tlin

Meh I had a mistype, I meant to say .5% If 2,000 santas is only 0.5% of the market, then you're implying there are 400,000 santas out there. In his 2006 tip.it times article, Duke Freedom estimates that there are 15,000 santas in the game. It's possible he was off by 1-5x, but there is no way he was off by 30x.

Whips now are kind of ugly on the ground. The old look of Whip was much easier to get excited about when you saw it on the ground. Now: Original:

Article 1: I think BTS is great, even if they can't stick to it strictly and have to delay the occasional update by a week or two. It gives me stuff to look forward to, and in a good timeframe. Twitter hints are too short-term (~2 days warning), and Development Diaries are too long-term (can be months or years before the actual update). Article 2: Today I was slaying Dark Beasts at Kuradel's dungeon and (counting me) there were 2 people, which is an ideal number for that space. A 3rd guy joined in, and insisted that the room could support 3 people even though with 3 we all had to fight for spawns. So, I just hopped to a different world to do the rest of my task. Outlining what you think is good slayer etiquette is ok, but everybody will have different opinions on what's acceptable. Most people that I know would say that it's fair game to set up a cannon in any multicombat slayer area that allows it (e.g. Daggs, Specters). I sort of agree with this point. The tip.it times have had some very good articles in the past, by very qualified people. For example, I still look up and refer to the Duke Freedom articles every once in a while even though it's been many years since he wrote them. The current 2 tip.it times, while they're okay, are about the same level as what I'd expect to read in a decently-constructed RSOF rants forum topic. Does the tip.it times staff actively seek out top players to write good articles? Or do they just wait for anyone random with a point to make to submit articles? What I'd really be interested in reading would be: +) Articles on any interesting clan merching issues, by owners of the top manipulation clans. +) Anything written by Chessy, ACIDY, or any of the other uber-rich. +) Perspectives on any YouTube Runescape video community issues, by someone with 5,000 subscribers. +) Articles on any interesting monster-hunting issues (maybe how things have changed with time, drop rates, strategies, impact of dungeoneering, etc), by any of the top boss-monster hunters or soloers (e.g. the people with RSC galleries that have 70 hilts and 40 sigils). +) Any articles about skills or minigames by someone ranked in the top 5 in that skill or minigame (there are a ton of interesting community/change-over-time/etc issues I can think of here for a good number of skills). +) Perspectives from past famous players who have long ago quit, on what they miss, what they don't miss, what they got out of the game on reflection. +) Articles on interesting clan activities/issues by founders/leaders of the most famous clans. etc.

Another way to buy phats without dealing with the hassle of street prices is to get your buy offer for max in right after the GE updates and the price of that phat changes. There are a number of IRC bots that will send out messages as soon as GE updates. The sooner you get your offer in the higher priority it will be, and if you get in quick offers a few times you're likely to eventually get one.

Why wouldn't you want to go with more than 2 people? 3/4 man pro Sara/Arma makes over 1M/hr on average.

Elysian is the best shield for team Arma. Sure DFS might be sufficient, but it has -5 ranged attack, no prayer bonus and no damage prevention. Using Elysian over DFS gives you that tiny bit of benefit in kill speed, reliance on altar, and also lets you have more Hitpoints available for ruby bolt specs. Divine prevents more damage, but that extra damage prevention is unnecessary and comes at a cost of prayer points, meaning that you need to bring extra prayer pots and be more careful when your prayer points are low. Spectral is comparable to Elysian but doesn't help with preventing Melee damage. Elysian isn't better than Divine/Spectral/DFS by a huge margin, but it's better by enough to be the best shield there.

For team Armadyl, I like Elysian the best (over Divine, Spectral and DFS). Elysian can also be used at Sara- if you get last hit and need to tank the minis, then switching to Elysian + Whip helps. I don't do DKs so I'm not sure what's good there.

I have an iPhone, and I've played Runescape on it via Remote Desktop (the WinAdmin app) to a real computer and logging in from the real computer. It's fairly slow though, right click is tricky, and you have to scroll to see the full screen. I've used it to check on the GE and put in new GE offers, but I wouldn't dare do anything like monster killing with it. I think a very useful native iPhone app would be one that lets you view and update your GE offers. That way if you're away from your computer you can still see how things are doing, or if you're in class when a new update comes out that causes everything to crash, you can put all your stuff on GE for min. An app like this would require the users to trust that the app programmer isn't secretly storing and stealing their Runescape passwords though. I've also at some point wondered why there aren't more Runescape apps, and decided that maybe it's because Jagex doesn't want third parties using the name Runescape (trademarked) to make money, since it may imply some sort of sanctioning which isn't actually the case. So even if someone does make a good Runescape app for the iPhone, I don't know if they'd be allowed to keep it up in the App store without Jagex approval. Lastly, here's a computer-based app that I've written that I check very often; it tells me how my bank is doing relative to each GE update, what the best/worst performing items are, and can also graph my own net worth over time: I've thought about making an iPhone native version of this (so I can check from anywhere how my bank is holding up), but think I decided that I didn't really want to commit to indefinitely providing the expected support for such an app (e.g. rewriting the GE scraping code if Jagex ever changed their page formats, upgrading my server if it became popular, etc).

Are those logs just from boss kills or are they including minions as well? Just boss kills. Drop rates from minions can then be estimated by taking the ratio of drops from minis to drops from boss. For example, 12 of my 170 sara swords are from minis. That means for every 158 zil swords I have 12 mini swords, or 13.17 zil swords for every mini sword. If Sword drop rate from Zil is about 1/136, then that means the estimated sword drop rate from minis is: (1 zil sword / 136 zils) x (1 zil / 3 minis) x (1 mini sword / 13.17 zil swords) = 1/5373

I log my drops at Godwars. Here's my last 10,341 Zilyana kills: http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/2067/10341sara.png And my last 4,149 Kreearra kills: http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/221/4149arma.png I also have data lying around from 5,000 Abyssal demons and 10,000 Corporeal Beasts (made by aggregating data from other people who use my drops tracker), but too lazy to dig out those links at the moment.

I had a LS arma trip a few days ago where as 3-man we got Arma Skirt, Arma Hilt and Arma Chest, and then after 1 guy left we got Duo Arma Hilt followed by Arma Helm. I've also had a LS sara trip with 2 hilts, a CS sara trip with 2 hilts, a LS corp trip with Arcane and Elysian, and a Wyvern slayer task with Visage drop.

Hmm, how do you do that here? On RSC you can click the "quote" button for a bunch of posts, then when you reply, all the posts you want to reply to will get quoted. However here when I click on the "quote" button it just brings me right to the "Post a reply" form and doesn't let me quote additional posts.

haha, nice graphic

Short answer: I did a lot of sandwich lady random events. Longer answer: When the GE first came out, I looked for something that I could collect a lot of using the GE, and realized that triangle sandwiches were listed there. So, for the first two weeks of the GE being there, I had in constant offers to buy a lot of triangle sandwiches (they were listed like 50 gp each then). I probably bought the majority of triangle sandwiches from the people cleaning out their bank spaces now that they could do it with the GE, and I ended up with over 30k of them before I moved on to other things.

That's a program I wrote, but I'm not really publicly distributing that one at the moment yet because more users would mean more distinct items it needs to keep track of, and it's already taking longer than I like to update every item after each GE update. One of these days I'll come up with a better algorithm for that.