quitthegame

A lot of answers having to do with what looks good, how each gender takes care of the hair, etc. None of those answers address the original question, which is why is male long hair looked down upon today, when throughout history it was often not only allowed, but encouraged? Any answer that adequately addresses that question must discuss what changed between prior centuries and the past 100 years. In the US, at least, we have a military-positive culture, in the which the default military hairstyle was settled upon as extremely short about 100 years ago (as part of the industrialization of the military at that time--short hair is the most efficient). Military hairstyles as a unifying mark have a long history, although the "no hair" look is actually not historically common. Long hair was actually allowed in the US military 200 years ago, and US culture was also less military-positive 200 years ago. So inevitably in the past century, long hair on men quickly became identified as a mark of the counter-culture, and unacceptable for mainstream purposes. If you read books from the 40's and 50's, right after WWII mobilized pretty much the entire country in the war and war-related businesses, you'll see proud references to other counterculture members as 'longhairs'. Though that social category still exists, it is obviously less strongly demarcated now than it was then, as it now functions as an associated modifier, and not a basic identifier.

Gossip is a positive evolutionary adaptation in a small tribal setting. Gossip about multinational corporations, based on limited information and in an impersonal internet setting, is partly just humans acting out biological imperatives despite their unsuitedness for the modern world; while sometimes actually effective, if you look at the effectiveness of prediction by virtual stock-market simulations for various economic and political future happenings, in the various tests that have been set up to measure the accuracy of "mob think".

They did drop loot, just not as good loot as they do now. I used to kill them for fun when I ran across them, I don't remember them dropping anything worth picking up, at least? Kinda fuzzy on it, obviously. The point remains unchanged unless they dropped way more than I'm thinking, though.

Your point seems to be that the revenants used to be easier to kill, and now they're harder because you have to deal with revenants and also pkers. Are you aware that in the golden age of easy revenants to which you refer, they dropped no loot? If you were not aware, well, now you are. If you were aware, then your argument is flawed and incomplete for not addressing that.

Yes, negative and positive both, neverendingly. Although Blizzard and Activision are the same company.

To illustrate my point through intentional absurdity. That point being: Statistics are the study of using limited data samples to approximate the probability distribution of a data set across its domain. Neither of our sentences mentioned any method of obtaining limited data samples, so if any math had been done in either of our sentences, it would have been "probabilistically speaking", but since such math did not occur it should have just been "Logically speaking,", except he was wrong in his logic as well. Returning to being on point, the reason phat sightings went up was the same reason that their price went up...dicers spent bills to buy them from merchants who had hundreds of sets and couldn't wear them all at the same time, because there was a perception that wearing a phat made you a more attractive host for random gamblers, creating a new distribution of phats in which sightings were more common. Now that dicing is banned, the items most prized by hosts, phats and spirit shields, are crashing. It was my perception that torva/pernix/virtus, although valuable, were less used by hosts in this way, as they were slightly less recognizable and hosts seemed to usually just match the phat with their body/legs. Obviously, the raw material/rare dichotomy changing with the bot removal has also impacted prices, but this additional effect on phats/spirit shields is why they dropped a greater percentage than other high priced items. (which is what I'm hearing, I don't actually know the value of all the rares, but that's the impression I've received here)

This comment is incorrect for two reasons. First, it commits the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses; in this case a false dilemma is presented. Everyone responding to the OP is free to take positions that do not fall into either the DIY camp or the efficiency camp. Second, it ignores the practical fact that actual advice offered to the actual OP was in fact found useful. When one's theoretical argument offers one a conclusion contrafactual to the actual observed data, it is time to reexamine one's assumptions.

This is a misleading argument, Jagex has multiple times pointed out that paying for membership is exchanging RL cash for ingame benefits, and so by your definition below going P2P is already RWT. Obviously then, we see that we must be careful to avoid equivocation with our definitions of RWT. I agree with most of what you say in regards to F2P "neglect", except for the crucial conclusive statement which is where you make the link that F2P neglect will be bad for P2P as well. A skeptic might say that F2P players' guidance will not be "hey new friend, go play P2P without me, but ima stay here in F2P to tell more new friends to go play in P2P without me". The skeptic might argue that high-level F2P players instead pressure people to stay F2P, and in fact this phenomenon might be what motivated Jagex's recent attack on high-level F2P players. Until we can get some hard data, all we have are our two hypotheses, but Jagex's actions tend to support them having data supporting my version. I must say, my brief sojourns in F2P worlds tend to reinforce this impression in my mind.

That's true, by definition of "peak". However, it's also true that sometimes people say that a game has reached its peak, and then later something happens and the game becomes even bigger and reaches its actual peak. It's actually a fairly common occurrence. Also, a game could have a "total player peak" (f2p plus p2p), and a "subscriber peak", and a "yearly profit peak" (which could be different than the subscriber peak due to huge profits from...promotions!), and those could all be in different years. Which one is the real peak? [ I am familiar with a lot of MMO's. They are all, every single one of them, doing way more promotions than before. To me, it looks like MMO promotions are the current trend. I respect that it looks like desperation to you and to many others, but I find it hard to believe that you all would still have that opinion if you'd seen them in as many other MMO's as I have recently. Also, I have a bunch of friends in the gaming industry writing code, so I know why they are going with the differentiated payments model. E.g., my friend worked on a game for the Iphone where people cook recipes and serve them in a restaurant, very simple game. Some premium recipes are available for real cash. 80% of the players play the game for 2 dollars and never buy premium recipes. One lady spent 16,000 US dollars on recipes. 16000 US dollars, on a game whose sum complexity is equal to that of the cooking skill in Runescape. I am not exaggerating any aspect of this story. PS. 2 dollars, apple takes a cut, plus you have to store their data...so each of those customers is probably worth just about nothing to the gaming company. At some point the company is going to realize all of their profits come from the premium recipes, and then the $2 version of the game inevitably gets damaged.

I'm with you that it was nice how different RS was from every other game. Now that's no longer true, as RS has joined the crowd and offers all these "free" promotions. But-- isn't it going a bit far to say RS looks like a sinking ship, for handing out free promotions like nearly every other MMO out there? Are you implying that MMOs themselves will be extinct as a genre soon? That seems unlikely, they are very profitable as a genre.

replying to sees_all's metric article: I realize this is just a side point of your article, but I have to point out that your principled stand: "As a customer I'm going to vote with my wallet and I will not be paying for any more subscriptions to RuneScape, at least until JaGEx includes all players in their hiscores.", seems a bit confusing. From Jagex's point of view, you're going to look like some number of active F2P accounts. This is supposed to send them the message that F2P is unplayable without highscores? They are supposed to know that you, as a happy F2P-only player, would resubscribe if they add back in certain features for F2P? I don't see how they could possibly know that, or how they would be likely to infer that. You seem to be in fact sending the opposite information to Jagex than you're intending to. Obviously if enough people took your stand it would be distinguishable, but I see no reason to think that such occurred. If we assume that Jagex has some goal, let's say 8 active P2P accounts per every 1 active F2P account past a certain age, and many people take your stand of quitting P2P for F2P with every F2P feature reduction, then one could see a vicious cycle where Jagex keeps taking away features from F2P to attempt to drive those players to P2P, which causes P2P players to start playing F2P in solidarity, and the cycle continues; at least until F2P actually becomes unplayable, or until players manage to communicate that they are taking such a stand by some other means. I must confess I don't think enough players will follow your strategy to bring this possibility to life, however, and Jagex may not have such a goal anyway. The main point of your article seems perfectly true, although not the first time I'd seen those concepts.

It still exists, but in a slightly different form. Before you couldn't buy and sell one type of item at the same time, now you can. Before the x/4 hour limit was a hard limit, now you can buy the limit, and then sell those x again at a higher price, and now it will reset your limit so you can buy another x immediately.

That's not a fine demarcation. You're always going to have some small % of people who want to use chins for fun, regardless of the efficiency. And then you could have chins being efficient range xp for only a super small percentage of people, so that you could say they're practically without a use. So if you set a hard number, like "is it possible that for 99% of people chins aren't profitable to hunt, and for those same 99% of people chins would be too expensive to buy," yes that's very possible. For 100%, you'd have to have at the very least chins be strictly dominated by another ranged training method, and also they'd have to be not that profitable to hunt. Of course, the strict domination would lead to the second condition. (Where strict domination means that that from x-99 ranged, there's always a method that's both cheaper and faster than red chins, where x is whatever you need to use red chins) "I also wonder, from an efficiency standpoint, could hunting chins be worth it to combine hunt exp with saving on chins?" Of course, the standard efficiency formula would apply here for anyone seeking hunter xp. (set up equations for ( hunter xp + money)vs time, then plug in money = income rate * time, to obtain solutions in terms of income rate, to show which ranges of incomes should use which training methods)

It's funny when people quote you and reply to you despite not understanding a single word that you said. I think that's another trick they learn in college :) Even funnier when those hypothetical example 'people' said the day before they'd never reply to you again ;) Good thing I like a nice laugh.

Yes, but wait until the early-admission Ivy League acceptees start telling these old and tired college seniors how out of touch they are with both the RuneScape teen audience and the minutea of truly modern Iphone-driven game trends, with their ever-shifting nouveau internet morality and their ironic overseriousness. Oh, how the trodden worm will turn!

You say you want advice, but then when someone makes the obvious suggestion that 100% of pro bandoers use claws instead of EEE, you argue with him? :unsure: Arguing over whether faster kills from claws prevents more dmg than EEE heals? That's debatable, but which is more useful in a crash/anticrash situation? Best of luck to you.

I think people need to grow up and move on and accept it. That or leave. It's up to them. Or you could just learn to ignore them: Your Options ---> Profile ---> Manage Ignored Users Nobody is making you read these dissident voices but yourself. Or, you could learn to ignore him. Your Options ---> Profile ----> Manage Ignored Users. Nobody is making you read his anti-dissident voice but yourself. That's 3 layers of self-recursion, anyone up for a 4th? Interestingly, this is one of those situations where the first person to point out the possibility of leaving is acceptable, but the second person who piles on violates the rules of discussion, since that opens up this chain of infinite recursion. Few other examples like this in discursive logic, all similar in that respect. XKCD did a comic on it a few months back.

There seems to be some kind of a common theme here, as if this is the thread for college students to bask in their superiority over Jagex, whose employees have all been growing ever dimmer with every year they are separated from their university of record, as well as rolling around in piles of sleaze and money. Carry on, then.

That is always a true answer, and therefore never a useful answer. I'm wondering what your point is in giving it? :P Perhaps to establish that this topic is, in fact, asking for a useless answer? If stating a general truth establishes that a question is asking for a useless answer, then every question is asking for a useless answer, as one may imagine someone responding to any question with a general truth. Can you think of the system of 2 equations that functions as that general truth to answer nearly every single question in Help and Advice forum? I can ;)

That is always a true answer, and therefore never a useful answer. I'm wondering what your point is in giving it? :P

That really is the heart of the efficiency debate, though. The easiest way to answer that, is to point out games where the people in RS who currently efficiently grind xp, would have more fun role-playing, and varying their gameplay. That is to say, games that reward and are designed for that kind of gameplay, games like EVE, Darkfall, etc. Ironically, people who are not into grinding into RS might end up doing more of what people might term "grindy" gameplay in those games. That's because people aren't grinders/not grinders, people are achievers, explorers, killers, or cooperators, and in RS and those other games, different levels of grind are associated with each of those 4 fundamental gaming personality types.

This is a disingenuous argument. Treating P2P as a unified mass of people with one unified opinion towards F2P is obviously inaccurate.

I feel like while it is basically the Efficiency thread in disguise, but she's making a valid point. That point being that in the efficiency threads, you have people saying they're not playing efficiently, but they should have the freedom to play the way they want. This concedes the point to the efficiency-meisters in a way, as by conceding that they are more efficient, you're conceding the goals of the game to them, as efficiency is goals/time. A better response to the xp efficiency meisters is to say that if you have different goals, as then differing efficiencies will result for each theoretical action as a result. I have seen that exact point raised in the efficiency threads, but I could see wanting to have a thread in which these presuppositions were made explicit at the beginning on the grounds of fairness, although I don't really think it will go anywhere in the end so I wouldn't have started it personally.

I think people need to grow up and move on and accept it. That or leave. It's up to them. TBH, I've noticed a fair number of people in P2P worlds who have recently switched from F2P to P2P. I'm not sure what makes people think that the tactic didn't work. Seems to me that a lot of people did grow up, move on, and subscribe, and that people who quit RS but still post here are basing their arguments on wishful thinking.

People want to feel like they've made their mark. Some MMO's let you influence the game world, or NPC's, in some lasting way. Runescape doesn't, so the only venue for changing the game world in any way is by acquiring xp or wealth for your own character. Artificially doing things in a more difficult way has always been a minority pursuit, when the end result is indistinguishable from the same goals reached via more efficient means. Asking a significant number of people to pursue something other than the development of their own character-- when no such individually driven change in the game world outside of your character is even possible--is a fool's errand.