Yoko Kurama

Someone from my clan pointed out Drumgun's experience today (he said it was extremely high). Seeing as I hadn't checked the Hiscores in forever, I decided to give it a look. I was shocked to see Drumgun at 59M experience. Just for fun I decided to do some quick math, with conservative estimates: Divination has been out for roughly 39 days, or 936 hours. Calculated at an estimate of 100,000 experience/hour at Divination (this is not technically accurate, as at levels below 99, you wouldn't get nearly as much, and even at 99 it would still be lower than 100K, and 99 is 13M experience, keep in mind). It would require 590 hours for 59M experience. 590 hours divided by a total of 936 hours having been available since Divination gives us: 590/936 = 0.63, or 63% Mind you this is an extremely conservative estimate, but still, that's about two-thirds, on average, of every day since Divination having been spent on training. Or 16 hours per day spent on it, that still leaves 8 hours for sleep, I suppose. I guess some people really can train it all day.

There needs to be a new 30-day reward for the people who did all 30. Nothing major, but something.

That would actually be really nice of them. I hope they do that. No. That would be a fundamentally douchebaggish thing to do.

I disagree: it was different, but it was still something rudimentary and simple. Novice quests, even post-DoC still conform to a certain standard, they're short and easy. If I am not mistaken, it was even mentioned on the Podcast that it would be a short quest. I expect more for something that is going to address one of the most well-developed arcs and characters in the game. Especially when the question at the end of TWW was 'Is Sliske a God?', and 'How did he get the Staff?'. Simple enough. We have waited 8 months for that, and it's all just going to be some sort of short thing? Meh. With all the waiting, the hype, the self-congratulatory patting and podcasts, It should be a Master quest with medium length at the minimum. Also, from my understanding, and I could be wrong here but, in DoC the hitpoints were scaled, but not really the damage. Also, the Dragonkin may have been written out of the quest as well. If that is true, that'd be another major disappointment.

Missing/Presumed Death is a Novice quest. It's nice to know we waited 8 months after TWW for all the epic stuff that was going to unfold, only for it to be some short Novice quest. If this is all they had planned, as far as filling some of the details of TWW, then they should have released it months ago.

I agree with Q, on both counts. EoC has somewhat discourage exact game-mechanic interest because it's constantly redone and obscure. Even I don't know too much about and I don't bother to learn. Also, Divination is the simplest skill to understand as far as experience goes. With regards to my reference of newer players, that was my attempt to explain why veterans and older players are dominating (in terms of population), rather than explaining why we have so many Divination maxed players. You're right on that, that didn't directly influence the number of 99 Divination players.

That would encourage competition within the team, and would probably be destructive, particularly for the team spirit, in my view. Everyone would be trying to get the most experience for themselves. I don't really like floor selling either, but I don't think it's really a problem (aside from all that advertising spam).

Except a lot of the decent teams also tended to be abusive whenever a mistake was made. This left people with the options to put up with abusive players or get terrible exp. For most people teams are still the best option for exp, but if they don't want to deal with abusive players there are other options now. From my experience, the abusive teams were usually part of the 'rushing, or maximum efficiency' style groups. Even then, many of them had systems of tutoring newbs into their ways, and would often gently push you into the right way, and would only resort to pure abuse if you were repeatedly incompetent or failed to listen. Still, I admit, abuse was there. There were also mixed style teams/clans, and skilling clans, where abuse was virtually non-existent. I found that even if you were a noob and weren't a great at dungeoneering, if you simply were willing to listen to people when they would give you instructions or correct your mistakes, they'd be patient and wouldn't be abusive.

Back when Dungeoneering was lively (as late as the summer of 2012 when I got 120 Dungeoneering), there were several 'official' and 'unofficial' worlds, and several clans/friends chats for Dungeoneering which had their own worlds where you could join them for all sorts of Dungeoneering styles: fast-paced rushing, or relaxed skilling, or a mixture. I used to alternate between them based on my mood. The only option was not to do it with a bunch of random people all day, who would quit and cuss at you. There were communities out there. Now, that's all been lost.

You put it down in words much better than I did. This is precisely what I meant by my previous post. Basically we are getting a turned upside down pyramid here, with few new players being the tip of the pyramid at the bottom, and lots of veterans at the base of the pyramid at the top. I'm not so sure that that is for good...:/ Yes I have long begrudged this development. It also means that no update, no matter how high-leveled or well planned, will ever have the excitement of the past updates, because there will be thousands of players who are Maxed out. We will never have something like the great race to 85 Slayer of 2005. This was enabled not only by the culture of efficiency, but also by Jagex throwing away bonus experience extremely carelessly and recklessly in the past several years (even predating the SoF). It's had a very devastating effect on the game, in my view. They have completely destabilized the game for short-term profit (the various bonus weekends and the SoF), and out of shortsightedness. Any time a game is reduced to its hardcore base, that's usually a bad thing. There must be a balance between newer players and older players, their numbers and the amount of influence they control. Now we are getting more and more players who are not only willing to chase 200M but actually getting it. I can actually foresee the day where Jagex will give in to their demands, and lift the 99 cap and add more levels (there are always threads in HLF asking for this). This will only be more burdensome to the rest of us, who have no interest in going for 200M.

There are a lot of maxed Divination players because the community has declined in number and is now more disproportionately dominated by veterans and older players. The rate of newer players joining is abysmal, as is the number of free players and newbies. Also, the culture of efficiency above all has been firmly entrenched. Everyone is interested in getting levels and less interested in fun and 'time-wasting'. All of this adds up to lots of people getting 99 Divination very fast despite it being a slow skill, by means of probably fiercely grinding.

It seems Jagex has been running late; they are either facing abnormal difficulties or are slacking off. Now that the quest has been postponed, does anyone think that Battle of Lumbridge conclusion may also be postponed? The quest is supposed to be next week, as is the BTS, as is the conclusion to BoL. It seems that even with only 2 or so updates per month, they keep pushing them into the next month. Next month's schedule may be delayed as well. Any thoughts?

He's only a few points away from 99. He's apparently not getting 99 so Jake can play make-believe and pretend he's rank #1 or something. :wink: Still, the number of players at 99 is quite a lot. Usually that takes a lot more time.

Yes, it's all about incentives (as I always say). If you have a skill that was clearly designed to be a social skill (Dungeoneering fits the bill), then you actually need to give and maintain incentives for people so that they would want to do it in groups. When you release incentives and methods that reward players for soloing the thing, or alternative methods, such as Sinkholes and Daily Challenges, then yes, they will eventually move way from doing it with teams. It's not rocket science.

I don't mean to derail this thread, but Dungeoneering (my favourite skill, and in my view, the best developed skill) proved to be popular until Jagex strangled it with their own hands, set it on fire, and threw it off the balcony. With Sinkholes giving ridiculous experience for 5 minutes of (fun) effort, and the same with Daily challenges, and tons of bonus experience, AND the boost to solo Dungeoneering, and Dungeoneering worlds are dead (there are other factors too but these are important ones). They put so much effort into and it actually turned into a great skill and then they ruined it. It's amazing how little they know about their own game.

As do I, but I am not hopeful about that prospect.

I knew this is what Jagex does and I let my guard down. Foolish Yoko. Desperation for BXP may also be due to the fact that we have much more, and much more powerful, BXP sources now. Dungeoneering had, what ... TOG and Pengs?Yup. Bonus experience is abundant and everywhere. Who could have possibly predicted that this would happen? No one.

The damage reduction, from my understanding, is very negligible at best. As for the prospects of using this armour at KK, I find that to be wildly dubious at best.

This was from the article on the decline of players: I don't see how this is a problem. Runescape's popularity and liveliness and server populations have always been measured by this standard, why change it now? It's true that, technically the people online at 12:00 are not necessarily the same as those online at 12:01, but since we have always used this standard, there is a level of uniformity and consistency. When the numbers were much higher, you could have said the same thing "sure, there are 100K players online right now, but those online at 2:00 are not the same as those online on 2:01", but the point is that in absolute terms it's been a decline, and that's important.The statistic is useful, and it's consistent.

Yes. I expect it will be Mining/Smithing. Which isn't exactly illogical (the quest will obviously be about smithing/mining and Dwarves), but it would be a nice bonus for it to have some open lamps (since GM quests do tend to give some free-to-choose lamps). However, I am not actually expecting any Divination experience from it, it will probably be Smithing/Mining.

Apparently the new rumors are that Divination bonus experience will be allowed this Tuesday. Would be pretty cool if that GM quest gave us even more lamps. :wink:

EoC quitters were definitely more important in the decline of RS (the recent one) than the natural decline. That much cannot be denied. You seem to be understating the case, not only as far as EoC quitters are concerned, but also the general decline. It's very simple to test it out. Server populations are at an all time low, as is the rate of new players joining, and the amount of people at spots and what not. Even if you account for bots, there was a time when there were a lot of chatty humans there who just aren't there now. There are spots, areas, and minigames that are completely deserted when this was never the case before. It has been a very stark decline. Also, if the numbers of the past included bots, then so does today's 50k figure. It's not a good number no matter how one breaks it down.

I am a supporter of the EoC, and even I don't need any concrete graphs or statistics to tell me what has happened. The few verified statistics we do have show that there has been a stark decline in the number of active players, and we have seen all the uproars, complaints, and upheavals over EoC. As long as you haven't been living under a rock for the past 1.5 years, you should be able to put two and two together and acknowledge that a lot of the older players didn't like EoC and left over it. That's just the price we had to pay for EoC. Own up to it. There is no need to extrapolate or conjure fancy graphs, it's happened right in front of our eyes, it's so obviously true.

Yes, strange isn't it? These days you're some horrible noob if you only play for 6 hours, and it's considered perfectly normal and commonplace for people to play 6 hours a day (many play far more than that). Something like this would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The 6 hour log doesn't actually address it in any way. It only inconveniences you momentarily. If it, for example, made it so you could only play 6 hours maximum per day, that'd be a concrete step (though obviously that won't happen), but a mere trip to the lobby is nothing.

Don't hold your breath, Leik, they have been teasing us for weeks, without any explanation or words. I have 9 spins saved up, and anytime I get a ticket, I bring it back down to 9. They're are masters at wasting everyone's time and being ambiguous about expectations. Hold on now. Not to interrupt the thread or anything but this is actually happening? Is it the kind of thing where you have to be elite to have this done, or could someone with my stats make a request and actually get a name out of it if it's reasonable for them to do so? Because this is something from my Scape bucket list and if it's the former I might collapse into some kind of hate-singularity. It's something that's in elite circles at the moment, but you could try going into Mod Jane's FC (when she is online) and requesting for a name to be freed, she might do it.