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  9  The RuneScoop Soapbox - Opinion and Commentary on RuneScape and Beyond

The RuneScoop Soapbox - Issue #3 - Why They Say You Don’t Play The RuneScoop Dynamic Moneymaking Guide for RuneScape

Published: January 27, 2010

On Tuesday, Jagex announced that due to unforeseen technical issues, the company was forced to delay the planned content update to the following week. This move was met by disappointment from some players who were looking forward to the update, which is reasonable enough. But it also led to the usual overreaction and hysterics by others, with plenty of the usual whining, protests and accusations—which is not reasonable. It’s also a pretty good indication that some people don’t understand anything about how software works.

I have a computer engineering degree, and I’ve been a programmer off and on for 30 years. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it is that creating software is at least as much an art as it is a science. There is a particular software engineering methodology that can be followed to ensure a good chance of a product or update being done on a particular schedule, but not every problem can be predicted, nor every contingency planned for. And the more significant a new feature is, the more difficult it is to ensure that it is fully tested and able to work properly on all systems.

If you write software, there will always come a time when something you planned to have done at a particular time is not ready. This does not mean that the developers are incompetent, or that the quality assurance department is inept—it is simply the nature of the beast. When this does occur, you only have three choices. First, you can just release the software anyway, flaws and all. Second, you can stall the customers by delaying the product day to day while trying to iron out all the bugs. Or third, you can acknowledge that the feature isn’t ready, and delay the release until it is done.

For a customer, none of these seems like a great outcome, but that’s life: you don’t always get the choices you want, and you have to make the best of them. Anyone who can’t handle that simply needs to grow up, because being unable to accept waiting or disappointment is behavior only tolerable in young children.

For the people who are unhappy about Jagex delaying a release, I have to ask: are you saying that would you prefer the alternatives? If so, you have pretty short memories, because two of the most common complaints about Jagex over the last few years have been buggy releases and lack of communication. In delaying a feature that isn’t ready, Jagex is doing the right thing, and even if players don’t like having to wait, they should give the company credit for choosing the best of the available options.

Part of why some people are upset is because they feel like they were “teased” about the new update by the by the “strange event” Jagex programmed into the game that some players experienced during the past weekend. But this simply shows that Jagex thinks this new update is something big, and the bigger the change, the more difficult it is to get everything working perfectly the first time. Does anyone really think that Jagex itself is happy about having to delay a big release after putting a teaser into the game about it?

Regardless, the bottom line is still the same: would you rather they released a game version filled with bugs, or just left us hanging day after day? Well, I’ve had to deal with companies that put out buggy software just to “hit their deadlines”, and others that just stalled releases endlessly without being straight with their customers about what was going on. And let me tell you, it is no fun at all.

Corporations don’t like to admit mistakes, and so in many cases the natural inclination is to go ahead with incomplete releases, or to stonewall and deny customers information. Jagex is going against this natural cover-up tendency of software companies, and so should be commended for the approach it now takes to dealing with these situations, not criticized.

You can’t hassle a company for buggy software releases and then also hassle them when they hold back releases to ensure they are bug-free. And you can’t demand better communication with customers and then constantly shoot the messenger when he or she tells you something you don’t want to hear.

During the 1970s, the renowned actor and director Orson Welles starred in a series of commercials for Paul Masson wineries. These spots featured a now-famous catchphrase: “We will sell no wine before its time”. This slogan conveys simply the idea that you can’t rush quality, and while software doesn’t need to be aged like wine, it too should not be released before it is ready.

The RuneScoop Soapbox - Issue #3 - Why They Say You Don’t Play The RuneScoop Dynamic Moneymaking Guide for RuneScape