Doomster

My thanks to a random passer-by who repaired my gravestone - was not available in game to thank, but I'll retun the favour when I see one. I bought the best F2P gravestone, but the only way to make 3 minutes to low level wildy (ambushed by a revenant), is to rush to the castle bank (Lumbridge), draw and use a teleport (Falador, Varrock, Skull sceptre) then run like hell. If you want "helper repair" in F2P, I'd suggest getting the best F2P gravestone as it shows you do care about your items and it's easier to spot, as well as lasting longer. Not sure I'd bother attending to the free marker, as a player that hasn't bothered to upgade to one of the higher gravestones is probably not going to be back

If you want to combine prayer and a degree of armouring for when prayer runs out or needs to be saved, then the "prayer armours" (Initiate / Proselyte) may be worth a look. A similar case occurs with prayer books - if you pray for protection, then the attack bonus Zamorak book is better than the balanced Guthix or defensive Saradomin.

Bounty hunter: 1. Enter the arena 2. Hunt for your assigned target (fat chance!) 3. Get piled by an army of rangers - dead before you can turn a prayer on I'm preparing my own assault, with disposable equipment, and I may turn to the dark side (rogue attacking anyone). I have a few ideas on dedicating a character to BH, but a bit afraid to retune a pure/semi-pure in case it all changes again. At the moment (F2P low level) the strongest seem to be (pure?) rangers, firing addy, since rapid range engages fast, from a distance and hits well enough with multiple attackers. They may also have a bind & blast mage to assist.

We could well discover that.... Runescape needed the bots! On the other side, F2P resource gatherers and sellers could do very well, since the lack of autoed logs of all kinds will fuel demand and prices, and there will no longer be competition from an army of alphabet soup level 3's In passing there was one other solution mentioned - maybe RS2 could have been continued with traditional wilderness, PKing and whatever, but closed to new signups, and the new "RWT-proof" version could have become RS3 (or RS2.5) - a few sweeps to nuke the BOTS, and long-time players could have continued with the game they knew, just as some diehards remain with RSC.

Wait it out (my status of F2P planning to go P2P changes to "not going P2P any time soon unless they find a much better balance"). Put these in order: Baby, bathwater, thrown out with The idea that trades have to be balanced to a level that would satisfy a pernickety accountant, is so wrong... I have sold stuff I didn't really want to sell, when offered a high enough price, and bought stuff for later just because it was cheap. I was looking forward to Bounty hunter, but the pilers are destroying it. Mind you, I've made quite a few successful addy arrow stealing missions, I wouldn't steal normally, but this is WAR - and I will NOT sell them at the Bounty hunter area. Guess I'll have to find another grinding game to level up in, as as Jagex's pursuit of RWT/bots at all costs is just too much - I said before that we weren't going to like their answer - how right I was!

The bot issue has several facets: A lot of players really couldn't care less about bots, RWT etc. other than for the resource competition issue - for them, simply reducing the damage bots do is enough - eg. the store update that prevented bot-buyout. The wilderness update now looks like another ham-fisted anti-bot update preventing both honest players and green dragon bots from using monster cover. Overall, the problem with bot-banning is the ease of replacement, so some restriction on new accounys is needed: 1. Require an email, and verify it against some lists of forum abuse emails, those which are "easy-come, easy go" 2. Have a CAPTCHA, a good one (maybe Recaptcha) 3. Restrict account creation, no more than 2 per IP per day 4. Bar certain ranges altogether - naybe bar China, Korea etc. from new account creation, and bar known proxies. Finally, there's the "cripple RWT" approach, and given their destruction of staking, it seems that nothing is safe. The exchange sets a benchmark of "fair" trading, though it is skewed by many factors. It is also anonymous, making RWT impossible on the exchange. I guess the next step is not just to look suspiciously at unbalanced trades, but to ban them altogether, or allow only 1 or 2 per day and a greater number of smaller gifts. This still leaves PK and death by monster - and maybe the delayed death pile in monster death may be a precursor to other steps. There is also the nervous awiating of the gravestone, and what that will mean to PK. There is one basic question.... What worries you most, bots, or what Jagex's next move against them will be?

The inflation on Yew logs is quite something, though that is drawing more players into competition with the bots, actually, it highlights a defect in the price tracking. Sellers of finished items, particularly of lower grade items, will often put them at the lowest price, resulting in a downward pull, while buyers of bulk stock often place the order at above the midpoint price, resulting in an upward push even if there is nothing wrong with the prices as they stand. There is certainly a readjustment, but where it will end is anyone's guess. I'd say the most damaging thing to rares has been the dual arena update, as rares can no longer change hands as rewards for a fair fight. The ease of trading on the exchange is a double edged sword, while anyone can now be a trader, even while offline, it puts everyone in competition, tough competion for some items with saturation buyers or sellers

There is camstudio ( http://www.camstudio.org ) - freeware Or a limited time free offer on Camtasia 3 http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/22 ... -download/

Good F2P foods: 1. Swordfish - 14 HP in one bite 2. Lobster - 12 HP in one bite, and if you are fishing, you catch ONLY Lobster 3. Stew - 11 HP in one bite, low cooking level 4. Anchovy Pizza - 9 HP per bite, x2 - each one equivalent to two salmon If you can use the cooking guild, apple pie is also quite good - two bites of 7 each, and easy to make a full load unless other players are taking the supplies. Wine is also 11 HP in one bite, but the effect is not good for melee combat

Collect eggs at Karamja volcano (1 spawn) or Varrock dungeon (2 spawns). Kill Hill giants (best) or hobgoblins (if hillies are too busy) for limps. Have potions made at 5gp a time, bit slow to do the dialogue every time.

Only remaining things in F2P are self-set. Get a Skull Sceptre (no big deal if you've beaten Elvarg). Get level X in a particular skill. PK Get a muddy key and take the chest reward. Take on the Greaters (toughest F2P monster) and the PK hazard. Collect full random event kit. Get rich & buy a phat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_(programming_language) NB. Esoteric programming languages are often deletion vote targets. http://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet - esoteric programming language wiki http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html - It really is baffling

If you want more HP on a mage, then training attack (melee) to 40 may be worth a go - always handy to be able to wield a rune pickaxe or axe for woodcutting - just watch the Atk/Str total (no more than 50% over mage) so you don't major in melee combat instead.

One possibility may be that the exchange will only allow trading at values within certain limits, relating to the player prices for each item. Maybe player to player trade would also be limited to prevent assymetric trades above a certain amount (though that would impact gifts & prizes). If dropping was made "private" then that leaves PK and NPK drops as the only other thing to be addressed as a potential way to shift a large value of items. The thing is, whenever Jagex have acted against rulebreakers, the cure is often worse than the disease! 1. Pure essence - drove the autos from harmlessly mining essence, to competing for other stuff. 2. Shop update - killed the autobuyer bots, but messed up the buy/sell prices for everyone else. 3. Putting a stake through the heart of staking Battling a swarm of bots cutting Willows, I thought "if Jagex ever fix this, we're not gonna like the result".

Servants must be paid after every 8 trips, but will ask (don't pay then) after the 7th. If you have the servant bank and plank, then that's 2 trips for each load

Back to F2P smithing, and a quick ore comparison: 1. 2x Iron & 4x coal make 2 steel bars, total 110 XP smelted and smithed 2. 6x Iron makes (average) 3 iron bars, total 112.5 XP smelted and smithed. Iron is the best XP per ore collected, BUT: 1. Each load takes longer to smelt, as the animation repeats for every ore 2. More bars, so longer to smith as well 3. Poorer sale/alch values For those reasons, steel may be preferable. Mithril, superheating in the mining guild or superheat / ruins forge from the Hobgoblin mine is another possibility, as bringing back a load of bars means a lot more XP per trip, though mithril is worse XP per ore than steel. Gold from the crafting guild (if you can do it, and get clear runs) may be worth a shot, but it's not worth competing for. The "long walks" can be worth a try, they are: 1. Air runes, followed by Crafting guild gold or Rimmington Iron/Gold 2. Mind runes, followed by Skeleton Coal Those methods are best used as an extension to runecrafting - I got a lot of air runes, gold, and tele'd back.

Level 30 gets you a score table placing in: Runecrafting Slayer Herblore Construction Hunter Farming

6 in total, I won't name them all, as I'd rather not be cross-traced from one to another. 1. First, main, and at some point, going members after a bit more stat polishing (balanced). Close to member quest levels in all F2P skills except defence. 2. Steel pure steelmaker with protect item prayer, to be a cheap wilderness explorer (can also fish swordies, so you don't want to meet him in a fight). 3. Doomster59 - pure mage, and the slightly nooby name is intentional. 4. Rock Egg - don't laugh, was the only un-numbered egg name I could find, the aim being to confuse while hiding as an egg, when the egg ring is long forgotten (pure full hybrid). 5 & 6. Skull sceptre pures: Skeleton fun (succeeded at level 16), Sceptre Mad (abandoned after the luck on the first try) - both have skele suit and everything since.

If it is an "all of runescape" market, then you would need VERY deep pockets to control it, though some degree of price manipulation might be achieved. Whatever price a "cartel" tries to set, smaller traders would be likely to undercut, getting the trade unless the cartel constantly buys them out.

If it works well, the liquidity of the market will be increased, and that may tend to lower the prices, due to easier trading by non-dedicated merchants. The only way I can see it shifting Rare prices, is if a considerable number of Rare owners choose to trade their rares to buy supplies for a Skillcape or merchanting.

If you have a domain, you will get a lot of wildcard spam, and also bounces when the miserable gits forge YOUR domain as the source. You have to block anything which is not a name you use or a valid generic name - your host might address email to "customer@yourdomain", or some other alias, and you are supposed to accept mail to postmaster@ http://www.spampal.org/ Well worth a look, use one of the less rabid blocklists, some of the alternative ones have an "any ISP without adequate outgoing spam prevention" condition, and block way to much - those based on CBL, XBL, Spamhaus and such are generally ok, but some lists are administered with extreme personal bias.

Depending on how it works, the exchange is going to shake up trading. I would expect that maybe one player could place one item (or quantity of items) on the exchange at one time, to keep the volume down to manageable levels.

Self-Sufficient + opportunistm If I can buy supplies cheap enough, I'll buy, but more likely to be selling supplies. F2P, bit short of time now or I'd be going P2P to so some quest-bashing. And that makes a difference, there is so much you HAVE to buy in, and so little that makes good money. I've bought cooking levels with Tuna from the store - if I can make use of a cheap surplus, but the player market favours the seller, maybe quick & easy disposal through the exchange will improve things, higher trade volume without really trying, and maybe lower prices.

Gold farming is a problem in many MMORPGs - low wage / slave labour hogging resources and then selling them for real money (or selling the resources in-game for gold/in game currency and than selling that on black market sites). They may be people, but more likely people in charge of an army of bots. Typically far eastern, low wage countries, China & suchlike, often countries that are also troublesome spam sources and spam-friendly internet hosts, rotten to the core - never mind China's incoming "great firewall of China", the internet would be a better place if they were disconnected entirely.

In the southeast room - make use of the ladder in the corridoor north of the room when you leave, saves wasting a teleport or taking hits on the way out.