Creaphis

Great post, Kaida! This tutorial quest is actually really screwy. Both my old main (Creaphis) and my Tuto Island account were made long before either of these tutorial quests existed, and both have credit for completing "Unstable Foundations" in their quest lists. However, Creaphis is able to enter Roddeck's basement and watch the cutscene, but Tuto Island can't! I think the key factor is whether or not the account ever logged in while the "Learning the Ropes" tutorial existed, which is the one with the three-headed green dragon. Even though I wasn't playing at the time, I must have logged in on Creaphis at the right moment to get credit for doing "Learning the Ropes." I didn't log in on Tuto Island until later, so the game treats her as if she did "Unstable Foundations" (the one with the red dragon pet) instead. So anyways, not everyone is able to go down there and claim some lamps, unfortunately. Also, I can't believe I never noticed the wordplay in "Sir Vant's" name before. :blink: Oh, yes! The dear, sweet innocence of noobhood! I started in much the same way... mining copper and tin so that I could smith bronze, then mining iron so that I could endure the fickle whims of the furnace, and then mining one part iron, two parts coal so that I could smith steel and sell my wares to Horvik - and throughout, I would gab with my friends every day at school; we would brag of our respective accomplishments. But alas! Those days of innocence are gone! So how does one recapture the bliss of such ignorance? Answer: one doesn't. :mellow: I think that in my blog I give the impression that I've somehow turned back the clock and returned to a virginal appreciation of this game, and that may be a misrepresentation. The dirty truth is that instead of coming to every new part of Runescape with a child's eyes, I exploit my obsessively-complete foreknowledge of this game so that I may better accomplish the absurd goals I set for myself. By doing this (and by chatting/playing with friends and random folks), Runescape is fun after all this time. It sounds like you're taking more or less the same approach as I am, so... keep up the good work! :smile: One last thing Kaida: make sure you talk to Fred the Farmer (the "Sheep Shearer" guy). He'll give you 2000 coins for a job well done. :wink:

Hooray, another HP pure! :thumbsup: Keep up the good work!

I also just plant my seeds with supercompost and hope for the best. If you did want to be absolutely sure, though, that none of your plants ever die, here's what you could do: 1. Plant all your herb seeds with supercompost. 2. Bind your nature ammy to one herb plant or another (I bind it to the last plant in my rotation, so that I can know when they're all done). 3. 40 minutes after planting, visit your herb plants again, and treat any disease that has appeared. (You can skip the troll patch, as it's disease free, and you can skip the patch that your ammy is bound to, because you can just ask your ammy whether it's diseased or not.) 4. 20 minutes after you began the last round of checks, check your herbs again. 5. 20 minutes after that last round of checks, or once your nature ammy buzzes, go and harvest all of your herbs and re-plant. Ultimately, it's not too much work to farm in this way. Instead of making one complete farming run every 80 minutes, you make one complete run and two partial runs.

Ring World is correct. Another point I'd make though is that you shouldn't bother to spend time ONLY to get junk. Fletching maple longbows (u) is a decent idea, because you also get fletching XP, but if you spent an hour getting 100k worth of some other junk item, without getting xp or any other advantages, then you'd be wasting your time, because you could have spent that same hour earning more than 100k geepees, which are always preferable to junk. The best junk items to gather are the ones that you don't have to put any extra time into gathering, but which just sort of naturally appear in your bank while training. Here's an example: rings of duelling (1). They're locked into the same GE value as rings of duelling (8) (about 3.5k), so if you only use up the first seven charges of each ring you can keep the ring and use it in junk trades. I learned that last trick from the friend who explained all of this stuff to me. It took me a while to get it. :shock:

The Runescape social scene is definitely starting to feel weird. I'm not sure, though, that Runescape players are taking this game more seriously than they used to (there have always been people who take this game VERY seriously), and I'm also not sure that Runescape players are less friendly than they used to be. I think that the average player is every bit as eager to make new friends as ever! But, some other things have changed. I'm not sure what changed exactly, or how, but I have my theories, and the Grand Exchange is one thing that I'd like to point an accusatory finger at. Yes, I suppose that rants about the GE and about trade restrictions are nothing new. But, hear me out. :wink: Back in the old days, before you kids were born, if a player wanted to sell some super sets so he could afford one of those awesome dragon meds, then this player couldn't just jog down to the GE and type some numbers into a box. He or she had to browse forums, post threads, and do their time in Varrock center or Fally park, so that they could eventually find somebody interested in what they had to offer. Now, I know that a lot of people don't miss this process at all. It was time-consuming, it was frustrating, and a few people you'd meet along the way would be just plain jerks. But, all the same, I believe it was community building, in an indirect sort of way. Trading is a social thing! If you want your big business deals to be successful, you have to communicate. You have to be able to recognize that your trading partner is a human being with their own needs, and thus be ready to compromise. And, even though the person you trade with won't stay on your friends list forever, you're still reminded that, yes, there are other people in Runescape, and to accomplish what you want to accomplish, you need their help. Now, thanks to the GE, an individual's journey through Runescape can be entirely independent. Well, no, independent is the wrong word; let me change that to isolated. All the buying and selling that a player needs to do can be done automatically - humans have been entirely removed from the process. People talk about the Grand Exchange as if it were its own entity - perhaps the second cousin of some lesser-known god in Runescape's pantheon - which arbitrarily decides what's going to sell, and for how much. People complain that "The GE isn't selling Item X today," laying the blame on the Grand Exchange God, who works in mysterious ways... So anyways, when we gained the Grand Exchange, we lost a reminder that we all rely on each other (for money, resources and equipment, at least). We've lost this reminder that other Runescape players are people too, and this is causing players to be more aloof and distant, nowadays. Well, at least this is my theory - I'm probably barking up the wrong tree. :oops: But! Even if everything I just wrote is wrong, this is still true: we all need to remind ourselves from now on that everyone we see is a human being, with a life of their own, in which there has to be at least something worth talking about. I believe that the people who play this game are as friendly now as they ever were, but they're just not as good at breaking the ice as they used to be, so we have to go to extra effort to talk to them so that their natural friendliness can shine through. :) This is something I have to remind myself of, from time to time. Admittedly, I often get a bit self-absorbed, caught up in my own silly schemes, and I let some people remain strangers when they could have become friends. So, here's the plan: I'm going to try to be attentive and friendly, to start conversations, and to take breaks from whatever I'm up to when somebody wants company. I hope you'll do the same. For instance, if a pink-haired, level 36 nooblet ever captures your attention, don't just keep mum... Compliment her on her new cape. :cool: Playing the new-and-improved castle wars with this character is so much fun. Challenging! But fun. Now, obviously, some things are hard to do in here when you've got 90 life points. Attempts to capture the enemy flag usually don't end successfully. So, I generally just hang back and help my team in other ways... In other news, I've been making a surprising amount of money lately by growing toadflax and selling it in back alleys so I bought a bunch of big bones and did this... ...until I got this! So, I played with it for a bit... (Don't worry, monsters in houses don't give any XP.) ...but, now I'm having second thoughts about getting 43 prayer. I mean, it's nice, but it's just a convenience. When you get right down to it, nobody really needs it. (Thank you for your houses and time, Dee and Royal!)

Then again, +1 to attack isn't a big deal, no matter what you're doing. If you prefer to have more defense, or if you don't like the mask's style, dump it. If you change your mind, another one is easy to get.

How barrows weapons work is that they degrade while you're in combat, not only while you're attacking. I'd expect chaotic weapons to work in this same way. What does surprise me, though, is that these weapons degrade faster if you're getting attacked by more opponents. Can you prove that this is the case?

Another easy way to get those first few farming levels is by playing the Sorceress's Garden minigame. Each time you steal herbs, you gain 50 farming xp. On this character, I went from level 1 to level 17 by playing it, and then I did "Forgettable tale of a Drunken Dwarf," which brought my farming to 25. You can make a good profit by growing any kind of herb - you don't have to stick to ranarrs and snapdragons Hops, vegetables, flowers, special crops and most bushes are more trouble to grow than they're worth, unless you want to gain xp as fast as possible. If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by farming, I'd recommend sticking to herbs and trees.

Yup! What you see there is him strutting about after knocking Tuto off her feet. However, the tables soon turned... :twisted: It's good to see a clanmate in here, by the way. We pures need to look out for each other. Yes! As I've been saying all too often lately, to friends, clanmates and random passersby, I'm getting there. Eventually. Admittedly, I've been dawdling a bit lately. ;-) But, until I actually do something legitimately impressive, maybe this will tide you over? This was the trickiest quest that I've done so far. I was expecting that killing the mercenary captain would be a simple affair - work through the captain's dialogue tree, get him hostile, set up a cannon, get it firing, and that'll be that, right? But, as I'm not one to give up easily, I started experimenting, and found that if you set up a cannon here... ...and then lure the mercenary captain over around here... ...then the situation almost resolves itself. Almost, but not quite. To make sure that all cannonballs flew where they were supposed to, I also brought a friend down here to, ahem, "distract" the other mercenaries. (Thanks again, Royal!) I faced some other unpleasant difficulties in this quest, partly because of my 9 hp, but mostly because it's Tourist Trap. <_< Oh well, it wasn't all bad... ...but when I finally finished that quest, I was more than ready for a vacation! So, I left the blistering heat of the desert behind me... ...and travelled to beautiful, tropical Karamja! For those who are curious, here are my current bank and stats: [hide=Bank and Stats] [/hide] And I also have LOADS of quest reward screenshots that I haven't posted yet, so here they are, under the hide, where you don't have to look at 'em. ;-) [hide=Quest Rewards] (I never saw the quest reward screen, because I accidentally clicked out of some character dialogue at the exact wrong time. #-o) [/hide] Bye for now.

Aw come on... 1732 days! I thought that was pretty good! :^_^:

Way ahead of you! :wink: If you scroll up, you'll find the reward screen for Waterfall quest underneath the "hide." Okay! There's something that I need from you. Don't worry, it won't cost you anything, and it should be easy enough to oblige. What I need is for you to think back to a time that you've seen pro wrestling. Maybe you were just channel surfing and happened to pause on it for a few seconds; maybe you have a considerable interest in pro wrestling and watch it regularly (that's fine, I won't judge you). Either way, you're bound to have seen, or rather, heard, an announcer, at some point, cry out: "LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Now, if you watch any TV at all, it's also inevitable that you'll have seen the eponymous "monster truck rally" commercial. These are the commercials that you see now and then with thirty action-packed seconds of metallic carnage. Big trucks drive over little trucks, bigger trucks drive over big trucks, and progressively more ludicrous contraptions tear even those bigger trucks to shreds, while a voice-over tells you that you'll see all of this, and more, on Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! You will learn from this gravelly-voiced gentleman that, while a ticket gets you one entire seat, you will only need the edge. Finally, with these things in mind, consider the last time you went out to a professional sports game. It doesn't really matter which sport – my own experience is with baseball, but they're all pretty much the same, in at least one way. You know that moment, where the home team starts piling out of the locker room or dugout, and onto the ice, diamond, court and/or field? That moment when the action is finally getting underway, when the pre-game tension bursts like a dam, and everybody in the stands is going crazy? That moment, when, above it all, a charged-up riff from some eighties classic blares, and the announcer yells out the names and numbers of the home team players like he was a Southern Baptist preacher listing the glories of his Lord? You know it? Good. What I need is for you to shout with me. Shout with me. I don't care if it's 3 am, and your little brother is asleep five feet from your head. I need you to shout with me. There is no need for fear, or trepidation, for you will not be calling out alone. Your voice will be one of many. I need you to channel the strength and power of the pro wrestling announcer. I need you to channel the truck rally advertiser's ferocity, and his malicious glee. I need you to feel the sports announcer's certainty of the glory, the holiness of the team he introduces. Feel the energy welling up inside of you, that absolutely demands to be released, and SHOUT THESE WORDS: CANNONNNNNNNN RAMPAAAAAAAGE!!

Well, the answers to these questions will affect how I approach a great many quest monsters, but the one that's been on my mind most recently is the Temple Guardian from "Priest in Peril." Pures used to be able to kill that overgrown dog with cannons, but that doesn't work anymore... :blink: I probably won't finish that quest for a while anyway, because another point that's come to my attention recently is that as soon as Priest in Peril is completed, it's possible to get crawling hand slayer tasks from Burthorpe, which is a real drag when you have to recoil them... Lots of answers here suggest that poisoning monsters to death with hits of 0 is at least worth attempting, so I guess that I'll make it standard practice to attempt this method before I commit to damaging a monster in the normal way - and thus gaining that dreaded hp xp! I'm not sure how the melee accuracy calculations work, but I'm assuming that if I booze it up until my character's completely sloshed :grin: (ie. until attack is at 0), and if I use a defensive or aggressive attack style, and if I balance out the accuracy of a bronze dagger (p++) with a berserker necklace, giving me negative melee attack bonuses overall, then it should be pretty unlikely that I ever do damage.

1. Is it possible to poison a monster with a hit of zero damage, with either a poisoned arrow or melee weapon? I'd like to test this myself, but am unfortunately unable to, due to the nature of my character (click my sig for details). I think that it could be tested, though, if someone were to drain their strength down to 0 with certain drinks or sara brews, and then equip a bronze dagger (p) and hack away at some monster with it. If you ever saw green damage splats appear on a monster that you'd only hit 0's on, then we'd have proof that it's possible. 2. Following from the above question, if you kill a monster 100% with poison damage, do you get credit for the kill? (ie. When you kill a monster 100% with recoil/vengeance damage, you often don't get credit for killing said monster, so you don't get any item drops, and if a quest depends on you killing this monster, you won't be able to continue the quest if you've killed the monster only with recoil/vengeance. I need to know whether or not poison damage works in this same way. Thanks!)

A series of updates has made it virtually impossible for furies to enter the economy. They'll likely never go down in price again.

Heads started falling off pickaxes when the first random events were added to the game, which was after Runescape 2 was already out for a while. During 2005 I guess. Before fletching, there was only one kind of log. The woodcutting skill was originally for nothing but chopping regular trees, just as the firemaking skill was for nothing but setting these regular logs on fire. You got more experience per log chopped and burned as your level got higher.

And the way that these pickaxes were more effective than bronze is just that the automatically "clicked" the rock for you multiple times in a row. Rune gave you twelve automatic attempts in a row to mine a rock instead of the default 1. I can't say that I miss those days.

No, though I hope that I'll be able to survive the queen wave in the future, when I have a lot more defense and a LOT of luck. In the meantime, I'm building a respectable collection of Barbarian Assault wave 10 tickets. So, I'm not sure that anybody cares about my boring ol' quest reward screens, but hey, I have them all sitting in a nice little folder over here, and it'd be a shame to let them go to waste! [hide=Quest Rewards] In case you're wondering, I joined the dark side. :twisted: There was a 1 in 12 chance that I wouldn't be able to finish this quest. (If you get the starsign "Leo," the quest reward includes constitution experience.) Luckily, the random-number-generator gods weren't against me that day. :cool: [/hide] Now that that's over with, I have some big news! You know how I've been saying that it's time I got a cannon? Well... I spent some time yesterday, working hard, training skills, scrimping and saving, and I finally had enough money to buy... ...my first PARTY HAT! :thumbsup: I know it's only a purple but I still think it's pretty cool. Unfortunately, though, I got a little bit overconfident about where I brought it... ...and lost it to the Jail Guards by Draynor! #-o Oh well... I have enough money left over for a cannon though, so at least that's something. :wink:

This is a very important point. Our arguments over whether players can be trusted are ultimately moot, because it really doesn't matter if we know what content is going to be in updates in the first place. Everywhere else in the game industry, the goal of advertising is largely to give potential players a good idea of what's going to be in a game to encourage them to go ahead and buy it. Jagex, on the other hand, has this peculiar belief that keeping future game content a secret will somehow make it more enticing. I doubt that this belief has any basis in fact. Personally, I'm more likely to look forward to an update if I know what it is that I'm looking forward to, and I'm also perfectly happy to play through game content that has been in this game for years - so, obviously, it's not secrecy about the content that keeps me interested in this game. Secrecy like this is unnecessary, and even counter-productive, because it prevents Jagex from getting useful player feedback before updates are released. With this point in mind, here's what I think is the best possible beta-testing system: - Some players are carefully (or perhaps randomly?) selected to test future content before release. - These players are not asked to keep the content of the updates a secret - they are even expected to spill it. - These players provide feedback about gameplay and design choices back to Jagex staff so that updates can be modified in these important ways before release. Note that this is not an open beta, so most players will still have to wait for the update to get to try it, and they will still look forward to updates as much as they always have. Note also that without any element of secrecy in the beta testing process, we don't have to worry about player trustworthiness, NDAs or "insider trading." Note also that some bugs will always slip through the beta-testing process, but this isn't important. What is important is that major design decisions, which would be considered mistakes if released, are reevaluated before it's too late. Unfortunately, this would still increase Runescape's operating costs, as I mentioned earlier, so we'd still be paying more per month or be getting fewer updates under this system.

It's a voting hat! You can buy them from the games shop in Al Kharid. I like how it's both fanciful and simple, and that it looks good with pigtails. It's odd that nobody else wears them. (Or at least, nobody else wears them yet - maybe I'll start a trend?) Thank you all, very much, for all the positive comments. I'm glad that you're finding my day-to-day wanderings entertaining. All the same, though, I feel that I owe you, my loyal readers, more. I mean, it's about time that I got to the main events, right? The big skill goals? The difficult quests? The merching and money-making? I still haven't even gotten around to making the money for a cannon!-.- There's not much I can do without that, or without all the other tools and supplies I'll have no choice but to pay for. Maybe it's time I put this project into high gear. Maybe it's time for me to start working a little harder. ... Naaaaaaaaah... The last thing I'm going to do is disobey my own commandment to play for fun. Skilling and money making can be fun, but I'm still not quite there yet. I almost am, but not quite. If you're getting bored with the current flow of things, make sure to check back regularly. :^_^: Since last time, I did some quests... [hide=Quest Rewards] [/hide] I rescued a castaway... I failed to impress the scouts... I journeyed to the edge and back... ...and I got another kitten, and sought vengeance! It turns out he's not much of a fighter. Oh, and check this out: I'm not sure that you noticed, but Tuto Island is a level 2 attacker. :cool: It turns out that you don't gain any combat xp inside of Barbarian Assault, so I could hack-and-slash my way all the way to level 5 if I wanted to! However, because I'd rather not die, over and over and over again, losing the game for my entire team each time (it gets embarassing :oops:) I think it's smarter for me to just hide in the safe spot behind the horn of glory. At least then I'm making sure that everyone else gets their calls! That's good enough, right? Right? The above screenshot was taken while I was on a team led by a friend of mine (Thanks Royal!). It's easy enough for a strong player to attract talented teammates, so that group was more than able to beat each wave, despite being one player short, I suppose. When I went back to BA later, though, without a high-level player's endorsement, I found it a little bit trickier to move from one wave to the next. Unsurprisingly, not many people are eager to have a level 22 flower girl join their team. However, more surprisingly, when that noob is the leader, it's actually possible to put a decent team together! I think that confidence is key. You must appear as a confident, capable leader. You must be an effective recruiter. And, above all, you must hope that the people you invite haven't noticed your level... Current stats: That's all, folks. Sorry about all the pictures. I hope your bandwidth can handle it. :wink:

Trust is absolutely not the issue. If Jagex is avoiding the use of beta-testers because they fear that information about their updates would be leaked, then they chronically paranoid, because: 1) Software and engineering companies with FAR more valuable secrets are still able to protect them, because non-disclosure agreements DO work. 2) Trustworthy and insightful testers ARE available in large supply. For starters, Jagex could invite player mods, who have already been deemed trustworthy by Jagex staff, to evaluate the gameplay and design choices of new updates before they're released to the public. If it really was so difficult to find good help, then the software and game industries would collapse in on themselves. Read qeltar's last post again, carefully, if you don't understand this. If you still believe that no trustworthy testers could possibly be found, then you may be suffering from paranoia yourself and should speak to a professional councellor about that. Here's what is the issue, and what always is the issue when it comes to poor development of games and software: COST. Right now, Jagex is releasing new updates weekly or bi-weekly, and is charging its subscribers $6 per month, which currently covers all costs of hosting, development and administration. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that not much of that $6 is profit. If Jagex added another stage of testing to its development model - even if the testers were volunteers - this would increase their operating costs. Jagex would have to hire new staff to administer the beta-testing program, Jagex would have to pay for more test servers, and, because the testers would certainly be finding many problems in the new updates, Jagex would have to hire extra development staff to help resolve these issues in time to release these updates on schedule. To cover these extra costs, Jagex would have to raise the subscription price. The only way that the subscription price could remain the same as it is now with a good beta-testing system in place is if updates were developed more slowly and released less often. Now, ask yourself: would you be willing to accept either of these changes? Higher subscription fees, or slower updates? No? Well then enjoy your glitch-ridden, bizarrely-designed Runescape.

From that I gather that you don't usually listen to the game's own music.

Interesting. Continue.

I tried it once as a level 1 healer, and drinking from the pool only healed me by about 20 life points per sip. Perhaps I'd have a better chance if I worked my way up to level 5 on the lower waves, and massively improved my defense and magic stats. Or is there a better way for a healer to heal him/herself than by drinking from the pool? I didn't have much time to experiment... Oh wow, that's encouraging. Good to know! Then I guess I'll hold off on corp slaying with this character for now. :-D

[i tried it once as a level 1 healer, and drinking from the pool only healed me by about 20 life points per sip. Perhaps I'd have a better chance if I worked my way up to level 5 on the lower waves, and massively improved my defense and magic stats. Or is there a better way for a healer to heal him/herself than by drinking from the pool? I didn't have much time to experiment...