strilmus

Whoa whoa wait what Hitler?! If you are ever going to use Hitler as an example for anything you better have a good reason to do so! And if you are not comparing Jagex to Hitler why did you bring him up? Use the "if you give a mouse a cookie" example for non-Hitler related comparisons. Anyway. It's not like Jagex is going to take over Poland if they do this.

You say something like that and then a few years later BOOM dragon platebody.

Then why would it matter if another item was handed out or not? You joke about the magnifying glass being junk. Then why care at all? They can hand out all the items they want as long as they remain beneath your standards of a reward and no harm is done! Frankly I don't see the big issue at all about this event if it's being handled by a different team (community events) than the one responsible for actual updates (content team). If this event never happened, then things would be exactly the same except without that event!

Why yes, they do seem to get the holiday events. Makes sense to me. Gives them a nice introduction to how things work around Jagex and the chance to explore making content. Holiday events aren't permanent, so they don't have to be done perfectly as they'll only be in the game for a short period of time. It also, however, explains why many of the holiday events we experience now aren't up to the standards created before. WHAT I mean, the previous Christmas/Halloween/Easter events were pretty elaborate.... Looking back on earlier events, the artwork and amount of time put into each one seems to be increasing if anything! Study the course of events. The reality compared to your rose tinted lens of the past is much different! (I ain't blowing smoke, I was there during the earlier events too ya know.) They just have to solve the player density cluster[bleep] problem. Methinks you are reminiscing about old rewards that can be traded. Are you? ADMIT IT :lol: As for posting Dev Blogs with actual info, I think you all ruined that magic when your expectations exceeded rational limits.

Either way I get the feeling that they're holding back for a large high level update.

[spoiler=Actual Post]The two main problems with approaching games as a method of teaching any type of concept is that: 1. Games are mainly for fun, and if it is even possible, there's no way you're going to get them to think of games seriously as the main vehicle for any other kind of thought. Most games that have tried to accomplish a higher purpose either come off as too preachy because they forgot to actually make a game, or the idea simply turned off potential players because of the preconception that these types of games come off as too preachy and therefore unplayable. 2. With that in mind, nobody has ever tried to make a game that works to your benefit other than some games that are trying to catch onto a fad (Wii) or "edutainment" which is aimed at kids more than anything. And we all know what those games are like. :D At the end of the day, well made games need to satisfy the bottom line, so unless they have some sort of death wish, most developers choose to work on the appeal of the game rather than the intellectual impact in order to maximize the chances of success in the market. I have been researching for a few years to see if it is actually possible to create a socially responsible game (as in, adding more to human culture than taking away) that won't get crushed by either the potential player base or the market. These are my conclusions: 1. The game must successfully disguise its true purpose. Nobody except the developers must know about the intent to accomplish an enriching environment for the human spirit. (This sounds extremely corny and ridiculous but it's pretty much what you are trying to do.) This is like poison to people looking for fun. Avoid all lengthy dialogue by characters that would give this away or unrealistic situations that paint everything with ultra positive or negative hues, or really obvious metaphors that do nothing except destroy your credibility. The message must come through by your actions, not your words. Everything you do (and DON'T do) will affect the outcome. 2. The game must be good. This is really obvious but frankly sometimes I wonder if we forget in the middle of the job. This thing must play well and by extension, sell well in order to make any kind of impact on culture. The main difference here between this and normal games is that it has to work with the other goal and sacrifices can't be made either way. 3. This part is the hardest. The game will have to make enough money in order to survive all the way to the completion of the goal, but at the same time, it must not damage society. You do not want people ditching work or school for this game. You do not want people to spend hours or days or weeks or months doing this at the expense of doing other real life things that they would be better off doing at that time. Nobody must die or be killed as a result of this game. There shouldn't be sweatshops trying to play your game for money, or people scamming other people out of their personal information using this game as a means to do so. In short, people should want to play this game, but they shouldn't feel the NEED to play this game. Granted, this will probably happen a bit, depending on what your game is, but since you choose what you are going to do with this game, keeping these issues in mind when you are making these decisions is better than blindly forging ahead. Searching for the deeper cause rather than treating the problem superficially works well. All this being said, Runescape is definitely the wrong place to start. The players are very much unwilling to change, so the game is also unwilling to change much in order to avoid incidents like PvP removal, to the point that if anything actually becomes less painful to do, it is considered a menace to the game and should be destroyed, despite the fact that it is just trying to help. In its current state the atmosphere is almost designed to crush any kind of actual development of the mind save for what you gain from social interaction. In other words, the game itself is pretty much useless for learning. Most strategy comes down to rock/paper/scissors with varying degrees of complexity depending on the situation, and nothing changes at higher levels except for where you can do the almost exact same thing you were doing earlier but look cooler doing it. The whole balance of the cycle of work and output has been turned on its head, where it is more important that you can do something than the things you actually do with that ability. Now, there's nothing wrong with Runescape as a game (granted, an extremely simple game without much thinking needed), but it won't fulfill any deeper need than to waste your time with distractions and watching grass grow. TL;DR Post is about making games that help society as a whole rather than some kind of distraction from life's problems. Main obstacles: 1. Games ARE distractions by nature. Trying to do something other than that is, by our current preconceptions, pretty much the opposite of what a game is in the first place. 2. Most games these days are made to turn a profit. They NEED to do this in order to survive or get enough exposure. Anything that doesn't serve this purpose is secondary and therefore barely explored, or just turned into another selling point. Blah blah blah did some research. Making such a game perhaps possible. Conclusions: 1. Nobody must know that the game is trying to be helpful or else nobody will play it. Do not do anything that could be observed as a direct result of having a "Disney" philosophy. 2. Game must not forget it is a game. The game must be FUN. But the other objective must not be forgotten. Fun and learning must survive together. 3. Do not be evil. Be wary of possible outcomes that encourage harm against other beings (REAL harm, not fake harm). Problems are best handled head on rather than avoided. Runescape is too set in its ways to be of any use for learning except in situations involving more than one player. Game is too simplistic to offer any real education. If anybody wishes to discuss what I wrote to the extent of debating certain points, you must suffer through the gauntlet of text in the spoilered part before I consider your opinion valid.

So, the choice is yours. Do you sacrifice your money now to gain a multiple advantage on your coin to boost yourself to new heights? Or do you take heavy advantage of the money flow and get more now, so that later if the market collapses under the weight of the influx, you will have more purchasing power then? You may decide to gain the immediate training time advantage and hope your investment pays off, or fail and end up paying for your gambit later. On the other hand, if you take the long bet and decide to go for profit entirely, you could end up on top in the end. At the same time, you might find that your time was worth more to you than the gold. Or hell, you can just ignore it all and remove yourself from the economic rush entirely with unrelated training. Then again, maybe you can combine that with the profit angle (avoid the drug you deal in, so to speak) and make some scratch on the side. That might not be as profitable as devoting your time to one goal, though. This isn't a horrible event. People keep acting like every darn thing that happens to them will ruin the game. It'll take much more than that to throw off years of stubborn resistance to reality. Runescape plows ahead with nary a thought to the consequences. Won't get anywhere refusing to deal with it. You've got a decision to make. What will it be?

I wonder how long it takes to alter the color though.... I mean, depending on how difficult it is to use Photoshop to shift the color balance slightly, maybe several months? There's no possible way they could have covered ALL of those items.

Initially, reading this I didn't think it would be it (it in itself doesn't sound like a "skill" as it would be a minigame) but now that I looked at the content team interview, this is pretty much the most logical explanation. Although they are trying to hide details, they kind of gave away more than they thought. A skill that implements most if not all aspects of gameplay, and balances between combat and noncombat expertise? Not a lot of guesswork from there. Although some of their answers are a bit off, seeing as I can see that equipment costs will still be factored into funding expeditions (you can't expect to go into dangerous areas with bad gear), and that there will most likely be a bunch of combat encounters involved....one of the answers mentioned several boss creatures for F2P, so I'm thinking at some point you can go bounty hunting for deadly deadly monsters in some twisted nest of darkness. Also, this idea isn't entirely new, unless we're missing one really big detail that hasn't been remotely hinted at. I think they're playing it up too much. The skill is basically another game as they said, but it's another game that's been done before somewhere. And of course what you can do will be directly affected by your other skill levels anyway, although it won't stop you from messing with the skill entirely. There's probably a ton of phat lewt at stake though, and it's fun so why not. They better be right in that it takes pure skill and determination to be good at though, I'm tired of games that delegate gameplay to numbers and rely on the player to live entirely vicariously through the avatar while they sit and stare at the screen do stuff for them. Also I'm hoping there's a bit of team gameplay somewhere to be found.

Kind of makes me think of a few small tidbits from Meeting History. I hope we get to punch a hole in the timeline again :D It'll probably be P2P though.

Now that I think about it, if you had the staff and was wearing d-hide, landing the special would get you protection from all sides of the combat triangle at once.

Hey, you know how in some multiplayer games where they design bosses that require more than one person because it's literally impossible for one person to harm it all the time without the assistance of somebody else? Why don't they try something like that? Maybe make the thing so large that it takes up several floors of a structure and make it so that one person on each floor has to coordinate with the others to hit it at the right times? Perhaps too ambitious?

What I'm not sure is if they are actually sacrificing resources for these community based updates, or if they're two separate things entirely, and quality control went down for normal updates or something. It can't take so much time to have some jmods and pmods organize an event to throw the entire update schedule off. I think there's something else going on. Also, I gotta say, if you just wanted normal content, I think you're expecting a single player type of experience. They're entirely painless to deal with, nobody ever gives you sass, and since you're not directly competing with others for resources, the xp curves are much more forgiving. You will never have to deal with "nerfing" or trolls or anything. So go play an Artix Entertainment game or something. Failing that, you guys could just make a guild of your own and lobby for your rights as paying customers. :D I am currently not playing the game right now because of the lack of justification for the money, of course. I would love more content too. I just want to be sure of the actual problem before pointing any fingers.

Well yeah. It's an ad. I hope the people imitating Billy Mays do his legacy justice. Might consider doing it if the orb of oculus isn't a chore to use.

I think it's pretty cool. I am just wondering how they set up the blast furnace event. Do they supply the ores and then you give back all the finished bars?

I'd be more sympathetic about the specialness if we had more high quality screenshots, or vids of GE, or several perspectives of GE to work off of. The ghostliness of the figures makes picking up their features really tough.

Gonna be like that, huh? Okay. So you got this one word. Yeah. Draw all these conclusions from it. How do you connect the red energy and the temporary hole in the universe that showed a bunch of cloaked strangers in red flanked by ones in green with this stuff? All we know right now about slugs that they take control of people by latching on to them. There hasn't been any magic so far, just mind control and a whole lot of irritating messes as a consequence, most of which involve sneaking around and sapping their efforts with clever tricks. Where do we make the leap to power of unimaginable proportions, and slightly breaking the universe?

Hm. I don't know what we'd do with cosmetic items seeing as the equipment system restricts this kind of thing to using for events and skilling. Not that it would be a bad thing but I haven't touched many of my costumes. Maybe it would cut down on using high level armor status symbols in place of actual fashion sense but eh. Most of Runescape has already married to the idea of slamming their head against a brick wall for respect ("I slammed my head against the wall 100 million times! I am better than all of you!"), I think any other ideas remotely 'progressive' to the world of old school mmo grinding would be rejected so hard. :D

The more they say the new skill is original, the more I think that it's total bull and somebody is already doing it...developers are very bad when it comes to scoping their competition unless they base their entire game on topping the competition. Then it sucks because they forgot to make a game. It's pretty funny. I just hope it's not too much of a letdown when they finally get around to doing it.

Hah. Oh geez. After about the twentieth or so page I can't keep reading. Look, it was just a joke. His choice of words mean NOTHING besides the fact that he took the first anagram on a list after punching his phrase into an anagram generator. He could have easily gone with something else on the list and then you'd be discussing those words instead. "Acolyte until" is the alphabetical first phrase that will come out of an anagram generator if we're not counting chemical words. Which most common generators will not use. JUST A JOKE. I swear you folks could turn a sneeze on a tissue into dragon crossbows or something. Anyway, I'm leaning more towards the ritual (it kind of looks like the ritual) but anything could happen :P Echo of the future? Current event? Things are getting more chaotic. I'll be staring at this video to see if anything else was going on.

I still don't see why this doesn't count as scamming. Person tells you lie. You buy into it. Person gets away with your stuff and you are left with nothing. SCAAAAAAAAAAAAM. Pretty sure we had a rule for it. Just because it's not selling one thing in place of another or tricking people into the wilderness or getting them to say their password out loud in chat doesn't mean that it's any less of a lie, and if they think it's a grey area, then these con artists who call themselves "merchants" have just managed to make Jagex swallow the biggest lie of them all. If they really want to take action, they can just make the rule right now, and then wait a week and see who's left. If you are the governing body who makes the rules, if you need a rule to allow yourself to act then MAKE THE STUPID RULE ALREADY. Of course you can't retroactively ban people for past transgressions not covered earlier but if they keep going after a week then feel free to axe them without any guilt. Don't just frown and wag your finger at them! That won't make them stop at all! Eliminating these "merchanting" clans will not solve everything though....

Geez, I started reading this thread and it was going somewhere but then it turned into total crock. From what I see, so far we have: One possible slayer or hunting update (leaning towards hunter) which will award pretty things that the entire combat triangle is likely to appreciate unless they're actually referring to skillers, but that would be kind of silly seeing as we have clay tools already. A patron of the skill associated with the update will have something to gain but the outcome is, as always, unclear. Hell, it might just be another freaking boss for freaking rich players with freaking rich armor. Like we need more of that. One not grandmaster quest perhaps advancing the Myreque plot which has stagnated for ages but we don't know for sure (Paterdomus is the largest temple on a waterway that I know of) but there are knights at work here. People will be underwhelmed. One actual grandmaster quest involving the actual (and is not the prepreprequest) for the "final" showdown between the Mahjarrat which will answer a bunch of questions but probably raise more. This quest has to be Grandmaster, seeing as the prereqs for it will be the PREVIOUS grandmaster quest plus all the other ones connected to these crazy peoples, and hell if that doesn't cut it for you I don't know what will. The fact that all of them, including the weakest ones, are equal or greater in power than the highest level player scares the cabbage out of me. This will be a major turning point for sure, and certainly not the end to the main plot arc, which small hints here and there have been indicating something much larger at stake. Any other kind of speculation veers off the path of rationale.

That being said, I wouldn't mind if there really was an ingame, not holiday related event that turned the water red. That would be so awesome even if it is ridiculously gross!

Many of the minigames are implied to have backstories as to make them work in the Runescape world....having a random activity be some sort of game doesn't make practical sense if it's your life. Gut feeling says that Stealing Creation is due for some kind of closure this year, what with Zaros preparing for his big comeback. Hopefully he fares better than the other aging celebrities.

Derailing the topic for a moment... I am concerned, however, that there isn't anybody on the Jagex staff that know anything about economics aside from situational research that they consider to be immediately important to them. They would benefit greatly from having an inside person that deals with the market on a hands-on basis and relays crucial details regarding trade, including this mint cake development. No more blundering about in the dark with heavy handed judgement calls. I think they rely on player mods to bring this stuff up. It doesn't seem to be working. Back on topic: I would not mind trading mint cakes for anything above their actual value as long as profit is gained. Being conservative about vague situations like the temporary adoption of cakes for cash saves a lot of trouble in the long run. :P