Louisc111

No, you won't lose anything, no matter how long the break is. Lovely! Thanks for your reply. I've been playing since 2004 and, whilst it's by no means certain that I'll return, I do hope to be able to afford the time for RS again in the future. Especially after all that effort. Must fight the addiction and do some sodding work. Cheers!

Ok this is probably a stupid question, but dammit I'll ask it anyway! I have to take a serious break from RS due to RL commitments (same old story!) and I want to know what the consequences of canceling my membership are. If I cancel my membership subscription I know my bank space will be reduced, and since my bank is full bar ~30 spaces I imagine it will be unaccessable if I log in as a free player (which I won't be doing, but just hypothetically). My questions all boil down to this, can I cancel my subscription today, for example, and then reinstate it say a year from now with no negative consequences? I.e. I won't lose the contents of my bank etc even if I cannot access my bank until I resubscribe. Any info from those who've actually done this would be helpful. Cheers!

Dear Unseen Sky Goblin those are some high reqs! Impressive. I can do many of the diary tasks but by no means all (except Lumby, natch). It seems like there will be some training to do! (and D-bones are gonna rocket imo).

Interesting. ~90% of the thread is a semantic quibble over whether or not Dungeoneering is an X or a Y. Way to miss the point fellas! ;-) Thanks to everyone who answered, when I get a minute I'll sort the wheat from the chaff and try to extend the discussion beyond the "you're clearly a kiddy fiddler because Dungeoneering is actually some type of banana" level.

Inspired by this thread I did something very stupid yesterday. I played WoW. Erm, it's rather good in many ways. The problem is I like RS WAY more (despite the graphical wonderfest that is WoW, sorry but it is pretty) for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. What will keep me in RS is the storyline and how the quests work to expand it. Other people's mileage may vary. WoW quests so far seem to be remarkably like the Slayer skill in RS (kill X of this). I have to say that I like the apparently faster levelling of WoW (that might be because of my noobishness) because (raids and whatnot aside, something I have yet to get to) it appears to me at least that I can max a character quickly in WoW. I once calculated I'd be 63 before I managed to max my RS character...and I am >30 years away from that! So for someone with limited time to invest in gaming (until yesterday RS was the only game I've played since a very long time ago) it seems like WoW has a quicker return on time invested. Now I'll qualify that by saying that is my initial impression, I'm not trying to start some infantile flamewar on WoW vs RS, but I'd genuinely appreciate the input of people with more experience of WoW. Are my initial impressions valid? I.e. is it true that levelling to maxed characters is quicker and easier than in RS? For the purposes of my question ignore the issues of gameplay mechanics (clicks and buttons), graphics (of course there are differences, but I LIKE RS's graphics), and cost (I'm lucky enough that the difference between ~£5 a month and ~£10 a month doesn't bother me, a possible advantage of being an adult I suppose). So far my impressions seem to be that RS is a more serious RPG fan's choice (more sandbox, less shiny bells and whistles, but more substance and more difficult in terms of levelling) and WoW is the more traditional gamer's choice (quicker levelling, more role based/limited play, very shiny with lots of bells and whistles, less substance in terms of levelling, i.e. it's not the focus, but a much bigger game world). I'm happy to be corrected on that of course. What do people think?

Because I enjoy it and because it has the feel of the old pen and paper RPG type games I played a million years ago. I don't claim any of this to be true for anyone else by the way, it just suits me for some reasons. I have sufficiently powerful computing abilities/kit to play WoW or any game on the market (my PC is a custom built scary beast for work reasons) but there is something delightfully casual about RS for me, so I enjoy it. I also like what Jagex are doing and the way they do it, vastly more often than I don't. That said, maybe I should give WoW a go, just to see what it's like..... ....oh noes a new addiction! ;-)

Dungeoneering like a beast. I just want me some dung levels. Plus I've just spent a tonne of cash on something silly and can't afford herbs and whatnot, so I'm concentrating on free training skills.

Hello All, Whilst anticipating an upcoming fantasy novel I thought about what the characters in that novel were like, what "level" they might be in a Runescape context, what skills they might have have and how their "endgame" might translate here. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Runescape will last a finite amount of time, let's say 10 years from this point, after which no new content will be added. Whether or not the servers will close and the game will end is a moot point here (it might extend the discussion but I hope it's not the crux of the matter). Access to top content in the game is done in a variety of ways, quests are only one part of that. People with awesome levels (by which I mean all skills are 99 plus 120 dung) have access to high level content from a variety of sources (not enough, they need more, but that's a seperate matter). In fantasy novels the heros/heroines are not always uber powerful near godlike creatures (although they often are), and frequently they don't start that way. Often luck, circumstances, help etc play a greater role than individual awesomeness, and then they are usually only awesome in a narrow area. Ok, given those things I was thinking that it wasn't absolutely necessary for the final uberquest of Runescape to require all 99s and 120 dung etc. In fact I think it's a bad idea because I think it misses what draws so many people to the fantasy roleplaying game genre, i.e. the adventure/plot/roleplaying element of it all. Runescape is a cracking roleplaying game (that's what the RPG part of MMORPG stands for folks!) because it allows such freedom. There are people who "crack" quests at comparatively low skill levels, for example the people who slew Nomad at terrifyingly low combat levels. People work out ways to kill Jad with a rubber chicken, take on the Corporeal Beast with a banana (ok that one I made up) and a variety of things. I think the ultimate end of runescape quest series should be similarly open. Obviously it should have high requirements, but the time investment of all 99s + 120 dung is enormous. Even all 90+ would be an enormous task to achieve and that's less than halfway up the xp grind. I think it's more fitting, and more pleasurable, to have high requirements (90+ in multiple skills) coupled to a few 99 requirements, a few minigame/activity/quest acheivements a certain amount of money etc. Something to really show the player has PLAYED the game. Merely requiring the maximum in all skills is pretty dull. Less game, more grind. Don't get me wrong, I've got no particular beef with grind, nor so I think all things should be easy to access, I just think that making an integral story part in a game/RPG extremely difficult to access is counter productive. Hard yes, something only a dedicated person with multiple spare years on their hands can acheive....no. What do you folks think?

They already said that this wasn't Batch 2... 1.5 isn't the same thing as 2. FYI. I'm not sure who you are responding to, but you're comment is meaningless either way. Your premise is essentially "The number 1.5 is not the number 2". Thanks for the insight, buddy. :rolleyes: Next time try to inject a little meaning into your post, instead of trying to teach people how to count. "FYI" I was informing Demo that this Dungeoneering update wasn't meant to be Batch 2. He didn't say it was batch 2 :l he said it was 1.5, and you tell him it isn't 2? He never said it was. :mellow: His comment was "Batch 1.5 I see." He wouldn't have posted that if he wasn't expecting something more substantial (ie Batch 2). You've never heard of literary tone? And just for the sake of it, heres the quote from the Dev Blog. [/hide] Wow.... just wow.... He meant Batch 1.5 as in the update between 1 and 2. I mean come on. Way to make a mountain out of a molehill. Den defined it best: I said batch 1.5 because it isn't substancial enough to be batch 2. That being said, it still brings certain improvements to a skill in dire need of some. So between lauch and batch 2, thi is batch 1.5 :P Sorry if I caused any problems :lol: AHEM! ONE POINT SEVEN FIVE!!!!!!!!!ELEVENTYONESHIFTONE111!!!!!1!1! Because it really, really, really, REALLY matters. ;-)

Nope. Rank bothers me not. It's interesting to be in the top 50000 or so rs players, but hardly meaningful to me. I play to explore new content (which I get lvls to be able to do), keep up with the storyline, quest (which I love), and now dung (which is like a little mini quest per instance). If I can do this with friends and have a chat then fine. Basically having put some effort into my acc I keep it on tickover.

And to be frank, my serious point isn't really that people will spend more time inside, that was kind of a joke. Sorry if that didn't come across. The serious point is I think that lvl cap raises are a bad business decision. More players play casually (where "causally" = not chasing all 99s etc), more money is to be made from this greater number of players (who are also endlessly recycling by old people leaving and new people coming in), so providing goals that are actually reasonably acheivable by these players AND that satisfy the needs of the high lvl players is a good business decision. Raising lvl caps doesn't do this. Higher lvl caps only appease a subset of a minority of players (i.e. those high lvl players who also chase high xp etc, so playing to grind as opposed to playing to access different content), it disencourages casual players by making even less reasonably acheivable goals*, and it causes an inevitable "arms race" which raises the average levels a player needs to have to play the majority of content (and even all of some content, see for example herblore and pvp). *Before the "oh you just want it easy" whiners show up: RS is a game. Your 99 is forever earned, nothing can take that away from you. The "easy" argument is a stupid one. As a game ages more people will inevitably reach high lvls, more people doesn't dilute your acheivement. If you climbed Everest without oxygen tanks then that's what you did no one can take that away from you. If someone else climbs Everest with oxygen then that's what they did, the end acheivement is the same but you had the harder route to it. Satisfy your tiny, precious, fragile ego with that. If a thousand people climb Everest with or without oxygen tanks none of this changes the fact that you climbed Everest. If the only point of you climbing Everest was so people would look at you and get all moist and fluffy, then you missed the point of climbing Everest and to be blunt are so needy that I recommend therapy. Currently RS takes a good deal of time (like I said above, ~3 years, non stop to complete, going by Jagex's own numbers) 3 years of 24 hours is a serious time investment. More than a degree, so think about it. If content is what is needed, as opposed to ego massaging numbers for an insecure few, then there are far better ways to deliver it.

They already said that this wasn't Batch 2... 1.5 isn't the same thing as 2. FYI. I'm not sure who you are responding to, but you're comment is meaningless either way. Your premise is essentially "The number 1.5 is not the number 2". Thanks for the insight, buddy. :rolleyes: Next time try to inject a little meaning into your post, instead of trying to teach people how to count. "FYI" I was informing Demo that this Dungeoneering update wasn't meant to be Batch 2. He didn't say it was batch 2 :l he said it was 1.5, and you tell him it isn't 2? He never said it was. :mellow: His comment was "Batch 1.5 I see." He wouldn't have posted that if he wasn't expecting something more substantial (ie Batch 2). You've never heard of literary tone? And just for the sake of it, heres the quote from the Dev Blog. [/hide] Wow.... just wow.... He meant Batch 1.5 as in the update between 1 and 2. I mean come on. Way to make a mountain out of a molehill. Madness? THIS. IS. THE. INTERNET!!!! The internet folks, it's serious business. Anyway since there were post release tweaks to dung, which were obviously dung 1.5, that makes this dung 1.75 and anyone who disagrees is clearly a kiddy fiddling commie scumbag who eats poo and smells of wee so there. With knobs on.

Oh yeah, and ai realise that not all the level caps have to change, but I am arguing against any lvl cap changes. There are better ways to add content without making huge xp increases required for good content. The example of all lvl caps changing is just the easiest exampl to use because it gives an idea of scale better.

I've got to say that I am spectacularly anti raising level caps to 120. Two major reasons: 1) pure self interest, 2) it's "unhealthy". (CAUTION: LONG!!) I'll take them in reverse order. McDonalds could release a double double battered, deep fried triple cheese 4000 kcal greasemonster uber burger topped with quintuple bacon, jalapenos, mozzarella, chorizo, salami, double sausage, coupled with "your own body weight" sized triple cooked fries and 2L pure lard shake meal that instantly gave you the cholesterol level of a 400lb 55 year old shut in and the BMI of a block of flats. They could do it and dammit it would sell (hell even I'm thinking about it), but should they do it? Obviously given their current marketing push (salads and the like) they've read the market and realised that, although people love a burger, there is a distinct social push towards healthier lifestyles, even though waistlines are increasing geometrically across the world! There is an awesome amount of calories available on their menu. Yummy, yummy calories. However McDonalds have realised that, despite increasing western lardiness, more of their customer base (and potential customer base) want a coffee and a salad or a relatively low calorie lunch rather than a heart stopping quantity of fat and calories. The same goes for Jagex. There is an awesome amount of content in RS. raising more lvl caps to 120 is just like making the burger above. It encourages more people to stay inside, sat on their spreading behinds playing games endlessly, which, whilst fine up to a point (even a very large point) has its drawbacks. How does it encourage this you ask? Well it sets up a very effective arms race. Forget about racing up the highscores, the hardcore few will always try to be number one/go for completion, think of the casual gamer. There are vastly more casual gamers than hard core gamers. There are 2 million spot on the highscores and less than 1% of them are filled with maxed accounts (maxed prior to dungeoneering I mean). >99% of the Jagex's market is not going to fit into the hardcore model that is, to be blunt, heavily over represented here on Tip.it and the RSOF. Now that's not a bad thing, but as people have noted, there are many gaps in the current game that need filling (and filling well) before we get to >99 in any skill. And let's also not forget that no one yet has 200m in all skills, so for the number chasers there are those goals to go for. Now where was I? Oh yes, arms races. Look at herblore. When untradeable high lvl pots came out what happened? Herb prices soared (not a bad or good thing necessarily) as people raced to the high herb lvls. Don't get me wrong, I like the goal, I'm merely describing the shift in herb prices as a concrete symptom of an arms race. Suddenly people had to get those lvls just to compete in relatively simple aspects of the game like pvp (or even just improve their pvm performance). Raising the level caps would force this sort of race, people would have to have vastly higher skills just to compete in relatively simple aspects of the game. Quests with >99 reqs, pvp content etc etc. It puts a massive time burden on an already heavily burdened player base. Taking Jagex at its word, the full game has >25000 hours of content. That's just under 3 years solid playing. Let's say 3 years (factoring in a learning curve and errors etc) for easy numbers. Very, very few people are going to dedicate that quantity of time to a game. It's fine for them to do so, that's their choice, I make no judgement about it other than to say that it is a big time commitment, even spread over the decade or so that Jagex has been running RS. Up the level caps to 120, do the lot. Never add another skill, no more updates of any kind (other than the content that fills all skills to 120) and you have increased the commitment hugely. Just using rough numbers a 99 is 13m xp, 25 of them is 325m xp. A 120 is 104m (I think, cba to look it up) which gives us 2600m xp for all 25 skills. That's 8 times what it takes for all skills to 99. Now I know that's very back of the envelope, and doesn't include dung at 120, but I am trying to give an idea of scale, not absolute accuracy. This raises the amount of content in RS (if you call continually grinding numbers "content") to a minimum of about 24 years. Let's be really generous and factor in training efficiency increases, and multiply by 4 instead of 8. 12 years content. 12 years sat on your behind tweaking numbers on a screen. That's McDonalds catering to the uber calorie burger market, fine for those that want that but it is a minority of the market. (Those people can also already buy two normal burgers, or three or 200 million, just like the current 200 mill xp caps offer players, if they want to) RS is a Massively Multiplayer ROLE PLAYING GAME. As an old fashioned old git who played paper/pencil/dice rpgs, the purpose was not to have some uber maxed character, that was a consequence of play. The purpose was to explore exciting fantasy realms and to actually play roles. That's where the questing and dungeoneering element of RS do so well. Granted it's not for everyone, but that is the purpose of an rpg. Increased level caps dilute that purpose, shifting the emphasis to level chasing for little reward. Sure this game needs higher level content, but it takes little more than imagination to provide it, increasing the level caps isn't the solution. A Dragonkin quest that allows smithing of dragon metal at lvl 90 smith, but requires you to do the equivalent of "swap spellbooks", you can't mine/smith normal metals and have other disadvantages while making dragon metal for example. No need to make 120 smithing. Constitution items that raise the lvl but impact strength perhaps, no need for 120 constitution. Another combat skill (only adds ~13m xp rather than 91m xp) that raises the combat lvl to 150 (12 lvls) and allows for faster hits/greater hit dodging. How about something I've suggested before elsewhere: composite skills. Add content to high lvl skills but require other high lvl skills to use it, tempering metal requiring herblore and crafting, allowing better smithing of metals. Making better potions by crafting and constructing distillation apparatus. Cutting special, rare trees that can only be found by hunting the weird bugs that eat them and setting them on fire, then using the wood from those trees in special arrows and bows or witchwood battlestaves.... So what Jagex needs to do is diversify it's menu, provide more salads, a few paninis, some different burgers, a nice baguette, maybe even some fusion cuisine just like McDonalds have done. Leaping straight for the uber burger approach to satisfy a number hungry few detracts from what makes an rpg worth playing, it encourages arms races that sap time and effort and oush the average amount of effort a player needs to put in just to play an average game up enormously, and thus it discourages the majority of players, i.e. the comparatively casual. That's millions of people. Millions of monthly subs in the bank. Bad move. So I mean "unhealthy" not just for the player flattening, widening backsides (that's really their problem) but "unhealthy" for Jagex's bottom line. And now for the self interest part: my levels suck massively now, they would suck 8 fold more if all the lvl caps changed! (Ok so I'm not actually that serious about the self interest part. I really do think lvl cap increases are a stupid way to increase high lvl content) Sorry for the tl:dr

I believe many are not angry about them not having boots but about the effect what this gp created from thin air will cause to already messed up economy Which messed up economy is that? The one where I can pretty much buy anything I want from the g.e. in minutes if not seconds (as long as I can afford it) ? Perhaps it's the one which my little character on the screen has to train to get an item or level I want it to have instead of being handed it on a platter. No wait, it's the messed up economy in which this tiny change will have an ultimately (and possibly even immediately) tiny effect (if Jagex's numbers are to be believed and I have no reason to doubt them, nor has anyone provided a decent reason to doubt them). Ahhhh yes it's all clear now. Well why didn't you say so. Sorry for the sarcasm, but there are many players out there (no idea of actual numbers, but in my experience, it's all the ones I encounter. I realise anecdote is not the singular of data by the way) for whom this is just a non issue. It has a negligible to zero effect on our game. It seems to me the only people this will effect are people trying to mass huge fortunes and those lucky few who have hoarded a boot or two. Even those effects are likely to be short term. If I were a betting man, and fortunately I am, I would bet that this is representative of the "silent majority" of players, just getting on with their game. Until someone shows me some concrete numbers, and let's be blunt Jagex are the only people with those numbers, then this remains yet another whinefest over five eights of sod all. And before someone prints off the g.e., correlation does not prove causation. I haven't even had a pair of climbing boots in my bank for over a year btw, so I missed the boat on this one too. As for update leaking: evidence or stfu. This I'd have to see. I'd also suspect, based on what is known about jagex's ability to check trades, that they could easily find in prior to the update someone bought a ton of climbing boots. That person, and the person who leaked to them, could then be dealt with. I'm not having a go at you personally RunescapeVII, I don't even know you! And I realise you didn't bring up all these points but people are treating rumours, faked pics, and opinions as if they were fact and getting riled about them It's ludicrous. Calm down, dear. It's only an MMPORG.