Makoto_the_Phoenix

There's only one thing I can say about this update. Yes. It's absolutely perfect. Now this is high level content. It makes me want to level up Herblore even more, if only for the Super Antifire. Did some quick maths, and the new maximum hit for Magic is now either 44 or 45, depending if they round up or down (I get a floating point number like 44.7999). Mages aren't pushovers much anymore.

My stats are high enough now that I can get most anything that I either want or need with time, and if I had to redo it all over again, I wouldn't think that I would need anything. If I have skills, I have money in time; if I have money, I have skills in time. It's kinda Zen in a nerdy way, if you think about it.

It's actually rare for me to leave my machine on while I sleep, but when I do, I usually listen to ambient trance songs. One that comes to mind is Moonchild by M83, Porcelain by Moby, and whatever else happens to be playing in my Last.fm playlist; I believe that at one point, I had dozed pleasantly to 12,000 Suns by Iridium. But hey, that's just me. I happen to prefer techno or ambient trance to doze off to than anything faster than 135BPM. [i use that for when I want to wake up.]

Talk about a wonderful update. Now all of the weeks of waiting are over. And now we can commence with the more serious discussions on the forums before the freeze. Good job, guys! :)

Before I reply to this, let me remind you of the scope of my rant. My intent is not to say that the entire skill is a failure, and that it should be removed. My intent is, however, to scale the rewards of Mining such that they match the rewards of both Fishing and Woodcutting. I know you might think that this takes away the "uniqueness" of the skill, but try to keep an open mind. Fair point, not everyone really has access to MTK or the Coal Carts. But that doesn't mean that Coal Mining wasn't totally wrecked by MTK. Also, how is it selfish? If I don't want to buy anything I shouldn't have to. If I don't want to buy Iron bars I shouldn't have to. In stark reality it's probably not feasible for me to mine 300,000 ores, but should I choose to, then it shouldn't be so painful. Again, I don't care that Fishing or Woodcutting are AFK skills. They're gathering skills. Their point is to gather resources. The only problem is that the resources which would benefit Smiths and Miners the most (Mith and Adamant) are so scarce, and respawn so slowly, that there's just little point to gathering them in the first place. You've reaped the rewards of Mining and banking every ore then? How long do you figure it's taken you from whenever you decided to start until now? Let's compare that to Woodcutting or Fishing - the former in which you already have a 99 in. Tell me - how much faster was it to get to that 99 while, at the same time, reaping all of the benefits of the skill? I never did say that it was impossible to train in any other way than power-mining. What I said was it was the only real option - as in the only realistic option. Please allow me to break that down for you. Realistically speaking, if I want to get this skill to a high level, I have to spend my time in a god-forsaken quarry, grinding away. Realistically speaking, if I want to get this skill to a high level, I have to forsake the rewards of any ore between my current level and 85. Realistically speaking, if I want to get this skill to a high level, I have to spend several orders of magnitude* more time on the skill than any other. See what I mean? As I said earlier, that's a specific kind of skilling which I don't subscribe to. I prefer to gather everything in bulk, then process it in bulk. Your way may be more efficient, but that is not what this rant is about. It gives Miners a false sense of hope that the skill has improved, or that this item will improve their Mining. Sorry, but I sure don't like being deceived when it comes to this. *Order of Magnitude: Basically a multiple of 10^n; for instance, 3 orders of magnitude would mean 10^3, or 1,000.

A few replies from around the horn... I should probably put somewhere in the main post that I have absolutely no concern for the economy or the prices of ores in this rant. If they fall that's fine. It means that they can finally get used in a more efficient manner again. It means that Smithing becomes profitable again. It also means that I as a level 92 Smith don't have to buy hundreds of thousands of iron bars (yes, iron bars) just to get levels. It would mean that I can finally put that high level Smithing to an actual use. Mining in the Wilderness? What if Jagex were to move every Magic tree to the Corporeal Beast's lair? Every Shark spot inside of the Saradomin stronghold? I'm not going out to the Wilderness with those insane Revenants just to get some more Adamant for my Smithing goals. It's just not going to happen. Also, the Mining Guild's ores aren't sufficient enough to support more than one person, and they're not sufficient enough to meet the demands of any bulk miner - suppose I wanted to make 10,000 Adamant plates, for example - at 3 ores with a 10 minute respawn time, I'd be able to mine 18 of them an hour, and in about 2,778 hours (or 115.75 consecutive days), I'd be able to meet my goal. Not even realistic. Lastly, not sure if it was mentioned before, but the point of mining Coal is both moot and has been made exponentially easier - both Miscellania and Coal Carts provide more coal than any one player knows what to do with. What I stated with respect to Woodcutting and Fishing was that the option to power-level exists with both skills. It's not a stark requirement, and in most every case, it's simple enough to train and bank your logs or fish. With Mining, the only real option you have is to power-level. The only mine that was close to a bank is Donkadan's mine (which was still pretty good even without the bank nearby), but Gold isn't the only ore we use to train with. What about Adamant and Mithril? What about Coal, which we so desperately need in bulk (and yes I know that Miscellania pretty much nerfed Coal mining)? In regards to mining + superheating: No thank you. It adds more burden and effort, and creates more problems than it solves. For instance, suppose I either don't have the cash for the Natures, or I've earmarked their purpose for something else (high-alching all of those Adamant plates). Suppose a new update comes in that makes this form of Mining obsolete. Suppose that I set a goal to mine specific types of ores (example was 50,000 Adamant) and smelt them all subsequently at a later date. That strategy does not fit into the means of those kinds of players, which, as either a good thing or bad thing, is how most everyone skills - build up a stockpile of some item T and processes it when it is more convenient or economically viable to do so. I've tried the mining + superheating option long ago in Classic, and I didn't like it even then (back when Mining could be considered simpler). My stance on that probably can't be changed on that anytime soon. I didn't assume that the Dragon Pickaxe wasn't coming out. In fact, I knew it was coming out since the dev diaries for the Dwarf quests were written. I simply stated that we have no need for such an item until the problems that exist are resolved. It's out now, and it sure as hell doesn't improve the situation - it just makes it more obvious. It's not about AFKing. It's not about paying attention. It is about giving Mining its purpose back. Have you actually tried to gather bulk Mithril or Adamant? The point of this skill is for us to gather ores for us to actually use in Smithing, not for us to sit out in the Desert to power-grind Granite for months on end. I'm fine with Mining being unique, so long as it's unique in a meaningful way. I never did mention any changes to Runite, and I denounced the motion of mining + superheating earlier in this post. That's true, but it doesn't change much. Although now that is the best spot in the game to mine Adamant, that doesn't mean it's not pointlessly slow. @Pyrac: Not much to reply to in your post, but the key point I walked away with was improving the simplicity or ease of the skill. That's not what's intended with this rant. I said this much earlier: In layman's terms, increase the rewards of Mining for yourself, and not increase the ease of the skill overall.

On a slightly less related topic, it seems that now the much coveted Dragon Pickaxe is now available in the game. What does this do to revolutionize Mining? Well let's tally up the factors. - Mining speed is increased slightly - Rocks remain unchanged Doesn't look like too much. We get a shiny new pickaxe for a skill that still desperately needs to be reworked. I don't know why they bothered bringing in the pickaxe anyway. Oh well. All I can do now is demand that they change the way that Mining works.

Maybe because its not exactly "wasting your life away" And you get some nubs saying "nice cape" once your done. You seem to keep thinking everything in runescape is useless, but if its fun, its not any more a waste of time than going to a party, or some other form of "fun" I may be jumping into the debate late (you can blame/attribute that to college), but what part of Mining is fun?

It's good to see such a nice pickaxe, but it's still a horrible thing considering the current state of Mining.

If you mean "is there a Linux distro that I can install and watch flash and play RuneScape with", then the answer is yes. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora can all do that. If you mean that you want to run it from the live CD and do that, you could, but it'd be way too painful. Plus, the speed at which things run would be several orders of magnitude slower than if you had just ran them from an installed machine.

Ah. Uncyclopedia. Uh...what were we discussing again? If we agreed with the parody? I dunno if I could ever consider nodding my head in agreement; it's as bad as news sites citing The Onion for fact.

I'm not sure what's worse - the fact that you think that younger players spoil the game, or the fact that you're probably likely to be caught by Barbarica's own filtering methods. Although, in your defense, the latter would be rather funny. Look. You can't tell jack about a person just on how the way they talk on t3h Intarw3bz. You have to actually talk to them and get to know them before you ever pass judgment. If you're adamant about what you said, though, then you should really look into what Ageism is and how it's warped your mind.

Oh please. Trading charms wouldn't wreck the economy in any way. Heck, most of the people that think it would wouldn't know a wrecked economy if they were staring right into their own bank. To be honest I was glad they didn't make charms tradable from the onset. It introduced a peculiar balance into the skill, such that it's not fully tradable but still very expensive. If they made charms tradable they would have to make shards untradable, or introduce a new kind of balance to ensure that the skill couldn't be 100% buyable.

Could you please clarify what you mean. Do you mean that they are running out of ideas, or that it is becoming too complex to update timely? I think he means the latter, but that's not necessarily true. The size of a project is, indeed, a huge obstacle in how often it can be detailed, but there's no doubt in my mind that the game can be updated modularly, such as in smaller parts, without affecting the whole overall. Perhaps that's why they're also updating the game engine. It can help clean things up and make it easier to update various parts of the game more quickly.

What is a challenge if you can have your hand held while undertaking it? It's up to you to adapt to the change or just go without the cape.

Linedancing was just pure epic. It really was. When I first watched it, I didn't think I'd be impressed, but I walked away very confident that the player that had made that movie took a *lot* of time and effort into making it. It was fantastic and was quickly an early favorite of mine. I saw the others, they were good, some funny (especially the one with the big mouth & the RS TV), and then I saw Excl's. Made me laugh hard. If I could vote twice I'd split the honors evenly between Excl and "Linedancing", but I wound up voting for Excl in the end.

Yeah, everyone seems to be moving to machines in which a 64-bit OS only makes canonical sense, and I've been sitting on 4GB of RAM for almost a year now. I haven't moved my machines to 64-bit since RS always seemed to break, so I figured I'd ask about it. If he ever opens up the question thread, I'll ask about officially supporting Linux with complete documentation on the main site. I'm doing an alright job with the community, but it's always nice to know if the OS you're running on is officially supported... I run 64-bit Windows 7 RC, and it runs perfectly fine. The only 64 bit platform which it might not run on is 64 bit XP, but that's not widely used. It was a very good question though. I've had reports of people not being able to run HD reliably in any 64-bit Linux distro, so I figured I'd check out what was up. I'd expect that Windows/Mac would work alright with relatively few hiccups. Ah well, I didn't get my (other) question in on time. Too bad, this was the Dev Blog I wanted to ask Andrew personally if Linux support would go official soon. :(

Yeah, everyone seems to be moving to machines in which a 64-bit OS only makes canonical sense, and I've been sitting on 4GB of RAM for almost a year now. I haven't moved my machines to 64-bit since RS always seemed to break, so I figured I'd ask about it. If he ever opens up the question thread, I'll ask about officially supporting Linux with complete documentation on the main site. I'm doing an alright job with the community, but it's always nice to know if the OS you're running on is officially supported...

You're not permitted to even have more than one God cape, let alone capes from the same God. Anyway, I didn't give my reaction to this earlier, but all I have to say is, "Already? That was fast." It also seems that Fullscreen RSHD is cooperating with the newest version of Ubuntu, so this might finally be an incentive to upgrade. :D

Bug abuse is bad, mmkay? Anyway, I'm surprised this update came so soon. At least I'm glad it'll encourage me to use a more powerful staff when I'm casting spells. I'm also really glad that we don't have to use staves anymore just to cast combat spells effectively. :P

@Zierro: I like you. Your rant is full of win and glory. What are you on? Its there job to listen to our ramblings. What are you on? It's Jagex's job to listen to constructive feedback which they can use to improve their game and future projects, not to put up with angsty teens just [bleep]ing and moaning about the most inane stuff.

I don't like using the n-word. I don't say it to any of my friends, and they don't say it to me or around me. If it's bad for one group of people to say it, then it's bad for all groups to say it. If we're talking equality and stuff like that, let's keep it 'equal' and not say the 'n-word'. Oh, and for those that didn't know - I'm black. Didn't see that comin', I'll bet.

Here's one I found in my archives. It was dated 5 July 2007, about 48 hours after Mithril Dragons were released (and we didn't know all the nuisances with them): I think the DC got me killed. Didn't have the skills to recover the ONYX BOLTS I was using at the time. FML. :wall:

Oh, how narrow-minded is the propaganda that was written for this occasion. I actually laughed irl at the "timeline" of the game - I honestly feel like finding the OP somewhere and telling him, "HEY! It's 2009! RuneScape is as strong as ever! What do you have to say to that?!" Anyway, I usually like to give syntactical analysis of a rant, but I feel that there's just no point to this one. It's all wrong. Completely, utterly wrong. So wrong it makes Eatrunearrow look damn good. And you have to be pretty damn wrong to actually make that guy look good. The OP doesn't take into account that Lootshare was implemented before this time, nor do they take into account the Assist features implemented either - had they taken the time to look it up (since they were so into quoting news), they'd have found that evidence before the major updates anyway. It's also interesting (as in "pathetic") that this piece of writing decided to use large numbers inappropriately. A fifth of active players PKed? As if. Subscription plummeted? Only 60,000 subscribers out of a million at the time - only 6%. And the limits? Well hell, what happens when you let a million micro-markets collide? Chaos, that's what. Had the limits not really been there, market prices for specific items would have been radical and insane. I refuse to read this dribble any longer. It's just...pretty damn ignorant of the truth. Actually, I haven't seen any rants based on this event that actually had any real, correct evidence. At best, he's pulled numbers out of thin air. However, at the time, it was probably true. But not true as you and I define it - true as in the emotional "facts" being spread around the RSOF and here like a giant propaganda machine. That still makes it wrong, though. So very wrong.

No, they're probably not going to allow UTF-8/UTF-16 special characters in the names. It'd be cool, though. At least, for me.