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JMOD POST Page 20, 59

Recently there has been a lot of controversy regarding the update to climbing boots as well as regarding me and my role in the situation. Now that my forum ban (which was unjustly given to me [But that's a separate another issue]) has been removed, I can finally say what I had been intending to since shortly after I was banned from the forums.

Some of you may have seen my name pasted and spammed all over RuneScape, in clan chats, the Recent Updates and Rants forums, and for those with access to it, the High Level forums as well. All these messages and posts were regarding a video (which I won't link to or encourage you to watch) that was made with regards to the change to the climbing boots. In it I shared a couple of screenshots sent to me, as well as some I took myself regarding certain individuals who may or may not have been told beforehand about the change to the boots, as well as an exponential increase to their in-game wealth as a direct result to this update.

In the video, I also sent somewhat of a hostile message towards Jagex and Mod Mark, the Mod who appeared to be leading this update. While hostile, it was hosted on a website unrelated to RuneScape.

The post I made a few days ago was also expressing my discontent with the update, in a more friendly way, that broke no Jagex or RuneScape rules.

From what I gathered, my video was the cause of my forum ban, which then set off a chain of events involving tens of users spamming the RuneScape forums, and hundreds of users rioting in game and spamming in clan chats. Unfortunately, having somewhat of a fairly decent sized following on a video sharing site can do such things.

For those who did see my video, you will know that because of it, many people, myself included, think there was a leaked bit of information regarding the boots, which enabled some users to stock up on them prior to the change happening. Whether or not this is true is not something that can be determined from..

...pictures alone. As most of you know, RuneScape pictures, and in some instances, video, can be faked. Anything that appears to be unrealistic is something that could be faked. However, in the same sense, just because something seems untrue, does not mean it IS untrue. While I imagine many of the pictures floating around with people showing thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of noted climbing boots are fake, it does not mean ALL of them are fake. To assume such a thing is to assume that someone created all of these images within the first few hours of the update, which also makes the assumption that all of these people are capable of editing pictures to make them fully real looking, as well as assuming they all had the proper image editing software to fake such a thing. Therefore I think it is extremely safe and conservative to assume that not every picture or video seen was a fake one.

There are also cases of high volume amounts of boots being shown in game by actual users. I myself have seen players with thousands of noted climbing boots,who actually traded me them in game, meaning I saw them in the trade window with my own eyes, the most being around 18,500 from ONE player, many others having low amounts of thousands as well.

This is where my initial problem with Mod Mark and Jagex in general occurred. Mod Mark was seen by everyone in his clan chat at the time, STATING that not a single user had over about 1,800 climbing boots. My problem with this, as already seen pretty much everywhere (on and off RuneScape), that this was simply untrue. If Mod Mark had the guts to say that he and the other Jmods responsible for this update had researched it prior to implementing it as much as they did, then certainly he would know if that were actually true or not. Another interesting tidbit of information I would like to pose at Jagex is why they claim they know how many users had how many boots in game, when previously, when the Dung. glitch...

...allowing users to smuggle Daemonheim items into the actual RuneScape area still worked, they said there was no way for them to check individual user's banks to see who had items and who did not? Which is the true answer? Can you check user's banks with such ease as you claimed with your most recent update? Or did you just hope that we didn't bother to check for ourselves if it was true or not.

Another flaw in the story I see is that why, as a company, would Jagex admit if there was a leak of information or not, when they are not obligated to admit such a thing? There are such things as ways to communicate with people apart from in RuneScape, such as instant messaging clients, Voice Chat programs like Skype, gaming systems like XBox Live, or even, God forbid, word of mouth. There is no way to EVER contain information 100% of the time. It's also not like this would be the first time information was leaked before. It's common knowledge now that both the Extreme Potions update, as well as the Ancient Curses update, were both leaked prior to them coming out, as shown in multiple old messages, as well as chatlogs from messenger programs. Even my friend himself who's name I won't mention (But who won a certain Machinima Competition and went to England) was given information about updates to the Orb of Oculus prior to the updates actually being released. While updates to the Orb are far less game damaging than changes to the price of a once-cheap item, a leak is still a leak. Therefore, while I am not 100% certain *MYSELF* if the update to climbing boots was leaked or not, there is not a doubt in my mind that it could have very, VERY easily have happened.

Finally, many people are telling me and other upset user to simply "get over it", and that these people just "got lucky". No. Incorrect. Let me explain to the the difference between getting lucky, and being given an unfair advantage. Getting lucky would be getting an Armadyl hilt twice in 5 kills. Getting lucky...

....would be soloing Corporeal Beast and getting a Divine Sigil all to yourself. Buying ten thousand climbing boots, and having them rise 35,000% in price is being given an unfair advantage. People go to bosses with the idea of getting good drops in mind. No one (unless the information was leaked) bought thousands of climbing boots with the idea of them rising so high in a single update in mind. That's why this wasn't luck at all, this was simply an unfair advantage given to many lucky individuals.

Mod Emilee had the courtesy to throw some mathematical statistics at us regarding how many users had how many boots. In short, she said that 1% of RuneScape's players had, I believe it was, 500 Boots or more in their bank. 1% seems like a paltry amount sure, but we're working with percenatages. Which goes to 100. Let's try working with numbers. That single percent equates to tens of THOUSANDS of players, meaning tens of THOUSANDS of players made off much better than anyone should have because of this update to climbing boots. That DEFINITELY seems unfair.

I don't quite understand why Jagex didn't just raise the price ceiling of Climbing boots on the Grand Exchange to be more flexible and just allowed them to raise naturally on their own based on players' demand for them, similar to how they did for raw bird meat and eyes of newt a while ago. That would have made so much more sense, and would have been less suspicious.

To conclude this rather lengthy series of posts, I just want to say that I am sorry on many levels for any damage I have caused to the forums, to any clan chats, and to any players affected by my "followers" and supporters. Please let it be known that I *never* once told any of them to spam my name anywhere. Give that credit to a separate video maker who told them to do that, who's name I also won't mention. I do not encourage spam, riots, or rule-breaking in any ways. It's not what I am about, and I know that no change will ever come from such things.

I however, am NOT sorry for the opinions I have about this update, nor the way in which I handled it. Let me and what I did be proof that we do care very much about these updates, especially the ones we feel are completely unjustified, and that had many better alternatives that took little to no thinking to implement them over the currently made choice. I know that at this point a rollback is out of the question, but it's sad that it had to come to that, when it could have been executed SO much better.

I would also like to say I still stand by my opinion that Jagex, you as a company need to learn to trust us with the truth, and learn to be more honest with your players. Hiding things does nothing, because someone always knows, and someone will always find out. Just please tell us the truth more. It's better for everyone in the end. It wouldn't hurt to admit that you guys are wrong sometimes either.

To those of you who read the entire message I posted, I want to thank you for your time. I hope this clears up things involving me and my role in this a little bit

Thanks everyone.

The problem that I think sparked everyone was all the fake images going around, it did make the situation sound more crazier than it was, and I won't lie, I was more infuriated knowing these pictures were around (but it calmed down a lil knowing they were fake).

But I can assure you MMH does not lie! HOWEVER, the whole 1% could mean anything, 1% of 10,000 players is still a lot of players who had an unfair advantage, which still makes it unfair in it's own right (imo). I mean there are currently more than a thousand santa hats (which one person owned at one time), how could there not be more climbing boots?

As for the Daemonheim bug, they said that any item once used, traded, unweilded, etc will automatically disappear as they have safe locks in place to make sure if they get smuggled out they have no use (besides looks, but at one point im sure they'd be forced to take them off).

But let's face it, did any of the shouting even help? The riots? Not really. Flaming a mod doesn't do anything, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if they decided not to change anything due to the attitude of some of the players over the last week, it's shocking. At the same time, it's more embarrassing for Jagex to have their players think of them like that, it's just very dangerous for their own company to begin with! >.>

Anyways I think we're getting ahead of ourselves, no need to complain on silly bans, etc, that's not going to help the update. It's still wrong in the sense of it being an unfair advantage, which is stated in the Bug Abuse rule and is what Andrew stated when he removed tradeable rares in 2003. It was wrong for a reason and they knew it, they just thought they could get away with it for a good intention, but again that wasn't a very bright solution to things.

One last thing - No point in complaining now, boots have been alched, no rollbacks will ever happen this late, all we can do now is watch climbing boots crash and laugh at Jagex's price theories.

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The man of the year is back.

Glad to see a response, even after the situation.

I agree about pretty much everything, especially about players having a LOT more than 1.8k boots, not many people are foolish enough to believe otherwise.

Nice read, you should not be having to apologize. You did nothing wrong.

I am not one of your "followers" however I still see that jagex was wrong in this instance, and they have taken no action to fix this.

Players also did not spam your name in chats. There is a video on youtube, maybe you favorited it, I forget, however the user simply says "Logdotzip" in Mod mark's clan channel and he gets kicked, this is not okay.

Also, about the figures you provided, 18.5k maybe Mod Mark missed a 0 and added it to the price of the climbing boots, who knows.