[2019] You Thought It Was Just A Lag

Hey all. There are a few things being raised here, and we'll cover each, in some way. There's the exploit itself. There's us NDAing content creators and the responses from Mod Bolton. There's the idea of any collusion between Reddit and Jagex.

In terms of the exploit. It's standard to not discuss active investigations and actions being taken, at least until after we've taken steps to resolve the issues. We became aware of a method being used to duplicate gold, and a combination of things - including tip-offs from Rendi and our system monitoring - led to us becoming aware of it very quickly. The Support and anti-cheating teams worked on removing a large amount of gold and investigated the accounts involved, whilst the SysAdmin and Engine teams were working on stopping it happening more. We remain diligent, and are yet to see any repeated occurrence of the exploit - work is continuing to improve our game systems to prevent this sort of thing from occurring again. In response to Rendi’s tip-off specifically, we were (and remain) very appreciative of his tip-offs. The video doesn’t seem to cover any of the other interactions that occurred between him and the JMods in the server in which we did quickly acknowledge his tip-offs and did thank him for his vigilance.

There's no collusion or conspiring for suppression with the Reddit admins. We don't astroturf or censor posts and we will never do that. It seems that they independently took action to prevent information sharing of replication steps for duplication methods. I'd presume that they were acting entirely in good faith, and did so to prevent knowledge of the bug being made public and risk its further abuse. If that's the case, then I think it's because that they think it's better if everybody doesn't spend their time duping cash. I don't think there was any malicious action.

In terms of NDAing the content creators. This is entirely separate from this specific game issue. Mod Bolton is the Head of Influencer Management, and he tried to reply to this thread at 7:07am to explain, though it looks like his comment was auto-hidden! I'll reply to my comment with his message.

*edit - Bolton's comment has now been unhidden, you can find that earlier in the thread*

If you have any other questions, please do reply and ask them.

Mod Bolton’s message (auto-hidden earlier this morning):

Hey there Rendi, I'm sorry you felt you needed to leave the discord, or that you are in any way unappreciated. I really don't have any info on anything in-game, as my focus is wholly influencers, but I'd like to explain my comments that you discuss at the start of the vid.

I should clarify that the reason I was concerned about "incorrect info" leaking out of the discord, was because we were seeing a "telephone" effect on what was actually said in the chat. Players were hearing second-hand stories through streamers, and creating reddit threads with totally incorrect claims about what creators and Jagex were saying. As the person in charge of influencer, that is unacceptable regardless of the topic, and is traditionally solved with an NDA.

In general, NDA's don't apply to anything you bring into a channel yourself. An NDA just protects what others say in the chat, allowing both creators and Jagex to speak freely, and preventing creator conflict or content spoiling (e.g.- someone shares some info in chat for a new vid, and it leaks on another's stream). I hope you can understand how it's a tool meant to allow discussion, not stifle it.

Additionally, we’ll be NDAing content creators as part of the new content creator program we’ll be implementing in 2020. We want to start circulating more advanced publishing and game information in the future so that creators can pre-prep content, but that will require a decent amount of confidence in the security of the channel.

I hope that explains my position a little bit better. If you'd like to chat further, I sent you a friend request on Discord.

Not quite like that, but we'll be sharing ideas and maybe a bit more insight into release dates. We certainly won't be sharing mechanics or anything.

If it's any consolation, I'm planning to do the same with "normal" players too with my 2020 plans.

It made for an interesting commute to work.

I'm afraid we aren't able to share that information. I'd personally like to, when we're in a position where we consider the issue entirely resolved.

There is precedent of Jagex pursuing legal action against people who maliciously damage the game, yes.

Just an overview - I'd want players to apply to be involve, and then I'd use data and analytics to choose samples of those.

There was more interaction with him than was in the video.

Not quite - it'd be information-based rather than an actual testing environment.

If we had a sandbox testing environment for content creators then I'd want to roll that out to everybody!

https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/e2bmu0/you_thought_it_was_just_a_lag/f8v213c?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

A roll back wasn't seen as a viable option. It was the best course of action when we made errors like the Twisted bow spawn, and the max cash stack drop on death, but wasn't here.

We don't want the economy destroyed. We don't want to reboot OSRS. We don't want to remove polling. We don't want to add MTX.

https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/e2bmu0/you_thought_it_was_just_a_lag/f8v1tsc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

The playtesters for Theatre of Blood didn't encounter the fully-balanced Raid, nor did they see or expect Verzik's final phase.

It's a tricky one. If we don't allow playtesters to engage with content on release day then we'd find it hard to get suitable playtesters.

We do have playtests, that's entirely separate from what we're discussing. We have playtests for "normal" players too.

The NDA isn't meant to censor. An NDA wouldn't have prevented Rendi from creating a video like this, for example.

Nope! They had access to the same information you did. There were a few calls we had with them to talk about Leagues generally, but we didn't go into specifics at all.

I'd hope not! It'd be one for /u/JagexBolton to address, but we wouldn't gain anything from content creators feeling like they had to stay on our good side.

We've spoken about past exploits/bugs, similarly we've spoken about staff leaving and attacks to our login servers, so it wouldn't be unthinkable - but this point still stands - "It's standard to not discuss active investigations and actions being taken, at least until after we've taken steps to resolve the issues".

Think of it this way - players are scared about a gamebreaking bug ruining the economy, they're told that we ignored it and tried to cover it up, and were even shown "proof" of it too. I don't blame any player from reacting to this video. It's entirely understandable.

We didn't try to keep his mouth shut in the slightest. An NDA would not stop him creating videos like these.

Employees do playtest content! It isn't just content creators, there are "normal" players too! The fact is that our players are better at the game than we are. We hire good players, and we'd strongly encourage great players to apply for vacancies as they arise.

What I meant was that we'd have nothing to gain if we forced content creators to feel like they had to stay on our good side, and act against their usual nature. We have plenty to gain from them remaining critically-minded and empowered to voice their actual opinion and expertise.

No NDA has been signed, but they do sign NDAs when they do things like visit the office. Nobody has been threatened with a ban.