked, “What is Runescape?”

“A cool game where you fight and drink beer!”

“That game sounds…interesting, how and where do you play?” Asked young little K13.

“www.runescape.com, just sign up and start playing.”

So as most people would, he tried to play the game. He wasn’t really in to MMOs at the time, so he didn’t really get the point. At this point the game had no addicting effects on his life and later left the game at level 11.

About 6 months later it all came back to him. He was bored on a Saturday in the middle of summer and decided to revisit the game to pass the time. He started a brand new account and when he did, he was a full on addict. 10, 20, 30, then 40, he was leveling fast and working on the skills that could get his gear on a role. Getting tantrums when someone tried to make him leave the game. Questing and grinding for 10 hours, seemed like 10 minutes and he couldn’t get enough. His goal was to reach level 99 and to be able to pk in the wilderness. Unfortunately he never killed anyone in the wilderness and quit the game at level 47.

During his journey in the game, he had many hardships. At many times playing for 5,6,7 hours a day. Late into the night, and long into the day he kept on playing. He dealt with 2 Chinese black market dealers, -$40 bank accounts (that’s a lot of money for a 12 year old kid), and a lot of heartache (I will go into detailes about all of these things, all linked together in 1st person… I hope).

Chinese black market dealer 1- One day I decided to buy some Runescape gold because some person kept spamming me on Instant Messenger. I paid the money and was told to meet at the east bank in Varrock. All was well and I later sold half of the gold to my friend that also played the game.

Chinese black market dealer 2 (and the bank account thing) – This one was a little more intense. Chinese black market dealer number two was from a website called buybuy or something similar. I saw that they could off for a decent price, so as most buyers would I tried it out. I paid using PayPal, but for some reason it went through my bank account. I didn’t have enough money in my account so when it tried to make the payment my bank charged me 20 dollars (which I didn’t have). When PayPal charged my account again in an attempt to make the payment there were still (because of the negative balance). Now with an $(40.00) balance, he found out the payment didn’t go through. I demanded my gold either way and they didn’t know the payment hadn’t gone through. When they found out they were MAD. They demanded that I pay them asap or they would take action. After I did pay them, They still bugged me! so while telling them to leave me alone on IM one day and they made creepy comments (that my brother found, not me). Eventually I got the funds back from my bank and in the end, all was fine, but it was not worth all the troubles I had.

Runescape is an addicting game with dangerous qualities. As we know, Runescape can be played free of charge. Because of this it is a dwelling land for pedophiles and rapists alike. If you tell some one you are 10 (figuratively) they usually say they are 10 also. In fact, a good friend of mine got a ‘girlfriend’ on Runescape and was told he was talking to someone his own age. I talked to her on my account and she told me was divorced and had 4 kids. Although I am incredibly against these qualities of the game I will always play a little bit. I rid myself of all the addictions related to playing the game and have kept it that way for quite a while. My story might not be as intense as yours but I believe that 500+ hours I have spent on the game was time badly and well wasted. Sorry if I made a mistake in this post. It is my first one on TRB.

1. The Knowledge Database

This helpful database is more than just that. It is Jagex own self-structured fansite, giving their players all the information they could possible need, all in a convenient location on RuneScape.com – awesome deal for everyone, right? But let’s look at the reasoning behind this. Would Jagex really spend their time amassing all of this knowledge into one place so that their players would have a more enjoyable (and easier, which is a key part too… but I’ll get to that later) gaming experience? This is how Jagex introduced the update:

“The aim of this update is to provide better support for our players, so that if you’re stuck or just need some friendly advice, you can quickly get the help you need rather than asking Customer Support or hoping someone is talking about it on the forums.”

(News Archives – March 13, 2008)

That seems a bit contradictory to the follow up posts by Jagex Moderators on the forums saying that the intention of the K-Base was to “protect players from malicious third-party websites”.

2. The Grand Exchange Database

Being a staff member on a separate tipsite, it is not often that you will hear me singing praise of our “competition”, but there is not denying the incredible work that Ben (Goten) and the rest of the Zybez staff did when they compiled their famous market price guide. The introduction of the Grand Exchange Database is a direct stab at that project, and furthermore it seems that Jagex has gone out of their way to make it as inconvenient as possible to extract data from their databases. I have truthfully no idea why a readable format of the data has not been released, as was done with the hiscores – although that was yet another example of Jagex only helping out tipsites indirectly because they couldn’t stop it and they would prefer to save bandwidth. Is it not ironic when Jagex finds it necessary to begin each news post with something along the lines of “We did this in response to player feedback”? Read on:

“Many of you asked for the ability to view graphs of market values and track item prices as they rise and fall. Well, this week we introduce the Grand Exchange Database Beta, which does exactly that!”

(News Archives – April 15, 2008)

3. QuestHelp

QuestHelp, in summary, is Jagex taking a primary role of fansites and attempting to render it obsolete. I feel that is all I must say for this one; does it really seem necessary to make a half-ass attempt at quest guides that simply comes off as the creators of the game making the game itself easier? What is their incentive to lower the required IQ for the game? Well, the younger crowd is taking over RuneScape now, and Jagex is doing nothing to stop it (although they only recommend the game for those ages 13 or older). Why would they want to prevent potential customers from playing? As long as they are paying, it doesn’t matter what age they might be. Getting back to QuestHelp, however, it is nothing more than Jagex realizing that tipsites are having a negative impact on some of their players. Once again, they have taken steps to make RuneScape.com another contender in the tipsite world, and cleverly disguise it as being “for the players”:

We know […] that simply resorting to looking up the entire solution can take all the fun out of the quest and often results in you seeing more solution than you wanted to see. This can leave you with the feeling that you didn’t really solve bits you could have done.

(News Archives – May 10, 2006)

But well done, Jagex. You have succeeded in being the first case I have ever seen where a beta version of a feature has lasted 2 years without receiving any changes whatsoever.

The list goes on. If you look at the way they redid the forums, or how they have modeled the hierarchy of their own website, you will see the same patterns. Only once, excluding content in the Knowledge Base, has Jagex truly recognized the fan site community in a public way. It resulted in the second largest riot to ever grace the likes of RuneScape (For the record, that puts it in a close second place to the wilderness and trade updates; aka “The Day RuneScape Died”). Yes, you guessed it. The riot I am speaking of was the one resulting from Jagex’s changes to rules 7 & 9 – the rules regarding third party software, and specifically clients.

On January 2^nd, 2007 Jagex “extended rule 7 to make it clear that it DOES now include third party RuneScape clients/world switchers” (News Archives), meaning that all runescape clients other than the official one were outlawed, as they provided an “unfair advantage” – to use Jagex’s favorite phrase. Once again let’s investigate their reasoning/justification for this radical change:

“When RuneScape fansites are distributing programs which are then used to discuss breaking the rules or result in their own users being scammed, it’s clear that our rules need revision! We don’t want to be unnecessarily restrictive, but we obviously also have to balance that with protecting our users.”

(News Archives – January 2, 2007)

…A classic example of Jagex cutting of the nose to spite the face. If your users are losing their accounts and passwords due to third-party software, sure, some action may be warranted, but severing one of your major lifelines has never been a good choice for Jagex, and they never seem to learn. When at first the update was met with incredulous pleas for withdrawing the new rules, Jagex quietly inserted another paragraph into their news announcement:

“We have done this for two main reasons: a) The sheer number of users losing their account/password to programs which pretend to be one thing but actually steal their password; b) Problems with some of these programs including extremely unsafe chat channels where large amounts of scamming go on, and users encourage each other to try to break the rules.” (News Archives – January 2, 2007)

So Jagex is now pointing the center of blame at the security issue, and has seemingly forgotten their original claim that the reason was that programs such as SwiftSwitch provided players with an “unfair advantage”. In fact, Mod Burgess on the forums would go on to say that IRC is “unmoderated” and “promotes rule-breaking” – a statement that could almost be no further from the truth. This may come as a shock to Jagex, but RuneScape players get scammed in RuneScape. If you want to fix that problem, fix your game… remove trading or something if you have to hahaha… (wait a minute…).

Anyways, now that I have discussed what Jagex has said in response to these updates, let’s look more at what some players said when those changes were made. (Quotes all taken from the RuneCrypt forums – original posters may not still hold these opinions)

“Runescape is evolving more and more into a communist state. The chat filter is already oppressive and now even things that aren’t directly part of the game are being questioned and controlled.

I could quite easily live without SS, I survived without it for a LONG time and only recently started using it. What I disagree with is the freedom of choice that’s being taken away yet again.”

(Agent Yuri)

“Banning SS because it provides a thriving clan community a source of communication, and because Jagex failed to satisfy their customers, is stupid. Jagex you were well aware of SS already, you also made numerous promises to make a clan communication system and you did NOT do that.

Jagex, you backstabbed your customers with a false promise, then you turned a safe client that was acceptable into some taboo thing that will now get you banned. SS is safe and better.

Jagex, you failed to do the obvious, and instead took the only decent means of communicating through clans over RS away from us.

May as well ban in-game trading, I mean scams happen in trades too?”

(X Sam Sam X)

The topic of freedom came up on multiple occasions during those debates and discussions, and then continued as Jagex gave Player Moderators the green light to mute any protestors. You may not come from America, but the freedoms of speech and assembly are somewhat basic rights, especially in such a “politically correct” game.

To make it easy for you to see, I have collected gathered some statistics from RuneCrypt’s user databases and public polls.

• 1 in 4 members stay active on the fansite after retiring from RuneScape.
• 1 in 8 active members changed their status from P2P to F2P, or changed it to “Retired” after the changes to rules 7 & 9
• 1 in 3 active members uses some sort of third party software while playing RuneScape.

What can we learn from this data? 1. Fansites keep players in the RuneScape community when RS itself can’t. 2. Updates targeted at fansites are generally unpopular, and result in Jagex losing members. 3. Players don’t listen to Jagex’s advice, and prefer to use third-party software.

But if there is a Jagex employee reading this article, take this as a plea. Regardless of what I just said, I believe that 98% of the decisions made by Jagex are spot on. The company as a whole has fully deserved the awards it has won, and RuneScape will forever be an MMORPG that can’t be mimicked. It is vastly different from any other game I have ever played, and I think that the 98% of good choices could be increased to 99% if more trust was put in the hands of the players, and in turn to the fansites. When it comes down to it, the upper level of the fansite community is administered by at most 25 people working their asses off to serve the most loyal fans – would it be asking too much to give us a break now and then? RuneScape wouldn’t be RuneScape without it’s players and fans. Jagex is simply shooting themselves in the foot by trying to protect their players from the big, bad tipsites who are run by… their players.

It certainly has been some time since my last article. I am terribly sorry for the unexpected hiatus! However, I am back and I am here with a present.

Speaking of presents, I want to present a very special presentation that will hopefully present to me some very presentable responses from you!

I am very happy to announce that The Runescape Blog has made its first Vlog (Video Blog!) and we are possibly the first Runescape-centered blog to do so! It is quite a large video, around thirty-five minutes long and i have embedded it below. Enjoy!

If you did not already know I am going to describe to you the sort of fun you can have at the house parties in world 31, Rimmington. These have been a big part of my life as a Runescaper because they are simply so exciting! Each time I enter a dungeon I know, due to the thousands of different variables, that I am going to have a completely new experience each time. The best part is that I know every time I will have fun!

As recently stated, there are many variable situations included in a session of ‘house partying’ in RS and because of this I found it difficult to write a succinct article about it. However, I came up with the idea of videoing myself partaking in my favorite past-time of all; this has allowed me to cut out much of the heavy information that was weighing down my old article.

Now that all of this has been said, let us get down to the real business of partying!

The fundamentals of house parties.

Such fundamentals are:

• The roles of different players (e.g pkers: mages, rangers, meleers, tankers, pures) or; (skillers, people who are using different furnishings found in the house/dungeon for skills) or; (party-hosts or people who are achieving a goal, these players are usually the hosts of the dungeon/house and are inviting people in to share their achievement.)
• The fact that if you are in the dungeon/combat ring, you are most likely going to be attacked.
• The fact that you are most likely going to encounter mean spirited people who will try to annoy you; just ignore them :).
• The fact that you are definitely going to have some form of enjoyment!

House parties are dynamic.

In every party you will see different:

• House layouts (including dungeon layouts!)
• Monsters
• Furnishings
• People
• Parties
• and the list goes on and on…

Because of this each party is different to the last!

How to gain maximum enjoyment from the party:

Bring friends!

I can not stress how important this is! Going to a party on RS without your friends is not only rude but it is also very boring! Not only is it more fun with friends but it opens up the party for you for several reasons:

• You get to share the experience which creates memories… memories strengthen friendships!
• You can team up on other people and completely decimate them :-p
• You can have fun battles against each other to see who can claim victory!
• amongst many other things… you are going to have to find out for yourselves!

Utilise a strong arsenal of weapons and armour

This is another very important point that I must stress. If you bring poor weapons and armour you will get killed far too often. It is in your best interests to purchase the best weapons and armour you can afford so that you can do your best in the dungeon! (Looking cool also goes a long way with some of the people who go to house parties :-p!)

Have your wits about you

House parties are fun, however, they can also be the breeding ground for fighting. Make sure you do your best to steer clear from this sort of behaviour… if you cause a fight the best thing you can do is to just ignore it!

Don’t be too serious

Dying is not shameful, nor is it annoying. Don’t flame other people if they kill you and you respawn outside the portal. Just accept that you did not win…. that time :D!

To sum this article up:

• House parties are fun!
• Bring friends, good weapons and armour, your wits and your happy face to have the most fun!
• I hope to see you at some House parties in the near future!

Now go watch the video!

Ta ta for now :-).

`11

Now, this may not be the case with all players. I know some people just simply enjoy the simplicity of playing RuneScape in a webbrowser with java. Yeah, everyone has their own preferences. But wow, im actually quite impressed with Jagex. I have looked at some of the screenshots they released and i certainly am impressed. Although we currently don’t know how they plan to release the high resolution version of the game, im quite firm in believing that the next generation of RuneScape will not be running on java. Simply because java is not good enough.

Ok so, Jagex releases a new graphics update. So what you may ask? I think this is what all those long lost rumors of RuneScape 3 was. They have been working on this update for a very long time. Theres no possible way to reconstruct all of RuneScape in a matter of a year or less. Its just too much work. Ladies and gentlemen, cheers to the next generation of RuneScape!

Now.. we sit and wait, we don’t know much about this mysterious update..yet. But ill be sure to rewrite another article once it is released.

Now this brings up the controversial question, “Is RuneScape just a game… or is it a pure addiction?”. Well there are many different scenarios and life stages but i am pretty sure we can all agree that RuneScape is mainly focused on the younger teenage or pre-adolescent group. But could this be the problem? It most certainly can be, but it wouldn’t be fair to place the blame all on one factor. After all, Runescape is supposed to be a fun friendly environment right? I think not.

The reason why RuneScape has more problems with their prayers than other games do is because of the lack of focus on a certain group. Jagex publicly states that RuneScape is focused towards people ages 13+, but does this really stop kids from playing RuneScape? Of course not. From my own experience, RuneScape is widely introduced to kids as young as the age of 8. The wide availability of the internet and children being able to have access to computers more frequently now promotes this idea as well.

Now the controversial issue about this is, Who is RuneScape really focused upon? Society pushes RuneScape amongst youngsters and even though Jagex officially states that their game is for 13+, they do not make a very valiant effort to enforce their policy. After all, their making money right? Of course they are! Children, no matter how radical their parents are, will find a way to buy membership and fulfill their lust for RuneScape.

This is why i believe Jagex is a very controversial company, they tend to focus all their energy in stopping or fixing things that affect their profits. For example, black marketing, they sure did something about that didn’t they? Of course, they needed to stop people from stealing and making money off their product. But of course, children being taught that they should get “drunk” or that they should scam others for self profit, yeah thats definitely something their going to ignore until it somehow affects their capital.

Afterall, Jagex tries to make RuneScape out to be the harmless game that condones cursing/swearing and other acts of vulgarity, but yet many aspects of their game play involve drinking, fighting and scamming for self gain. All of these aspects eventually lead up to the final question, is runescape an addiction?

Well this type of question or comment can be answered in several different ways and im sure their is no definate answer, but i believe that RuneScape is indeed designed to be addictive. It is really no mistake that most of the RuneScape player population is under the age limit, its no mistake that over the years, RuneScape has evolved from what i used to love to a game filled with lust hungry players out for self gain. Of course, Jagex didn’t “intend” for this to happend, they didn’t want to make obnoxious players from kids who grew up playing RuneScape. Of course not, none of this was intentional. Its something that is bound to happend with such a thing.

These types of issues sure don’t affect Jagex as a company, but i hope they do realize that they are ruining lives. Not to say that everyone that ever was addicted to RuneScape or played RuneScape had a messed up life, but RuneScape can ruin lives. It can force kids to kill their education to play something that they think is more important, it also creates social outcasts. Some naive children will believe that playing games will always be better than real life and will grow up thinking life is a game. It will cause a lack of functionality and will help create a barrier between the real world and the MMORPG that they have committed themselves to. Although these effects are not common amongst most RuneScape players, the fact that such a game can have such effects is disturbing, and whats even more disturbing is that a company who claims that they care for their players wont do anything about it except put up a knowledge base article saying to take “breaks”. Yeah. Bull____.

Note: I know this article wasn’t very well arranged but it does express some of the key concepts. Feel free to comment and discuss.

-Soul