Life is a Bitch?

The new tipit Times article prompted me to write this post. I had been kicking the idea around for quite some time, but the glaring duality in the newest Times sucked it out of me.

I recently had some t-shirts made up for my RL pizza shop. In the process of developing the design, I came across a shirt with the old phrase, “Life is a Bitch, Then you die”. This is one of the phrases that at first glance sounds pretty true.

Ranting about Runescape has been covered to death. Just look at the rants section of the official forums. Nearly 700k posts, (compared to the compliments of just over 100k). That people complain is not really trying to get across here. You will never satisfy all of the players all of the time.

Looking closer at the actual phrase brings out the contradiction in this line of thinking. We can all agree that life is a bitch some of the time, but is it true all the time? If life really was so bad, wouldn’t dieing be a welcome relief? I assume most of you aren’t searching for the nearest tall bridge or cliff to jump off, so don’t let this overlooked contradiction poison your thinking. It does have a very observable though. The root of that phrase is something along the lines of telling Jagex: “Why bother trying, your updates won’t matter anyway”.

Now, I am sure that most of you readers couldn’t care less about the morale of anyone at Jagex (a few of you might even be actively thinking of ways to screw with it), but really if you are going to complain, then COMPLAIN! Don’t make some lame article that rants about updates, then finished with: “All in all, I can’t wait until the graphics come out, but please don’t continue to improve them”.

First of all, Jagex is out to make a profit. To do that they need to sell subscriptions and advertising, and in order to do that, they need to generate new customers. I am pretty sure they are actually happier when older players leave the game. The older toons are the ones skilled at emergent gaming, who pked well, merchanted well, and the ones who took advantage of every loophole there was. Old Paul in his Ivory Tower doesn’t like it when people don’t play the game the game the way he meant it to be played, and hence Jagex goes out of it’s way to stop it.

Back to the article though. Das ripps on Castle Wars. Well, I miss the point there as well. The goal of the game is to gain combat XP, with the secondary goal of getting some fairly noobish looking Armour. The higher level amours only tell others that you have spent hundreds of hours at Castle Wars, something that others might attach some status to, but I sure don’t. He more players there to kill, the more XP you get per game! The more the merrier, and if you don’t like the terrain, there is always FOG, Bounty Hunter, and Clan Wars.

You don’t need the wisdom of Solomon to write an effective complaint, so please. Take a stand, hold your ground, make a decent argument. Don’t make lame attempts and snide comments like, “is variety not the spice of life?“ Either complain about updates or shut the hell up.