Would you work for Jagex?

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?