On the December 21 2010, Jagex announced a poll regarding 'Old Wilderness and Free Trade'. Due to the amount of text, quoting it would create a massive wall. Instead, go here to read it. Many more cynical people called bullshit on this, for several reasons
- Jagex had relentlessly dented the hell out of the game to cut down RWT and botting. Countless features have been nerfed to worthlessness. People didn't think they were suddenly going to reintroduce what was the biggest RWT method in the game?
- Free Trade and Old Wilderness were voted for en masse. But who's going to say Jagex won't hide some restriction in there? The loot might be crap, you might only be able to free trade a certain amount of times before a trade limit kicks in, etc. Jagex can easily stick an excuse in there.
- Jagex say they have been effectively combatting botters and RWTers. However their methods are often misguided, outdated and easily gone around. You know as well as almost everyone that botting and RWT techniques exist in ways Jagex are almost incapable of countering. And they're going to bring back the main road for cheaters?
- Corporeal Beast, Treasure Trails, Revenants and the Chaos Elemental are all things designed around a wilderness without Pkers. Unless Jagex actually make some worlds non-PvP (which didn't happen as Jagex lack the most basic of foresight) you can look forward to wasting half your supplies just GETTING to Corporeal Beast. Jagex say they are going to be careful checking how these features work but they won't fix it perfectly.
The first thing Jagex did was create the world's most half arsed petition. All you needed to do was punch in a random username, and that counts as a vote for the Old Wilderness and Free Trade. No password required, no check to make sure its not the same IP address voting again and again. (which meant you could have a good laugh making 'Racists' and 'MagicBumMan' vote for the Old Wildy) The petition eventually reached around 1.6M votes. The amount of those that were actually legit is still being investigated.
OMFG! Jagex are being serious with this![]
With the petition reaching 1.6M votes, Jagex clocked on that somewhere, somehow, there are some people that actually do give a shit about this whole concept, so decided to step it up a level to see if it was a 'bleah, alright then' or 'YEEAAAAA' (followed by spending 2 hours spamming in G.E ordering people to vote for the change, despite the fact they actually started in April 2009) They removed the (useless anyway) petition and instead created a referendum. However, this requires a username and password, so Bum Monster most likely won't be bothering. The end results weren't a lot less than the petition, despite taking far longer.
Against all odds however, after the referendum ended with 1.2M votes, 91% of which supported bringing back the old Wilderness and Free Trade, and Jagex duly said that they would bring it back on February 1st. Whether it manages to not be hampered by delays is anyones guess, but you have to hand it to Jagex - many people called bullshit on this, but it looks like it will actually happen. The main problem is that the only way RuneScape is set to 'improve' is by going back 3 years. Hardly progress is it?
As a final note, although this is a rather blatant plug for an upcoming article, they mention how 2011 will be one of the most exciting years ever. I think this article will disprove that.
(Stormy, you were wrong dammit! Quick, do something to draw all attention away from this article! - Smz)
(That should fix it. - Stormy)