dargonhuman

I try, but I keep getting told that my prayer isn't high enough, and I don't feel like getting my prayer up enough right now.

Dunno how I missed this post last night when I posted, but definitely +1 to this! ATM my girlfriend and I live somewhat far from each other so the majority of our interaction is on the phone, and there are times when she doesn't even know I'm playing RS when we talk. When I do other things (read/post threads, look at webcomics, etc.) she notices because I get quiet and sound distracted when I do say something. Interestingly, I've got mild ADD (which is why I tend to multitask) and RS distracts my ADD enough that I can focus on her better. Even more interestingly, as I was writing this I realized that RS is the perfect game for ADD people - there's such an abundance of content that, unless you're bored with RS in general, there is always something to do, from D&D's, activities and minigames to the plethora of varied skills (and the wide variety of ways to train them) to the quests and PvP content, there is literally something for almost anyone and never a shortage of things to do. If you get bored in RS, you're either not suited for MMOs, your character sucks, or you're not looking hard enough for something to do.

I'm a multitasker, so being able to switch tabs/windows to do other things while grinding out some automated xp (mining, smithing, etc.) is a plus. Additionally, the low system requirements make it run decently while doing other things on my dinosaur rig. Also, RS is a simple game to pick up and therefore easy to set down. Sometimes I've only got as few as 10 or 15 minutes to play. That's not enough time to do much on other MMOs, but in RS 15 minutes is more than enough time to get a load of ores, charge an inventory or two of Fire Orbs or run a round of my active Farming patches. And those are just the things I do on a regular basis. As already mentioned too, RS is cheap. $5/month means giving up one combo meal a month at a fast food restaurant for me, not a problem. Paying $15 or $25 a month means giving up some groceries or toilet paper or some other necessity that I need to survive. I'm not willing to do that for a mere game. And if things do get real tight for me and I can't afford even the $5 for a month or two, then there's still the extensive f2p area that I can hang out in until my situation improves. RS is flexible for people with all kinds of schedules, needs and circumstances. Players are allowed to come and go as they please or need, and it will be relatively unchanged. In the same light, the gameplay is extremely flexible for a multitude of play types - pvp, skillers, merchants, combat monsters, hybrids of two or all three are all welcome and supported. Simple, cheap, flexible, convenient. That's why I don't play other MMOs.

I've never understood the hatred against bonus xp weekends - it's been my impression that the majority of RS players are constantly looking for ways to maximize their xp/hr rates, but when they're handed one of the best ways to do so, people start crying, "It's not fair!" How is it not fair? Disregarding personal connection issues, everyone has equal access to the event - it's not like the weekends are exclusive to members or certain overcrowded worlds - so it's not like some groups of players are favored over others. Jagex have admittedly made several grievous mistakes over the last few years, but bonus xp weekends are not one of them in my estimate. The overwhelming popularity of Pest Control as a low-risk, efficient method of training many skills is evidence that most players welcome and embrace any and all ways to reduce the grind-factor. Even many of the haters of xp weekends often complain how RS is "click-scape" and training skills past lvl 70 is a grind-fest. It's confusing, then, how something as beneficial and easy as an xp weekend couldn't be anything but useful to reduce clicks and grindage.

It makes me wonder what the "rioters" do when their favorite TV shows go on hiatus for the summer - or as the new trend is going, go on mid-season hiatus. Seriously, if you're that desperate for new entertainment, pick up a book. If that's too "lo-tech" for you, then download an e-book. All the fun and escapism of RS, with 100% less grinding!

Did you try adding water to it? Works on old ketchup lol...

Why do I need a reason? It's my account to do with as I please. If I just want to set it to Private for no reason at all, that's my business. Why is it so important that you know why I set mine to Private or not? Are you some kind of cyber stalker?

I don't listen to RS music. As for what I do listen to, lately it's been the sound of my gf's voice as I talk to her on the phone while I play. Otherwise, whatever happens to be playing on my RipStick mp3 player, which has way too diverse of a selection to list here.

"#5: Banking directly from your equipment screen." I totally agree with that suggestion, and would like to expand on it. There should be an option to fill containers (abyssal pouches, coal bags, etc.) from the bank screen. It's incredibly irritating, not to mention time-consuming, to have to fill your inventory, close the bank screen, fill the containers, reopen the bank screen and refill your inventory. If there was a way to either fill the containers from your inventory without closing the bank screen (or better, fill them directly from the bank), it'd reduce a lot of unnecessary hassle. They could just add it to the bottom of the right-click options, kind of like: Deposit-1 Pouch Deposit-5 Pouch Deposit-10 Pouch Deposit-X Pouch Deposit-All Pouch Fill Pouch Examine Pouch This should also be implemented into Shops (in case you use the Note/General Store trick for running Nature Runes) except of course replacing "Deposit-" with "Sell-" I'd love it - it'd make Runecrafting with pouches and smelting with the Dungeoneering Coal Bag go just that much faster. And let's face it, when you're running several hundred Addy bars or a couple thousand Nature Runes, you need all the shortcuts you can get.

Here's a crazy idea... If you can't afford something on the G.E. because it's too expensive, try making it yourself? If you don't have the skills to make it, get them. Yea, it's probably (read: most likely) going to be a boring, tedious trip at times, but the end results will be more than worth it: when you need something, you can thumb your nose at the manipulation clans and make it yourself. Heck, make MORE than you need and cash in on the manipulation clans' efforts to thwart you. That'll show 'em. Things like this is why I DIY as much as I can in the game - the only person I need to rely on is myself, and if something goes wrong, I can turn it into a learning experience and become a better player, instead of sitting around pouting like a child on a timeout.

For some reason, a lot of those pics give me the creeps. I dunno why, but seeing those "out of place" areas where they don't belong, and seemingly above/below where the "cameraperson" is standing makes me feel uneasy. The more I reflect on it, though, the more I think it's reminding me of some particularly surreal childhood dreams where I'd find entirely new, unexplored worlds "under" our own - i.e. I'd be walking in well-explored woods, turn the wrong way on a path and find an entirely new set of woods that weren't there before. While I'm sure everyone's had those kinds of dreams, they always left me feeling unsettled and wary when I woke up, and it seems like these pictures are bringing back those feelings. Anyway, my DIY psychoanalysis aside, I've encountered several of these kinds of misplaced areas lots of times over the years, most of which I was never able to identify. Not sure if they're still there, but there seemed to be corners of a couple Runecrafting altars in the northern-most corners of the Rune Essence mine. I actually started a similar thread on another (now long-dead) fan forum quite a few years ago, and we came to basically the same conclusion - most of the areas are on the same plane, with multiple floor constructs like buildings extending into higher planes as needed. It's nice to see that curiosity on this issue is still alive.

Considering how "Quiet Before the Swarm" ended, I'd say that's a distinct possibility - heck, that was the first thing I thought of when I read that Sir Ewain is "now one of the Temple Knights best agents, and has been granted free rein to pursue the knights goals as an independent adventurer." There's no way someone like that would NOT be involved in what's going on in that quest. I just hope we don't have to wait over a year to get the next part of the series, like so many other multi-part story quests go...

You have your facts mixed up. f2p WAS the whole game before p2p was implemented, and IS the full game. p2p is merely an (admittedly massive) expansion to that game. Saying f2p is a demo is like saying WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness was a demo for WarCraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal, or that Half-Life 1 was a demo for Half-Life: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Now, for the ACTUAL Runescape demo, I've played part of it just past the first Quest, which involves using an ... unorthodox technique to slay an out-of-control pet dragon to save the Advisor. The main draw was the fact that this new Quest not only opens the demo, but also introduces actual spoken dialogue into the game. Yes, the characters actually have voices (including the fast-annoying Narrator). It''s kind of cool, but the female Narrator gets annoying quickly. After that, the content is pretty limited. You can't leave the Lumbridge area (basically the H.A.M. hideout to the Al Kharid west gate and the Furnace to the swamp) and you an only do like 10 Quests (which is pretty much all the Quests that start and don't leave Lumbridge). Being restricted to Lumbridge, you are severely limited in the skills you can train and the resources you can access. Anyone can access the demo account - it's not password protected - and it can be deleted if you want to start from scratch or create a f2p account.

Yea, but they've been saying that since RSC - I'll believe it when I see it. The problem (as I see it) is, everytime Jagex makes some progress in bringing Range and Mage closer to Melee, they undo it a few updates by releasing some new uber-powerful Melee equipment. If they spent a month focusing on just Mage and Range updates, they could fix the triangle. Of course, the rage from the Meleers (which seem to make up the majority of players) would be ... loud and difficult to ignore.

All I can say is, life's not fair, deal with it. At the time of the first XP weekend, I was only able to play for a little over 2 hours because my Internet at home was down and my local library only allows me to be on for an hour a day. But I never complained about it because I know that's how life goes sometimes. You either get over it or waste your time getting mad at something you have no control over. Personally, I'm for more XP weekends - it's a fairly unanimous opinion that the grinding is horrible, so anything Jagex can do to reduce the grindage should be celebrated and embraced, not shunned. I don't understand the argument that "it lessens my sense of accomplishment". Huh? Accomplishment? I didn't realize clicking 100 more times than necessary was and "accomplishment". It was my understanding that getting the levels was more important than the journey. As much as I enjoy the process of smithing, getting from level 81 to 83 in two short hours was even more fun.

Regarding multitasking, I tend to do so as well, but that's mostly because I have a short attent... Squirrel! ... Sorry, had to. But yea, I have a short attention span that stems from an overactive imagination. If I can keep my "hind-brain" distracted with something, be it music, TV shows or movies I've already seen or whatever, I can focus more fully on what I'm supposed to be (or want to be) doing. Sometimes that's Runescape, sometimes it's reading a book, sometimes it's work (used to be homework til I graduated). Hell, even now I'm watching videos from the Internet as I write this. Browsing the forums helps me concentrate on the show better.

I hear that. Try playing RS - even RSC - on dial-up for a few years (as I had to when I started) and you'll realize that 7 second loads are nothing compared to the 30 second delays I had to suffer. Compared to that, a 3-4 second delay is a mere blink of time, and a 7 second delay is a short sigh.

When Runecrafting came out, there was just one type of Rune Essence that was useable by both p2p and f2p and could be imbued at any altar. Greedy morons saw this as a gold mine, created tons of bots to just mine ess on f2p then sell it to members or just to get gp to sell irl. Jagex split Rune Essence into Pure and "regular" ess with the built-in restrictions to prevent this.

Do me Haha, that's funny. I approve. As for my vote, I'm with Mdeoxys, which isn't on Karamja lol. With the exception of the Shilo Village Gem Rocks and the Nature Altar, there's really nothing available on Karamja that I can't get easier elsewhere in Runescape. Even the Nature Altar doesn't really require that one actually go to Karamja to use, so long as you don't mind using the Abyss and have a Glory Amulet. So yea, I don't really go to Karamja much, if at all, in my normal Runescape sessions.

I'd actually be more proud of figuring out some mind-bending puzzle than relying on some random numbers and an invisible "Luck" skill to defeat a boss with weak, easily exploited AI coding. It might have frustrated me to no end, but I feel very good that I finished the EM3 sliding puzzle by myself, even better than defeating some of the "tougher" bosses on my own.

It'd be nice if we could solo with NPC teams (like most other MMOs do). I've seen my friend solo dungeons in DDO with NPCs and it could work in RS... Granted, there'd be quite a few AI issues to deal with, but really, would it be any worse than the hordes of slack-jawed noobs we deal with now? At least AI teammates would be easier to control if they do something wrong!

I have to agree with this for one point alone - it seems like the developers never, ever ask themselves, "How could this fail?" or "How will this make other content fail?" Every time I think I have a great new idea I want to suggest to Jagex, those are the first things I ask myself, and I usually come up with a sizeable list of failures, so I end up just forgetting about the suggestion. But I'm only one person, with a team of almost 400 people to bounce ideas off of and work out the kinks, there should be better updates coming out. For example, the new Elemental Workshop 3 quest - out of 400 people, no one stopped to ask, "Isn't there a better way to move the tiles than putting dozens of switches around the grid?" When the grid spans the entire room, who wants to spend literally hours running around flipping switches, when they could have added a nice little "control box" for our avatars to operate that would let us simply click the tiles, instead of watching our avs run around like idiots for three hours? And why is it we have to wait for Batch 2 of Dungeoneering to save our solo progress? Why wasn't that implemented from the start? It's those kinds of fails that make it into the game that turn what could be great updates into mediocre or rubbish updates, and I think that's what most people try to complain about, but don't know how to complain about it properly. For the most part, I like to believe the majority of players do appreciate and respect the amount of effort it takes to churn out regular updates so frequently, and we may set too high of expectations for some releases, but Jagex could avoid a lot of these problems by spending a little more time on the pre-production aspect and asking "Can this be done better?"

I'm a miner/smither in-game, and I don't even remember the last time I set foot in the Mining Guild... I've found so many more attractive options for training those two skills - particularly Mining - that it's just not worth it. Ooh, 30-some Coal and a measly 5 Mithril rocks? This is worth getting 60 Mining for? Nah, I'll go to the Haunted Mine, or heck, even the Edgeville Dungeon, since even that's got better offerings, which is sad because Edgeville Dungeon mine predates the Mining Guild... The other guilds I've been to are rubbish too; Crafting Guild? Pfft, please, the gold mine near Keldagrim (the one you need the Gold Helmet to access) is better, and less crowded. The only people who benefit from the guilds are f2p, and they can't even access most of them! Even as f2p, I rarely went to the Mining Guild, preferring other mining spots like the Wildy mines to get my ores. Heck, when I was f2p, the Mining Guild was a better shortcut between Falador and Edgeville than it was a place to train. Of course, now it even useless and obsolete as a shortcut, given I can tele to Varrock and use the underwall Agility shortcut in the GE to get to Edgeville faster. If anyone wants to argue that the alternative methods I've mentioned are quest rewards and the guilds are just skill rewards, thanks for pointing out the point Cacmypants was making - guilds, as they currently stand, are obsolete and worthless to anyone who has done the quests. It'd be nice to see the various Guilds become somewhat dynamic, with additional rewards and content unlocked the further you progress, and possibly with some quest-unlocked content. I'm not familiar enough with most of the various quests or guilds to actually make useful suggestions for how to implement this, but in regards to just the Mining Guild, they could take all the higher level rocks currently outside the guild - the mith and addy in particular - and move them in the guild. They could also add a pickaxe store inside the guild that offers lower prices than Nurmof. And that's just for starters...

The worst part I can remember from Monkey Madness was getting the timing right on the jailbreak - those cursed Gorillas were annoying! Otherwise, it wasn't that bad. Just long, and at times, tedious. I had a harder time doing Ernest the Chicken (lever puzzle... *shudder*) than I did MM.

I agree with you; I love a good sliding puzzle myself, but the lever system just makes this one take far too long. I eventually did figure it out, but at the end I felt confused rather than satisfied. Confused because I couldn't figure out why we had to deal with all those freaking levers. Would it have been so hard to add a control box or something our character could use that would allow the player to simply click the tiles we want to use, instead of running our butts off making hundreds of lever flips? Really? I was okay with the counter system - I felt it added an extra layer of urgency to be as smart and efficient as possible, and having to move the gearbox tiles into just the right place was fun, but those darned levers just got on my nerves. I'd probably have finished two or three hours sooner if I hadn't had to do all that running (then waiting for my Run energy to recharge...). All that for a Body body, some wimpy exp and a single Quest Point? Gr... I feel like I should have waited for a guide...