My fiftieth blog post!

Jonathan's Junkyard is having its "golden jubilee" with this post, the 50th since it was started about a year ago. What a milestone! I didn't expect it to come so soon, but apparently I write more prolifically than I thought I would, averaging around a post every week.

I thought I should do something a little bit special, especially since my recent posts haven't been on the most fun topics. But I wasn't sure what exactly to write about, until I hit another significant milestone, this one in the virtual realm.

And it's fitting that I should talk about this. Before I discovered my flair for writing, before rabbits and water and cooking videos and Roman war novels, it was there to while away the hours with me, and teach me things to boot. And until today, it's a treasured friend that I keep close to my heart.

I've written about it before. RuneScape, the medieval-fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Whew, what a mouthful!

The cape

Today is the 10-year anniversary of my account. Just before coming to Blogger to write this post, I logged into the game to claim my 10-year veteran cape.

To do that, I had to go back to where everyone's RuneScape journey begins: the courtyard of Lumbridge castle, the place where new accounts first appear in the world. I talked to Hans, the caretaker of the castle, who is controlled by the computer, or "non-player character" in gaming parlance, and bought the cape from him for 100,000 coins. That seems a bit steep but if you've been playing for 10 years and can't afford that then you need a head examination.

I was honoured with a server-wide broadcast announcement so that everybody online at that moment will know my awesomeness. Who am I kidding. Nobody reads the broadcasts actually. Even I don't. But still, it was cool.

Me being informed that I had paid 100,000 coins to Hans, followed by the server-wide broadcast announcing to all players online at that moment that I had acquired the 10-year veteran cape. And yes, "pure ebil" is my display name.

Here's a look at my character wearing the cape.

The big, shiny sword is not part of the cape. It's my main-hand weapon that I carry in a sheath on my back when I'm not using it. You can see my off-hand weapon in its own little sheath on my belt. In combat, I hold the big sword in my right hand and the small parrying dagger in my left.

The red contrasts nicely with my gold-trimmed blue armour like the cherry tomatoes in a well-presented dinner salad, making my character look so damn good!

With this cape on, I now belong to a very exclusive group of players who have stuck with the game for a decade. I do come across others wearing the cape, and we immediately feel connected and usually type out a quick comment in the chat to acknowledge each other.

Lessons

RuneScape is my idea of fun. The slow, repetitive gameplay is a turn-off for all but the most loyal of players, but I find it incredibly charming and relaxing.

Not only that, it teaches me that good things come to those who wait. I must be patient, and put in the time and effort to get my reward. For example, I made 4,859 bows the other day, so that I could train my fletching level from 55 to 65. For those who don't know, fletching is the act of creating ranged weapons like bows and arrows. This is a historical fact, not something invented by the developers of RuneScape!

There. You too have learned something from RuneScape!

RuneScape also taught me the basics of commerce. I never took economics in school and probably never will, but I understand how demand and supply affect prices because like most players, I rely heavily on the Grand Exchange. This is an automated marketplace where we can buy and sell goods. For instance, I'm selling the 4,859 bows I made that day at an offer price of 390 coins each. So the computerised system will search for another player who wants to buy the bows for at least 390 coins each, and match us up, giving me the coins I'm due and the other player the bows he asked for. At the moment, the bows are sitting in the Exchange unsold, because they're not commodities that move in big quantities, but the Exchange will keep trying to complete the transaction until it succeeds, that is, a buyer for my bows comes along and puts in a buy request for at least my offer price.

The Exchange, and indeed the whole economy, is entirely player-driven. Market forces determine which items go up in price and which go down. Supply and demand are the key drivers of this.

One famous example is the introduction of Stiles. There's an island where players can catch lobsters, tuna, and swordfish. Previously, players had to take a ship to the island, catch a full load of fish, take the ship back to the mainland, offload the fish, then repeat the process. This made it very tedious and those types of fish were in short supply, so each of them could fetch hundreds of coins. But when the developers of RuneScape put a man called Stiles on the island whose job it was to swap real fish for notes, which are basically slips of paper representing an item thereby saving space in players' backpacks, the prices of those fish tumbled to under a hundred, because players could now stay on the island for a long time, catch load after load of fish, exchanging the fish for notes as they went, then, when they were good and ready, return to the mainland and dump literally thousands of fish onto the Exchange. Supply shot up overnight so the market crashed.

Besides content knowledge like this, RuneScape has imparted people skills to me too. The account I'm using now is actually my second. I lost access to my first one more than 10 years ago after being tricked by another player into giving up my password. It was the infamous scam where the conman would say something like "You can't say your password backwards in chat. It gets censored out. See: *********". And victims like me would stupidly try it and of course it won't be starred out and every player in the vicinity will suddenly know our password. Can't we just change the password immediately? Well, yeah, assuming we're smart enough to realise that that's the solution to the problem. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't streetwise at all back then, allowing myself to get tricked in the first place and then not knowing how to remedy the situation until it was too late.

I remember feeling hot all over when I failed to log in the next time and it finally dawned on me what had happened. Luckily it was a pretty terrible account so the scammer didn't get much. Being young and pretty dumb, I didn't train my levels as efficiently as I do now, and I was clueless about making an income, so my account was practically unskilled and poor. Nonetheless, it was a valuable learning experience for me. My second account, the one that turned 10 today, is much better than the first and, more importantly, it hasn't been scammed of anything, not even money or items.

But although I became more shrewd and less gullible when dealing with other players, I didn't want to become a hermit and refuse to interact, because that would have defeated the purpose of playing a multiplayer online game. And I'm glad I made that decision. I've come across lots of fantastic people in my travels across RuneScape, and chatting with them while fishing or woodcutting has opened my eyes to different cultures and ways of life. It's really cool to hear from rifle-toting Americans who shoot raccoons for sport, for instance, because that's something I'll never get to see here in Singapore.

All in all, the RuneScape community is a great one to be a part of. I attribute it to the fact that the vast majority of us are mature, as we're mostly in our 20s now. Sure, you'll find the usual boob jokes and bad-tempered quarrelling, but if you look below the surface, we abide by an unspoken code of honour. Nowhere is this more evident than at limited resources like mining rocks or popular combat training monsters, where each rock or monster will only award points to one player at a time. If more than one player is in the area, we somehow manage to reach a silent agreement on how to divide up the rocks or monsters so that each player has an equal share to themselves, because rushing for the same rock or monster would just be a waste of time for all concerned. And if one player is already next to the rock or monster, no other player should go for the same one. If we judge that the place is saturated when we arrive and can't support us without causing a drop in overall efficiency, we should switch to a different server which is less crowded rather than stubbornly competing with those already there.

What will happen if you violate this creed, you ask? Well, my young padawan learner, prepare to find your character's screenshot and display name in a rant post on Reddit, possibly accompanied by a boob joke involving your mother. Social shaming for the win!