Sunday, February 14, 2010

RuneScape Dinosaur

One of rare articles from Tip.it I find myself completely disagreeing with. The author is complaining about lack of "solo game content" being produced by Jagex and how Jagex's recent focus on community building is hurting the game. I was shocked by the article, especially seeing it coming from Tip.it. I mean I mostly play solo, but I love what Jagex is doing for RS community now. Yes, the first half of 2009 was poor as far as new game content goes, but a series of updates late in the year more than made up for it. And I bet that lack of updates early in 2009 had nothing to do with RS community building. At some degree Jagex used community building activities as a filling for missing updates, but it was not the cause! If anything could be blamed, it should be MechScape, which was planned for 2009 and probably had been consuming a lot of resources and attention at the time. That would be my guess anyway.

Back to the article, the authors position just seems very selfish to me. Or am I missing something? I am surely biased when talking about RS community after all. Are there really that many "dinosaurs" who play Runescape exclusively solo and don't want anything to do with broader RS players networks? Might be a rhetorical question, as such players probably wouldn't read this blog anyway. But who knows, the article got published at Tip.it after all.

6 comments:

YT Da White said...

Personally I don't like a lot of those "community" based mini-games, Mobilising Armies is one such game that put me off the whole "community" thing and I haven't played it since the first week it was introduced.

Don't get me wrong though there are some mini-games that are enjoyable. Although the only one I really like is Penguin Hide & Seek, mainly due to the fact that you can gain a large amount of XP in any skill every week and it can be fun finding the penguins! If there were more mini-games like that, that weren't focused on a specific skill I would be more inclined to play them.

I don't mind being a part of the community and interacting, but the majority of the time I am surrounded by immature players who just like to insult each other and say they're better that everyone else. That's the sort of behaviour I can't stand and that is why I turn my Public chat off a lot of the time, its annoying. Of course that isn't Jagex's fault, its just the way of things and can't be changed IMHO.

BTW 'Biased' is spelt with an S not a Z, wherever you come from.

Nice blog. :)

Vaskor said...

YT Da White, thanks.
I want to clarify the post. When I talk about RS community building I am referring not to minigames, but to Jagex's involvement into broad RS community: what they done on RSOF, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, their Q&As, work with fan sites, clans and support for in-game events.

Fixed the spelling :-)

llocidul said...

That article made no sense, I seriously didn't understand a thing he said. What I did understand was that he wanted game content THAT HE LIKED... meaning the orb update made him made and mobilizing armies wasn't fun to him... Seriously though he basically said that he wanted RS to be a RPG, or that he though of RS as a RPG and that their was no MMO in there at all.

Alex said...

I was shocked when I saw a PMod who'd never been on any forum but RSOF, and I think there are a lot of those players out there.

I think we don't realise how rare we are in the whole of RS - we're the educated elite to an extent (regardless of levels) and most people only use fansites for guides, if at all.

Dan (silentc0re) said...

I recon the new skill could possibly be community based too

Which may be a problem, just like finding a worthwhile partner for the two group quests in the game (Heros and the other one where you pick your gang)

Jax said...

1) It's an MMO-MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER (if you want your solo stuff try Assassain's Creed or Dragon Age or...I dunno.....anything else?)

2)I think the weak start to 2009 was due to a Jagex getting ready to change leadership, an emphasis on tinkering with the smaller things and some of the big whopping stuff we got at the end of the year.

 
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