Thursday, May 24, 2007

Shoutbox Added

I have added a shoutbox to the forums so that members who are logged in will be able to chat between themselves (and to me) when I am online.

The forums themselves are not being used as much as was anticipated - afterall, I was asked by a few members to install some forums and am left wondering why those members who requested them haven't used them.

Anyway, I will push forward with working on more runescape guides and I am likely to make basic guides initially. The reason is so each section can be filled with basic information initially and anyone who wants to be a guide writer can help to improve existing guides etc.

This way, more information is available for all runescape players and it should help make the site overall much more useful.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Runescape Co-Founder Andrew Gower Interview

Runescape recently hit 1 million paying subscribers and seems to go from strength to strength in the MMORPG game industry. It is a lucrative market and is showing signs of crossing into the marketing plans of many major industries as the world takes their lives into virtual environments.

I came across this Andrew Gower Interview about runescape and its future. It is an interesting read for the runescape demographic in some regard. I have also noticed that runescape came about through his exposure to text based MUDs - I also discovered text based MUDs while at university and did look at creating one myself (although at the time I asked myself the same questions about making it different to all the others - I settled on keeping it generic as I was not really that much into the programming side of things).

Anyway, nowadays I am getting more into the programming aspect - well more into websites rather than applications development - although I do have the intention of being able to get learning some of the web development technologies available today.

The interview is a rare interview and as Andrew stated they are concentrating more on the product than the marketing - so I wouldn't expect many more interviews to be surfacing. It does prove that they are still 100% focussed on developing the actual game itself and that has to be good news for all runescape players.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Runescape Bots and Real World Trading

The announcement by Jagex today that they had banned 8000 runescape accounts and seized 6 billion runescape gold sent shockwaves through most of the community.

Many players realised that some bots and plenty of real world trading was taking place, but they failed to grasp the scale of it and how it has impacted on the overall runescape economy. This is the seedier side to all MMORPGs in the last couple of years and continues to become a greater influence even after Ebay Delisted sales of virtual currency.

I had longed to see Jagex publicly tackle the issue in this way and even sent in an email with a way to get all legitimate fan sites on the right side of Jagex. I felt the problem would have started to come under control after Ebay took their stance. However, it simply added fuel to the fire and increased the determination of bot users to gather up large sums of virtual gold and sell to players for real dollars.

Jagex have learned that it is going to be a long fight to get it back into check and many current runescape members are feeling hard done by - having to work their way up in skills only to find the prices of items highly unstable, rare item prices rising out of reach and their favourite training locations covered by bot users.

The discussion on the runescape forums had reached more than 70 pages at the time of writing this and it didn't look like it was going to stop there. Many of the most popular fansites also have long discussion threads relating to this incident.

Overall, price instability could be highly volatile over the next week or two as the impact of further bannings takes place within the game and as Jagex increase their mechanisms for effectively detecting and efficiently removing the problem sources.