Tag: Mark Gerhard

Mark Gerhard Departs Jagex


scapesink

Mark Gerhard has announced that he is leaving his position as CEO of Jagex this December.

One of my proudest achievements at Jagex has been our efforts of tackling Botting and Gold Farming. When I first joined this was a huge problem for the business which I understand had plagued the game and community for many years. Today the game is virtually bot free and with the introduction of Bonds, gold farming too has become almost inexistent.

Gerhard will be replaced by RuneScape’s Vice President, Mod Pips. Read the entire farewell letter below.

(Source: RuneScape)

Jagex: What's Coming And Going


scaperune2

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)

Jagex: What’s Coming And Going


scaperune2

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)

Jagex Announces Upcoming Bot Ban, New Account Security, HTML, and More


Suffice to say, there has been some animosity among the RuneScape community lately with Jagex’s increased focus on their cash shops (Squeal of Fortune and Solomon’s Store). Mark Gerhard has taken to the RuneScape front page to pen a letter to the community addressing concerns over Solomon’s store and the future of RuneScape. In the letter, he states that great care is taken to ensure that anything offered on the store does not affect the integrity of RuneScape or Jagex. Over the past year and a half, the RuneScape team has doubled in size.

We place immense value in our – and your – game’s integrity, feedback from our community, and continually improving the game experience for all, and we have a strong track record of making decisions in this area that we know may be sub-optimal, commercially speaking, but represent our values. For example, we know that directly selling gold, XP or even accounts would generate between 10 to 15 times more revenue than Squeal or Solomon’s Store generates combined. However, we simply won’t do it, because we don’t believe it’s the right thing for the long-term health of the game.

Gerhard goes on to address bots, spam, and account security:

This week, you should notice a significant reduction in gold farmer spam. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will not only be launching our most comprehensive and formidable anti-bot update but players will also see a significant upgrade to their accounts’ security to protect against phishing and hijacking. This is called Jagex Account Guardian, and we’re introducing it within the next two weeks.

Finally, the letter offers a screenshot toward a future RuneScape update, running the client via HTML rather than through Java (pictured above), and notes that there are already plans to bring RuneScape to additional platforms.

We will have more coverage of the anti-bot updates as they appear, which will be “over the next few weeks.”

(Source: RuneScape)

Jagex Bans High Profile Gamblers and Botting Clans


 

Hi,

Today we have banned several high-profile accounts from the dicing scene.

We can happily confirm that the ring leaders found to be involved in selling RuneScape gold have been banned. Their actions have directly funded a sizable portion of all real world trading activity within the game, led to increased macro use, and resulted in huge surges in spam advertising.

Such actions are strictly against our rules, and all accounts have been wiped and permanently nuked.

This should serve a clear warning to anyone else engaged in similar activities; expect more bans of any continuing offenders.

We have been finely tuning our new anti-cheat and anti-hijack tools over the past few months and are now steadily bringing these systems online in select areas. This is part of an on-going rollout that will be completed over the course of next two months. More good news will follow in due course.

Some of you may already have noticed that we have started cleaning up the high scores over the last week and this will assist us in being able to re-introduce relevant gold farmer free F2P high scores again. :)

Mark Gerhard
CEO

Hi,

Today we have banned a large number of accounts involved with self-titled “botting clans”. All of these accounts have been identified by our new data analysis tool and are 100% guilty of breaking our rules. These accounts have been permanently banned with no chance of appeal.

As mentioned on the forums yesterday, expect more bans and punishments in the very near future.

The use of bots will not be tolerated and will result in permanent action against any accounts found to have cheated in this way.

Daniel Clough
COO & VP of RuneScape

Jagex's Problem With "Not RuneScape"


In the Jagex family you really only fit into one of two categories: RuneScape and Not RuneScape. What is the difference, you ask? Well, the RuneScape category is successful and the “Not RuneScape” category is not.

1. FunOrb Was Abandoned And Left For Dead

As per numerous Jagex posts on the RuneScape forums, Funorb is discontinued and no longer supported. Not only did Jagex abandon Funorb when the service wasn’t as profitable as they had hoped, there was never an official announcement that development had ceased. Instead Jagex whisked the Funorb developers silently, without informing anyone that development had ceased, and moved the entire team over to 8Realms. To this day, the Funorb website still does not display any indication that the service has been discontinued, unless you count that the latest news post is dated 2010.

Funorb still runs today, likely because there are still a small number of people who still hold on to the service and the website probably costs very little to keep running, but it is fully discontinued and has no moderators working on it. To top things off…

2. 8Realms Never Launched…

A second blow to Funorb fans. 8Realms was supposed to be Jagex’s first in-house game developed on a platform other than Java, not to mention Jagex’s first developed game to feature a fully functioning cash shop that offered real advantages to throwing large sums of money. I gave a quick hands-on impression of 8Realms, and while the game was enjoyable, it carried a fatal caveat: regular server wipes. In all, the game was one giant race to the end, and whenever someone made it to the end, the entire server was wiped and everyone started again.

For a game attempting to coerce players into opening their wallets for those delicious gems, 8Realms was set to be a very expensive experience. One with little payout, considering only one player could actually win and then all of your money spent was for nothing. In the end, 8Realms gathered a whopping ten percent of the income needed to stay afloat, and was trashed in beta.

3. Stellar Dawn/MechScape Show Woefully Substandard Community Relations

Having written this website for as long as I have, I am well acquainted with how MMOs are marketed: years ahead of time. Not only are these games in development for years before they are even announced, the announcement can take place two, often three or more years before the game ever hits store shelves. I even had a term for this: hype fatigue, to describe a point after a game is announced where interest wanes due to long development cycles. In the case of the MMO industry, where titles can and have been delayed well over a year, this effect is rather widespread.

When MechScape was under development, Jagex refused to talk about the game at all. Then-CEO Geoff Iddison would give an interview every now and then to reassure the community that the game would be out in 2008, and that the product they were creating was so great, it might even surpass RuneScape. For the length of its development up until the game was finally cancelled months after its intended launch date, not a single screenshot or video capture of the game was released to the public. Jagex refused to talk about more than concepts and vague promises, and ultimately the game was canned (and possibly so was Geoff Iddison) for not living up to expectations.

MechScape was cancelled to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, and in its place Stellar Dawn was born. In their announcement in 2009, Jagex stated that not only would Stellar Dawn succeed where MechScape failed, it was ready for release in 2010. I hope you see where I’m going with this. Following in the tradition of its predecessor, and proving that Jagex had learned nothing from the lack of communication with its community (or the press) about MechScape, Jagex silently worked away on Stellar Dawn throughout 2010, pausing in July to launch the official website with a “coming 2011” banner. At this point, Jagex had already announced Transformers Universe for a 2012 launch date, leaving me asking: Does Jagex even care about Stellar Dawn?

Well, 2011 came and went without a single video clip, screenshot, or the kind of details you might expect from an upcoming MMO (or any other release), and in March 2012 we finally learned that Stellar Dawn has been put on developmental hold so Jagex can focus on their other products. In fact, Jagex’s communication over Stellar Dawn was so poor that the official website displayed a “coming 2011” banner well into 2012 before the game was put on pause.

4. Transformers Universe Is Following The Same Path

I have to say, I have more optimism for Transformers Universe, and I will explain why: Third party IP holders. This isn’t Stellar Dawn or MechScape or Funorb, or 8Realms where Jagex owns everything surrounding the game and can develop and release to their heart’s content. Oh no, Transformers Universe means contractual obligations. Hasbro is the master and Jagex is the humble servant, making sure that the game is developed in a manner that is approved, on a timeline that is approved, and ready for launch by a date that is approved.

I said the same thing with the company being run by investors: Jagex’s previous projects are a fine example that, left to their own accord, the company will screw around for a few years, waste countless millions and the good faith of their community, and eventually scrap the game entirely because it didn’t turn out fun. Nobody wins, not the developers who are laid off, not the community, and not the investors who expect their money to be spent wisely.

Mark Gerhard recently interviewed with Develop Online, where he mentioned that the company was abandoning its “hobby” projects and giving serious focus to its current and future titles. Good. All it took to reach this conclusion was two failed MMOs, one failed MMORTS, one failed games portal, and one CEO.

Jagex’s Problem With “Not RuneScape”


In the Jagex family you really only fit into one of two categories: RuneScape and Not RuneScape. What is the difference, you ask? Well, the RuneScape category is successful and the “Not RuneScape” category is not.

1. FunOrb Was Abandoned And Left For Dead

As per numerous Jagex posts on the RuneScape forums, Funorb is discontinued and no longer supported. Not only did Jagex abandon Funorb when the service wasn’t as profitable as they had hoped, there was never an official announcement that development had ceased. Instead Jagex whisked the Funorb developers silently, without informing anyone that development had ceased, and moved the entire team over to 8Realms. To this day, the Funorb website still does not display any indication that the service has been discontinued, unless you count that the latest news post is dated 2010.

Funorb still runs today, likely because there are still a small number of people who still hold on to the service and the website probably costs very little to keep running, but it is fully discontinued and has no moderators working on it. To top things off…

2. 8Realms Never Launched…

A second blow to Funorb fans. 8Realms was supposed to be Jagex’s first in-house game developed on a platform other than Java, not to mention Jagex’s first developed game to feature a fully functioning cash shop that offered real advantages to throwing large sums of money. I gave a quick hands-on impression of 8Realms, and while the game was enjoyable, it carried a fatal caveat: regular server wipes. In all, the game was one giant race to the end, and whenever someone made it to the end, the entire server was wiped and everyone started again.

For a game attempting to coerce players into opening their wallets for those delicious gems, 8Realms was set to be a very expensive experience. One with little payout, considering only one player could actually win and then all of your money spent was for nothing. In the end, 8Realms gathered a whopping ten percent of the income needed to stay afloat, and was trashed in beta.

3. Stellar Dawn/MechScape Show Woefully Substandard Community Relations

Having written this website for as long as I have, I am well acquainted with how MMOs are marketed: years ahead of time. Not only are these games in development for years before they are even announced, the announcement can take place two, often three or more years before the game ever hits store shelves. I even had a term for this: hype fatigue, to describe a point after a game is announced where interest wanes due to long development cycles. In the case of the MMO industry, where titles can and have been delayed well over a year, this effect is rather widespread.

When MechScape was under development, Jagex refused to talk about the game at all. Then-CEO Geoff Iddison would give an interview every now and then to reassure the community that the game would be out in 2008, and that the product they were creating was so great, it might even surpass RuneScape. For the length of its development up until the game was finally cancelled months after its intended launch date, not a single screenshot or video capture of the game was released to the public. Jagex refused to talk about more than concepts and vague promises, and ultimately the game was canned (and possibly so was Geoff Iddison) for not living up to expectations.

MechScape was cancelled to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, and in its place Stellar Dawn was born. In their announcement in 2009, Jagex stated that not only would Stellar Dawn succeed where MechScape failed, it was ready for release in 2010. I hope you see where I’m going with this. Following in the tradition of its predecessor, and proving that Jagex had learned nothing from the lack of communication with its community (or the press) about MechScape, Jagex silently worked away on Stellar Dawn throughout 2010, pausing in July to launch the official website with a “coming 2011” banner. At this point, Jagex had already announced Transformers Universe for a 2012 launch date, leaving me asking: Does Jagex even care about Stellar Dawn?

Well, 2011 came and went without a single video clip, screenshot, or the kind of details you might expect from an upcoming MMO (or any other release), and in March 2012 we finally learned that Stellar Dawn has been put on developmental hold so Jagex can focus on their other products. In fact, Jagex’s communication over Stellar Dawn was so poor that the official website displayed a “coming 2011” banner well into 2012 before the game was put on pause.

4. Transformers Universe Is Following The Same Path

I have to say, I have more optimism for Transformers Universe, and I will explain why: Third party IP holders. This isn’t Stellar Dawn or MechScape or Funorb, or 8Realms where Jagex owns everything surrounding the game and can develop and release to their heart’s content. Oh no, Transformers Universe means contractual obligations. Hasbro is the master and Jagex is the humble servant, making sure that the game is developed in a manner that is approved, on a timeline that is approved, and ready for launch by a date that is approved.

I said the same thing with the company being run by investors: Jagex’s previous projects are a fine example that, left to their own accord, the company will screw around for a few years, waste countless millions and the good faith of their community, and eventually scrap the game entirely because it didn’t turn out fun. Nobody wins, not the developers who are laid off, not the community, and not the investors who expect their money to be spent wisely.

Mark Gerhard recently interviewed with Develop Online, where he mentioned that the company was abandoning its “hobby” projects and giving serious focus to its current and future titles. Good. All it took to reach this conclusion was two failed MMOs, one failed MMORTS, one failed games portal, and one CEO.

Jagex Opens New Studio: New Game In Development


Develop Online reports that Jagex has opened a new studio outside of Cambridge, according to CEO Mark Gerhard. There has been no information revealed about the project other than that it is a “very experimental game,” and that the UK developer remains committed to its focus on quality over quantity.

“We actually do already have a small studio outside of Cambridge, and that’s working on a very experimental game.”

More information will be coming within the next few weeks on the new studio and what they are working on.

(Source: Develop Online)

Jagex: Our Other Projects Were Hobbies, That Ends Now


Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard has always been pretty frank with the internal going-ons at his company, and in a recent interview with Develop, he answered the question as to why all of Jagex’s products that are not RuneScape have either failed to launch or failed to make a profit, and the answer is simple. The company has been treating its non-scape products more as hobby projects than real games. Gerhard believes that 8Realms, Jagex’s HTML MMORTS which shut down recently due to poor response, received precisely the attention it deserved from fans.

“I think to other projects, like 8Realms and things like that, I think that was one of the last hobby projects that we carried through, and obviously that was evident. Now it’s just working on the projects that matter.”

Jagex is currently working on several major projects, including the upcoming combat upgrade for RuneScape as well as the upcoming Transformers Universe MMO currently slated for beta in 2012.

(Source: Develop Interview)

Jagex Leak: Combat System Overhaul Icons




 

 

In case you don’t play RuneScape, earlier this month CEO Mark Gerhard responded to player criticism over the controversial Squeal of Fortune with the following message:

…it should be evident that we just gearing up for our most exciting and biggest content year ever……….. including a complete upgrade to the combat system later this summer!

The update may come sooner rather than later, if the above leaks via the RuneScape official wiki are to be believed. According to reports, the combat overhaul will bring RuneScape more in line with other MMOs, introducing a hot bar (which the above images would presumably fill) and balancing out the combat system to work as intended.

More information to come, hopefully soon.