Troacctid

Also, doint it all by yourself means it's pure profit. No it doesn't. You still lose value on some of the conversions. Items have value even if you don't sell them. I mean, think about it this way: what if instead of processing your materials, you sold them all for the equivalent gp? You'd have some amount of money. What if, hypothetically, you then went back a week later, changed your mind, and bought back those same materials for that same amount of gp, and proceeded to process them as normal? You'd lose exactly the same money. If you view every multi-step process as a single step, everything is pure profit as long as you end up with more than 25 gp in your bank, because that's how much you have at the beginning. I can powertrain to 99 construction and end up with 3k gp in my bank and it would still be pure profit.

It's not harder.... but it's definitely less efficient. Like countless others have said, if I get 99 cooking with shrimps all the way, do I deserve a cape more than someone who cooked sharks? We obviously have more content because we are willing to pay for more. This has nothing to do with how difficult it is to get a skillcape. That was merely a side point to illustrate the idea that the achievement needs to be recognized somehow. Well, the trouble with making it the "best" cape is that some players will feel obligated to grind to 99 even though they don't want to, just to get the +9 defence. Untradable equipment that's as elite as a skillcape needs to be sensitive to everyone else by not blowing what they already have out of the water.

Well, burning the logs you chop actually is more efficient overall, especially in f2p where banking is so much more difficult. But a lot of the time there's a disconnect between what you want to gather and what you need to process. For example, bowstrings are important for training fletching, but worthless for training crafting. And you mentioned rune essence. The idea of buying materials is that you get to play the game on your own terms. If there's something you don't want to do, then you don't do it--you just make money somewhere else, and use that money to pay someone else to do the thing you didn't want to do. In this way, you never have to do anything you don't want to do, unless you don't want to make money.

I heartily agree with you that pre-GE trading was some serious suckage in every possible way I can think of. I had the same aversion to trading...I was more or less a dedicated DIY'er for the same reasons. But instantaneous trading has made the DIY method all but obsolete. The Grand Exchange has allowed me to buy and sell and become richer than I ever thought I'd be. Brugsen Bursen is my hero!

If you're doing enough quests for WGS, might as well go that extra yard and get the cape, it's only 10 quest points away.

You could try the mine immediately north of Edgeville in the low-level Wilderness. It's actually closer to a bank. It's low-level Wildy, so revs aren't a big problem, and there's two iron rocks and three coal rocks.

^My questions

Yeah, it seems like the elf storyline was going somewhere epic. Shame. On the bright side, the Myreque storyline is definitely going somewhere epic, and we know from the Chaos Elemental that a new Myreque quest is coming out in the near future.

Muggiwhplar posted a very good thread about buying skills a long time ago that had a lot of good discussion. Check it out. You might find it interesting. Honestly? It doesn't matter how you train your skills. Every player is a self-made player. This isn't real life, where some people are born into poverty while others are born into wealth. Every character starts with the same amount of gp in their bank, and every character needs to earn their money. Think about it. Unbalanced trades are dead. Discontinued items aren't around for free anymore. Any penny you have, you had to get somehow. What's the difference whether you got your smithing level by buying steel bars or mining gold to smelt? If you bought those materials, you had to work to earn the money, too. Everything you get, you get because you work for it somehow. So we're all self-made players.

Um, are you serious? The whole point behind the release of skillcapes was that there was no recognition, or even acknowledgement, in the game for the significant achievement of reaching level 99 in a skill, something that should have some recognition. Achievements like having lots of money already have recognition. Duh. It doesn't matter how easy or hard it is to get 99. It only matters that you can get 99, and that without a skillcape, it doesn't really mean anything. If there was a need for skillcapes in p2p that was enough to prompt their original release, that same need is just as strong in f2p.

And .... What ibxtoycat is saying is that members with skillcapes could go into free worlds and have an advantage in pvp.

I think this idea misses the point of updates. Runescape isn't about corporate money-grubbing; it's about making a great game. The thought that the free game is supposed to be a demo for the members' game is misguided. There's a reason that things like member NPCs, summoning obelisks, agility shortcuts, and other members-only content aren't even clickable in free worlds. The free game is meant to be complete on its own. This is an important premise, because the same hole that skillcapes filled when they were originally added to the game--as a way to show off the game's most extreme achievement that would previously have been totally unacknowledged--still exists in the free game. As I said before, they should have been f2p from the very start. It's not too late to remedy that error. Another important premise is that small fixes are worth doing. If Jagex wants Runescape to be around for the long haul, it's not enough to churn out new content at the expense of the old. That's the whole point behind the "upgrade year" that they're doing. Small fixes add up to create a better overall game experience. And that's what making skillcapes f2p would ultimately be: a small fix. How high a priority it ought to be is obviously debatable, since after all, a lot of small, simple fixes put together as a whole can end up taking up quite a bit of developers' time...but there's really no question that when it happens (and I do think it will happen), it will be an improvement.

Updated the eucalyptus section, with some other tweaks. I'll write a section on evil trees eventually. Just like J.K. Rowling is still working on that Harry Potter encyclopedia. It'll get done...no rush.

How does agreeing that skill capes don't entice anyone to get membership support your argument...? o.O Well, some people have said that skillcapes should be members-only because it's part of the package you get when you pay the subscription fee, and giving them to f2p would in some way take away from p2p. I was addressing that sentiment.

I just lost the game... On topic: My favorite activity is questing. Any time a new quest comes out and my internet is stable enough that I don't need to worry about disconnecting, I'll log on just to do that quest, usually without a guide.

Look, skillcapes should have been f2p in the first place. It's just not the sort of thing that has any real justification for being members-only at all. Like you said, skillcapes don't really entice anyone to get membership, and it's mostly only members who go for them anyway. Since free players can get to level 99, they might as well get the dumb cape for it, right?

I'm not saying that the skill cape is the only reason that people get members. I'm saying that f2p getting skillcapes doesn't benefit Jagex in any way. Wouldn't it better if f2p got an update that would also create new accounts/create new members, in turn allowing more updates? This would be a valid point if giving skillcapes to free players would take up a significant amount of programmers' time that could be spent on other updates; however, it's unlikely that is the case.

Most quests are not very difficult to do without guides. I only use guides for dangerous quests with a high risk of dying. A lot of the time you can even deduce the items you need based on the skill requirements. (If a quest requires a mining level, I always bring a pickaxe. If the quest requires Icthlarin's Little Helper or Restless Ghost, bring a Catspeak/Ghostspeak Ammy. If a quest requires a woodcutting level, you probably need a hatchet. And so on.)

They take a ridiculously long time to obtain though, I'm not sure it's worth it.

But don't you see? You're trying to say that f2p shouldn't get updates because it would cause them to whine, or in other words that updates that cause whining should not be released. But free players don't whine about updates! It's members who whine about updates! And they invariably whine about every update, no matter how seemingly uncontroversial, which by extension of your warrant implies that no updates should be released for anyone. That line of reasoning is flawed. And nobody is saying that free players deserve more because they look at ads, or whatever it is you're saying you're thinking they're saying.

Jagex has already "given in" at least half a dozen times in the past year, and how often do you see free players spamming the forums begging for updates? It's only members who whine and cry about updates. I would bet you a godsword that if skillcapes are made available to free players, the Game Feedback, Rants, and Recent Updates forums will be flooded with many more members ranting about the update than free players asking for more.

Free players shouldn't get content because they're free players? There's no slippery slope here. If free players get skillcapes, it doesn't mean they get fletching and summoning and thieving and castle wars. It means they get skillcapes. By the time you get 99 in f2p, you shouldn't have to fork over enough coin for membership just to get a strictly cosmetic reward...

I've also had a lower average yield per run lately, but not nearly enough to prove a general trend...it's far more likely that it's just a streak of bad luck.

Summer Pies with the Bake Pie spell are like 1m xp/hr, that would be the absolute fastest, I think. Is that really faster than barraging? I barraged rock lobsters for 92-94 magic, and it was like 110k-120k. Rock lobsters wouldn't be the fastest, though...the fastest experience would be monkey skeletons, or other players, I would think.

Summer Pies with the Bake Pie spell are like 1m xp/hr, that would be the absolute fastest, I think. Is that really faster than barraging?