Yoko Kurama

He's still the weakest of the main Gods, by a longshot. (Supposedly Zamorak is on a lower tier post-BoL, but he still seems incredibly powerful). ;)

They said that despite being a 'buyable' skill, it will be very slow.

A city seems easier to design than a skill, for Jagex anyways. It's also conceptually more satisfying (though, that's subjective, sure). I don't have too high hopes, but it's been too long, and it deserves to be done for that reason alone if nothing else. They have also completely dropped the ball on quests this past year (less quests in 2013 than any other year), and yet we know they usually have the capacity to do great quests (TWW/ROTM/WGS/BoDM) - so it would be nice for them to go into that direction again. The City will be accompanied by a GM quest. Also, it just seems like a lot of older spots are dead on a lot of worlds (empty banks, empty squares, etc.), it would be nice to have a city where you can actually find some people on again. Most of my post though, was a measured response to the poster whom I quoted whom I found to be very flippant to an update a lot of people have been anticipating for quite some time.

You guys realise they already ditched all the lamps about a week ago in favour on bonus xp stars, which are currently on the star fall epically common promo to celebrate said change right? Yes. I don't want bonus xp either. This. Though, it's already too late. For several years they have inundated the game with free bonus experience everywhere. And they wonder why skills are suddenly so easy to level, a less meaningful accomplishment, and then proclaim that we need a ridiculous insidious prestige system to rectify this. Well, if you hadn't been giving away bonus experience like it was air for several years, then we wouldn't be in this situation, would be? I mean, the Hati/Skoll thing just gave like 700k+ bonus experience in two skills for about 5 minutes of work. Who thought that this was a good idea? Seriously. Always nice to see when 5 minutes of work yeilds more experience than several of the top quests, for instance, in the game. Jagex has no conception of a proper incentive structure.

Oh, please. Get over the fact that people waited for the Elf City for a dozen or so years and thus are voting for that instead of the skill that will probably be rushed, useless, and (as confirmed) slow to train. Any credibility that Jagex had (and they had plenty with me, because of how ingenious and exciting and enjoyable dungeoneering was for me) was lost when they came out with the abomination that is Divination. They have already stated that that 90 2H weapons will no longer be part of the Invention Skill - which was the allure for a lot of higher level players. The Elf City is an extremely important part of lore; it's supposed to be a high-level hub (which is pretty neat), and it's allegedly going to be designed to be a new place that will be a prominent part of gameplay - in that players will be there a lot (unlike cities like, say, Yanille or some in Mortanyia where no one comes to after they do the quests - and most cities in RS are empty anyways) and it will even have a GE. That's a lot more interesting than some skill that will be poorly designed, that everyone will probably no-life in 2 month and never revisit again. And the Elf City has been confirmed to be accompanied by a VERY massive and special GM quest (that has also been anticipated for years). Let us not forget that in the 2013 poll that Jagex put up, the Wold Wakes came in number one as the most popular update of the year, while divination was not on a similar level. It's clear what sort of stuff people like.

I like Mod Dean and adore Mod Slayer (who reposted Mod Dean's post in HLF), but announcing this again was completely unnecessary. It has once again crashed several markets (just when they were stabilizing). Should have just sprung it on us next week.

I am tired at the moment so perhaps I'm missing something very obvious, but what's wrong with the picture?

The bit about Mod Timbo is absolutely hilarious. I guess we know now that Mod Osbourne can't be trusted. And where will they be crashing exactly? Every boss worth doing has its own instance and skilling resources are also instanced to the player. Welcome to 2014. Actually no. Some of the instances are ridiculously expensive, such as the Vorago instance, which costs 1M/hour. I don't know of a single person that uses it.

Except that, the gear the invention skill is going to release is worse than existing gear, costly to make, and they said the skill would be slow to train and 'friendly to billionaires'. I can't see any reason to get excited for that. If it never comes, I won't complain.

Well, I want my Comp back, of course, but Max isn't that bad. Especially now that I don't range in PVM, so I don't have to worry about bolts. If it takes another few days (assuming I fail the two scrolls from today), whatever, I can handle it.

I hate it. I should able to decimate two noobs with my Seismics/Drygores, but usually it's a struggle. It's silly.

I have 2 scrolls pieces, and 2 scroll voyages today. So I might be able to get it later today.

Yeah, I don't buy the budget issues explanation. It really can't be that hard to throw us something in there, can it? It seems more related to the time; this is like Divination (as another poster said) -- something they hyped long in advance but only really started working on very close to the due date, and it was inevitable rushed and poorly designed. I mean there were a lot of small things they could have done to polish this update up, and they just didn't do them. If Dev budgets really are tight, then they should prioritize away from things like voice acting (which are nice but hardly necessary), and focus on crucial quality aspects of it. Some of my most favorite Runescape updates/quests didn't have voice acting and they weren't diminished at all by that. So yeah if you're tight on cash, prioritize.

They've done it before with other famous RS yt'ers/famous players, namely angerfist. Typically these players who also know jmods sometimes get faster response times on their tickets as well. Their customer support system is still inconsistent. Yup, they have done it before. Though, there was a recent server crash (the Derptrolling incident), for which there was absolutely no acknowledgement on the part of Jagex, and no response at all, and in which people lost lots of money -- this was only last week or so, and there was another crash the week before -- I'm interested in seeing if they are going to parade their hypocrisy around for everyone to see so close to those incidents.

What will be interesting to see if Jagex will have the audacity to give Dardan his stuff back, when their policy, typically, is no rollbacks regardless of scamming, hacking, or even server crashes.

Reefwalker is annoying, but not that hard or long, and it does make sense. As for upcoming Tuska content, I doubt; they are so lagging behind on quests/scheduled updates, I'm not expecting anything more than what they have announced from that (and not even all of that).

You're right. I was wrong about the Comp Cape, apparently it does receive the new bonuses (though not completely, but good enough). So Comp is still BIS. I was sort of overwhelmed by the long list of updates today, so I didn't read as carefully as I ought to have, and relied on RSOF posts instead, one of which said Reefwalker was BIS and better than Comp. I still find that recent Comp Reqs are getting more and more cumbersome; in the past it was mostly songs, now they make Comp Reqs what were usually Trim Requirements; like getting the full Airut mask.

I bought my Seismics a few days ago, but I'm not too worried. Still, a bunch of earthshaking updates today (and I don't necessarily mean in a good way). They have completely wrecked a lot of markets by their sheer incompetence. A lot of the things that happened today should have happened years ago; then they wouldn't have been such a sudden change. Still a lot of flaws that need fixing; the comp requirement is silly, as is the Comp Cape no longer being BIS (this should be rectified immediately, let us combine th new cape with Comp). The Oxhead Nerf was completely unnecessary, whatever oblivious Mod did that in a vain effort to balance something that was already balanced should instantly change it back. The Seafaring imbalance in Ports which they said they would fix ages ago still hasn't been fixed. Lame. Aside from not having as many rewards as they previously implied, a lot of the ingame stuff (like the amount of new building/ship updates, was completely lackluster). Looks completely rushed. And so on.

We don't need another ring. We have Sixth Age and Vigour, and those bascally cover everything, and have decent requirement (a quest, and dungeoneering). Rings was a stupid idea. T85 Power Armour; an alternative, T85 shields (as was originally planned), or something completely different, would have been better. Rings, Capes, and Darts, when we already have enough of the former, and the latter sucks, was always a stupid idea.

The new BTS for next week is up. I told you guys the Rings would be useless (apparently it has 2.0 crit bonus for all styles, useless when compared to pre-existing rings). The capes will likely also be useless. That leaves the darts...

Well, no, the entire idea was terrible and there wouldnt have been a single positive outcome.Economically it would have kept demand for lower end supplies. In the end you can't prove it was a bad idea until you saw how the chips fell. Actually yes you can. You can easily extrapolate what was going to happen based on what we knew. It might have made demand for lower supplies higher, but been disastrous in other respects. And given the luck-based mechanic of the game, with PVM and merchanting being where the money is at, and the move to an experience craze, skilling will never be a good money-maker again. What prestige would have done is removed any sense of finality in the game and put everyone on a never-ending race to level forever -- I can't think of anything good about that.

Well, no, the entire idea was terrible and there wouldnt have been a single positive outcome. Agreed on both counts. Most of the game is grinding and boring enough, let's not make gear the same way. Isn't it enough that obtaining useful gear is a chore enough, with some costing well into the billions? Same with organizing teams for things like Vorago. Don't need to add to that.

, and are basically just half-assing it to keep the boat afloat and nothing else. This, at least to me, is blatantly obvious. They made ranged significantly more viable when they changed Death Swiftness to allow multiple people to use it, but it is still not as powerful as magic. Ranged needs its basic abilities to be buffed, something that Jagex is "supposedly" working on. And Vorago's drop rates need to be doubled. IDGAF if a few elitist scumbags cry about not getting 500m splits of 6 man wands. No piece of equipment should cost anywhere close to that much GP. Even if they double the drop rates, wands probably won't drop below 1B because Vorago is too hard for the average player to kill with any regularity. I myself am slowly losing interest in RS again... Once I reobtain my Quest Cape, I'll probably semi-retire again, only popping on now and then to do stuff with my clan or whenever they release a new quest. I have over a year of members now, so yeah. You can only kill a boss that takes 20 minutes per kill so many times without a major drop before you start to lose interest. And while the GP from a drop would be nice, I don't really know what I'd buy. And besides, if I need GP badly enough I make decent enough money from my real life job that it is more efficient to just buy GP with bonds than spend hours grinding a boss hoping for a payday. Devotion (if they don't end up nerfing it in pvm) makes vorago a lot easier. It's a nice little perk for Bomb Tanks (and everyone on certain phases), but it does absolutely nothing to reduce the hideous amount of effort needed to fight Vorago, the obscene drop rate, and the difficulty of finding and organizing competent teams.

There was a DDOS Yes I know. And I'd be totally sympathetic to Jagex if they weren't total douchebags about it. There was absolutely no J-Mod response or acknowledge on the forums, or a rollback, and just a lot of brown-nosing forum moderators locking threads with legitimate complaints/concerns. That's where the fault lies squarely on Jagex.

I don't see anything more on the openness front. There are various things that they won't comment about that are very pressing. The delays also seem inexcusably excessive; they seem to be wandering aimlessly from one pet project to another without any cohesive plan. It's not that there were a few hurdles here and there; they have consistently been behind on deadlines for major things (and several of them!), that to me suggests that they are mismanaging their time. To offer an analogy, think of it like being in college or high school. Almost everything has a deadline. Usually though there's enough time that if you start on time and put in a decent effort you can succeed. Sometimes though stuff comes up and there's nothing you can do about it. So you go talk to the professor/teacher and explain what's happening. Usually they are understanding and grant you an extension or something. However, if this keeps happening, time after time, and more than a few times, they are no longer as understanding and quickly begin to point the finger at you and conclude that you must be mismanaging your time. That's precisely how I view this. That Jagex has consistently missed various deadlines, had little discussion about it, ignored various things, and been totally casual and flippant about it, suggests to me that they are bad at managing time, and are basically just half-assing it to keep the boat afloat and nothing else.