Bartuccio3

Considering 92 in a skill takes anywhere from 60-120+ hours of grind dependant on skill. (According to various sources, this a bit less than how long it takes to max level a WoW character), id say thats pretty dam more than high, especially because this is a SINGLE skill. I'd just like to point out that a lot of skills, particularly "buyable" skills, will be level 99 with excess experience if you spend 60 hours training them in "normal" ways, without focusing on being as efficient as possible. A good example is cooking, even going back to old methods that were available long before RS2 was out: you didn't even need 2m experience to get to sharks, and could attain this much experience in 10-15 hours if you were properly focused and using good methods, assuming you only count time spent actually cooking and not trading for supplies or diy fishing; sharks from 80-99 would take less than 45 hours. There's 60 or fewer hours to a 99 stat, and the hours required are taken based off of the new cook x rates, which lowered the rate of production per hour to people that actually can pay attention and click quickly. Taking 60 hours to hit level 92 assumes a maximum average of 108k experience per hour, which is far below average players' thresholds for most skills if you exclude melee stats. I could really only see it taking so long to reach the halfway mark in any stat with current methods if you're very inattentive, training melee combat stats, levelling mining or fishing, or dungeoneering with a poor team or solo. Given that this leaves well over half the skills being much faster, and also that your sources for a max level WoW character probably just memorised a good quest chain and know how to powerlevel (I tried retail for a month and never hit 30, playing over two hours a day; much more than 60 hours and not even mid-level?) I'd say you're probably over-estimating time investment for RS based on lack of relevant gameplay experience. I consider my 73 dungeoneering to be quite low given that it's higher than other stats of mine that took much more effort to obtain, yet from your previous posts, it seems that since it's 70+ (the high-end requirements for current quests) you think it's ungodly high. I'd really suggest not considering the first 1/13 (or in this case, less than 1%) of a skill to be high level, regardless of what stat it is. Ever since somebody maxed combat the first time, that's what should've been considered "high level," especially as it became easier over time to attain. The non-combat equivalent would probably be having at least 80-90% of the required experience for max level in the skill, imo. Another thing I'd like to point out is that time isn't as valuable to an MMO gamer as you make it sound. MMORPGs are notorious for having much longer timespans required to achieve anything than console RPG games and those already go above 100 hours for a single playthrough on anything with extensive content beyond a straight walk from the start of the game to the final boss with a few random encounters tossed in for lulz.

It may have just been poor luck, but I think there may be some sort of mechanism now which increases monsters' accuracy. It only really seemed that I was taking excessive damage against meleers, but I think in keeping with the theme of the devs trying to punish the metagamers there may be some random check if you have a piece of armor in [x] slot which results in a guaranteed hit on you if you don't. I realise that this isn't the case in regular rs, but there are a lot of peculiarities about dungeoneering, likely resultant of it having started as an entirely separate game. Anybody else notice something like this, or did the RNG just hate me this afternoon?

I disagree. More severs, unless its something like double, would be far less practical. More people spread out=slower spawns=bad. As well, more people will be bossing, so prices drop. As well, people can last longer, and more people boss, as some either hate crashing, or can't crash. All in all, its not practical. I fail to see what you disagree with. The economic repercussions of having twice as many spawns should be obvious, so I didn't bother to mention it; aside from that, everything you mentioned with increasing servers was stated in my paragraph on the subject. Tl;dr?

[spoiler=Clusterquote] Who do you know that you'll only be grouped with bad teammates?? It could match you with good teammates just like doing it manually. Almost no one has tried it so nobody knows for sure. And you're also assuming that the system only matches based on dungeoneering stats. Who knows how it actually works and whether it will always match you with bad teammates or get you good ones? NO ONE HAS USED IT. That's my point. Because people like you seem to have a preconceived notion that auto-grouping automatically sucks because it will only group you with bad teammates. Why people can't give it a chance is beyond me. It doesn't take levels into consideration at all (other than for what floor you choose, obviously), which is the problem. If people in world 117 use the auto-grouping system, you're going to be grouped with four people from world 117. Yeah, there's a very slight chance that you might get a good teammate, but IT'S WORLD 117. It wouldn't be any different on any other world. We know exactly how the auto-grouping system works, hence why no one uses it -- it sucks! I still feel that without people actually using it, saying that it sucks is just plain stupid. I'm not denying that it MIGHT suck. If people try it and if it does indeed suck, then atleast there's something information that Jagex can use to improve it. But nobody uses it and the people who get inconvenienced are casual gamers. The majority of the gamers. Who are looking for a good time and just playing rather than waiting around in the lobby shouting for team requests just to get things going. It reminds me a lot of the times before the GE. Yes, there was that thrill when you advertise your Amulets of Strength successfully against the other competitors and make a sale. But for the most part, standing around Varrock West Bank shouting "Strength Ammys 9.5k!!!" was a boring, annoying and irritating process. GE streamlined the process so much better and made money-making more accessible to the casual gamer. A good auto-matchmaking system can have that exact same positive effect on Dungeoneering. However, in order for the grouping system to work, people need to use it for starters. And that's unfortunately the hard part... If it's anything like the auto-grouping in Barbarian Assault, which would probably be a good indicator, anybody that used this wouldn't know anything about how to actually play through the content, and it would fail miserably.

I'd say a rough estimate for an average 117 team is 1.5-3 hours per large, which is absolutely terrible. Being picky about your team-mates is like adding countless hours onto your life when you consider this.

[spoiler=Long quote from two posts up] That's just plain depressing. I thought I was having terrible experiences, but apparently I managed to pull myself away from bad teams before hitting a really terrible one like that. I'm still waiting to see whether I'm going to get viable solo exp when the new batch is out or if the random teams get better; if not I have a feeling I'll just keep slowly working my way up to having the levels for every skill door and then finally be able to take control of the situation by being an effective keyer instead of having to play the noob lottery and hope that either I have the highest noncombats or that the person who does knows how to rush.

It was mentioned quite a few posts back that adding more servers would be an easy solution to this, but that profitability would prevent that. Really there isn't any way we're going to see additional servers anytime soon based on the low rates of players, where I almost never see more than 3 or 4 servers at maxed player count and even world 2 dips below 1500 overnight. I really don't think it would be enough to solve crowding to add more servers unless we had at least three times as many servers as now. With current technology though, for example a hexcore processor with hyperthreading (12 logical cores, all of which could easily clock to over 3ghz on a reasonable budget for an online gaming company,) if you dump enough upper-end tech into every server, we could easily run multiple game servers out of each physical machine, assuming their bandwidth would allow for it. Even just having two persistent game worlds running on each server box would give us all less headache when dealing with game resources such as slayer monsters, mining rocks, and easily farmed bosses. If there turns out to be some difficulty with having so many players handled by a single machine with multiple game worlds, or if respawn rates are set too low due to population spread (average worlds going to 400 instead of 800 then) the servers could just be adjusted to a lower player limit (fewer players = less system stress, and respawn rates are based on ratio of current:maximum player count.) I know I'm getting a little in depth here, but after lurking a lot I thought I might contribute to both sides a little, with my anti-crash contribution being that suggestion on how to alleviate crowding. As far as crashing goes, I just accept it as part of the game. RS started as a giant PvP death orgy and this brought a large competitive spirit to the game, which it still has. People are going to fight over the resources they need to make their account "better" than everybody else's. Also something that a lot of people fail to account for, as far as when they argue for the rules or "spirit" of the game, is that the way multi-target zones are coded is that anything there is able to attack anything else: if you don't want other people to take things from you, you need to adapt by either out-performing them or leaving and doing something else or finding a different server. I say that anybody making demands of other players not to utilize core game mechanics such as multi-target combat zones is being against the spirit of the game; much as the new admins will promote player safety and sharing is caring crap, we all know this is a very competitive game outside our own circles of friends with whom we (usually) cooperate.

[spoiler=Off-topic rant] You realize you're playing an MMORPG right? Hint: Break down the first three letters. If you refuse to play with other people, just stick to single player games. Most MMO games make soloing optional. This means it is a perfectly valid expectation in such games to be able to play without relying on others for clearing out game content. How is it still an MMO if people all chose to solo their experience grind, you might ask? All playing on the same servers, we have to compete for resources in persistent environments and there is an active economy due to the fact we can exchange harvested resources amongst each other. Another aspect of MMO games that you obviously neglect is direct competition between players, not over server resources, but against each other, be it through a PvP activity or through verbal argument. Disruptive community members drive others away from the community, so often a soloer may just be some kid who's sick of being trolled constantly for not having other people's idea of a perfect setup for his own account; on the converse, there exists content in many games which is so unbalanced/overpowered, your character becomes a god and it is then a waste of time to group with others as you're not doing anything faster than you could manage on your own. As PvP is concerned, particularly with combat, there will often be 1v1 scenarios: what good is your cooperative team when you can't rely on their aid to solve your problems? To say teaming in MMOs is always necessary or that social aspects can't turn people away from grouping is downright hypocritical unless you're playing some watered-down garbage designed around the concept of a children's show, such as Barney. Honestly it's pretty disgusting that you would tell people to quit just because they don't enjoy being dragged down by others that either aren't as good at the game as them, or needlessly insult them, or that wouldn't be accepting of combining real-life responsibilities with gameplay. Just because somebody doesn't have the time or consistency to be devout to a sub-community doesn't mean they should quit the game altogether. Tl;dr: MMO doesn't mean "forced party grinding game", it just means there is a ridiculously large amount of people that all affect each others' gameplay in some way. Sorry that this seemed a little off-topic and wordy, I'm just very opinionated and easily take offence at people telling me my method of playing a game, which is within the design and so-called "spirit" of the game, is entirely invalid just because I don't do something frivolous with no impact on gameplay: in this case training alongside random strangers simply for the sake of surrounding myself with random people. I suppose that if you look at my little rant here, it could be considered on-topic if the developers decided to look through this, consider the current state of solo dungeoneering, and rebalance the skill to be equally fast experience in any size team: the way I interpreted it, the entire second article was about the new skill being training without grinding, however the terrible teams one finds themself in during early levels can be excruciatingly painful due to others' inability to educate themselves on the best ways to do something; I don't mind a dungeon being slowed 2-5 minutes because somebody needs to take care of some regular everyday function irl, but if I'm being dragged through floors slowly enough that I could get faster xp by soloing because people are wasting time with unnecessary tasks, for example making 5 full sets of armor after everybody is already more than adequately equipped, it just gets annoying and tedious, and doesn't feel like the fast-paced dungeon crawl many players expect. I thoroughly enjoy the skill when I have a competent team, but can't stand it the majority of the time due to the general crappiness of groups available to my low dungeoneering level, so I get stuck soloing, which is worse than grinding since it's a reduced experience rate not for making the dungeon as a whole less difficult (as they scale to the abilities of the player(s) involved,) but instead simply because I chose to go it alone. If facades, false socialization, and muttering curses under your breath are brought on by an activity in a game, you're obviously not enjoying it and only doing it for the end result, which I believe everybody could agree on as a general definition for grinding.

The way I've seen most people do is to use the wilderness course until 70+, then switch to Ape Atoll at that level, where 70 is the point you significantly fail less and 75 is the point you stop failing. Agility boosts can help you to fail less when you train, so you might want to invest in some potions or pies. If you hate training agility more than you do playing Barbarian Assault (not that you should hate either of those,) it would be wise to charge a penance master horn to give you double experience until it runs out of potential. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's around 1m bonus xp from a fully charged horn, +/- 250k. Another option, though one I abhor, is the agility arena minigame at Birmhaven, where when you trade tickets in bulk you get a large percentage bonus on the agility value of them, the most expensive option being 1k tickets for over 300k xp, though that would probably take much longer than any other option I mentioned. This place is basically only useful (in my eyes, at least,) for getting items that can't be obtained any other way (some sort of pirate apparel, as I recall) and for doing the Karamja achievement diary.

If this cart is the same one I think it is, just right-click and select search.

Well, i was talking about pure ranged xp and, well, i really doubt he would want to melee them. Ranged would be smarter as far as the experience is concerned, but if he's looking to do buyable skills or is otherwise concerned with money moreso than experience and melee is getting more kills per hour, I could see where this might be considered useful. Either way, low exp gains do sound kind of suspicious for hardcore grinding; maybe we can get an update about this so we don't have to keep speculating? Expect xpx to comment on this and tell you your wrong about the kill/h with your 71 Dung, Just a warning. I'd be the first to acknowledge my lack of experience there. Just saying that if for a given person melee kills faster than range, regardless of what is better when you're doing things the optimal way, then melee would make the money faster.

Well, i was talking about pure ranged xp and, well, i really doubt he would want to melee them. Ranged would be smarter as far as the experience is concerned, but if he's looking to do buyable skills or is otherwise concerned with money moreso than experience and melee is getting more kills per hour, I could see where this might be considered useful. Either way, low exp gains do sound kind of suspicious for hardcore grinding; maybe we can get an update about this so we don't have to keep speculating?

It's not really that it's not a profitable skill, I just don't have access to any method of it that makes enough money per hour for me to want to train it yet is all.

I'm personally hunting for my own hood right now, and having little to no luck even being able to spawn a spider. The idiotic way people act in 117 has turned me off of teaming until I can actually make it into a good group on a separate server. I might just have horrid luck but the teams I get normally give me lower xp/hr rates than soloing medium dungeons... Anyway given how rare the spiders can be, and how rare a drop the hood is from one of these spiders, if I were teaming, I would gladly take somebody that knew what they were doing over somebody else just because they had a hood. It's an awesome piece of equipment, but having it (or not) still doesn't make somebody good (or bad) at the skill, it just means they had better (or worse) luck when training it.

lol whats so significant about having 72 wc? Only thing I can think of is that if you're stuck at 72 in a skill, you can't ever have 1m experience in it.

Well I'm the type of person that just hates to train any skill that's both slow xp and low profit, so based on what options are currently available to me, I despise the runecrafting skill. I recently remembered that I hadn't been using the Tears of Guthix minigame and that at my levels it would give me RC experience, so I trod to Lumbridge, grab my Seers' headband 3, and head on through the hole in the wall, making my way to the snake in a cave. I tell a story and enter to collect my water, and avoid what I consider as toxic waste. As the blue stream I'm catching dries out, I click to move to the next stream and nothing happens; I continue to click periodically over the course of a half minute, and still nothing is happening. It is at this point that the "connection lost" message finally rears its ugly head. I figure that, as normal, it's no big deal and it's just a minor inconvenience for the course of a few seconds. At this point my screen blanks, so I close my browser and reopen it. I figured that, like with combat, if you lose control of your character, they eventually time you out, you usually end up safe and in the same location, and you just get back to life as normal once you log back in. Apparently the devs either don't expect you to be able to lose connection during this minigame, or else they just don't want it to be a regularly received experience benefit. Upon getting back into the game, I find myself with a paltry 1k exp gain in rc and being told I can play the minigame again in 6 days (really 7 but that snake seems to be hellbent on being literal and never saying that 24 hours, +/- a few minutes, is a day.) TL;DR: make sure you have a good connection to your server when you're going to play Tears of Guthix, unless the experience doesn't matter to you all that much. If you drop connection for any reason, you cannot get your wasted time or wasted potential experience back. Oh and if anybody decides to go all RSOF on this thread and reply with "U mad bro?", the answer you'll receive is a short and simple "[bleep] yes." (Yeah, the extra 2k xp makes that much difference to me, lol.)

I'd get dungeoneering high enough to access the hill giant resource dungeon then camp in there. The crowding is extremely low for such a high competition monster. Big bones recently have been hovering at or above ~700 each, so this would be fast and easy money with some decent combat experience thrown in.

Don't tell me people think you need 70 defence to wear gloves? OT: don't raise defence unless you find that you need to; there's no reason to go to 70 unless you actually plan on using Dharok's. PvP armour has the same stats corrupt or not corrupt and at 70 defence, you still can't equip the standard version. Elysian and divine shields can't be equipped until 75 defence, so 70 wouldn't do you any good there either. Piety is much worse than turmoil, so again 70 defence is useless. Could somebody please show me a reason why he should bother getting more defence levels on an account he's trying to keep at a low combat? Imperfections don't necessarily mean you have to go and make it even "worse" if there's no benefit to doing so... No benefit? barrows armor has good defence and if you quested 70 def (i think thats what ruggug is trying to say) you would save HP lvls. Low HP is gimped these days with the damage inflation and I don't remember the last time I saw anybody using barrows gear for serious PvP. All I see anymore is poor people using rune and rich people using Bandos or Vesta's, occasionally seeing some Ahrim's for hy/tribridding. Unless you look specifically at (fairly outdated) ranged tank setups, I don't think you're going to see melee barrows gear the way the current risk system is.

That's not what they're asking for, though it is a good source of information to create a timeline from.

Since it seems like there's an entire layer of the graphics not showing up and you do have Java updated, my first instinct would be to find out what graphics card or chipset your computer has and get the latest drivers for it from the manufacturer's website. If that doesn't fix it, you should search around to find out if your graphics processor has problems with Java or else with RS specifically. If neither of those is returning results, you could always try asking in technical help on the official forums or waiting for somebody more knowledgeable than me to respond. I can't say anything specific on the Windows XP side of this because I've been using nothing but Vista and 7 since mid-09. Hope I helped, and best of luck with this.

Don't tell me people think you need 70 defence to wear gloves? OT: don't raise defence unless you find that you need to; there's no reason to go to 70 unless you actually plan on using Dharok's. PvP armour has the same stats corrupt or not corrupt and at 70 defence, you still can't equip the standard version. Elysian and divine shields can't be equipped until 75 defence, so 70 wouldn't do you any good there either. Piety is much worse than turmoil, so again 70 defence is useless. Could somebody please show me a reason why he should bother getting more defence levels on an account he's trying to keep at a low combat? Imperfections don't necessarily mean you have to go and make it even "worse" if there's no benefit to doing so...

Very good idea, although I'd like to expand on it. For sake of accessibility, the tiles should have a right-click option to super-impose numbers over the image. The payment for easier puzzles should reduce the grid from a 5x5 to a 4x4, and perhaps an even more expensive option to create a 3x3 puzzle. As to people complaining about the lag, I definitely see that this is a big problem. It seems like the lag got worse after the new trails were implemented, though I haven't done a clue scroll since very shortly after the new ones came out so it might just be stress on the server from running too many clues in the rush to get new rewards. But there really is no reason that puzzles should lag. PDA devices in their early days commonly had 4x4 16 puzzles available, and had no lag. The NES/FDS original version of Final Fantasy had a 16 puzzle available as a minigame that could be accessed from the ship in order to gain money outside of fights, and even on such an early system there was no lag. Anything that can't handle a slide puzzle is obviously misusing the system resources of where the process is hosted or else being a little bit too cautious in excessive checks for server-client consistency (that lag you get on occasion if your visuals get too far ahead or behind the calculations for damage on the server is a good example of this.)

There shouldn't be any offence that could only be reportable if somebody has spoken recently, unless it's an offence the requires talking, such as offensive language. This is even more of a problem on the German language servers, unless they've changed it since the last time I used those; you literally can't report anybody for anything if they haven't talked since you have to choose what you're reporting out of a listing of your chat log. Personally, I couldn't care less about bots, but macro reports aren't possible without it being an auto-typing macro. You also can't report somebody for scamming unless they were advertising the trade: say for example, you are trying to buy a super-poisoned weapon and they swap it out for an unpoisoned version, obviously worth less, and you don't notice. If you had been saying that you were buying a dds for max trade and you wind up with a regular dagger, and they never spoke, unless you can report the [x] wants to trade with you message now. All of these efforts being taken to set up an automated customer support really seem to be ruining the game a lot more than they're aiding it.

But you're going to have to do a lot more prepping, no? Times have changed. Making sure you're prepared for the elite stuff is a must. Wouldn't it be a lot easier to prepare in members? F2p is quite limited. At any level, p2p should have access to faster experience and better moneymaking. The only reason not to become p2p earlier, rather than later, is if there are real-life circumstances preventing you from doing so or limiting the length at which you could be p2p. For example, if you only had enough time between education, work, and other real life engagements to play for one hour a day when not on holiday, staying f2p in the beginning of your account's life could be a good option. Really the only reason I see not to have p2p though is if you really can't afford $6USD a month, if you aren't going to be actively playing for an extended period of time, or if you're underage and don't have parental consent (which the, in my opinion, overpriced game cards have somewhat eliminated as an obstacle.)

Yeah, forgot that f2p can't use waves... Guess the deaths then instead of bloods. From what I've seen with videos and guides involving those with higher levels, they tend to prefer range and melee armor mixed when tanking, especially for the shades which seem to be a mix of range and mage that can't be protected against. I'd say if you're keying you should focus on binding defensive gear and then getting mage robes to switch to for offensive bonuses as you need them. Maybe look at having a robe top when you can bind multiple items. A tank is a very peculiar case compared against the standard fare of mains and melee-based pures that make up the majority of accounts. This is pretty interesting to come up with a strategy for.