I knowww, it’s been a while. I’ve been really busy with uni and, frankly, I haven’t had anything that I wanted to post here yet. Did you notice that “yet” was italicised? That means that I have something that I want to post here, but not right now. I’m going to post my first Informer news article on here when the deadline draws closer to it. I’m sad because not a lot of people read the Informer. Whenever the sticky in the forum is posted, only 1-2 people respond.

We’re working on a way to fix that though. Right now, I just suggested that we post Informer and Update news on the front page. This might get new listeners/viewers to these sections. Anyhow, the article is an interview. A damn good one too. I’ve never really interviewed anyone before, so I hope people find this interesting since I did.

-Stupid Things that Happen in Kristina’s Life-

Ok, so I did a really dumb thing the other day at work. My boss told me to disassemble a large metal display case before I leave to go home and I though “Oh, that’s going to be easy”. I used to work at Ikea and, believe me, I can put things together really quickly. But, I um… didn’t exactly realise that taking apart a dusty old metal case would be so hard. So.. important fact: the display case is next to the window and there is no space on the floor to set it down whilst disassembling it.

So I figure I’d do the LOGICAL thing and start unscrewing the screws from the top and work my way down. The screws are a bit..screwy..because they hold together two panes of the metal siding. That means that when I unscrew all the screws on one side, two panes come down. Well, TWO people are supposed to be taking this thing apart but it was just me. .. Long story short: I unscrewed one side of the case and one pane slipped out of my hand and almost broke the huge window next to it. The only thing that stopped it from doing that was a box I set there earlier XD.

When do you all think I’m going to get fired?

I’ve been thinking about this lately and I realised that after a long time of saying “Oh, yeah. I’d definitely work for them. I bet I could change a lot” that I would never work for them. I was talking about this with Mike and he mentioned how everything that goes wrong with Runescape is a “bug”. Was the naming of an NPC a derogatory name for black people REALLY a bug?

It’s nothing new when I tell you all that Jagex are 10 years behind the times. You know it already and you know that they’re doing nothing to catch up. On RSBANDB, in order to keep the most current new on the front page of the site, we (I never do this, admittedly. :oops:) have to manually copy, paste, and format the article. You know what would cut down on that all? It’s nothing that’s supremely complicated and it’s not brand new technology. It’s called an RSS feed and it wouldn’t take too much effort for them to implement one.

On top of that, I was just delighted to see that the question that I sent to Jagex about whether or not fan sites could use Press images was nicely responded to with a default message that amounted to “Please use our crappy .zip file instead”. Let me give you a taste of what’s in this zip file (I know I’ve complained about the “fan site kit” before, just bear with me).

Now, you might be able to make something with it if you cropped it, painted over it a little, and incorporated it into the design. But you can’t! Jagex’s license (contained in the zip) firmly stipulates that:

a) The images must not be altered in any way, except for resizing or rotating.

Do they even WANT fan sites to look attractive? Because of this, I asked them if they would be willing to allow fan sites to use images in the Press section of the Jagex corporate site. The section does NOT specifically prohibit fan sites from using these images, it just says that they can be used for “review purposes”. So rather than giving me a thoughtful answer, I get told to use their rubbish 3D renders that look like they were made in 1992 by a 14 year old.

Jagex does more than ignore any communities that exist beyond their carefully moderated official forums. In fact, I’m going to go as far as to say that they heavily dislike fan sites. “Oh, but what about the lite high scores page?” Do you all really think that Jagex did that so that fan sites would have an easier time accessing them? Almost certainly not. There was obviously some problem that was being caused by fan sites accessing their high scores and rather than disallowing them to do so, they made a light version. Granted, they decided to do one nice thing.

If there could be one thing to sum up Jagex’s attitude to fan sites, it would be this. Do you notice something? “Investigation in the Community Team”. There’s only a team to investigate communities, not inspire them or help them in anyway. How do you expect us to pay money each month to you all if you put us out to be the bad people?

Well, I took some of the criticisms to heart. Believe it or not, I’m a person who has feelings and logging on after a really long day to someone calling me a “c**t” wasn’t really something that brightened my day. I’m all for freedom of speech and, frankly, I don’t care about who said it and why. I’ve decided to improve on these criticisms.

So I put my mind to work and I came up with this.

I’ve been thinking recently about what categories fan sites fit into and I’ve come up with a few. Granted, there are probable more.. so if you can think of any then let me know. If you take a quick look at my list of Innovative RuneScape Fan Sites below, you’ll see that I chose fan sites that specialise in a certain service or feature. This is the first category that I am going to introduce:

• Service-oriented sites: Sites who are integral to the RS community by offering high-quality services that are unmatchable by larger sites. These smaller sites have a very specific plan of action when it comes to what they offer. RSBANDB’s “claim to fame” came about from the introduction of services that no one else had. It started with quality calculators, then spread to goal and stats signatures. Sites that offer services are often able to stay successful because there’s a smaller group of committed and/or talented people to keep things running. In order to stay a unique and savvy service-oriented fan site, the site needs to offer things that are either a) Not currently offered by any other site or b) Not offered in as high of quality or diversity.
• All-encompassing RS sites: I call these ones “Wal-Mart” fan sites because you can literally go to them for anything. Quest guides, item databases, dungeon maps, etc etc. The list goes on. They’re great sources of obtaining general information about the game. Their communities are often huge, as well as a little impersonal. Because Wal-Mart fan sites are so huge, they have a tendency to lack in providing a consistency in quality of their services. This isn’t unusual since running a fan site of this magnitude is a lot of hard work.
• Advice sites: These sites deal in the realms of giving advice, suggestions, and predictions regarding the game itself (or the community of RS). These sites probably don’t do as well as the above two, but they’re there to help anyone and everyone who needs guidance. I often think that some of these sites should be converted into blogs if the site owner can’t think of a way to expand the site to make it more interactive. There are a few, however, who do an amazing job of bringing functionality to their sites.
• Forums: Now, you might say “Wait a minute, that’s not a site!” but it technically is. Lots of clans represent themselves on forums rather than a full-blown site. Many people decide to develop a community rather than an actual site. In a way, this is good and bad. It’s good in a sense that people who visit these communities get individual help from other members. It’s bad in a sense that getting people to join is the hardest part. An example of a site like this is RSC.
• Illegal/Shady Sites: These sites deal in the “darker” side of Runescape. A dark side of Runescape. Sorry, that made me laugh XD. These sites are more able to monetise their content by selling macros and/or RS Gold.

All of these sites work together in supplying RS players with what they need, legal or not. We all do our part, no matter how small or large we are, in creating a supply to everyone here.

Lately, I’ve been designing a lot of far-into-the-future features for RuneWire. Yesterday, I designed badges that will pull the RSS feed from your RuneWire account and stick it on a nice little image for you to display elsewhere. I’m going to be putting them into sig form soon enough. They’re likely going to be released after we leave beta testing. So, it’s not too far off! Here are the samples.

Here comes the head of a pin part now. I’ve been putting together a design for the client. I had to make it small enough to fit in the corner of your screen while playing, while still including features that you need to use to upload screenshots and such. If there are any other designers who are reading this who can give me any feedback, please do! I’m all for learning new things. What I have so far:

Let me explain this a little for you all. The image uploader is hidden until you click the “>>” (Add Screenshot will be the alt text of the >> button) button. Then, it slides up and you navigate to the file you wish to upload, then click “Go”. The conformation or denial pops up in the uploader box when the file is/isn’t uploaded. This will all be developed in AIR, but we’re waiting for that to go into Beta 2. Cool? Uncool? I think it’s a nice idea. It’d be really cool if RuneWire became really popular, and we could integrate this into a larger RuneScape client that’s already out there. It really depends.

Okay, XD I’ve not wrote a semi-mean post in a while. I don’t know if this is mean. I don’t think it is. I was on DeviantART a few minutes ago and I was looking at a really wonderful self-portrait that an Australian girl took of herself. Here it is. So, I figured I would look around in her gallery a little more and I notice a comment on her userpage that simply said “Link. :)”.

Click the link and compare the two. XD The kid who drew that obviously isn’t a bad artist at all. He knows how to shade and he does have really neat art in his gallery. I just.. I don’t know how he finished that sketch and thought “Oh, this looks wonderful!” She looks like a scary version of James Spader. I just..yeah. If someone ever seriously sketched a picture of me that made me look like I was a different gender, I’d be a little freaked out.

Not to mention that people are supposed to get permission from the original artist (her) before releasing a sketch to the public. I just..yeah. Am I being overly picky? Is that sketch really a “diamond in the rough”?

I’m not going to needlessly attack Jagex for some of their recent actions against a forum moderator when they perm banned his account over a misinterpreted joke. However, I think that although a perm ban is a very harsh punishment, Jagex are really trying to do the best they can in the worst way possible. In order to understand why they’re so strict when it comes to warning/banning, you have to realise that they feel that since the majority of RS players are under 18, they have to protect them.

This sense of responsibility is annoying to everyone, frankly. We all know cases where the Jagex report readers have unfairly banned/blackmarked someone for something absolutely silly. I think that these guys maintain a zero-tolerance attitude to things like real-world item trading. Because of this, they do not “get” that some of the things that are reported are a joke. The reason why they’re pursuing real-world trading so scrupulously is that if they could potentially be held accountable for things like identity theft.

No, they can’t really be sued since it’s against their rules to do real world trading. But, it really hurts the game’s reputation if they let it seem like they’re not doing anything. This seems understandable from their point of view, but it’s outrageous to most of us. Jagex are not going beyond Runescape when it comes to addressing real-world trading. They do not push for legal action against sites who sell RS gold or sites which sell items for real life money. Instead, they go after their players because it’s easier for them.

They’re using the lazy method of getting something done and it’s negatively impacting people who only made the mistake of joking about something that probably shouldn’t have been joked about.