Interviews with Runescape Fan Sites: RunePlanet

Today's interview is with Aaron, one of the founders and developers of RunePlanet (formerly known as RuneAddict). RunePlanet is very dear to my heart. Not only it's one of the oldest Runewise's partners, but it's also the only fan site that features Runescape Reader's Digest posts, which I am very grateful for. It saddens me that Jagex decided not to include RunePlanet into their fan site support program (for some "historical/personal issues", I am afraid), but it does not make the site less safe and friendly.

Q: How would you describe your site in a few words?
A: Friendly, interesting and a family.

Q: Can you tell us about major milestones of your site? A little bit of a history?
A: Certainly, our biggest milestone was the tracking signatures, we were the first website to offer them, this initiated a huge interest in our site.
RunePlanet/RuneAddict was setup in April 2007, the site started out as RuneAddict, however since we did not register RuneAddict.com it was eventually bought by a RWT website, we did not like this bad image for RuneAddict, so we changed the website to RunePlanet. The design of the website that is used now was created by the co-owner of RunePlanet Da Legend369, who was previously one of the most popular signature creators out there.
A more complete history of RunePlanet can be found here.

Q: What inspired you to start a Runescape fan site?
A: I was a part of many fansites, however all of them were very...big, so no one really knew, or cared about each other, I wanted to change that with RunePlanet.

Q: What were your original goals for the site?
A: Our original goals were to have interesting content, good signatures, and a friendly, helpful community.

Q: Had your goals changed over time? If yes, how and why?
A: Partly, once JaGeX started providing support for fansites, we tried very hard to become one of the approved fansites (to the extent of changing our name to not be confused with RWTs), but after awhile we no longer felt the need to have approval from them, we'd rather provide the best service for our users, our friends than to be censored by another company. (but to clear it up we do NOT support RWT).

Q: Was it the first web site you ever created?
A: No, I created quite a few before this, I actually created a few other (RuneScape) fansites before this, however RunePlanet was the biggest success.

Q: What technologies were used to create the site? Did you add new technologies into the mix after you created the original version?
A: The site relies heavily on PHP and SQL, as the site progressed we had integration with more Javascript and AJAX (mostly from Da Legend).
The signatures use the GD library, and cURL.

Q: Is there a unique feature/service your site provides to Runescape players?
A: Not really, at least not anymore, I feel that our signatures are very unique and beautiful, we were the first to offer tracking signatures and one of the first to offer Adventure Signatures, however other sites now offer these, which is always good, we need competition :).

Q: Which feature/service took the most time and effort to create?
A: This is tough, I'd say the tracking signatures, they were such a massive hit that I had to redesign some of the code because they were getting so much traffic, at one point we were getting ~10 requests per second.

Q: Which feature/service was the most complex from the programming stand point?
A: I'd say the adventure signatures, we started using cURL to get the adventure logs, I had never used it before and it took awhile to get used to it, but it is very awesome :P.

Q: Is there a feature/service of the site you are most proud of?
A: The community, people that would have never met are now great friends because everyone there cares about one another.
I'm also proud that I inspired other sites to offer services we had.

Q: Did you start the site alone or with friends?
A: RunePlanet was an evolution of one of my older RuneScape fansites, so most of the users from that site came over, a few of them still visit to this day. After a few years I also decided to partner with a fellow site owner, Da Legend369, (and Topper4125 was also promoted to site owner).

Q: Are you the only developer of the site's code?
A: Lets see here:
The website was designed by Da Legend369
The original stat signatures were designed by Topper4125
The modern signatures were all designed by me, excluding the Da Legend signatures which were designed by Da Legend369, and modified by me.

Q: How much time do you normally spend supporting the site? A few hours a day? A few hours a month?
A: As I have become less interested in RuneScape I spend very little time working on the website (however this will be changing soon...I'll be providing you with more info on why at the end of this interview).
When I first started RunePlanet I worked on it daily, I spent many hours each day working on features.

Q: What is the most difficult/challenging task you have to do to maintain the site?
A: The hours I spent working on the signatures were pretty challenging, however I really enjoyed it, it made me think, "how am I going to do this...what will it look like, will this look good?"

Q: How many staff members do you have? How did you find/chose them?
A: We have about 10 moderators, 2 "Lead" admins, 6 site editors, and 3 site owners.
They were all picked by their performance, and their activity on the forums.

Q: Are there aspects of web site management you were able to completely delegate to others?
A: Yes, I previously did all of the interviews on the site, and did a lot of site content, we now have an entire staff that provides guides, interviews and news to the site :).

Q: Did you even had to deal with hostility and/or attacks from other fan sites?
A: Not really hostile, however we have had sites steal images or information, we were not happy about this to say the least, however everything worked out.

Q: Did you ever consider making money with the site or is it just a hobby?
A: We do have ads on the website, however we do not make much money from these, the money goes to support the server.

Q: What do you think about the current Jagex's fan sites support program? Do they do too much, too little? Is there something you'd wish would go differently?
A: Well I'm sure most people know my feelings on this program, but I will state it again, I honestly believe it is a popularity contest, RunePlanet worked very very hard to get on this list, however we then decided we'd like 100% control of the aspects of OUR community. It was a good idea from JaGeX, but it should have been executed better.

Q: Do you still play Runescape? If yes, how often?
A: The simple answer is No. I was a VERY active user for many years, I managed to get ranked 19 in Cooking at the height of my RuneScape career. I did many interesting things, including becoming a Player Moderator, but that is all in the past, I no longer have interest in the game itself, I was on yesterday for the annual RunePlanet Christmas party.

Q: What's you Runescape goals, if any?
A: When I played my goal was to obtain 200m cooking XP, I had 3 or 4 friends do so while I was doing so, one of them, the highest rank was Neeko74.

Q: What kind of Runescape player are you? Which Runescape aspect is most appealing to you: quests, role-playing, skilling, pking, minigames etc.?
A: Skilling, I never had interest in PKing, other than to kill time with friends, the wilderness was great fun.

Q: Are there other Runescape fan sites you personally use as a Runescape player?
A: I do visit a few as they are owned by friends, Draynor, RuneWise, and sometimes Tip.it

Q: Do you follow/read Runescape blogs and news papers from other sites?
A: I do not really follow them, but I do read topics from RuneWise ;).

Q: Is there something you don't mind revealing about your RL (age, country, hobbies etc.)?
A: Sure, I am 22 (started playing around 16-17?), I live in the United States, for hobbies I enjoy programming, hanging out with friends or my girlfriend, I do make YouTube videos about technology which is always fun.


Thank you very much, Aaron!

P.S. A little "insider info" about upcoming updates at RunePlanet :)
If you are using RunePlanet signatures, you'll be pleasantly surprised soon. The signatures are being totally redesigned now: each signature, foreground, background, the generator etc.

Villandra Interview

New interview at RuneAddict. This time Arieder interviewed Villandra who is known for setting and reaching tough goals with her characters. Like reaching 99 Slayer with 10 hp or getting an untrimmed Summoning and Slayer capes. Good and thoughtful interview.

P.S. I also got interviewed today. Quite an experience, but I'll be quiet. I simply can't wait for Icey Dan1's video now :-)

Collaboration between Runescape Fan Sites. Continued.

In my first post about collaboration between Runescape fan sites, I did not mentioned a project Arieder from RuneAddict and I had already agreed upon. It was quite inconsiderate from my side and I apologized to Arieder shortly after. Fortunately, he didn't hold the grudge and finished the project today.

The project was about integrating Runescape Reader's Digest posts into RuneAddict, thus giving RuneAddict's users an easy access to Runescape news and articles I feature in this blog and giving the Runescape Reader's Digest even broader audience. Again one of those win-win situations I was talking about in the first post. You can see how it was done on the RuneAddict's home page.

With that, I want to thank Arieder for coming up with such idea and actually making it happen. I really appreciate it.

Runewise on Twitter

Well, I've been subscribed to Jagex's Twitter account for quite a while now and finally decided to start Runewise's Twitter too. Here is the URL: http://twitter.com/runewise

Feel free to follow if you have your own Twitter account, or subscribe to the RSS feed, if you don't. I'll make sure to return a favor and follow yours :-)

Will this Twitter account replace the Runescape Reader's Digest? No.
I will post in the blog as regularly as before. Twitter only allows for short concise messages and quick interactions, and that's exactly the way I plan to use it.

Plus following other fan sites and players is quite rewarding. I've been using it for a few days only, but it is already fascinating to see how other fan sites are being built and updated: Arieder is in the middle of the RuneAddict home page rework and MechScape World just started a new community event (by the way, if you like creating cool pictures, take a look - you might want to participate). With more fan sites joining Twitter it may become THE way to keep a hand on a pulse of the Runescape community.

Runescape Inverviews

Two interviews posted on RuneAddict (actually, there are more, if you like these two, you might want to take a look).

The first interview is with a maxed out player (Timlahaye) who took only 2 year to get there. There is something so alien about the way this kid play (or should I say work?) the game. For me it is scary to even think about devoting so much time and effort to the online game (though I do like playing Runescape very much).

Question: how much XP do you average per day, and how long do you usually play daily on average?
Timlahaye: 5m or so lately. But I am not sure on the hours average. Maybe 15?


The second interview is with a pure skiller (Elishot) with 2ooM Thieving exp and a few other skills way beyond 99. This one is more human. One thing that especially got my attention was a point Elishot made about Skill Capes.

Question: What was your favorite and least favorite updates that Jagex has done recently?
Elishot: A lot of people are going to disagree with me on this but the skill cape releases really ticked me off after a while. At first I thought they were great, but then I realized they are entirely based on showing off, and they HAVE changed the meaning of getting a 99. Before them, people actually trained what they liked, instead of trying to get a skill cape. Before, 99 was something that was not common and was looked at differently then now. Now people go for 99s just to get a cape.. and some people don't even like the stats that they train, they just want the pretty cape.

Interesting perspective, isn't it?

Runescape Tools at RuneAddict

Runewise has been affiliated with RuneAddict for quite a while, but with all honesty I personally hasn't been visiting RuneAddict very often. In fact, last time I was there it was still 2007...

Anyway, I went to RuneAddict today and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of work Arieder and his team have done over there. Some new services are indeed very nifty and I can only applaud. These are two I liked the most:
1. Skills Info (statistics about 99th in the game) - seemingly simple, very cool.
2. RuneDemon - somewhat similar to Runewise's skill analyzer, nicely done.

Enjoy!