Cause of bad manners in Runescape

I think everybody noticed that people's manners in Runescape are rather low nowadays. Many possible causes were brought to consideration, such as return of the free trade and wilderness, bots and gold farmers, removal of the word filter, maturing of the Runescape populations, un-maturing of the Runescape population, Jagex, world wide crisis and unrest in North Africa. But finally, Kayla was able to nail it on a head and found the very original source of all the troubles. See for yourself!

Don't turn your back on the RS community and other links

I am still catching up with hundreds of blog posts I've missed - it'll take me a few more days :)
Anyway here are a few interesting ones I found:

• Thoughtful (yet passionate) post from Jax about people tendency to see RS community in a bad light. She used Dungeoneering as an example, but it's not just about making Dungeineering teams. Made me think about my playing patterns too... Playing "solo" too much. Yet, I am usually playing in short sequences (30-60 mins) and infrequently (especially lately) and jumping into a clan chat for just a few mins feels odd. I guess it does not have to be that way - I mean, I shouldn't feel odd about doing it, should I?
• Aximili E I's blog reached two years milestone. Congratulations! Take a look at a few featured (by the author) posts.
• And finally completely unrelated to Runescape, but extremely important "Doors conspiracy revealed"! So true (and scary:) ) Enjoy.

No reward - No event mentality

Omnitec raises an interesting problem in a new Tip.it article. The problem is about players not willing to participate in in-game Tip.it events unless some kind of monetary/status reward is at stake.

Quite honestly I haven't experienced this problem myself. The events I participated in were organized by much smaller communities (like Canting Away festivals, Runetower or Runewise events). While there were a few activities with rewards attached, I don't think there was a single person who would come to those events because of the rewards. Quite on contrary, people were willing to sacrifice their experience and money in order to make it fun for everybody.

So, is there indeed a problem? Is that the case where size of the community is a deciding factor?
Does the problem appear in clans too or only on really big sites?

Runescape Community

Very good review of the latest Tip.it article from Aximili E I.

I especially agree with the comment regarding communities on various fan sites: "Its much easier to find a place where you can make a mark in a small forum like RuneScoop then in Tip.it."

There is an issue with small forums though. It is hard to find many people who would be interested in creating content. I have this problem at Runewise. Fortunately people do step up and help. After all about 50% of the content at Runewise was produced by volunteers and I am very grateful for that, but we are still constantly falling behind new Runescape updates. I'd imagine this problem does not exist for big fan sites.

I guess there is some point of balance, when the community is small enough so people are comfortable with each other, yet big enough that the number of content contributors is sufficient.

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.

Penguins as an indicator of Runescape Community health

As strange as it sounds, that is exactly what Alex's post is about. Nice continuation to the "Runescape Community" discussion.

The Runescape Community

Can I add anything to Merch Gwyar's post about Runescape Community? I don't know... I mean I can add more examples of players being friendly and nice to other players and, of course, some examples of players being rude and obnoxious. But that won't matter, right?

Yet... I have different view of the Runescape Community and the way it is now. I actually think that it hasn't changed. Well, not exactly, Runescape itself has changed and the community had to adapt, yes. But it didn't get either worse or better. It stayed the same. You see, we are talking about millions of people playing Runescape, some are bad, some are good (mostly good - just because people in general are mostly good). I don't think that out of a sudden good people left the game and bad people started to join, or vica versa. What I think is that some people left the game and some people joined - and that was it.