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Back in the early days of Runescape, the Jmods were pretty much an integral part of the Runescape experience. You could tell they were intimate with the game and really enjoyed playing it as much as they enjoyed working on it. As the company grew, it felt as if more employees were simply people interested in game development, and not so much Runescape itself. I mean, it is hard to find 500~ people that are obsessed with a particular game and have a particular set of skills different from the rest of the 500 people, so it should come as no surprise that this development of apparent indifference happened over time as the company grew.
So you have people that go to work, get some tasks done, go home and get paid. I don't think a lot of them actually hop on Runescape just for an hour or two, to actually play the game for a bit. Imagine if they did. They'd see some of the same struggles we flood the forums with, without having their work bias clouding what they see. Meaning, if an animator played the game for fun instead of work when he got home, he wouldn't be so hyper-fixated on just the animation issues, he'd notice more things about the game and perhaps he'd know just the person to talk to about it over a coffee break. Whereas all we can do is cry about it, and hope some developer decides he gets paid enough to listen to us cry (spoiler alert: he doesn't)
But during this double-exp event, I've seen Mod Camel pop up out of nowhere and yeet a slam buff on everyone doing Hall of Memories, he didn't say much and quickly popped off again, but even that was enough to humanize the people responsible for this game just for a little bit. I saw a screenshot of another Jmod interacting with some players, and I remember during a Valentine's event last year, I also saw a couple of Jmods. I guess I just wish it wasn't like spotting a rare animal (although Mod Camel is a very unique animal indeed, have you seen his Fashionscape? My god what a majestic creature)
So thank you for that, I hope the folks at Jagex appreciate the mods who actually play the game, and if I was a shareholder, I'd heavily recommend incentivizing player interaction with a little nice bonus for whoever racks up the most active game hours bi-monthly or so - you have no idea how much it means to us, to have some kind of assurance that Jagex isn't just a boardroom of fatcats in tuxedos, deciding what new and exciting ways they can take our money, while whipping employees that only care about doing the minimal amount of work to keep their job so they can pay their rent.
TL;DR - I like Mod Camel, Mod Camel is nice. Pay him more.
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