Sorator

Minor nitpick: Construction actually is a money sink, because of the cash it costs to turn logs into planks (paid to an NPC, not a player), as well as the various absurdly-expensive supplies that can only be bought from an NPC.

Reminds me of Puzzle Pirates, which works much like this - all worn items last for a certain number of hours played before degrading to dust, regardless of whether or not you're using them. (Or it might be a week of realtime for most clothes - it's been a while since I've played.) You can store items in your house for long-term non-degrading storage, but if you're carrying it - even if you aren't wearing it - it degrades. Edit: I don't actually think this would be a good fit for Runescape, though.

Castle Wars analysis.

[spoiler=Quote block] Of course there is always the factor that updates can appear ready and then when taken from a closed test server environment to a live game where players inevitably throw thousands different permutations of hardware and in-game gear at it something goes wonky. And to that I would say that their closed test server environment is not sophisticated enough to test the content properly and maybe they should invest in more infrastructure along those lines, if the basic functions of the things they test don't even work right. But it is simply impossible to predict how something will act when you throw it in to the live in a game such as runescape. There are so many thousand upon thousands upon thousands of different system configurations and different combinations of items & actions that even game studios much larger than Jagex haven't /got a hope in hell of ever testing against all of them. Not to mention you can stress test as much as you like nothing ever compares to real genuine stress of users all over the globe putting server requests in to do with content. It is a simple fundamental fact of games like Runescape that plague even the largest of game studios and there is no away around - stuff behaves in unexpected ways when exposed to real genuine users no matter how well tested it is. Anyone who thinks you can hope to have nothing ever break when exposed to the live game and that it is flawed testing whenever something does break is deluded about the chaotic nature of how coding behaves when exposed to real users vs test environments and about how impossible it is to even come remotely close to testing things against the endless array of different hardware/software setups computers can have - and that's before you even consider the myriad of permutations of items/actions possible within a game like Runescape. Anyone one of which could cause a random breakage or function failure for reasons unknown. I'm fine with some odd stuff happening that was seemingly unrelated to the update, or weird niche cases causing unusual bugs. I play League, that sort of thing happens over there allllll the time, and it's annoying, but it's really unavoidable, as you said. But when a basic function of the primary feature of the update doesn't work for most or all players (loot system during combat with revolution), that's a pretty big oversight in their QA process. And when that sort of thing happens over and over, it gets really frustrating.

Magic! I got it up very, very close to 99 and then held off on actually finishing it for quite a while, because I just didn't feel like it yet. Which also meant I had to avoid training Dg for a while, because it was close to 99 as well but I wanted Magic to be my first (definitely my favorite skill in the game). What finally made me get those last few xp was BXPW, when I realized I could hit 99 Summ pretty easily. So I got 99 Magic, Dg, and Summ in rapid succession. I played for about 9 years before getting my first 99, and I had my quest cape and base 92s before getting any 99s as well.

I'm okay with it. I've gotten by pretty well with my default 5 bars thus far; I have to switch things out sometimes, which is mildly annoying, but it isn't the worst inconvenience in the game. And between bonds and loyalty points, you can get more without a massive inconvenience or having to pay RL cash. I think it's a pretty good fit for Solomon's, honestly, much like bank boosters.

Any reason why everyone below rank 300 has no stats?

Barb Assault is the only one of those I really play.

You should pretty much never use research mode. And by "pretty much never," I mean never. Actually I believe that is from dismantle mode...arrows are grouped into 'Metal Weapons/Ammo' along with metal weapons, so you choose either no more dismantling weapons, or risk taking a GP hit like that if you receive a substantial ammo drop. Nope, that was research mode, hence the "granting 1383 bonus XP in Fletching". You have the same problem regardless of mode, of course. Not everyone is as lucky as that...(I know not everyone is as unlucky as this though)... That... wow. My condolences, sir/madam, for that is truly awful net connection.

Alternatively, it's much less random this way because what you can and can't do isn't affected by the calendar or this week's TH promo. It's more consistent.

Agreed. Vanity items and overrides and such are absolutely fine. That's the main revenue model that League of Legends uses as well, and I think it's a fine way to earn some money from mtx without killing the game. I'd be pretty okay with TH offering a faster way to get some stuff (like skilling outfits, silverhawks, spring cleaner, and the like), if they were also available in-game. I'm looking forward to the minigame spotlight thingy they've mentioned a few times now, even though I've picked up just about everything over time from free spins. The heavily game-impacting stuff that you can only win from TH is the problem, as you said, along with the excessive amount of xp/bonus xp.

One small update I'd love to see is the ability to right click > activate all my prawn pennies/pounds, instead of having to reclick them (and then the fishing spot) every so often. (And if you get the perk that extends their duration while you have charges active it'd just add charges as appropriate based on the charges you currently have.) Also, right click > open all prawn balls would be lovely as well.

[qfc]15-16-261-65604552[/qfc], page 61 Jagex needs to pay for anyone who designs content a few courses in game design, because obviously they can't learn on their own. Wonderful, so they completely ignored player feedback in the thread they made for that explicit purpose and instead completely undid any and all usefulness Darklight had. Well done, Jagex.

Probably a good thing; that lets folks who are training fishing collect them over time, without having to revisit old spots because they didn't have an aquarium yet. I'm curious whether it's faster to just do barb fishing for all of them, or to do, say, barb fishing, monkfish, swordfish/tuna, lobsters, and salmon/trout for their eggs, and barb fish for the rest. (Might just get one of the two from the multi spots, I suppose.)

Could be that they're still fiddling with it, so this isn't necessarily the final state of things... but I agree that this is sketchy reasoning.

I would've loved to see Flingers included in this update somehow; it's one of my favorite minigames to play, but I feel it has slightly lackluster rewards. A decent chance at golden eggs or prawn balls would've pushed it over the line into "excellent rewards" territory for me. Well, in that case I should have stuck to my original decision on not reading the first post. If you're not even going to bother reading the thread then feel free to extend that attitude to not posting as well because you're not contributing anything meaningful to the discussion. I'll second that.

I noticed that the % bonus xp options on skill calculators and planners are a bit out of date; I tried to do a comprehensive listing of what needs to be updated. You don't seem to have any of the TH outfits listed - Cooking, Crafting, Divination, Farming, Herblore, Prayer, Smithing, and Summoning each have 5-piece outfits, so they should have options for 0%/1%/2%/3%/4%/6%.Construction has a maximum possible 7% boost, not 6%, because in addition to the standard outfit (1% for each piece * 5 pieces + 1% bonus for full outfit), you also can use a sculptor's chisel for another 1% (it does stack).Hunter doesn't have an option for the enhanced yaktwee stick (5% boost). This should probably be a checkbox, not a dropdown menu. (I also noticed the page title & URL say "Hunting" instead of "Hunter", though the text at the top of the calc & planner is correct.)Mining doesn't have the golden mining suit listed - it's a standard 5-piece outfit, so 0%/1%/2%/3%/4%/6%.Runecrafting listings are out-of-date - it was updated to the standard 5% for a 4-piece set, instead of the listed 2.5% maximum, so it should have 0%/1%/2%/3%/5% options (or 0%/1.25%/2.5%/3.75%/5%; see below.)Woodcutting simply has a no/yes option, instead of a breakdown by piece - it should have 0%/1%/2%/3%/5% options (or 0%/1.25%/2.5%/3.75%/5%; see below.)Fishing and Thieving have the outfits listed (and calculated) as 1.25% per piece, instead of 1% per piece + 1% full outfit bonus. I actually don't know how the game calculates it. That may be worth testing, if you haven't checked it since the last relevant update in Sept 2012. This would likely affect the Runecrafting and Woodcutting outfits as well, since those are also 4 pieces instead of 5, and they might be doing something similar with the 5-piece outfits too (1.2% boost per piece). All of these are true of both the skill's calculator and its planner. (Props for consistency!)

A notable exception which took an enormous amount of community pressure to make happen.

I'm almost certain that these were initially part of Invention, yep. Definitely got changed around for the promo, but that's where the idea started, for sure. They admitted a few of the items released on TH would be used for inventing somewhere. I know Protean was a concept for inventing as well as portables. I just wonder what will happen now, do these concepts get scraped for inventing, do they get some with some kind of lesser bonus than the paid versions? Pretty sure if it's released as a TH item, it's not going to be released in another form. They have said that there's at least some Inventor stuff that they'll release as high-level content across a couple different skills at some point; it hasn't all been cannibalized by TH.

I'm almost certain that these were initially part of Invention, yep. Definitely got changed around for the promo, but that's where the idea started, for sure.

Nope! Once you've done all the clue voyages, you can repetedly get the last voyage. You won't go through the entire sequence again.

Got my last upgrade done yesterday; now I'm just working on clues and a few scrolls and stockpiling trade goods. Still sending out azura voyages after exhausting my rerolls for the day, because eventually I'd like the portal, but that's a very low priority for me.

I think including rare item tokens was one of the things they did right with Vic. I'm not buying them, because I don't care a whit for cosmetics, but I know that many others care about them a great deal, so it's nice to see them have a way of earning those rewards other than "buy more keys". (Especially since the tokens are so very, very rare.) Now if only they hadn't borked the exchange rates all to heck and people could actually reasonably obtain the golem/ethereal outfit pieces...

Woah wait what? I'm... actually not sure how I feel about that.