Armadyllo

Technically, the only reason pures work is that Jagex balanced their combat system badly in the beginning. In a game where players are encouraged to train every skill as high as possible, with no disadvantages for having higher levels in a skill, it's simply poor design for players to get a benefit by deliberately training a character without certain skills. For the players who'd worked out the best stat-distribution for Wilderness PKing, or for one-on-one duelling, or whatever, it's pretty galling that Jagex has just changed the game so that pures don't get the same benefits. That's the kind of change that a designer might decide not to make to a well-established game out of respect to customers who preferred it the old way. But, frankly, pures should never have worked in a well-balanced game, and it's interesting that Jagex wasn't afraid to change it. This is just a guess, but I'd imagine Summoning isn't going to be pure-friendly either.

I'm very much hoping that the worst is well behind us now, and Jagex can go back to producing nice updates.

Thanks, guys, I'm glad y'all liked it. Yeah, sorry. I'll try to tone it down next time. :)

The game isn't becoming risk-free. As far as the Wilderness is concerned, there seem to be a lot of people arguing that Jagex has gone and made the revenants far too much of a risk. Boss fights are potentially far more dangerous now that your friends can't pick up anything you drop when you die. (Gravestones aren't much use when you die to lag.) The main risks they've removed - including item scamming, luring, pking in unexpected places, etc. - are risks created by other players, not risks created/controlled by Jagex. Emergent gameplay is sometimes a great way of getting a fun & risky activity (such as almost any team activity in the old Wilderness), but sometimes the emergent behavior really isn't worth having. Such as scamming, stealing an account to transfer the items off it, all the tricks that involve getting a newbie into a dangerous area to kill them, etc. If Jagex wants to get rid of all those risks, I really don't mind. It's true that RuneScape is getting dumbed down, but that's not necessarily anything to do with the RWT updates. The dumbing down, in my view, is shown because you can't go into a dangerous place these days without having to click through a box telling you that it might be dangerous! I don't think this is just due to kids or young players. This would be caused by players - of any age - who think they just lost their stuff "unfairly". They might have a legitimate reason for thinking that, or they might just be a whinger.

And yet you still seem to need a skull to get your POH crest changed to the skull.

Jagex can, effectively, choose: 1. Make the game internationally popular, giving fun to millions. Requires hundreds of staff (preferably more Support staff than they've actually got) and lots of management to keep everything running smoothly. This makes Jagex rich too, but that's a good thing because it can fund more servers, more developers, more bandwidth. Unfortunately, a company of ~400 people is going to have far more trouble with its internal communications than a start-up company where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Thus you get announcements from a website team that don't match what the programmers did. (There was a lovely thread about this.) Also you get updates where no-one seems to have had the gumption to see if it worked first; that's going to happen more often when you've got people assuming it's someone else's job to fix. 2. Keep the game small so that it can be run by a tiny staff without any communication gaffs. Everyone would know everyone else, and instructions could be passed down from the top of the hierarchy to the newest staff without needing to be filtered through layers of procedure and protocol. Requires the game to be so unpopular that only a handful of people ever plays it. I really don't believe it's possible to scale a company from 3 lads programming in their mom's kitchen to ~400 hired minions without the company losing its up-close-and-personal face. Sure, it'd be more cosy for the select few players if RuneScape and Jagex were still small, but it'd be a rather selfish attitude! Jagex could probably do better than they have done, though, especially over the communication of the RWT updates. The over-hyped cheerfulness of the BTS documents and update announcements is also getting on my nerves.

Hmmm. We've just seen Jagex do a huge sweeping change that affects almost every aspect of the game in some way, and it's been mighty unpopular. If they did what's been suggested above, it'd be an even bigger sweeping change, and I really don't think it'd be much more popular. The game might suddenly become the cleverest MMORPG on the market, but it wouldn't be RuneScape any more. For that sort of thing, they'd do better to create a brand new game. Which they are doing, although my expectations for it aren't so high.

I'm not seeing the big fuss about Jagex failing to block unbalanced trades first try. It's funny. Besides, it's not the first time they did an update without anything happening; for the Warriors' Guild update, everyone was stood on a hill outside Burthorpe shouting "Where is it?" until Jagex rebooted the servers again. I love these little moments. Sure it'd be nice if they'd not mess up an update, but if they're going to do an update that doesn't work, at least it was the update that most people didn't want in the first place. Agreed, it'd be nice if they'd use that list of price corrections and do something with it. That sort of thing does annoy me.

Mmmhmm. Jagex must really hate you if they've deliberately stolen their own server just to make you depressed. Or maybe they forgot what order the numbers come in.

I guess it's inevitable that if you put ~150 servers online, there's going to be one or two offline for maintenance at any moment. With the servers scattered all over the world, getting them fixed quickly sounds difficult.

It's not just about the game, it's about the online community that grows up around the game. For some people the community ends up being the most fun bit of the whole RuneScape experience. There seem to be plenty of people who don't want to spend time clicking around the game, but who are very happy to chat about it and see how it's changing. That's a perfectly valid way to spend one's spare time, although I don't think it'd appeal to me personally. I'm sure there'll have been people who really succeeded in quitting over the last month :D

Everyone quickly finish giving out those Christmas presents!

Supposing Jagex made the revenants weaker on f2p. Wouldn't that just encourage members to hop to f2p worlds to walk through the Wilderness? And, if so, would that be a problem?

Maybe this is Jagex's way of trying to cut down on people posting "I got muted" rants on their forums.

If players' combat levels go up to 138, but revenants only go up to 126, that'll mean that a maxed player can never be attacked by a revenant if they're below level 12 Wilderness. That'd make the Abyss completely safe, possibly the Air Obelisk too. Not really a great idea. So what kind of creature might it be?

It doesn't sound any easier to trade in items than in gp. The Grand Exchange is automatically shifting the prices of the items up and down every day, so we'd need to know the current price of the item and ensure we'd got the right number of it to trade for whatever it was we wanted... Nah, I think I'll stick to cash for most of my trading needs.

Farming and Slayer seem to have taken them quite a while, even though they're nowhere near as long as Summoning. Farming's quite clever, but generally unpopular. Slayer is surprisingly popular considering that it consists almost entirely of repetitive tasks. I wouldn't describe them as rubbish, but I wouldn't spend long complimenting them either.

Given the amount of upheaval the game's gone through already, Jagex should be careful about doing anything that's a radical departure from what they've installed already. RuneScape looks set to survive for a good long time as new people come in to replace the ones who've just quit, but it'd stir up more and more resentment over and over again if Jagex kept on changing huge aspects of the game in controversial ways. If they're going to wipe RWT properly, they're not going to be replacing the Wilderness as we knew it, except in some crippled form that's not much better than BH. Whereas they might be able to make BH better, in time.

Plus they'd start needing skill requirements of all sorts of skills once they've got beyond the beginner quests. Heh, people have often asked for more rewards from quests. Now we get to unlock something we had a couple of weeks ago!

Lol. As I understand it, we'll still be able to buy/sell 1k single law runes. The restriction is that we'll only be able to do it a few times in 15 minutes. Realistically, I wasn't selling them that fast before the update.

If the RWTs do find a loophole, it's a pretty safe bet that Jagex will plug the hole pretty quickly. After what they did this week, we know they're not afraid of making changes! The RWTs aren't going to be able to keep the loopholes secret either. They'll have to tell their customers how to collect the items, and they'll have no way of knowing whether the person buying the gold is really an "undercover" Jagex worker. Plus the legitimate players are usually pretty good about reporting bugs.

I suppose they could write to the gold-sellers and say "Please stop running your gold-selling business," but that's not very likely to work. Beyond that, they'd have to prove that the gold-seller was breaking some law, which is tricky given that courts aren't generally interested in enforcing the rules of online games. Then, even if they somehow won the case, they'd have to hope that the website's hosting company and the gold-seller - who might be in a different country - would respect the decision of the court.

We know that Jagex bans bots, albeit slowly. The problem has always been that the botters kept coming back on new accounts, transferring the wealth to other accounts so that they didn't lose anything when their botted accounts were banned. Jagex would need to ban them before they could transfer their wealth, and they couldn't do it fast enough. Now that the botters can't pass the items to other accounts, Jagex can take their sweet time banning the accounts, and the items will be lost along with the XP when they do it. How many people would pay real cash for an account that might have been botted for a week, knowing that it's had a dodgy history that might lead to it being banned at any moment? It's not a safe deal.

If Jagex thought the RWT was going to kill the game ever, they'd be criminally irresponsible to ignore the problem. Instead they've moved heaven and earth to solve it. They spoke briefly in their developer diary about credit card fraud; we can see reasons why this sort of thing would affect RuneScape far worse than other games, since players can pay Jagex directly for RuneScape membership rather than buying a boxed product from a third-party shop as for other big games. Perhaps the credit card thing is a genuinely game-threatening problem, even though we'll never see the figures ourselves. Jagex's newsposts can be summarized as follows: We've had to remove loads of popular features because of RWT, but we've tried to replace some of what we took away by releasing Bounty Hunter, Clan Wars, Assist and Lootshare. Have some more bankspace, you like bankspace. That's not a sign of Jagex being blinded by the awesomeness of the new features. They've seen very clearly that they're taking away stuff that people love, and they're trying to make it up by giving us new features that replace some of the gameplay mechanics. Which suggests that they're between the proverbial Rock and Hard Place, with pride preventing them from putting it so bluntly. Is it good enough? Many are saying no, but there are a significant number of people saying they're willing to give it a try. There are also people out there analyzing the effect this stuff is going to have on the game's economy, preparing to turn a fat profit! I wish them luck with that.

Would that be a pking section where players drop items for the pkers to pick up? If so, it'd break the whole point of removing unbalanced transfer of wealth between accounts, so the whole update would be for nothing. If players wouldn't drop anything, it'd be pking for no rewards, which isn't going to be so satisfying as the old system. If they're going to make such drastic changes to the game, leading to so many people posting about quitting, we should at least hope like heck that it works!