Ts_Stormrage

Tbh; Div location in citadel pl0x :)

@helring & sy accursed: Twice I mentioned that I would post an article on the issue of RWT since my piece on bonds... Three times if you count that I would follow up on the very article I wrote in that I would follow up on it... Probably because it's quite an important topic and I think people should form their opinion with as much information as possible... But in this case it was mostly because Jagex had their little press release that I simply called bullshit on, when almost everyone (I saw only one person that seemed to have a good grip on the facts) drank the Kool-aid... So yes I said "hold on, you don't have all the information yet" while using the opportunity to tell people where and when to find it... But... If you're implying that I'm spamming my articles too much, then by all means report it as such... I dare you... I double dare you... Back to the discussion at hand... While I actually do have a few sources that set me on the path of finding these solutions, none of the information I got was classified or difficult to find... I'll admit, I've been at this a while now and at some point the information started to find me, but I always check and confirm what I've been told... That is how I know that people stake for a living; an actual living to feed themselves and maybe even their families... Not for any kind of "fun"... This is a source of GP for the gold selling companies, and sadly it isn't the only one... So we have to poison all the wells if we want to dry up the GP trade, which means we'll get some of that poison too... That means limiting staking... It also means making gambling elsewhere with your GP less-than-viable by putting a casino in RuneScape... Just like bonds are an attempt to move in on the GP trading market, so would a casino be to move in on the dicing market, and would offering cash back for bonds be a proper attempt at moving in on the quitters market...

To be fair, my payback would be only 33% as I suggested in my article that they give 1 pound back for every bond redeemed (actually I said 10 pounds for every 10 redeemed, to cut administrative costs)... While this would indeed couple a real world value to GP, I think bonds already do that anyways... My version just opens up the street so traffic can go both ways... Going back to the premise of this thread, and Jagex' press release to go with it, I don't think goldfarmers have suffered any damage to their businesses, but the suggestions I wrote down certainly will...

Regardless of a post being edited or not (people can change their mind, can they not?), the fact remains that a LOT of players bought Bonds to begin with, pretty much proving that there is definitely a market for it... I also mentioned this in my article, with the addendum that a demand is almost always met with a supply... The success of Bonds is evidence (circumstantial, I know) that those 40-50% isn't a number pulled out of their corporate asses and is an educated guess to say the least. Truth is, we'll never know how many people are willing to cheat, how many of them have indeed cheated, how often they cheated, and how big a scale they have cheated on... This demands a solution that fixes the leaky tap, rather than putting bucket after bucket under it... And whether you like it or not, I have provided one that most of my shady-er sources agree would stop the problem... Not only have other games already taken similar measures and be successful at it (Diablo III is an example), but they fully expect Jagex to go down this road as well...

That's the thing, though... Jagex' own stats say that 40-50% of all active players have at some point bought or sold GP... That is a HUGE customerbase willing to break the rules, and these are only the ones Jagex KNOWS about... The solution I'm offering eliminates the need for constantly having to dig into a player's background and banning them one by one without a permanent solution... Cuz they tried that with botters, and for every type of bot they auto-banned three more showed up, and for every person they had to ban manually, a whole lot more accounts were being made just as easily... For this game to thrive a couple of things must happen, and one of those is to have a permanent solution for problems such as this one...

They could lower bond prices a little but can't really lower them much past what the minimum price to buy those things with cash is. This probably would affect prices much. The same issue with giving players more, the most they could raise it to is like 18 days members/10 spins/200 runecoins which probably won't raise the prices much. However, I still don't agree with the methods in the article. Between the two of you, do any of you understand why the methods in the article are there? Not to make bonds more attractive, but to actually deal a blow to the GP trading business by taking away their supply lines... Something that bonds definitely are not doing in their current form...

Thought I did... By increasing the desire to buy bonds as well as decreasing the GP supply to GP sellers...

When has the community ever taken a significant amount of time to adjust to something? There's a reason why the amount of people online on RS2 and RS3 have been 30/70 almost since it's inception. When free trade was abolished, most people that quit did so in the first month... No the community doesn't adjust... It forms an opinion almost immediately, and acts on that... If something becomes, as you say, part of the RuneScape culture, it is only because people are getting used to it whether they like it or not... Prime examples are of course the Squeal of Fortune and Solomon's Store... Part of enjoying a game for fun is having a game that isn't being corroded from the inside to begin with... This means certain measures will have to be taken, and is what eventually brings us to some of the points in my article...

Yes, I have to disappoint the Canadians there, but so far I haven't found a legal place to source it from. In the words of your anthem: Sorry! You might try to find the episode yourself (S16E2), and skip to 17 minutes in for the bit portayed here...

@NukeMarine That idea has been floating around in my head for a while now as well (see my earlier posts where I'm hinting at something related)... It's part of a rather all-encompassing solution with more things picked out from other ideas, that I'll offer in my next article (one day to go)... I'm sure you'll like it :)

I guess that makes Jagex's recent moves equivalent to governments decriminalizing and regulating drugs to stamp out black market drugs which has worked fairly well IRL from the reports I've heard. Whether the same concept would hold for RS remains to be seen but I seem to recall someone saying that it worked in another game. That was Mod Jacmob ;) These bonds are only a half-assed solution, because in other games, they did a little more... More on this in my upcoming article...

@Everto Malum: No, that's not going to work and is going to create an unfairness that needs not to be expanded any further... The only person coming close to what is really going on is OrTradeMe... I wish I could tell you more right now, but I would be spilling the content of my Tip.it Times article, which is due to be published this weekend... It is a follow up on my last piece on Bonds (see my signature), and should be a proper eye-opener to everyone who's hands are still clean... You're going to want to read it this sunday, that is a promise...

http://forum.tip.it/topic/321548-birthright-of-the-dwarves-2nd-october-2013/?p=5458379 As I said there, due to DC's the end of the quest was rather buggy, and I can't do certain post-quest things... I hope that gets fixed as well :(

Is it me or... RS has been buggy lately, and doing this quest probably required me to reload the client about a dozen times... As a result I think I missed a lot of cutscenes, and I didn't ever get the option to put Drunken Dwarf the 3rd on the throne... Nor can I find Veldaban anywhere (I didn't kill him)... I tried logging out and back in, but that didn't help... Suggestions?

This weeks Tip.it Times is all Bond-themed... And its not James ;)

And what a job you did... thanks :)

I did mention both of those :) And yea, of course there will be updates to it, there has almost never been a feature without additional updates...

And in that respect, he's like almost all of them gods...

But in-game lore wise, this skill has only recently been discovered, and as far as I can tell, you have, as the adventurer RS revolves around, just volunteered to become the leading expert in it, doubly so by being the world guardian... And no it's not like Runecrafting, because there you merely discovered the means to teleport to the Rune Essence and a shortcut to the altars...

For me, the main reason why I am on the Godless side, is quite simple... Gods are very powerful beings, almost all of them through very powerful items, that they actively sought out, for whatever purpose... This makes them power-hungry (still), and frankly, I don't trust any of them with any of their powers... No matter how ill-gotten, no matter how remorseful, and no matter how well-meant...

[hide=LOTS of quotes to respond to:] [/hide] First of all, regret does not make one virtuous, this isn't Catholicism... Second, his "with me or against me" also reeks of self-serving arrogance... Finally, this whole "victory at all costs" and "the end always justifies the means" talk is never a way to win somebody over who is already doubting you... Yes, I would agree that the dialogue is set up in a way that it does re-affirm your beliefs about Saradomin, which makes him rather multi-faced in the public opinion, where everyone will soon have their own version of events, and is quite detrimental to what an MMO means... To me he seemed like any one of the Abrahamic gods, a supposedly-but-not-really all-knowing and all-powerful 5 year old kid who wants to have all the toys for himself... I wonder how this plays out in the next quest, where our choices here will apparently have mattered, at least to some extent...

[hide]This may be, and it is exactly why I don't think Saradomin deserves to be a God either... He himself admitted that you, the adventurer, are more virtuous than he is... I haven't been persuaded from my position that I'll support him for now, as he can help me kill the other Gods, like Zamorak and Bandos... But in the end, I'm goign to want to be the one ending up with that crown of his...[/hide] Good quest though... And still wish I knew what all the other dialogue paths were...

Would love to see a collection of all the different dialogue options...

A clan mate of mine got one last night while fishing in the battlefield. I think it was 'the Boundless'. That seems unlikely, since they are "drops" from the stuff you can kill on the battlefield

Does it matter what it's called? Please discuss the articles rather than semantics...