MMO Rant: Jagex Blames Players For Its Own Incompetence

Exploiting a planned discount.

We need to talk about Jagex’s deepening incompetence when it comes to their definition of an exploit as well as their out of control real money promotions that are now toppling over one another and causing issues. Last week Jagex published a notice that four thousand players were identified as “exploiting” a discount related to treasure hunter. For a number of hours you could buy keys with oddments at a discount, and it was possible to cash out “oddments,” a byproduct of the game’s lootboxes that can be used to buy items including keys, and people were getting oddment amounts worth more than the keys themselves. This created a surplus problem and in some cases people could theoretically keep buying the discounted keys with their reward cash out.

Here’s the thing: This was entirely Jagex’s fault and it’s not an exploit. Because Jagex loves money and hates quality control these days, nobody bothered to check to make sure that the discounted treasure hunter keys couldn’t offer back more than they cost at such a reliable amount. It’s an amateur level mistake and another in the line of Jagex refusing to admit that they embarrassingly screwed up and are throwing blame on the community to compensate. It’s also another example of them using the word “exploit” when it comes to another mistake causing their real money system to give more reward than they’ve meticulously programmed it not to.

You see the problem here is that there’s no real indication to the average player that this would be an unintended outcome. Jagex purposely put the keys on discount and they know what the value of its drops are. They programmed the items manually and they programmed the oddment cash out deliberately. This isn’t something obviously wrong like killing players in a non-pvp area or one-shotting bosses with a specific gear set, it’s an outcome of your programmers being lazy and not doing the bare minimum of their job and also not wanting to take responsibility for their pathetic oversights. Anywhere else those guys would be out on their ass, but at Jagex they just blame the community and keep working.

If this is the outcome of any exploitation, it’s the one on Jagex’s part who have become so eager to drop any pretense that their statements about being less greedy have any sincerity. Every few months we hear about how sorry Jagex is that they’ve thrown game updates out the door in favor of a constantly revolving buffet of increasingly exploitative cash shop events, and yet the enthusiasm with which Jagex pursues its next “give us money you scum” event has gotten so out of control that the company isn’t even bothering to properly balance those updates leading to “exploits” like this. Maybe if you weren’t overloading the game with these promotions you’d have time to balance them.

Putting a 50% discount on keys when you have all the data that there are rewards worth more than that 50% discount isn’t an exploit that can be pinned on the players using that discount. Your quality assurance people messed up. Your programmers messed up. Your managers messed up. It was an elementary level mistake and it is 100% your fault for introducing it into the game and 0% on the players who participated. So don’t come out with a statement blaming players who “attempted the exploit.” Take your lumps and put the idiot responsible for this oversight on notice.

“We want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we do not tolerate bug abuse or exploits in RuneScape. We hope that the actions and communication today make this clear.”

This statement is disgusting and it’s a clear sign of Jagex’s current operating style of terrible quality control and the constant shifting of blame. I’d hate to see what the internal company politics look like right now.

You see, what this tells players is that Jagex has no idea what it’s doing and can’t competently program an event but will gladly punish players for not understanding your internal design philosophy. The lesson learned is that your players must navigate a minefield of your own making to ensure that they’re having fun but not passing that secret threshold of returns you’ve devised that is neither logical or standardized lest they be beaten with a big stick for having too much fun. It puts players on edge that anything they’re doing might at some point be determined as an unintended level of return of investment and deemed an exploit with their account punished.

This announcement doesn’t instill confidence. It says “we’re not doing our job and it’s your fault.” This isn’t how you grow a community, it’s how you kill it.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.