While doing a few quests in Canifis, I noticed a very peculiar set-up of the town. What I found there was HORRID and OFFENSIVE that I had to write this blog entry to tell you all how I’m on a mission to boycott Canifis forever. You shall see my reasons in a moment. As I walked through the town, I noticed that there was an NPC named “Svetlana”. I thought Oh, that’s awesome! A Russian NPC! How quickly my excitement faded. As it turns out, there are several NPCs with Russian names in Canifis, but when you examine them you get a rather unpleasant surprise:

“Seems a bit of a drama queen”.

A bit of a drama queen, eh? So all of us Russian women are just drama queens who secretly turn into werewolves when you attack us? We just sort of, I don’t know, have nothing better to do than to create drama and aimlessly walk around a swampy village according to Jagex. Here’s another:

“He keeps calling me comrade”.

Oh, right. Because all Russians are obviously commies who sit around drinking vodka all day saying, “AHH KOMRADE, ZIS IZ VEDDY GOOD VODKA. IZ BETTER ZAN ZAT CAPITALIST GARBAGE YOU AMERIKANS DRINK, DA?” That’s right, we’re all just a bunch of communist werewolf weirdos, don’t mind us!

“A travelling man. Are those fleas?”

Fleas? So now we don’t wash? We’re just a bunch of dirty gypsy communist werewolf drama queens? Well you know what, you’d stink too if you had to live in Canifis! Might I also add that ALL of these NPCs are hostile whenever you try to make conversation with them. You might say that “Oh, but MQ! It’s because they’re werewolves and they hate humans!” Wrong! It’s because Jagex thinks we’re all a bunch of anti-social overly-aggressive jerks. Let me introduce you to Irina, another participating citizen of the anti-Russian campaign that Jagex has founded.

“I bet she works out”.

Oh does she? We’re just a bunch of steroid-ridden women who are drama queens as a result of the influx of male hormones into our bodies? That probably explains why Jagex has made us all morph into WEREWOLVES when attacked. Oh, oh, oh, let me guess: we got the werewolf ability when Chernobyl happened.

In essence, Jagex has a rather peculiar view of Russians as being communists, masculine (the women), drama queens, poor, dirty, aggressive, and simple-minded. LET ME ASK YOU THIS, ANDREW GOWER: WHO WAS THE FIRST COUNTRY TO SEND SOMEONE OUT INTO SPACE? That’s what I thought.

More Russian NPC descriptions:
Vera: “She seems sure of herself”.
Yuri: “He’s staring at the moon”.
Georgy (which is actually more of a Bulgarian name): “A simple villager”.
Nikita: “The woman”. (Sorry, Nikita is actually a boy’s name.)
Zoja: “A healthy villager”. (You mean she escaped Chernobyl??)
Lev: “A tough looking villager”. (Yeah, you better watch out Andrew.)
Yadviga: “A well off villager”. (Her names means “wealthy”, that’s the only reason they say that!)
Sofiya: “A wise villager”. (They’re just saying that because it’s the meaning of her name.)

I don’t have much to write about, so I’ll leave you all with this:

I am so glad that Jagex are game designers, not architects.

It’s been a while, I know. Shane, Jeff, and I haven’t forgotten about RuneWire though. Jeff gave me the green light to begin further designs on the client. Looks like we’ll be able to utilise AIR for it and that makes me über excited. I’ve updated the design and fixed a lot of accessibility issues that existed previously. Though, I NEED your input on it. It always helps to have a second (third, fourth, FIFTH?) pair of eyes looking at this and telling me where the design might cause problems for users. If you can do that fully and courteously, I’d be glad to look into your feedback.

In other RW news, Shane (when he finishes midterms next week) will be implementing a PM system. I’m really happy about that. I’ve been heavily pushing a group system on RuneWire, but that will come much later, so don’t hold your breath. Right now, a few things need to be worked on. Mainly, I want to see a better notification system so that you can see when friends add you, PM you, reply to your posts, etc. Also, Anubis suggested a to-do list and that should be added too. I hope you guys find these things helpful (if you’re a RW member, that is).

Here are the design drafts of the client.

Login:

Main Client:

Image Uploader:

Settings menu: *Known issue: Opacity level should be changed to “Window Opacity Level”.

Notification box: *Will notify user of PMs, Friend adds, and Mini-blog replies.

This took me quite a long time to put together! It’s so hard designing a small client that won’t get in the way of your RS playing! If you have any feedback at all, feel free to comment on here.

PS: This blog is now running on WordPress 2.3 and I have tags now (instead of categories). I love the new version and many thanks to Jeff for sorting everything out for me!

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.

I was playing Oblivion last night and I realised that it was the voice acting that made me really pay attention to a story and get involved in it. In Runescape, I just click past most of the dialogue without even being bothered about the story. What if Jagex actually got decent voice actors to read out the quest dialogues? Would you find it more easy to become interested in the quests? Before anyone brings up the whole thing about loading times, let me just ask that you throw that out the window for now.

Now, we know Jagex are NOT good at making sound effects. I mean, heh, they have that ultra-lame sound your character makes when getting attacked (you know, the “eerrk!” sound. Or the “oorrkk” sound if you’re a male). Now that I think of this though, Jagex release so many quests every few months that it’d be a bit of a hassle to hire someone to read off the dialogue for each new one. Anyway, just a thought.

-Gripe that is not related to the above post-

Ok, for those of you who work in retail jobs/food jobs, isn’t it annoying when customers use your first name constantly? Yeah, I have a name tag, I get it. I don’t need you saying “Hey, Kristina, I like this purse. Isn’t this a great purse, Kristina? Oh, Kristina, this one is even better..Kristina”. Wtf, I seriously had a lady do that to me today. Maybe she just liked my name..or maybe she’s a l– Oh god, I didn’t even think of that. AND SHE TOUCHED MY SHOULDER. I need a new name tag.. I don’t want some crazy lady stalking me. My new pseudonym should be ______. (pick one for me)

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?

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.

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.