strilmus

Also, as it turned out they solved the smuggling issue simply by eliminating items from the process of maintaining the citadel. Not so sure about the play field though...considering how "versatile" they claim it to be, it might involve the use of your inventory for some of the game modes.

Chances are it's a reference to something obscure. More importantly, Jagex has got to stop using jpg files. This is the 21st century, we have png now...

They really need to update his wares for the player of today, though.

"It looks like today's challenger has brought in a live dragon to complete his dessert....ooh, that looked like it hurt. Remember viewers, whenever you use dragonfire in the kitchen, be sure to wear your ice gloves at all times. That is, if we didn't have a disclaimer for our viewers to never try this at home."

Horribly impractical, but YES No less practical than having to dunk 27 individual rods into a well. hell yes, dragon chef tournaments (not really but we can dream)

As fun as it is to scarper across the area like Batman, I wouldn't have minded as much if the graphical quality wasn't getting in the way of the experience. :razz: I do hope that they make the vyre hunting a bit more accessible to the other combat types.

I'm glad that they're cleaning the sanguinesti slums up as far as palette variety goes. That whole area is a brown smudge and it made it really hard to see where some of the path was.

Eh, I'm too lazy to reupload the image.

Here are my finished notes that don't make sense out of context.

Sweet. Now THIS is a puzzle that makes the men weep.

That was hard? Ciphers are usually your opening move in a puzzle fight... me english teacher would have something to say about the mixed use of numbers there so are we gonna speculate on who the mysterious figure is or the ominous message?

I kind of miss my sleeping bag, though...I would have held onto it as a keepsake. I still say the game as a whole has to shift in order to make botting less profitable, but of course nobody's going to ever take that chance since we know they can't handle anything above "remove free trade" and "put back free trade".

Overall, if the system doesn't prevent granting rings to users based on time that user spent working on the citadel, then a botter can set up a whole operation in which they are gaining extra exp in one account that is being earned by all these other accounts, without that account sacrificing time. Hopefully they can avoid such a glaringly obvious flaw, though. Right?

well, instead of having to log in 50 people individually, I imagine with bots that you can have a whole bunch of them toiling away at the same time without needing meaningful input because they're in an instanced, static location that is totally controlled by the user

But... Doesn't requiring a large number of people favor bots and dummy accounts over real people moreso than letting a few play? The philosophy that they can stop people from trying seems odd, when it is clear that all they do is disadvantage the actual players even more with impediments that don't really mean anything to botters. Hell, the way the system is set up, rings can be granted to specific accounts being geared for sale while the rest of the slaves fuel the entire thing. It's like an energy farm for account selling!

That, and the desert slayer dungeon is filled with hostile level 90 banshees that hit pretty hard, so....probably not a good idea to just run through there wearing both melee armor and no head protection. EDIT: I liked the parts where suomi refers to goofing off as wasting exp. I giggle a bit inside.

Okay, a couple things. About EA, google "sin to win". As for Bungie... Also, many games are going free to play in order to get more customers. I think all these principles we claim to have are more flexible than they appear to be.

They were testing an anti-idle security measure. Let's see anybody try to afk after a house falls on them.

That being said, they've done worse to various other items for much flimsier reasons, and people didn't care after about a week or so.

Got Call of the Sea also since I'm probably not going to be fighting up until the month I get the 5000 point bonus. Also got the cheapo outfit, plan to buy the others next month... The poh costume storage will only store one of them, and it'll automatically revert that one to the default colors, so...darn you jagex For all of yall silly people wondering, the replenishment of your points is not dependent on when your membership month ends, but when you started the loyalty programme. If it worked any other way, it would be somewhat unfair to everybody else that you got 3000 points and then proceeded to buy up all of the specials at once.

My question is this: Does the reward justify the effort, or are they simply too invested in the effort to see the end results objectively? I mean, at the end of it all, you just have your stuff, your levels, and all the memories of you standing there, perhaps chatting with your friends idly or something, hewing out a rock or watching some chinchompas trap themselves repeatedly. It seems like a lot of the people who became famous for their RS accomplishments all ended up quitting anyway.

So we're okay with this thread? Are we just going to ignore it a day or so after it's created and go back to what we were doing? Honestly, I don't think we should be expected to support the weight of the mistakes that everybody else made. Hell, we need to make the push to solve the problem instead of shoving it under the rug. If our Platinum status means anything at all, we should be able to talk to Jagex on a somewhat...personal level. If it doesn't mean anything at all and we have no means of establishing regular contact, then the whole relationship is meaningless, and we shouldn't even bother to continue dealing with them if they want to treat us like a toy that is expected to hold up to their standards, yet is unable to discuss matters that are of concern to everybody. And this is the point where I derail this thread. [spoiler=so, this is the part where you ignore me if you don't like reading exposition] Jagex? Powerless? It is only because they put themselves in a position without power. There are several fundamental things that keep bots in business. Firstly, there's the whole browser game thing. That's always gonna leave their doors open. They COULD change it but it wouldn't be part of their business plan, so, yeah. Next up, we have the hackneyed game mechanics which both provide a reason to bot (a ridiculous amount of time spent earning your way towards content which isn't WORTH the amount of time you spend getting there) and the entire system which the game's economy is based on, in which the most valued items are supplies which become instantly worthless once they are made into the things that should have been useful, the gear which becomes useful after the process of rendering supplies useless is complete, and the dumb trinkets and baubles that you buy with the scads of money you get from that whole process that you don't have any use for after it all. More on that in a bit. And finally, we have the community, involving both the players, and the developers. The players don't respect the developers because the developers don't respect the players. And they're both going about it the wrong way. Here we have the child which does not get the care it needs and decides to just take whatever it wants. Here we have the parent who does not know how to care for the child, and treats them disrespectfully because the child does not behave. The developers do not give their players the content they "need" (in the sense that for their money they should be provided for in terms of entertainment) most of the time, and teach them all the wrong things because all the things that they do happen to like are entirely arbitrary compared to what is deemed necessary to obtain them. The player, seeing that the goal does not fit any rhyme or reason with the journey, sees that they should forge their own path to the goods regardless of what the parent says, because the parent's been wrong many times and is not really the pinnacle of good judgment when it comes to these situations. However, neither is the player, but at least they know what they want and know how to get there the "better" way. And therefore a good lot of them consider cheating to be viable, acceptable, perhaps even superior to any other method, as those methods have been shown to be substantially flawed in of themselves. MEGA DISCLAIMER: In no way am I saying that players are in fact actually all whiny children, although I'll allow you to indulge in that thought right now if you particularly enjoy it. ... Okay. You done? I still stand by my other statement that Jagex makes for some incompetent parents though, because they'll never actually read this, or if they do, we'll get a good laugh out of it if they decide to handle it immaturely. Anyway, the players are put in the role of the audience, or the passengers. They cannot directly control what happens to them. They can, however, react to it. The developer, based on those reactions, is supposed to figure out how to guide the players to new ideas and experiences that would be most beneficial to the audience. The player grows depending on what they are shown. The developer grows depending on how they change their output based on the reactions. And all have failed in that regard. Constructively, I mean. To learn how to cheat and ignore the consequences, or to deal with cheating by putting it off and ignoring the consequences, are some kind of growth, but hell if that makes anything actually better. So, the two components, the people, and the environment, are intertwined. And they form the game. The game is fundamentally flawed. On the surface everything appears to be fine, or fine enough, to the developers, and the players. A lot of the stuff I write sinks to the depths of the data grinder, so that either means that I'm so wrong that nobody's going to bother replying (but this is the INTERNET so that can't be true) or that they simply don't care. And perhaps that is fine if you want things to stay the same. But if they do, the game will never give you what you really want. I've been over this many times, so I'm gonna summarize it now. CHANGE THE GAME TO BE THE GAME WE ALL WANT. CHANGE IT DAMN YOU. I'm not talking about just your average slap an update on it or remake the tutorial or undo the removal of free trade (although somewhat essential to the process, not the entire fix) or even cheat, or add cosmetic items to farm the rest of the money out of the playerbase or create "emergent gameplay" with clans, or make an area with tents in it that allows you to parade around with a customized flag up your butt showing how insignificant the whole charade is. I'm talking Runescape 3. (I'm going to post more later, but for now feel free to rail against my proposal until I wake up and am at an operational state to use a computer.)

Overall, I just wanted some kind of change so that people would start thinking again. So I cast my wish for chaos. Sure, you can stay with the unchanging world and its rules set in stone, but that game was going to die too, so even a worse alternative was worth risking because it won't really matter in the long run. All we had to lose was some arbitrary amount of time, which would be spent on some other game. Of course, all it really resulted in was selfish thinking. It was the basis for every action preceding and following the vote. That was the risk. Most of us were willing to take it, but I don't think anybody ever really understood much about it. It wasn't as much deciding that it was okay to go ahead with the plan, but rather the the readiness to accept the plan's consequences. The no vote just meant that you would be left behind in terms of the state of mind you would need to adapt. The vote was pointless. I don't regret it because you can't regret something that you didn't have anything to do with. I really do hope that most of you did not believe that the bots would stay away. However, I have to note that they were getting stronger without the free trade help anyway because their motives and methods were already changing. Jagex's only change was to become more lenient so that they would presumably be able to keep tabs on their actions rather than impose any real punishment, allowing them to come up with new countermeasures based on this information. Apparently that plan didn't really work out. Claiming that your vote was right or wrong is pretty much like saying your vote mattered when it came to things like the general election or when you voted against the war in Iraq or a particular law or anything, and the only people who should care about that are politicians because we pay them to care about stupid things like that. When a course of action is fueled by ulterior motives, the voting is ultimately rendered a moot point because your say had nothing to do with how the actual decision was made, even before the vote was counted, unless you were one of the pawns supporting the mass scam gesture masquerading as a legitimate procedure. And even then, you're just a puppet with somebody else's hand up your ass, who is led to believe that they actually live in sesame street. On a more direct note, I believe that the actual change never actually occurred from this update, but enabled the capacity of people to decide things for themselves back to its natural state, which overall is a benefit should they ever decide to make the real decisions that would get things back on track. Until then... Every week they wait before they take some real action is another debt taken out on the community, but since when has that ever been their concern?...

At this point, because of the botters (you can see them in the mining guild area) and what comes out of the LRC, mining coal is pretty much worthless to anybody who is trying to compete with the bots for it. On the other hand, training smithing is cheaper, so perhaps you should look into that. If prices are higher, to say that you're getting more gold compared to what you were getting before is a fallacy because you're still getting the same amount of purchasing power. It just raises the bar for everybody who can't compete with the bots and high level players.

Although I enjoy reading about game history, I guess I'm not really that enthusiastic because it's been written about several times. wessan, if you really need to ask me what it was, i don't think you're trying to remember hard enough you don't remember at any point in the past when jagex did something drastic to get rid of bots? nothing at all stands out? about four years ago?