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?
Tags: RS Community, Runescape |
September 19th, 2007 at 12:54 am
They’ve always been douches towards there community.
When there was only a few thousand people playing you’d see Andrew and such walking about RS, hell he’d post on the front page and meantion it and stuff.
I remember him once talking about how he was going about as a level 3 and getting insulted and called a fake. XD
Since they got big, they turned into assholes.
Look at the clan chat, that is the most basic thing ever but it’s taken years of jagex promising clan support and not supplying and they had to literally organize full scale riots made up of hundreds of people to even get a simple thing like that put in.
Just don’t bother with them, it’ll take a lot of work for little payback.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Unfortunately, I just have to agree with your conclusions. Jagex’s dislike and disapproval or fan/help sites sips through. Or maybe they don’t know how to deal with it or (which is also possible) they simply don’t care. After all, we keep making fan/help sites without help/approval, people keep playing and paying money, number of subscribers grows - no reason for fan/help sites issue to be a high priority for Jagex.
September 19th, 2007 at 6:26 am
By the way, I made an RSS feed for RS News: http://www.dapper.net/services/runescape_news_short
Feel free to use it. Couldn’t get short descriptions for the news, but News name, date and link are there.
September 19th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Jagex doesn’t like us…
September 19th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Why would Jagex support a site?
They are a monopoly on a game they created. They don’t even comprehend the word “fan” because to them a better word is “slave” or “addict”. To be honest Jagex is a corporation making million of dollars why should they siphon some of that off for a few measly fan sites. To be honest the fan sites could disappear and Jagex wouldn’t care…because people would still play, and that is their bottom line.
Would I work for Jagex? Of course…the only way to make something better is to do it yourself…if they hired me I’d make a regular habit of going through and answer questions…and I’d try to use my influence for better game feature and to finally destroy macroing.
September 19th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
No I wouldn’t. I’d prefer to either do some DB admin work or come in as a CEO to steer the game in the right direction. MQ and I were tallking last night and we agreed they need to listen to the users more than they do now. I view Jagex as being as closed up as the original “web 1.0″ companies if not even more than them. I wouldn’t enjoy being told what content I could and couldn’t make.
And as for the fan art thing… Well they need to realize that not everyone who runs a fansite is a 13 year old
September 20th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Hey Shane, I very much doubt that becoming the CEO Jagex would do anything…I bet the current CEO doesn’t know the first thing about playing Runescape. He probably is more focused on general number, getting advertisements and such. Plus in large corporations…you usually have a Board thus they will control money and what big steps will be taken. The basic idea behind a corporation is to split responsibility over a wide range of people so that no one person can change the fortunes of the company. That is why corporations are so deadly. They make all their decision based on fiscal or monetary gain or loss…thus they lose any sort of human interest. You have seen the result with the way Runescape has changed into a very impersonal, dry game…as well as a no mercy mentality when it comes to people who have been playing for years, but a mentality of leniency or at least stalling for macros that ruin the game…as long as they pay a monthly fee for all their accounts (and many of the macros in the P2P worlds do exactly that…2 or 3 accounts to a person). In the end I would see it as better to be a low level Jagex mod than any executive. You could brighten someones day in relative anonymity instead of spending all day trying to convince a bunch of avarice executive piers that creating content for the fan sites is needed.
September 20th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Lol, you’re so right (sadly) on a more positive note, I remember when there where less than 2 hand fulls (thats 10!) people that worked for Jagex and EVERY update was a great one.
Now there is over 140 Jagex Staff Members their updates are more frequent, but suck more c*ck than a pornstar.
Anyway, I was going to apply for Jagex a couple of year back, however they’re sadly underpaid for their yearly income, it seems Andrew is more greedy than meets the eye.
The Hiscore thing I know information of and why it was made but I’m not sure that is public information so I can’t really state why.
As above, becoming CEO wouldn’t change a thing, you would only have Rank 3 priority (can’t say anymore than that, I’m already pushing it).
September 20th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
To CRAPAHPIRAT (sorry I can’t edit posts).
That wasn’t Andrew, that was Paul, on the account “Paul Eyres”, I talked to him on that account, he got verbally abused and called a noob quite a lot which was quite funny I thought lol.
September 21st, 2007 at 1:20 pm
GET REAL! Have any of you worked for a medium sized software company?
Key word: COMPANY. Yes, it’s about money - - welcome to Western Civilization! Money is what keeps the coders fed and keeps the servers running. If Jagex wasn’t watching the bottom line they would fail.
Jagex is a business. If they let just anyone use their name and images then they can lose legal right to Runescape as a trademark. If they openly encourage 3rd party sites, then they can become legally responsible for the activities of those sites. They have to watch their B-hinds or the whole company can be dragged down in courts. We are lucky they are a UK company, if they were a public US company then they could also be exposed to law suites from their own stock holders if the stock holders thought Jagex was doing anything other than pursue their “fiduciary responsibilities”.
Jagex is an impressive company. The way they rapidly release updates in innovative - - they started doing it when other RPGs were still selling shrink wrapped boxes for $50, and only released “updates” to fix bugs. Jagex provides several ways for customers to provide feedback, but yes, you have to provide that feedback via Jagex’s website. They watch their forums and I have seen many suggestions adopted into the game and many complaints addressed. There are a lot of software companies who don’t do this.
When any company grows it hires new people who don’t share the same original vision, that’s unavoidable. If you want RS to match your vision of where the game should be then you have option of posting on Jagex’s sites. If you want RS to become better than it is now, then you should realize that they need to spend their limited resources in-house and not waste them coddling fan sites which don’t generate any revenue for Jagex and could vanish in a month or two.
September 21st, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Waste money “coddling” fan sites? How hard is it to allow fan sites to use concept art, the SAME concept art that magazines and newspapers can use? Fair use can encompass these images if they wish it. It has nothing to do with copyright, it has to do with their unwillingness to provide minimal resources to the same people who pay them 5 USD per month of membership. All it costs is words.
Secondly, you seem to enjoy being put in the backseat by a company. Before I go on, are you free to play or pay to play? I don’t know about you, but I’ve paid money to Jagex for them to fund the development of a better game and a better community. To ask nothing of a company, to simply let them treat you however they want is frankly just a sheeplike thing to do.
It’s the consumer who made the game popular and it’s the consumer that they answer to.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:07 pm
You all might find this interesting…
http://jagex-ltd.com/CompanyHistory.aspx
It has a lot of technical information about Jagex I didn’t know and yes Jagex is a corporation.
I don’t see how they could get in trouble with trademarking. Releasing graphics for public does not make you liable to anything. Plus their forums suck. If they really cared they would make solid forums with some gooie and organization. As it stands the whole thing is a list of topics and threads.
September 22nd, 2007 at 4:30 am
I sent a query in a long time ago asking about “the community package” etc and got a reply about copyrights etc.
You’ve got to take into consideration Jagex doesn’t create these images “as” a company, but individuals -within- the company make them “for” the company.
The same thing applies to most ‘artists’. You make some work, and people can use it, but without modifying it, because it’s yours and you spent a lot of time on it. I guess if you really want some better runescape images, why not just take some screenshots and cut them out, or better yet - make your own?
September 23rd, 2007 at 6:07 pm
When an artist makes concept art for a company, the company indeed owns the rights to the artwork if it is contracted out. So, if I am hired by Jagex to make a picture of a dragon, they own the rights to it.
Making one’s own art is another alternative that I’ve thought about. However, I wrote this post in the interests of all fan sites who want to create more relevant layouts using Press images.
September 24th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
I missed something. What is the derogatory name for a black person that has been used as the name for an NPC?
September 24th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Not too long ago, an NPC (I forget where) was named “Nigger”. The mistake was corrected a day or so later and classified as a “bug”. The NPC has now been renamed Nipper. How that was a typo or a bug is beyond me.
September 26th, 2007 at 7:28 am
It was an NPC on the then newly-released Dorgeshuun city. I’m the one who posted that screenshot on Runescape Media section. Go dig it up somewhere in the pages for it.