Arcley

It's like they want to imitate Maple Story or something. The new rwt features are remarkably similar. - Gachapon is functionally much like SoF - A special currency linked to ingame money - Massive amounts of cosmetic items bought only with this currency We're only missing 2x exp and item cards now.

Think about this way. With bxpw gone you can freely train buyable skills whenever you want. No longer waiting six months just so you can get levels in a skill without feeling like you're wasting money. They'll probably ruin it with new microtransactions though yeah.

I know I'm nitpicking but since you said the most efficient and I know the efficiency ppl like to argue about details (just look at the 200m thread)... If you swap the chapel and the menagerie, you can utilise all four exits of the latter and reach all the portals going through three rooms rather than four. I know. It's groundbreaking. Anyway I think the best advice is what rooms are best to have near the entrance and that's already been given. Specific room arrangements aren't really that important because let's be honest. The best exp isn't about saving two seconds here and there walking a slightly shorter distance. It's about playing a few extra hours instead and getting a thousand times higher benefit. So I think most of Deathlord's advice is good for a full featured easy to use POH, even if some of the possible activities aren't the best use of a player's time. Gotta have fun sometimes too.

Nonsensical apologetics on your part. So just because we have legitimate concerns with this update, we shouldn't voice them? We should pretend to like it? The problem isn't "ZOMG, they didn't make the game easier, time to complain". The problem is that the update failed to accomplish its goal(addressing the fundamental problem of limited monsters/crowded spots). Nah, it was more about you focusing on the exp efficiency of the update rather than monster locations/crowding. Which seems a separate can of worms completely. Not sure what you were hoping the update would be like but if both players got full exp, then that would totally force anyone who cares about their efficiency at all to do duos exclusively, not to mention *double* their exp rates. It wouldn't even fix crowding because people would be doing twice as many tasks as before. I can't see how they could've solved those issues with this update. What actually helps is adding a lot more tasks so people are spread out more, and maybe new locations to do the old ones (although this is a sloooow solution, might be worth it trying to come up with better ideas). Speaking of which... That would actually be bad for crowding if it works for obvious reasons.

If the whole point is getting xp, then that's something that needs to change. Doing activities socially is much more fun and personally fulfilling than doing it on your own, and Runescape has trended towards this fact, and it's not an unwelcome one. If all you care about is xp, all the power to you, but lots of players don't play the game for that. I certainly don't. There are already plenty of social activities to do in RS which allow you to get a decent amount of XP. This one is egregious because rather than making a slow skill(one of the slowest) to train more bearable it only compounds the problems already present. And having one more social activity hurts how exactly? I really really don't see the problem. One update that doesn't make the game needlessly easier and people are already complaining. No wonder game companies are so keen on introducing power creep.

While these are all valid modes of travel, many of them have some sort of requirement attached to them, quest, skill, or activity related. What's the problem with that? You'd take quest rewards away just to make the game easier? I don't like that logic at all. The game needs rewards, something to keep progress more rewarding. While we're at it, let's add a lodestone to gnome tree stronghold so we can remove spirit trees from the game! Half the teleport spells are already useless because of lodestones.

This game now more pay-to-win than ever. Pathetic.

I think this qualifies: myself I never even did penguins, pointless minigame even if the rewards were decent, so this isn't much of an update.

This made me lol! Many of the updates since New Year have been considered some of the best we've had in ages (as a general consensus) with only 2 major stinkers (SOF and Effigy nerf effigies) and a few that whilst not amazing and aren't exactly bad either. Fixed that for you. The nerf at least diminished the damage caused. Otherwise spot on.

Sure, you can go out of your way to hunt wizards (that have a tendency to teleport right before you reach them, is that good design too?), but it's in no way the main focus of the activity. Most people still seem to afk 1-3 islands. And why not. It was designed to be good exp for no effort. And now it's *their* fault the content is boring instead of Jagex's? In no way is this afk-training promoting activity "good design" or "engaging" or all the other cool words you used. Also the gameplay doesn't change as you level up. Mid level nodes + in rare cases wizards is what you're always doing.

LOL @ Runespan not being about doing the same thing repeatedly. That is all.

I, for one, don't understand what's wrong with adding some diversity to the game mechanics. How exactly would this ruin all pve content again? If anything it'd spice it up if implemented well.

I'm not even sure why you'd argue if Runespan is a minigame or not because that's completely irrelevant. The point is, it gives best rc exp in the game for the least effort out of any runecrafting training method. Those two don't belong in the same sentence. A much better way to balance it would be to tune the most demanding content to give the best exp rates, and have content like Runespan at a happy medium where it's not useless (people would still do it at lower exp rates because it's a more relaxing way to train the skill) but at the same time doesn't obsolete all the other related content in the game. You might also want to read the first article in the new Tip.it Times for more information.

I'm saying the new method is too good exp for the effort compared to the majority of existing content in the game. In two days of semi-afk rc the skill went from one of my lowest to one of my highest. To clarify, it's not the exp rate that's the biggest problem, it's reasonable that rc is closer to other skills. But for the best rates you should at least have to put an effort into it (runespan has zero requirements! at least abyss, zmi, etc take some preparing, utilising other skills, etc. to do efficiently) They did have some actually good ideas earlier to make rc less tedious like ess carrying familiars and extra teleports, but those were never really all that effective. As an example I think pouch-crafting would be more popular if you didn't have to manually fill and empty them all the time, and they were more of an inventory extension for essence only (think how bags in WoW work).

You could use that argument to justify every bad change to the game ever, including things like Squeal of Fortune. Just saying'. If this was a single player game you might have a point. In a MMO you can't ignore the interactions players have with each other. 'don't change how you play the game' like you said, and you'll fall quickly behind everyone else and spend twice as long to achieve the same things. Where's the fun in that? (note: a lot of updates that make the game easier are /fine/, nobody wants useless new content, right? Arguably in several cases they went way overboard though *cough* 2x faster afkable rc *cough*. But I don't think that's a debate for this topic)

I'd imagine low level runes would see the biggest impact because nobody levels with those anymore. High level runes on the other hand could easily go down in price because more people will be getting to a high runecrafting level now for the ability to make those in the first place, and the new runecrafting rewards allow players to make more runes per trip to some of those harder-to-reach altars.

Except it'd make a lot more sense to just turn the burth tutorial and/or the quest F2P permanently. That's the kind of content you want everyone to see. Not lock players out of a tutorial until they pay if they missed it during their short trial period.

But the same logic applies to current f2p too. You get the content for the first ~40 levels in the f2p skills. Surely that makes people want to reach for their wallets so they can see the remaining 60 levels. It's not fair to talk about F2P being outdated in comparison, there are still constant graphical updates, etc. - apparently Jagex is now starting to work on updating some of the old quests too. Whatever they add to F2P, after a while people would just start to think of it as a standard F2P feature. Then after a while they'll start saying, "hey, we should get a free trial of members features". Time limits are less fun than level caps btw. They force you to rush through content rather than play at your own pace. Not to mention time limited full featured members would be open to abuse from people making multiple accounts.

I agree that the thread title is misleading. F2P is a members trial already. Doesn't matter if you call it a trial/demo/freemium/whatever, the common feature is allowing players to see a part of the full game for free. Sure I could see how something like "every skill in the game L1-L20" could work, but we've had the same system for so long already I can't see them changing it anymore. Maybe an extended free tutorial but that's about it.

For 99% of the players rising prices shouldn't change anything. Things cost more? You earn equally much more just by doing the same things you always did. The minority with maxed stats who could make money in ways that weren't bottable (thus the income wasn't devalued like almost everything in the game), will find it harder to buy everything to 99. This is good too for the overall balance of the game.

Ingame loading times are a lot faster for me now - I'm loving this while doing agility. Floating tooltips are nifty too. Don't like the new interface icons though. They're not consistent with the rest of the game art (like skill icons) anymore.

It'll be hilarious when people start stealing the guards <3 As for NukeMarine's idea, it should be possible to create a script that reads the other player's message, removes the random letters, and posts the correct response within a fraction of a second. Not safe at all.

So I was curious about the WoW policy regarding this, apparently Blizzard has been through the same thing. In the early days of WoW the /exact/ same thing happened. Players running unfair odds with the built-in roll system. It was quickly made illegal for pretty much the same reasons Jagex is currently using to make it harder (see the official responses at http://www.wowwiki.com/Casinos). Their present TOS is rather vague about it though. The impression I got is that it's okay to run WoW casinos, but using the ingame chat to advertise them is against the rules. And if someone does run a scam, the GM system basically ensures that they won't get away with it, usually returning the stolen money (unlike in RS I believe). That certainly sounds like a more effective solution. Remove the advertising rather than every item in the game that could be exploited in some way. Regulating it seems very unlikely, considering it's seen as something that doesn't belong in the game. I do like how an ingame casino could act as an effective gold sink though. A browser MMORPG called Kingdom of Loathing does this, and it removes a lot of money from the economy despite a very small cut. The difference is, that game is a lot less serious and the players generally more mature so a gambling system isn't terribly out of place.

Easily the best update since the bot nuke. No respect for anyone who did this, scammer or not. The so called "legit" dicing clans were just pyramid schemes. I wonder why is it that the RS community makes such a big deal of gambling anyway. It's not a problem in other MMOs I've played. Lack of mods? They should have a lot more time to handle scammers now that the bot number is down...

What real life? Well, okay, on a more serious note, not really. Occasionally it may come up when someone says how stupid and pointless game it is, but I'm trying not to get in those conversations. Sometimes I may talk about it with one friend of mine who plays it as well, though that's not really so common.