The RuneScoop Soapbox

Note: This essay just expresses my feelings about the recent update and how it has made me view the Slayer skill. It is not intended to persuade anyone about anything, nor am I suggesting anyone else feels the same way I do. Take it for what it’s worth.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, both in real life and in virtual worlds like RuneScape. Sometimes they have common elements. In the real world, I am very poor under pressure – I have nerves of mush, not nerves of steel. I am also very risk averse. I have made some progress in these areas over my 20+ year adulthood, but not a great deal. Much of it is simply innate, and I have learned to live with these characteristics through my own lifestyle choices.

These attributes also carry through to RuneScape. I have maxed out melee combat stats, and am close to maxed out in Prayer, Ranged and Magic. But despite that, I have never been to the Dagannoth Kings. I briefly tried the God Wars Dungeon but found it nerve-wracking. (I actually solo’ed Graardor once and barely survived, shortly after GWD came out.) I am still working up the courage to try tormented demons.

It is for these reasons that I always liked the Slayer skill. Now that I write RuneScape guides and reviews full-time, I have to do lots of things in the game I don’t like, but when I wanted to take some personal time just for fun, Slayer was my most frequent choice. I enjoy casual combat, not fighting tough boss monsters. I appreciate variety and was attracted to the idea of being given different monsters to kill, some of which had special tricks involved, and then getting bonus XP in a separate skill for it. I liked the steady pace of the skill, the ability to do it at my leisure, and the new features that allowed me to block some of the monsters I didn’t care for.

When the dark bow was released, my Slayer level was around 86. I ate lots of wild pies to try to get one, and eventually got my level up to 90 so I could fight dark beasts without fancy pastry. I kept working at the skill, knowing eventually there would be a new level 95 monster (or whatever). I told myself that I should keep plugging away at it despite there being nothing above level 90, because some day they would release a higher level monster and I wouldn’t want to be locked out of it.

And so now we have a new monster, and I’m locked out of it anyway.

It’s a mistake to accept one’s limitations as carved in stone, and so I work to improve my weaknesses wherever possible. Until last week I had never seriously tried the fight caves, knowing how I tend to react in these sorts of situations. Jagex forced me to challenge myself in this area with the new strykewyrms update that requires the fire cape.

I have now tried to complete the fight caves a total of five times. I have made use of expensive gear and my high level Herblore to no avail. I have tried melee, ranging, halberds, poison, onyx bolts. In my most recent attempt, I blew 14,000,000+ gp on a strong PvP weapon that degrades after one hour, because some folks said it would allow me to kill Jad quickly, but that didn’t work either. I have now spent 20+ hours in the last week between doing the fight caves, working on strategy and discussing how to do it with various people.

While accepting limitations without challenge is a mistake, it’s just as foolish to deny essential elements of one’s physical characteristics or personality. And it is quite clear that I just don’t have what it takes to do this.

I noticed something interesting on my most recent attempt at Jad. I didn’t feel particularly nervous when he showed up, having a plan in place to try to take him down, which I executed on. But I looked down and realized that my left hand was shaking violently as I was in combat. This was already my fifth try, and I should have been more comfortable with the process. But subconsciously, my “fight or flight” reflex had kicked in, and there was really nothing I could do about it.

I used to love Slayer, but since last week’s update it just isn’t the same to me any more. Some people have tried to convince me that I “haven’t lost anything” because all the old monsters are still there. Which is true, on an objective level. But for me at least, the skill is no longer something relaxing and satisfying. It’s stressful. I’m approaching level 95 Slayer, but that will no longer seem to me an achievement, just a reminder of my own incapability.

Where before I felt a sense of excitement going to get a new assignment, now all I can think about is how much of a failure I am for my inability to get a fire cape. I used to love going to visit Kuradal, and now just thinking about her makes me see red. Every time I start a new task I think to myself: “If I didn’t suck so much, these might have been ice strykewyrms”. And then I keep wondering, “maybe if instead of working on Slayer I spent several more hours in the fight caves, I could somehow figure it out?” On a conscious level, though, I know this will just waste more of my time and frustrate me further.

Slayer has gone from my favorite skill to my personal albatross.

Jagex wanted these new Slayer monsters to be “elite” content. I guess I’m not elite. And I suppose RuneScape is now moving on and leaving people like me behind.

The previous soapbox article I posted was not specifically a complaint about the fire cape requirement for the new Slayer monsters. This one is. If you don’t like that, then don’t read it. You have been warned.

What strikes me most about the debate over this subject is that some players seem to have absolutely no capacity for understanding that people have differences. Getting a fire cape requires a specific skill set that some people have and some do not. This situation is not like having a high level in a particular skill, which just takes time and determination. There are some people who simply cannot do things like this.

I’ve also noticed something else: a disproportionate number of high level players who have issues with getting the fire cape are adults, sometimes older adults. Not all, of course, but a much higher percentage of players who have issues in this regard are older than those who are mocking them with idiotic comments about how they are “nubs” because “Jad is easy”.

I don’t have a fire cape. I’ve never tried to get one. I don’t want to get one. I have decided I may not even try to get one. In part because I am annoyed that Jagex is trying to force me to do it. But more because this is not the sort of content I play RuneScape for. (EDIT: I did try. It went as expected.)

I am not a twitch gamer. If I were, I would have no problem with Jad. But you know what? If I were a twitch gamer I also probably wouldn’t be on RuneScape. There are a lot of other players who are in exactly the same situation. They are in many cases, a lot of RuneScape’s longest-paying and most dedicated players.

RuneScape should provide a breadth of content for all sorts of players. I have no problem with there being aspects of the game that don’t appeal to me, and that I have no desire or even ability to do. I am fine with missing out on the direct rewards of that content. But I do have a problem with having those styles of gameplay shoved down my throat in order to do other things that have nothing to do with them.

If Jagex wants there to be “twitch” style gameplay in RuneScape fine—but don’t conflate it with the usual “achievement” style of gaming that is what drew many of us here in the first place. Getting 93 Slayer requires hours of time and dedication; we’ve earned the right to kill these monsters. Being deprived of one of the Slayer skill’s best rewards over a bad Internet connection or a physical lack of reaction speed is simply unfair. And no number of inconsiderate, childish “twitch gamers” deriding me will change that.

Jagex has spawned a great deal of controversy with its new strykewyrm monsters, the highest level of which requires a fire cape in order to kill. There are plenty of arguments going on about whether or not this is a reasonable requirement, if it should be removed, or if some alternative should be made available to those who either cannot or will not get a fire cape.

That’s not what this article is about, though. I want to step back from arguing over whether or not the fire cape prerequisite is fair, to why it was imposed in the first place.

I think some folks have lost sight of the fact that the fire cape isn’t just “an item” or “a piece of content”: it is the final reward of a difficult minigame. As such, it should be an item of high intrinsic value: it should be something that people want for its own sake.

There was a time when this was the case. Those who were able to get a fire cape wore it as a badge of honor, especially those with lower combat skills. From a practical standpoint, the cape itself also offered significant advantages within the game, because it was clearly better than any of the alternatives.

But times change, and the game evolves. Getting the cape is a lot easier than it used to be—at least for those who have a good Internet connection and the right mental makeup for this sort of content. Fire capes are no longer rare. Youtube videos showing players beating Jad while wielding flowers have removed much of the “respect” that once was afforded a fire cape bearer.

From a gameplay standpoint, the fire cape has also lost some of its luster. Several years ago, a cape with +11 to all defensive stats, +1 to attack stats, +4 to strength and +2 to prayer was a real gem, because the alternatives were so much worse. Then we got skillcapes, which offered a higher prayer bonus, even if they were worse in other areas. For lots of players, the final nail in having much interest in this item for its own sake was the Soul Wars cape: its +12 prayer bonus is, for me, much more appealing than +4 strength or a couple of extra defensive points—usually when I am fighting something where I care about stats, I am using prayer.

The minigame itself also very obviously holds little draw for most players. Some like the challenge, but a large percentage of ‘scapers simply don’t like that style of intense gameplay, assuming they have the ability to complete the task at hand at all. Even those who enjoy getting a fire cape once usually groan at the thought of having to do it again if they lose the cape.

Clearly, RuneScape players have lost much of their former taste for the fight caves and even the fire cape itself. The proper solution to this should have been to make the minigame more appealing. Unfortunately, Jagex has instead chosen to essentially force some players who don’t care about the minigame to do it because of something else they do care about: the Slayer skill. Instead of reformulating the fire cape and the fight caves as a whole so they “taste better” on their own, they have bombarded them with “artificial flavor”.

I think this is a short-sighted approach. Minigames should be both fun to play and have appealing rewards that stand on their own merits. If that’s not the case, the minigame should be reworked, not made more attractive artificially through arbitrary requirements for other areas of unrelated game content. And while it’s easy to come up with a rationale like “you need the heat of the cape to damage these ice wyrms”, make no mistake: this is an arbitrary attempt to link unrelated game content.

Sorry, but I don’t want to see a level 95 Slayer monster that requires a five-feather chompy hunting hat. I don’t think we need a new type of Farming tree that has to be treated with “the stuff” from Trouble Brewing. I cringe at the thought of a level 90 Woodcutting tree that you can only chop while wearing a full set of rogue’s clothing.

I don’t want to be forced to do these minigames. I’d like to see these minigames revitalized so that I want to do them for their own sake.

Schadenfreude is a German word that describes a feeling of happiness or satisfaction experienced as a result of the misfortune of others. And it’s been flowing at high volume in the RuneScape community over the last 24 hours, as a result of Jagex’s decision to make mint cakes a more common reward from the Gnome Cuisine minigame.

Mint cakes are simple food items that restore 100% of your run energy. While marginally useful in and of themselves, that use was not enough to make them exceptionally sought after—and that was even before the 2009 run energy update made all energy restoring mechanisms less valuable. Rather, mint cakes had come to be used as a substitute currency of sorts, allowing players to balance out trades of expensive items. By greatly increasing the supply of these items, Jagex has effectively devalued them, leading to a significant loss of apparent wealth on the part of those who owned them.

I was amused myself when this update came out, because I had warned players for a long time that something like this could happen. While they told me that mint cakes were a valid currency alternative, I pointed out that they were only rare because Jagex made them rare for no particular reason: most likely, they just never really thought anyone would care very much about them. And unlike real discontinued items, Jagex never made any representations that mint cakes would continue to be rare.

The comments I’ve been reading for the last 24 hours, though, suggest to me that a lot of players’ feelings on this subject go well beyond just chuckling at a bit of foolishness. They indicate an attitude of relief and even vindication of sorts at the thought of players getting stiffed due to this update. Most of this indignation seems to be directed at “merchants”, who are the convenient scapegoat for every situation related to trade in RuneScape these days.

But are these viewpoints really fair? Or even valid?

I have no problem with items like mint cakes being made more common, for a simple reason: they never should have been rare in the first place. An item like that is only useful (for its intended purpose) if it is available in a reasonable supply and/or at a reasonable cost; an item that restores run energy but costs 40k is of no use to me.

But I do have a problem with the reason why Jagex appears to have made this change. It seems quite clear that they made this item more common specifically to reduce its “alternate” use as a means of balancing trade. And that strikes me as both unfair and ineffective.

Contrary to popular opinion, mint cakes were not used by just “greedy merchants out to screw honest RuneScape players”. They were used by a lot of players who wanted to exchange items they got as drops or no longer needed for other items that they wanted. Like most forms of currency, mint cakes were usually obtained in a trade and then used in a subsequent trade, with most players not holding on to them for very long periods of time. By making this overnight change, Jagex has made this like a game of musical chairs: the music stopped, and the ones who happened to be holding mint cakes on the morning of February 1, 2010, were left holding the bag.

Beyond the fairness aspect, though, we really should ask ourselves honestly: why did anyone ever care about mint cakes anyway? Nobody gave a darn about them before the Grand Exchange. Why did merchants and other players use them?

The answer is simple: the dysfunctional state of the current economy. Mint cakes (and other substitutes) are used to allow players to try to get around the flawed prices in the Grand Exchange, which gum up trade. Their use was not a cause of the problems in the RuneScape economy, but rather a symptom of it.

It is a fundamental of economics that if you try to force someone to pay more or less for an item than he or she thinks it is worth, that person will try to find a way around the restrictions. And so, predictably, that’s what happened here. People like myself have been trying to get people to understand these basics of economics since the GE came on the scene, but apparently, nobody is paying attention.

“Fixing” mint cakes doesn’t really fix anything. Even if they start spawning on the ground in Lumbridge, players will just move on to some other substitute currency, or the use of other tricks to try to get around the real problem: a system that forces unbalanced trades on players in the name of enforcing balanced trade. Jagex can’t make every uncommon item more common; it simply won’t work.

I don’t blame Jagex for popping the mint cake balloon. But the company needs to recognize that the ultimate cause of this problem is its own policies. For over two years, we have been waiting for Jagex to correct the tight trade restrictions on the Grand Exchange that lead to these sorts of problems. For over two years, Jagex has claimed it would monitor and adjust item prices based on actual values, but has not followed through. Those are the fixes that we really need.

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.

Published: January 19, 2010

High level players who are unhappy with updates to RuneScape sometimes comment that they believe that “Jagex developers don’t play their own game”. I’ve said this once or twice in the past, and now regret doing so—it’s a pretty disrespectful accusation, and also one that makes no real sense. Obviously Jagex developers do play RuneScape: they have to play it as part of their work, and I’m sure most have personal accounts as well.

But while the “developers don’t play” comment might go too far, there’s a kernel of truth to it, expressed due to frustration by players who take the game seriously. Expert RS players feel that Jagex developers often make design and update decisions that reflect a lack of deep understanding of serious players. If they play the game, do they play it in the same way an experienced player does? How many of the managers who make key content and gameplay balance decisions are really involved in their product?

It’s not possible for any developer to make updates that everyone likes; human nature says that some people will find fault with just about anything. The problem is with updates that nearly everybody hates; with changes that just make no logical sense and are never adequately explained; and with modifications that will rather obviously make people unhappy but that seem to take Jagex by surprise. These are the actions that cause people to wonder what on earth is going on over there in Cambridge.

Here are a few relatively recent examples of the sort of game changes that cause experienced players to wonder whether the developers responsible for them really understand how the game works.

Painfully Slow Death Animations

A couple of years ago, Jagex embarked on a plan of some sort to make monsters die in a more “realistic” way. I’m sure some talented animators did excellent work in making monsters fall down or flip over smoothly, and then fade from view, as opposed to the old standard “fall to the knees and disappear”. The animation given to demons is particularly nifty.

The problem is that these death animations are slow to the point of interfering with gameplay. There are now monsters that take twice as long to die as it does to kill them! And during that time players have to sit there waiting for the drop, or spend time running around by killing other monsters and then returning for the drop later.

The classic example would be chaos druids. These are not training monsters: they are killed for only one reason, and that is for their herb drops. Most high level players can one-hit a chaos druid, but then they have to sit for 2.5 to 3 seconds waiting for it to die. And when you can kill several hundred of these per hour, those seconds add up: in my tests, I’ve found that the imposition of these death animations reduce the number of herbs I can get per hour by a solid 20-25%.

A standard principle of architectural design is form follows function, which means simply that the way something is designed should be based on how it is to be used. But here we have an example of a change made to form that inhibits function. It doesn’t matter how pretty the animation is—after you’ve seen it a few hundred times, you don’t notice it any more. And once you realize how much time you are wasting looking at these animations, you start to actively resent them.

Even more inexplicably, Jagex has imposed these animations on chaos druids twice. When the new death animations were initially added to several monsters, chaos druids were included, but when players complained the slow animation was removed. Then, sometime in the last year or so, they were added back again. I don’t know why, and I don’t know a single player who didn’t prefer the plainer, faster death sequence.

Font Changes, and Font Changes, and…

It seems that every few months, the company tries to change some of the fonts in the game, and the reaction is, nearly always, pretty universal irritation. And then most of the time the font changes are undone or further modified.

Even those who don’t dislike the font changes have the same question: “Why are they bothering with this anyway?” Is there a full-time “font developer” hiding somewhere in Jagex Towers who has to be kept busy? Maybe there are indeed good reasons why these font changes keep showing up, and perhaps Jagex could communicate them better. Right now, they just make players scratch their heads.

Strange Barbarian Assault Item Changes

Jagex just released what appears at first glance to be a pretty impressive overhaul of the Barbarian Assault minigame. However, as part of that update, they removed combat bonuses from several items: the strength bonus was taken off the fighter torso; the fighter hat now has no fighting bonuses, and most inexplicably of all, the ranger hat gives a penalty to ranged attack. These changes were apparently made because of other benefits that were given to these items, but have so far proven very unpopular with those who already got the items for the benefits they had before.

I happen to think that some of these people are engaging in needless hysterics over the loss of a couple of bonus points, and that we should wait to fully assess the new gear before jumping to conclusions. But that said, what surprises me here is that Jagex seems surprised. Did nobody there really understand that the strength bonus was the prime—if not only—reason most players worked to get a fighter torso? Did anyone there really think that a fighter hat with no attack bonuses, or a ranger hat with a ranged penalty, would go over well?

Super Instant Update! Literally as I was writing this editorial, Jagex decided to put the strength bonus back on the fighter torso, after a couple of hours of screeching and moaning from the usual suspects. I have mixed feelings about this—kudos to Jagex for correcting a bad update, though I hate to see tantrums rewarded—but the original point remains: couldn’t the whole situation have been foreseen and avoided?

Unhelpful, Unending, Unblockable Warning Messages

Last but certainly not least, the item that finally motivated me to write this editorial. Along with the Nomad’s Requiem quest that was added to the game on January 11, we got a bizarre “update” that causes a message to be put into the chat window every time you open a beast of burden. It warns you that any items the familiar is carrying will land on the floor when the familiar disappears.

This warning is such a pet peeve that I barely know where to start. But how about this: Summoning has been around for two years now, so is there anyone who uses a beast of burden that doesn’t know what happens if it is holding items when it disappears?

If there are people who don’t know, do they need to be reminded every time they open a beast of burden? Surely telling them once would be enough? Or maybe once per login? But no, you get it every time you open a beast of burden, even if you don’t do anything else. For some players this means literally dozens or even hundreds of these messages in a playing session.

Well, why not turn on the “in game spam filter” then? Oh, that doesn’t block the message either! (And even if it did, why should I have to remove all game messages to get rid of this stupid warning? I want to know if I catch a fish or cut a log—that is useful information, even if only modestly so. The 10,000th repetition of a warning about something I already know is not).

Is this warning a big deal? No, it’s not—it doesn’t make the game unplayable or anything. But neither do a lot of other things that drive people nuts. Suppose when you’re in your car, that every time you stepped on the brake pedal a warning appeared on the dashboard telling you “Don’t brake too quickly or you could lose control of the vehicle”. Okay, that’s a good reminder for some drivers, every once in a while. Still, how many times would you see that light up before you hurried over to the dealer and asked them to make it stop?

For me, this warning message is the epitome of a game update that makes me wonder if the guy who came up with it ever plays. If Jagex felt the need to give this warning, a simple one-time announcement on the forums, or as part of the patch notes, would have sufficed. I do not know a single real player who finds this anything but a pain in the butt.

In Closing…

I don’t really know how many Jagex developers are serious players, and neither do you. I hope there are a lot of them, but I have to wonder. And it’s true that Jagex does listen to complaints, and in some cases these sorts of weird changes end up being revised. But it still leaves the nagging question of why they were implemented in the first place.

I, among others, have been pleading with Jagex for years to set up a beta test system for RuneScape. Jagex’s position seems to be that they don’t feel this is necessary, or that it would be too difficult to implement. But changes like the ones above—and they are only a few recent examples of a long trend—strongly suggest to me that a beta test system is necessary. There’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to ensuring that content changes mesh well with how the game is actually played. I feel confident that any of these unfortunate changes, if shown to even a couple of dozen long-term serious players, could have been fixed or avoided before they ever saw the light of day.

Published: January 13, 2010

Warning: Contains mild spoilers for the quest Nomad’s Requiem.

Oh boy, here we go again.

It seems that every time Jagex releases a new quest that has any sort of reasonably high prerequisites, or poses any type of challenge, whining about capes starts up in earnest. Small but noisy groups of players who currently own the quest achievement cape and think that it is in mortal peril resume their plaintive chants: “The requirements are too high!” “The quest is too hard!” “If I get those levels it will wreck my pure!” And along with the moaning comes the demand that these alleged problems be “fixed” immediately (if not sooner).

And so it was with the release this week of Nomad’s Requiem. This time, for a change, most of the complaints were not the childish “pures” expecting the world to revolve around their efforts to exploit weaknesses in the combat level calculation. Instead, it’s been about the difficulty of the quest, especially the boss fight at the end. Some players started the quest, got beat by the boss, and did what they always do—run straight to “mommy” and demand that the challenge be made, well, less challenging. After all, if they can’t finish the quest, they lose their quest cape! Not fair!

Let’s start with a little secret: the boss fight isn’t really that hard. Sure, he hits for a lot of damage, and it requires plenty of supplies to beat him. So what? It’s a grandmaster quest where the fight is pretty much the only debatable challenge at all—were you expecting a rock crab? Jagex has balanced out his attacks by making the guy much easier than he should have been in a variety of ways. First of all, he tells you what he’s going to do before he does it. Should a boss really even do that? Second, his special attacks all come in a predictable, repeated sequence, with plenty of time to prepare. And third, some of his attacks can be dodged anyway.

If all that weren’t enough, Jagex added in a real gift to players: they took all the danger out of the fight, courtesy of a (cheesy, IMO) gravestone spawn right next to the bank if you die. Some would argue that a fight with no danger and no risk of loss is not a truly challenging fight, but more like a combat-related puzzle. And I would agree with them.

Even the developer of the quest feels it should have been more difficult. And I agree with him as well.

But that’s not really what this editorial is about. It is about the attitude that some players seem to have about quests, and especially the stupid quest cape. It seems that some players have come to believe that if they have ever owned the quest cape, that being able to wear it is forever more is their right. And that Jagex should arrange things so that are never be faced with the prospect of temporarily being without it.

Well, poppycock, I say! The quest cape is not an entitlement – it is a symbol that indicates that you have completed all the quests in the game. Not just the ones you find easy or fun to do or you have the levels to complete. All of them. And that means the quests as Jagex intended them to be, complete with—in some cases—difficult requirements and serious challenges. And it is only natural that as the game evolves, that will mean tougher quests, because otherwise the game would get boring, and the cape wouldn’t mean much anyway. (Does anyone view a fire cape with as much awe today as they did several years ago?)

The idea that Jagex should dumb down its quests for the sake of those who want to retain their quest capes is putting the cart before the horse—or in this case, the cape before the quest. They should pay absolutely no attention to the quest cape in designing quests. None.

Yesterday I heard rumors that “nerfing” the quest was being considered. This would have been a bad precedent that would have led to even more whining and complaining over future quests. I have to give Jagex mega-kudos for denying these rumors, saying clearly that they will not be making the quest easier just for the sake of making it easier.

To the whiners, I say simply this: if you are really that desperate to have a quest cape, then earn it. Fight Nomad a couple of times, learn his attacks and how to best deal with them. Try some different strategies, because that does matter. Or, here’s a radical thought: level up some skills. If all that fails, I assure you that within a week or two, every fan site will have detailed instructions telling you exactly how to beat this guy.

I guarantee that in no time we’ll see players with combat levels well below 100 wearing the quest cape again. And seeing them, we’ll then get to read a large number of complaints that the quest was too easy. You’ll see.

Published: January 8, 2010

This past Saturday (January 2, 2010) marks the second anniversary of the removal of free trade from RuneScape, and the start of the modern era of trade in the game-what I call the “Grand Exchange Economy”. In recognition of this milestone, I am re-launching the Soapbox with a series of articles about the Grand Exchange and the RuneScape economy as a whole. I’ll be looking back at how well the GE has fulfilled its potential, its good points and bad points, and some of the problems it has and how they can be corrected.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

—Walt Kelly, Pogo

Kelly’s famous quote is considered by some to be one of the most succinct expressions of humanity’s tendency to be the cause of the very problems we try to fix. Sometimes people spend so much time trying to get out of a hole that they don’t see that the shovel is in their own hands, and that the first step should be to simply stop digging.

And so it is with the economy in RuneScape today in general, and the problems associated with “merchanting” clans in particular. (I put the word in quotes because it’s not a real word, but it’s what everyone uses to refer to what is more normally called “trading” or “arbitrage”, so I’ll continue to use it.) Ask nearly anyone and they’ll tell you that merchanting clans are horrible, terrible (and probably fattening), and that they hate them and wish they would go away! But just as is the case with any other evil that supposedly plagues society, it doesn’t take too much delving beneath the surface to see that they exist not entirely because of Jagex, and not primarily because of their supposedly diabolical leaders. No, they exist because of thousands of RuneScape players who enable them.

An Overview of Merchanting Clans

For those who aren’t familiar with merchanting clans, the idea behind them is very simple. A good-sized group of players, often with several who have a great deal of wealth, conspire—and yes, I chose that word for a reason—to make money by manipulating the price of one or more items. They usually choose something that is reasonably popular but does not trade in large quantities, and when the signal is given, everyone in the clan tries to buy as much of the item as possible. Over a period of days to weeks, this causes the price of the item to slowly increase on the Grand Exchange. When it gets to a preselected target price, the group then dumps the item, making a profit and forcing the price back down—often as low or even lower than the price was before.

An Example of Price Manipulation

This 180-day history chart for super weapon poison (weapon poison++) shows a classic example of the sort of price manipulation undertaken routinely by clans. I noticed the dramatic price rise because I was working on my Herblore Optimization Guide, and could think of nothing that had occurred in the game itself to justify an increase in the price of this poison from around 7,000 gp to nearly triple that amount in only a few weeks. So I posted on the RuneScoop forums to see if anyone knew why this was happening. And I was told (unsurprisingly) that some merchanting clan had decided to run the price of poison up to 70k! Of course, it never got that high—but that’s all part of the game that the clan leaders play so they make money at the expense of everyone else. Note also the smaller spike in mid-November, possibly also a manipulation attempt.

These clans are loathed by regular players, because of the negative impact of this sort of manipulation. First of all, because of the trade restrictions on the Grand Exchange, whenever a large number of players are buying an item for its maximum price, they “absorb” most or all of the supply of that item, making it difficult for ordinary players to get it. Then, the reverse occurs when the item is being dumped. Even when trading can occur, it often is only possible to get the items in small quantities at the inflated prices that result from the clan’s activities.

Merchanting clans are also hated in RuneScape for the same reason that those who make money in this manner are widely reviled in the real world: they don’t engage in any sort of productive activity, rather just exploiting and profiting from the work of others. Making money by buying and selling items on an exchange is the classic example of a zero-sum activity: you only make money by someone else losing money. And people who lose money aren’t happy people.

Finally, merchanting clans often engage in deceptive advertising to try to lure new players into joining them. They also mercilessly spam busy areas—especially the Grand Exchange are in Varrock—trying to find new recruits.

Who’s Really Responsible?

Most serious RuneScape players want to know what enables merchanting clans to do what they do, and how they can be stopped. But there is no simple answer to this: they exist because of a confluence of various factors. Jagex is on the receiving end of the brunt of the complaints about these clans. And it is true that Jagex does bear much of the blame here. After all, it is the Grand Exchange’s tight trade limits and price restrictions that ironically enable the very sort of behavior they were ostensibly designed to prevent. Jagex has also been very slow to take any direct, proactive moves to stop merchanting clans. I’ll cover those issues and much more later in this series.

But it’s not Jagex that I want to focus on right now, because that’s really the easy way out for us as a community. The hard reality is that these clans are made up of players, and without those players, they could not exist. Even if you want to blame the leaders of the clans, the fact still remains that without a steady influx of new recruits, these clans would collapse.

The situation is, in many ways, comparable to any other illegal activity, whether it be illegal drug trafficking, modern slavery, forced child labor or the like. In each case, there are authorities that enable the situation to occur, be it via poor policy making or lax enforcement. But in each case it is also true that these things would not be occurring if there weren’t a market for what they produce. It is the demand for illegal items or services that causes them to be supplied.

And so it is with merchanting clans: the bottom line reason they exist is because of players who want to join them. And why do people want to join them? The answer to that question is simple: greed. Players sign up for these groups because they view them as an easy way to make money with little effort. They are drawn by the prospect of “guaranteed money while you sleep”—in fact, I’ve seen merchanting clan spammers use almost those exact words.

If you sign up to participate in a merchanting clan, you are part of the problem. You are trying to make money not through your own creativity or hard work, but simply by depriving others of the value of their thought and effort.

You’re the Perpetrator and the Victim

In addition to being unethical, joining merchanting clans is often very counterproductive: most players who join them do not get the results they are hoping for, or are promised. And that’s because it’s not just the general population that gets ripped off by these clans: some of their biggest victims are their own members. In many ways, these clans are little more than pyramid schemes that benefit those at the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.

Think about it. If everyone buys up an item for many days so that the price rises, what happens if they all decide to sell at the selected target price? The massive dumping of tons of players’ stock of that item will be too much for demand for the item to absorb. Since the price will have just risen (due to the clan’s manipulation) other players won’t be as interested in the item. With so many clan members trying to sell at once, many of the sell orders won’t be filled.

Well, the leaders of the clan certainly don’t want to be “stuck” like that! And they sure as hell don’t care about you. There’s a simple solution for the clan leaders, though: they simply lie to their members. They pick a “public” price that they claim they want to sell at, and then they dump their own holdings before that price is reached.

This works great for them! After all, at the time they decide to sell, it may have been many days in a row that people have been trying to buy these items at the maximum GE price. They know the loyal suckers, er, members of their clan won’t be selling yet. So they can get rid of everything they bought and make a nice profit.

What about everyone else in the clan—that is, people like you? Well, they are left holding the bag. Since the clan is “officially” still buying the item, the clan’s pawns end up in many cases buying items from their own leaders. If the target price is reached, all of these peons are left to fight for the scraps as the price drops every day. And in many cases, the leaders deciding to dump the item before the target price means that target is never reached at all.

Just Say No

I can sum up the point of this soapbox article very simply. The best thing you can do as a player to combat merchanting clans is not to participate in them. Without a steady stream of new victims, these clans cannot continue to exist—every time an item is run up in price and some members get stuck holding items they can’t sell, they get annoyed and leave. The leaders just get back to spamming some more, looking for new people whose greed they can exploit. If the supply of new victims dries up, so does the clan.

In addition to the ethical and practical reasons for avoiding merchanting clans, there’s another factor to take into consideration: it has never been easier to make money in RuneScape via legitimate activities. Gone are the days when only very high level or very skilled players could earn gold quickly. You can make money these days while having fun, while training skills, while engaging in socializing activities with friends, or even while doing other things on your computer.

It is easy to make 100k, 200k, 500k or more per hour now. This is not only because of how valuable many items are, but also because of the existence of resources to tell you how to make money. The best of these is in fact right here on RuneScoop: the Dynamic Moneymaking Guide can show you hundreds of ways to make money. All of them legit, reliable, and doable without enriching a dishonest clan leader or contributing to the decline of the economy.

Be part of the solution: refuse to be part of the problem.