Catching up on 1000+ blog comments

Blog comments are fun to go through.

Some are great! I've approved a great number of comments today and they now appear in the comments section of the various posts they were posted to. I especially like the friendly comments from other blog owners - when I update this site, I'll be setting up cross-linkings with some of the ones with quality content.

Some are spam - runescape gold, runescape scams disguised as helpful sites, etc. I'm sure the spammers don't really care that they get comments rejected on some sites, as their modus operandi is "spam lots, all over the place" and even a %.01 return rate on their spamming is enough of a reward for them.

Some comments, however, are well-meaning people who are probably a little frustrated, and their frustration is coming across in their attempted communications with me.

Like the guy who hadn't looked at the most recent postings on the blog to realize it hadn't been updated in over 8 months when he said, exasperated:

dude wtf top blocking all my comments and stop trying to make people thing thoughs are yur runescape stats

All ridiculousness and jest aside, I'd like to let and commenters know that I don't ignore them, exactly - but I've left this blog unattended for a while and have a lot of work to do to clear out the backlog of comments. So, if I haven't answered your question, it is likely that I haven't gotten to it in the comments yet.

And of course, because of all the spammers that abound, all of the comments in this blog need to be approved by me before they show up on the site. If the world were full of people who don't try to clog the system up for the rest of us, I wouldn't have to do this.

But it has to be said - why do my character stats threaten you so? Certainly there are many players much higher level in everything than me now? And what "accomplishment" exactly is it for me to have wasted so much time to level all those silly skills? :) :)

Silly noters. Thank you for your entertainment - good and bad.

Merchanting (Price Gouging) -vs- Scamming

(aka, "On Scamming, part 2" Part one can be found here)

On the continued topic of Scamming on the free online role playing game Runescape, I'd like to add some of my own thoughts.

I've often heard people cry "scam!" when really, they're mislabelling what just happened to them - they've either been price-gouged by an or are uninformed about what they're buying, and neither are really the seller's fault nor problem.

Not the seller's fault??! What on earth do I mean by that??!

I mean this:

If you're desperately looking for an item, and someone charges you twice the regular cost for it, and you pay that price they request, that's opportunism, aka price-gouging. Personally, I like to sell things to people who are desperate to get them, precisely due to the fact that I can ask for 1.5-2x the normal selling price, and I'll generally get it.

In real life, the government protects us as citizens from price-gouging, as an attempt to keep things "fair". In online multi-player games, the game government (Jagex) is a much smaller presence, and thus Merchanting (sometimes negatively referred to as price-gouging) is NOT bad nor evil, since Jagex is more worried about other types of "crimes". The raw truth is that the prepared adventurer will think ahead about what they're going to do in the future, and NOT get caught so desperately needing something that an opportunistic player could overcharge for.

Regarding the "uninformed buyer" thing, if someone tries to sell you a pair of white boots for 5k and you buy them, not knowing they cost under 50 coins at a shop in Al Kahrid, it's NOT a scam. Ignorance of the value or availability of objects is not an excuse to shift the blame of you feeling "ripped off" onto the seller.

Personally, I refer to the following web forum page when considering all my buys and sells:

UPDATED SEPT 2007!

http://www.zybez.net/priceguide.php

Page 1 and 2 have prices for almost everything on the game, and the post is updated as required.

There ya go, more information you may not have known.

If you have suggestions for topics for me to post about, please leave comments!

Part three of this On Scamming topic can be found here.
Part four got lost somewhere but will probably come in the future.