Jagex seems to do a whole lot of apologizing, whether it is for the lacking infrastructure, your bot-detection software banning legitimate players, the enormous resources squandered on “hobby projects,” lacking basic security to prevent unauthorized purchases, and playing vigilante justice against the operator of a fan site.
Mark Gerhard has posted an announcement on the RuneScape website detailing how Jagex plans to move forward in several areas of communication. For starters, they recognize that players were not informed properly that Botany Bay, Jagex’s bot busting tool, was meant to be introduced into the game gradually, learning about how bots act in order to learn how they operate and eventually be able to catch them automatically. To compensate for the heavy rise in gold farmers, and due to Botany Bay not being fully implemented for a good while yet, Gerhard announced that several parallel bot-busting programs will be coming in 2013.
On the topic of micro-transactions, Gerhard is unapologetic. The money that Squeal of Fortune and Solomon’s Store have brought to RuneScape has allowed Jagex to double the size of the RuneScape development team, allowing the company to tackle big issues regarding infrastructure and improving the game’s audio and visual quality. He does admit, however, that the two cash shops virtually dominated the release schedule, often times bringing in content that felt completely out of context in the game’s environment. Gerhard also admits that Jagex went overboard in 2012 with promotions, giving away far too much with promotions like Sizzling Summer. Promotions in 2013 will be less frequent, and do less to undermine player achievement.
Overall, 2012 had some pretty dramatic changes to RuneScape’s foundation, something which Jagex hopes to continue into 2013. Jagex plans to introduce two new skills, a number of more meaningful quests, temporary events, as well as improving the engine to allow multi-core support as well as porting the engine to HTML 5 and more. Gerhard ended the letter with a sign of gratitute towards the community:
I don’t believe we’ve ever actually thanked our members for helping us to make RuneScape into the incredible game it is today, not to mention providing a completely free game for millions of players. So, a very big ‘thank you’ to our members from myself, the RS team and the free community.
More on RuneScape as it appears.
(Source: RuneScape)
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