jettrider

Source Well there you have it. It'll take time to get people to stop bragging about solving puzzles quickly (with the help of a guide). It's much harder to randomize a puzzle with a turn limit - like this one - without creating unsolvable positions; for something like the 9-square slider in Nomad's Requiem, though, I would like to see it scrambled by having the computer execute a set number of moves randomly. A reverse scramble can't create an unsolvable position and it ensures a generally equal set of difficulty the more moves the computer makes. I understand the prioritizing that's going on - designing the puzzle as the main element of a small low level quest and taking out weeks of QA - but I'm hoping that when a true Grandmaster quest rolls around, the puzzle is created from the beginning with the purpose of randomization. If you think about it, there are really three ways of completing a quest: 1. Getting out a guide and following it through step by step. 2. Looking at general tips, required items (so you don't have to run around while doing the quest), and then figure out how to complete each step on your own. In the case of a puzzle, you get help understanding the concept of the puzzle but do the solving on your own. 3. You do not look at anything and just play through the quest by yourself. Jagex cannot stop people from using the second method, but they can increase the prestige of the quest cape by making sure that you can't use a "Puzzles for Dummies" guide. I have a couple friends who still had no idea how the puzzle worked after the quest was over, as all they did was watch a video and mimicked what the other character did. For a small-scale quest like EW3 that's okay, but not when designing bigger puzzles. I actually had to look up Within the Light to remember the puzzle. I'm assuming it's the one where you redirect light to the appropriate wall? I barely remember doing that one - I guess I got lucky, but I just remember taking each pillar one step at a time and rotating it in the right direction. It's not really a puzzle when every plausible solution works.

From the first article - I would agree that, for those using guides, the EW3 puzzle may have been harder than the Temple of Light. However, without any aid whatsoever, I have to say that understanding how to manipulate the light beams is much harder than grasping the mechanics of this sliding puzzle. It helps to think of it not as a 3d slider but as a slider with two unique pieces that must be present in specific places as part of the final solution. Actually, since other sliders have all unique pieces, I'd say the difficulty comes not from the third dimension but from the differences from regular sliders (method of moving pieces, move counter, obstacles). To bring the puzzle part of the prestige to the Quest Cape, Jagex has to create puzzles like these two where the starting position is randomized. A player therefore has no way to follow a step by step guide but must understand the workings of the puzzle. That ups the difficulty for a lot of the people that stormveritas mocks while keeping the same level of difficulty for those who already struggle without guides.

It is manipulators taking advantage of the broken system. If people didn't hoard items, we really wouldn't ever hit many problems. I own a Divine, I do not want to sell it, I use it to monster hunt and make money. Am I a hoarder? Just because the price on the GE is too low to convince any of the Divine owners to even remotely think about seling their shields on the GE does not mean that everyone who has more money than you is out to get you. If you want to blame anyone, blame Jagex for placing such irrational restrictions to trading. He's talking about people buying as many of one rare as possible to keep high street prices on it, allowing them to trade them out in small chunks for enormous profits on rising items and even more desirable rares. Not surprising, considering how the money saved in those rares cannot be converted into gold coins, and how even if it could, it would not fit in one stack. People who own 1-2 divine/elysian spirit shields are nowhere close to the problem. In fact, I salute you for owning the item I most desire to have. The problem is in items that cannot be earned from drops or made from skills. People who buy rares for personal use are not to blame either. The problem lies in those who buy these items - especially unwearable ones - for the sole purpose of creating an artificial market. The inadequate GE legitimizes this artificial market and causes huge price rises in inaccessible items instead of useful rises in items that can be created or earned through drops. If more people stored money in skill-based and drop items, it would give new life to activities that produce those items and move the game forward instead of sideways into an artificial market not founded in any game content.

Well, judging from what we have so far: Elemental Workshop I - 20 mining, 20 smithing, 20 crafting This is a very quick quest, all you have to do is click on the machines to fix them. No puzzles, level 20 requirements. Elemental Workshop II - 20 magic, 30 smithing This has one tiny pipe-matching puzzle, the rest is once again a "retrieve and click to fix" type of quest. Elemental Workshop III - 20 mining, 33 smithing, 33 defence This quest is entirely based around one puzzle, which is luckily harder than the single puzzle the series has produced so far (the pipe matching). Unfortunately, it's only about on par with a regular 5x5 slider because you get unlimited moves to solve the complicated parts and there are multiple ways to achieve every solution instead of having a set model to work with. It is nowhere near the difficulty of the Temple of Light, an actual 3d puzzle. The reason it seems so hard is that the controls are maddeningly slow, making it seem like a much longer puzzle. So, following the trend, EW4 should have a 40-50 smithing requirement and produce a slider-difficulty puzzle combined with a retrieve and fix quest. Hopefully EW5 will start to see a smithing requirement near 60 and will surpass the Temple of Light as the hardest puzzle in 'scape. EW6 should have both the smithing level and puzzle difficulty required to unlock the highest rune altar in the game. Of course they'll probably release it with a 10 minute puzzle-less quest with level 40 requirements just to spite this, but I for one would like to see it appropriately rewarding and rigorously accessed when they finally do release it.

It isn't terribly difficult to get into the rares market. Cash helps a lot though, but you need it anyway to be able to afford the price of rares with the inflated value of coins. You can create things that are rare on the street and are intermediaries to the big rares (unfinished wergali/torstol potions, onyx gems, royal crowns). It takes cash, patience, time, and luck (in the case of crowns), but it's possible to create enough of these items so that your cash stack can access a rare.

Yeah, as for the GE article. The santa dip this week was enough to push me out of the rares market for good and I sold all my santa hats just after the dip was over. The rares market is a creative and profitable way for players beyond the cash cap to keep making money at the same rate, but it is a full time activity. You need capital and constant alertness. I made a nice profit off my santa hats but it was time to sell them. I can make more by solo merchanting with the money I earned than by having them passively rise in the GE, and I prefer that my economic future not be decided by a handful of players I have no connection to.

"with no help from any other players!" Also quests such as Cook's Assistant have been changed to make them longer and have untradable items which need to be collected. What prevents you from collecting the items beforehand *by yourself* and then going to the actual quest start point? For Doric's quest, you can mine the ores *yourself* then go to him and complete the quest in 2-3 game ticks. For Witch's Potion, you need to start the quest, kill a rat and get its tail, then run back. You can gather the other items by yourself beforehand. This is still faster than The Blood Pact. The description was left ambiguous so you really didn't set the ground requirement that "shortest quest" meant total preparation time. If you think of special cases when you're writing for such a wide audience, include them! You want to spell out exactly what the fact is. Why is this important? The Blood Pact required a lot more coding than Doric's Quest or Witch's Potion. Your little fact on the times page influences thousands of peoples' opinions. It should be absolutely clear what the fact is - ambiguity creates incorrect viewpoints. We like to deride these smaller updates but are never reminded of some of the lowest level, smallest content quests we have.

The DYK was actually wrong. A few of the gathering quests such as Doric's Quest, Cook's Assistant, and Witch's Potion can be completed within a few game ticks.

Well I agree, fun should be the first priority, but there are efficient ways to train every skill, even the very slowest one. Efficiency isn't really about the fastest total experience, unless of course your only goal is total experience. In the absence of a system documenting what a player's previous teammates thought of him or her, leaders have to make snap judgments whether or not to accept players. Really, only two factors come into play: speech and combat level. Have you said anything intelligent or something completely stupid? Are you a player moderator (can be both a blessing and a curse)? Have you been teammates before? And the level aspect: do you have a combat level that's considered high? Generalizations are always a bad way of judging individuals, but for forming a team for a 45-60 minute raid, they're certainly better than nothing. In RuneScape, the high level/low level stereotype is (sadly) correct a majority of the time. Hey, you're having fun. More power to you. You have the right to play the game however you want, but I'd like to point out a couple things. First, it's clear that you have a different goal for what you want to accomplish in the dungeon from the others. There is one player who really wants experience and there are three players putting up with a militant leader for the good of the team and for their own experience. You clearly aren't going to change how these people think or relieve their stress like it relieves yours. There's always a way to lighten up the situation and try to talk to your leader rather than immediately ruining their day. There's a way to both have fun and get good experience at the same time and that's by not blowing up at the first sign of trouble. Second, you mentioned that your current account is low leveled and that you know you acted like you were a kid. Just be aware of how that confirms the stereotype you complained about earlier. Your actions are only confirming in these players' minds that dealing with low levels or kids (which, for all they know, you are) is a terrible idea. Again, you're only exacerbating the problem and making people more uptight for the future instead of lightening the mood. While it's well within your right to do that, I'd really like to see the mechanics of large dungeons be changed to the point where it is possible to complete an emote room or lever puzzle even after you kick someone (ie have 4 people). Even with one player sabotaging the team, the experience rates are far greater than what you would be able to solo. The only exception is when a lever puzzle or emote room is IN THE BOSS'S PATH, which would be even rarer halfway through the dungeon (if at the start you could simply reset without losing time), and these circumstances only slightly cut into the humongous exp difference. It would be silly for me to argue more over experience rates except to once again point out that teaming is much faster experience even if done inefficiently. Feel free to train however you want, but be aware that it is always worth it to form some sort of team for at least floors 30-35.

There is no written rule about how a skill should best be trained, and jagex obviously wanted this skill to be best trained in a team, and as we can see from the complaints, they succeeded in doing so. It's not solo or gtfo, it's team, solo or gtfo, you make your choice. If solo xp was was increased by a 150% multiplier the xp differance at the top end would get nearer to 5k an hour meaning that it'd be stupid to even consider teaming, thus killing the design of the skill. I'm genuinly baffled by the critisism to the teamingly concentration of the skill, after all it's just one skill and is very interesting for me to train a skill in this way. Atleast they are doing something to get all you loners off afking at a tangling vine to work together for the sake of better efficency. Better efficiency. Let's talk about that. You have mentioned that your (semi-believable) soloing rates are for players with high efficiency and that teams are horribly inefficient. This is the crux of the problem. This skill rewards players for being INEFFICIENT whereas the exact opposite is true of every other skill. Playing large dungeons in 5 man teams for the majority of your time spent dungeoneering forces you to ally yourself to quite a few morons, even among the higher levels gathered in world 117. Yet playing in a team and completing a dungeon at all - even if it takes you twice as long or more as an efficient team - guarantees you higher rates than the fastest possible rates soloing. There is nothing wrong with a skill that rewards team efficiency more than solo efficiency. There is something wrong with a skill that rewards team inefficiency over solo efficiency. The effects are not as obvious right now because the skill is still relatively new, and they will forever be dulled because - as you mentioned - dungeoneering is only one skill. I can wait to train it only during peak hours when finding a team is easy. It's very unpleasant however, and it's an absolute joke to say that soloing this skill the whole time as a training method accomplishes anything exp-wise. "Significant" but not "dramatic". I can't even begin to guess as to what that means. :) I've already mentioned enough figures that i have myself tested. 30k an hour pure soloing, 40k an hour soloing 1-29, large dungeons 30-35, 35k an hour on an average team(5:5 small 1-24, 5:5 large 25-35), 50-55k an hour on a very good team(1-11 5:3 12-27 5:5 small 28-35 5:5 large, same team trourought the floors). This is the problem right here. First, 30k experience soloing the whole way is a bloated rate. It's rounding up from the maximum numbers that you threw out here, probably rounded up themselves. Second, I don't think anyone is questioning that soloing the low floors - whether on complexity 6 or rushing them - is a legitimate strategy. The problem arises when you try to use experience rates from doing floors 30-35 large (which should be the majority of your time spent training no matter what solo method you use) as an argument for being able to solo the skill. Under that scenario, soloing is the minority. Third, the 35k hour on an average team is a made-up, rounded down number. You can't compare the best possible soloing rates to the average (which you have slashed about 10k/hour off of) as your argument. It's not opinion on whether or not teaming is a good or bad thing. It's that the skill rewards players for teaming even if they display no teamwork whatsoever. We have teams that are all over the place, arguing with each other, being inefficient or inconsiderate; yet these teams are getting much higher experience rates ("significant," to quote you) than the most efficient of soloers. Just as a player should be rewarded with faster experience for playing efficiently, a team should be rewarded for playing more efficiently than five individual players could alone. But if they play incredibly inefficiently, acting as individuals, then they should get the same experience as a solo player could.

Please, do not post subjective misinformed information as facts... runecrafting is one of the newer skills of runescape and was released a little more then 6 years ago. I'm sure there are others misfireing in there but i couldn't have been bothered to read it that thoroughly. What concerns soul runecrafting....why? Why is it important? there is nothing really missing from the runecrafting skill than an unused novelty altar seen once in a lifetime during a miserable quest? what ever quest it is released with, it's bound to have low requirements and be easy, and not have any good rewards. I meant one of the oldest RS2 skills (in fact THE oldest), and I was going by the beta (2003). You are correct in saying it's "little more than 6 years", it's about 6 and a half I think. I usually don't count months and tend to round quite overzealously (7 = 10). So it's not a misprint, just me rounding too much. :) I guess I'll change it. And it's important because it's something that is guaranteed to be released but has gone so for many years. Just a pet peeve of mine, and I think it's fun to speculate about what will happen in the future. Many others also enjoy speculation. If you think soul runecrafting is useless, you won't hear any disagreement from me; I just think it's interesting and I always like things to be complete, regardless of how novelty they may be. I'm sorry for being so blunt about it, but as many people know, people do judge a book by it's cover, and the first statement in an article very commonly decides if you are or not going to read it, and as it was, it just wasn't right. rs2 realease was 29. march 2004, so it's as near as makes no differance 6 years 2 months from today. The 10 year statement is poor because even runescape itself isn't that old, and rc was the 19th(or even alot later if you count the failed skills) skill to be released. Slayer and Farming are good skills. The rest are stupid. Then again, as a skill itself, slayer is pretty dumb; I'd never implement it in my own game. I'd definitely have monsters that you'd need special abilities to kill, but I wouldn't have a skill for it, just like I wouldn't have an damn UNDERGROUND EXPLORING skill (you know, the 25th one they just released)? Hunter's also a good skill idea, RuneScape's version sucks. And construction should have been called house-making. It's too limited. Hmm, I'm getting kind of off-topic though. By failed skills he meant the ones that were deleted, like Tailoring and EvilMagic/GoodMagic, not skills that came AFTER runecrafting. The elemental workshop series, from what I can tell, has a very long-term goal in mind. The requirements and difficulty levels are ramping up at a very slow pace. I would say that maybe the fifth or sixth installment will have high enough requirements and finally contain a difficult puzzle to release the altar, if it IS being released with the EW series. Then again, the soul rune has neither the price nor the prestige it had years ago.

Nonstop concentrating at Barbarian Advanced Course is 72k/hour Faster exp with penance horn but whether it's worth it to get it is entirely up to your BA team.

If you can get double the experience by spending 20-25% of your time solo rushing the first 29 floors on complexity 1, then why not make the trade? I find soloing in any kind much better than team dungeons unless I'm with a group of people that I know. There really are just too many incompatible strategies and incompatible personalities for large dungeons to work ALL the time. Plus I'd prefer not to play for long periods of time more than necessary.

It would be a good FM update, but I think these fires should require two new types of logs that would add content to woodcutting, monsterhunting, some sort of minigame, or possibly all three. For example, boss monsters could drop these on occasion, or new bosses would have respawning trees with high woodcutting requirements in their lairs. But as it is, adding it as just another use for magic logs doesn't quite justify the update.

Well, to put it more bluntly, why did you examine Kuradal 6 times to clear the chatbox?

That really sucks. Hopefully it's a one-time deal, I'd hate to have do deal with such a bad task on a regular basis even though I opt not to get them >_>

I don't think this problem needs to be solved. There are PLENTY of things you can do with spare cash and save it in (example: spirit shards, dragon equipment whose GE price is near its alch price). Carrying piles is an annoyance, but just that. The current rares market doesn't really hurt Jagex and it helps a lot of players. It creates an artificial market to allow players to buy and sell for a profit outside of the GE, which allows players to make money through trading on a freer system. This of course allows RWT, but I guess the volume of people buying above-market items for trade price is so low that Jagex doesn't care.

But the floors will stop at 60. And I'm not so sure that temporary boosts allow you to access higher floors.

First article: I can totally relate to leaving the dailies to train dungeoneering, heh :P I think the overview of the rewards was decently done, if not perfectly. I do have to say though that I really hope this isn't the last skill we get for a while. It took Jagex much longer to make a 30 minute quest (Fairy Tale Part 3) than to make something of this proportion; if part 2 comes out relatively soon, this will be doubly true. Hopefully they get out something even more epic - I, for one, trust that they can. And of course, we must wait for batch 2 to see if they really do pull out some of the more prominent figures in the storyline as bosses. Too early to tell which path they are taking. I did find one error though: Floor 60 would be accessible at level 119 dungeoneering, following the current trend.

Every post on the pmod forums is leaked within minutes of posting it. How would beta testing be any different? Besides, items used in a release are already mysteriously bought out the days before the release, and this would only make that problem worse. What they need to do is hire about three dozen people part-time before a big release (skill, minigame, GrandMaster Quest) and have their entire job be to play as a real player would. The full time QA team can still sort out all the graphical and minor glitches, but now people would actually care about how enjoyable and playable the content is. The perfect example is Mobilizing Armies. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone at Jagex HQ that they should check whether the scenarios were working or not - the last three were locked for half the first day or longer. Apparently it didn't occur to them that the best way to win was to do nothing. Apparently it didn't occur to them to that the fastest way to earn ranks was to kill yourself. These are all things that a competitive gamer would find within their first 3-4 times through. Yes, these are preventable. But not through the RS community. That would be an absolute disaster due to information leaking and the huge effects every update has on the market. I don't think Jagex should be spending their time in court trying to point out hundreds of NDA breaches using IRC logs as evidence.

It's mainly for two reasons: Every skill released nowadays is released in 2-3 parts. This means that people have legitimate complaints about why Dungeoneering can only be trained in one place, because Jagex hasn't deigned to tell us what part 2 entails. How can we accurately form an opinion about something knowing only 30-40% of the content? Dungeoneering and Farming were released without tutorials and are possibly even more confusing than Summoning. For farming, Jagex hyped up the collection of seeds pre-release, then created a skill that relied on time between patches instead of powering through your seeds in rows. Players were caught with dozens of thousands of seeds that would take years to grow. Hunter was a simple enough skill released in one part, and the KB did an adequate job of describing the basics. Dungeoneering was released with no tutorial and no help system, and the introduction article on the KB was a labyrinth of intricacies. This thing was a nightmare to understand in its first week. Summoning was relatively straightforward, but it got a QUEST to explain to you how to make pouches. This introduced 11 new item names in many categories (weaponry, armor, herbs, hides, cloth, etc), the entire prestige system was confusing, the Smuggler gave no hints of the tactics you could use to defeat bosses, and the KB was no help. People not understanding the content + people not having enough content to judge on + initial huge bugs and inaccuracies due to Jagex "developing in a vacuum" = "fail" for the first month until the fastest experience rates are found and part 2 is released.

Second article missed the solo disconnect/need to go issue, probably the biggest concern for Dungeoneering being a skill. It was also written too soon. It showed, too - the article misstated a lot of facts and intricacies that would be common knowledge a couple weeks from now. It did hit one point right though. Let's not judge the skill until Dungeoneering 2 comes out.

Guide Mode glitch: very minimal in terms of how disruptive it is to skill training. Low developer priority. Solo disconnection: they don't have the technical capabilities yet. This is highest priority. RC: it's very hard to balance rune prices, costs, and essence prices. The current low experience rate is a temporary solution until they can balance it longterm. Re-locking doors: Once again, very low priority Skill doors: it's a built-in annoyance, it showcases p2p features to f2p and entices them to subscribe. Over 100 level requirements are passable, you just need to figure out how. Capped f2p experience: lower level f2pers are already capped by their inability to kill things quickly. Though I agree, increasing p2p exp was the way to go.

Thank you. I had been confused since the start, then I was starting to get it, then I thought I had it, and this confirmed that I got it right.

First article: bringing up old points to an old battlefield. If Jagex made every decision for the majority of its players, we would have quests with no requirements, free armor with no requirements, etc. Clearly we have at least a few mid-level quests (still waiting on a truly high level, difficult quest) already, so Jagex must make decisions for a subset of its players sooner or later. People that argue for elitism tend to be hypocritical at times, only wanting elite content for levels and requirements they already meet. In the end, I think, it all comes down to projects on an individual basis. Sometimes a particular developer wants to stick with a specific amount of content for a while, making it as good as possible (Ice Strykewyrms - though I do not agree with the changes). Other times a piece of content may have been evaluated behind the scenes and cannot be practically changed. The reasons for these changes may not be appropriate for the general RS population to learn, and Jagex loses a lot of face when they try to create fake reasons. In all, this is more about perception of Jagex and content-specific debate over the exact requirements (Strykewyrms). I agree, their PR has been absolutely terrible and polls have been neglected, but at the same time, you cannot know the exact reason why Jagex makes the final decisions that they do. The solutions presented are also bad. Behind the Scenes were an absolute nightmare (and I have played from long before Behind the Scenes were created) and they weren't even used for some updates (Construction) while over-hyping others (Mobilising Armies, Summoning through diaries). Updates are much more exciting when you read about them for the first time; they have unlimited potential until you have checked that you have unlocked everything new. Behind the Scenes tried to put every update on a gold platter, meaning I wrote 10 out of 12 months off before I even played through the content. Think how much you could hype The Blood Pact, making it sound like a high-level, interesting quest, with tough monsters and new equipment; now compare that to the 2 minute, 10 second, useless quest we got. Creating any kind of forum where players talk about future updates would amount to the same thing. We can't even keep the relatively useless information on the Pmod forums private, and I regularly see content from the high level forum without being a part of it, so leaks would reduce it to a public forum. The inherent problem is that Jagex can reveal very little about future updates, and posting vague questions to the public is equivalent to asking the average American to write a 20-page composition on an issue in a small foreign country - they cannot possibly know enough to have an educated decision. In the end it all comes back to Jagex, not the random ranting idiots comprising RuneScape's general population. Is it worth developer time to revisit content and implement potentially tricky and useless changes? It's why we have no changes to Trouble Brewing, Rat Pits, etc after all these years. The writer questions Jagex's inconsistency with content revisions, and rightfully so; who are we, the faceless, naive, and ignorant public? Second article: something like this is in the Times annoyingly often. We get it, some players want others to stop being addicted and to chill out while playing RuneScape. Others are competitive and enjoy different things, and actually are addicted. Point taken, why not just put it at the top of the site in big bold letters?