The RuneScape Pig Pen and Hacking, Part III

This site has become increasing negative about all aspect of runescape lately and I am really getting tired of it. If you dont like the game, the please spare the players that do and just leave quietly. Your negative attitude won't be missed, and your negative comments wont be missed. Is this game perfect, no. But you all seem to lose sight that it is just a game. If you dont like the interaction of other players, then there are tools that you can use to limit you interaction with them. Scammers dont bother me, why? Because I am smart enough to actually check the second trade screen. There are always going to be bad players, just as there are bad people on life. I suggest you learn how to deal with them, are you are in for a terrible life lesson. If you are going to quit, then quit but dont keep coming on this site and constantly bashing. I have meet alot of good people on this site and enjoy the interaction with them. The core of us came here from the Black Hole Experience and there was a reason that we all left their and that Boris started this site. Let try to keep a postive attitude, foster honest game play and be helpfull when we can. We are constantly getting new members to the PigPen and alot of these players are lower levels and could use a better example than we are settinng here lately. You can learn alot from a game. I hope each and everyone of you learns that teamwork, being kind, helpfull and honest is the basics of life."____________________________________________________________________I have something to say regarding Sir Gol's post.First of all, it's real easy to wax poetic on how there's too much bashing on runescape . But when you've been around the block as long as I have, (and unless Sir Gol is some kind of insane powerleveller I would surmise he has been around as long as I have) you see a lot of garbage in RuneScape. It becomes even more difficult to maintain a balanced perspective when you are so heavily involved in something like this.I have always had a problem with the people who post things like "...it's YOUR FAULT for getting scammed." Yeah, right. Because scammers have a legitimate purpose in RuneScape and it serves me right for letting them get the better of me? With that kind of mentality one could argue that laws are infringing on the rights of people to commit crime. I suppose that it's easier for people such as Gol here to shake his head and go "tsk, tsk" and pretend that it's somebody else's problem.As for the people who post that they are going to quit, they are frustrated and unhappy. I don't mean that they had a bad day and didn't get a whip PK in the Wilderness, I mean they had a BAD DAY, probably the latest in an ongoing stream of bad days (or weeks, or months, or years...). And a lot of the time it's because people view Jagex as being extremely lacklustre in the Customer Support area. I mean, let's face it. How many players do you know that have received a decent level of customer support from Jagex? I'd surmise most of us have not. And is that OUR FAULT for having the audacity to send in a query about why Verac's special ignores prayer that happens to get lost in the shuffle?I don't think so.The runescape community has been in decline steadily since year one. "But wait," you say, "it only seems like that since RuneScape has expanded so much more". That logic is true but only on an extremely limited basis. Go to the official forums and check out Rants and see how many people post hourly complaining about how they got their account stolen, or that they were offended by somebody going out of their way to make anti-semetic comments in-game and how the player mod standing beside them refused to mute the offender? How about the kids who commit suicide because their so-called "friend" stole their account because of the Santa hat on it? How about the rants of people who post on the forums because their posts/threads got locked/hidden and no explanation by the moderator in question was ever offered forth?The number of posts in Rants outnumbers the posts in Compliments by FOURTEEN TO ONE! Wake up, people.You say you're smart enough to actually check the second trade screen. Congratulations, so am I. So are a lot of people but a lot of people are not. Do you take the time to educate other players how to not get scammed in the future? Or do you just sardonically smirk and say to yourself "tough luck kid" and carry on?I've met a few decent people on runescape over my years, but I've become so horribly jaded by my experience on this game that I've all but closed the door on meeting new people because all they seem to want is to be respected by their peers for having said "hi" to me, or to use me for my high levels, or whatever. Nobody actually gives a flip if I'm having a good/bad day.I've even managed to fall in love over runescape with someone that was on the BHE. She knows who she is and there's no need for anyone to ask who it is. All I have to say about that experience is that, lo, it burned me in the end.And then of course there's Gol's comment about you "all leaving the BHE for a reason and Boris started this site". As far as I'm concerned you left the BHE because you were duped into thinking I was some horrible dictator waiting to crush you all with my unholy administrative powers. At least there you were allowed to use acronyms. You're all welcome, by the way.And in case anyone doubts that I have anything valid to say regarding the subject, I have an e-mail I would like to share with you all that I sent in to Jagex (yes, I am able to e-mail Jagex if I feel I really need to) detailing my exasperation with this game.__________________________________________________________________Courtesy of Boris de Pig, from his Forum Mod days, for volunteering the screenshots I refer to in the following quote.runescape money"This game used to be fun.My name is Mike O'Hara. My RuneScape identity is "Shadowdancer", a name that I now regret ever conceiving five and a half years later. Nevertheless, I am frustrated to the point that I require composing of my thoughts and sending this off.A few of you - those who are not employees/owners of Jagex - might be bemused or curious about this message. Or perhaps you don't care. Do what you will with this.runescape moneyTo the Jagex members I've sent this to:First of all, I am bloody well sick and tired of getting "Unable to send ticket" when I try to send Customer Support a query. And just what is up with the three unreadable messages in my message centre anyways?But that's not why I write tonight.runescape moneyTonight I had an encounter on the forums with some of your moderators. Lady Belinda, Amarra, and Mod Emilee along with probably 90% of the rest of them yelling at me to shut up about an issue I have regarding forum persecution. This was the breaking point for me.You see, I am constantly being condescended by a group of Forum moderators, Viper21o1 being one of the worst ones. I don't like it, but when I speak out I get told to shut up and take it to CS. I tried, but my existing queries to Mod Peter cannot be deleted because supposedly "a Jagex staff member is looking into this query" or somesuch.Customer Support has largely disregarded my issues and questions, which basically is tantamount to telling me my input means nothing. Fine, at least tell me as much.I have gone so far above and beyond the call of duty of a regular runescape gold player, as some of you know. When I first started out during the early months of 2001 I was a frickin' jackass on RuneScape and on the Internet. I remember Paul PMing me in-game to tell me to cool my jets because I was on the forums posting inane and downright frightening things. And he was of course right to do this. I remember getting myself killed in the Wilderness for the first time and wondering why my Varrock Teleport spell failed on me as I died, and promptly quitting the game. I had even given away my password to a friend of mine because I was so thoroughly disgusted. But I came back to it, and reclaimed my account.September 11, 2001 occurred, and I don't know about you guys in England but over here it was a really (The administrators frown upon bad language) up day. People were living in sheer terror. The events of that day woke me up, and I decided to become a more responsible person on the whole. I smarted up and stopped the idiocy on the forums.runescape gold When the pumpkin drop occurred in October, I collected some pumpkins on another account "Stone Rhino", and then after the event was over I did the popular thing and "drop traded" them over to Shadowdancer. Then I read on the forums about how wrong it was to do this thing, and I thought it over. I decided from that moment on I would abide by the game rules and since that day I have never broken another game rule ever. I even gave away the pumpkins to other people (except for one or two I think).runescape gold I remember the black hole, and the Black Hole Experience that was put in. I remember opening up my own little business where I collected 5 coal a month from people and in exchange I would go and rescue people who had been scammed into dropping their Disks of Returning while in the hole. :\ Nobody took me up on it, but boy did I bank a ton of disks. I took them PKing with me one day and died though...runescape gold I joined some fansite communities. runescape gold Community was my first one, and at first I was welcomed by W13 himself. But over time my personality rubbed against people and I had a hard time with people asking questions that I thought were pretty common sense. People started to "idolize" me while others villainized me. Eventually I was banned for reasons which remain vague to this day.Prior to my RSC (RuneScape Community, not runescape gold Classic) banning I had opened up something called "ShadowdancerVision", which was basically me using my personal webspace to host screenshots of my runescape gold window which were captured and uploaded every 30 seconds or so. It was a huge hit across the 'net, but eventually after a few months I got tired of not being able to use MSN or other applications at the same time so I abandoned it.I joined RuneVillage some time later, but experienced the same sort of thing there. I managed to get a story about RuneScape published on their library archive after I got banned from there as well:http://runevillage.com/theLibrary/shadowdancer/ManAndDragon.php(By the way, I have a story on the Story forums right now called "Larissa The Sandwich Lady" - at one point I was seriously considering writing a series for each of RuneScape's random events and submitting it to Jagex for consideration)So it seemed I couldn't get along on fansite communities so I started my own. I dubbed it "The Black Hole Experience", and it managed three incarnations before I pulled the plug for good. It was during this tenure that I started "Scambusters", which was kind of my own way of fighting back against scamming in RuneScape. At first it was just me posting my tips on how to defeat scams and report hack sites to their hosts to get them taken down, but eventually it grew into a team of people. Mod Hulme and Mod Chris E even knew about us, and I would report to CS the billions of scam sites we managed to stumble upon.The BHE - my forum, that is - collapsed for the third time due to internal strife and pressures, and another fansite sprung up from the ashes. Or more accurately, the admins from the BHE defected to make a fansite forum without me. This is called the RuneScape Pigpen, run by Boris de Pig. It is a hack site, but nobody seems to listen to me when I say that. A hack site springs up from my fansite. Irony.Boris de Pig, last I heard, was a player moderator. More irony.I managed to somehow attract the attention of a certain person named "Skaarjnick", who has apparently made it a goal of his teenage years to dub me some kind of RuneScape account thief. His reasons for this is because of my efforts to stop people who do this sort of thing in the first place. To this very day I get random PMs from people who say that "I" hacked so-and-so's account (often from Skaarjnick himself posing as the victim, the twisted fool). I used to get riled up over this but eventually I became so jaded that I just don't even respond any longer to these accusations.Speaking of account theft, I managed to have my account taken twice a year and some months back during the so-called "line of duty" in investigating scam sites and reporting them to Customer Support. A hazard of loyalty I suppose, but apparently Jagex holds this against me and this is one of a billion vague reason why despite all I have done and continue to do I am not considered worthy to be a moderator - in either sense. But I'll come to that in a moment.runescape gold has become poisonous to me, gents. I love this game, but I also desperately hate it so, and I've told many people this repeatedly. I despondently sit in this wooden chair and click my mouse. Walk there. Build larder. Tear larder down. Rebuild larder. Exit house. Run to bank. Withdraw 24 planks. Run back to house. Click friend. Say "hi, i wish i could stop playing this game but i need a construction level". Hit ENTER. Right-click larder. Tear larder down. Build larder. Reb--God, somebody smash my computer tower or something. When I'm out at work or volunteering at my church (yeah, I'm a Christian, kinda freakin' ironic eh?), I sometimes wander to thinking how far off level 98 Smithing is, or why my post got locked, or why my abuse reports never get looked at, or...So what do I do to relieve the addiction? I log into the forums. Hoo boy. I'd like to state that the RuneScape forums, for me, have never been very kind to me except for the time when I had my thread in Rants stickied titled "0700 GMT - Cant Log In?". Gosh, I was tickled pink. I thought to myself "maybe Jagex will invite me to be a mod here, and I can do my bit to improve the community". But....no... Well heck, fine. I mean, I post so many decent posts and answer questions and provide intelligent arguments (read: debates, not flames) and am active on the forums. Except, that one fateful day a few months back where I happened to be logged in, and there was a bug where everybody was (briefly) a Jagex mod. I thought I had gone to bed and was dreaming about being on the forums...everyone was wreaking havoc everywhere. But I wasn't. I had merely gone to my forum profile, and instead of where I usually see "Posts by Shadowdancer - this is you" or whatever, I saw my good post/bad post count...uh, yeah...so much for decent posts and a "valued member of the community", as CS once wrote me. I made a single post in general telling people to please ignore the moderator functions which were suddenly made available to us and that it was a bug. Yup, responsible me.My tenure on the forums has been very cruel. I've been misunderstood, insulted, had my posts hidden and threads locked/hidden with no explanation more times than I care to remember. I do recall seeing a screenshot of Robd75 posting in your private forum mod forums called "Admin Lounge" (I believe) saying that I was a horrible person and should never be made mod, ever.To this day Robd75 is still a forum mod, and the kicker is that he's not ever around anymore.In-game, I see so much childishness. Now, I am not so naieve to expect that only adults will play an MMORPG, especially one as kid-oriented (and RuneScape is kid-oriented as far as I can see) as this one. But it's in such sheer quantities. Whenever I reveal to people my age, with VERY rare exception, I am mocked for my age. I don't mind that so much. It's the horrible amount of taunting and spamming and macroing and insulting and cheating and bug abusing that ruins the experience for me so much. And the fact that I am talked down to on the forums, and my queries to CS are met with silence or disdain, and the fact that I only get noticed for the "negative" and no amount of good I do will ever mean jack squat.runescape gold is going to put me in my grave soon, I feel."__________________________________________________________________Oh, I still play RuneScape. But a lot of you folks there at the Pigpen have caused me not a little bit of grief with your uninformed opinions of me thanks to certain people. I am, as they say, horribly addicted and nothing I feel except for getting killed in a car crash or something will save me from RuneScape.