Please Whitelist This Site? I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. If I can't make at least a little bit of money to support my family via this site, I'll have to stop working on it. One alternative is to become a RuneScoop member. It's cheap, you get access to all of the site with no ads, and you help keep the lights on around here. If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add RuneScoop to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on Runescoop.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@http://*runescoop.com/*". Then just click OK. Thanks for your understanding! Sincerely... Qeltar, aka Charles, your hard-working host and RuneScape guide-writer extraordinaire. :)

RuneScoop.com  >  An Introduction to RuneScoop

An Introduction to RuneScoop Tips For Navigating RuneScoop.com

I started out wanting this page to be a general overview of RuneScoop, what it is about and what my goals were in creating it. But I quickly realized that I couldn’t adequately describe the site in isolation. RuneScoop evolved from a previous site that I created, and to comprehend how this place came to be in its current form, I really need to give you a little bit of the larger history of my involvement in RuneScape.

I never set out to be a MMORPG player; it was in fact my children, then aged 12 and 9, who got me hooked. They kept telling me about this great new game called RuneScape that I had to try. I knew I had a tendency to get hooked on video games so I resisted for weeks, but finally they wore me down and I gave it a try. I almost quit my first day when I got toasted by an uber-powerful level 9 wizard in the Wizard’s Tower. J But I persisted, and it didn’t take too long until I got hooked. Within a few weeks I had passed my kids’ character levels and was on my way to being a high-level player.

But as I was getting to know the fun aspects of the game better, I was also getting an education on its darker side. I found the game filled with cheats, harrassers, scammers, lurers, hackers and scoundrels. I became involved in community discussions only to find complaints to Jagex falling on deaf ears. I, like many other adult players, grew disillusioned not only with the amount of negativity in the game, but Jagex apparently refusing to clean things up or warn honest players.

It was out of this frustration that TruthScape.com was born. As the name implies, its original goal was to provide information about RuneScape that couldn’t be obtained via other sources. It detailed scams and lures and hacking methods to help players learn about the dangers that they were in and how to avoid them. As time went on, I also added some advanced gameplay guides to the site to complement the more serious subject matter.

Over time, though, Jagex changed for the better. The main turning point was probably the hiring of Mark Gerhard as CEO to replace Geoff Iddison. Mr. Gerhard immediately ushered in an improved era of communication from Jagex to the players. At the same time, fixes were made to correct a lot of former problems that led to negative game play. And structural changes to the game—especially the removal of unbalanced trade—eliminated whole categories of scams from RuneScape.

These changes made many sections of TruthScape irrelevant. Furthermore, with Jagex obviously making a positive effort, I no longer felt the same antipathy towards the company that I once did. And so I had to decide what to do with the site going forward.

Since I very much enjoy finding advanced gameplay techniques, I initially decided I would keep writing guides and try to make the site grow that way. But I quickly discovered that these guides take tens or even hundreds of hours to make, and the pittance I was earning from ads didn’t justify spending so much time on the site during a recession. Thus in late 2008 I stopped working on TruthScape, and in mid-2009 shut it down.

At that time, I had already done a lot of early work on what I hoped would be a “magnum opus” of sorts: a huge, comprehensive guide to moneymaking methods. It always struck me as a shame that this never got published. I also had many people tell me that they really missed the gameplay content on TruthScape. So I decided to give this a go again, using a different model: subscriptions.

The name “TruthScape” didn’t feel right any more, as the site wasn’t going to be dedicated to exposing anything. I thought of “RuneScoop” because it sounds like “RuneScape” and it reflects the idea of coming here to get the best information. I decided to launch the site with both free and for-pay members’ sections, and see how it does.

And so that’s where we are right now. I plan to make a considerable investment in this project, and with any luck, I’ll get enough support to allow me to keep doing it for years to come.

An Introduction to RuneScoop Tips For Navigating RuneScoop.com