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The game is set in a fantasy world, in which you control a character representing you. There is no particular goal or objective to the game, and no way to finish it. However, a lot of things that can be done within the game, for instance you can interact with other players, by talking with them, trading with them, and even killing them. There are several instances in which a one found his/her soulmate in the game. Quests can also be undertaken, for instance a Dragon slaying quest, and many activities such as fishing, crafting, mining and smithing can be performed. As these activities are performed your character will become more skilled at the activity. It is not uncommon for a dedicated player to spend in excess of four hours a day training his characer; there are even a few rare cases of players spending over ten hours, most days, playing RuneScape.
Runescape begins on a tutorial island. Although this may seem boring, it is imperative to understanding future gameplay. For those stuck, moving around is executed by left-clicking on a piece of land. While on tutorial island, fighting, communication, cooking, banking, doing quests, and other skills are learned. The player goes to the beginning city, Lumbridge, once they have completed the tutorial. From then on, where they upgrade their character is up to them. It is recommended to at least get your combat level up reasonably high, so that you are not constantly killed by NPCs (computer characters).
RuneScape has many communities within it. Many players have grouped together to form groups known as 'clans'. These clans often have alliances, and occasionally go to war with each other; meeting in bloody clashes often exceeding a hundred participants. Sometimes players enter the war zone to pick up leftover items, such as enchanted ammulets and armor. It is not only fun to evade higher levels, but profiting as well.
There is also the Wilderness area, in the northern RuneScape land, in which player characters can fight one another. This is known throughout the game as PKing(Player Killing). When one gets deeper into the Wilderness, they can combat with players farther and farther from their combat level. Close combat can only be performed in groups of two, however it is possible for people to join in using archery and magic. There are many available weapons, spells, and potions available to assist fighting in the wilderness.
Over the past three years, RuneScape has been hampered by cheaters. These people create programs to gain an unfair advantage over other players in the game. An example of a RuneScape cheat is AutoMiner, which one executes to constantly mine various ores. One can start it, go to sleep, and wake up with a bank full of steel bars. When Runescape first opened, cheating was at all-time high, and rarely was dented until Runescape introduced the member service. With additional cash revenue, Jagex Inc. has been stricter than ever about security and has implemented many macro detection routines and protections to ensure that an actual human is playing. It is also nearly impossible to hack it by any method.
Some of the detection methods and workarounds employed by Jagex in the fight against cheaters include: Changing the communications protocol to make it harder for communications-based hacks to operate, shifting the screen by a few pixels in a random direction every ten seconds or so to make cheats that always click on the same spot on the screen to miss the target, automatically logging the user off after 3 or 4 minutes of standing in the same spot, making the minimap's compass display have only a loose relation to the angle of the map being displayed and making the minimap rotate a little bit every time you move from it and move back on to discourage cheats that can examine the minimap for specific details for navigation, making users get "Fatigued" while doing any task that may be automated with a cheat, then requiring the user to type in a mangled word to recover from their fatigue. Nevertheless, some cheats manage to get around the lax cheating prevention that Jagex has implemented - notably the "AutoMiner" (by Nicholas Sherlock), which allowed users to automatically sleep in an early implementation of fatigue, automatically bank items by navigating to the bank and talking to the banker, then returning to the spot that it game from (A feat of navigation when you consider that this cheat is based purely on RuneScape's interface - it does not monitor RuneScape's communications and it does not modify RuneScape's code), which is currently no longer under production. Serious faults in their game allowed users to trick the server into giving them items, completing actions not normally allowed (such as killing bankers), altering the items being traded to rip other players off, etc. None of these attacks would be possible on a server that was coded securely.
In 2003 a beta version of the improved 3D engine and revisions to gameplay began. Jagex have claimed that this will make RuneScape the most advanced Java based game in the world. RS2 will be available sometime in March, 2004.