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| - We are working hard on a new skill, which will be available to free-to-play and members and which shows our continued commitment to the free game. We are also looking to improve some of the free quests as well as early graphics. The free-to-play game is epic - there are tens of thousands of hours of gameplay and we are working on a number of updates at the moment. Becoming CEO of Jagex was hugely exciting for me and is still a real honour. As for the forums, we are planning to make a number of improvements to the usability of the forums and make them more interactive with avatars and the ability to quote, as well as allowing more of our free players to post. We care equally about our games and our players and do not think that we have to choose one over the other. We take great care designing our games and making them appeal to our players and, naturally, will continue to do so in the future. We understand that we cannot please all our players with every update. I can assure you we don’t change things because we are bored and we see usability improvements as essential to the continued success of all our games. The truth of the matter is we sometimes realise after we have built something, despite careful planning, that we got it wrong and, naturally, have to fix it or improve it to make it more efficient. As for using player polls, we do plan to continue to get player ideas and suggestions from them. Yes, this is still a project we are working on and the project has not been cancelled, we just have a load of other big projects going on at once. Yes, indeed, we are looking at all the consoles at the moment and deciding which one or two are best for our community. When I became CEO, one of the first things I did was to reinstate the Rants forum as it is important for us to hear your constructive negative feedback. We have a specific forum team who look after the forums and pass on all your feedback. I’m primarily focused on our great playing community, but we also need to ensure that RuneScape will continue to grow for at least another decade. In order to do that, we need to make sure there is also a healthy influx of new players to balance the economy and ensure there are not just 10 million level 99s walking round. I realised a long time ago that you can’t please everyone, no matter how much you want to, and it’s never pleasant to get flamed for an update; however, I don’t mind that much, as it’s more important to do the right thing for the community and the game than it is to win a popularity contest. Absolutely! Andrew and I were actually talking about this the other day. What would be really helpful is to have a list of features you think would help you to make videos, so we can assess which ones are possible. The biggest advantage of RuneScape is that it can be played in the browser without a big download and by everyone, and while quality graphics are important to the playing experience, we are also committed to keeping RuneScape at the optimal specification to ensure that hundreds of millions of players worldwide can access the game. I like this idea, though I’m not sure we have the infrastructure necessary to provide this to the same quality as websites like YouTube. Our environment has really been built around providing the game in the best possible way. We do not have any plans to open offices in other countries at this time; however, you never know what the future will hold. The Jagex team is always growing and the studio is getting very full, so it is a possibility. The people whose feelings should be considered when ranting are the RuneScape content developers who work tirelessly and passionately for months on a project, with the sole aim of pleasing the players. Happily, only a small minority of players tend to actually rant about content. We always look at the forums for feedback and, when it is constructive or helpful, we look to implement that feedback into the game. Yes, indeed, we are talking to a number of people about doing a film of some of our games. I expect this would be a full feature film rather than some sort of cartoon. I have always had a high degree of confidence :), but it is a big responsibility being CEO of such an incredible studio and, thankfully, we employ some of the best people in the world, which makes my life a lot easier. We probably spend 80% of our time talking about improving the game for our current players and I do not suspect this will ever change. In fact, most of our updates are aimed at current players rather than for bringing new players to the game. We all spend a lot of time in game talking to players, so we always try to design content that we feel our players will enjoy. Haha, I ask myself that question every day. Well, firstly I do not have an office! I sit on the same floor as most of our game developers in an open plan office. I tend to spend as much time as I can speaking with the staff and helping out where I can. I do, however, spend a lot of time signing stuff. I see merchanting clans as pyramid selling schemes, where, typically, only a handful of players actually make any money and everyone else loses money - just like real-life pyramid schemes. Because of this, we are not in favour of them in RuneScape, and try to warn players not to participate in them. The fact of the matter is that our current player demographics are a lot older than a lot of people think, so we don’t have to change the player base itself, just peoples’ perception of it. We have dealt with this by nuking the "kiddy" content, for examples, the Stronghold of Player Safety. I do love the fact that we have a game that is suitable for an incredibly broad, worldwide audience. Firstly, we don't rely on players to spot bugs - that's what our QA team is for - but we're grateful that players are so diligent at spotting those that slip through. We do constantly look to the forums for ideas and feedback, There is no "chop, chop" at Jagex. Our ideas for content come either from the Players or from staff across the company. We always encourage our teams to be creative, to make sure we make the best possible content for our players. This is currently in development. It has taken a long time, since we had to get all our old code compatible with our latest code libraries and back-office systems. There is still a lot of work to do - probably a few more months - but, rest assured, we are working hard on this. I think it will be very popular when it does finally come out, as we are packing in a bit of a surprise at the same time. These Q&As are a part of our ongoing commitment to not be perceived as being so secretive. Hopefully, that shows our commitment to our players. Both Andrew and I regularly talk to our players in our Clan Chats, and we now have more J-Mods in game than ever before. The sad reality is that it takes months for a developer to create even just a single new quest, and while we have a very big team working on updates, we cannot guarantee a new update every week, but we do try our hardest to make them as frequent as possible without sacrificing quality or creativity. We have also done a lot of work in recent months, both in RuneScape and on the forums, and working with recognised fansites, to be more open with our players. Yes, indeed! I have even been in one of the videos, for "giggles"! :) We are always interested in player suggestions and we like to support players who are inspired by our games, but when it comes to publishing it gets very complicated, as publishing not only has a lot of legal technicalities, but also takes a lot of time and a bucket of money. If you think you have something great, though, feel free to send it to us. Yes, we have a project underway to better utilise the CPU, so as to enhance the software mode of the game. The focus test is specifically to see what new players think of the game, so no big secret there. :) Our ability to detect all botting is not really related to free trade. We are looking at improving the trade system, and we may consider relaxing our trade limits a little more in the future, but this is still under discussion at the moment. These are interesting ideas and we are looking at ways of providing more support to clans. The only way to find out what players think about new content is to actually show it to them. We could do all new content as a beta first, but then you have the problem of some people loving it and others not. Then what do you do? Do you say if more than 51% like it, keep it? We find that it is typically only the players that don’t like something that respond - the rest of the community just enjoy the content and say nothing. If you look at the Rants feedback, it is typically less than 0.5% of the total players that respond to an apparently unpopular update. Does that mean the other 99.5% like it and it should stay? We would never knowingly create new content that we knew would be unpopular. Our developers want all their work to be appreciated by the community and to enhance the game for all. Yes, we are planning to release a new display name system shortly. This will essentially allow you to change your in-game display name to be different from your login name. You are right, we haven’t done any marketing in the past and we still have one of the biggest communities in the gaming world as a result. We love this game and I’m confident it has a very bright future, indeed. We do plan to build an in-house marketing and PR team to spread the word like other companies do, but, ultimately, we know that nothing beats our own players telling their friends about RuneScape. We have taken player feedback onboard and, as mentioned previously, we are now planning on improving the forums with avatars as well as other new features. This is a great idea, I will go and speak with the audio team now! Yes, this is still something that we plan to do based on players’ total XP level. Who knows what the future may bring? :) What features would you like to see on the iPhone? We have been really ambitious with our updates over the last six months, which has been a challenge for everyone at Jagex. The QA team do a fantastic job and would never knowingly release updates with bugs, but, as I’m sure you will understand, that the game is so epic it is almost impossible to catch everything. We don’t look to our competitors for our strategies. If anything, we tend to get shamelessly copied by the industry. We have always tried to make our games and updates the best that they could possibly be, regardless of the competition. We still have one of the world’s largest, and still growing, communities, not to mention the Guinness World Record for the most popular free game, which tells me that we are doing the right things overall. Yes, we currently have a project underway to provide players with a lot more information about their avatar progress and status in game. I don’t expect we will ever remove credit card payments as this is still, by far, the most popular method of payment for our players. Also, the majority of our members like the convenience of being able to automatically renew their monthly membership via credit card. We are keen to offer subscribers a wide variety of payment methods and will ensure that we continue to rollout RuneScape payment cards worldwide. This is an interesting idea and one we are currently discussing. I love the idea of preserving all player accounts, so that they can play again whenever they want too. Interestingly enough, we have recently seen a significant number of former players return to the game. We may reset the accounts for players that have been permanently banned and make those account names available again; however, we are also working on a new display names systems to allow players to change their in-game name, and there will be a subsequent update to the system that will allow players to choose longer player names, which will provide a lot more choice. We strongly oppose private servers, irrespective of their size, and always look to shut them down. We have also been very successful in taking their ringleaders to court. I don’t talk about future updates or content in my Clan Chat as I wouldn’t want to spoil future updates and content isn’t really my area of expertise anyway - that’s what the RuneScape team do really well. :) I just enjoy the content as a typical player on my choob account and I just use the Clan Chat as an opportunity to talk to players about every day stuff, usually have a bit of a laugh and sometimes they give me feedback on new content or things that annoy them in game which is also helpful. So since we just chat about random and everyday stuff I don’t think it is important to get transcripts on the forums. The reason why we have regular Q&As with the players is to officially answer questions relating to the game. Absolutely! We are currently pushing our current supplier to bring their shipping costs down. If they don’t soon we will move to another supplier that can provide low worldwide shipping costs. I get involved with all aspects of the studio’s operation; however, I have very little input into the development of the game - the main game decisions are actually made by the RuneScape Content team, My choob account recently went over level 90 combat. :) I can’t think of anything that really annoys me, but I do wish I wasn’t so poor and had more cash. Then, I guess I’ve just got to earn it like everyone else. :)
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