RS2: Blaming Miniclip for all the evils of Runescape

The golden age of Runescape

Long ago and far away in a land that time has forgotten there was a game called Runescape, which people eventually realized was NOT Run-escape but Rune-scape. In this fair land all were good, true, loyal, brave and polite.

Miniclip ends the age of innocence

Then came the evil known as Miniclip. Runescape was listed as the best free online world on this site. And lo! Evil newbies poured forth in uncountable numbers from tutorial island. The once fair land of Runescape was covered in darkness. Thenceforth good was vanquished forevermore. Scammers, beggars, trash talkers and the liked now ruled the once fair Lumbridge.

What is Meili babbling about this time??

Well, in plainer talk, there is currently a feeling or popular idea that the old Runescape used to be good until it was advertised in Miniclip, which caused it to be flooded with annoying 12 year olds. An example of this is this quote from Tip It:

I have been playin runescape for about a year now when i first started playing everyone was really kind and nice and the word noob was rarely used. varrock sq used to be full of people all lvls helping each other out it wasnt rare for a high lvl player to help out a lvl 3 the game wasnt about who had done the most quests or who had the highest lvls it was bout helpin ppl makin friends nd just avin a nice time on the computer. But now a year later that has all but vanished. There is no peace anymore Noob is the most common word in the Runescape dictionary people ask for help and they get called a noob there are no more helping other ppl u cnt even trust ur own friend ne more as you think theyll scam u. WHY HAS THE PEOPLE OF RUNESCAPE CHANGED?

I, for one, do not recall Runescape ever being noob-or-child-free. Never has everyone been always friendly and nice to me. Am I actually playing a different game from the person I quoted above? There have *always* been beggars, scammers, noobs, etc. for as long as I have been playing. Sorry, I don't removing Runescape from Miniclip would make the game nicer.

Evil pk clans are fun!

My first clan

I kinda miss being in an evil pk clan. My first clan was a skill clan, Runescape Dinasty (RSD) which I joined way back in RS1 (or Runescape Classic if you wanna call it that) without even thinking much about it after its leader Livinlarge21 asked me to. I was so clueless about it I just said "yes" despite the fact that I later had to ask my friends what clans actually do! IIRC there was as yet no website - Livin was still in the planning stage. :)

Anyway, RSD was pretty small then and just full of friendly, nice people. I really enjoyed my time there. We had our own private forums and we had fun with RS events and generally just hanging out at the forums. However, with more and more people joining the clan became bigger and the inevitable happened, people wanted to pk.

Prior to this, I had never pked with anyone but a few close friends and at the most we would have 4 people. That was already considered a big pk group as if you split a set between 4 people it isn't really worth it. Mostly I was alone or it was just me and one friend.

Why I left it

The pk trips with RSD were my first time to pk in a much larger group and I didn't like it. I finally quit after several times when RSD members would attack the person I was with. Since we had a rule that a member could not attack another member, I was forced to just watch as they would attack my friends.

That, and Sue Me told me to quit lol. Shortly after this he said he was quitting RS, which pissed me off. I complained that if he was going to quit, he shouldn't have made me quit a clan that I loved just because he didn't like them since he wouldn't even be around anymore.

Oh noes not not an evil clan!

Around this time, Sue Me and Adx1 hit upon the plan of forming a pk clan. They asked me to join and I accepted. In the beginning we had a private hidden forum in New Era, an old fan forum, now defunct. For quite some time we had no name. :) We had a thread going asking for name ideas and finally settled on "Malicious Intent" as an appropriately scary-scounding name. Now that we had a name, it was time to let everyone know that we existed and were recruiting. The leaders were Sue Me, Adx1 and Zorro Toy. The sole requirement for membership was simply "to be one of the best pkers" and there was no level requirement.

I'm not evil, just misunderstood!

This really amused me personally as although I pk, I have never been a "hardcore pker." I've always been a nice, friendly type of girl, why even when I pked noobs I would say "hi" to them first! There were only a few girls in MI, these were myself, Pepsi, Flower (I'm not sure but I think she was a member for a few days) and Marryn. Pepsi and Flower eventually quit the clan after a few days so it was just Marryn and myself then. The lowest level member was, I think, Da Killmasta (70s) and the hightest was Fist of God (121).

Yes, but the Iron Chef ownz you more

As the clan was made up of pkers, it had a lot of enemies, chiefly those who had been pked by members. Somebody made a sig which had "Malicious Intent - Death is a gift you give to your enemies" and some forum wag made this one as a joke:


What is this "peekay" you speak of???

In contrast to RSD, MI were allowed to pk each other. I recall some members even threatened to quit after Sue Me pked them.

Anyway, MI had some really cool pks, the pics are on my website:

http://www.anzwers.org/free/jagex/malicious.html

Ironically, although when I first added these to my website I considered them "new," now that it is 2006, these are considered old. How time flies!

The pks were really fun although, as I stated previously, it sucks when you have to share the kills with a lot of people. We also had a problem with stealing kills. Whenever a victim was close to dying, MI members would all start maging him so that they would get the kill. This was considered a somewhat cheap tactic and annnoyed the pker/s who had done all the work catching and also taking damage while the kill stealers just maged once or twice and got the kill. Still, unlike today, all kills were always shared.

Pepsi, the owner of the New Era forums, or one of her group (it might have been her real life daughter Flower or her online bf) quarreled with one of the MI members and demanded that he be kicked. The leaders refused and Pepsi's group left MI. The clan forums were moved.

Good vs Evil

The best time for me in MI was the war with RSD, my old clan. Before this I spoke to Livin and my other friends in RSD as this would be a war where I might have to attack my friends. We agreed that it was just for fun and no one should be hurt if they get killed. :)

The MI tactic for the war was basically "return until we win!" This was a crucial part of our plan as we knew RSD would outnumber us four to one. Members pledged to use up their whole bank if they had to, no mean feat as many had over 100 sets.

Due to this tactic, the war was the longest lasting one I have ever seen, lasting for several hours. RSD claimed they won the war due to controlling the altar while MI claimed to have won it because they got more kills.

Oergg has some pics of the MI vs RSD war:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/banditelli/mivsrsd/

RSD are in purple capes, MI are the ones in blue and black capes. Many of the people in the pics were actually random pkers though. All of the events I mentioned happened in RS1.

Player mods

Today I gained some insight on RS's player mod system.

Ok this probably won't be interesting to many so feel free not to read the rest below as this is NOT an anti-pmod rant.Apparently, ages ago Ultima Online (UO) had a "volunteer program" where players signed up to provide online help. These people were counselors and provided all sorts of human-type help in the game, especially to newbies. :) So far, so good. However it seems that the program was totally corrupt.

Volunteers - mostly females
Game Masters (actual staff irl) -mostly young males

The predictable happened with some sexual hijinks, ingame favours and such like in this "Lum the Mad" link.

I must say that UO seems to have taken advantage of the volunteers and at one time even fired thier entire (paid) support staff. Were they relying almost entirely on unpaid volunteers as their customer support staff? Tsk tsk.

Anyway, UO scrapped the volunteer program and the volunteers sued them! And the volunteers won the case.

"The lead complainant, Catherine "Terendil" Reab, had worked her way up in the volunteer program to the position of regional lead counselor, managing a rather large team of volunteers under her. For this, she was given $500 per month as a thank you, in addition to various goodies (including sundries), both real and virtual (in-game), from OSI, including a free monthly account."

from Gamespy.

I guess the volunteers argued in court that they were exploited as they were unpaid workers who took the place for tech support which the company would otherwise have had to hire.

I am guessing this legal precedent is the reason behind many weird (to me) Jagex rules for pmods, for example the "no going out of your way to mod, just play the game as usual" rule. If the pmods actually went out of their way to help as the UO volunteers did, then Jagex would be vulnerable to a lawsuit as the pmods are acting as cs staff would! Plus other policies also make more sense to me now...

Salon also has an article on it.

Back to the first link, these is one of the juicy parts:

"The GM’s formed a PK group during this time, and they were sworn to secrecy about it. They made characters and super charged them, gave them goofy names and they went on regular rampages and killed players on purpose. For fun. To release stress."

Eh at least Jagex is nice enough not to make level 126 chars and pk newbs!

...Wait a minute, Jagex mods used to one hit kill players, too! Anyone remember that? IIRC Wickedwayz once had a thread in tip.it about how he wanted his stuff back after a mod killed him. He wasn't the only one either but that was in beta.

In RS we have had some minor incidents as well with Jagex staff and female players but I think maybe I shouldn't go into that.

"Many GM’s were on duty drunk or stoned. They would convey that to us in IRC."

Huh and we joke about customer support staff in Jagex...maybe it's actually true and they really are drunk when they answer cs queries.

"SRC Zaronia made a trip in about this time period (thanksgiving I think) to go see GM JA, she and he were on line lovers I guess. Well I am not sure if he chickened out or what, but one look at her — and I think he freaked, and he ditched her. Treefrog came to her rescue and he rescued her all right, for an entire week — in bed — she says they didn’t get out much, except to drink. She also bailed his ass out of jail for a DUI — she had to call OSI — and Treefrogs mother to get the money back she paid to bail him out."

*giggles* Apparently the girls got all sorts of stuff from all this like in game money, houses, special illegal one-hit weapons, as well as getting their character's stats edited.

First post!

Welcome to my new Runescape blog!

I am the webmaster of Meili's Runescape Pics. This blog will be for my writings, the site will continue to have the pictures.

The name of this blog is from one of my favorite places to hang out in RS1 (the old version of Runescape, now known as Runescape Classic), the stripey bank in Ardougne. Since this was the bank closest to the lever for p2p wilderness, this is the bank most pkers and high levels used.