Runescape Reader's Digest Blog

Runescape Places game

2012-01-09T11:56:00.003-05:00

I've been working on this game on and off during the last 2 month and now, finally, it's ready and open for players! Yay!

This is my first and, so far, the only experience with creation of online games and I am pretty happy about how it turned out. Game mechanics weren't that hard to implement. As usual, content creation was the most time consuming part. I had to learn how to operate the Orb of Oculus (it's in itself not a small feat!) and search Gielinor for interesting and beautiful places (no complains there!). Also Cremnlin helped a lot by giving me "gamer perspective" on scores, lifes, skips and other bells and whistles - quite fascinating :)

I'll keep adding more places to the game over time (it has 200+ now), hopefully, others will also contribute, but even now the game is playable and actually quite challenging.

So, check Runescape Places out, I am sure you'll enjoy it!

geReporters, Runefest and BXPW

2011-09-08T22:20:00.003-04:00

The summer's gone, but my writer hat is still laying somewhere collecting dust and sheltering spiders. I am afraid it'll stay that way for some time more. RL happened and I've been working hard. I can't complain, though - the work I've been doing during the last year or so is the most interesting work I've ever done - in fact, maybe the most interesting work there is in IT business nowadays. So yeah, I am pretty happy about that.

As far as Runescape goes, I still play, but not much: do my quota in the Clan Citadel, a few slayer assignments here and there and a lot of Temple Trekking recently.

Runewise will be at RuneFest. Alas, I can't come personally, but Tabt, Goggie and Jethraw volunteered to represent Runewise at joined Sal's/Runewise stall. I just shipped Runewise's poster (designed by Cremnlin) and some fliers to Tabt. If you end up going to Runefest, come by the stall and say hi :)

I also got some good news from the Grand Exchange Central. They are fully back in business and Absenm has big plans for the future, including hosting an analogue of "World Street Journal" for Runescape economy. Writers are very welcome. If you wish to become one, contact Absenm at absenm[at]gmail.com. Here is a quote from Absenm about expectations for the writers: "People interested in writing for us have two options. One, write guides that give tips and advice. Two, geReporters, who write stories about the eco system not related to giving investment advice. Straight out reporting what is currently happening. Just the facts."

Finally, BXPW. I sold all my herbs and will be training construction. But that's not what I wanted to say :) Much more interesting is this article from Merch Gwyar. She uses BXPW as an example of game event which could be shared by parents and children, even if parents are not playing. One thing I would add is that in my opinion it should not be a one street road - children should also make some effort and actually tell their parents about the game events ahead of time.

Cheers!

Runescape Clan Citadel Planning

2011-08-05T09:34:00.003-04:00

I thought that introduction of Clan Citadels would affect Runescape greatly, but I couldn't even imagine how profound the change would be. It's not only clans that got affected - everything, including gameplay has changed. At least from my point of observation.

Now people have a huge incentive to join a clan and not just any clan, but a big one. It looks like the time of small 4-10 people clans is over - no one wants to struggle with a low level citadel -it's all or nothing. And then comes resource gathering - let's face it, it's quite tedious, even at 1000 mark. Right now it amounts to 2-3 hours of chopping wood in a week, fortunately, not always alone, but still it's a lot of time if you don't play much. My average playing time is somewhere around 5 hours per week, spending 50% of that time on one activity is a daunting prospect. I did 1000 in the first week and I am at 700 this week, but it'll have to change - I am not happy with my Runescape experience. I'll have to find a balance between my inner commitment to Canting Away and the way I prefer to play the game. And I have a feeling that it's not just me who is going through this kind of struggle. And what will happen when say 50-60 members clan stop producing enough resources to advance through the tiers? Dissent and finger pointing? Breaking up? It is a possibility. I hope Canting will be immune from it, but only time will tell.

Will we end up with only really really big clans left standing in a half a year?

Why half a year? Apparently this is a minimum time required to build a tier 7 clan citadel. See Teacuptime's calculations, finding and suggestions for planning clan citadels here:

Very insightful. An interesting twist is that apparently after Tier 7 citadel is built, it's not that hard to maintain the level. If only 12 people out of 50 do their max in resource gathering in a week, the citadel will stand. So maybe, there is a chance for middle size clans after all :)

The magic number is 27775. If a clan makes this number of resources per week on a regular basis - it'll live. If not, I am afraid, there is a good chance of the clan eventually breaking up.

Share your thoughts, please. Especially if you were in a well established clan before the update. How did it affect your clan? I am very curious :)

Barbarian Assault. Killing Queen with One Omega Egg

2011-07-17T21:34:00.003-04:00

It's funny how little is needed to give an incentive to train a particular skill. I've been shying away from training Agility for several years, then Jagex released auras, I chose Surefooted and suddenly found myself doing frequent 20 mins runs on the advanced Gnome Course and my Agility jumping from 81 to nearly 85. But that's not the topic I wanted to talk about.

I've been using Penance master horn when training Agility, so, naturally, I had to mix my 20 mins runs with Barbarian Assault games in order to refill the horn. This is my favorite Runescape minigame - no complains there :) I love it. Barbarian Assault is simply the best way to make new friends in Runescape.

There is just one thing that frequently tarnishes it: Barbarian Assault Myths...

The biggest culprit is the myth about the egg launcher. You know it: "don't shoot!!! we'll all loose points" and it's variation "don't shoot!!! I won't get as many points as I could for my role". Of course, both statements are completely false. No one looses or misses any points because of other players using cannon to kill penance creatures. But the myth persists and people loose their tempers because of it, name calling ensues and teams fall apart.

I think I got used to it, though. It seems like this myth won't disappear no matter what...

But now a new destructive myth appeared and I am worried about it having bad impact on the game: people insist on trying to kill the Queen with just one omega egg. It's actually not a myth, it's a glitch in the game which is possible to exploit. I found one video where it is shown, see here if you are interested. In a nutshell, it is possible (or used to be possible, I don't know if Jagex already fixed it or not) to load the cannot with some normal eggs, then everybody opens shooting interface and starts spam-clicking on the empty omega egg slot. Then the collector loads just one egg and boom, it goes multiple times, the queen is dead.

I actually don't care that much about this glitch. If it works it presumably saves a minute of the game time, who cares! What I care about is the fact that people start to force their teammates to try it. It is not very easy to do with spam-clicking and all that, so it NEVER works the first time! What happens next is just as bad as it is repetitive. The person who wants to exploit the glitch insists on trying again and the rest of the team begs him to forget about it and kill the Queen in a normal way. It goes on for a while (5-10 mins!!!), sometimes another unsuccessful attempt follows, finally, names are being called and someone quits the game. In short, I have yet to seen a Queen killed when someone mentions trying this "one omega egg glitch". Brrr...

So yeah, if that happens to you, my advice would be to run! As soon as the glitch is mentioned, quit the game and look for another team. Seriously. You'll save yourself 30 mins and spare the rest of the team from a nasty exchange.

Return to Canifis Review

2011-07-04T12:41:00.004-04:00

After reading (and enjoying) the first Runescape book "Betrayal at Falador", I was really anxious to get my hands on "Return to Canifis". So, as soon as I got one, I put away other books I was reading at the time and dived into another "away from the computer" Runescape adventure. The promise to travel through vast evilness of Morytania was very alluring. And the author didn't disappoint me, at least not in that area. Both Canifis and Mort Myre swamp came out perfect - just the right mixture of fog, stench, dampness, evil, hope and despair. I do feel different now, when traveling through these parts of Gielinor after reading this book. So, if you are after this kind of experience, by all means, go ahead and get the book!

But if you are looking for something more, like engaging plot, likable new characters and great adventure, I am afraid, I'll have to disappoint you. Despite its many flaws "Betrayal at Falador" was better in this regard... "Return to Canifis" had so many illogical turns in the plot, that it never came out as a cohesive sequence, even at the end. Actually the end was missing altogether - which was another big disappointment for me, I do like books having a logical conclusion, even when they are parts of a series.

So what was the plot? In a nutshell, Kara, Gar'rth, Theodore and Co met in Varrock, spent half of the book there among half developed (and not finished even at the end of the book) court intrigues. There was a monster in the city as well, whose presence wasn't fully explained either. Then they went to Canifis as part of so called embassy, got in a few conflicts with werewolves, escaped, traveled through the swamp to Meiyerditch, got back to the swamp and made a dire escape back to Misthalin. Of course, they got separated and re-joined, met new characters and fought many battles along the way, one wouldn't expect less, there was even a hidden thing going on for Gar'rth, which I won't spoil here, but... Almost none of it made sense, if you just stop and think about it. It bothered me greatly.

All those hints about Zamorakians at the court - didn't come anywhere. Groundwork for the next book?
Pia's actions throughout the whole book were quite illogical too. What was she doing there in the first place, btw?
The whole embassy stuff - it was only used to get our heroes to Canifis, it was never intended to be a real embassy.
People from the swamp... they only wanted to get away and get away quickly. So how come they dared to make forays into Canifis or even Meiyerditch? Made no sense.
Vampires, being so powerful, were not able to prevent people from going back an forth to/from Meiyerditch and actually let our valiant heroes to escape? Common.

The list could be longer...

Also add to it an overabundance of blood and gore (just like in the previous book) and considerably less humor. Ah, yes, and the jealousy! Quite frankly I was fed up with Kara's and Theodore's jealousy thing going on forever. There got to be something else about their relationship worth writing about.

Anything else? Actually there were several good things too:

Fight scenes were very good throughout the whole book and none of them dragged out (like the main battle in "Betrayal at Falador"did). The fights were diverse, realistic and in general very well described. The supposedly climax fight on and around the balloon was quite awesome.
Again, just like in the previous book, there were no completely "black" or "white" characters - everybody had something both good and bad going for them.
And the scenery. But I already talked about it...

Following my summarization pattern from the previous review:

Did I like "Return to Canifis"? - note as a whole, I only liked certain aspects of it.
Would I recommend this book to others? - only if you are a Runescape player and would like to get a "feel" for Morytania to enhance your in-game experience.
Should other Runescape books be written? - why not? But the next one should be considerably better. I don't want another "Return to Canifis".

How to kill Jad without a fight

2011-06-25T21:34:00.004-04:00

I am still alive, I just went undercover for a while. Almost literally. Anyway, I kept playing Runescape on a fairly regular basis, but didn't do much on the site or (obviously) in this blog. I am not sure if I am ready to come back to regular writing, but today was a special occasion - I finally killed Jad!

I tried to do it time and again for years, but to no avail. Supplies weren't an issue and I learned how to switch prayers without loosing concentration, but as soon as healers would appear - boom, boom and I was dead. I read guides and watched videos, I even tried to tank Jad with turmoil and vengeance, but it didn't work either.

Finally I bumped into the solution. Somewhere in the middle of RS Wiki article about Jad I saw this: "In fact, it is possible to kill TzTok-Jad using only deflect curses. The damage that is deflected back to him does not count as the player's damage, which means that the healers will not be summoned when he is at half health." OMG!!! It is possible to kill Jad without having to deal with healers! I couldn't believe my eyes, but I did try this approach and... it worked. After about 8-9 minutes stand-off Jad killed itself - the only thing I had to do was to watch Jad's attacks, switch prayers and take an occasional sip of prayer restore potion.

So if you are still on a quest to kill Jad and have similar problems, give this method a try! Good luck!

Edited on July 21: this method is no longer possible. Jagex closed this loophole.

History of Gielinor Quiz

2011-05-09T22:21:00.002-04:00

I absolutely have to share it with you: just added new quiz called "History of Gielinor" to Runewise (thanks to Wabbit). I think it's the best Runescape quiz I ever saw. Try it!

25 Signs the Runescape Economy is tanking

2011-04-26T01:05:00.002-04:00

An awesome video from Excl. The ultimate answer to "RS economy gone bad" remarks :)

Latest news from the Grand Exchange Central

2011-04-24T19:05:00.004-04:00

I am back from a week long vacation (was exploring Kentucky - loved it) and I do plan to resume more or less regular postings.

Meanwhile, here is the latest update from Absenm about the Grand Exchange Central reopening. Almost there!

Well, The Grand Exchange Central is about 80% up and running. Just cleaning up a few issues. It may seem that two months was an awful long time to fix our security issues. But we needed to use what little time we had to make sure we didn't face these issues again.

First of all, you will see that the site looks pretty much the same. That is because we focused on stuff in the background. Redundant security and visitor protection was paramount. But we also managed to make most pages load up to 4x faster. We also tweaked certain formulas, to make our lists more reasonable in what they display.

The Mock Grand Exchange portion of the site will still be down till summer. The MGE had major issues, and it seemed it was better to simply start fresh with it; building on a foundation focused on security first, and learning from our technical challenges of the past to make an overall better mock exchange.

We are in talks with other fan sites about hosting our forums. Forums are a terrible security risk for a site, and having an outside forums host will protect the main site from attack. In the end, the GEC was never about the forums, so having a trusted fansite take that responsibility just makes a lot of security sense.

Obviously, you'll see nothing new on our site from a visitor stand point. All these months of work went into a foundation based on security. But we did implement some tweaks that will also help us expand in the future.

I'd like to thank everyone who was concerned with our issues, and sent me and the GEC their best wishes for our return. We are almost there, and I hope our former visitors will check us out again and be reminded of why they liked us so much.

Thank you again, Absenm

Honest Players Overrun RuneScape

2011-04-07T22:42:00.002-04:00

This one is probably from April 1 issue, but it's both funny and witty. There is even some hidden truth inside, if you really think about it. Enjoy!

Meeting Zezima

2011-04-06T12:09:00.003-04:00

Well, I met Zezima in game yesterday. I guess it happens to everybody sooner or later.

I've been restocking at Edgeville bank for another trip to Chaos Tunnels, when somebody pointed out that Zezima was there. Indeed, he was standing at the same spot I was - presumably fletching. If not for that remark, I wouldn't even notice him and would simply go back to the tunnels.

As you can imagine people started to freak out and ask Zezima for various favors: pictures, phrases etc. Nothing too extreme, after all there were just about 10-15 players in the bank at that time. It wasn't like a big crowd following Zezima into the wilderness or something of that nature. But still, it was stalking and after a few kind responses Zezima stopped answering any questions or remarks thrown at him.

What about me? I was standing there, thinking about all those things I could say. After all for me, Zezima was (and is) one of a very few true Runescape folk heroes (or legends, if you will). I don't think anybody else (despite being #1 or whatever) quite achieved his status in the eyes of Runescape players. I doubt anyone ever will. I could have said that, right? Or maybe I could have said that I have special code just for him at Runewise, because people enter his name there all the time. But no, I know that he doesn't actually use Runewise and I wouldn't be able to explain my "folk hero" theory in a few words as well. So I said the only thing I could under the circumstances and that was how I met Zezima.

I ain't dead

2011-04-04T23:43:00.003-04:00

I ain't dead...

I am just slacking. Actually, that's not entirely true. I've been playing some and I did major rework at Runewise (fixed ALog based services), but I was generally not in a mood to write anything or even join Canting Away's clan chat. I did today, so maybe that's why I am writing, who knows... Or maybe it's this time of the year - I remember skipping a month or so last year too, right around March/April. It's spring after all: lots of orienteering, field work and just "work" work.

Plus I am still kind of mulling over the whole "Jagex"/"Night moth" situation. It's rather disheartening. Oh, and BTW, Runescape Adventurer's Log is broken now (go check yours). Yeah, well...

I do have a link for you, though, which is sufficiently gloomy and depressing, yet interesting at the same time: Fred kins' investigation of the Runescape's dark side, aka tracing roots of RWT companies.

P.S. I won't promise to resume regular posts just yet, but I am pretty sure I will eventually...

Night Moth

2011-03-22T23:13:00.003-04:00

I feel like a night moth trying to break through the glass. It hurts but I just keep bumping into it. Why do I get this feeling almost every time I communicate with Jagex?! And I can't even blame them. Working for a big corporation myself I know how difficult (if not impossible) for them is to deal with "unknown" entities (well, like me, or other fan sites for that matter), but it still hurts. I wish the world would be simpler, I really do...

Oh maybe I am just too tired these days...

I wish I could share with you "Come, O My Love" song by Carolyn Hester, which shows exactly how I feel now, but I couldn't find it anywhere...

Bob Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee" from White Stripes will have to do

Grand Exchange Central Re-opening

2011-03-21T22:44:00.004-04:00

Below is an announcement from Absenm about the Grand Exchange Central re-opening. Yes, it's up and running again, yay!

Set your calendars friends. April 15 is the official re-opening of The Grand Exchange Central. Before then we will be bits and pieces. But portions of the site will be up. Even today.

We have spent a month finding everything we could to secure our site. Our security is not just watching our users back. We have taken the offensive. Fool me once shame on me. Fool me twice shame on you.

No. Sadly, you will not see anything new. Not yet. Six weeks of work went into security. But at the same time, while rewriting everything, we put in to place some very powerful plug in routines. Once we know you visitors are safe, we can start adding things at a startling pace.
Our little baby hacker has awoken a sleeping giant. We at the GEC will be bigger, stronger, and way more cool than even we had dreamed.

I personally, Absenm, apologize for taking so long. It was required to protect our visitors. We will never again allow hackers to take us down again. I am not issuing a challenge. I am making a statement of fact.

We are going to be smart. Just adding pages slowly. There will be broken links. But in a month you will hardly notice we had been gone. By April 15 it will be business as usual. It is time for resurrection. And the GEC will be there when the dust settles.

So please, RuneScape friends, check on us. You will be glad you did. And on April 15 you will have your GEC finally back. Until then, please watch our progress. We will be a little messy, but we are back, and constructing the site you always wanted us to be.

Merch Gwyar's 1000th post

2011-03-18T19:41:00.003-04:00

This is Merch Gwyar's 1000th post and it is beautiful.

Do you realize how lucky we are, that Merch Gwyar plays Runescape and chooses to write about it? I am so glad she does and I am happy that it helps her too.

That day we spent together (to commemorate her 500th post) was one of my best days in Runescape. Maybe the best. I am also an avid reader of her blog about Mexico - in the last two years I happened to travel there a lot and came to love that country.

Thank you, Merch Gwyar. There will be time, when Runescape will be no more, but wherever you go and whatever you do, please, know that you have a special talent: you can touch and heal people's souls with your words. Thank you...

Bonus XP Weekend

2011-03-14T17:14:00.004-04:00

It was a very busy weekend, indeed. But mostly IRL (orienteering - ftw). I did manage about 7 hours of playing time, though. I wanted to raise my Smithing to an "effigy" level (which is also a level where I will be able to finally smith myself promethium 2-hander and plate - still to be done). And I wanted to get my Summoning up (I didn't have enough charms for 91, but it's an ultimate goal). So I went through 12K adamant bars and then spent all my Summoning charms. Here are the results:

12K bars is a lot, no way I would try to smith all of them in a row. Instead, I made short breaks every half an hour or so and trained some other skills for a bit. That's where Construction, Fishing, Fletching, Herblore and Crafting exp came from. Runecrafting came from Tears of Guthix.

I also took advantage of people selling by-products of BXPW Smithing for prices way way below their high-alch values. Made a few millions on that. It's always fun to look for and exploit such merchanting opportunities :)

As far as links go, I have a non-RS one. I simply love this picture (and, of course, the movies it's based on). Thanks to Jamie for the pointer (again non-RS blog, but some of you may remember her as Bluebrisingr).

Apple 0123 or is it Apple O123 after all?

2011-03-12T18:19:00.002-05:00

Dan recently posted a promotional "100b+ staking video". I don't want to promote the guy who made it (my reasons below). If you really want to see it, you'll find it without much problems anyway. The video shows a few staking clips, one of them with a guy staking and loosing a full set of party hats. They call it insane staking and it is. But call it any way you want, in my opinion, there simply too much dirt related to this aspect of the game.

I don't like staking. I don't like how it emulates gambling and fosters gambling addictions in Runescape players. It also has historical ties to RWT and, of course, luring and deception are right there as well. And it's the deception aspect I want to talk about here. That guy who lost a set of party hats, his name was in the video and it was displayed as Apple 0123. He is in the highscores with mediocre combat stats: 70 Attack, 70 Strength, 81 Defense, 84 HP, 90 Ranged, 52 Prayer, 60 Magic. There was no way someone would use such account in Dueling Arena and bet anything valuable. Something was very fishy. Naturally I got curious and went searching for Apple 0123. I found him (on RSOF selling party hats and also on some rather fishy forums - surprise, duh). There was a few threads where he boasted his staking gains and they were indeed significant - not just one set of party hats, but something like ten of them. But he wasn't Apple 0123 after all - his real name was Apple O123 (aka letter "O") and he used this deception as his means to lure other players in staking big items. Apple O123 has 85 Attack, 99 Strength, 99 HP, 1 Def - figures...

Finally it all made sense, but it didn't look any less foul to me...

Return to Canifis. Prologue

2011-03-10T20:54:00.002-05:00

The prologue of upcoming new Runescape book (Return to Canifis) is out in public. Enjoy!

Thanks to Ben for the pointer.

Cause of bad manners in Runescape

2011-03-08T19:30:00.003-05:00

I think everybody noticed that people's manners in Runescape are rather low nowadays. Many possible causes were brought to consideration, such as return of the free trade and wilderness, bots and gold farmers, removal of the word filter, maturing of the Runescape populations, un-maturing of the Runescape population, Jagex, world wide crisis and unrest in North Africa. But finally, Kayla was able to nail it on a head and found the very original source of all the troubles. See for yourself!

General Graardor

2011-03-07T18:11:00.003-05:00

Finally! I successfully soloed General Graardor today! Yay!

It took me just about a year and a half :) Yes, I know, most people are able to solo Graardor with lower combat stats, but it's not only about stats, believe me... I made several attempts late in 2009, came close, but not quite - and after that I simply couldn't make myself to go there again - I'd always find something less stressful to do :)

So how did I end up there? It was Nex's voice that did the trick. After yesterday's post I was so eager to hear one of those monsters speak, that suddenly there was nothing else for me to do in Runescape - I had to face Graardor or quit in disgrace :)

The first fight was very messy, I was mostly concerned with staying alive and didn't pay much attention to anything else. I ate and ate and ate and 30 sharks later found a pile of Ourg bones at my feet. Not exactly 30 kills in one trip as some people do. Anyway I teleported out, restocked, came back but this time turned "auto-retaliate" off. 30 sharks later I had two more piles of Ourg bones in my inventory.

And, of course, during all that time he kept talking to me about "breaking bones" and "splitting skulls" in that very charming voice of his :)

Voices in Runescape

2011-03-06T20:17:00.002-05:00

I haven't been in any of the God Wars Bosses rooms this year... Apparently they all got real voices back in January! And Nex too. Nex's voice and phrases are utterly creepy. I found three recordings on RS Wiki: one here inside an article about voice in RS (the article is quite interesting by itself BTW) and two here.

As far as voices of God Wars Generals, there are a bunch of videos on YouTube. Here is an example with all four generals featured. But it's 13 mins and quite tiresome. Is there some recording or video where these voices are delivered in compact form?

Runewise's Badges of Honour

2011-03-05T22:29:00.003-05:00

Just added a new feature to Runewise called "Badges of Honour". You can see more details about it here.

It's amazing how much interesting stuff could be done based on Adventurer's log data! Runewise now have four services based on Adventurer's Logs: first it was a "hidden" congratulation service, then community records, then personal records and now "badges of honour". And I have a feeling there will be more. Oh, how I wish there would be Adventurer's log for F2P players...

Thanks again to my friends from Impact for providing the ALog service to Runewise.

Vitruvius

2011-03-04T12:29:00.003-05:00

I haven't done Elemental Workshop IV yet, and now I am glad I haven't :)
It'll be much more fun after reading this post from Helm Lardar where he talks about Vitruvius's and praises his skills in metallurgy and magic.

What does it take to get into top 100 in Runescape

2011-03-02T20:08:00.003-05:00

What does it take to get into top 100 in Runescape highscores nowadays? Check out these astonishing figures. I know that with my tempo, I'd reach those levels in approximately 23 years. Ouch...

There are also numbers for getting into top 1000 (total and in every skill). Those are more manageable, but still so freaking far away :) I actually used to be around 950 in Farming for a while, but it's in the past now and I don't think I'll ever get into top 1000 in any skill again. No matter how efficient you are, it does come down to playing time. 6-8 hours a week won't cut it.

Message from Absenm about the Grand Exchange Central situation

2011-02-28T10:00:00.009-05:00

Below is an official announcement from Absenm about the latest news from the Grand Exchange Central and the status of the site recovery. As you are aware, the GEC is being completely reworked at the moment, including the forum, which makes it hard for Absenm to keep in touch with the GEC users. I am happy to use Runewise and Runescape Reader's Digest to get the message out and I would encourage you to help too. If you know someone who used to use GEC and wonders what happened to it, point them here or reprint/link this post. Thank you!

Greetings Runewise Friends. My name is Absenm, and I am the webmaster of a site known as The Grand Exchange Central.

Over the past couple of weeks the Grand Exchange Central (GEC) has been the victim of a targeted hacking attack. At first it started out small, and I worked diligently to head it off as quickly as possible. Usually I was able to get in and restore things within hours if not minutes of each attack. I spent a lot of time trying to secure things. But the attacks kept coming, stronger and nastier. I eventually needed to temporarily close down to confront the issue head on and prevent GEC visitors from becoming victims.

Sadly, some people did manage to get infected by rouge javascript that was injected to my site. To those people I formally apologize. I know this must be frustrating to you. There is nothing we can do to change what has happened. But know that the GEC takes your security seriously, and our current efforts to protect you and all our visitors in the future are extensive, massive, and severe. I take this attack on the GEC personally, and rest assured I have been spending every waking minute confronting this issue. I do urge anyone who visited the GEC in February to make sure you perform solid virus scans on your computers, just to play it safe.

I admit, I probably should have taken greater efforts to alert our visitors to the situation. I did mention the hacking attempts in our forums several times. But it would have been more responsible for me to post a warning outright on our main page too. There are a couple of reasons for not taking that step. First, I thought I had it handled and that it was just an isolated script kiddie. Second, I really didn't want to give the hackers the satisfaction. Third, I didn't want to publicize the issue to prevent others from trying to take advantage of the situation. So I just notified visitors through the forums. In the future, potential security threats will be posted on our main pages immediately. In fact, if the GEC detects its under attack, it will automatically post a warning. This warning won't mean we have been hacked, simply that an attempt is being made and visitors should be cautious. (This is a new security feature we have added). I toyed with the idea of having the site automatically shut down, but then decided against it. Anyone who wanted to shutdown our site would simply just need to start trying. That isn't a solution. Plus, every large site is attacked multiple times every day.

Before I go further, some of you have noticed that the domain grandexchangecentral.com has expired. Please don't let this scare you. As it turns out, the domain name was set to expire already. After talking to my hosting provider to make sure I had leeway in renewal, I decided for security reasons to allow it to expire. The GEC was already down for our security overhaul, and we already had plans to go to a VPS, so safely expiring the domain was not an issue for me. Frankly, it is just less of a distraction for me right now. I have all my attention on overhauling the GEC, and I don't want to keep tabs on an open domain just in case someone managed to start posting code there. This is overkill. But I really want to protect my visitors, even if it kills the GEC search rankings.

So, what happened? Everything concerning the GEC has been destroyed in a manner of fashion. By my own hand no less. I suspect the problem arose from a rootkit being hidden on my site, injected through a malformed URL. The GEC is terribly complex, and I couldn't find the access point or rootkit. And even if I did find a rootkit, I could not be certain it was the only one. Thus, post attack security simply wouldn't cut it. I'd secure all directories. I'd sanitized my variables. But it was already too late. The safety of our visitors and future of the GEC depended on drastic actions. So I killed everything (kind of). I'm working with backups from last year right now.

So what is happening now? Well, just because I'm working from backups from last year doesn't mean much of any of those backups will ever see the light of day again in their original form. I am going page by page, line by line, rewriting everything using all the security precautions recommended from various security professionals. When GEC2.0 returns in the beginning of March, there will be several layers of security and monitoring. We are being both defensive in our measures, and proactive. No site is hack proof. But you can know, that if we ever do get hacked again, we did everything we could.

I'm not going to go into exactly all the security we have implemented. I'm not going to give hackers a blue print. But I will let you know that the entire site will be starting out clean. If a file is on our site, it will have been scrutinized for every possible weakness. Again, nothing that was there in the past will be there in the future without some form of security modification. Also, we are off loading our forums to a remote forums host. That means an attack on the forums (which is where I think this started), can not bleed onto the rest of the site. Also, a hosted forum has the benefit of always being updated to the latest security patches. For a few more weeks, the MGE portion of the site will also be down. That is a weak point that will take longer to protect. But the GEC itself, with its graphs and lists and Runedexs will be available.

Our goal is to be back up on March 3rd. That's the goal. And we think we will make it. The only reason I can see that will cause us to not meet that deadline is if my hosting provider takes longer to drop us onto a VPS. That is scheduling that is kind of out of my hands right now.

Also, be aware, we are still collecting price data. So even though we have been down now almost a week, GE pricing data has still been collected and will be available as soon as we are back up.

Once again, I apologize to anyone effected by this. Trust me. I have been deeply effected by this myself. And I feel your pain. I am terribly embarrassed and hurt and frustrated and mad. We were just hitting our stride, and this happens. I hope that the RS community will quickly come to trust our site again. I think the measures we have taken will make all our visitors feel safe and secure.

I'd also like to thank Vaskor for allowing us to reach the RS community through the Runewise site while the GEC is down. Runewise will always have a friend and partner with the GEC.

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