loqk

on the subject of, "These are a Few of my Favorite Things" you've read my mind :-D

about "An Open Letter to Mr. Mark Gerhard" apparently, a lot of people missed the significance of the way the clan fortress was introduced. as a psychology student currently doing my phd, it was a fairly textbook example of applying psychological pressure using peer pressure. peer pressure is usually something we try to avoid, as it can be quite destructive, as is the case here. the points system introduced pressure to stay a member for longer. this was a clear psychological pressure to stay a member, in a complete break from the tradition of runescape. if there had been some sort of policy announcement, declaring the free game being removed, this would fit nicely with a winding down of the free game. instead, management got cross when people suggested that the free game was no longer world class. it was pressure, but it still put the power in your hands, the paying member or non member. the clan situation was much more underhanded and uses principles of psychology i expect of super villains, not world class games companies. first, clans were introduced, and every effort was made to accommodate free members. jagex practically went out of their way to make sure free members were included. after the praise had died down a bit, and everyone was settled into their clans, they introduced citadels. perfectly good, and all above board. oh, and by the way, they constantly degrade, and only paying members can do upkeep. all free players in clans were effectively being made into dead weight. using up precious clan numbers, while unable to contribute to the major piece of clan content. to maintain your citadel, you are forced to consider what all those free members in your clan really do, and are they worth it? as paying members, they could increase the upkeep of your citadel, and increase its quality. as soon as someone runs out of pocket money, or needs to take a break for whatever reason, their part of the upkeep is lost, and the clan suffers. if they had made citadels like houses, with non members able to contribute with gold, even though they could not visit since they were not members, there would be no problem. people could play as they could afford, without undue pressure. if they allowed the non members to visit and do upkeep, they would demonstrate their support of free players, while bonding the clan as a whole. instead, they added this subtle rift, tearing clans into two groups: members, who could upkeep, and non members who could not contribute at all. this is an unfair use of psychology to weaken the non members game. if they had announced that's what they were doing, that would be fine. instead, they pretend to support non members, while using psychology to make the clans apply peer pressure. do i stay a non member, and be unable to contribute to the clan? will i be kicked out of the clan? will there now be two clans, members and non members, slowly drifting apart? this was what we in psychology technically call "a dick move" i've been a paid member since i discovered i needed to be a member to get the cosmic talisman. i've been a continuous member for about 5 years, whether i had time to play, or not, and i believed in the game and supported it wholeheartedly. a couple of times, on a student scholarship, i have had my credit card denied, and re-established membership, as soon as my card was in balance again. i had thought some decisions were good, some bad, some indifferent. the new policy of shafting the free game, rather than just advertising the paid game is beyond mere meanness, or simply making a profit, and has moved into disreputable conduct. i left the paid game voluntarily when citadels were added, with their twisted psychology, and i will not become a member again until the injustice has been rectified. a simple, "we no longer have a free game" from management would be a simple solution, and seems to be what they want to do. however, they still want to win awards for being the best free game. they simply cannot have it both ways, and it is time for them to wake up to the fact.

i think one of the most important questions you can ask about a game is, would i recommend this to my friends. at the beginning of this year, i was still recommending it to my friends. i no longer do that.

instancing being used to combine people from different worlds would be awesome, and the technique itself sounds brilliantly implemented. at first i wondered why people would want instances as it would reduce the number of people playing, but this explanation sounds quite good. personally, i have seen only about 2 bots since the re-introduction of the wilderness. what i have seen more of is people accusing power levellers of being bots. what happens is that some power leveller is skilling as hard as they can, and not chatting. some pker comes along, demands that they talk, then kills them and claims they were a bot. confirmation bias means that these people see bots every where they go. they claim there are far more bots than there really are because each time they see someone who won't talk to them, they declare them a bot. each time they see a "bot" it just confirms that everyone around them is a bot. this is more a psychosis than a reality. there may be many bots, but if so, i have only seen 2, potential (not actual) bots once on a non members world. if there really are a lot of bots on non member's worlds, perhaps the players that fear them so much should just change to a member's world instead :-) if the people who can pay, do so, there will be fewer players to compete with those who can't and the bots won't be so much of a problem as total competition will reduce.

like member rewards points, citadels are a new method of punishing players for being non members. in all previous updates, if you could pay, you got all the advantages of membership. if you could not, the advantages of membership would be reinstated as soon as you could pay. in these new updates, as soon as you can't pay, (for example you needed your pocket money to but Christmas presents or needed your pay for medical bills), you are punished. directly through reward points, as the points rate is reduced, and indirectly via citadels as your team mates become unable to maintain their work. these are both classic psychological torture methods designed to force you to continue paying jagex despite your economic situation. the rewards points are relatively mild and put pressure on players, but at least it is still their own decision. if citadels simply degraded visually, and maintained their level, this would be moot, but since the citadels lose real work, this forces clans to demand that clan members also become paying members to maintain the citadel. this use of psychology to put peer pressure on other players is unconscionable. in the past, i have always recommended runescape to my friends as an excellent game that allowed players the freedom to play as they wanted. as of the introduction of citadels, the management has shown themselves to use the kind of dark psychological techniques used by black mailers and fraudsters. i am very disappointed in the management and can no longer play a game that uses such underhanded techniques let alone recommend it to others.

Crocefisso , brilliantly written article thanks for expressing the opinion we share so eloquently. Hamtaro's article, while sound advice, is now out of date. unless runescape allows the spamming of incorrect passwords like the banks used to, then a strong password is not worth the time cost to the average user. keyloggers simply make strong passwords as easy to find as weak ones. and, if you can't spam the passwords, a weak password is almost as strong as a strong password. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/2009/SoLongAndNoThanks.pdf

Hi I saw someone do this at the grand exchange, then looked on the runescape wiki for confirmation http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Heal_Group i haven't managed to pull it off myself yet, and it takes a little organisation, but it seems that, if you use heal other on someone and then immediately use heal group, both effects may take place simultaneously, potentially killing you. it may be useful to have a note letting people know it is possibly to die by using these spells too closely together after recent changes to the effects of nightshade, rock cakes, nitroglycerin and other health reducing items, it is rather difficult to die in a nice safe spot to show off your grave. if this works, you should be able to die cleanly somewhere interesting, and if you have a friend nearby, keep it active for an hour. with a group of friends, you can sort out a mini graveyard around your house portal for Halloween.

i'd be happier to see all level and experience caps removed. one thing you see at low levels is specialisation, with some people training crafting, some magic, others other forms of combat, ant others smithing, woodchopping etc. this diversification drives the economy, with people who specialise in one thing needing items from other specialists. as you go up levels, you begin to run into the caps and you become a generalist. in games other than runescape, you are forced into a role by your class, but runescape is unique in that your training path allows you to make your own class by training in the things you enjoy. raising the level caps to 120 simply gives more room to move, but doesn't solve the generalisation problem. since the levels are based of a mathematical formula, they theoretically go to infinity except for artificial caps. the main limiting factor is what to do at higher skill levels as there are not an infinite number of types of trees ore ores you can use, nor an infinite number of armour types. spells could be made continuously more powerful, as the damage from them is formula based, but the runes required would also need to be somehow formula based rather than depending on new runes every few levels. utility spells and teleport spells are also added level by level and have no way to have an infinite number of them to match the levels you could achieve. clearly, solving these issues is beyond me, as i am not integral to the development of a gaming system, but perhaps a committee of bright minds, like those at jagex could come up with some ideas :-)

you can get hunting rocks for shattered heart while catching imps. as far as i know, i catch imps in the most efficient way possible (trade secret), and i only get 1 imp about every 30 to 45 seconds, so the time it takes to get the rocks is quite long, however, if you are catching imps for later use, this can be handy to know. now i'm off to catch imps, and get my rocks :-) see you in falador :-) ps. i may be really bad at keeping secrets that only benefit me :-)

hi, according to the wiki (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Evil_tree#Rewards), "Players collecting the reward from a farming leprechaun afterwards will receive only half of the magical banking time.". since i seemed to have unexpectedly low magical banking times when i collected my rewards from the leprechaun (as i did 100% of the time) I changed to collecting my rewards from the tree. i believe i get the expected amount of time chopping trees now.

oh, and an active player in a few games is known as "it"

it looks cryptic to me cliff might mean edge, and an imp could be a villain, so I'm checking out edgeville, but since I've never done a cryptic crossword before, I'm not sure if I'm close

Thanks Racheya, that was interesting and informative.

That's very interesting, i never thought of it like that - but a 20GB hard drive for a multi-million international company, even a Terabyte drive... that's really not that expensive is it? lol true, but like I said, I made up those numbers. They could be bigger or smaller than I guessed, but they scale the same way, so if the files are larger than I guessed, then the hard drives will need to be bigger. I suspect that each update in our character profiles has been accompanied by the addition several months before of new additional or updated hard drives. the other possibility is that they simply rent space on central servers. this would incur a cost based on the database that would scale the same way for the changes I mentioned before. So adding new players would slowly increase their costs, but adding a new feature would multiply their costs for each player.

oh, and on the topic of memory space for player profiles: i am an experienced programmer and have a good understanding of what exactly is required for each user account. each user account is a small database entry using 1 bit (1/8th of a byte for most of our recorded selections (most likely for most of our quest completions too) it also has a reasonably large entry recording the number of items of each typy in our banks and inventories. each of these entries is probably 3 numbers, one records the bank space number, one records the item type, one records the number of items. so far you have a record that you could probably print out in numbers on a single A4 sized page; a nothing compared to the space on your hard drive. the problem is that each account is unique. whereas each picture of each item and each landscape layout is sent to all players identically and uses up a fixed amount of space, each time you add a new player, you add to the space required for the player database. each time you add a new feature, you have to add it for every person, so you multiply your storage requirements. this means that once they know their storage requirements, and determine the player file size, adding new players isn't too much hassle, but adding a single yes/no selection can swamp their hard drives. for example, if each player entry takes up one kilobite and we have 1 million players, that's 1 million kilobite , or 1 gigabyte. each new player takes up 1 new kilobyte, so a 20 gigabyte drive will hold 20 million players. if we add 1 byte to the player file, that's 1 byte to every player file and thus potentially an extra 20 megabytes of storage. this means you can hold about 20,000 less potential players. all because of a tiny change. to add an extra bank space you are looking at about 12 bytes of space or 250,000 fewer players for your one bank space. since bank spaces are added in rows of 8, that's 2 million less players for one extra row of bank space. these numbers are made up, but representative. if runescape adds a few extra switches to your menus, it is nice for you, but it has potentially cost them millions of players. this is countered by getting bigger hard drives, but the hard drives cost more money. so next time you think you must have an extra feature, or must have more bank space, remember that it costs them money to do so, and it is you who ultimately pay that money :-) ps. some more bank space would be nice, i ran out again :-P

one of the things runescape does well over other games is to be instantly discardable. Other games such as world of warcraft require you by their nature to find a large group of people and quest with them. if you leave the group, they are a person down and it is close to a betrayal if you need to leave to eat, sleep or poop. runescape is designed so that at almost any point, you can leave to do something else with no negative consequences. even quests that ask you to do something immediately really don't mind if you forget about them for a year. this is much better than many other games that give you 10 minutes to complete a quest, and if you lag out for 5 minutes, you fail the quest. the game is good focussed on the single player experience, but i agree that having your friends able to join you in these single player activities is a great thing and the heart of mmogs. the ability to drop out at a moments notice without negatively affecting your friends is one of the great strengths of runescape.

When I saw the recommendation of super poison in your inventory to kill the mole for this article, I thought that someone was finally using their head to kill the mole the easy way. Turns out I was presumptuous in this assumption... Poison, while quite useful has a little recognised side effect: it protects you from further poisoning. If you have been poisoned by a weak monster and are taking 2 damage each splash, you have about 8 splashes (12 damage) where you cannot be poisoned by a stronger monster that could do 12 damage per splash. The same applies to the mole. If you super poison it to begin with, then it shortens the time to half health, at which point the mole flees. Then you must continue to hit it, follow it, hit it, follow it till you run out of energy and have to walk the maze. If instead you attack it till it flees at half health, then hit it with super poison, you can leave it alone and let it die of the poison as the total damage done by super poison is almost exactly that of half the health of the mole. While taking only poison damage, the mole will not flee, it will just wander peacefully till it dies a few minutes later. Another way to do this is to use the poison to begin with, switch to normal ammo till it runs, then wait till the initial poison wears off and then attack it again. This can be a little tedious as the time for the poison to wear off is quite long. Also, if you happen to see someone quietly following a giant mole without attacking it, instead of charging in, check to see if it is poisoned. If so, it is already dead, it just hasn't noticed yet. Only attack it if you feel that you have way too much run energy and think walking is preferred when your own fight begins. ps. I think the super poison is so close to half the hit points that it may be worth taking an extra 10 hp off the mole after it runs the first time to make sure the super poison works in a reasonably short time :-) ooh, according to the runescape wiki, this only applies if you super poison the mole with a melee weapon, but I haven't seen a difference in melee or ranged super poison... A quick calculation from more data on the wiki suggests that you can expect to do 60 damage in 20 mins. this damage seems a little low and the time a little long from my experience, but i can't find a good analysis of poison damage on the web... I'll have to do one myself.

yep, quoting the manual: "Up to level 30, enchanted dragonstone jewellery, the Pharaoh's Sceptre and grand seed pods from the Gnome Restaurant minigame may be used, and a ring of life will save you if activated." the other teleports can be used up to level 20 (http://www.runescape.com/kbase/viewarti ... le_id=1700) however Necromagus didn't say he got blasted 2 levels from level 20, he said 2 levels from safety, so he may have died at level 32 wildy where neither his ammy, nor the ring could have saved him

ooh, i just imagined 20 rangers standing on the same spot all with rings of stone. you walk in and see 1 white dot and a rock where a person should be. you get too close trying to work out what it is and an unending rain of arrows descends upon you.....

ooh, sounds like they were at least trying to pk in the deep wildy, but standing next to 2 rocks is a bit obvious :-P the easter ring protects from the environment and slows the rate of stat drain the same as the ring of stone does, but is a little more obvious when standing in the wildy :-)

on the topic of "the code", i get the impression that some good pkers wrote about the most profitable methods of pking and some other people read it and decided that it must be an honour code designed to let them win fights. it then mutated into the hideousness we see today. this is similar to programmers of skill writing hacking applications for themselves and making the code available. then the so called "script kiddies" with little ability, use these programs and think they are cool hacker types, rather than the hacks they really are. good pkers will pray or not pray as is their wont. prayer costs them money and so it is inadvisable to pray before your opponent. they understand the game and have no arguments with others, win or lose. poor pkers see this as a rule everyone should follow so they can win, and then complain when they are loosing, or gloat when they are winning. good pkers may drop a "good fight" comment at the end of combat, just as one of you are "sent to lumbridge".

on the topic of pking, has anyone spotted pkers using the ring of stone to hide, then jump out and attack? it was an odd tactic since they still show up on your minimap, but i guess some people didn't keep an eye on the minimap... i think the reason they used it was that it allowed you to pot early and reduce the rate of level loss while you were rock. i don't know if it let you set up prayers and reduce the prayer drain too....

if you are patient, and the area hasn't been changed too much with the recent upheavals in the wilderness, red dragons are even easier to kill than green. there is a spot outside and west of the lava moat surrounding the red dragon island where you can hit one dragon when it wanders close enough. you will need telegrab runes and to keep an eye out for revanants, but i made quite a lot of red dragonhide armour with dragon hide from there.

in most games, and in the early days of runescape, at least in the circles i played with, the scientific method is known as power leveling. powerleveling is usually used to get a specific goal, sometimes getting all levels to 99 is the goal, so that sort of person only powerlevels. i power level to a nearby goal, like the next teleport or mage level, and then cruse, playing for days, weeks, or months (now that i'm fairly uber) untill the next worthwile goal looks just within reach. then a few hours, or days of power leveling and i have my goal and can use my new ability when crusing until the next cruse time comes along. for those who argue that power leveling isn't necessarily the same as scientific leveling, consider that power leveling involves dedicated focus on one single task that you believe is the best method. if you hear about a better method, you will try both, determine exactly which is better, then do that alone till you finish, or find a better method again. this is the scientific method :-) although i am too lazy to record all the datails of each leveling experiment, i often ran time trials of each method to see how much xp i could earn in one hour, including natural slacking with boredom. if a method is faster only if you focus on it, whereas another method is slower, but you can do it perfectly with little concentration, then you can often get more xp per hour over time with the slightly slower, but more consistant method. anyway, i think powerleveling is a good goal getting technique that you shouldn't use all the time as you may find the game becomes rapidly boring. on the other hand, if you find powerleveling many characters without dawdling around looking at the scenery enjoyable, then powerleveling to 99 in each skill could be for you :-) the important thing is to have fun :-D

from this discussion it appears the term "junk" is a little misleading. what the properly done junk trades do is trade a large number of over valued items for a single large undervalued item. for example (for illustration purposes only, none of these numbers are meant to be accurate) if i feel that chickens are only worth 1gp and the grand exchange has them at 2gp, and everyone else agrees, so no one will buy my 1 million chickens on the exchange for 2gp, then i have 1mil worth of chicken and 1mil of over priceing. if i want a god sword that is priced 2mil, but i want to pay 3mil for it, it is 1mil underpriced. if i trade all these at once, i get 1gp for each of my chickens (1mil) and pay 3mil for my godsword for a total of 4 mil. the trade sees that i have put in 2mil worth of chickens and bought a god sword for 2 mil for a total of 4 mill. both me and the trade system are happy, and so is my trade partner because he just bought 1mil worth of tradeable chicken (theoretically) and sold his godsword for 3mil. it is true that my trade partner has effectively 2mil gp and 1mil of chickens worth aproximatly 0 and therefore i have sold my chickens at twice their value and bought the godsword at it's correct value, but if my trade partner can use these chickens in a further trade, then he will collect the full value of the godsword. if he cannot offload the chickens, he has sold the sword at slightly above average price and has a stack of chicken to eat or dump. it is sort of a gamble. if i sell on the exchange i make mean price +%5, if i sell for junk i may only make mean price +30k, or i might be able to sell the junk for mean price + 50%. and eventually, an update like summoning may make my 1million chickens worth 100gp each in both value and exchange price, in which case i make mean price +50% + 100 mil this is a long odds gamble, but worth it for some people. on the other hand, like buisinesses that lose money for tax purposes, some people hear about these "junk" trades and try to make them while not understanding them. these people loose a good deal of potential money by selling "junk" at cost and then paying for the sword. in this case, the buyer gets the full worth of the eminantly sellable "junk" on top of the price of the sword and is very happy. :-) for me, i'm not much of a people person, or merchant, i've been playing for a few years and am too high level and too rich (to mangle a simpsons quote) to bother making trouble for my self to buy items i don't use or need. i just buy and sell on the exchange things that are profitable, and hoard or dump stuff that is not profitable. hooray for earth! ok, i'm done :-) ps. oh and if the prices were corrected overnight, the junk trader wouldn't have lost money as the 1million chickens would be worth their correct price of 1mil and the godsword worth it's correct price of 3 mill. so they would have the correct total of 4 mil if the prices were corrected after a normal 2 mil trade for the godsword, his 2mil gp would stay the same price, but the godsword would now be worth 3 mil, thus i have gained 1mil gp in the trade and my trading partner has lost 1 mill in the trade pps. i keep forgetting that he has the chickens and money and i have the godsword, so the above ps may be exactly wrong. if anyone else has a functional brain at this time of night and could correct my math, i'd be most greatful