It took me a year to get it....

It took me a year to get it...

Have you ever had a joke that took you a while to get? Its awkward and makes you seem slow. One time, it took me over a year to get a joke. I was told that joke a dozen times during that year, and each time it flew right over my head. Let's start at the beginning.

I started playing RuneScape December 20th 2005. I remember the exact date because it was the day that my high school let out for winter vacation. It was good times. It took me about an hour to think up my name, and another hour to do the tutorial. I thought I trade by dropping items on the ground for others to pick up, and I was afraid of the giant spiders around Lumbridge.

One day, by chance, I wandered into Draynor Village and spoke with Ned. He agreed me to make me some rope in exchange for 3 balls of wool. I didn't know what rope was for, but I wanted it. Bad. I spent several hours finding my way back to Lumbridge, sheered some sheep, made the balls of wool, and was never able to find Ned again.

After I got my bearings, I started woodcutting. I loved it and got all my money from it. I got my woodcutting up to 60 and started cutting yews. World 57 Edgeville was my home. I became a member in the summer of '06, just during my vacation from school. At some point during that summer I was wandering around Yanille. I happened across this:

[hide=Big ol image][/hide]

I examine everything I come across, so needless to say I examined that thing. I examined it good. An Ogre Standard: "Not very high."

I didn't get it.

I did come up with some wild theories though. Ogres are tall, yet the standard is "not very high." Did the ogres not make their own standards? Did they steal someone else's standards? Were ogres once short?! Over the next year I passed by that standard frequently, examining it each time, never getting it. Then one day, in autumn of '07, I passed by it and examined it as usual.

An Ogre Standard: "Not very high."

Oh.

I get it; ogres have low standards.

[hide=About me!]My RSN is Psycho Robot. I'm very proud of it. I named my account after a character from Invader Zim named GIR. Zim is a member of the alien race called the Irkens. They conquer planets. Its what they do. Zim is an Invader, which means that he is sent to planets in order to blend into the indigenous life forms and study them for weaknesses to exploit. The leaders of the Irken race hate Zim however, and instead of giving him an assignment of value, the send him off in a random direction of space (that just happens to lead to Earth!), on a "top secret" mission that takes him far away from them. Each Invader is given a robot called SIR (Standard Information Retrieval) Units that assist them in information gathering and, if need be, combat. Instead of giving Zim a SIR unit, the leaders make him a robot out of garbage. Because they hate him. The robot actually turns on, though, and identifies it as GIR. When asked what the G stood for, he said he didn't know, and then started hitting himself. Truly, GIR is a psycho robot.

Here is a list of stuff I like!

TV: Futurama, Invader Zim, Robot Chicken, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Scrubs

Music: Savatage/Trans-Siberian Orchestra (these two bands are made of mostly the same musicians), Nickelback, Pink Floyd

Books: Calvin and Hobbes, The Inheritance Cycle (Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr, un-named 4th), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, America (The Book), I Am America (And So Can You!)

Movies: The Dark Knight, Bruce Almighty, Airplane!, Blazing Saddles

I'm currently enrolled in an art school in Pittsburgh and majoring in Interior Design.[/hide]

[hide=RuneScape Project! (Canceled indefinately)]Firstly, my stats!

Currently I'm training runecrafting, crafting, and magic at the same time. I craft 10k nature runes, craft 10k pieces of jewelry, and alch them for a profit. What I make and alch depends on the current prices of the GE, but its usually bracelets of some sort. This project started out as a way for me to get 77 runecrafting, but then I figured out that alching with all the runes it would take for 77 runecrafting would get me to 96 magic. I figured I might as well craft some more and get to 99. Then as I was deciding just what I should alch, I figured out that I stood to gain a huge amount of crafting xp while still making money! GOAL BAR TIME!!!

Note: it is VERY encouraging to see how far I have to go with crafting :lol:

[hide=Runecrafting Screenshots[]

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[hide=Magic Screenshots]

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[hide=Crafting Screenshots]

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My project was canceled, because...

[hide=I quit!]Its been six months since the initial manipulation started, and it shows no signs of stopping, either on its own or with help from Jagex. With the release of the 180 day price graphs, I'm able to see just how bad things are:

[hide=Prices]

[/hide]

Jagex has shown no interest in doing something to combat this obvious manipulation of prices. In fact, in the "Merchanting Clans - Discussion" thread on the RSOF (QFC:74-75-963-59124148), after 50 pages of posts supporting the dissolution and even banning of price manipulation clans, Mod John H posted this:

[hide=Mod John H's post]Hey everyone,

I promised to stop back in and post again. Been super-busy here (as always ;)) but at last, here I am. :)

This is obviously something that a lot of you feel super-strongly about. I'd like to clarify a few things.

I know some people think that Jagex is ignorant and/or under-informed about this situation. Not true. We've had eyes on this issue from the very top of the company downwards. The info in the "Merchanting clans and you" thread was all vetted and approved by Mod Mark, who is our Senior Game Designer. We also have a lot of back-end visibility on exactly what's happening in the Grand Exchange.

Basically, Grand Exchange price manipulation is not as serious a problem as some people think it is. Most people probably don't even notice it's happening, and all effects are temporary. It doesn't have any harmful effects on the overall economy, because it doesn't cause any wealth to be created or destroyed - only redistributed.

We know there will be players who aren't involved in any kind of merchanting/price manipulation at all. They want to buy a particular item (for a quest etc) on the GE, but when they get there, they find that it's much more expensive than they were expecting because it's been manipulated upwards by a price manipulation/merchanting clan.

The player then has a choice to make. They can either choose to pay the market price, or they can choose not to.

Remember that no-one is obliged to buy anything, ever. All items can either be made by the player or obtained from drops. Obviously this requires a certain amount of prior time investment in production or combat skills, respectively. The ability to buy items is convenient for players who have not yet invested, or don't wish to invest, that time.

If a player does want to buy something, they are still not obliged to purchase at prices they don't want to pay. If they want something badly enough right now, then it's their choice if they pay a price higher than the one they'd like.

What goes up must come down, and artificially inflated prices will crash. The crash usually takes prices down to a point below where they started, too. But you don't often see people complaining that the item they wanted to buy was too cheap. ;)

And of course, one of the beauties of RuneScape is its open-endedness. The player is free to do something else. So if people do end up waiting a week or so for the inevitable crash, then it's not like their entire progress through the game is halted in the mean time.

Moreover, out of all the thousands and thousands of items in the game, only certain ones are even possible to manipulate. It's a sort of "perfect storm" of factors, including the price range, quantity in circulation and so on. The vast majority of items are not manipulable, and of the few hundred that are, it's only practical for the clans to have any measurable effect on a dozen or two at a time. So for any given item at any given time, the likelihood that it is currently being manipulated is very low.

It would probably be possible to change the game mechanics so that price manipulation just wouldn't work. But we'd have to be incredibly careful, because we would risk breaking every other trade that currently goes through the GE with no problems at all. Essentially, it would take a non-trivial amount of work to address something that is not a major problem.

That's all game-mechanics stuff. There are still some other related issues.

A lot of these merchanting clans promise to help their members make huge profits, when really the leaders have no intention of helping anyone. They just want to get rich themselves, and they've worked out that if they can get enough people to push prices up, they can then cream profits off the top. The leaders make money, everyone else in the clan loses money.

Some people view this as a definite scam, and that's understandable. These clan leaders are lying to their members, after all.

But although that's true in principle, there are obvious difficulties in trying to make this a punishable scamming offence. There would be such a massive time delay between the false promise and the lossy outcome - at least days, probably weeks - that it would be next-to-impossible to link them together. Again, for any individual case, we could probably make these links with enough effort - but it would be incredibly time-consuming, which would take our resources away from other, frankly more important areas of player support. And in any case, all trades are entirely voluntary. No-one has to buy anything, even if someone else is telling them to. That's why the informational sticky makes it so clear that you should never risk anything you aren't prepared to lose.

There's also the problem that everyone knows the clan leaders will dump before they say they will. The disreputable clan leaders are telling their members "we'll let you into the inner circle and tell you when the real dump date is, if you will advertise the name of our clan in-game for a certain amount of time" (usually non-stop for many hours).

Gullible, greedy players then end up using autotypers (which is against the rules, as everyone knows) and spamming the screen, causing inconvenience for everyone around. In practice, of course, the leaders don't really have any way to know who's spamming their clan details, or how much, and they certainly don't have any intention of letting the spammers into the inner circle. All they want is to get their clan name out there so that there'll be a steady stream of new blood, ready to lose their money so the clan leaders can profit.

In short, as we've said many times before, if you join a merchanting clan you are much more likely to lose money than to make a profit. It's your own responsibility, but you've been warned.

Cheers,

-JH[/hide]

The thread is currently nearing 140 pages and no further replies have been made. I've underlined the most frustrating, and quite frankly, insulting passage. It shows just how little Jagex has been paying attention to this whole mess. If Jagex feels like this now, chances are they aren't ever going to change their stance. Because of this abysmal reaction to what is obviously a large crisis, my frustration with Jagex has reached its zenith. I'm still a member, though my chat is always off so you'll never find me. Ever! And I don't follow any new content, train any skills, or do any quests. I just spend nearly all my time at Castle Wars. If Jagex gets their act together, I might start actually playing again. In fact I hope they do, I still want that crafting cape.[/hide]

[hide=Outfits!]

I like looking stylish more than anything, so have lots of outfits that I like to wear! This first one is red. I made it to go with my red gecko!

This second one is the outfit I wear whenever I'm crafting. I use the furnace near Edgeville, so I have to wear my Varrock Armor 3, and my Guthix vestments go well with that, so there!

I made this outfit to go with my quest cape, its one of my personal favorites, both for its simplicity and for how well everything goes together.

This outfit won me the Tip.It outfit contest last year in the woodcutting cape category, so I got to be in the first row of the Great Tip.It Picture or whatever that is. I still haven't found anything in the shield slot that goes with this, so if anyone has any suggestions, my ears are open!

I love doing clue scrolls, and this is what I wear whenever I go on them. I got Karil's for magic defense against sara mages and revenants and the shield and Guthix cloak for the prayer bonuses.

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[hide=Clues!]

In chronological order...

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[hide=Reviews]

Since I quit, I guess I should do SOMETHING with this blog, so I figure I'll just review some stuff. A guy needs to rant SOMEWHERE right? And ranting on the RSOF is like talking to yourself in a crowded room.

Now then, going back as far as I can be bothered, and skipping updates I don't have strong opinions on...

[hide=Mobilising Armies - July 8th 2009]

4/10

Finally, after months of hype and development blogs, we're ready to play Mobilising Armies! Wait, no, we're not. They shut down 3/4 of it hours after they released it. Oh well at least we can play 1 out of the 4 scenarios... Wait, no, we can't. They set up the team system so you have to wait hours to get into a game. Alright, fine. They sorted those problems out. Now we can play!!! Oh... how disappointing.

Strike 1: the best way to play the game is to not play the game. Yep! Just wait around till everyone beats eachother up, then mop up the remainders. Or is that not your cup of tea? No worries! Just go on suicide runs to kill yourself as fast as possible. You'll still get more points per hour than someone who plays the game properly!

Strike 2: There's no free chat system. They said there was no way to make one, but there is.

Strike 3: The rewards are terrible. There's no reason to play it. Sure, there are some people who like the gameplay (despite all its flaws) and sure there are some people who like the outfits (despite the fact that you can't put them in the Costume Room), but 90% of players care about just two things: hitting harder and xp. This game offers neither.

You're out!

Additionally, is this the solution to the junk problem?? People with junk didn't want to play a damn game. They wanted money. The people with the junk can't even sell their junk to players who DO want to play this game, because no one wants to play!

In other news, the note system had some amusing easter eggs. Its nice to see Jagex having a sense of humor. The right click summoning menu was a bad idea, although the other summoning news, that you can now take familiars across the river to Zamoraks' encampment in the God Wars Dungeon, was good.[/hide]

[hide=Faruq's Tools for Games - July 15th 2009]

6/10

Cats and other pets driving you crazy? Can't click anywhere without getting a message "This isn't your pet!"? How would you like some cats that you can plant anywhere! These plantable cats (or "Marker plants") can be put anywhere: in front of agility obstacles, under players in PvP worlds, and in the party hall! They'll drive players crazy!

This update seems pointless, but some of the devices are actually pretty neat. If they seem useless, its because your mind isn't open to the possibilities. But the marker plant problem really throws a wrench into things. Jagex really should have planned for this...[/hide]

[hide=Fur 'n' Seek - August 10th 2009]

3/10

This quest was a real disappointment. It was basically a copy of Rag and Bone Man but longer and more annoying. I was watching things carefully the first day it came out. I saw that the secondary wishlist was very long an had a lot of really tough monsters (all species of dragons, Bork or General Graardor, Wyrvens, Aquanites, etc.). I thought with a list like that, the reward had to be something special. Boy was I wrong... You get an upgraded version of the Ramskull helmet or Bonesack, but in reality its only a few points better. So they're useless for their stats. They do teleport you to the Bone man's camp though, so it might be useful for treasure trails that take you over that way, IF the teleport worked more than once a week! So they're useless for their special effects.

Now on to the big one: the Skeletal horror. After you kill all the monsters for the secondary wishlist, you get to fight this guy once per week. The first week you fight him, you get 10,000 Slayer and 7,000 Prayer xp. Cool beans! But the, for each week after that, you get 1,250 Slayer and 1,000 Prayer xp. There are no drops or anything else. Just the paltry amount of xp. Its not worth it to fight it. Even excepting the huge amount of work it is to kill each of the monsters for the special bones, the xp values are so low that its not even worth the time it takes to prepare to fight it. In the same amount of time you could get twice that much Slayer xp. What was Jagex thinking? Did they honestly not foresee that no player would bother to kill this thing? I don't understand why they waste their time developing content no one will use.

On the plus side, they allowed Berserker rings to be imbued at Mobilising Armies. Probably because no one was bothering to play it before they did this.[/hide]

[hide=Personalised Shops - September 2nd 2009]

0/10

That's right. Zero. Jagex really screwed this one up. Big time. The stated goal of this update was to encourage a stronger community where players would buy things from other players instead of from shops. The REAL goal was to stop real world traders who were using the infinite stock shops to trade money. Jagex tried to do this (they admitted it was against RWT) with the meat shop in Oo'glog and the Cullinaromancer's chest, but those were both reverted after they proved extremely unpopular. How do you solve a problem when your solution proves unpopular? By doing the same thing of course! Jagex COULD have reduced the stock from infinite (an necessarily large number) to a few thousand. That would be enough for a player to make use of the shops for training, but not enough to fuel real world trading.

The first issue is that the stocks of items weren't nearly enough. Items which were very difficult to get apart from stores, like raw bird meat, vials, and cheese, had dismal stocks of around 10 to 100 at the most. Even summoning shards, which are IMPOSSIBLE to get outside of shops, only had a stock of 65k, which a mid level summoner could burn through in an hour. You could also only buy 500 at a time! Buying all 65 thousand shards would take longer than they last a summoner! The Dorgeshkaan range shop stocked TEN bone bolts.

Now the prices of the basic ingredients for herblore and summoning will skyrocket. Pots of flour, Vials of water, all types of meat... You can't even make your own pots of flour by buying pots and picking grain, because guess what, there are only 10 pots in stock in every general store! So unless you want to mine clay, make soft clay, make pots, fire the pots, pick the grain, grind the grain, then fill teh pots with flour, you're going to buy them on the GE. That's encouraging a nice strong community bond, right? Using a soulless method of trade that has no player interaction? Right?

So now every player is going to be buying their supplies on the GE. There will be a huge demand. But what kid of supply can we expect? Well looking at what is necessary to produce a simple pot of flour, there's not going to be much. Huge demand, low supply... Sounds like the ingredients for a huge price spike made all the worse by everyone's favorite masters of RuneScape, the price manipulation clans! They bought up the entire stock for the herblore, summoning, and even rune markets! Glad Jagex could help them make so much money.

There's a whole other issue with these shop updates: the TzHaar shops. Jagex calculated that Tokkul is now 10x easier to get (by selling items to shops, which was never really the intended method of earning Tokkul to begin with!) so they hiked the price of Onyx tenfold WITHOUT 1.) increasing the amount of Tokkul players had and 2.) increasing the amount of Tokkul you get from monster drops, the Fight Pit, or the Fight Cave. Not only that, but due to the changes, players could buy obisidan armour and weapons from the GE then sell them to the TzHaar stores to reap in a huge amount of money.

Given all these issues, this shop update was an appalling failure and the WORST update I can remember.[/hide]

[hide=Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf - September 9th 2009]

I won't give this a rating out of ten because I didn't do the quest, however I do have a few opinions on it. Firstly, why is it that the Dragon pickaxe is dropped by monsters? Why can't miners get it somehow? I've seen a lot of good suggestions, like you get shards of it by mining, then join them together by smithing them. Jagex should have done something like that. But nope. New item? Monsters drop it. That gets a tad tiresome. Secondly, the Hand cannon was glitched and it allowed several players to attack a single player at once without being in a multi-combat zone. A disappointing lack of testing.[/hide]

[hide=Advisors and Objectives - September 17th 2009]

7/10

I like the objectives and the removal of the advisors (they were pretty kiddy...) but Jagex forgot to add the training weapons to the General stores like they said they would, then took a month to fix it...[/hide]

[hide=Photo Booth and Forum Avatars - October 7th 2009]

5/10

Its nice to have a bit of variety on the forums if you're into that, but its only for members, which is disappointing because F2Pers have to make do with a hideous giant question mark face for their avatar. It also stretches out the pages a lot. One line posts have an inch and a half of blank space to make room for the avatar. Also, there's no way to hide them if you don't want to look at them. Lastly, and worst of all, things like this. Need I say more?[/hide]

[hide=High-level Herblore Potions - October 7th 2009]

3/10

Hey! Mages can now hit 54 with Ice Barrage! Finally they stand a chance against meleers, which they should have always beat! Oh wait... you need 91 herblore to use the potion that makes you hit that high, and you can't use it in PvP...

This update made herblore a combat skill. There's no denying that no matter how much Jagex wanted to. It was also extremely unimaginative: all of the new potions were just boosted versions of old potions (save for one, but we'll get to that later). They're all untradeable, which is supposed to give players an incentive to train herblore. Adding a firemaking requirement to weild weapons would give players incentive to train firemaking, but that doesn't mean it makes one damn bit of sense!

The worst part of this update was the obvious lack of testing that went into it. Remember the one unique potion mentioned earlier? It was a potion that restore special attack bars. So now you could use your already overpowered dragon claws to rush someone and nearly kill them, then drink some potion and presto! You can use the ridiculously overpowered special attack again! This also means that Dragon bow special attacks (which were already nearly leathal) could be fired twice in succession which had a near 100% mortality rate on anyone not in metal armour. Jagex "fixed" this by 1.) changing the Dark bow special attack from 55 to 65 and 2.) adding a 30 second delay between drinks of the special attack potion. Still, a very disappointing update.[/hide]

[hide=Within the Light - October 13th 2009]

I can't say much about this update because I didn't do the quest, but I think that by releasing the long awaited continuation of the Plague City series without any rewards apart from xp was a real let-down. They should have rewarded players with SOMETHING besides xp...[/hide]

[hide=Future Q and A Sessions - October 16th 2009]

Quoting directly from the update post...

We got a lot out of the recent Q&A sessions so we’ve decided to hold 2-3 per year, with the next one to be held in January 2010.

So, if you have any questions, save them till January 2010, and they might be answered, and if not you can try again a few months later![/hide]

[hide=Ardougne Achievement Diary - October 20th 2009]

5/10

I didn't do the diary, but looking over the rewards, they seem fairly worthwhile. I like the way the cape looks, although as more and more pieces come out, and in light of how Jagex said the achievement diary will have a effect when the whole set is worn, I can't help but wonder if Jagex realizes how hideous the whole set looks together. The cape gives fairly good stats, which is more than can be said for any of the other pieces of equipment, which are 100% useless for actual combat equipment, since they're only as good as adamant equipment. It was nice seeing that, like the Varrock diary, the Ardougne diary gave us the option to redirect an inconvenient teleport location to a more worthwhile location.

One reward I do have a problem with, however, is the teleport to Ardougne farm. Why oh why on earth would Jagex limit it to just one per day?? The Lumbridge/Draynor BEGINNER diary gives you the ability to teleport to the Falador farm unlimited times per day, so why limit this cape's teleport so harshly? In light of this stupidly low daily limit, I honestly cannot foresee anyone making use of it. Why? Well, I've done a lot of farming, and I know that players like to have one inventory set up and use it over and over. Since farmers can do allotment runs every 2 hours or so, they will exhaust the cape's teleport on their first run and after that it will be useless. Its more hassle to change your inventory setup to take this cape along with you, then changing it back for your next run, than this one teleport is worth. Simply put, its not worth pissing around with the cape wondering if you can do another teleport yet.

That segues nicely into the next section, the elite tasks. First problem: they were disproportionately high. 93 Summoning? 91 Smithing? And for what? The ability to teleport to Ardougne farm with the cape unlimited times per day and four 50k xp lamps for any skill over level 85. By the time you're level 85 in a skill, 50k xp is NOTHING. Even if you used all 4 lamps on one skill that you had just got to level 85, you'd only get about 60% of the way to the next level. Second problem: They are a completely unsatisfactory answer to a desperate need in RuneScape, high level content. Getting 93 summoning and 91 smithing is a lot of work, and if the only way Jagex can make think to make it worthwhile is to slap some arbitrarily high level requirements on some achievement diary tasks and failing to make the rewards worth the effort, then having high skills will remain pretty much useless.[/hide]

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Now go away!

Lovely story. :D

Good luck.

I loved your story dude, and you let me in on the joke too ! \

Good luck with crafting/mage/rcing!

Very nice blog too :)

Added a couple gained level screenshots. I'm awesome.

i looked at that pic and couldnt figure it out either lol..but grats on figuring it out after a year haha

Awesome blog, man. I used to raise two skills doing kind of what you're doing, except I was alching yew longs.

Good luck on your goals. =]

I wouldn't have figured it out if you hadn't said what the joke was :P

Nice story.

Really? I thought it was an obvious joke...

I hadn't taken it as a joke either, but I was like #-o when you explained it.

Good luck on those goals :

Ha, I was a little confused until you explained it too. :oops: Good luck on all your goals!

~Eve

Looks well put together, good luck :D

nice bl0g

Just got 87 magic last night \

Edit: Added shots of 77 crafting and 68 runecrafting. Got em a while ago but was too lazy to upload them right away :-#

Great blog i love the Ogre standard =p

I didn't get that joke ever before either #-o nice blog though.

Oh, nice blog and gooALL GLORY TO THE HYPNO TOAD

Oh, nice blog and gooALL GLORY TO THE HYPNO TOAD

Yes! Another slave!

I'm gonna be re-doing the avatar soon so the eyes will flash :P

Lol I didn't think it was that hard, but I'm just a natural smart*ahem* like that, so that's probably something I would actually say. I saw the picture and started laughing, as I haven't ever examined it before. Nice story though.

Nice blog, keep it up!

good luck with your goals, person who knows a lot about dragonkin :P

by the way I didn't get that joke until you pointed it out :(

Lol@ the Orge Standard thingy :P Jagex jokes are lame lmfao. And good job on 99 WC :D

Wewt, 2nd page! :D

lol now I know what that means :P XD

good luck on your goals, not easy getting 99 in skills and stuff :P

lol now I know what that means :P XD

 

 

 

good luck on your goals, not easy getting 99 in skills and stuff :P

Your sig is hilarious by the way :thumbsup:

Way oversized though, not that I'll tell! Make sure you have it saved on your comp so you don't lose it, in case a mod finds it ;)

HaHa, the story reminded me to my young years. Never knowing to way to anywere #-o

I love the avatar to

Good luck on th goals!!

All glory to the hypno toad!

^^