November

November
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November 24, 2003:

Jagex has released a large explanation of the combat system in Runescape 2 (RS2). Because of its size, it has been moved to a separate page. You can read it here.

Reldo, our accident prone librarian, writes to inform us that he has once again expanded the Library of Varrock with both some more Tales and some more Histories.

Those fans of Reldo's literary collections should make their way there immediately, as the library will adhere to its usual opening hours.

November 21, 2003:

We are pleased to announce that our new Hiscore system is now running, showing the top 250,000 players in each skill!

You can still find the Hiscore tables from the same link on our main page, and although they may look the same, they are updating much more frequently.

The Jagex Web Dev Team

November 17, 203:

We would like to warn our players, that a few losers are sending fake 'become a moderator' emails, to try and trick players into giving away their password.

We would like to remind everyone that when we are inviting people to become moderators on the RuneScape forums we NEVER send the invitations by email. If you receive an invitation it will be through your secure message-centre here on runescape.com only.

Therefore if you appear to get an email that appears to be from us, then be very suspicious, it's probably fake. Delete the email immediately, and then go to runescape.com (not via a link in the email) and check your message-centre instead. Be sure to also read our security tips located in our 'Rules and Security' section for general account security advice.

Please also bear in mind that forum moderators will be hand picked by Jagex staff only. Please do not ask about becoming a moderator, because we are NOT accepting requests in any way shape or form. The best way to be picked by one of our staff is to be a regular quality contributor to the forums.

Thanks,
Jagex

November 12, 2003:

We're about to restart the forums, so you won't be able to access any forum pages for a few minutes while the system reboots.

A number of bugs and issues highlighted have been fixed. These include:

The back links on the message page now takes you back to the appropriate page, rather than the first page of the forum
Capitalization problems with chat filter fixed
A number of improvements have been made to the chat filter to reduce unnecessary censorship
Posting to a thread that has just been deleted now gives a clearer error message
Added page indicators which tell you how many pages long a message thread is

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions made so far concerning the forums. We do value your help with this beta, and are reading your comments. Expect quite a few updates to the forums over the next few weeks, and don't worry, this is not impacting the release date of RS2. The forums, and the whole runescape.com website are developed by a different team to that working on RS2. In fact this beta is helping by testing some of the new architecture and code libraries used in RS2.

The Jagex Web Team

November 11, 2003:

We are very pleased to announce that our Official RuneScape Forums are now available for beta-testing by our members.

We have decided to restrict the forum beta to members only so that the forums can be tested with a limited number of users. We expect that the forum beta will last at least one month, but we will aim to offer full access to everyone as soon as possible.

RuneScape Members can log-in and help us test our new forums from the Forums link on our main page.

Please DO NOT send in customer support queries regarding the forums. Members can provide feedback directly on the forums via a forum post in the feedback forum. Non members - please be patient and keep your eyes on the news and updates section for forum related news.

November 8, 2003:

The recent item duplication bug is now fixed.

We're pretty sure the loophole that was being abused to create items unfairly no longer works.

Thanks to everyone who emailed in with information. We received over 600 messages from people keen to help, in just a couple of hours!

We will work out what we are going to do about the items that were introduced to the game next. For now I would just recommend that you avoid buying or selling party hats/crackers completely for the next few days whilst things settle down.

If you sell now you just risk getting ripped off, because currently people are overreacting. Bear in mind that the number of party-hats in circulation now is still less than the number around 1 year ago.

Rest assured that anything we do will be as fair as possible. We're NOT going to ban people just for buying a hat at a low price. We're only really after the people who started this, and we think we've already caught most of them.

Due to a number of false rumors going around I'd like to state a couple of things:

We are NOT going to delete all p-hats ever, that would be a total overreaction.
We are NOT going to rollback all the save-games, that would also be overreacting.

November 7, 2003:

       It has come to our attention that someone has worked out a way of duplicating or creating items in RuneScape unfairly. Particularly it seems they are doing this with Christmas-crackers which produce party hats.

       Obviously this is a pretty obscure problem, since it's taken over 10,000 combined years of RuneScape playing for anyone to find it, but we're determined to close this hole.

       Luckily we take regular backups of the RuneScape database which are securely stored here on DVD, so it will be possible for us to run a comparison against these backups and identify anyone who has suddenly gained a large amount of wealth in the last few days. In this way we expect to identify and remove the items which have been introduced to the game, and take action against those involved.

       Therefore if anybody offers to give you valuable items, or you find them lying around on the map, then we recommend you do not accept them and report the person using the email address below. If you do accept them you will be receiving stolen goods, and we may mistakenly take action against you. If you have recently been given such items in suspicious circumstances we recommend you dispose of them before it's too late (i.e. drop them in a quiet area).

       We are also appealing to the players for information relating to this problem which would help us fix it. So if you know anything about how this is being done, or someone has offered you a cracker/party-hat recently then please email itemhotline@jagex.com - any information you can give would be gratefully received.

       We are also offering a reward of a free life-time membership to the first person who can give us information which directly leads to us being able to reproduce this ourselves.

       Rest assured that everything possible is being done to fix this, and the people who have obtained these items unfairly will be detected using our database backups.

Update: This problem is now fixed, thanks for everyone who offered help. With respect to the reward we offered, this will be given to the person who sent the first email explaining how the object creation was done.

November 6, 2003:

The RuneScape credit card billing server is now up and running again. WorldPay, our credit card processing company have resolved the problems that they were experiencing.

Any subscribers who have been waiting to sign up for membership are now able to do so.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thanks,
Billing Support

November 4, 2003:

Unfortunately there is a temporary fault with the RuneScape credit card billing server. Worldpay, our credit card processing company are currently experiencing technical difficulties which they are working to resolve today (Tuesday Nov 4th 2003).

A tiny number of current RuneScape members whose credit cards are used for repeat billing may find they are unable to use members features for a very short amount of time due to Worldpay not being able to process the monthly re-billing on the account. However be assured you will not lose ANY days on members, and your account will be re-billed ASAP.

Therefore any member who is currently unable to use members features DO NOT sign up and try to pay again.

We apologize for any inconvenience, we are making every effort to get this situation resolved as quickly as possible.

Thanks,

Billing Support

November 2, 2003:

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that we're still on schedule to release the RS-2 beta on the 1st-Dec.

I've been getting into work early, and working a few weekends, and I've managed to make up the time it took to do the Halloween event, so 1st-dec is still on.

With respect to the Halloween drop. Unfortunately it seems a lot of people were upset they didn't manage to get a Scythe.

In particular the fact that we all live in England means unfortunately people in Western US are asleep whilst we are in the office, and able to login to the game to drop items.

This is supposed to be a bit of fun. Something to enjoy! Not nothing something to get upset about! Therefore I'm going to try to cheer you by doing a more US friendly drop of Scythes this evening. I'm not going to stay up all night to do it, because I have to sleep, but instead I'll do 4 drops at specific times.

I will be dropping Scythes at:

       Sunday 4pm (Eastern US Time)
       Sunday 5pm (Eastern US Time)
       Sunday 6pm (Eastern US Time)
       Sunday 7pm (Eastern US Time)

and then I'll be going to sleep! :-)

No doubt some people will complain that I am doing this too. It's impossible to keep everybody simultaneously happy all the time, but I'll do my best.

Andrew