Quyneax

Well, imagine you take a sine wave and cut off the top off each peak - this is the money stakers would sell, the stuff they don't need to rebuild. When they drop below zero, they have to get money elsewhere - bossing, merching, RWTing. Staking is zero-sum, but there are definitely high peaks. Note: this is not a math essay. Don't bother correcting the terminology.

For some reason, the skeletal trio members still have their overhead prayers... so it is possible! The responsiveness of the prayer buttons (and abilities, and quickprayers, and action bar) is indeed horrible. They should at least allow us to 'lock dragging' if they can't make a decent drag-and-drop system.

... Wow. It's much bolder than I expected of Jagex. It seems to me that it could be a smart thing to do, if you wanted to fight RWT, but I'm not sure the balance is right. The price of bonds needs to be quite high as gold farmers can achieve high gp/$ - bots don't cost much to run, apparently. The price of spins is ridiculous as well - Jagex is really making a joke out of that. 14 days of membership will never equal 8 spins. It's an insult to the players to even offer the option to spin for that much real-world money. I understand that it is required to balance the in-game cost, but if you are going to offer only 8 spins per bond, you should not give the option to buy spins with bonds. All that is fairly trivial, since you are still buying in-game benefits for real-world money, that is, it's still RWT, which makes the competition in the game less fair and fun. I don't like RWT and I still don't support it, not here, not anywhere. If I have to buy access to a game, that's fine, but I want the game whole and unmarred by further real-world money intrusions. If you mingle real-world cash with the game, you inextricably link and mix the game with the real world as well - essentially, the real world becomes part of the game. That is not what I play games for.

There's the Al Kharid scorpion mine resource dungeon, which has five impling spawns and some gem rocks. There isn't much useful to do there otherwise, though. Maybe you can quickhop to catch lots quickly.

Floor selling is a great example of emergent gameplay and the cost of AFKing. I don't mind it that much because I don't think it is imbalanced. The biggest problem is that Jagex took no steps to officially implement the system, which means it's still somewhat prone to scamming and rank sellers making ridiculous amounts of money. Similarly, auto-overloading at the start of a floor should be implemented, perhaps as an elite diary reward or whatever. "Kill a boss while under the effects of an overload" is a perfectly good task (similar to the 5-minute floor challenge) and so is "Give Thok 100 (noted) overload (4)". The clear emergence of x:1 c1 small, 1:1 c2 small and 5:5 c6 large as the dominant standards for dungeoneering should also have been implemented, perhaps by allowing people to save default configurations. The auto-grouping system should have been improved the moment Jagex saw it was deserted, which was straight away. All of these fixes would solve some of the social aspects, that is, it makes it better to do floors in a row, which does improve team cohesion, and making it less worthwhile to manually make a party (of randoms) and therefore less worthwhile to select people before dging with them.

I don't think this is true. Just before EoC, the knowledge of the game and the interest in efficiency was higher. EoC and its regular reshuffles have all but killed the interest in exact game mechanics, simply because the required amount of research is too great. It has to be redone every time Jagex 'fixes' something, which is very discouraging. Some people make valiant efforts of course, and skilling is understood very well (because that hasn't changed as much, I suppose) but I think the knowledge of EoC mechanics hasn't spread so far yet. That said, your point stands in a way: Divination is so simple, that everyone can understand it and train it at near-maximum efficiency. That this also makes it incredibly boring is something Jagex is willing to put up with for the sake of a level playing field. Apparently Jagex hasn't realized that strategy and tactics are a key part of gaming, as every shooter, rpg [...] card game and board game proves (also randomness, which is really quite lacking in Divination as well).

You need at least three pieces to get the damage reduction. I'm guessing you want helmet + either boots or gloves to be good armour (Nex, Ports, Glacor/Automaton), so you should get war-priest boots or gloves if you go that route.

There are now 1500 people at 99 Divination exactly. Suomi is rank 1501.

RSwiki mentions the following: "If wearing three or more pieces, there is a 1% chance per piece (starting at 3% for three pieces up to a total of 6% for the full set) whenever you take damage, that the damage is reduced to 10% of the original damage. Note that even if you have a mix of the armour, you still retain the bonus to negate damage. For example, if you wear a Warpriest of Saradomin cuirass and greaves, but Warpriest of Zamorak boots and gauntlets, you still maintain the 4% chance to reduce the damage to 10%." Which works out to a damage reduction of 0.05 * 0.9 = 0.045, or 4.5% overall, assuming five pieces are worn. Hybrid helmets, boots and gloves are universally horrible (because the non-hybrid counterparts don't reduce accuracy anyway), but perhaps it's worth wearing one bad hybrid piece to get 2.7% damage reduction, with top and legs as 'useful' hybrid.

If you play(ed) with 'obnoxious fools', then that's probably down to you, due to the lack of organization of not-'obnoxious fools'. Dungeoneering is a social skill, much more than any other skill in RS ever was or is. If you want to secure the long-term availability of decent/good/great teams, you need to use clans or friends chat. The social pressure to dg in a way that's good for the team (rather than the individual) isn't strong enough in a random world, as there is no way to track 'obnoxious fools'. Since soloers now get such good xp rates, there is no reason to even try to team up anymore. I'd argue that perhaps there wasn't enough incentive to do so in the first place - look at how quickly warband fcs set up and compare that to dungeoneering chats. So yes, they 'ruined' - massively changed, and made less viable one of the core concepts - the skill by reducing the incentive to team up. It is also in part to blame on Jagex' absolutely horrible auto-grouping system, which first of all should default to 5:5 larges and secondly should join people based on friend, ignore, friends/guest clan chat and clan bonds. E.g. make a team out of five clannies instead of out of those five randoms who have eachother on ignore. Edit: Teaming up did get a lot easier with keybelts and EoC, which made it very easy to solo every guardian door and most combat-based puzzle rooms. Mgting to a difficult room is almost unheard of now, it's just your mime/ports/boss and such.

I think that's chimes you receive, so that people who had all their crew die on them and can't complete any voyages will be able to start back up or something.

I'm not sure how significant Torment is compared to leeches, but that might be it. Another thing might be that your equipment simply doesn't cut it.

87 divination. Edit: Got the 'of Daemonheim' title :).

I don't think you can take screenshots in fullscreen (certainly couldn't pre-NIS) so that's out.

[hide] Future updates don't make the skill useful now. Now, we have an extremely bare-bones 'skill' with no interesting parts. Releasing an interesting update, with actual work put into the design, doesn't stop anyone from releasing updates to the skill later on. Look at Dungeoneering, which has received the task set only recently, after several years. So you expect a fully fleshed skill on release? Look at Summoning, Dungeoneering, Construction. Neither of these were "complete" till some years after their release. Heck even Dungeoneering still lacks Floor 61 and is therefore still not complete. It might feel bare boned now. But give it a year and I'm sure it will be more fleshy =3 [/hide] I expect a skill that can stand with the other skills on release, yes. That means that after ten years of updates, I don't want to see a skill that would be suitable for RSC days. Now if Jagex' update rate, which is low (as you refer to with f61) was much higher, I might accept a bare-bones release, but since it isn't, I don't. Summoning 2 was fairly fast (~2.5 months) and Dungeoneering was released in batches by design, with about 3 months' wait for Occult, then another month for Warped (however this was pre-announced). Divination has no announced batch 2, and it's certainly much more annoying to level than Summoning and Dungeoneering were on release. Also, I think the game has changed, as more people are now high-levelled, heavy grinding more common (the race to 99 was over very quickly). After so many years of no new skills, you can't just release a really boring grindy skill and 'force' all the maxed/near-maxed players focus on that skill exclusively. Although apparently, you can, so maybe I should say 'shouldn't'.

What xp/h are you getting for your 23m?

Future updates don't make the skill useful now. Now, we have an extremely bare-bones 'skill' with no interesting parts. Releasing an interesting update, with actual work put into the design, doesn't stop anyone from releasing updates to the skill later on. Look at Dungeoneering, which has received the task set only recently, after several years.

Since Jagex has so much trouble balancing different ways of obtaining the t90 weapons, they should do what Hedge suggests and make all styles obtainable from the same source. It's a guaranteed balance, even if it's a bit boring. It may be difficult to admit that you can't design a certain thing well enough for it to work, but that's what needs to be done.

A huge number of people not ranked in attack but ranked in overall disappeared after OSRS. Did all the skillers leave EoC or what?

I'm pretty sure you do :P. Certainly Bavarians, Berliners and other 'cool' areas, also certainly the east-west distinction especially in older Germans. Don't forget the German bundesländer are similar to the US states in terms of powers - unless a task has been given specifically to the federal government (foreign affairs, military), it is a matter for the bundesländer. Some of the names might be a bit long for casual speech though, so maybe they'd be using nicknames or other allusions that we don't get. You certainly see regional identity almost everywhere. Edit: Prussia also doesn't exist anymore.

That's what I thought of, guessing that's the case for ganodermics/ascensions then as well?

The only acceptable resource drops are, in my opinion, prayer xp (bones), slayer xp (since he's not assigned) and tectonic energy (plus other unique V-only drops). Dropping more runite bars is just going to make mining even more useless, and when we do get around to fixing that, it'll be easier without huge resource drops competing. The best team bosses are still tormented demons and dagannoth kings, because they scale to your level and team size without actually scaling, if you'll pardon the terminology.

Having the same assigned doesn't help in the case of mutated jadinkos, as someone at 81 slayer tried to invite me and failed. Not sure if the slayer level is relevant.

No, except hex. I think longbows should have added range, with ammo determining damage type - there is no reason you couldn't use brutal, bodkin and broadhead arrows instead of tying damage to bows.

Or it's one month after the release. Exactly. If Jagex really was all about selling spins for Div, they would have opened the skill up to lamp use weeks ago. But they waited exactly one full month which is quite a reasonable timeframe IMO. A month is far too long. So many maxed players wasted so much bonus xp by not being able to use it on such a bad (boring, slow) skill. Divination is designed to be a bonus xp sink, with the low xp rates and extremely boring grind. Not allowing bonus xp on Divination is like not allowing effigies on runecrafting (back in the day). If they had really wanted to make an 'old-school' gathering skill, they could have, easily, and it would've had urns, it would've had a minigame, it would've had about 50 different resources that aren't even worth it (but hey it looks cool), it would have an AFK method and a high-attention method, it would have some profitable resources but none of them worth it and finally the mid-tier resources would be the best xp/h. None of this holds for Divination. The only thing that gathering skills have in common is that they are slower, therefore better to use bonus xp on. I conclude: Jagex designed the skill to be a SoF promotion magnet, and they added some popular rhetoric to make it seem like they were meeting the community's wishes. The one month is just part of the rhetoric. It isn't based on the actual use of the bonus xp ban, which is to allow a fair grinding contest. The contest is over, the first to 99 has been recorded, and nobody else will be remembered until someone hits the first 200m. If 200m is too far, then you should just allow bonus xp past the first 99. But since Jagex doesn't care about any of this, they just set the longest ban they feel they can get away with because they think it'll be popular (I think it's popular only because it delays the inevitable SoF promotion, because I don't think anyone enjoys grinding Divination more slowly).