fat_klutz

That's a very pessimistic opinion. They can make account creation more difficult. They can perma ban at the first sign of botting, no matter what. They can refuse member payment from credit cards of people caught botting. They can do the tutorial worlds like I said to better monitor the influx of new accounts instead of just having them mix in immediately with everyone else. They can make reporting botting accounts easier. They can make it so if you're reported X amount of times within Y time limit you have to perform some stupid mundane task that bots wouldn't be able to do. Also I'm not sure how these things are temporary. If you start permanently banning people, they are going to be scared. People aren't going to buy gold anymore or bot their way up. Jagex could additionally require longer membership payments so if you are caught botting you lose more than 5 dollars a month or whatever they charge now. You talk about the balance between doing what is good for the game and what is popular. Jagex can do plenty of things without removing the wilderness and such to slow the influx of bots and the simple fact is they choose not to. I just made an account. It took 15 seconds. They require an e-mail address but don't even require you took activate your account with a code? Simple stuff like this might seem like a waste of time but how do you know its not going to help if you don't even try.

This is what gives me pause on balance article. You can make accounts harder to create, you can create a tutorial world with strict supervision where accounts have to remain for X number of days before being released into the regular worlds, you can simply stick a Jagex mod at any number of X locations and just start banning the people who are obviously bots. Players who like to be 'quiet' when skilling are going to notice the mod and do something differently so nobody would be magically getting banned. I understand that there isn't a magic button that can be pressed but to call people morons for believing after 2 years (or however long) Jagex might actually invest some time into fighting bots? That's a pretty ridiculous statement. I agree the solution is to move forward and not back. I feel like Jagex though seems to move sideways. As for pacing, obviously I agree... how could you not... My opinion is they need to rebalance things across the board, across skills. If RS is going to survive and grow things like smithing tables need to be totally reworked. Full rune needs to be smithable at lvl 50 and Jagex needs to rerelease totally new things. It is ridiculous that it takes 99 smithing to make something incredibly useless (exaggeration, I know it has its uses). Yes, it would be a massive change but I think it needs to happen. Maybe somebody who agrees can talk more about that. I know I said I agree that you can't move backwards but I think Jagex does need to look back and realize that 8 years ago when a r2h was the best item in the game it was ok for the pacing to be how it was and it take 99 smithing to make such a weapon. 8 years later things have changed and the pacing of the game is quite awful IMO. There is too much to do and I feel like new players must be incredibly confused when they join and look at the skills and say what is the point of training smithing when it is going to take me 6 months straight of smithing to make armor I can wear after one day of playing. Anyway, overall the article is good. It is thought provoking, although the one poster was right, a bit abrasive.

Or start playing competitive DotA, I love the game too :D Nah, Heroes of Newerth is easily the best DotA-copy out there. It is the best DotA copy. Which is why I don't play it. Because it is literally a copy and I could just play DotA for free. I will admit I only played HoN during the beta so I'm not very up to date on it but I still here it is more or less copy paste DotA. I do read S2Nome's blog from time to time and he seems pretty smart so I don't doubt it is well developed, I just don't care about graphics enough to invest when DotA is still around. LoL is a significant depature from DotA and it is quite difficult to compare them seriously. It is like comparing Halo to CS or RS to WoW. Both FPS/MMO but they go different directions. Hopefully Ice and Valve get it right with DotA 2! Also I'll be the first to say I was dissapointed when they took away tree spirit. They dropped a lot of natures and were fairly easy to kill. Plus they did help pass the time, especially when one would spawn and everybody would freak out trying to figure out if it was theres or not.

Very classy interview. I was a little shocked by all the mentions of having to waste experience by waiting around for a couple of minutes.... I guess for most people playing like that is a chore but if you enjoy it, more power to you. Best part of interview, DotA shout out. Have you tried playing League of Legends? It's fairly similar and there are just as many trolls at the early levels but overall lots less leavers and such. Good luck on your goal.

I hope you're kidding... you get 40 range, buy a cannon, buy some cannonballs, get 60 woodcutting or whatever, take the canoe to wildy, cannon drags in 5 minutes, tele back with glory to edge and repeat. You can just leave your cannon there in between trips. Nechs need 80 slayer which I'm fairly sure takes a hell of a lot longer and far less people have.

I wonder if this would be such a big deal if Jagex had better implemented the changes in the first place. One can only wonder.

Well I don't even play anymore but if you want my opinion they shouldn't be allowed. First thing, the long argument about 94 vs 95 prayer. I thought this was actually a good point but this demonstrates a flaw with the leveling system, not really a good supportive argument. It is something that should probably be changed. Second thing about weapons/prayers being reflected in combat level, you may not be able to see d-claws in an inventory but if you are fighting somebody who is lvl 126 you know they have the ability to use them. If they choose to use them or not to it doesn't really matter. The one thing old pkers did well is minimize on stats and only get exactly what you needed. It was your choice to raise your attack past level 60 knowing you can not afford anything more than dragon weapons. On the other hand it is impossible to guage whether or not somebody has the ability to use extremes. If you are not willing to do the quests to get all those fancy prayers or do the dungeons or whatever than don't raise your prayer level!! If you can't afford the new armors don't raise your defense! It is your fault for getting the levels if you choose not to get the best equipment for them!! When I played, there was options, you didn't have to have X,Y, and Z stats to be good. You could play a mith pure, a 1 defense pure, a rune pure, etc. The bottom line though was that if you were going to get 40 defense you were also going to wear the rune. It was assumed that players used the best items they could and as such seeing someone level 26 probably meant they were lvl 40 range. Even if they were chilling there in full iron knowing they were 26 gave you a good idea of what they are capable of. Knowing a player is lvl 126 means you should know they could pull out ags at anytime. On the other hand it is impossible to know at any level if they are going to use extremes, that is my problem. tldr: I agree with the people who say you can't see em can't use em. Hope my explanation made some sense. Suggestions instead of just complaints though... Allow the pots in the wildy. If you skull yourself though/have a skull they become supers. That way people who wanna hunt Choas elemental can still do it with extremes... if you are attacked with an extreme on leave it. That will be one of the risks to attack a non skulled player now. From then on however any extremes drunk will only appear as supers. I my solution is pretty fair. It lets people still use them in the wildy against monsters and even possibly agaisnt other players if the attacker is willing to take the risk.

This is rediculous. Nothing against Jagex having a fan convention but they have on game and their is absolutely no reason to bring players together for LAN. Blizzcon works because Blizzard can give out beta keys, have contests, have LAN comps, have a competitive tourney, reveal progress of their new game, etc. I hope this goes well but I just don't see how it will work.

Scroll wheel that [cabbage] like you scroll wheel a deagle in COD:MW. Regardless of whether it is against the rules or not it needs to be changed (and people need to be told of the change so we don't have people getting banned for not knowing) so it is against the rules. I don't have a problem with speeding some things up but clearly this is an abuse of the game. Yes, the game may be flawed and may need to be fixed but in the mean time we don't need every kid with this mouse getting 200m fletching exp in a week.

Ya... the whining is out of control. Stuff like the PK riots were ok but this is a logical change that has absolutely no impact on the gameplay. Infact I am surprised you guys managed to discuss it for 27 pages. I though the firecape compromise was much more interesting overall.

Gee creating a ton of bolts isn't exactly selfish when you think about. For a small minority of players yes, it might hurt their economic lively hood (doubtful, I doubt many people make a ton of money from bolts) but the lower prices for a majority of players wins out.

You think only 100 players made a significant profit? Considering that people were saying bolts and supplies were difficult to get it is absurd to assume that there were not more people doing this. Why do they have needed to produce millions of gold. Even 20 million is a TON of gold and enough to buy a lot of levels in certain skills.

No but it is messed up if there are low levels players that just made 400 million doing this which is enough to buy like 5 99's in stuff like cooking, herblore, smithing, etc as well as sick combat gear and basically as many ancient spells as you want to power level maging.

I'm glad that they banned these people. Really. But I somehow doubt only 100~ people where doing it... It seems like they purposefully banned those with more time on their accounts while letting others off maybe. Of course I have no evidence of this but it seems plausible to me.

I enjoy how only about 15% of this thread was about imps, 30% was about unrelated material, and 55% was QQ/arguing. It made my day.

As an 80 priest in a guild with TotC 10 and 25 cleared, I'd like to just back up nerdboy's opinion. I mean, he has no right to what he is saying, because all he has done is level and BG, but he's still able to see that WoW is a borefest. Been playing that game here and there ever since Fall 06. I quit before BC came out because I thought the game sucked. When the new expansion came, I got an email for a free trial. Thought some things seemed more promising after trying it, bought a month, leveled to 80 and started to clear Naxx and quit because of what a joke raiding became. A friend convinced me to start again and I think the current raid content is fun, but still a shadow of what it could be. Also the game has become ridiculously simple. But anyway I'm geared for the final raid of this expansion, Icecrown. The patch is supposed to hit Tuesday, and honestly I can say that if the Icecrown raid does not show significant improvement from the quality of the rest of the content thus far, this will be my last month of WoW. Raiding used to be a fun challenge, but anymore its just a bore task. The bosses are so easy that the only reason people raid is to get gear. It used to be a fun and challenging experience where the gear was just a nice reward, not the main point of the trip. Nowadays people act like you are a noob if you don't have every single piece of your equipment at the current highest raid level. Sorry, but some of us do not find it enjoyable to kill the same bosses every single week and spend 10-15 hours a week in the repetative raid borefest, sitting around and just waiting for your luck to turn out so you get the gear. Also Arenas are completely terrible these days. If you aren't the right class, or one of your friends isnt, then one of you is going to have to make a new character just so your teams can work well in arenas. And last but not least, its so gay how the "Server" system works. I understand that it is how most RPGs work...but I love Runescapes system so much. If I meet someone IRL and find out they play WoW its always like "Oh, you play?? Sweet! Wait...what server?" And then they are on a different server than you, and you can't play together unless you pay 25 dollars for a transfer, or you take a month and level a new character on their server. The whole game is just not very conducive to fun. It can be very addicting and very time consuming....but if you take a moment and just look at your gear and say "Wait....WHY am I about to commit 3 hours of my life to clear this raid again??" Sometimes youll realize that you really arent having any fun at all. Yes, server issues do seem to be a BIG problem in WoW. Servers are always down. I would say that Blizzard has at least a 10% downtime. And the whole comment about being able to server jump on RS whenever you feel like it, ya that is really cool. In RS, what server you are on is not really that big of an issue, since chat AND the exchange are global. That is what really makes the grand exchange a powerful gaming tool... possibly one of the best tools in the gaming world today. Anyone can list from any server and sell to anyone on any other server instantly. Nether LOTRO nor WoW can boast about that. Which in some ways is better because you don't have global economy [bleep] ups. Only server economy [bleep] ups.

I'm just wondering how hard it is to get good gear in RS when you're friend can just lend it to you.

Sounds like a good update! Good job Jagex!

RSC... People played it to PK. People PK on free. No Free.

http://www.gamespot.com/webonly/rpg/runescape/index.html?tag=result;title;0 http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/index.html?tag=result;title;0 http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starcraft/index.html?tag=result;title;1 http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/callofduty4modernwarfare/index.html?tag=result;title;0 http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/counterstrikesource/index.html?tag=result;title;1 No, good games don't get made fun of. I already addressed the WoW issue. People make fun of it because south park did an episode with stereotypical video games nerds. Nobody is laughing at the graphics of WoW or the customer support or the massive grinding so you can wear a cape.

Can you start trying to understand the concept of my posts and stop taking everything so literally? Somebody asked why RS gets laughed at and I listed the reasons. Now tell me why WoW players get laughed at. Tell me why CSS players or CoD4 players get laughed at. Tell me why SC/WC3 players get laughed at. This is why you are wrong. Good games do not get made fun of in mass. It is impossible for there not to be someone out there who makes fun of SC but the gaming community on the whole (whether they play MMO, RTS, FPS, w.e) respect SC. You might suck at shooting games but are you honestly going to say that CS is a bad game? Uh... probably not. Somebody who doesn't like MMO's isn't going to sit here and bash Diablo and make fun of it simply because it doesn't appeal to them. So unless there is some massive conspiracy RS must actually suck in the eyes of other gamers.

I was sitting at a tree woodcutting and somebody walks up and calls me a [bleep]. Go into a random bank and try to ask somebody an intelligent question. I am betting 80% of the time you get a stupid response back. Can you name for the hard quests. Count them up. And then divide it by the number of quests. Somehow I doubt your number will be much anywhere close to 20%. I realize their are pros and cons. Bad graphics is a con but like you said it allows more players to play the game and makes it easily accessible wherever you are. Bad customer support is not a con. It is a problem. There are no pros to Jagex's terrible customer support. Similarly there are no pros (in the context of serious gaming) to a combat system that is horrible balanced and based 80% on luck. You do know what an Xbox is right? You put a disk in a play the game. There is no way for the game makers to communicate with you once the game is purchased and in your Xbox. Please PM and let me know you are trolling.

They may have had smaller bases but the problem is the "base" wasn't even told. Are you to blind to realize that somebody playing on their Xbox doesn't get a helpful message every two weeks letting them know their is a contest going on? The WoW players that get laughed at are the ones who play 20 hours a day on 5 computers at once. Every RS players gets laughed at because Customer service sucks The graphics are terrible It is impossible to hold a conversation for more than two seconds because the maturity is non-existant Your "skill level" is proportional to how much time you grind and has no basis in reflexes or understanding of the game Absolutely no regard to balance in PVP Everything about combat relies on you getting lucky Jagex never admitting they made a mistake and fixing things Terrible end game content considering the time effort Questing is basically gather said list, kill monster that requires you to switch pray (Hard concept), return to quest giver The economy and trade in general suck now? Before the GE you couldn't even skill because of bots I am sure I could find some more things if you want.

Blizzard started small just like everybody else (3 people)... I think launching the genre would be an overstatement as well. RS was not very popular until it was mass advertised on Miniclip and such. Whether or not Jagex did or did not deserve this I think it is hard to dispute that the poll was incredibly bias and poorly done. It is like the time poll's for the worlds most influential person of that year. Look at the poll from last year, the guy who started 4chan won. I'm sorry /b/tards but your hero is not the most influential person in the world or the person of the year. However because the poll was on the internet it catered to the /b/tards and got all their votes. Similarly, this poll was catered to Jagex and their audience because of how it can be advertised to potential voters and such. Somebody sitting at home may have played games from all three developers but if they are currently playing a game from Lionhead on their Xbox they aren't even going to know about the poll and as such while they might think Lionhead is the best developer their vote is never going to be counted. So seriously, stop getting anal and freaking out at everybody who says Jagex may not have deserved this. The poll was poorly done and hardly proves anything except people who play RS went and voted. And RS does get laughed at on other games sites btw.

I was kinda hoping adventure log would be F2P... I mean really Jagex? Are you so cheap you can't even let us know how long we played? Content is one thing but time played? And reading the 76k thing I laughed and said to myself sounds like absolutely nothing is going to happen. We will see though.