[Mirrorforced]

Time for a new release of the: >>>Tip.It Times!<<<

When replying please make sure to clarify the article you are replying to! Thanks!

Enjoy the articles!

[1unahtreiloh]

Gonna follow all those ABC's

[GrCheese]

I would love Mod MMG to have a look at that second article. I play this game for the game, have only willingly joined one clan (then ditched them), and have never cared for or made anything related to machinima. Making us wait two weeks for updates that don't effect more than a small percent of the Runescape community is disgusting.

On another note, clans *may* be important but I agree with the author of the second article that Jagex is just playing this up too much. I hate clans and they seem to hate me, the only reason they're being viewed as important is because other MMORPG's support them and Jagex wants to get in on that... instead of relying on third party affiliates to keep track of it.

[AsiaNeko]

Re: Runescape Dinosaur

I agree with the bit about this Orb of Oculus... RuneScape is supposed to be a fantasy role-playing game, not a way to make silly videos. I see no practical use for this new item, except to use the game in a way it was not meant to be used.

Now, about how Jagex is upping their clan relations, I really like that. Most clans (I.E not those price manipulation clans) add a lot to the game, by getting like minded people together to do good for each other. Even if its only invading bounty hunter (Which I don't do, since I'm not too fond of pvp), or doing hundreds of trawler runs, or invading each others castles in an attempt to steal a little flag to bring back to their own, they come together to do something they enjoy doing, without having to suffer chat boxes full of "Noob" "Nerd" or "No Lifer!". I like clans, because of the good they can do for the community.

[3hitm4g3u]

Clans add a whole new perspective on runescape gameplay and I do believe they are very important.

However I can't see why Jagex would spend time making updates for them other than the odd bonus update every now and again.

And the video thing could be interesting, for a small amount of players.

[jettrider]

First article wasn't really serious enough to be the headline one. Not that it was bad in any way, but humorous or creative writing belongs as an accompanying article in my opinion.

Second article was very good. Some people would like to respond that Jagex supports clans through the CM, not Content, team. This is however easily countered by saying that Jagex needs to pump more resources (ie, hire more people) into the Content team and not the management teams. If they have no query system for customer support, they're better off stripping down community management entirely.

You can talk about variety all you want, but in my opinion, until the updates are absolutely perfect (brilliantly and carefully refined to be perfect in terms of playability, rewards, and glitches), these projects should be given lowest priority. The current RS updates are nowhere close to this standard. I would say that they need to update more frequently, but in all honesty, RS needs to avoid getting too big too quickly. The solution is then to keep the same schedule of content updates but to hone each one to perfection and to make each offer lots of gameplay (that means no more 10-minute quests!).

[hawkxs]

Enjoyed both articles very much, but I still miss the fictional article.

And I too wish Jagex to take a look at article #2.

[jonni]

enjoyable read on both counts; mhl raises some good points !

I've come to believe that aside from a few necessary updates such as clanchat and tournaments, jagex should really leave the bigger clans well alone. they've been fine for years and they're fine now without much jagex fiddling. let jagex have the rsof clans.
But yeah i agree with the above post that clans are still really important to the game and are great fun if you like that sort of thing

[Ring_World]

Both articles were very nice.

First one made me laugh

But to the second article author, the orb isnt made just for machinima i personally see it as an all around good thing. Runescapes viewing is terrible, if i need to explain this you obviously havnt played other games.... But we see always above our head kinda like a RTS game. Like age of empires or Warcraft. I would love to see first person or see more angles then before. This and extending the horizons would be some of the best graphical(?) updates ever imo. I have no interest in moviemaking but i wish instead of the orb they could update the actual viewing...

But other then that i agree with your points.

[Roflcopters]

Great article, I fall into that article. Me_Hate_Libs says "Thanks everyone!" She can't post. So she asked me to tell you guys.

[mario_sunny]

Agree with everything in the 2nd article.

[Dirkmetal]

Most of the time win I see Me_hate_libs post on the forums I get ready for a load of negative comments about Jagex. Well I did get the same reaction from the second times article. The thing is though, everything said was true. This feels like it could become the same crap Nintendo did with the Wii; leave your longtime fans behind and appeal to the masses.

[troacctid]

The first article...meh, didn't interest me very much.

The second article...for somebody who enjoys the game so much, you sure seem bored of it if all you're doing is waiting on updates.

[Nick_6464]

I'm going to have to disagree with the Second Article. This misconception of "nerds" making movies being such a low number isn't true. If you ever visit YouTube there are a LOT of RuneScape movies: machinima, PvP, bosses, etc. So it's there's a pretty big number of people that this update relates to.

Secondly, I can totally understand the fact that Jagex should focus on their game rather than machinima. I personally believe the same way: Companies should focus on the games and leave the movie-making to the players. But the problem with RuneScape is that there cannot be any 3rd party interaction. Loads of other games either have some sort of machinima contraptions in them or allow 3rd party interaction. But not with RuneScape. Not only is creating 3rd party software against the rules, there are no files which to manipulate to make such a software: it's browser-based. So crying that Jagex does ONE update updating the lack of machinima support, is really, really pathetic. I can make the same argument on high leveled quests. I can't do them, nor do I really want to at this point. But do I [bleep] about it? No.


But keep down it really is a matter of not understanding, I think. You look at the World of Warcraft machinima and you WOULD support more machinima tools because there will be people that will make awesome ones. Is not the case of RuneScape because there aren't a lot of great ones. From my viewing, the good ones are organized into more of a short-series-like manner or focused on the player themselves. Maybe if there was more story-driven machinima, expertly done, some of the negativity of machinima will go away.

[rawr_im_very_scary]

The first article was mildly amusing.

Second article....Personally, I disagree with most, if not all of it. I wouldn't mind vidding some stuff, and this orb could make it easy for me. I also think it's nice seeing Jagex focus on PR instead of quietly making gameplay updates. Too much focus on clans, etc, is a bad thing, but...honestly, until Mod MMG came in, I don't think there was ANYTHING except maybe a forum section. I've also seen a good deal of high level updates and some very nice quests this year; the year when, I thought, content would suffer because it was the upgrade year. Despite being in a small clan, I often play the game solo-ish, and I'm quite happy with how it is right now.

[Misterknowitall]

Second article is so very, very true.
Runescape has never really been about clans, competitions or video-making update-wise. Since Mod MMG's rise to power though, we've seen a change in that. And looking at all the positive feedback, I'd say most people are very happy about this.
Players who liked the old updates better, like me, are starting to go extinct.

[strilmus]

What I'm not sure is if they are actually sacrificing resources for these community based updates, or if they're two separate things entirely, and quality control went down for normal updates or something. It can't take so much time to have some jmods and pmods organize an event to throw the entire update schedule off. I think there's something else going on.

Also, I gotta say, if you just wanted normal content, I think you're expecting a single player type of experience. They're entirely painless to deal with, nobody ever gives you sass, and since you're not directly competing with others for resources, the xp curves are much more forgiving. You will never have to deal with "nerfing" or trolls or anything. So go play an Artix Entertainment game or something.

Failing that, you guys could just make a guild of your own and lobby for your rights as paying customers.

I am currently not playing the game right now because of the lack of justification for the money, of course. I would love more content too. I just want to be sure of the actual problem before pointing any fingers.

[jettrider]

Maybe it didn't strike you all as such, but the second article seemed to me to be a reflection on the fact that 22 of Jagex's last 60 updates have been game-related, and that's including all the small fixes. The last 5 developer diaries have been about topics other than game content.

You can justify any individual update coming out, but the main point is that Jagex seems to have quite a lot of personnel taking more active roles in the support and special interests subdivisions. There's nothing wrong with that, except the fact that all the support staff is catering to clans and machinima makers instead of answering queries for everyone. How exactly is that taking a more balanced approach to the community? RS content has slowed - and while that's ok if each update is offering lots of playability, the quality of each is going in the opposite direction. I have yet to meet someone who thinks that RS is currently in the most perfect state it will ever be in and that Jagex should sit back and focus on support.

It's not the orb in particular - it's the whole shift away from content and towards community involvement. It was the result of people complaining that Jagex never tells us anything and that they never log into the game and that they never support people making videos or writing about RuneScape. Well now they log into the game and everything, but it's leaving gaping holes in terms of content.

Jagex seems to be operating in waves:

On September 9&17, they gave us a new dwarf quest (albeit a very short one) and the Living Rock Caverns.
On October 13&20, we got a short/medium quest and the Ardougne Achievement diary.
On December 3&8 we got another short/medium quest and Kuradal's Dungeon
On January 11 we got yet another short/medium quest (Nomad's Requiem)

Notice the waves? They're getting smaller and less frequent. All the other weeks were filled with little tweaks that were more cumbersome to balance than they were to make. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the "tweak" weeks have been the ones in which the new developer diaries, machinima contests, and Q&As were on.

Now I know most of you are dying to pin this as "crying about updates." I'd be perfectly fine with 7 updates in 5 months if they all offered me lots of playability. The four quests took me less than 3.5 hours to complete. The shortest quest - dwarves - took me 10 minutes, while the longest - Nomad's Requiem, a supposed Grandmaster quest - took me no longer than an hour. Achievement Diaries take a little bit longer, on the magnitude of 1.5 hours, but compared to quests they are much simpler to write. The Living Rock Caverns and Kuradal's Dungeon were much appreciated, but of the two, only one - Living Rock Caverns - introduced a new game element (resource collection spots based on timers instead of amount of resources).

This week should start off a new wave. It'll have to blow my mind to change my conviction that the content team has not kept up with growth as much as the support teams.

[Kalafai]

Ohhh,,, the did you know makes me think. If I have the GE teleport from my house, does that mean I can scry the GE to make sure it isn't busy/spamed/noisy?

[troacctid]

Kalafai, on 31 January 2010 - 03:02 PM, said:

Ohhh,,, the did you know makes me think. If I have the GE teleport from my house, does that mean I can scry the GE to make sure it isn't busy/spamed/noisy?

Yes, but only the entrance to the GE, not the center. So it isn't particularly useful.