A few weeks ago there was some heated debate going on in the games community about a rather controversial rule change that Jagex made. The rule change meant that ‘luring’ was now allowed within the rules. Luring is the act of tricking people, who want to buy or sell valuable items, into the Wilderness on false pretences. The lurer lies to the person that he wishes to trade with him, even though he has no real intention of doing so.

The lurer then proceeds to ask the person to meet in Edgeville to trade. When the buyer or seller shows up there, the lurer stands somewhere near or in the Wilderness and asks the person to come to him. A regular trick is that the lurer drops a small amount of cash in the Wilderness, which the ignorant person then tries to pick up. As soon as the person enters the Wilderness he finds himself attacked by the lurer and his friends.

Now Jagex claimed that people were warned well enough about the dangers of the Wilderness. In other words, they considered it your own stupid fault if you fell for this and that there was nothing wrong with people who tried to lure other people into the Wilderness. Jagex did add that they considered luring to be “not in the spirit of the game” �" whatever that vague description may actually mean in reality.

Many people were outraged about this ridiculous argument of Jagex �" and rightly so. Jagex completely seemed to miss the point that the lurer lied to trick his victim into the Wilderness in the first place. Whether Jagex warned well-enough about the dangers of the Wilderness or not had nothing to do with it at all. The lurer had no intention to buy or sell and was only interested in tricking the person into the Wilderness to kill him for his precious items. Anyone who has the ability to reason logically would immediately conclude that this is in fact an act of deception, which fell perfectly under rule number two “item scamming” before the rule change was made. Anyone with even the slightest amount of common sense available to him would also know that this kind of behavior is totally unwanted in the game and not just “not in the spirit of the game”.

I can imagine that Jagex was showered with complaints about their stance and perhaps they even started to realize that their initial stance totally missed the point after reading some of the arguments. Either way, Jagex luckily decided to revisit their stance again to finally conclude that luring is, in fact, an act of deception and thus unwanted behavior, reportable under rule number two. Unlike many, I refuse to congratulate them for doing so though. I can merely consider it a good and adequate correction of a huge mistake.

Especially because I believe that the whole situation could have been prevented. I have personally seen luring evolve over time and consider Jagex guilty of neglecting that prevention is better than cure. When luring first occurred on the discontinued items board of the official forums, it was just an 'incident'. It actually took quite a while before more 'professional' scammers started to execute the luring scam on practically everyone who wanted to buy or sell a rare. Still, even when it started to take place ‘regularly’ Jagex continued to close its eyes for the luring scam up until recently. Nowadays I sometimes come across posts with “Luring attemps: 17, Real offers: 5”.

Being the person who first named Price Manipulation (the act of lying about an items price or making ridiculous claims about its future price for the sole purpose of raising the items price) as a problem way back in time, I am sadly seeing a lot of similarities between the way both Price Manipulation and luring developed with the passing of time. Jagex ignored both problems until they were so widespread that they practically couldn't do anything about them anymore. When Price Manipulation became such an issue that the whole discontinued items board was cluttered with it, Jagex eventually decided to do something against it. The damage was already done by then though and the same goes for luring.

I sincerely hope that Jagex will try to use a ‘prevention is better than cure’ policy in the future instead. It will both prevent embarrassing rule changes that clearly show that Jagex has no idea what is going on in the games community and it will also enhance the game experience for the honest players by ensuring that issues like luring and Price Manipulation never become as widespread.