NukeMarine

You forgot the pay to win aspect. Player A buys 10 bonds for 30 pound. Player A sells all bonds and makes 60m in 2 minutes. That is my only problem with bonds. And when you take bonds out of the equation, it's still Player B giving Player A 60 million for no work in game. Player B still had to gather the GP from somewhere in game so it didn't just immediately get injected. If you had no problem with this situation when its friends, then there a small logical step to the bond situation between strangers. On the bright side this will stimulate the economy. Player A who buy bonds with real cash then trade those bonds to Player B for GP will likely use that GP to purchase items for playing the game. Player B, just being a rich ingame player will likely not be spending that GP (hoarding it) so he sees no problem trading the GP for more membership days or runecoins. Yes, I am comparing the two. If you have a real life friend that starts the game and you give his new character 20 million gp and in return of your help he gives you $15 which you use to pay for members then you just simulated exactly what is happening with bonds. More likely, your friend would not pay you money and you're just being a good bud helping him get started but the friendship is a real world aspect affecting the ingame economy. Now, I don't know where you get the "Almost nobody just 'donates' cash" statistic from but I doubt it. I've given gp to people I knew in real life that played this game. I just don't do it for strangers. The bond situation now allows strangers to do for each other what before was primarily limited to good friends. You may not like the comparison because it now happens on such a scale as to dwarf the previous situation. However, bonds create a method that matches another situation where players in real life exchanged cash then traded gp in the game. Jagex is wagering that bonds will compensate enough to remove that market. Time will tell. I think Jagex needs to create a bulk redeem process that offers bonus spins and runecoins at 80% of the Jagex store direct bulk buy bonuses. Reason being bonds are tempting to trade for GP if you want to use it for membership, spins or runecoins. You can only have so much membership (maybe 25 bonds). I just think that they need to make bulk spins and runecoins just as attractive to encourage players to redeem bonds for those further stimulating the economy.

Let's take bonds out of this entirely. Player A has a real life friend Player B. Player A gives his real life friend Player B's new character 100 million gp. Is that breaking the rules or is it fair? Player B is in Player A's clan. Player A gives Player B 100 million gp. Is that breaking the rules or is it fair? Look, fair trade was removed like it or not. Unbalanced trades are now allowed in the game. If you wanted to, you could give 1 billion gp in coins or items to anyone for any reason. The game's been that way for nigh on two years I believe. Does it really matter that Player A gave 100 million to a player because they're his real life friend or clanmate compared to giving 100 million to an unknown player in exchange for 20 bonds? The results are the same in that noob players now have a lot of cash that came from another player and not from the game. Except for the time in fair trade, you always had the ability to give money to friends, families or strangers. Now you just have the same ability, except now it can be in exchange for an item that offers runecoins, spins or membership days. Nothing is the game has changed except perhaps much more gp being put into circulation.

I hope Jagex changes it so the rate of LP to RC is constant. Something like 200 LP to 1 RC or even 300 LP to 1 RC would great. Assuming that RC are still $1 for 50 RC with the highest purchase, that means players are getting $2 in Rune Coins a month after the 12 month mark. Jagex is smart by the way. Now people can claim the Solomon purchases are from loyalty points even if they used runecoins and still hate on Jagex for selling rune coins.

TL:DR - Level 52 with boon, energy+memory, enriched wells: 26,840 xp/hour At level 52 with Boon here's my research based on 10 rounds (used stopwatch, tracked lap time, noted if enriched popped up each round, saved energy for total after 10 rounds) Energy (En): 6 xp Memory (M): 20.9 xp Energy Memory (EnM): +5.1 xp / 5 energy Enriched Memory (XM): +26.9 xp (20.9 turn in + 6 gathering) 26 slots took on average 2 min 00 secs to fill and deposit. Each round nets 37.8 energy on average. Each round nets 1 enriched memory on average (+20.9 xp) Formula: (M*20.9 xp + E*6 xp + EnM/5*5.1 xp + XM*26.9 xp) * (60 min/ min per round) Calculating: (26 * 20.9xp + 37.8 * 6xp + 37.8 / 5 * 5.1xp + 1*26.9xp) * (60/2) =835.7 xp round or 25,070 xp/hour If you catch an enriched well, expect about 20 enriched memories (+20.9) and 29 energy bonus (+6 xp) which adds 592 xp every 20 minutes. Edit: Just did the same at Level 53, no change in numbers. In addition, if you go after chronicles, consider if your turn around time to turn them in is worth it. If not, consider collecting them for hunter xp and destroying all 10 when you get that many to keep collecting.

If this writer thinks that things done on the computer have no value, I'd like to see how'd he react to a 20 page story being deleted off his hard drive with no back ups. I mean, it didn't really exist right? All he really lost was some of his free time which doesn't really have any value right? We all know Jagex likes to say that all this is there property and there's no real world value to the GP. Something tells me that the courts are going to rule that actually these accounts and the items on them do have value because people have placed a value on them. As such, companies like Jagex that open up virtual environments will be held to higher standards and conditions with how they treat that environment and the accounts associated with it. It can be like conditions placed on landlords where the person renting has many rights that cannot be violated just because they don't own the property such as kicking them out without notice or cause.

I'm interested. Do you mean stuff like saying a few chants while mixing potions to give a chance of extra XP/an extra dose (increased benefit), or something like a mantra while cooking to reduce your chance of burning food (reduced penalty)? I always imagined it'd be like 5/10/15% boosts to non-artisan skills that deplete prayer the same way the combat prayers work. Kind of like the skilling auras except with prayer. It could be both. A skill prayer book where some prayers are the 5/10/15% boosts to gathering skills while other prayers could benefit such as xp boosts or reduced penalties from failing. Basic idea is get the cool things that went to combat and utilize those in non-combat skills.

Herblore: Create lower tier non-tradeable combo potions since it'd be nice to have something like Att+Str+Def or Rng+Def or Super Magic+Super Defense combo potions. Create more skill improvement potions (although herblore habitat kind of does this). Prayer: Create skill based prayers bringing it into line with herblore and summoning. Skills: Create abilities for skills and adapt resource gathering like they did combat. I've said it before, but mining, fishing and woodcutting are sort of like slayer only you're target is high defense with 1 hit-point and a guarenteed drop. I could see Jagex changing it so that resources now have "hit points" that you can drain while abilities let you gather faster.

Outside the wilderness, there are very few areas where the combat level is actually relevant. On top of that, the combat level system is never going to be fair since it never takes into account the two critical things: inventory and player skills. The inventory is obvious since you can be 99 in all skills, but if you have nothing on you then you're toast to someone that's 50 in all skills and fully armored with food. The player skill comes into play when you have equally decked out players. Guess the update I'd like to see is allow a free-for-all wilderness option complete with mini-map and player indicators showing who all you can freely attack. Yeah, have a combat formula for things like quests and the PC boats, but give PKrs an option to just kill in the wilderness and not care about what level they're on. Select Free-For-All (along with multi or single way), and players you can attack players that match your mode (single or multi) and either are near your combat level or have also selected free-for-all. On your mini-map they show up as blue dots and you see blue skulls above their heads. White dots and non-skulled players are therefore safe to ignore. Seriously, outside arbitrary separation in combat areas, is there a real need for combat levels?

The variations are a lot. For example (in my opinion the best one is) - Strength affects the damage of melee, ranged and magic - Attack (renamed Accuracy) affects the accuracy of melee, ranged and magic - A new combat skill - Melee takes all the abilities requirements and melee equipment requirements. In other words you'll have 3 neutral skills affecting the accuracy, the damage and the defense and 3 class specific skills which affect your Melee techniques, Ranged techniques, Magic techniques and what equipment you can wear. Something like this would be a good change. Rename Attack to Accuracy and have it apply equally to melee, range and magic just like defense does now. At the same time, Accuracy abilities can be altered to reflect this change and can be used in any combat style. On top of that, all weapons and armor can have the main combat skill in addition to accuracy or defense in order to wield it. Probably would work much better than introducing new skills to balance out attack for melee. Just a passing thought, what if they created a way for Herblore, Prayer and Summoning to have abilities? These are tertiary support skills for combat with inherent special abilities in and of themselves. Still, a couple of methods to use these skills with the adrenaline bar sounds fun.

The point I don't get is Jagex has the ability to stop convenient gambling right now. The just have to remove the random element of flowers and other methods people pull off near banks. Instead, they do this workaround ban on certain terms that just leads to people creating new terms like "C/H 2x". If there were not random flowers there is no gambling. Jagex needs to stop these half measures that solve nothing and infuriate everyone. And yeah, you can't stop off server gambling but who cares. Jagex doesn't enforce driving rules or what other websites you visit either. Unless you bring back restricted trade and all the headaches that causes, you just have to accept people are exchanging items for their own reasons for good or ill.

The "We pay we say" mentality is old and I'm glad it's not the majority opinion in this thread. I've always been in favor of not just updating F2P, but slowly moving older content over to them. Fletching, KBD and Canoes should be made F2P for example as mentioned earlier. Plus, they really need to make a Cockroach King or Queen. If this change (in addition to software mode removal) reduces number of bots on member servers, all the better.

Good on Jagex. They built hype among current players, encouraged old players to come back to the game, built a new method to help the revenue stream using something that's 6 years old. Yeah, they always intended to release this as a members service. Maybe the hoped that interest would have been high enough to allow F2P. Yeah, they moved the goal post to at least cover their minimum intention. In the end, I think this will generate more funds overall. Jagex will know for sure after the first month when they find which accounts are concentrating on which server.

The economy should do just fine without discontinued items. While there's a gold rush at the moment, the hype will die down. The economy will grow, but it'll be slow. I'll wager there'll be less 3rd age items per player than discontinued items are today in the main game. Jagex has mentioned possibly introducing main game discontinued items via Treasure Trails. That will stay so it makes them very rare and not discontinued. Given the flack people are giving over unid herbs being made grimy, might not be a good idea. Some serious purists on that point.

I'll be honest, until this weekend I didn't think the vote would reach 500k. However, it should be 350k anytime now. Given the initial excitement on the release, I can see MMG giving the greenlight on this being a free member's feature even if it doesn't reach 500k. Graphed Vote Projection

It's interesting that Jagex is allowing duel log-in with the caveat that you can be on RS '07 using one account and RS main using another account potentially paying $24 a month to play the game. It also read like they would have allowed you to use one account, but the system can't handle that at the moment and not likely to be looked at for some time if at all. Minor note as not many will have two active member accounts. There will be die hards that level two characters at once. I can also see it being a method for cross server merchants to handle trades more efficiently. Not the best thing in the world, but trust trades are a part of both times. By the way, I like that real merchants will make a resurgence in RS '07. These guys put in a lot of work collecting small amount of resources to sell in bulk amount at a premium price. The GE removed their use and brought on the stock traders we see today.

Wonder how opening up the servers will affect the vote? Before it was vote and after the votes are counted you'll get a month of RS '07. Now it's vote now and you can start playing RS '07. That's gotta encourage players that cbf'd for voting to just vote yes to see what the fuss is about. That said, it's a wonder in the Q&A that nobody asked about holiday events, emotes and non-tradeable holiday items. Has that been addressed anywhere? One option (easier to implement) is for holiday items and emotes to cross over if you have access to them in the main game. Another, more complicated option, is for Jagex to release an old school holiday event when the holiday rolls around. Just no rares please.

If after all of this (advertising, offering 1 month free, encouraging even those not interested to vote yes for potential of more content) it doesn't get 250,000 votes then I think it's safe to say the interest just was not there. Wonder if there's another reason behind all this? Something like Jagex staff wants to have 07scape, however it must justify such a venture with its stock holders that could care less about giving customers items for free. So, Jagex rigs a poll heavily weighted to bring a large amount of yes votes to convince the stock holders that releasing a 6 year old version of the game is a viable method of keeping customers.

So let me get the logic straight: People want 2007 RS back exactly how it was. No account made in 2007 had the ability to get a rare outside of chain of trades with accounts that existed in RSC. Basically, if someone else didn't give it to you, you weren't getting it. So lets add an additional change to 2007 RS that allows randoms to appear on accounts or in the game. I'm kind of cool with the idea that your character has access to all the untradeable holiday items it has access to in the main game via Draynor. On top of that, if the account is old enough, it can have untradeable versions of the wearable holiday rares. However, don't introduce rares when no such mechanic existed in 2007. That would be akin to randomly letting some accounts have their 2007 version with full stats and bank. There's just no fair way of doing it, and allowing all accounts to have it removes the purpose.

I'm not worried about members having access. I never found RSC to be a drain on the community and I don't see this being one either. I'm more hesitant about F2P being allowed which will mean enormous amount of goldmining bots. Along with that, if it's just a member's benefit like RSC (well, when it was open) I don't want F2P temp membership and all the bots that come with it to access 2007scape. The exception I would accept would be F2P accounts with a certain amount of hours in game or certain number of months membership. I won't play the game, but I would like to see what the economy would be like without unfettered F2P or seven years of economic legacy. That said, will the biggest skill be 66 Hunter with chinchompas or 85 slayer for the whip or something else? Barrows will be big since those will be the best armor sets.

Really appreciated the "Did you know.." portion. I had a Mark VII or something challenge, so tried the Dagon'hai Monks out. With Verac I frequently one-hit them at 300 xp a pop. Decided to go back after catching up on challenges. I took 8 doses of extreme, activated momemtum, and proceeded the one-hit fest stopping only to pick up occasional charm and dagon'hai robe. Just walking around the water, skipping the Zamarak Warriors (3 hit at 200 xp), not even needing food, it seemed like I was getting 200k xp/hour but zilch for drops. Until the inevitable patch, these seem like good spot to train melee. Still, no drops.

I don't like grinding, but I might grind fishing, rc and thieving to 90 over the next couple of weekends just to help with the scroll and trade goods in the pincers. Here's hoping for some common sense improvements to the economic portion of the mini-game in addition to making the changes to decay and repair for superior items.

Creating Legacy servers will not split the community. There's been a legacy server called RSC since the start of RS2 and the community on the main has only gotten larger. Had Jagex offered up a group of legacy servers after each of the major updates (removing free trade then EoC), it might have kept a lot more of its members. The Legacy servers would not be updated with exception of clearing out bugs so development hours lost to the main servers would be negligible. Also, these could be buffers to help people get over the old version and slowly move onto the new version. And if not, who cares. They're paying into the game and having fun playing an old version of it. The majority of players will still keep up with the main servers cause that's where all the money and time for development is at. Legacy servers are useful and beneficial to the game and community overall.

I think these are relevant questions for the long term substainability of Ports: For those in the pincers already and now concentrating on trade goods, how many days (assuming 8 voyages a day) on average is it taking to gather up 20 plate, chi or lacquer? In the time it takes to gather up 160 plates for a tradeable Tetsu set, how many bones, spices, chi and lacquer do you think you'll also have gathered? At what average daily profit will you think it's worth continuing with this? Right now, for easy profit, there's 300k for broad arrows, 100k for battlestaff, 50k for seaweed, 150k for MTK, 60k for spirit shards and 300k for jewelry. These aren't guarenteed levels (arrowheads and jewelry are volatile), but 800k gp for minimal effort a day. Then there's the 250k for yak hide that takes 10 to 15 minutes pushing the total over 1 mill a day. Not saying Ports should exceed this, but I don't think players are going to stick with ports past the non-tradeable stuff if simpler methods exceed daily average profits of ports.

How exactly do you invest loads of time? It takes a minute to put 2 boats under way for 8 hours, for a total of 3 times every day. So yeah, 3 minutes a day. And for that you will have a steady dribble of resources coming in, resources that will make for sell-able items(armor, scrimshaws and soup). As said earlier, the money used for repairs, when used right, is actually still very low for pop armor. What most people don't understand, however, is how much money it costs to own high priced non-discontinued equipment. You can lose it when you die(DC). You can't use the money to merch. The price will always steadily decrease. An update can make you lose a ton. That's alot of things to consider even before we get to the price- and really, you need the whole set with gloves and boots to make a significant difference, and the gloves and boots are atleast as expensive as the other parts. Pop armor is extremely good for how much effort it takes to obtain it. You're underselling the time and effort that will be needed for this. First, after all upgrades are done the only voyages worth considering are the trade good voyages and MAYBE the 25k xp voyages. Let's be generous and say you can find a plate voyage a day along with maybe bones and spices. We'll even assume 100% success. That's still 40 days of visiting port to make a full tetsu set in addition to what bones, spices and other armor items you can pull in. If you visit three times a day, that's teleport to Port Sarim, go to the port, go through the voyage results (maybe do randoms though they're nerfed pretty bad now), reroll voyages to get trade goods, set up ships for sail. It seems a tad longer than two to three minutes. Even then that's two to three times a day for 40 days. Players of that high a level might be expecting a million per day return on investment. Considering you get that from the few moments of Slayer shopping, seaweed, and buying jewelry and shards on GE, it's not that high an expectation. Now, making that armor is bound to be easier than trying to mine the level 78 armor from the Forinthy dungeon revenants (not sure, never tried it). Those armor have better stats and 10 sets sell for less than PoP armor (except statius). I would hope Jagex improves the system of ports to match effort with reward. As said, people really like this mini-game. Hate to think a poorly thought out tradeable armor and scrimshaw system combined with the faster than normal degrading effect ruins all that well received good will.

To make the lower level, non-degradable stuff, less worthless. And yes, it's a stupid reason, but that's one of the main reasons why they do it. I don't agree with the line of reasoning Jagex gives for degrading. However, I do think degrading is a great system and should be done for all armor. If armor degrades then that creates a market for either the material used to make it, the system used to acquire it, or creates a money sink. Pros and Cons to each method, including mixing them. Still, it's better than the fact that there is Rune armor in the game that technically was made 8 years ago with nary a ding on it.