So, I’ve come back to Runescape after many a year. Funny enough, I had been playing Guild Wars before this and after two days, I’d had my limit. I wanted to come back and play Runescape again. Being part of RSBANDB and not playing RS had really distanced me from the community and, well, I wanted back in! So I figured that I would go F2P for a time and if I managed to level my Mining to 70 I’d start a P2P subscription.

WILDY IS GONE! BAWWW.

That was one of my complaints when Jagex changed the way PVP works in Runescape. Now that I think about my experiences with the Wilderness back when I was a mere level 60, I’ve come to realise that I actually fucking hated it. I’d be going about my walk to the abyssal-whatever and some jerk would PK me on the way and I’d lose all my pouches. How fair is that? I think the removal of it will probably make a better gaming experience ultimately.

THE PLAYERS ARE SO IMMATURE

This is undeniably true. I was talking to Brad yesterday and he said it best, “The game has changed significantly, but the players are still the same”. Immature kids still play Runescape and everyone else has to deal with it. I deal with it by turning off public chat.

RUNESCAPE IS JUST CLICKING

Using the internet is just clicking. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything fun to do on it. Okay, lame comparison. I don’t mind it. I find it relaxing to watch TV and mindlessly chink away at an iron rock.

So, yes. I’m back. I’m going to probably make more Runescape Postcards like  this and this. Any suggestions as to what I should make it about?

And I feel like a complete jerk for really not noticing it sooner. I don’t normally spend my time reading topics in Runescape General Discussion since I don’t play RS anymore, but I’ve realised that the RS sections of our site consist of really good and interesting people. In some blog posts, I talk about the immature people on RSBANDB who act like sarcastic morons, but after really looking at the individual replies to topics in Runescape General Discussion and Runescape Questions, I really do think that we have a great and helpful community.

Because of this, I know that our community hasn’t really changed. When I first came to RSBANDB, I felt that there was a lot of really good and interesting discussion amongst people who typed well and were helpful. In the RS Questions forum alone, each question usually has about 3-15 replies from people who know what they’re talking about. Things haven’t changed. If you step outside the world of the Sandbox and Non-RS discussion, you’ll see good discussion going on. The only difference is that since I no longer play the game, I don’t really connect to what’s being said there. So the change is really just me, not any of you guys.

Wow, yes, I’m sort of babbling. But my main point is something I said in a blog post a really long time ago about how communities really don’t change, we do.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

So, there’s been some debate over here about the Sandbox. At one time (not too long ago), the same person complaining about it once praised it for having a rich culture. Either way, I’m not blaming anyone for changing their minds about the Sandbox. Sometimes, good things in excess can be a little too much for anyone.

I was joking around with Shane and I told him that the Sandbox should be hidden from public view for two weeks to see if overall post quality went up. This sort of got me thinking.. would post quality go up if that were the case? Users spend a lot of their time in the Sandbox and if it weren’t pruned, it’d no doubt be the largest subforum on RSBANDB.

What if we hid the Sandbox from view for a while? Would it make a difference, and if so, how? Should we consider it? I don’t know, honestly. I always like having a few laughs, but things in RSBANDB have lately been a little sluggish. I’d like to know what you all think.

I got the news via The Unofficial Andrew Gower Archives that Constant Tedder is no longer the CEO of Jagex. The new CEO, Geoff Iddison (who has apparently been at the position since August) used to be the CEO of PayPal Europe. Here’s what TameBay (an eBay consultants’ blog) had to say about him:

Geoff was an unusual MD, in that he wasn’t afraid to mix with his customers. He was a frequent speaker at eBay University leading the PayPal session which was popular for all the wrong reasons - it was a chance to ask about that unfair charge-back! Geoff however was never afraid to enter the fray and field the questions.

If this Geoff Iddison is indeed the way they describe him as, could he be a positive asset to Jagex? Let’s assume that the gripes of Jagex being indifferent to fan-site communities stemmed from Tedder’s ideology. If Iddison were more into getting involved in the community, could we see this as being a new age of how Jagex interacts with its customers?

I certainly hope so and I’m also curious about the circumstances involving Constant Tedder’s departure. He was a long-standing friend of Gower’s and he doesn’t seem near retirement age. Either way, I hope that Iddison’s arrival to Jagex will help the company succeed in areas that it’s currently behind in.

Geoff Iddison on the left.

While most sites concentrate on the game of Runescape itself, Rob and Ren, co-founders of The Unofficial Gower Archive, steer clear of this well-trodden path by focusing on the most prominent figurehead of Jagex Ltd—Andrew Gower. Though a relatively new site, Gower Archive is packed with fascinating information about the mysterious Mr. Gower, including pictures, his curriculum vitae, and even old renders of Runescape Classic. I had the pleasure of interviewing the two to learn about the hard work that goes into making such a unique site.

1. How did you two come to meet each other? Was it a mutual interest in Andrew Gower?

Rob: We met on Wikipedia, after I recreated an article there on Andrew Gower with all the knowledge I had on him, using an archive of his personal website. He posted in the discussion page claiming he had a few pictures of Gower. I contacted him via Wikipedia and then talked to him through AIM and MSN. That’s when research on Andrew Gower commenced.

Ren: Pretty much. Through our Wikipedia contributions, Rob found out that I had material relating to Andrew Gower which wasn’t generally available. He got in touch with me it in April, and I was glad to find someone else who found it interesting. We’ve never met in person though, as we live in different countries.

2. Which tools do you primarily use to find information on Gower? What limitations do they have?

Rob: Basically the most prominent tools we’ve used are Google and the Wayback Machine on archive.org. The only thing that limits us is that some pages aren’t archived that we’d like to view. However, we’ve gained A LOT of information using those two tools alone. We also asked a Mac programmer named Nicholas Shanks about Gower. Apparently, Mr. Shanks went to school with Andrew. He was wondering if the article on Wikipedia was about the same Andrew he knew, and it turned out that it was.

3. In your opinion, what was “the tip of the iceberg” when you started your search into the life of Andrew Gower? What bit of knowledge caused you to delved deeper?

Rob: I guess it was when I found his website on the archives. I became immensely interested about what the guy has done with his life. Then I met Ren, and it sparked my interest further. My main interest is DeviousMUD, but there’s not much left about it sadly.

Ren: Good question. Originally my interest was fairly passive – back in 2001 Andrew was pretty accessible, as in we were both on the IRC channel at the same time, his old website was still up (and not too unknown in the community), and he had his webcam running most of the time. I archived this stuff at the time and didn’t really go out of my way to find more. When I met Rob and found out that he was interested in what I’d found I thought that there might be others out there who felt the same. Andrew Gower is an amazing individual who has achieved a lot and I like a challenge, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to try and find out more about who he was.

4. What process do you go through to determine whether or not a piece of information is legitimate? I’ve looked through your site and noticed that some material is unable to be linked to since it happened in a chatroom or on a site which no longer exists. Essentially, is it up to the visitor to trust you on this type of content?

Rob: Most of the information we have is backed up by trusted sources. Ren finds most of the stuff we have, anyway. He runs it by me and I agree with what he’s got and he uploads it on the site. It’s up to the users to trust our data, but we’re 99.9% sure that our information is completely legitimate.

Ren: There are several main sources for information: the media, websites, personal archives, the Internet Archive, Google Groups and first-hand accounts. I found many of these sources with the help of Google. It is true that much of our content is now impossible or difficult to find elsewhere. However, I’m a bit of a hoarder, so over the years I’ve kept copies of interesting material. Where possible I’ve provided links to working sources on the website, but for the rest you’ll have to trust in us and believe in our confidence regarding the material’s veracity.

The only inconsistency we could find on our website is from the IRC log dated 02 January 2002 and has MrAndrew saying it will be Runescape’s birthday in 7 days time (when other sources say Runescape’s birthday is on the 4th of January). The source is from tip.it and states the information is from the trustworthy Lightning, so we think that it is not fabricated.

However, someone could have got the date wrong somewhere. We have noted this consistency on our website, and if anyone finds something which doesn’t add up then we will definitely investigate it fully.

The material from “Andrew Gower’s Amazing Homepage” was taken directly from the Internet Archive copies of http://www.fitz.cam.ac.uk/~acg29/ and http://www.fitz.cam.ac.uk/users/acg29/ (originally hosted by Fitzwilliam College).

I was around in 2001 when MrAndrew was on IRC and ran the JagexCam and the majority of the logs and images were saved by me all those years ago. I provide dates and timestamps, so if you can track down anyone else who was there at the time then they can confirm it. At the time there was no doubt that it was him, as it had a Cambridge hostname and he possessed knowledge that nobody else could have known (e.g. providing information on upcoming updates). It was also through the IRC channel that I learned of www.runescape.com/runescript.htm which provided information on Runescape Classic’s scripting system.

I’m certain that the pictures of Andrew from JagexCam and his personal website are genuine, as they are from primary sources. The photographs given to me by HawaiiGopher all seem to be of this same person, so I am confident they are all of Andrew Gower.

The homepage contains a quote from Nick Shanks and we’ll have to trust him that he really went to school with Andrew Gower. However, I checked out an old archive of his CV and it all matched up. This was before our site went live, so he couldn’t have gotten the information on which school Andrew went to from us and it would have been pretty hard to find elsewhere.

5. I’ve been dying to ask this one. What is the BIGGEST mystery that you’ve solved about Mr. Gower and what mysteries are you currently trying to solve?

Rob: Well, there’s the penguins. I don’t know why he’s obsessed with penguins but I guess we’ll never really find that out. I’m always interested in finding out how long it took him to learn the Java knowledge he has and what sparked him to make DeviousMUD/RuneScape.

Ren: Rob vaguely remembered that Andrew’s middle name was Christopher, and as Andrew’s e-mail was acg29@cam.ac.uk it seemed plausible. However, we couldn’t just trust our own memory. After much searching to no avail I found definitive proof that his middle initial was C through one of his old Atari games. It was only when I thought of searching for “Gower, Andrew Christopher” yesterday and found a page on the University of Cambridge website which listed that name alongside several known friends of Andrew Gower that our minds could be put to rest and we could make that assertion on our site.

The mystery of the moment is Andrew’s GBA3D engine. If you check the communications section, he talks on IRC about his work on a Game Boy Advance 3D engine that he was intending to show at the 2001 European Computer Trade Show in London. He seemed pretty optimistic about it, going so far as to say it could have some patentable elements. But the story seems to end there, and I’ve heard nothing of it since.

6. Lastly, what do you see for the future of your site? Are you going to expand searches into the other Gower brothers?

Rob: We plan on finding more and more information on the guy as possible. We may add bits of things about other Gowers (considering there’s about like four or five Gowers associated with making games with Andrew) but there’s most likely not as much information on those people as there are on Andrew.

Ren: Much of what we don’t have are not on any website, no matter how much we use search engines. We’ll just have to hope that a visitor has an old IRC log or other material archived and feels like contributing it to us. Many of the photographs were provided by HawaiiGopher after I tracked him down through much Googling because Rob found an old forum post which contained some Andrew Gower pictures. I believe that the more visitors we get, the more likely it is that someone who has something worthwhile to contribute will come along and decide to help out. So spread the word!

As you can see, Rob and Ren have quite the detective skills and they could use your help as well! Their site provides a solid collection of content that leads back to the golden days where Gower brushed shoulders with his own players. These days, though far away, will always live on in the pages of The Unofficial Gower Archives.

Links:
The Unofficial Gower Archive – http://gowerarchive.googlepages.com

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?

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.

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.

So every now and then, there has to be a gap in posts where the e-drama dies down and the boring MQ shows through. I decided that since some people think that I’m negative toward a lot of fan sites (even though I’ve only expressed criticism of two), I’ll post a few sites that I believe are innovative in thinking up great new ideas relating to Runescape. Feel free to suggest any other ones that you think make the grade in terms of creativity. These are in no particular order, by the way.

1. RuneTUBE: It’s a good idea, but unfortunately it’s a little too niche. There is the ability to make groups, but there is no spark for a community. Unfortunately, there is little to no activity on it and it is now for sale. I guess that all-encompassing gaming video sites like GeeVee or even just plain old YouTube get the traffic. I think it deserves some credit though, since the idea was there. Another like-minded website, RuneRate, rewards top views with GP and it also seems to be dormant. I suppose it’s too narrowly focused of an area.
2. United Freedom Fighters (UFF): A bit of a cheesy site, but it has good intentions. UFF is essentially a free-for-all clan for anyone, regardless of level or clan affiliation. I’m not sure about the success of the clan, but these guys seem out to have a good time instead of worrying about winning. Go them.
3. RuneWise: I actually had never heard of this site until Vaskor first commented on my blog. Though we don’t always see eye-to-eye on things, I always thought that his site took a wonderful and more personal approach to Runescape advice. I actually recommend that you go there and enter your stats and see the suggestions you get for raising skills. If in doubt, there’s always the RuneWise forum to go to. I like the idea, it’s wonderful and it beats the impersonality of some of the larger sites.
4. Lumbridge City: A little hesitant to put this one here, as the site is well..it’s messy and clumsy. They have a bit of a tourist trap of a website running here, but the idea of a Runescape social network isn’t too bad. It allows you to do what sub-forums normally do, but in a more open way. You can create a clan group and message and organise events or you could visit the marketplace. There are many social capabilities offered here, and I give credit where it’s due. I don’t give credit for them trying to monetise on their “Runescape Power Guide!” and their numerous gold-selling ads. The site is a bit of a sham when they could’ve done more with it. Shame, I think.

Yes, I could only find four. I did try, but I felt like all Runescape sites were trying to just offer what’s already on Tip.it, RuneHQ, and the other huge Wal-Mart-ish RS sites. I think that sites who specialise in a certain area or promote a different way of thinking are the most creative. Rather than trying to do everything, why don’t we just be good at something?