Troacctid

I don't have a blog entry for you today. Instead, my guest article for the Tip.It Times was published in this week. You can check it out here. Hope you like it! :thumbsup:

Glad to see that people liked my article! :D Technically, this sort of variable only affects the economic viability of the choices involved. We all do have a God-given 24 hours a day to spend as we wish. Most of us are going to be sleeping, working, going to school, and so on for the majority of that time, because that's simply a much smarter choice than playing Runescape for 12 hours a day. But theoretically, you could alter your schedule to play more Runescape if you felt it was really important--it may not be a good option, but it exists. However, setting that aside, I find it's usually more appropriate to discuss time spent on Runescape separately from time spent outside of Runescape; that is, character development ought to be measured based on the time displayed in the Adventurer's Log, not the age of the account. Under that criterion, real-life situations more or less become a non-issue. Oh, and the existence of limited moneymakers, particularly Miscellania and farming, takes off a lot of the pressure to spend hours grinding for money. I've made the vast majority of my fortune that way--it probably takes less time out of your day than, say, checking your Facebook or channel surfing would. You could spend half an hour a day online and still be richer than somebody who spends hours but doesn't bother increasing their wealth. Yes, that certainly is interesting. In fact, it could probably be the subject of another article on its own. And it's a fair point. My perhaps-conceited hope is that the reading of my article will in itself bring the less-informed players up another step or two. :-w (Although they'll need to have already found Tip.It, haha.) You should subscribe to my blog then. ;) </shameless plug> But yeah, it seems I've been pretty well-received, so I may do another one at some point. Well, attention span is really just another choice. You choose to vary your activities because you find it more fun that way. And of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all. (By the way, if you have a short attention span, I'd highly recommend farming. It's amazing money.)

And keep in mind you don't need to fill it all the way to get the double xp. If you're leaving for farming runs and such regularly--and you should--it hopefully won't matter all that much if it isn't 100% filled.

I'm completely blown away that you would post a rant about how slow woodcutting is just a few weeks after an entire update dedicated solely to making woodcutting faster to train. Really? Really? Honestly.

Exactly. Using fruit bat near to a bank is a silly way of getting papayas. It's not as fast as the noting method and it's noisy and annoying for others. The best method is probably to have a huge bunch of scrolls in your inventory as well as a handful of extra pouches then going Canifis (if the lepra lets you note tree fruit there) and just activating the scroll and noting the papayas and pineapples. There is a summoning obelisk very close and a bank not too far away if you run out of scrolls/pouches too. You could also do a bit of herb and allotment farming at the same time. No, it's better to go to the Varrock tree patch and chop ivy while your special bar is restoring.

I believe it was based on a player suggestion. (I recall a suggestion thread on the RSOF.) And it was a cool idea. I like it.

If my calculations are correct, that's around 300k xp/hr. Of course, you need 18 picks, which alone take 5 hours, plus however long it takes to get the horn. Which makes it not 300k xp/hr. Math fail. :roll:

I'm always running...but I don't run everywhere. I teleport everywhere. The multitude of transportation alternatives dampened the impact for me. I would, however, rate it as the #1 F2P update of the year by a landslide.

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous topic. Have you thought this through at all? "Jagex should leave old content to rot, no matter how broken and in need of an update it is! They should focus on giving us nothing but new things, like they used to do back when Iddison was in charge and we got Vinesweeper, Evil Trees, Perils of Ice Mountain, Gnomecopters, and other amazing things!" "The first two updates of a year are indicative of every single update for the next 12 months, therefore 2010 is going to suck!" "Jagex changed the fighter torso to have no strength bonus, saw the outcry from the player base, and within hours reversed the decision! They are totally out-of-touch with the players!" "There was no new content at all this year! Just a Grandmaster quest, a massive change to thieving and fishing, a new staff that gives you free runes and has a 1HKO special attack, and an armour set that restores prayer while you wear it! Come on guys, we're already almost three weeks into 2010!" Quite frankly, I'm appalled at the silliness.

You know what else comes in waves? Barbarian Assault. Who knows, right? OH YEAH! Called it, baby! \:D/

You know what else comes in waves? Barbarian Assault. Who knows, right?

Official forums.

Mint cakes are used as anti-junk. In a normal junk trade, the seller puts up the item plus junk, and the buyer pays the GE value of both. With mint cakes, it would be the buyer who puts up the mint cake. So if you want to buy something that's undervalued on the GE, you can use mint cakes in place of some of your cash and buy it without the other guy needing junk. Of course, if you happen to have lots of junk, just offer it along with the mint cake if you want to sell it for pure cash.

Isn't that a "graphical update" to Barrelchest? No. Notice that the barrelchest has a literal barrel for a chest, uses an anchor as a weapon, has no reason to need a graphical update, and is not a water troll. That fish building concept art is a thought too. Where did that come from?

They look weird :blink: That's just what they look like while you fish them with your hands: I was thinking, "Aww man, this is another of those hints that will only make sense after the content comes out, because we don't have enough information to solve it yet..." Then I went back and looked up future update clues. Maybe it's this? I'd be psyched for a new pirate quest if that's what it is.

You can go to a free world and have summoning not count for your combat level.

I just want a new Sea Slug quest so I can make a "This is your brain on slugs!" joke.

I bet you thought I was done after the Top 10 Updates of 2009. Nope, there's more! It's time for the Bottom 5 Updates of 2009, the five updates I thought were the worst from the past year. Remember, this is based on my opinion, so if you don't like it, go make your own list. Or comment. Or both. Troacctid's Bottom 5 Updates of 2009 5. In Pyre Need What is it? In April of 2008, players voted in a Guaranteed Content Poll on a new type of summoning familiar to add to the game. The winner of the poll was a phoenix. Eight months later, Jagex unveiled In Pyre Need as the first update of 2009. In this quest, the player is asked to aid a dying phoenix in a ritual to restore its power. As a reward, we gained access to a new Distraction and Diversion in the Phoenix's lair: every day, we can revisit the phoenix to spar with it for the chance to earn some of its feathers, which can be used to create summoning pouches for summoning a phoenix. On rare occasions, a phoenix egg can be found in the lair on the way out, granting the player a new pet phoenix. Why does it suck? It just doesn't really do anything. Sure, we can visit once a day, but the rewards aren't very good for the time it takes. Sure, we can summon a phoenix, but it's not that big an improvement over other familiars of the same level. The pets are cute, but there's not really anything to do with them besides show them off. And the quest itself was stupid. Why was it a quest? The daily event has you fight your way through the cave and battle the phoenix at the end; the quest has you run through the cave without fighting and talk to the phoenix. What's the point? Why not just skip straight to the Distraction/Diversion? Pretty much, I don't like this update because it didn't add anything of value to the game. Other updates can get away with that, but I'm taking off extra points because this was a Guaranteed Content Poll result that could have been cool and wasn't. 4. Display Names What is it? In October, members were given the ability to change the visible name of their account up to once a month. That's pretty much it, I guess. Why does it suck? It's annoying. Initially I praised the update, saying, "While it's not a hugely significant change, and things are a little hectic the first week as everyone is changing names at once, there's really nothing to complain about, and I think it improves the game." As time passed, however, it became clear that it would be hectic every week. Players who changed their names had a little icon showing their previous names, but the icon can only be seen if the player in question is on your friends list, and it goes away after a month. Pretty soon I would be looking at a list of names in my clan chat and recognize none of them. The intent of the update was to let players with lame names change them to something different, but due to wishy-washiness and whims, it ended up being a nuisance to me. 3. Mobilizing Armies What is it? Mobilising Armies is a minigame. It was released in July after an unusually long time in development (release was postponed seven months!) due to technical issues; it does things that the game engine had never done before, such as completely changing the interface during gameplay. The game has the player control squads of elves, dwarves, and goblins to battle other players in a real-time strategy setting. Alternate gameplay modes include assaulting a castle in Siege mode, stealing treasure in Hoard mode, and rescuing TzHaar in Rescue mode. Why does it suck? "But wait!" I hear you cry. "You already put Mobilizing Armies as one of your best updates of 2009! What's up?" Yeah, I put Mobilizing Armies on both lists. That's because part of it was great, but the other part was stupid. The real-time strategy minigame itself is boring. You don't get any experience for playing it, and unless you spend excessive amounts of time building up your rank, you can only access the crappy, useless low-level rewards, so the only incentive to play would be if it was fun, except for two problems: first, it isn't all that fun; and second, there are good rewards--once you reach rank 300, you can access the most powerful rings in the game. So now if I want those nice items, I have to slog through a minimum of 25 hours of a lame RTS. The interface, which they probably spent months programming, is still clunky--you can only select one squad at a time, your camera control is poor, and you can only use quickchat to communicate with the other players. I consider the minigame a failure. It probably would have been better as a Funorb game. 2. PvP Drop Change What is it? In June, PvP worlds were changed. The drop tables were drastically altered, with items such as abyssal whips, barrows items, dragonfire shields, and dragon full helms being removed from the tables because of complaints that such items previously only available as rare drops from certain monsters were being devalued and little reason remained to battle mithril dragons, abyssal demons, and so on. In their place, a variety of ancient artefacts--essentially large sums of pure cash--were added to the drop tables. Why does it suck? The ancient artefacts solved the problem with whips and dragon full helms and stuff, but it created a new problem: massive inflation. With huge amounts of new gold entering the game from PvP drops, just about every item starting rising in price. Take a look at Runescape Wiki's Common Trade Index: Notice the spike between June and July? That's this update. It caused turmoil in the economy. To make matters worse, the artefacts are far more common drops than their more expensive predecessors were. With more consistent payouts, it became even more profitable to abuse the system by trading kills with friends, so much so that other moneymakers paled in comparison. This led to even more massive amounts of pure cash entering the economy, further compounding the problem. While Jagex made more patches to the system to fight such abuse, and the economy is much stabler half a year later, it's hard to deny that this update really [cabbage]d things up big time. And the #1 worst update of 2009: [hide]1. Woodcutting Rebalance What is it? On September 23, the woodcutting skill was overhauled, with several new training methods being added. Arctic pine and hollow trees were improved to give better experience, new special logs were added to teak and mahogany trees, ivy crept up Runescape's walls, and the sawmill opened its doors to part-time labor, paying woodcutting experience as wages. These new methods vastly improved experience rates. Why does it suck? Woodcutting needed an update, but this was not the kind of update it needed. For a long time, woodcutting has been a poor moneymaker without much reason to train it. The ideal fix for woodcutting would focus on high-level incentives for training with decent experience as a bonus, like the previous week's Living Rock Caverns, which was essentially perfect. Instead, what we got was faster experience and no incentives, making this a stellar update for...well, nobody! Nobody benefited from the woodcutting rebalance except for people looking for an easy skillcape. It's not as if woodcutting was ever a difficult skill to train...it's one of the simplest in the game. You get a hatchet, you click on a tree, you get logs. Repeat. And it wasn't as if the experience was slow to begin with--sure, it wasn't the fastest skill, but it wasn't exactly the slowest either. I'm not the type to complain that woodcutting is "meaningless" or something because of this update. It was just as meaningless before the update. And that's the problem. Here we have this long-awaited high-level woodcutting update, and it changes NOTHING. Oh wait, I'm sorry, it makes it easier for even more players to get to a high woodcutting level so that they too can wait for a real high-level woodcutting update to come along. At least the extended agility courses gave some nifty weight-reducing clothing; the woodcutting rebalance didn't even pretend to give some sort of reward. I thought Jagex had things down after the Living Rock Caverns, but then the next week came around. Apparently they got lucky the first time, because if the woodcutting rebalance is any indication, the development team responsible completely missed the point and have no idea why people want high-level content in the first place. Jagex: if you're going to obsolete my woodcutting guide, I don't mind, but could you at least do it with a good update? Please don't give us any more crap like this! [/hide] That's my Bottom 5 Updates of 2009. As a bonus, allow me to offer a short list of the best minor updates of the year, in no particular order: Menageries Pathfinding bug fix Price checker Chatbox spam filter Extended logout timer Separation of f2p and p2p bankspace Summoning interface upgrade Special bar percentage display Grand Exchange mine cart Removal of doors in Edgeville Furnace and the Blast Furnace Remembering clan chat on logout Remembering run status on logout Ability to queue high alchemies and other spells Adventurer's Log Allowing familiars on balloons and canoes Adding the Ava's Accumulator effect to Castle Wars and Soul Wars Fishing Trawler activity bar Lumbridge fishing shop Access to the forums for high-level free players And of course, numerous bug fixes.

Actually I think it may mean something and you're onto it. The first segment of each line so far is: A man A plan A canal But adding Panama- A man: a plan: a canal: Panama! The line "Amanap!" wasn't left of before you anyway... Yeah, that part was pretty obvious. "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama" is a well-known palindrome, so it was easily spotted once the general format of the response was figured out. I didn't think it was worth mentioning.

Here is a link to the Grand Exchange prices of every type of log available to nonmembers: http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_rs/results.ws?query=logs&price=all&members=no Oaks have risen in price dramatically over the past few weeks and are very profitable. I recommend chopping them southwest of the Varrock west bank. It's the fastest spot.

Yes, the whole point is that you get to use a salve (e). That's kind of most of the reason they're good.

Yeah, I agree, to be honest it seems to be Jagex getting revenge on Kingory (Another chinese themed Evony-like (Which is Civilization anyway)) Since they use "Most popular free-online game" When RS has one of the titles for it. (Also, Kingory uses stolen Chun-li art for the registraion screen, Reeaaalll quality here folks.) Evony stole the homepage of Runescape too. Would be interesting to see how Evony could get away with that kind of copying if Jagex have a similar game. Wow, that's kind of...

If you end up singing it again, I might be willing to do the harmony part. That song pwns. :wink:

1. You add items to your side of the trade that have a higher GE price than what they're actually worth--for example, unstrung willow longbows are completely useless and worth nothing, but the GE considers them to be worth a handful of gold. So you might offer your mint cake along with some unstrung willow longbows, and the other person would buy the useless bows from you in exchange for the mint cake. 2. Junk is the name used for items whose Grand Exchange value is, for some reason, higher than the actual value. This could be because the item is useless, as in the unstrung longbow example, but it could also be because the item has recently risen dramatically in price far above its true worth due to manipulation of the Grand Exchange system. (Obsidian capes are a recent example.) In the second case, the item will quickly crash, and during the crash it will effectively be impossible to sell. "Stable" junk is the first kind of junk, so called because it will hold its value and can be passed off to someone else later in a similar trade, so you can still end up breaking even on it. "Unstable" junk, the second kind, quickly loses its value as the price crashes; it may be possible to sell it back more easily than the first kind if the demand is high enough, but you're guaranteed to lose money if you accept it. 3. No, but nobody really knows how long they'll stay there. The trouble with commonly junk-traded items like mint cakes is that eventually the GE price starts catching up, people start collecting them to sell, and the increase in supply causes a crash. 4. You would need to trade your mint cake for other items that are undervalued on the GE, such as bronze knives or leaping sturgeon.

On the "canal" part, I think it may be referring to the four points of the compass (like the KBD said in Postbag 33).