Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

1) Graphics
A low blow, yes, because the game is designed in Flash, and was made so many people (up to 2000) could be on a single server, interacting and doing unique tasks, but in an age of Assassin's Creeds and Crysises, Runescape looks like an out of date 80s game. In the world of Flash games, yes, Runescape is king. In the world of games, period, Runescape comes out somewhere around Pac-man. But hey, Pac-man is single player, right?

2) Player Environment
You can walk into the White House dressed as an insurgent and get better treatment than the average Runescape player. Many of the game's players are between the ages of 5 and 14, and are of the belief that if anyone disagrees or doesn't want to sell them an item, they're a noob. The best way to play this game is to turn Public Chat OFF, and that makes the game much worse, because what's the point of being able to interact with one million plus people if you don't talk to them?

Or is rendering yourself deaf a choice for the better?

3) Racism BREEDS
I'm the average black teenager. I try not to take race into consideration while playing games like Runescape, but I'd feel a bit...Guilty if I played as a white person. However, it was a tad unexpected to get mocked with idiotic comments such as "lol black dude" while I'm pking. The racism exists everywhere in various tones, from people joking about chinese gold farmers to some of the mentally challenged "White Power" enthusiasts. After dealing with all of that s**t, no one wants to bother with the trouble of leveling...

4) Grinding is only good irl
I'm sure anyone up to date with the dancing scene knows what grinding is. Any decent MMO gamer also knows the second sense of the word - Doing something boring over and over just to level up, and upon leveling, the rewards are so minimal, or far away from your destination, it's pointless. The same applies to Runescape, where all the decent weapons (Dragon) require 60 attack, and the whip (arguably the best weapon in the game) requires 70. Getting to 70 attack is a pain in the a** if you can't stand constant grinding (without even good graphics to distract you). But is it worth getting 70 attack for the whip, which does put a significant bonus into your fighting style?

Nope.

5) Combat
No unique moves other than the occasional special attack (spec), and those are usually so ineffective or draining that there's no point in even bothering to use them. Also, Jagex has a tendency to nerf (lower all bonuses) all of the decent weapons in the game, and throwing in newer, more powerful ones instead. This does, of course mean that to use these newer weapons, you have to raise your attack skill even more... But at least during this time, you can talk to the few intelligent friends you've met, with no worries of talking limits, right?

6) Lack of scrolling and the ************* censor.
Let's say you want to tell your friend about this INSANE pk you made right outside of Edgeville. You message him, begin typing out your lil' monologue....And he only gets the first eight words, half of which are turned into stars because they contain h and o. Random words are also blocked, and once they blocked fook and chit, most people gave up on talking overall. But when they did,they'd have to calculate how much of their message will be readable, before everything else gets devoured by the stat toolbar. Of course, it wouldn't be too hard to make it just start a new line when the message gets too long, but Jagex has bigger things to worry about, like -

7) GOLD FARMERS
Yes, Runescape has the majority of the world's Gold Farmers - People who work for money and sell it for real life cash. Many members don't realize this, because GP Farmer accounts get banned so often, they never apply for membership. Thus, the free version of the game is stuck with all the bots, which become painfully obvious when about 40 people wearing the same clothes are crowded around a single tree with names like "nm31312" and yinjsu34," both of which scream "I'm an asian gold farmer!"
You can't forget that 97% of the game thinks China is the only place pumping out bots, of course! And on the subject of bots, we all know that there are some people (*cough* PARIS HILTON *cough*) who have a shitload more money than us, and they didn't do jack s**t. Nothing we can do, and we'd obviously prefer that over some kind of perfect world where everyone gets an even chance, and you have no reason to hate the rich people! Sort of like Assassin's Creed, The Matrix, and many sci-fi books, Jagex has decided to trade realism in for -

cool The Gilded Cage
Jagex wants it's players to live in a perfect world of gaming. No corruption, no major murders that leave you crying over lost goods and property, no people who hoard their money while the poor try twice as hard and make minimum wage....Sadly, they decided to cut out this aspect of realism and instead trade the freedom of the game for a gilded cage...Unwillingly. Let's look over these major changex.
A) Duel Arena SLAUGHTERED
The duel arena used to be where you could stake millions of gold on a fight! Make a year's worth of cash in minutes! Feel the rush in your blood, feel the love of lady luck pumping through your system, fighting through double or nothing battles, finally obtaining profit from those countless hours of grinding to get your combat stats up!
Now, the maximum amount of cash you can stake is 30,000g. This was to prevent gold sellers from staking 5 million gold for nothing and purposely losing. You may think Jagex's move was an intelligent one, but it's essentially the same as putting a giant glass orb over the entire United States to protect us from terrorists. It will most likely work, but they'll find ways around it, and it leaves the ordinary people ******** over.

B) Merchanting
Buy low, sell high. The epitome of success in almost any money-powered MMO. However, that apparently affected the economy too much, so merchanting got nerfed when Jagex released the Grand Exchange, which allowed you to leave your item to be sold while you ran off and did stuff (good!)...But it listed the cheapest offer before the rest of them (Bad, leaving you unable to sell high). Now, there are 2 ways this can benefit either the GP Farmers or the people...
You could see a Red Mask put up for only 10,000g! You'd jump on that, and sell it for a profit of about 20 million! Sadly, that won't happen either - Jagex has set it so items can only be higher or cheaper than a certain number. Such as, Red Masks most likely CANNOT drop below 19 million.
Now, let's say a GP farmer buys a customer's bronze pickaxe for 10 million gold. Customer gets his gold, farmer tosses the pickaxe, and has recieved his $5.But once again, items can only be listed in a certain price range. This is what Jagex tried (and succeeded) in removing, but you can no longer jump with joy if someone doesn't catch that missing digit in their selling price...

C) Un...balanced trades?
Let's say you lend a friend your red partyhat (easily the most valuable, cheaply made thing ingame)...Or lend him 20 million gpto go train skills with. Now, you could be trading items for real life cash! So, using the market price taken from the Grand Exchange, Jagex will soon prevent all 'unbalanced trades.' Guess you can't just give out 20 million gold as a Christmas gift anymore...
But there is a lending system! They can keep it until you log out, or for a certain amount of days! But honestly...What if it is just a birthday gift?

9) The forums - What the ********?
Now, if a player has an issue, he goes to the forums and asks for help, naturally. Sadly, the forums are only available to members, who pay $5 monthly. Now, membership SHOULD entitle simply the other giant ******** portion of the map and nothing else. I'd love to tell you how much more walking distance members get, but we'll just display it like this :

Size of the Free map as an image - 830kb
Size of the Members map as an image - 5.3mb

Now, if a free player has an issue, he contacts the help system or a moderator. What? Did I say something?

10) The moderators, man, the moderators!!!
Now, the last hard, solid number of people working in customer support was 67. But, according to Jagex.com, they have over 300 members, half in customer support. Okay then, we'll guesstimate they have 160 people in customer support.
Now, Runescape has about 1.8 MILLION players.
If each one complains, one person has to run through 11,250 complaints/glitch reports.
Now, there are some good people! Let's tone it down, if....1,200,000 people complained/reported daily (highly plausible, with people reporting GP Farmers and swearing kids), then each Customer Support man has to run through 7,500 reports.
Well, that sure as hell ain't gonna work.
I'm going to wrap this up with a simple image illustrating how Jagex solves it's overflowing amount of rulebreakers/glitch reporters.



Can you say bot?