Isthatok

Pure epic :D

Really appreciate the effort you've done for this, Slaya. I'm glad you were the one to step up! I may have an idea for the list, although it may be controversial to some. One thing that has always come to my mind is that the active list has been what I would consider a misrepresentation of the actual top 250 f2p list. Clearly there are well over 250 purely F2P players above 1012 total. In fact, we were able to identify 1000 of these players above 1311 in the Archives on pages 73-79 over a year ago. Although many of these players may not necessarily be active anymore, there are still a great deal of them who are, and have never heard of this list. At the list's current state, I feel it would be highly inaccurate to exclude these players; to put it harshly, it's like pretending they never existed. My proposal is that the active list be truncated down to 100 players, which would bring the requirement up to 1400 (at rank 100). The converted list can remain at 250 players if you want, since its minimum requirement is already very high (1467 at rank 250), but currently it is a testament to how inaccurate the active list is. This proposed change may be demotivational for some, but the truth is that many, if not all, ranks (and even mine) are extremely generous estimations of the players' actual rank, and that the #250 player now is really about #3000 in reality. I don't think denial, or even plain acknowledgement of that fact is a solution. One of the reasons why these players (let's say, below 1200 total) don't come here to join the list may be the fact that many of them are ignorant to the possibility that they may even be considered as a top free player. I myself was unaware of this list until I reached about 1280 total (this was before dungeoneering), and the minimum requirement for the list was coincidentally 1311 at the time. At the time I began to associate with others around my level who aspired to be on the list, and that's really the only way I came to know about the list. At this point, there were two things that ultimately led to my passion to enter the list: (1) Enough dedication and time spent on pure F2P to acknowledge the fact that I could be amongst the top players, and (2) there were people at my level who knew about the list and directed me towards it. Without these two things, I would not have known about the list. Even if 1k totals qualified, many of them are not dedicated enough nor consider their accomplishments significant. Also, few if any of their peers would know about the list and therefore they would not know of this list. Players tend to look for incentives before raising their skills further. As free players, that is especially true since there is not much else we can gain off leveling our skills this way. I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but it's true for many. Those who know about the list are influenced by the two factors I mentioned are more likely to be these people. I understand that with the removal of F2P highscores over a year ago the list has just become less and less accurate (even my rank should be markedly lower), but perhaps it's time to minimize these losses and cap at a more competitive level, and thus a somewhat better representation of the top F2P community. Let me know what you guys think. I know there are a lot of players between the 1000 and 1400 total range around here so I'm sorry if I offended you guys in any way. My post is by no means meant to hurt or scare you guys away. You are all welcome to be a part of the community, but my opinion is that the list should be a better representation of reality, and the only way to do that right now is to truncate it. Isthatok

Probably the best decision anyone could have come up with. I am fully supportive of this, Lord Slayas. Good work!

Word. I shall edit my post accordingly. Though I can't seem to make sense of your last half...

Very well then; I trust that your decision will be for the best. I do have my own opinions on this though:

So I'm guessing free players are allowed to level up members' skills to level 5 beginning whenever they implement the update? My view of it is that since it's available on a free-to-play server to do this it would be allowed. Any opinions on this?

Nostalgic Memories Written by Isthatok October 7, 2012 You know you've reached adulthood when you realize there are some things that you can no longer do. That thought struck me as I was talking to L0rd Slaya earlier today and reading the articles on his website - or technically, yesterday, as it is now past one in the morning and I am still up writing this. I'm sure that, like myself, a great portion of you guys reading this have come a long way playing Runescape over the years. As several of you know, I started playing in 2004 and retired just about a year ago in 2011 as No. 2 on the list of top free players. Nowadays, I'm working towards a demanding engineering degree, and I would never have the time to return to my previous lifestyle - even if I wanted to. Heck, I even got myself a wonderful girlfriend too. But looking back at all those years now, I can't admit that I regret having come this far in Runescape - even now as I am writing to our beloved community. In fact, the reason I am posting is to thank all of you for being a part of this rose of a community all these years, and offer some insight from personal experiences I'd like to share. Earlier on, we were discussing some of the future changes introduced in the Evolution of Combat beta. I ran around exploring through the beta on my main account, Isthatok. Quite frankly, I was expecting to spawn as a maxed out character of level 200 - but instead I noticed that I had no armour, and a combat level of 4 (don't worry, I'm still maxed out on the real version). It was like starting fresh again, and several memories from my childhood came back to me. Although the tutorial was so different, I felt like a "noob" again - for the first time in eight years. I remembered my first hustle with a goblin, and the time I got too greedy trying to kill one cow too many. Of course, I died both times. All the combat levels of monsters I had had engrained in my head over the years had changed, so I set out to try and find the biggest and baddest monster on the future Runescape (to my disappointment the revenant knight, now level 130, that I had once hunted so passionately for is now outleveled by a mere hellhound of level 132). But my point is that everything felt so new. I began to think about all those hours I spent training on rats and skeletons in the Varrock sewers, and how I never quite passed 100K in gold until I reached level 90. I was quite possibly the most inefficient and poorest player to reach that level. But it was not only the thrill of getting better that kept me going - I would not have made it this far had the free-to-play community not played a part in that too. Very, very few of you knew this but I'm only eighteen, and if you do the math it won't take you long to realize that I started playing at the age of ten. Moreover, I took on maintaining the list at fifteen. As you would expect, I was probably the most intolerable, stupid, annoying and arrogant kid you would ever consider talking with back in the day, but quite a few members of this community were able to put up with me, and even be friendly in doing so. Amongst these individuals was Syzygy. He's still on my list of inspirational people to date, and I highly doubt he remembers this but when I first met him (he was level 124 at the time), he was very nice and when he mentioned that he was purely free-to-play I guess that was when I thought maybe it was possible after all to reach 126 in free play. However, I pretty much forgot about the incident until I found him fishing in Port Sarim some time later (then 125). I even took a screenshot of him - still not knowing that our list existed. Eventually I kept spotting him and started joining his chat, named Syz Place, and it became my aspiration to stay free-to-play thereafter. He was truly nice to everyone, and has continued to be an inspiration to me throughout the years. There are a lot of names to mention, but I also met Huldarych as one of the oldest names on my current friendlist. He has been a supportive friend and eventually entered our list for some time. He even willed himself to join the clan I started and administered for eleven months back in 2008-2009. I haven't seen him in a long time and I assume he too has moved on but I wish him all the best. There's tons of other people out there on our list and have made a great impact to my time here - you know who you are and I thank you all for sharing these experiences with me. I honestly can't fit eight years of memories into a single post like this so I guess we'll have to settle with this much. Plus it is now past two and I really need to sleep. For everyone else out there, just know that little things and actions can come a long way. So now we come back to the present. In the next few years, I'll be balancing my life on more important things - education, work, and romance. And then after that? I'll be working and hopefully married for the rest of my life! All this means that I will never try to get those last 5 levels or dungeoneering, or chase any more virtual goals because I not only have no time - there's just no passion or reason to do it and I have bigger and better things to do, like building bridges and stuff. I'll miss my time here on Runescape as a "noob" and there are experiences that I will never revisit. As I have been doing for the past year, I will try to stop by from time to time to chat or try out new updates. As for you guys, I wish you all the best in your future endeavours both in Runescape and in real life. Everyone has their own story. I hope that you guys would be willing to open up and someday write something like this as well! Thanks also to L0rd Slaya along with his website crew for taking care of the community so well. Keep up the good work! See you guys around! ~Isthatok

Hey guys, Just a small blurb from me - I couldn't find the archives from last year on the new site so here's the link to it if you'd like to add that to your site :) https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B66nmDjFWLCZOWRjMWU5NWEtNDRmMi00MWI3LTk3NDYtYTAyOTE5ZWUzN2Y4/edit?hl=en_US Cheers, Isthatok

Hey guys, I haven't checked in for awhile now but I'm loving the new website, especially with the flags. Keep up the good work! Just a heads up that on the Active list that my total xp was somehow overestimated. It's currently 302,235,634 (last logged in: 80 days ago!). Compare it to the value on the Converted list and you'll notice that it's barely changed at all. Best regards, Isthatok

EDIT: Don't know why it doubled posted. Oh well.

Hey guys, I hereby recognize L0rd Slaya as the newest Top 250 F2P List maintainer officially as of May 19, 2012. We have moved our community to his website found via the link below. http://purefreetoplay.cu.cc/ We'll still have a tip.it thread in addition to this one (which will hopefully be preserved or at least archived). http://forum.tip.it/topic/311234-new-top-250-f2p-skill-total-list/ Happy Scaping!

The final 82-page Archive has been released. You can either view it on Google Docs which offers pretty bad quality, but from which you can download the original copy: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B66nmDjFWLCZOWRjMWU5NWEtNDRmMi00MWI3LTk3NDYtYTAyOTE5ZWUzN2Y4&hl=en_US Or you can download the document from PDFCast (takes quite a few clicks and captchas to get to): http://pdfcast.org/pdf/top-250-f2p-archive-11-11-11-pdf Isthatok

Thank you everyone for your kind words. The Archive is now complete and will be released in PDF format within 12 hours after the game update. I mentioned before that I won't accept any more names but I don't see why not anymore. I will continue to accept names up until the hiscores no longer become available. At this time I would like to thank every single one of you for contributing to this effort. Doing this has been a somewhat emotional experience for many of you, as well as for me. I solemnly thank all of you for your combined dedication. Isthatok

Sneak preview of the 80-page archive to be released tomorrow. (EDIT: 81-page now as I have included Wertyue's experience gain records and 200M achievers)