Tag: Runescape

Review: Runescape: Betrayal at Falador


Runescape: Betrayal at Falador is the first novel by T.S Church set in the world of Gielinor, envisioned by Jagex, more specifically the city of Falador and the White approximate king place approximately five years before the events of the game (the quest storyline), we find the world entering into chaos.  As the White Knights work to retrieve the demolished statue of a famous knight, a mysterious woman appears out of nowhere and near death. To the north, the evil Kinshra (black knights) under the leadership of Lord Sulla plot to sack Falador and conquer the region. Closer to home, a mysterious creature is murdering travelers, and the White Knights suspect a traitor is among them.

Betrayal at Falador is a treasure trove of Runescape lore, featuring everyone you would expect in the area around Falador: white knights, black knights, the dwarves, the Humans Against Monsters cult, as well as plenty of known names. Going into the book, my initial fear was that the characters in TS Church’s mind wound contradict the personalities presented in the game. Instead, Church goes to great lengths to preserve the quirks and details of each personality, reinforcing that this is in fact a Runescape book rather than a fantasy novel with some two-dimensional representations slapped on.

Betrayal at Falador follows an enormous cast of major and minor characters, and tends to jump around quickly between them often times offering not much more than a quick scene. In fact, a majority of the book’s chapters are only two or three pages long, with a couple single pagers thrown in. Oddly enough, this works to the book’s credit. Church manages to keep an appropriate pace throughout, shortening and lengthening each character’s part as needed without fluffing or needlessly slashing any details.

The story is tense, and the characters are fleshed out enough that you actually care when one of them dies, even if they play a relatively minor role in the story. That being said, Church employs one of my most hated methods of storytelling, the convenient obscurity. I can better explain by giving an example: one character is hunting another character, but does not refer to him by name. Only after a convenient reveal is the character referred to by name, both in the narrative and in dialog (internal and external). A small complaint, but I find it obnoxious when one character refers to his prey as his prey for several chapters, but once the person is revealed in another chapter in another location entirely, all of a sudden he feels comfortable referencing by name.

Church installs some interesting takes on the Runescape lore. The mysterious woman appears by way of a Ring of Life, a magical artifact which teleports someone near death to Falador. The ring is described as rare and powerful, and only fifty existing in the world, while in the game itself the ring of life is the product of a rather low level magical spell. The wizards are able to do far more with the runes of magic than players. Additionally, Church sets out a world large enough to remind us that what we play in the game is really just a miniaturized version of the full deal. Falador, housing less than a hundred NPCs in game, plays home to hundreds if not thousands of citizens. A trip to Taverly, mere minutes in the virtual world, is a multiple day trip for our heroes.

Runescape: Betrayal at Falador suffers from what I call Skywalker Syndrome, which plagues any story where the prequel releases years after the sequel. If you’ve played Runescape, you already have a good idea who is going to die. After all, if the person is present in the game, they lived. If they are prominent and do not appear in the game, they probably die. Overall the story is still suspenseful and engaging enough to keep the reader engaged, and Church was smart enough to cast the lead role as a character whose fate is left uncertain.

Runescape: Betrayal at Falador cost me over $40 USD when I bought it in 2009, because I ordered the hardcover copy at Jagex’s website and paid twice the cost of the book in shipping from the UK. Still, the book is worth every penny, even though you will spend considerably less than I did by buying the paperback at your local boom store. Likewise, you can purchase it in ebook format and save more money and trees. The book is about 400 pages.

The sequel, Return to Canifis, I will review when I have an opportunity to read it.

Most Surprising Act of 2011: Runescape Nukes Cheaters


Ever since Jagex’s inception, their fight against bots has been rather reactionary and ineffective. From 2001 with CAPTCHA codes and fatigue, to the random event system that probably claimed more players who had left the keyboard or lost connection than their intended targets, and so on. From 2005 onward, Jagex continued updates on an escalating basis to combat gold farmers who, despite massive bans and the shut down of Runescape classic to all but a few, continued growing at an even larger scale. In 2007, Jagex restricted trade to small imbalances, implemented the anonymous trading of the Grand Exchange. For over three years, Jagex implemented updates to soften those restrictions, and in 2011 all of that work went to waste when Jagex released the restrictions on trade and the gold farmers came back in an even greater force than they had four years prior.

So when Jagex launched the bot nuke and knocked the servers offline for the better part of the day, I joined a few other MMO journalists in awaiting the results, and were we ever surprised. Even after waiting for a couple of days, the bots hadn’t come back. The chatter on the cheat websites was of panic, and despite the attempt to keep their customers, the bot writers only seemed to be able to make big announcements of further upcoming announcements.

Bots still exist, don’t get confused, but those that continue on have nowhere near the complexity of their deceased brethren. Writing a bot that can click on specific sections of the screen in a specific order is easier to defeat than a bot that can fight dragons more efficiently than I can. So after years of telling myself that Jagex would never get rid of the bots due to a combination of incompetence and apathy, I can say that this year Jagex not only made me eat my shoe, but made me eat it dry.

Kudos to you, Jagex.

Picture of the ____: Runescape Christmas Feast


The Orb of Oculus is an item in Runescape that allows players to set up rather impressive screenshots. Taken at the Christmas holiday event released today, this is a reminder as to how far Jagex has brought Runescape’s graphics in the past few years.

Jagex Fights Gold Farmers, Restricts Free Accounts


Nuking bots from an MMO is easy, at least in comparison with nuking actual gold farmers. After all, programs can be broken from the outside, manipulated into revealing themselves, and detected through various means. But how can you know that the person behind the account grinding dragons for five hours is any different than the player grinding dragons for five hours to sell the gold for real money? Not until he actually makes the sale, and even then proving that the sale was for real cash is incredibly difficult.

With the new website, Jagex has announced restrictions for all new free accounts going in effect today:

  • New free-to-play accounts can only give away gold coins or items, or make a trade with an imbalance in the recipient’s favour, to the value of 25000 coins per 24 hours. This limitation also applies to drop trades.
  • New free-to-play accounts can make Duel Arena bets with no greater imbalance than 25000 coins per 24 hours.
  • We have also made a change to Wilderness PvP, where noted items will only appear to the original carrier when dropped upon death; not the killer. This affects all accounts – not just ones subject to the limitations above.

“The limitations will remain in effect until the affected account purchases membership. Subscribing will remove these restrictions permanently, even if the subscription later ends and is not renewed.”

It’s disappointing to see how much rampant gold farming can affect a game for its players.

Jagex Removes Dice In Runescape: Fights Scams


Back in 2009 when Jagex created the bag of dice, an item that allows a player to roll a set of dice and broadcast the results to his clan chat, they didn’t exactly anticipate that players would take their invitation of emergent gameplay and go ahead and turn the item into a tool for underground gambling systems run by shady, often fly-by-night operators. And when Jagex threw the nuclear switch and knocked all of the bots offline a few weeks ago, the number of players sitting at the grand exchange (and elsewhere) advertising their dicing services rose exponentially. Barring one shattered poodle, Jagex was forced to step in and proclaim that this is why we can’t have nice things, Pepper.

In response to the growing complaints over spam, scams, and shady business, the dice have been disabled and will be removed upon the next content update. Mod Mark commented:

Don’t gamble! There are too many people who will try to scam you or alter the odds in their favour. It’s never supported by JAGEX unless it’s about gameplay (like the duel arena). It’s likely that dice scammers will move over to another method of trying to scam you, so please, be vigilant and remember… if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably a lie.

Of course, dicing will simply be replaced by another popular method, assuming one hasn’t already. Still, busting bots and blasting a scam method in succession is rather impressive, even if the latter was essentially Jagex’s own Frankenstein’s monster.

Runescape: No Longer Housing Bots, Consolidates Servers


As I’m sure many of you are tired of hearing by now, Jagex dropped a bomb on its own game when they released an update that not only began banning bots at a rate of 9000 per minute (their figure, not mine), but also rendered the programs useless by gutting their core programming. When the dust cleared and the cheaters were gone, however, the impact of Jagex’s update became readily apparent, in the form of a 60% drop in player activity. Where 90% of the users removed were free players, according to Jagex, only 10% were paying members.

Breaking the bots caused an expected drop in free-playing activity due to millions of gold farmers no longer being in the game, so we have removed a number of free game worlds. While we were at it, we also made a smaller amount of changes to the member worlds, which will make grouping for popular in–game activities as easy as possible.

Unfortunately this has left the worlds a little sparse, and to make up for it Jagex has shut down around 30 servers today to consolidate players, from 172 down to 139. You can read the entire announcement here.

Jagex: Nuking Bots, Suing Cheaters, Sends Official Warning


Yesterday was bot nuking day at Runescape, and according to Jagex it has been an overwhelming success not just in cleaning up the game, but disabling 98% of the bots and gold farmers. Something has come to my attention from another player about receiving an email claiming to be from Jagex, offering amnesty and a last chance if the user no longer cheated. If the player continued botting, however, the email threatened to add their name to a list of defendants in Jagex Vs John Does, a pending lawsuit in the District Court in California.

The email is real, as Jagex confirmed on their forums. Check it out below:

Dear Player,

We have strong evidence that you may have purchased and used botting software in the past, specifically ibot software.

Botting and the cheating it brings is destroying your game, violates Jagex’s rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and any player that continues to engage in botting activity has no place in our community.

As part of bot nuke week we are offering you a 1 time amnesty and settlement lifeline, which is a chance to reform and change your ways. We’d like you to contribute to the community in a positive way, to compete on a level playing field as everyone else does and play in the true spirit of the game, with integrity. All of your accounts, main and otherwise, are now on our watch list and will be monitored for the use of ibot and all other inappropriate third-party software. Regardless of who you are or how long you’ve been with us, if you decide to cheat and bot ever again we will have no hesitation in: (1) permanently removing your account from our wonderful community in order to protect Jagex’s rights under the DMCA, and (2) naming you as a defendant in Jagex Limited v. John Does, which is a lawsuit based on DMCA violations that is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (Civ. Action No. SACV11-00969-CJC).

Please note that this amnesty and settlement offer is protected under Fed. R. Evid. 408. If you ignore our offer and instead continue use botting software, we reserve our rights to pursue statutory damages against you for between $200 to $2,500 per act of past, present, and/or future botting in accordance with 17 U.S.C. 1203(c)(3).

We do hope you make the morally sound and lawful choice of turning your back on bots. We look forward to seeing you in game having fun in a way that is true to the spirit of fair play and respectful to your fellow players.

Yours sincerely,
Mark Gerhard

You can find the thread confirming this at: 14-15-831-63310676 (Enter this into the “jump to thread” form on the forums itself). But wait! There’s more! Mark Gerhard promises yet another update today in Project Clusterfutterer (they’re going to keep making me say that, aren’t they?) with more updates later this week to combat the remaining 2%.

It's Bot Stomping Day In Runescape


It’s bot stomping day on Runescape, and that can only mean one thing: Celebration. Now, I’ll be celebrating in the usual fashion (cooking goulash and decorating my bathroom with crepe wrappers), but over at Runescape Jagex is celebrating with in-game events all week. Check out the announcement here, and prepare for a full week of extra experience, points, and more.

Yes, the servers are still down as of this writing, but what is a nuke without an accompanying electromagnetic pulse? I have a bit more coverage of Bot Nuke Day in Runescape coming up.

It’s Bot Stomping Day In Runescape


It’s bot stomping day on Runescape, and that can only mean one thing: Celebration. Now, I’ll be celebrating in the usual fashion (cooking goulash and decorating my bathroom with crepe wrappers), but over at Runescape Jagex is celebrating with in-game events all week. Check out the announcement here, and prepare for a full week of extra experience, points, and more.

Yes, the servers are still down as of this writing, but what is a nuke without an accompanying electromagnetic pulse? I have a bit more coverage of Bot Nuke Day in Runescape coming up.

Jagex Announced Project Clusterfutterer: Bot Nuking On Tuesday


Coming on the heels of yet another announcement to ban bots, Jagex has formally announced Project Clusterfutterer. Mark Gerhard posted an announcement on the Runescape home page stating:

Today, I am really happy to say we are in the long-awaited position of being able to announce that we’ll be launching our most formidable bot-busting weapon in our history, targeting what we believe to be 98% of the bots seen in game.

The initiative aims at “reflection bots,” so called programs that operate by reading the information being processed in active memory and act upon it, similar to how AI in a single player game always knows where you are because the active memory tracks your location. At least that’s my understanding of reflection bots.

Check out the full announcement here. Jagex is so excited, they have a plan of events next week to celebrate Bot Nuking Day.