Salvette

Really? I don't recall any other instanced events, though I missed a few older ones.

Total XP and total level measure different things. Total level can be best gained by training all your skills; lower level skills level up faster, and you can get to about level 30 in anything with reasonable ease. Trying to get a high total level will give you a balanced character. Total XP can be best gained by training a single skill as high as possible. The time it'd take to train your lower skills could be spent training Cooking or Fletching even higher, and below about 80, any exp gain is rather insignificant next to the amount you could get if you just stick with Cooking. Trying to get a high total XP will give you a character with with one or two skills far past 99 and the others would be lucky to get to level 30. It gives an absurdly unbalanced character. Total level restricts it to players that train their skills equally. Total XP restricts it to players that only ever train a handful of skills. People with high total levels don't tend to have any major weak points; People with high total levels tend to have nothing but that. I'm not particularly interested in skillcapes. Basing it on total XP will appeal to those that wanted a trimmed skillcape and thus have two 99s in skills they don't enjoy. I don't think these skillcape-hungry people are the sort we want. The most fair way I can think of is by rank. Level 83 in Strength or Cooking isn't very impressive, and that's shown by the rank at that level: around 400,000. Level 83 in a harder skill, like Agility or Runecrafting, will give a rank of more like 12,000. This is a rather good way of showing the value of different types of XP, since the easier ones will have a lower rank for a given level.

I haven't done nearly enough to be able to say much about them, but of the ones I've done, Spirit of Summer was one of the best. I spent most of the quest trying to figure out what exactly was going on, and that's a very good thing.

Certainly no more than ten million for any single part. For most of 'em, between two and five million. They're not much better than my trusty Barrows armour.

What's the point in questing it you're not reading it?

The problem is that it's easy to make money, so in virtually all cases, you're better off making obscene amounts of money and then spending it rather than gathering what you need for yourself. Were this a single-player game, your way of playing would be the only way. If you want an item, your only option is to go and get it yourself. You want 10,000 oak planks? You're going to have to cut them from oak trees and then turn them into planks by yourself. Same goes for combat gear: if you want a Whip, you need 85 Slayer. If you want a Godsword, you need to kill the GWD boss that drops the hilt, and you also need to get the shards of the blade. If you want dragon claws, you need to kill large numbers of Tormented Demons. Money would be virtually useless, and also hard to come by. Unfortunately for those who prefer to train skills by training skills, this playstyle has been made relatively inefficient, at least compared to the exp rates that can be gained by skipping more than half the work. As was mentioned before, this is due mainly to the methods of making money that we now have. A dying breed? There were few enough of you begin with, and with each new bit of high-level content (apart from things like Agility, which doesn't have much effect on how much money you have at all) will generally come a new, faster way of making money, further reducing the comparative efficiency of this playstyle. So yes. You are a dying breed, killed by Jagex. Personally, I play like this whenever I can reasonably do so. It makes a lot of activities become profitable when they wouldn't be if you bought the materials. It's not one of the things I rigidly adhere to, so I can't count myself as one of your number. Given what I spend my time doing, though, it's not really an issue for me. There's no way to buy Agility exp, and my subjects gather enough wood that I never have to train that skill I detest above most others, Woodcutting, in order to train Firemaking, which I enjoy.

Questing is different every time, and it takes thought. Apparently some people find it hard even with quest guides. Agility's less monotonous than other skills, and it's immensely helpful. I find Firemaking relaxing. Combat bores me. Most skilling falls into two categories: 1) Walking between somewhere and a bank, gathering or transforming items, walking back to the bank. 2) Opening the bank interface, withdrawing items, performing an operation, banking the resulting items. Since neither of those appeal to me much, I don't bother with most of the skills that are modified versions of those. Which is just about all of them.

Apart from 20, I'm in total agreement. I've met a total of one player who's worth talking to in RS; as a multiplayer game, it's just not worth all the disadvantages. I'd certainly play this.

Yes. Yes it is. Glad you realise this. The language is not something to be taken lightly.

So you think an entire skill is useless because somebody with an unknown Attack level managed to hit through your Defence level and your rune armour a mere four times? Having a high Defence level doesn't make you invulnerable. It just makes you harder to hit, and influences the random chance of getting hit in your favour.

Yes, I'm going to have to disagree with the second as well. It's not that hard to get a feel for when it'll change, and calling promptly is second in importance only to actually doing your job.

I'm actually not expecting most of my levels. I'm usually not overly concerned with when my next level will be, I just train. The only times I've actually had a accidental level were a Magic level once while teleporting, and a Ranged level and another Magic level from combat familiars.

Nope, quite wrong. It's 62 Strength to be ranked, and 53 Defence. There is a reason, yes: Strength is the only one that gives a boost to combat performance that people can see expressed in numbers. Many players aren't clever enough/have never thought about to realise what the other combat skills do, so they just train the one that gives them bigger numbers. I know this, my brother used to be one of these people.

They're absolutely fascinated with the number you just gave them, and they assume you are going to be just as interested if they shout a number back at you.

No. Using quest guides would spoil the quest completely. I do use QuestHelp, because it gives hints instead of spoilers, and you can't see the spoilers by accident. It means there is help if I get stuck. This way I still actually do a quest, not just run from place to place and spam-click "Click here to continue". I'll take you up on that. Start saving, mate.