Poopingman

Plenty of helpful facts. I am making amends accordingly. Some of those interviews are pure gold. Nice find!

Haha, the entire glitch with bearded women was a scream in general.

Think of a better descriptive term for it and I'll gladly change it. Don't want to upset anybody because of the title! Heavens no... :lol:

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=583381 Welcome :lol:

It was just a random screenshot I found of the old style bank. Definitely a rich player in any time, however.

Runescape Classic: An Insight By: Poopingman Table of Contents Prologue DeviousMUD Public Release Character Creation Early Hindrances Equipment Fatigue Skills PKing/Dueling The purpose of this thread is to shed some light on the history of Runescape. Understanding and respecting the history of the game is a valuable tool to help round out your knowledge of it. I encourage everybody to share their experiences with Runescape Classic so we can help dispel some of the mysteries still enshrouding the early days. Adding your knowledge can help this topic become a more thorough resource for all RSC information. DeviousMUD Runescape's long-forgotten older brother, DeviousMUD was one of Andrew Gower's earliest endeavors; clearly boasting numerous programming conjectures that would ultimately rear their communal heads in the first form of our beloved Runescape. Conceived in mid '98 and mired with glitches, DeviousMUD was indeed playable online as a one-week beta test for a short time before being renamed and ultimately retooled as Runescape. DeviousMUD in action: [hide=][/hide] [hide=][/hide] An extremely intriguing world map drawn by Gower during the DeviousMUD days. Upon closer inspection, particularly acute individuals will note plenty of resemblances to our modern world: [hide=][/hide] Public Release Runescape was finally released to the public on January 4, 2001. These first few months weren't without their faults, as certain bugs impeded gameplay. Initially consisting of just 2 servers (3 at the time of Poopingman's conception) with no more than a few hundred players a piece, these early days are of stark contrast to the massive environments we are spoiled with today. The environments are laughable compared to the awesome detail of RSHD, as all of the buildings featured the same two textures and maroon roof. Here are a couple of 3D renders covering nearly the entire playable world at this time, see if you recognize anything! [hide=][/hide] [hide=][/hide] Character Creation After creating a character, you were opted to choose a "class". The options were: Necromancer (Later changed to Wizard) Warrior Miner Adventurer Ranger I chose Wizard. Your selection dictated a small boost in a skill associated with your decision, along with matching equipment. For example, a miner would start with 5 mining, and a basic pick-axe. This feature was removed in July of '02, not long before Tutorial Island's release. Early Hindrances Through programming fault, NPCs were only allowed to engage with one player at a time. This caused chaos specifically at banks and during popular quests. Jagex attempted to remedy this by creating duplicate NPCs in key parts of quests. Speaking of banks, Runescape Classic featured a very disheveled bank interface that restricted the number of items that could be withdrawn at a time. Up until July 26, 2001, banks could only store money! The later inclusion of certificates made selling large amounts of items that were in high demand (Fish, for example) a very tedious process, often taking hours to simply swap to certificates! Miles, Giles, and Niles of Random Event fame originally performed the cert-swapping duty in Draynor Village. A vintage bank screenshot: [hide=][/hide] Equipment There were some notable equipment differences as well, especially pertaining to plate armor. Armor tops were almost entirely gender-specific, with only males being able to wear the male plate. Thrander, a long lost NPC who used to reside near Varrock's east bank, was able to switch tops to the proper gender free of charge. Female players were able to don both plates. Furthermore, adorning a plate top restricted the player from being able to wear gloves; the same was true for platelegs and boots. In these early days, the small attack boost garnished by wearing gloves helped maintain the rune chain's value, as it had no such restrictions. Early on, adamant armor was the best available. Rune armor was first introduced as the medium helm, a then highly coveted drop from lesser demons. Fatigue Near the end of Runescape Classic's solo lifespan, the fatigue concept was introduced to help combat autoers who were infringing the boundaries of fair play. The concept was simple: Training a skill would raise your fatigue slowly, capping at 100%. Once at 100%, you would no longer receive experience. A player then had to use their sleeping bag (Formerly beds only!) until their fatigue dropped. To awake from your slumber, you would have to enter a code, nowadays called a "Captcha". The inclusion of fatigue was widely hated, and it was eventually dropped after the switch to RS2. The sleeping interface: [hide=][/hide] Skills Certain skills were much slower during these early days, and would drive some modern players nuts! Mining was an incredible test of patience, as there was no clear-cut way to confirm whether or not a rock contained ore. Furthermore, every swing had to be confirmed by using the pickaxe with the rock! Later this was changed to simply clicking on the rock. Woodcutting was hindered by the existence of only regular trees. A fail message also prompted from time to time, proclaiming that you "Slipped and missed the tree". Prayer was ungodly slow, with the only methods of training being bones and big bones. In the very early days, prayer was divided into two categories "Good" and "Evil", as was magic as well. Following is an excerpt from an interview with Gregechidna6, one of the very first high-combat players, describing the significance of the magic types: "When RuneScape first begun, there were some significant differences to the skills from today's world. My personal favourite being "good magic" and "evil magic," which were two separate skills. The magic menu was split into two parts, containing spells for specific sections of the magic spectrum. The highest level spells didn't even really break level 20 if my memory serves me correctly. Some of those spells don't exist today in any shape or form. "Fear" was a spell that was certainly feared! When cast on a monster, it retreated from combat - beautiful for annoying players and stealing their monsters. Oh yeah, "new runes" as we called them back in the day, didn't exist. That means chaos, law, nature, cosmic and death runes. Those came out later on in one foul swoop when magic was updated into just "magic," and like forty new spells were added. And they were called "new runes" for ages. I don't know when that stopped, it has been years, though, they're not so new anymore." A very old stat menu screenshot: [hide=] Note "Tailoring", which was originally a standalone skill. It was later assimilated into crafting. Influence was basically Quest Points, and Herblaw was present on the stat menu, but dropped and revived some years later in the form we are familiar with today.[/hide] The aforementioned skill bubble: [hide=][/hide] PKing/Dueling PKing has always been an important variable in Runescape. The earliest days featured a world that can best be described as a hybrid between a PK and traditional server today. Before the arrival of The Wilderness, players were able to toggle between PK and Non-PK. Until February of 2001, what you chose upon character creation was what you were stuck with. Jagex then proceeded to allow players to toggle PK/Non-PK up to 2 times. Lumbridge was the only safe area, and battles raged nearly everywhere you went. I remember one particular experience when I watched a fierce clan fight erupt in the Barbarian Village. You were only able to fight players within 4 levels of yourself, but this posed a problem since combat levels weren't visible back then! You had to guess and try attacking people whose names were orange/yellow; a color-based comparison concept that still lives to this day. Obviously, this entire concept was dropped when The Wilderness was released. Running wasn't an option in Runescape Classic, so catching fleeing players was an extremely difficult proposition. Players couldn't flee during the first three rounds of combat however, spawning the birth of the ever-famed "3-hit". 3-hitting a player rendered the opponent near-helpless. "Catching" fleeing players was another fabled skill, represented by PKer's ability to time their next strike with a small window of opportunity during fleeing that gave them another chance at finishing their prey off. Eating wasn't allowed during combat, so minimizing your opponent's time out of combat was essential for a swift kill. Also worth mentioning is the fact that weapon speed didn't exist. Two-handed swords and battleaxes were much more popular during this time. Dueling was a popular addition that allowed 2 players to square off anywhere in the world. Lumbridge was the undisputed hotspot for dueling. The relocation of this feature to Al-Kharid has angered quite a few classic players. Dueling in Lumbridge: [hide=][/hide] A large clan war deep in The Wilderness: [hide=][/hide]

Ah, what an easy scapegoat for parents.

Some skills are obviously still profitable or simply unavoidable (such as combat) even when maxed. If someone gets to 200M solely to do it, well I think they're crazy.

Runescape's servers are rarely glitchy. Its your computer/ISP.

I agree. Happens to me all the time too. I get the randoms in the middle of a fight. Then Hyde starts [bleep]ing and moaning while I'm in combat, unable to get through his dialogue entirely.

I'm afraid to do this quest.

Why can't we say "Const" as a Construction abbreviation?

Quest.

After their last two crapstorms, this is going to be ugly. :lol:

Update. I was doing a level 3 clue that sent me to the Rogue's castle deep in Wilderness. I'm freaked out enough as it is, I come around the wall into the enclosed area and see a chaos elemental! I was right next to it. It messed me up pretty good but I was able to get away and world hop.

Not quite true. There is a huge difference between 10m cooking xp and 10m runecrafting xp. It's really a mix between total xp and total level. Most true answer. [/thread] I understand. There is some disparity. But its still a more clear-cut method than relying on total skill level.

A lot of people have too much time on their hands with this game...

You probably use guides for all your quests. I did that too until I did While Guthix Sleeps on the first day it came out without a guide. It was the most fun I had in RS in years. Try a quest one time without a guide, and solve the puzzles on your own. I've done plenty of quests without a guide. They still suck. I never used a single guide in rsc, and those were the days when quests were actually semi-decent. If they are going to make a joke, make it funny. Though, half of what you read in a quest is someone saying something that isn't funny at all, although it is meant to be. I'd much rather the person get straight to the point and tell me what to do. Not five minutes of talking about how his father is dead and his mother is in prison and oh hey why is six afraid of seven, then oh yeah, could you help me out with collecting this item because I am way too lazy to get it myself. Could you just get me a piece of rope, even though the general store is 1 minute away and easy to get to, could you just please get me some rope, I need some rope to tie this raft up. Yeah, I'm too lazy to get the rope, could you get me some rope, "adventurer". Why do I collect items for people when they could easily get the items themselves?!?! Seriously... I agree that quests contain a ton of stale humor. I chuckled the first time my character made a wisecrack about having to run errands for people. But he seems to do that in EVERY quest in recent memory. Its like even the characters seem disinterested in whats going on.

Its true that total experience is a much better judge of actual time invested. I agree that total level is slightly overrated. Slightly.

i think hes supa srs y so srs Wow, the internet really does make you stupid. :lol:

This one has some relevance, at least. Back in '03 I was the victim from one specific notorious hacker. His name was Azn-something. I logged on one day to find my pumpkin, disc of returning, party hats, easter eggs, most stuff of value gone. He modified my friends list to say You've been hacked by -insert name-. It took me a year to fully recover but I'll never regain the money I lost in the holiday items.

I agree. Certain parts of the environment are waaaay too tongue-in-cheek to be taken seriously. The entire penguin situation is an example. Another is the existence of the mobster-like Fairy "Godfather". Him and his suited henchmen look so out of place down in Zanaris. Its very obvious little thought was put into that aspect.

Easily the ghost boss at the end of The Haunted Mine quest. I wore my full armor thinking it wouldn't be a problem, but the fight came down to the wire, I used all my food and had a sliver of health left after the fight. I was sweating! I was really poor, so the loss of my best equipment would have been devastating.

I hate dying, and will avoid it at all costs. I 3 piece deep in the wilderness, and wear junk equipment (Adam helm, legs etc.) if training on Green Dragons in the wilderness. I guess I'm just that cheap.

I think its pretty obvious for most people. Part of it is showing off, part of it is the need to spend the money you've made on something, and the rest is actual functionality.