qeltar

People would give more constructive feedback if they felt it was being listened to. As for people being unhappy with things, that's because there is basically no interaction between customers and developers. The people writing content do what they want, and then act surprised when it isn't well received. It's a long repeated pattern at this point.

Try to see if you can make a cogent point, instead of just mocking what others write. It just makes you look foolish and not worth dealing with. This is not a simple matter of me "not liking the content". It is a matter of one decision after another that show that the developers are not in tune with what most players want. Not always on a big scale, often small things, but head-scratchers nonetheless. They've all been discussed too many times to bother relisting. Mostly rewards that pretty much no player would ever use, or content that is abandoned due to unrealistic assumptions.

The answer is the same as it's always been: they develop in a vacuum, without a proper understanding of what their customers like and want. They do it because they can get away with it. When a company is successful and has lots of money, they can do what they want and it doesn't really matter. It's only companies that are struggling for success and acceptance that listen to their customers (and ones who want to have *continued* success and acceptance).

It's a complaint because this shows every sign of being a recycling job, and not even one very well done at that. They had this game they didn't want to launch separately, and they didn't want to put in the effort it would have taken to make a real skill, so they shoehorned this thing into RS. If they had taken a few more months and done the job properly, it could have been really good. The whole thing smells of a half-assed effort. I have a nice wall here I could talk to instead -- more convenient and would yield the same results. I don't mind them putting in a skill I don't like.. heck, there are many I don't like right now. But this isn't a skill at all, and anyone who approaches the matter honestly will see that. I doubt anyone could list even three major things that make this a skill if SC and BA are not.

Every update makes it more and more clear that the developers don't have any clue about how players actually play the game. Another inexcusable design flaw is putting in doors that cannot be opened even using the maximum herblore boost, then hiding half the floor behind said doors, and penalizing players 50% of their XP for something they can do nothing about. Idiotic.

It would be a nice minigame, yes. It's not a skill if the only reason anyone can come up with for why this is one and SC is not is that "Jagex sez so". Well sure, there are some things they can't fix, but there are others they can. I do think they could fix the behemoth problem pretty easily, for example. But this doesn't remove grinding at all. It makes it worse. Each floor is randomly generated, so the specifics of doing it change, but the general process is the same. On each floor you equip yourself, kill stuff, gather resources, equip yourself some more, solve a puzzle or two, find a boss and kill it. This is the same on floor 1 as it is on floor 30. And the difficulty and time requirement doesn't really increase all that much either. It takes me nearly as long to redo floor 1 as the deepest floor I can get to. Yet because of this "prestige" system, I am making, overall, 25% less XP than I would if I were just allowed to repeat the deeper floors. This means doing more floors to get XP, which is more grinding, not less. I understand the desire to have players do more than just repeat the bottom floor, but as usual, they took the easy way out. The right way is to design the game so players have an *intrinsic* reason to redo the upper floors. Instead, they just penalize you for not doing what they want, which is an *extrinsic* motivator.

This was a list of design flaws, not unfixable design flaws. Those skills don't require gobs of XP to get anything useful out of them. If you play on complexity 1 your room XP gets whacked, your prestige XP gets whacked, you lose the room bonuses, you get a guide mode penalty AND a 50% penalty on top of that. I mean really -- five penalties? They might as well have just removed complexities 1 to 5 entirely. Very poor design. Why is it ncessary to do this at all? Am I forced to hunt polar kebbits when I get to level 90, or kill chickens half the time to level combat? It already asks the leader if he's ready for his whole team to go. It's also unneeded for solo play. Then why have it? Proper design means reasonable tradeoffs to broaden a piece of content; there should be both advantages and disadvantages to different complexity levels. If everyone knows you should always play on level 6, then the design is broken. It could if they bothered to make an effort to do so. You are supposed to be given a partial XP reward if you don't complete a floor, but that partial XP reward is a tiny fraction of what it should be. I actually had an occasion where I completed all of a floor except one monster -- I went into the boss room early by accident, killed it, then went back to the other rooms. I D/Ced with one regular monster to kill and got 1/6th of the normal XP for the floor. It is what it is. Jagex can call a turnip a hamburger if they want, but that doesn't make it so.

Absolutely true.. It may be the best minigame in RS. It's not a skill. All of the attributes you listed are applicable to a good minigame. It's a nice piece of content (except for all the design flaws) but it's not a skill because it doesn't fit the requirements, period. As others have pointed out, it feels like a separate game entirely, and that's because it basically is. Some of the many design flaws (can't be bothered to list all of them): 1. Rewards are unreasonably difficult to obtain. You can get to level 50 without getting anything at all for your effort. 2. Very slow leveling. 3. Mismatches between reward requirements and minimum levels to get them. 4. Inability to suspend play as a solo player. 5. Too-rare instances of monsters dropping high quality items as a solo player. 6. Double-counting of XP modifiers. 7. Extremely, unnecessarily confusing "prestige" system. 8. Silly 30 second "countdown" after the end of every level that can't be turned off. 9. Guide mode forced on for lower complexity levels. 10. Complete uselessness of lower complexity levels due to severe XP penalties. 11. Forced replay of lower level content. 12. Poor handling of multiplayer games where a player leaves mid dungeon. 13. Insufficient number of bound items. 14. Horrible integration into the rest of RS. 15. Laughably unfair "partial XP" rewards for not completing a dungeon -- even if the boss has been killed. PS All the sniping flamers can kiss my donkey.

If you did floor 17 before you had the level to access floor 18, you have to do 17 again to unlock 18. Yes, it's idiotic, but the list of design elements in this "skill" meeting that description is very long.

4 years after the release of Construction and there are only about 6000 people who are even halfway to 99. (and that skill is fast) It is clear to me that construction is also poorly accepted and is a fail skill. I agree, it *is* a poor skill. It is stupidly tedious to train, very expensive, and has basically no useful function for most players once they build a gilded altar. Of course it was intended for a specific purpose, which was to be a money sink and place for rich players to "show off". I don't think that's a particularly good model to aim for in subsequent skills. Try comparing it to Hunter or Summoning (now that the latter has been fixed, following a two month informal beta test.) Even there the comparison isn't perfect of course. But this is a completely free skill and I do believe it is not very popular because it is slow, confusing, poorly explained and very poor when it comes to rewards. I probably have 15 hours in this skill so far and NO rewards to show for it. Very dumb design.

Among the many glaring flaws with this minigame/skill is double-counting of XP modifiers. You get a 'bonus' for doing extra rooms, but if you don't do them you lose not just that bonus but your base XP gets slaughtered. Guide mode is completely useless because if you only do the minimum you get horrible XP. Evidence of how slow and how poorly accepted this thing is can be seen clearly in the hiscores list: a full week after release and fewer than 7,000 people even have 100k XP in it.

I did a bit of experimenting with this exact idea and it is NOT worth doing complexity level 1 even at the lower numbered level. The penalties are too severe relative to the time savings.

You don't... kill 3, block a tunnel, repeat. That's actually the easiest "boss scenario" I've encountered so far. PS A good indication of how unpopular this "skill" is can be found by monitoring one's rank in the hiscores. I can play for an hour, then log off for 10 or 15, and I'm higher in the ranks than when I last refreshed the hiscores list. A lot of people are just giving up on this after getting to a certain level.

I think the name itself is a pretty good clue: skill is a synonym of ability. A skill should be something you train to gain abilities or resources that are part of the game. This doesn't qualify. First, they try to break it. All software engineers understand this, except apparently the ones at Jagex. They are always "surprised" when gamers use their content in ways they didn't expect, even though experienced players never are surprised at what comes out. That's pretty indicative. Second, they want a reasonable balance of effort and reward, and Jagex doesn't seem to get this at all. So we end up with losable items that require 4,000,000 XP to get, the specials on certain Barrows sets that have been obsolete for years and never get fixed, and of course, penance tridents.

At level 50 Summoning, I had achieved abilities in a SKILL that helped me doing nearly everything in RS. What have I achieved at level 50 of this mess? Some guy says I have tokens. Hardly comparable. The emperor has no clothes. This is not a skill, it's a minigame, and a poorly designed and tested one at that. That equipment will have little impact on the game. Based on that criterion, Barrows is more of a skill than this POS. At least after spending 20 hours at the Barrows, I have something to show for it. And maybe if Jagex actually had a clue how people play their game, they might be able to release a major piece of content that doesn't have to be redesigned.

When the best thing most people can find to say about a so-called "skill" is that they get lots of XP in *other* skills -- which actually have some use in the real game -- you know something is pretty seriously wrong.

Whatever it is, it needs to be completely redesigned.

There's not much that anyone is going to figure out that is going to appreciably speed up this thing. For all the talk about how "different" this is, it's really the same thing over and over, and there's only one way to train it. If you consider it faster to be getting more XP per floor, but advancing slower in levels in the skill, then it's faster. I think if it takes longer to level up as you increase in level, it's getting slower. And it was pretty damned slow to begin with.

That's as to be expected...so I'm not sure your point here. I think it's almost common sense that you'll gain less levels per floor as you climb the level ladder. The point is exactly what I said in my first post: it's slow at the beginning and it doesn't get appreciably faster. A skill where you get well under 10k XP/hr at level 30 is slow. It's easy to find oneself wasting 5 or 10 minutes on a single puzzle room sometimes. I just had one I had to quit after 10 minutes because the puzzle was unsolvable.

I'm over level 30. It is getting faster in terms of XP/hr, but slower in terms of levels gained per floor.

Everyone keeps saying this, but it's BS. This is just a very slow skill.

The fact that you get XP in other skills is, for me at least, not a big attraction. The whole idea of a new skill should have been something that added a new interesting dimension to all of RuneScape. If I wanted to train those other skills, I would train them or play a... minigame. Most of the XP I am getting is in combat, and there are many players who really don't need it. The last skill already required getting tons of combat XP to train it.

People keep saying the "skill" goes faster as you level up, and it keeps going slower. 3k per hour or so at level 35 is kinda ridiculous, folks. The "skill" is a nice piece of content being wasted due to inept implementation by developers who clearly have no idea how players actually play and what they want. Imagine how good this could have been if Jagex would stop thinking they don't need input from players and would do what every other software company does: create a beta program.

This, of course, is a lie, and not even a very clever one at that. By insisting that fansites remove competitor ads, you are controlling what they do. Even if you don't directly try to control content, you are indirectly controlling and influencing these sites by imposing restrictions on them and threatening to remove your goodies from them if they don't do what you demand. It would be nifty if those who keep throwing this "conspiracy" strawman around would actually learn what the word means. By definition, it refers to multiple parties working together for a particular end, usually in secret. That has nothing to do with this situation and never did. This situation is not a conspiracy, it is just one party, Jagex, imposing its will on fansites. Hohbein, every post of yours sounds like it came from a government bureaucrat: pleasant and flowery in demeanor, but ultimately conveying nothing aside from "this is our policy and we won't change it". And that policy boils down to money. Jagex, a company that made $27,000,000 last year, can't handle the possibility of fansites making a few dollars off advertising other gaming sites. Most of these fansites make VERY little money, especially considering the amount of time it takes to run them. I know that I personally could make more flipping burgers for 5 hours a week than I've made off the 50+ hours a week I've devoted to my own site over the last six months. These fansites are in it for the love of it, and they just need a little money to pay the bills and compensate them for a fraction of their time. And these fansites have helped build RS into what it is now, and in that regard have made money for Jagex. And the company responds by telling them they will be iced out if they don't remove ads for other companies, which in most cases means they get even less of the pittance they get now? Stop pretending that what you are asking is reasonable. It is not. And stop pretending that there is some noble rationale for why you are excluding sites based on gaming ads. There IS no noble reason for it. The reason is GREED.

Yep, it does. Credit where credit is due. ;)