Real Madrid make history again...
UEFA Champion's League final
Real Madrid 3 - Liverpool 1
I didn't watch the game live. I considered it but couldn't bear to forego my beauty sleep. But I watched the highlights the next day and what a match it was!
Both teams were evenly matched until Salah popped his shoulder. He was on fire all season and the Liverpool fanbase was hoping that he could work his magic once more and produce the Champion's League trophy for them. There was even talk that he was in contention for the Golden Ball award, which is given to the best player of the year. Safe to say, the weight of expectation was just too much for the poor guy to shoulder, pun 100% intended. He simply isn't ready to hang with the big boys.
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| Mohamed Salah lies in agony on the pitch after dislocating his shoulder and tearing several ligaments in a challenge with Sergio Ramos during the Champion's League final in Kiev, Ukraine on May 26, 2018. Source: Getty Images |
Another player who isn't ready to hang with the big boys is the Liverpool goalkeeper, Karius. Real Madrid should give him an honorary contract for having practically gifted them the title with that strange throw to Benzema!
Of course there are lots of sourpuss anti-Real Madrid football fans bandying conspiracy theories around like nobody's business. One popular one is that Sergio Ramos, who is a so-called dirty player, intentionally hurt Salah by using some kind of wrestling technique like an arm lock to force Salah's arm into a position where his entire body weight came down hard on it when both players fell to the ground. Looking at the video footage of the incident, it's clear to see that Ramos indeed had his arm tangled in Salah's. But anybody who's watched enough football will know that limbs get intertwined all the time. There's nothing to suggest that Ramos trapped Salah's arm on purpose. Have a look at this YouTube clip and judge for yourself.
Another preposterous allegation is that Karius was paid to throw the match. This is even worse than the accusations against Ramos because it's completely unfounded. There's not even a shred of evidence to back up this claim.
Whatever. The haters can say what they like. The fact is, Real Madrid are the record-extending 13-time champions of Europe, having won the cup six times more than the next-best team, AC Milan. And the great Zinedine Zidane, such a legendary footballer in his time, has now become the first manager to win three Champion's League tournaments in succession.
Happy, happy.
... And Jagex cause trouble for themselves again
The Cambridge-based game development studio continues to lurch from one crisis to another. On the heels of the scandal they caused by threatening the creator of a popular third-party client software with legal action (see the appendix at the bottom of this post), they announced last week that they are shutting down the RuneScape Classic servers in August.
Understandably, this revelation has stirred up quite some consternation among the playerbase. RuneScape Classic is the original version of RuneScape from 2001, and is a piece of video game history. A few die-hard players have stuck with it over the past 17 years, and many felt that Jagex's decision to kill the game was unfair to those who've devoted almost their whole lives to it. Those who'd never played RuneScape Classic also criticised the move, saying that Jagex had lost its roots. Jagex really needs to tread carefully here. RuneScape is a franchise that depends heavily on nostalgia to retain customers, and the company cannot afford to alienate its stakeholders by disrespecting the long history and rich heritage of the series.
RuneScape Classic is only the latest casualty in a line of recent culls by Jagex. Chronicle: RuneScape Legends, a card battler similar to Hearthstone, and FunOrb, a minigame site, were also previously cut and will go offline later this year. The way I see it, this could mean one of two things:
Streamlining
Jagex, at the behest of its Chinese overlords also known as Fukong Interactive Entertainment, might be shedding the dead weight it has accumulated over the years in an effort to boost its income. This makes sense because the Chinamen paid $300 million to buy over Jagex in 2016 and they need to start earning a return on their investment. From the manpower perspective, dropping old and unprofitable titles frees up development time for new projects which hopefully will bring in more revenue. For example, the staff can devote more attention to making RuneScape Mobile, which is slated for launch during the next fiscal year, the best product that it could possibly be. With microtransactions, which charge small amounts of real-world currency in exchange for in-game loot, a commonly accepted and lucrative part of mobile gaming, Jagex will try their utmost to ensure that RuneScape Mobile brings in new players, who will in turn bring in more money.
Death throes
The less palatable explanation for Jagex's recent actions is that they represent a last-ditch effort to save the company. Maybe the company is in dire financial straits and jettisoning underperforming publications is an attempt to stem the bleeding from the coffers. After all, RuneScape Classic and FunOrb have been running for more than a decade with a tiny playerbase and low maintenance from the developers, so why are they suddenly urgent problems now? The official line is that they are based on outdated technology, suffer from multiple bugs, and players are using cheating software rampantly to abuse them, but these issues have been around for many years and Jagex never bothered. The abrupt decision to kill off these games seems rather... well, abrupt, and I can't help but suspect that there's something more behind it that's being hidden from us players. It wouldn't be the first time Jagex has tried to pull the wool over our eyes and it certainly won't be the last.
As a longtime 'Scaper, I fervently hope that the latter theory isn't true. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if Jagex goes under, a huge part of my life will go with it. They really need to get their act together though, starting with hiring a competent and experienced public relations professional to stop them from repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Their brand image has taken a terrible beating even among the most loyal followers, and repairs are badly needed.
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Appendix: The third-party client controversy
Old School RuneScape (OSRS) is a version of RuneScape based on a backup of the game's code from the year 2007. Jagex launched it in 2013 after many players quit the game following a massive but unpopular overhaul to the main RuneScape, now known as RuneScape 3, which introduced a more complex user interface and combat system.
OSRS has a large following among veteran players who are nostalgic for the simple game experience they had when they were growing up. The game must be played using a downloaded piece of software called a client, because modern internet browsers do not support Java, an old coding language on which the game is based. The client serves as a "translator" between the user's computer and the game servers.
Jagex provides a client for OSRS, which is referred to by players as the vanilla client. In computing, the word "vanilla" when used to describe software means original and unadulterated. But the vanilla client by Jagex lacks many quality-of-life features that make the game easier to play such as timers and automated statistic trackers, so fans with the technical know-how have developed several more sophisticated alternative clients, called third-party clients, and a large proportion of OSRS players use such clients.
On May 15, 2018, Jagex told the creator of a relatively new client, RuneLite, to shut down his client or face a lawsuit for copyright infringement. News of this broke on Reddit after the founder of RuneLite wrote about it on the RuneLite website, and players were outraged as Jagex was perceived to be showing favour to another established third-party client, OSBuddy, which had not been ordered to close. Several OSBuddy developers are former Jagex employees, and unlike RuneLite which is totally free, OSBuddy requires a payment of $2 a month to unlock the most useful features. RuneLite had been gaining traction and there had been a corresponding drop in the number of users subscribing to OSBuddy, and players suspected Jagex of trying to kill RuneLite to protect OSBuddy. To make matters worse, it was reported by several older players that OSBuddy had evolved from a cheating software that played the game automatically without user input, a practice known as botting. A few players also accused OSBuddy of stealing their account details and IP addresses, and selling them to third parties. The association between Jagex and OSBuddy was seen as an alliance of evil, and RuneLite characterised as the "good guy".
Players turned up in force to defend RuneLite and its founder, holding massive protests in the virtual city of Falador, cancelling their monthly membership payments to Jagex, airing their displeasure on social media, and sending death threats to Jagex staff. On May 16, Jagex belatedly released an official statement explaining that RuneLite contained tools that revealed sensitive code in the game engine whose function it was to detect botting behaviour, and because RuneLite was fully open-source, anybody could download the source code off the internet, decipher Jagex's anti-botting measures, and write botting scripts that evade those measures. After the developer of RuneLite agreed to take those portions of the code off the internet, Jagex backed down and allowed RuneLite to continue operating on May 18. This satisfied the playerbase and the protests stopped, but the poor communication by Jagex, who by failing to adequately explain their actions from the very beginning allowed the situation to spiral out of control, had already done enormous damage to the relationship between Jagex and its players.
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