Yoko Kurama

Except this 'choice' is restricted only to people who do combat/slayer/PVM/dungeoneering. Skillers can just pop on their amulet without the loss of anything (since they don't need amulets for things usually), while the other group has to actually do a cost-benefit analysis. How is this balanced? It's clearly biased towards skillers.

Well, the Elf City is supposed to be inclusive of all things, skilling, combat, PVM, and what not. Hence, it seems silly to favour just skillers. If it was merely a skilling city, well, then it might make some sense, but it isn't. you mean the 2.2% crit wasn't a moderate combat bonus to those hunting motherlode shards on slayer tasks? Why I never... As I mentioned above, slayer isn't the only area impacted by this. Some of us do other stuff like high level PVM, such as Vorago/ROTS, where one likes to have as much DPS as possible (I have considered bringing Elf switches but it's way too annoying). Also, you can't use Bonecrusher/DemonHorn (unless you want to switch) on slayer, either. That's annoying.Then there's Dungeoneering. Unless of course you have done livid farm and then plain old trollheim was a redundant spell made somewhat useful by the swap to gwd location. Old Trollheim spell is still useful for 2 hard clue coordinations. True but it wasn't exactly the end of the world to reverse run from GWD or troll herb patch to the cords seeing as they are something you aren't likely to get all that often. It wasn't the end of the world, but it was annoying, and it made a useful quest reward somewhat less useful.

Would be a lot better if they got rid of the need for the Elf Crystal Amulet completely. Currently it's biased towards skillers, since PVM'ers and combat people need other ammies.

Some neat stuff in the patch notes: -No more broadcast spam from the Varrock Museum, whenever some narcissistic [wagon] decides to use shattered hearts to get 20+ 99 messages. -No more Achievement Banners/Clan Vexes from douchebags who put them in inconvienient places like Pest Control Dock to troll people. Personally, these people should receive temporary bans and hefty fines. There's no excuse for this sort of senseless griefing. Not being an overt douchebag should be a rule. - A separate option for the God Wars Telly, thus separating it from the Trollhem teleport (since, they are both pretty useful and having to choose one sucked. This way we can have quick access to God Wars and Troll herb patch). - Green message for slayer task completion (the red was sort of sour on the eyes). Pretty good stuff.

For the second week in a row, the update has broken various things in the game, in addition to the newly released update not working. Hilarious.

From the last daily spin of the day - forgot to use them at reset, after a Vorago trip (we got wand!).

I wouldn't be too surprised if they do it though. They tend to be incredibly shortsighted in such matters. I wouldn't even be surprised if these 2h weapons are the best weapons for months to come, until they suddenly wake up and decide to balance things (aka Drygorescape/Seismicscape 2.0). Look at EoC - the game-changing stuff that was supposed to balance the triangle, was completely unbalanced in an extreme fashion, skewed towards mage and melee, for well over a year. They only attempted to balance it in 2014, and only now have we gotten some measure of balance.

Although quantity is important, sometimes quality really is more important. In a month where they are releasing a major boss that will likely be pursued by its target audience (high level pvmers) for the next several months, I really don't see a problem with them not releasing much of anything else (well, they are releasing other stuff, but it's small stuff, and the Legacy stuff), because most of us will be fighting the boss anyways, so it's no big deal. It's actually smart of them and appropriate to not release too many big things this month. I do hope that they release it as the first thing this month. That way we have something to do for the whole of the month. Though I can't imagine them releasing it without it's own BTS package-hype, so it probably won't be this week.

I agree, but at some point after joining, either through talking to people, interaction with the metagame/culture, perhaps the various announcements, twitch/youtube or whatever, they begin to wonder what the point of the game is, and they will get pushed into that direction. Even back in the day, when real life people I knew contemplated about RS or were wondering what it was about, it was always an awkward conversation. "So what do you do in there? Chop logs or something?", they'd ask. To which someone would reply, "yeah, you get levels up, and then you get a cape.."

I don't blame new players for not wanting to 'work' towards these goals in this metagame. I think their aversion to this is perfectly rational and appropriate. They aren't being lazy, they are simply recognizing that the task put forth in front of them is ridiculous. At least when the game was still about 80's, 90's, 99's, it was possible to play catch-up reasonably well. That's not quite the case anymore.

It's true that EoC (while, in my view, improving combat in certain ways) drove away a lot of the older player base, and also the MTX were unfavorable amongst the older player base. But this doesn't really explain why Runescape has failed to grow, attracted new players or why F2P has lingered. After all, to newer players, EoC wouldn't be as bad as it was to the older players (since the new players don't really know what combat was like before EoC), and also, the pseudo-complexity of EoC is more similar to modern games on the market that these newer players might have encountered. So it's not exactly fair to blame EoC. As for MTX, again the older generation hates it, but they are quite prevalent in today's MMO market, and I doubt newer players would be as averse to them as older players, since they have probably seen it elsewhere. I think the real explanation for the dwindling growth in new RS players has to do with the fact that the game has moved into a more hardcore direction (120/200Ms/Comp/Trims as opposed to 80's, 90's, or 99's). The game is extreme in the amount of time that it requires to get to 'respectable' milestones/achievements (120/200Ms) - and it is more or less akin to a part-time job now. This doesn't bother older players (myself included to a degree), because we are used to it, but I don't doubt that this is completely overwhelming to newer players: the notion that they'd have to be mega-billionaires or put in hundreds of hours to achieve even something mildly respectable (like a 120). Basically the game is becoming more entrenched and more focused towards appealing to the tastes of hardcore players and veterans, and that has come at the cost of appealing to new players. Most of the 'fun' activities are dead and deserted, a sense of community has also eroded, there is little meaningful competition (unless you count the extreme manifestations that occur between the top highscore players, which more or less boil down to who has more money, spins, hours to no-life), and much of the game is focused towards an endless mind-numbing grind, the exp gainz, and even non-skill activities are designed to be grindy. A certain amount of instant gratification is necessary and even good. I can understand quite easily why this generation of gamers isn't drawn to MMORPGs.

There was a server outage at the time the thread was made. It's not really any different from any other news thread after a few days - the event is no longer currently happening, but was a thing of the past. I could change the thread title to 'Server disruptions and Jagex's item refund policy'.

No. There is no need for that. I don't recall there being a rule which prohibits discussion/criticism of Jagex in threads discussing/announcing/warning of events. You seem intent on denying reality, or and intent on not acknowledging any sort of fault that might lie on Jagex's shoulders, but I see no reason to do the same.

Absolutely not. The server issues may have been fixed, but the critique of Jagex's behaviour with regards to this situation is still completely 100% valid and relevant. Their lack of acknowledgement and their handling of player's grievances still stands. Keep trying to pretend though that there's nothing wrong with the picture and that Jagex has no blame to share - it's quite amusing to see.

I don't. There were a lot of angry people at RSOF yesterday, but those threads are probably in the process of getting lost. Last time (December 2013), there were no rollbacks for the public at large. For a while, Forum moderators told everyone to wait from word from Jagex, but then, they started locking/hiding threads, telling people to stop making them, and one J-Mod got on his alt (non-J-Mod account) made a post saying that there would be no rollbacks at all, and his post was stickied.

So it seems... *furrows eyebrow* followed by *The Rock pose* I didn't lose anything, so I don't need a refund. As I noted in my OP, I survived the server crash. I have decided to put that in bold for those who have reading comprehension difficulties or are determined to make this personal rather than discuss the issue at large. Also it is an undeniable fact that Jagex does engage in the sort of preferential treatment that I discussed. This has more to do with dozens of other normal players who did die and lose and won't be getting refunds, as opposed to famous players who get rollbacks on-demand without lifting a finger. That's of course not true, as certain players definitely get rollbacks on-demand without lifting a finger.

No, but they are directly under Jagex supervision and follow their orders. So I am not sure what you're trying to say there. They are given direct instructions from Jagex and they execute them. To pretend that Forum moderators are independent of Jagex or are loose cannons is absurd. You can lose stuff if you died say at 12:00 PM, and at 12:02 pm the server crashes and it doesn't come back for 15 minutes (the maximum amount of a time a grave has without a bless). I have seen this happen numerous times. Also, I am pretty sure if you're in combat when the server goes down, you can still die. I have personally seen this happen at stuff like Vorago. People have lost stuff this way. I am not suggesting they get night staff, I am suggesting they a) acknowledge such problems when they occur, b) make some effort to address their customers when this sort of stuff happens, and c) have a consistent refund policy (either everyone, where it's possible, gets refunds for lost items, or no one gets them, as opposed to now where only famous players with J-Mod connections get them).

If you had read the thread you'd know this has nothing to do with the fact they aren't immediately responding to the issue (it's understandable that they can't do anything if they are in bed) - the problem is that they do nothing even when they get back to work (this has happened in the past). They ignore the issue, hide and lock threads, give no refunds/rollbacks, and ignore the grievances of players that have suffered. That is a problem. I can find well documented proof of targeted account rollbacks. *pushes up thick frame glasses and corrects pocket protector alignment* I can find you several more instances of people who lost stuff, posted on the forums, tried to reach out to Jagex, were deliberately ignored, and forum moderators told them to get over it (basically), locked/hid their threads and told them to stop making any more. I remember the same "no one is here at night to respond" issues back in 2004, so it's good to see Jagex hasn't evolved their policy on "what do we do with a 24 hour service if it goes bad at night?" in ten years. This too. It isn't even so much that they need to do something at 12 AM, it's that they should at least do something at some point. Their policy (which I saw firsthand in December of 2013 when servers crashed) is as I described earlier: doing nothing at all and pretending there is no problem. Still there are other measures they could take, and they haven't really done anything proactive on this front.

If you had read the thread you'd know this has nothing to do with the fact they aren't immediately responding to the issue (it's understandable that they can't do anything if they are in bed) - the problem is that they do nothing even when they get back to work (this has happened in the past). They ignore the issue, hide and lock threads, give no refunds/rollbacks, and ignore the grievances of players that have suffered. That is a problem.

Why can't it be both? Sometimes reality is nasty and I don't intend to cower away from that with some misguided interest of appearing to be 'neutral'. Jagex [bleep]ed up and they should be called out on that in discussions about this issue.

This. In a nutshell. The computer gaming world is a lot different now -- and all the MMORPG's have taken hits and lost a lot of of their player base. It's far more appealing for people to play fast-action player ready PVP console games than to go on the computer and play Runescape. :P That's part of the picture, for sure, but not the only part. Runescape has certainly taken a far bigger hit than say WoW; and another part of the picture is the lackluster management of the game and things like that. They have definitely driven away players and made the game less friendly for new players.

Last time it was those jevunile Ddosers that were the problem. I don't blame Jagex for the crash (I am not qualified enough to know what the causes are or how secure their servers/ISP is). I blame Jagex for failing to put in procedures to address the aftermath, their unwillingness to talk to their players, offer rollbacks, refunds, or any sort of acknowledgement. That's where the ball is completely in their court. Most people in this situation (just like the last time it happened) waited several hours for Jagex to wake up (it was also a midnight crash) and do something - they used all the proper channels tor reach Jagex - the wait is not the problem. The problem is once J-Mods finally got to JHQ they instructed RSOF forum moderators to lock threads, hide them, and the J Mods did absolutely nothing to acknolwedge or address the situation (there were even several in game). That's my problem with this.

So apparently servers are going down, people are getting booted out, the site won't load for 20 minutes at times (for some people), as well as the client. Beware. A lot of people have died, lost stuff, and of course in a time of such crisis, Jagex is absolutely nowhere to be found, there is no acknowledgement on the forums, twitter, in game, or anywhere, and no response to the grievances of people who lost stuff and are trying to reach Jagex through the forums or elsewhere. Which is exactly what Jagex did last time as well in December of 2013 when something like this happened. They completely ignored the problem, pretended it wasn't happening, then hid all threads on forums refering to it or asking for rollbacks/refunds for lost items and moved on. Oh, but I am sure, the top ranked players will be sure to get their stuff back. It's shameless really. I myself was at DKS before it first happened, got booted out, site wouldn't load ( for about 15 minutes), nor would client, a friend checked to see if i died (thankfully I didn't), I logged back on and teleported out. I have no doubt that If I had died and lost my stuff and the server hadn't came back up, I would have gotten nothing. Jagex really is lawless, callous, and concerned only with the needs of famous players. I am sure though, that they will promptly put up a new video sometime in the future with some charismatic J-Mod or another doing something funny, and telling us how much they care and value their customers. That should be enough damage control. Pathetic. To TIF Moderators: Feel free to move this to Rants, if that's the proper procedure.

They shouldn't. No regular player would get their items back, top 15 players shouldn't get special privileges. Incase you wasn't aware, they tried out a thing where they refunded hijacked accounts items, for a while, but something went wrong and they put a few million too many archer rings on some guys acc and it made them crash. So it's not special privileges, just a new thing they have been trying out, if someone gets hijacked for all their shit they deserve to get it given back, regardless of if they're top 15 or top 150,000 That's what Jagex claims, but that is a very very recent thing and for most people there is no way to actually contact Jagex for refunds. Unless I am mistaken, I don't see any links anywhere on the site for this program. Seems like another special privileges thing where if you know a J-Mod like Mod Jane, you can ask her or whatever. I know quite a few people that have been hacked, and they weren't so lucky as to be famous, and as far as I am aware they have been given no refunds at all. It's clearly a case of preferential treatment which is something Jagex does quite often. Most people if/when they get hacked, are told by Jagex "it's your own damn fault, nothing we can do about it" even if they are secured, and in Dragonseance's case, he didn't even have the good sense to have a bank pin... Seems like favoritism to me.

Defence gives you armor and generally damage absorption, constitution gives you health. I do not see the problem. As for abilities, yes you have no Cooldown for them, but they also cost way more adrenaline for much lower damage output overall. That and it gives you a debuff that halves your adrenaline gains. From a logical point of view (I realize this is a fantasy game, but still), the fact that you have armour on should mean your chances of living are vastly better and that you can take more hits. I preferred the system prior to the beta, as it is in the live game right now.