obidiah

The new coalition government policies are looking at least as Lib-Dem orientated as they are conservative orientated. It's now coming to light that theCapital gains tax increase from 18% to 40% which was proposed in the Lib-dem manifesto is going ahead which is going to be a huge hit to many people with investments. An increase in the threshold for income tax also straight from the lib-dem manifesto, is going to be of huge benefit to low wage workers. There was some initial anger from Lib-Dem voters that the Lib-Dems might be going against their principles by coalitioning with Conservatives, but the amount of concessions that they've got despite only coming third place is starting to look quite staggering.

I feel regardless of the rewards it needs to be a skill, as a lot of it revolves around unlocking more dungeon levels as you level up. - thus unlocking higher prestige levels and better XP. They'll always be some people who don't like a new skill, you can't please everyone after all. In the past there have been calls to remove new skills from such people. This time there is enough depth to the skill that it probably could be converted to a minigame. - so people are trying to get that to happen rather than have it removed - as they feel that is more likely to happen. As a minigame they can ignore it as it's no longer a requirement for competing in overall hiscores. However I think it's lose a lot of what makes it good if it were converted to a minigame. (which people who don't like may not understand as they don't think it's good anyway) I wouldn't want that, I like dungeoneering as a skill. It's a fundamental enough change that I can't see it happening though. I agree more actual uses for the skill would be nice and would counter some peoples misgivings about the skill, but even if there were I can imagine there would still be an "it's a minigame" crowd

Dungeoneering rewards have been adjusted by Jagex midway through this poll running. I'd probably now give a more positive response than I did when I filled in the poll, I suspect I'm not the only one. Not really anybodys fault, but with some people filling in the poll before the change and some after - we're going to get some strange halfway house opinion between before and after as the final poll result.

I think that numbers means you are too late, I thought that their names don't get changed into numbers until someone has actually nabbed the characters old name. If you delete the numbers and re-add the name you're after - it won't appear as numbers again as you've now added the new user of that name.

I will play it - how much I can't determine yet - depends if I get into it.

Market conditions mean that it's becoming more worthwhile to use your skills to get resources, rather than just buy it off the grand exchange? In terms of skilling products like food and potions, I'd actually say rising prices are a good thing. When the grand exchange and infinite shop stocks came out, it removed a lot of reasons to do many skill activities - it was just to easy to buy stuff. Large parts of the game became pointless, if some of that is being undone now - I say good.

In fairness when "in the first place" occurred. - they didn't have a company at all, let alone one filled with software engineers. Just a couple of guys who were almost still hobbyists.

It's nowhere near the disadvantage that people with bad connections that suffer lots of lag will have. Or lame frames per second people will get on worse machines. Bad computer equals slight disadvantages. In my opinion that's pretty much always going to be the way of things, matters in Runescape less than in most games.

There's a recent Paul interview he's done on RuneHQ - they have a link on their front page. If you're interested in Paul stuff. (Hopes it's ok for me to point out content on other fansites.)

Payments required for farmers to look after my plants

Back in the early days of classic it only displayed level and not xp. Then many levelups came as a little suprise. :thumbsup:

Question: Is it fair that things became that much more easy. I often see players complaining that Jagex are catering to noobs to much, by making the game easier and easier. I don't mind that sort of thing happening a bit, but the ability to do two skills at once seems to be making things easier on a crazy scale. I'm not sure they should re-introduce it.

If by that you mean do a few years of testing to find every bug. :P But seriously, how can you miss not being able to bank :P You miss it if it's bug being introduced with a quickfix to quickly fix another bug, because when you've got players going mental because they can't run and eat at once, the devs want to do the bugfix quickly with minimal testing. (So as a tester you probably only have time to check if running and eating still work, and not unrelated things like banking)

Problem is you have no idea how complicated it would have been to make the characters lie without glitches. There's a lot of clothing items in the game now, who knows how many would have to be remodelled to avoid glitching while lieing down. (that's traditionally been the response to such glitches and often those clothing remodellings are unpopular) Question: would you have preferred additional no update weeks so that they could make the player lie with no glitches? Or in that case would you just have them sit? There's a difference between lazyness and directing resources where they're most needed. Chances are Jagex aren't using the time gained by making them sit to put their feet up.

Well I personally do all the quests - so I don't do old ones cos I've already done them. To answer your question though. If you do a quest on the first day there is more of a sense of discovery, you're one of the very first players to be seeing something, there probably isn't a walkthrough yet, it appeals the exploring nature in us. You tend to meet all sort of other questers if you do them on the first day, things feel a little more friendly than normal. There does feel to me a little bit of a buzz on first days of quest. I like to be part of that. The new quests do tend to have better storylines, graphics, cinematics than the old ones too. For the player who isn't reward/requirement obsessed I'd say new quests are normally better.

Problem with the word noob is that it's meaning is ambigious. To some people it means new player, to some people it means annoying person. I try not to use it around people I don't know, as I can't tell how it's going to be interpreted.

Fact 1 Lots of low level players are annoying enough that any ridicule they get - they were pretty much asking for it. Fact 2 Lots of low levels aren't annoying. Many of these less annoying people are less noticeable than the annoying ones. (being annoying gets you noticed) Fact 3 Lots of high levels get bad experiences with some low level players and then develop a prejudice against all low level players. They then end up being rude to all sorts of people just because they are low level Fact 4 Lots of high levels are intelligent enough to distinguish between nice low levels and annoying low levels Opinion 1 There's actually more low levels who aren't annoying than are annoying. Opinion 2 Those high levels who can't smart enough to distinguish between the two types of low levels actually make the ratio of intelligent low levels worse. I've seen comments all over the internet from good intelligent adult gamers who get driven away from Runescape in the early stages because people are rude to them because they are new. This makes them think rather too quickly that the game community is too nasty and immature. (before they find the bits of community which aren't actually that way) Fact 5 I will continue to speak about against the sorts of players who think it's ok to be rude to low levels for no reason except that they are low levels.

To make this work it would basically be an option to pay as you play. If they did that they would set the prices such that anyone who is playing any more than average would effectively be paying more. If someone played 12 hours a day they're not going to say - well he's played for half his possible membership time so we'll charge him half the cost. - because then they'd be getting significantly less money from every single player. Also many of those who were pay as they player would probably feel like playing less, pushing the price up even more. Can imagine it'd come out at something like 50 cents an hour. (at a very rough guess) Frankly I'd hate to be paying as I play - wouldn't be relaxing. Wouldn't be able to chill and start chatting to my friends, as I'd feel if my money is ticking down then I'd really have to get as much levelling done as possible to get my moneys worth.

Hmm just looked at that poll, you can split the results into free and members, lol I don't think removing the free users from the poll helps some peoples cases at all though. For example: On the combined poll -88% think that 80 thieving is high level. On the members only -90% think that 80 thieving is high level. Why this would be I dunno. Seems odd that it would be that way round. My guess would be not many actual free users vote in polls, but high level members are the most likely to have free secondary accounts that are eligible to cast votes in the poll.

Paul's updated that post now, I copied and pasted it for Tipit's reading pleasure see below. [hide=]Edit *Note - nothing in this post says that we won't be giving updates for the top level players, I've edited this post to clarify my points as many people have read things into my post that I wasn't trying to say at all.* The thing is this poll doesn't surprise me at all. I estimate about 2% of members (not incluing free users) have 80 thieving. Only 90% of users (including free users - who tend to be lower level) are saying that 80 thieving is a high level, but then a lot lot more of our high level players answer polls than our low and medium level players (I suspect that fact might surprise some of you) - so there's always actually been a natural heavy bias towards high level players opinions in polls. (That's ok though it's precisely what players on this thread want anyway :P ) I realise that elite players in the top 1% of members like Torge Slayer do want challenges and things they can work towards too. They've certainly been making a lot of noise about it on the forums recently. ;) I think on some fronts we do actually cater to elite level players in that a lot of the combat minigames do get rather dominated by these players and it's hard for normal players to get a look in. There's good arguments to say that there should be some more skilling features in the 80 to 99 range though. AND I AGREE WITH THESE ARGUMENTS. The question is what sort of updates to make for people in this sort of level range. I am still not convinced that quests should be hitting that sort of range yet. They're very much one shot pieces of content that won't keep players at that sort of level entertained for very long compared to their average playing times. For the amount of development time that they take I think that quests should still target a higher number of players. For quests I'm a fan of slowly increasing the level requirements and making them slowly harder and harder, Suddenly making a huge jump up to some level requirement like 90, when the previous quest requirement in that same skill was 65, does not seem a good idea to me. That's not going to encourage many of the quest orientated players to level from 65 to 90, believe me that's far too daunting a level jump for many people of that level. Ok so quests might not be the best thing to be putting in at the very top levels just yet- THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE SHOULD BE NO NEW 85 PLUS LEVEL REQUIREMENTS ON ANYTHING! I was just talking about quests. Elite level players can and enjoy the quests still after all, the levels the quests are at won't satisfy their desire for having something to work towards, but they experience everything else the quests were intended for. I think most elite levels don't specifically want quests only they can do though, maybe some do, but high level updates can mean many different sorts of things. In essence what most players really want is more intermediate milestones to work to & keep them going on the long road to 99. Maybe that means some variation in the ways they level up as they go up the levels, maybe some slightly more profitabale skilling methods. (Or just less expensive methods). Maybe something which gives them a slight edge in some other game activity. Maybe that could be a new prayer, a new potion to make, a new agility course. I don't presume to be listing everything which everyone wants. I'm sure that there are plenty of ideas which people can think of and I see a few in this thread. I DO AGREE THE TOP 1 TO 2 PERCENT SHOULD GET MORE THAN 2 PERCENT OF OUR DEVELOPMENT TIME, but just be aware that you are 1 to 2 percent - so don't go expecting 50 percent of our work to be on those sorts of level requirements. There are actually a fair few updates we've done with level 80 plus requirements over the last year anyway actually which I've listed in other threads. To which the response from some players has then been "They're not the sort of updates that we want" To which my response would be fair enough, but surely that means your complaint shouldn't be that we aren't doing high level updates, but that we're not doing the sorts of high level updates you want.[/hide] Methinks he might be a bit irritated with what people read into the last iteration. ;)

Obvious to you and I maybe, quite clearly not obvious to the hordes of RSOF users who keep asking such questions over and over again ;)

In response to questions on an economic impact, if you turned party hats into money. Well right now I have party hats. I'm not keeping them for the investment. (they're not going up in price) and keeping them because it's cool to have party hats that I got because I was there in Christmas 2001. Therefore my party hat currently has zero impact on the economy. I'm sure that there are many many party hats being kept by people who weren't planning to sell them for various reasons. If they suddenly got converted into coins though, well suddenly I'd have 100s of millions of extra coins to spend - might as well spend them. At that point I'd have lots of economic impact. Whether that's a good thing or not I dunno, but I'd most certainly have an impact.

nachalo The thing about holiday items is people mostly want them precisely because not everyone can have them. People wear them to make a statement on how rich they are or how long they've been around (depending on if you're talking tradable or not.) Joe Newb probably mostly wants the old holiday items precisely because he can't get them. (I'd guess he's probably rather spoilt and used to getting whatever he wants) If everyone could easily get old holiday items, they just wouldn't be exciting, he'd probably lose interest and end up not even keeping the items - hence long term, his gaming experience wouldn't be enhanced at all. On the other hand the change would permanently take away from all the people who had already got the holiday items already. Suddenly they wouldn't have a cool unusual item any more. For me your suggestion isn't comparable to the wilderness trade limit changes because I don't actually see what the long term upside with your suggestion is. You need quite a lot of upside if you're going to change the game in a way which will upset a lot of people. konets

That's quite clearly a joking way for saying he's a longish way over 21.

Hi, good post. At times I like to play Runescape solo, depends on my mood. I think it's a good thing that it's possible. There are other popular games online where you're pretty much forced to play in a group if you want to do well. They don't appeal to me - there are times when I want some chill out time just to myself, but I still have the option to interact with people when I feel like it. (Though real life I find is best suited for when I really want interaction with other people.) I suspect there are many more solo players than people realise. The thing about people who keep to themselves is because they keep to themselves you'll mostly not be aware of them.