jettrider

I don't think we need to put developer time on this right now. It is broken to be able to kill monsters you can only kill on task - a precaution added on purpose - whenever you want. You can already block five tasks and cancel more than half of the others. If you want to kill monsters you don't need a task to kill THAT badly, then why not just kill them off task for the loss of the Slayer helm instead of the loss of 75 points worth of Slayer dart runes?

I know I'm bumping this, but: Now this isn't to say someone would do something like this, but that it has the possiblitiy to be abused just as the current system is. That's why such a system would only count legitimate offers, offers that have the potential to be filled (the buyer/seller is not on the 4 hour limit). Implementing the change I stated above would solve all abuse problems. And during the latest partyhat crash (many months ago, yes, but I remember), they were actually buyable for min in the GE because they were crashing. And for concerns about RWT (selling an item for med price then putting in offers for max): it already happens. RWT sell high street-priced items (easter eggs, pumpkins) for their trade price after the buyer pays them real money. Putting a system like this in place would not create a problem, it already exists and RuneScape runs fine even with it.

It's happened before with some high profile skillers, even one who got to 200m exp in a skill first and became a pmod after. Still, I doubt that the #1 overall player could last this long without suspicion (and I'm sure Jagex does look into the top players). I think Zarfot will eventually become first overall - he just murders all competitors with brute force efficiency. But I think that before he does that, Aasiwat will claim #1 for a short time.

The problem is not the frequency of large updates, but the low quality of larger updates. The game-changing updates last year were simply not replayable for fun, even though they offered important new training methods. New dungeons, skills, boss monsters make you want to come online; 2009's big updates just made training slightly easier once you got online in the first place. The gap between new skills is now at 2.5 years compared to a 6 month difference back in 2005. That's fine, as long as it is replayable. If you factor in the supposed smithing update, I ask you to look at the list of skills - almost every one has had some sort of new training method or skill revamp in the last year or so. A few haven't, but in general, we've got a good set of alternatives leading the way. Hopefully now we can focus on additional high-quality updates that change the way we play dramatically instead of changing the color of the potion we're grinding.

^ That is moving more into a discussion of gaming preferences and aesthetic features of a skill. I personally think that hunter was a bit basic on release but has since evolved into a sort of off-beat production skill that allows you to be self-sufficient for multiple skills. It is also one of the newer skills, meaning that update ideas are nowhere near exhausted. If Jagex hired more developers, new content would be more frequent but it would be of the same target group mix as we currently have and it would get less and less inter-connected. I feel that it's better to focus on the current distribution of types of updates, not necessarily target groups for these updates. If I had a choice between giving everyone in RuneScape a new 2-minute piece of content (Blood Pact) or a new training facility/new training options that everyone could use indefinitely when they reached higher levels (Living Rock Caverns, High Level herblore potions), I would go for the repeatable content every time, even if not everyone will be able to access it immediately.

I also wish they would stop doing D&Ds. The only D&D I participate in is Penguin Hunting, and only because the exp gained from doing it once a week is faster than the hourly exp gain in some skills. The rest are pointless (at least for my levels), and not even fun. Another thing I would like them to stop doing is making a bunch of smaller tweaks passed as updates just to fill weeks. We don't care if a week passes without an update, but wrapping up small arbitrary changes to the game as an update is insulting. Strykewyrms were very good but they did ruin it by making the fire cape worth almost nothing if you want to fight ice strykewyrms. Then add in the fact that jungle and desert strykewyrms are too slow to kill for exp alone when compared to other slayer monsters. Still, slayer updates are always welcome. I just think you need to lower your expectations a bit. The new skill is not coming out anytime soon, so don't get overexcited for it. These are mostly filler updates but it's all right since approximately 1 in 5 makes a significant difference in high level scaping style.

I concur with this, although I wouldn't make 3.5k overloads. I am personally making about 2700 overloads, and for the rest of the experience I am making extreme attack and extreme strength potions for use on slayer tasks. Overloads are very expensive and you shouldn't use them unless you benefit from doing so.

I don't mind that they're advertising on that screen, I mind that it's bad advertising. They could have used this update to make members look at another ad before logging in. Consider the percentage of people playing on members worlds to the number of people playing overall, I'd say that even those few seconds would bring in more cash than advertising membership to members. Besides, placing sponsored ads would remind members why they are members and perhaps give a slight incentive to remain a member.

I also dislike the membership buying ads for everyone. It doesn't apply to me and it's ineffective advertising. A much better strategy would be to place a sponsored ad on the general login page and then either a membership ad or no ads based on what version the user chooses. Or just store that information using cookies. None of this solves the problem that the new login screen doubled the amount of clicks it takes to start playing (no matter what Jagex says, it has). But it's good that they're trying to earn more money and (hopefully) hire more developers.

Never take an anagram made by a CM mod as a game-content clue. It's not a good joke at all. CM and Content have no communication and the anagram was made rapidly to mean "I can't tell you" - I assure you that there is no double meaning.

Not the most overwhelmingly argumentative article, but true nevertheless.

The problem is the type of compromise. In this issue the benefits from having a fire cape are so small that they are, in essence, completely removing the requirement. A better solution would have been to allow the firemaking skillcape as an alternative (so those who prefer not to do caves can do a more repetitive but same-cost option) or to allow Kuradel/Duradel to "sell" the ability to kill Ice Strykewyrms EVERY TASK - 2 points per strykewyrm every time you are assigned them.

Well I think we'll have to agree to disagree on how much effect this theory has on RuneScape - looking at Bandos armor's accessibility just makes it hard for me to believe the staff of light will go a completely different direction. Few people are discussing the times article because yours was so much more in depth and because there are more heated debates about the topic elsewhere.

Forgive me for commenting without serious training in economics, but I disagree with the idea that all this will affect accessibility. As waheera1 said, there will always be more of these items coming into the game. The fluctuations will be greater in magnitude (though reading the long-term graphs of valuable gear tends to be misleading because of general inflation), but at no point do these items, after the initial crash, become unbuyable for extended periods of time. During the times when everything is going up they are still buyable, albeit above the medium price. When they temporarily lose a little bit in price, everyone has a chance to buy one instantly for below the medium price. The only time that fluctuations affect accessibility is when they are bought out permanently (used as an alternate form of currency, which I discussed earlier) or temporarily. Temporary hoarding is unimportant for two reasons; first, higher end items (bandos armor, dragon claws) tend to be bought out less because many of the small constituents of clan chats are unable to afford more than a handful. Second, hundreds of pieces of equipment have been bought out temporarily at some point in their post-GE existence, but they always crash. Nothing important has been hoarded for an overly long period of time, because every significant piece of equipment has, like the staff of light, a renewable source. Once the item gets too high in price, the monsters that drop it tend to be killed more often by those who want a higher hourly profit rate, or a group in the clan (usually the leaders) want to cash in before telling everyone else they've sold the item.

Thanks for clearing that up (I think the Nomad part would be clearer if you mentioned the cape reward), and as for this part... At TSG (The Slayer's Guild) there was a seven page debate about the ice strykewyrm. The consensus seemed to be that the fire cape requirement was a fine addition and that its removal was a bad move. This is of course a biased group, a group that lamented the changes to extreme potions. However, it was encouraging that most of the high leveled slayers in the clan, most notably two leaders with millions of experience past 99, went back to the caves after many failures to try again instead of immediately complaining. I think that with the new prayers, combat items, potions, and the like, that 50% of 93+ slayers without the fire cape will drop. Remember, in recent history with trimmed skillcapes and then Soul Wars capes there has been increasingly little reason to spend time and effort obtaining a fire cape - now there is (was)! On to the merchanting part... Flipping items and temporarily hoarding items has no long term effect on the price of those items. The problem would be, as you mentioned, the use of these staves as an alternate currency as holiday items, mint cakes (in the past), blood talismans, mjolnirs, and divine/elysian spirit shields are currently being used. However, each of these items had something unique about them: Holiday items cannot be created. Mjolnirs can only ever be obtained once per paying member. Mint cakes could be obtained once by every member and then obtained only as a very rare reward from a forgotten minigame. Blood talismans can only be obtained once by every (high-level) member and then obtained only as an uncommon reward from a surprisingly profitable, yet unknown, "minigame" Divine/Elysian sigils are the two rarest probability drops from the hardest monster to kill in the game (in terms of personal drops per hour). The staff of light does not fit any of these criteria. You do indeed need to be high leveled to get it as a drop, but you can get an unlimited number if you just keep training slayer (this is why blood talismans will never go past about 500k market price, because burning corpses would become extremely profitable). You could argue that its comparative rarity to the amulet of ranging or the dark bow would keep its value well above the GE's capability to change prices, but as more people are motivated to get both Fire Capes and 93 slayer (especially those who already have fire capes), the incoming number of staves will exceed the incoming number of blood talismans or mjolnirs. Coupled with the fact that most people wouldn't pay nearly as much for a Staff of Light as they would for even an Elysian spirit shield, the price will crash eventually. 50m? 60m? Go ahead and guess, but the crash is inevitable.

^ A few spelling errors need to be fixed, and the name of the slayer monster corrected, but that should be put into the Times next to the first article ASAP. Just a few things I'm wondering about: Is that a typo in the last bit? I can't quite make out what the last clause means, perhaps the word intended was questing. Also, Nomad's Requiem was highly debated, with many people complaining that the final battle required too many supplies and attempts for the majority. It seems to fit in with the staff of light uproar more than oppose it. Otherwise, excellent points about the past and how the release itself of the fire cape as well as clicking minigames went well. I don't actually think the fire cape has much to do with this problem. The main limitation in accessibility is the fact that ice strykewyrms cannot be killed without a slayer task. This was an important update for slayers, but it does not make the staff of light nearly as accessible as the Amulet of Ranging; on the day of release, Aquanites were packed with approximately six times as many people as were needed to kill all the spawns on every world at max efficiency. Also, merchanting clans have relatively little to do with accessibility; the staff of light WILL go up, and it WILL crash, as combat magic finds increasingly fewer uses; non-combat methods of training magic are vastly superior, and melee has found ways to kill every monster several times faster than magic can. Even with the fire cape requirement, 93 slayer is now a goal for almost everyone with good combat skills, and with the staff of light being a much more common drop than sigils in terms of possible kills per day (even with the task requirement - the confirmed drop rate places about one staff drop for every other task) and less useful than spirit shields, it will never be harder to find than even arcane and spectral spirit shields.

3.141592653 rounds up to 3.1415927

The problem with this logic is that the task is also "optionable," the skill doesn't depend on one single monster. There are dozens of others for you to choose from. Honestly I don't understand what all this fuss is about. You don't absolutely HAVE to kill this monster on your way to 99 slayer. Why shouldn't people be rewarded for skillful gameplay with increased drop opportunities? And to keep the whole fire-ice theme going, having a firemaking cape work in place of a fire cape would be fine in my eyes - you can grind for hours on a non-dangerous task or you can use skill to get the cape more quickly. Cross-skill requirements are everywhere already, so don't complain about firemaking being unrelated. Ice Strykewyrms are built on three principles: High level content Fire as a requirement for killing them Only killable on task Let's not break any of these with a compromise. If slayer points were to be used to buy the right to kill these things, it would need to cost the equivalent of about 50-75m in runes from those same points. If this staff settles in for any amount of time at 15-20m, you'll make that amount back and more in your first 5-8 tasks of them (which is really not very much, considering a compromise should force you to go out of your way).

Your wrong. It's only 17k people. Of those that still play, probably 12k or so. Wild pies. Pie up right as you're about to get a task. Then pie up again to kill them. Also doable with only 87 slayer but that would be impractical stewing. If you think this is insignificant, you weren't around to see all the whip drops when wild pies first came out. Especially if this thing keeps going up in street price, expect an influx. Let's not make up numbers, by the way - I'd be more of the opinion that most high level slayers are active, especially with a rare and expensive new drop.

I don't understand why the same people aren't complaining about dying to the higher level slayer monsters when they disconnect. Same concept, really. You don't even need to have the greatest connection in the world to beat Jad, and chances are if your connection is that serious of a problem during the Fight Caves then you'll have died a couple times from disconnects (at least before they made the game SafeScape). Heaven forbid that a monster at level 93 slayer might be hard to kill (in this case, you must only defeat one hard monster to kill them easily for eternity). There are 37,412 people with a high enough Slayer level to kill Ice Strykewyrms. I cannot find anything wrong with Jagex wanting to cut down that number. As for a compromise, these monsters NEED to remain killable only on task. I guess I would support accepting a firemaking skillcape as a substitute, seeing as it is a boring, if quick, alternative. Other than that, if you can kill them on task with a bought ability, damage dealt without a firecape should be hugely cut down - maybe killing them half as fast as those with a fire cape. That way you can still fight them for your precious staves but it will not be efficient.

KQ's two forms were a great idea, and while the best gear was still hybrid range/hally in a big team, or even veracs set duo, the increasing combat level of the average person and the gear updates have made it much too easy. You can solo 4 KQs per trip whereas you used to be able to only duo 1 per trip.

Half right. Karils does nothing. Super defence potion makes a difference for all of his attacks.

I agree for the most part, especially making instanced dungeons for small group raids, but I cannot imagine making a boss TWO TIMES HARDER THAN NOMAD! Maybe as hard as, or even a bit harder, but realize the limits of levels, equipment, weapons, and food in the status quo. I killed Nomad with a full inventory of brews left (used 25 sharks in yak and a couple prayer pots) on my first try, so even if I was lucky it's not hard at all. And anyway, you can always bring more than 5 level 130s if taking the scenario I mentioned :D Should 5 people be able to take down something extremely epic so easily? As for how to make bosses harder, the best solution is to slightly increase the maximum damage but to increase the rate of attack. In one attack turn, players can currently heal: -14 from unicorn stallion special -15 from saradomin brew -23 from rocktail For a total of 52 hitpoints per round. There goes that 50 hit. Anyway, 50-60 seems like a reasonable max hit, as it makes you pay attention to avoid getting 2-hit. I like the Corporeal Beast element where certain items are ineffective (defence is useless there) and the TDs/DKs ways of making monsterhunting unique. If you combine all those on a monster that attacks quickly, with attacks from all three combat styles, and has high hitpoints with multiple minions defending it, you can start to get the kind of tactically and brute strengthwise challenging monster.

Seeing as the Corporeal Beast can now be easily soloed (first made possible with the discovery of Statius' Warhammers, then made even easier by Overloads), I'd say RS is seriously lacking a tough boss monster. In my opinion, the whole concept of grinding for cash needs to be done away with. Zilyana and Kril drop bones and ashes as 100% drops, while Kreearra's big bones and Graardor's ourg bones aren't much better. The average drop value from these bosses is about 20k if you don't count the large drops, and it will take you about 300 kills for every hilt. In part this is due to updates, as mentioned, and just general time. When the KBD first came out, and hell even when RS2 started, there was a much smaller proportion of people at a high combat level. Today, with 110k combat exp per hour available at armored zombies, hundreds of thousands of people have maxed a melee stat. With all the armor updates, the value of dragon armor - once worth 2-6m+ in an economy where gold was worth a lot more - has crumbled to just above alch value in an economy where gold means almost nothing. With the bolts update and the antifire potion, the KBD can be soloed by a person with 40-50 range and nothing else. So now you have a monster that is both pathetically easy to kill and drops junk because of other updates. What RS needs is a boss monster that cannot be defeated without a team, a monster that will NEVER be defeated by a team smaller than 4-5 people. It needs to be in either an instanced area or have a system where two teams can work together. It should have WAY more hitpoints than the corporeal beast or else have much higher defense so it takes a long time to kill, and every kill it should give a 100% drop worth about 50-100k+ to every player who contributed (or perhaps a proportional reward based on damage done). Only then should it IMPARTIALLY (not give it to people that spend hours and hours getting LSP) select a player to give a very good drop to - the best drop should only be perhaps 1 in 30-40. The idea here is that killing this thing even once should be an accomplishment, so when you kill it you know you are going to get something good. It just needs to become a matter of the challenge involved. I would even support a system in which getting a rare drop at all becomes more common as your group consists of less people. I'm talking about a monster that is twice as hard to kill with a group of 5 level 130s than it was to kill Nomad alone. That's the kind of challenge that needs to be present in at least one place in RuneScape to end the SafeScape/GrindScape combo.

I have read it through a few times, and NEVER did they say that gems, rune javelins or keys where rare items, in fact, they didn't state what are on the rare items list, just that some have very rare drops (visages/ godsword pieces) Also notice that the phrase 'Very Rare' has the word 'Rare' in it, which thus proves that visages and hilts are in fact rare drops, which means, that instead of your nothing drops, there is a CHANCE you will recieve something of this nature. So please don't flame me for using some logic, as it is obvious from my original post that i have read the ROW article, and I, unlike yourself, actually understood it. Edit: Also, in the last ~200 solo bandos kills, i have never recieved; rune javelins, gems or 'nothing', and i have recieved 2x Bandos Boots + 2x Godsword Shard, all with a ring of wealth :) Read this part once again: And this one: Each monster's class is a subclass of a Monster class. This class implements a drop system class - meaning that every monster uses the same system. The only difference is that the table slots assigned to each monster are filled in differently. You ask why they would make the item so useless; there are two reasons. The "rare drop wheel" is shared by all monsters so the item drop class would have to be lengthily modified or even scrapped to merge two different drop "wheels" The ring of wealth was released when these were the rarest drops in the game, and Jagex does not tend to change items as new updates are released, instead choosing to release replacements for them. And please don't talk about a 200 sample size as having any meaning. A sample of 200 kills is not even a sliver of the smallest fraction of a percent of the sample size needed to accurately estimate the drop percentages for each item on the table.