Users have grown acustom to certain modern features and functionality but every vision for a new web throws those out the window and and tries to recreate the most simplest form of the web.
The web today sucks but i'd rather have it than only static sites.
The core gameplay is so 'bad'. It looks and feels like a mobile game slop you'd see in a shady popup ad. The guns seen to have broken physics, the movement has input lag. I guess the idea of cat copters fighting is cool but there needs to be refinement to the core mechanics.
Maybe thats just the state of web games and they're all like this.
These Chinese companies use the data in ways that enable scamming of millions of people and businesses per year. The sheer amount of cybercrime that comes out of China and NK is crazy, its genuinely a threat to average people.
There are a lot of bad things you can say about China that gonna be true, but it's not well known for running scam call centers - quite opposite.
Authoritorian state with highly controlled internet and financial system isnt exactly a good place for running criminal enterprises.
There just 1.4 billions people in a country and many of them well educated and tech-savvy, so it obvious there just more scammers in total. But I doubt higher percent of population doing scams than average in the world.
“The sheer amount of cybercrime that comes out of the US and Nigeria is Crazy..." Is technically true, but what does that have to do with US AI models?
OP was talking about about China, no one here is using NK AI models or software stacks, so your comment is not only factually wrong, it’s plain fear mongering propaganda.
Everything Jagex touches turns to shit. They are not good at creating. At best they are a steward for already created IP and the community provides that taste that makes it good.
Jagex blunders hard and gets very lucky each time. The entire Oldschool RuneScape idea came from a private server whose owner was sued out of existance by Jagex, only for the community to revolt, and when official servers launched, they only survived because Jagex upper management forgot about their existance until the community did enough marketing for it.
Blizzard didn't forget about it though, they just ignored it until it became too big to ignore with Elysium, and then took it seriously and launched a great version of vanilla WoW with Classic.
They very famously did not ignore it, with the whole "you think you want that but you don't", the shutdown of Nostalrius and so on. People were going to jail for WoW private servers before 2010
yes, I meant ignoring the customer base that wanted it, but actively denying them is probably a better term. pserver shutdowns always will happen regardless if they're visible. I used to do a lot with them when I was young
Maybe Jagex from ~15 years ago, but today they are hitting out of the park with OSRS updates. You can't tell me with a serious face that Varlamore or Sailing are bad or were not created by Jagex, sure they had to pass in the polls but only a few things have failed that.
No, todays Jagex is just as oblivious and short-sighted as ever. They don't only make OSRS. It took Jagex over a decade to remove Treasure hunter (microtransaction gambling) from the game despite its addition (and continued operation at the obvious requirement of whatever of several, 7-ish? PE firms owned the studio). It was added for the obvious goal of increasing revenue on top of subscription cost, but grew into a game feature that overcame traditional levelling and moneymaking in exchange for real world payments. There was a period of about 5 years where the meta for training any skill was to kill engdame bosses and then gamble with the gold you made, using the xp rewarded from treasure hunter to level up. It was simply a more efficient use of time to train any of the 26 skills by not training any of the skills and instead gambling. It was so bad that they added an option for this interface to gamble multiple times upon a single user input and automatically redeem the rewards.
OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.
Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.
That was a year+ ago, which notably is when they decided to clean the game up. I don't see the point of using the past as an example when they very explicitly (like it was the very first set of criticisms aired in their keynote yesterday) are trying to move away from that.
What you're describing at the end is an attempt for a company to diversify and cutting their losses early to stem bleeding from projects which wouldn't have met the expected ROI. Gaming is a difficult industry and the majority of games do not get big. It's not surprising that the majority of their efforts to branch out failed.
None of your criticisms of the main game apply during the past year of updates. That + their attempt to create "sanitized" servers this year looks like another attempt to diversify - away from the microtransaction-based revenue source into a stable subscription source, assuming they get the playercounts.
It's insulting because RS/RS3 was designed from the perspective that everything leads to everything else. Prior to the sixth age, and I'm not calling that a mistake, and especially MTX, skills had a certain curve and quest lines made sense
What the MTX team apparently did is pocket all of it while not using the money to improve the game
Whether or not they're doing a good job now, their behavior across many years was/is despicable
Their new game, Dragonwilds, has been very successful. Jagex leadership today is not the same as Jagex leadership 10 years ago.
If anything, they're one of the first companies proving that getting away from gatcha/pay-to-win/pay-for-aesthetic/seasonal mechanics can be a good business decision in 2026, where there are many, many gamers who care about earned power (and earned aesthetic) and no longer want to be on a seasonal loot/rating treadmill.
For me, that's personal and I'm happy about it. I've played MMORPGs my whole life, really the only genre I'm interested in. Everquest, EQ2, GW, WoW (and many xpacs), OSRS, etc. Other than OSRS more recently, I've felt left behind for many, many years now. I want to play games where the journey is the point, and where earning what you have is fundamental.
WoW Forever, which in terms of player numbers is looking to be Blizzard's most successful move in over a decade, is coming largely due to the trail blazed by OSRS and the Jagex team.
Personally, I find Lord of the Rings online to be killer if you want the journey...
I've been playing for ~20 years and still haven't hit max level (currently, I have a 138 out of 160 as my highest). Still have about half the map left to explore too - its HUGE and still gets regular updates. Freeps vs Creeps is a neat take on PVP if thats your thing too
The Jagex of today is worse. For every good update there is a landslide of terrible balancing that erodes 100s of hours of progress. They have paved over so much of the game they cant really be called old school runescape. Sailing should never have been released.
As you can see it is percentage of coal as part of total energy mix that has been dropping for two decades.
As already stated above. Perhaps you missed that?
You're correct that absolute tonnage of coal use is still climbing, - but at an ever decreasing rate and was predicted to peak .. of course, thanks to some shenanigans by the Hegseth's of the world that may be deferred for a while, thanks USofA!
Of course on the plus side (for the atmosphere) there's been a drop in global fossil fuel consumption, so swings, arrows.
China, of course, is still well short of total CO2 tonnage lofted over the past century in comparison with the US - even allowing for a vastly greater population.
I understand you're talking about % of energy generation and its fine to highlight it but people here are talking as if % of energy generation means less coal emissions when its actually the complete opposite. There is almost no reason to care about % of energy generation by coal when they add the level of coal production that they've added over the past 15 years. CO2 output producted after 2010 is completely different to CO2 produced pre 1950. The difference is once the world started addressing climate change china went the complete opposite direction and because they can highlight a few stats people endless sweep for them as if they're actually doing something good. They have objectively destroyed the world.
>Those of us who produce value by beautifying, improving, and mending our frayed world and those who seek to collect and hoard the fruits of our labor by fueling endless conflict as a means toward endless revenue.
reply