Sorator

Very much agreed. In particular, I like to be able to chat while using an in-game guide. I've never liked that I can't see the rest of the game when using the world map, but I understand that it's necessary with that; with skill guides, though, it's not necessary at all. The extra info is nice, but I'd honestly rather use Tip.It/RSWiki for the same information than use the current interface.

I was disappointed with Lokie's "A Shaky Resolution"; I expect better-quality writing from the Times than this. The subject matter was iffy, at best, since when the article was being written there has only been two updates. I really would have waited longer to consider whether or not Jagex was holding up their resolution for 2012. But I was hoping for something interesting regardless. After reading the article, I was not left with a clear understanding of what point the author was trying to make, much less whether I agreed with that point or not. That's a major failing in any opinion-based article. After looked over it again, I realized why - the author didn't seem to know what point he was trying to make, either. To illustrate, let me summarize the three body paragraphs, as I understood them: 1. The Barrows update was good, though not everyone liked it. 2. Lowering the level requirement for All Fired Up was disappointing and Jagex lost the chance to set new precedent with a 90+ quest requirement. 3. We should pay attention to the small updates like Hati and graphical updates and not forget them as the year goes on. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the title of the article, but I believe the article was supposed to be criticizing Jagex for not entirely holding to their resolution, or not doing a good job of holding to it. However that is not the impression I get when reading the body articles or my summaries of them. I think that the editors may have been able to do a better job helping the author to clarify what he was trying to say, or recommending a change in subject if the author realized he couldn't make a full article on this subject - goodness knows that many times I've been halfway through writing a paper only to realize that I need to change topics for that very reason. While I appreciate the effort, and I think this subject could certainly be revisited in a few weeks, I think it was too soon to make any real conclusions at this point, and the organizational difficulties in the article did nothing to help. I would like to see better writing from the Times in the future.

I'd say that they've tried to make various fixes to make your initial foray into Dungeoneering less painful (lower boss monster difficulty, improved XP, etc) but I think the engine they released Dungeoneering under was just too limited to make a truly dynamic environment that would really get you into the skill. My main problem with the skill is the fact doing it alone is awfully slow. You need to do it with a group. We should have the option to train a skill and receive equal amounts of XP as anyone else trianing, solo or in a group.I may have enjoyed that a lot more. I don't like having people depend on me, or playing and being unable to nip out for a few minutes. THIS is my issue with Dungeoneering. And yet whenever I try to explain that to someone who likes Dungeoneering and thinks I would too if I only tried it one more time doing such-and-such slightly differently, they completely ignore me. It's wonderfully maddening.

Aye. It was certainly more interesting than the typical agility course. Though I'll be the first to admit I was pretty bad at it; I died twice on this section before really getting the hang of it, and that was with frequent uses of my EE to restore hitpoints.

Interesting... I definitely disagree with some of the things the awardsperson said - Runescape has definitely been on a decline in the last few years, and I don't think there's much argument against that. True player numbers were revealed (sort of) with the botnuke, and they were a lot lower than I personally expected. That being said, I don't know that we're currently on a decline any longer - that remains to be seen. The botnuke provided a possible major turning point, but it's hard to say which way it'll go - a short upward bump in the overall downturn is possible, as is a complete 180. To be fair, I think a lot of it hasn't been particular to Runescape; from the few other MMO-ish games I play, which are all at least browser-accessible if not primarily browser-based, all of the non-hardcore-gamer games have been on a big downturn on population. (Puzzle Pirates, for example, is currently merging eight servers into five, largely because where they used to have hundreds of players on a given server at a time they now are lucky to hit 200 on peak hours, depending on the server.) I can see best browser game, and I think I agree with it. Game of the year, though... it really depends on what the competition considered was, but I don't think I agree with that one. In this upcoming year, maybe, but not for this past year. I think the fellow writing may still be largely biased by the excitement of trying something new; it sounds like he hasn't played RS for an incredibly long time, if he's just now working on most of the achievement diaries. While RS is a great game with an enormous amount of content for a new player, that's a result of building up over the past decade, so I don't think you can call that + the bot bust the Game of the Year. However, it is indeed nice to see a positive perspective from a current player for once, as opposed to incredibly negative perspectives from players who have "quit".

I don't believe I've been sniped... but then, I'm not that well known, so woo. :-w

For the sets that are set-able via the GE (where you exchange the multiple items for a single 'box' and vice versa, to save space), you could put the set stats on the item database page for the 'box'. That would make a great deal of sense, IMO, though it wouldn't help for anything that isn't set-able. A link to the set 'box' page on each of the item pages for the items that make up the set would be nice, if you do this, as well as links from the set to the individual item pages. I would expect it wouldn't be hard to add a new category to the Compare Items tool to compare sets in this manner, once you made the change; you might need to categorize the sets as a new item slot, which isn't exactly correct but is close enough.

efffff the 90 fm requirement. That's gonna take a while to get, and I kinda wanted Magic/Smithing/Woodcutting to be my first 90s... blargh. *puts qp cape on cape rack for the foreseeable future* To be fair, they've been trending in this direction for a while. I do hope they don't do much more of it, though. Those who, like myself, love the quests but hate the training won't like it very much. Other than that, looks fairly standard... graphical updates & retooling Burthrope, barrows promotion (visage? whaaaa?), more bonus combat xp (and agil, primarily for those still lacking for RotM I'd guess). Bonus XP is always fun, if a little dubious, and I tend to enjoy the graphical updates, though I'm not sure Barrows really needs it. My overall opinion has to therefore be a mildly-enthused 'meh'.

That is some very interesting information, and I very much thank you for sharing it with us. However, that pretty much confirms something I already knew - as a casual player, such micro-efficiency is far more in-depth than I care to go. If I wanted to play for efficiency, however, that would be incredibly useful information, and at the least it's an interesting read and will let me understand a bit more of what goes on when I'm frantically clicking.

Remember, also, that you can do penguins/troll invasion/jack of all trades for some hefty bonus xp in the skill of your choice - herblore is one of the common choices for that due to its high cost, as well as runecrafting and agility due to their slow speeds. And yes, do farming. Just do it. Grab some xp in it from Tears of Guthix if it's your lowest skill, it can be a handy head start.

Yeah, clearly they're having some issues today. More bugtesting = less updating, guys... c'mon now...

LOL. That'd be kind of epic, but how much playtime will it take to get that? Sounds.... incredibly painful....

Actually, you just said you don't skill much. Jack of All Trades is actually quite good for nonskillers; it takes ~5 minutes to activate it, gain xp in 10 skills (pickpocket a guard, kill him on controlled style, bury his bones - you got 6 skills right there), claim the reward, and use it. It's a great way for anyone, including non-skillers, to level up skills they really hate training, kinda like penguins and troll invasion but with less work. If you aren't interested in that, I'd save up for higher versions of reverence; the others aren't that worth it IMO. Though you may wanna grab runic accuracy while it's on sale, if you think you want it.

Yeah, the best xp for actually crafting runes is ZMI. Best rc xp overall is Effigycrafting (cannoning Crawling Hands and using the dragonkin lamps from the effigys they drop to train rc). And the wicked hood offers some nice casual daily rc xp as well, for when you aren't actively training it.

1 & 2: Mostly covered above, though I'll add that farming herbs is still plenty profitable without jujus if you don't want to spend the time on em (and snaps should be fine). 3. Pretty sure it's on the specific item, not on the type; the limit on each item of the same type is the same though, which is why they get listed by type. 4. Probably once you get a shadow silk hood; many require that to dg with their team. But of course, if you can manage with a team before then, it's probably faster than without one. 5. If you have the levels, Ritual of the Mahjarrat is a recent grandmaster with plenty of rewards. You may want to look into the seasonal quests for some quick rewards, as well (Myths of the White Lands is the only one I can recall at the moment) and make sure you've done al lthe Elemental WQorkshop quests (we have I through IV). Oh, and Fairy Tale pt III gives an infinite-use watering can, which can be handy if you do other farming. Finally, check in on the Myreque quest chain - there's some good rewards in the Temple Trekking minigame (it got updated), and it's unlocked and improved by doing quests in that chain. The most recent one in that chain is The Branches of Darkmeyer. Oh! And One Piercing Note is the first fully-voiced quest to be released; it's definitely worth playing through (with the sound turned on!) to see what that's like, as well as some good prayer XP if you own any of the god prayer books.

That's what Tears of Guthix/Penguins/Troll Invasion/Jack of all Trades/Random event lamps and eventually effigies are for, of course.

Can't use it to buy battlestaves from Naff, either.

The recolor brought along different shape rocks as well. And the recolour is boring. How is making a recolour and changing rock form not changing the item itself? Of course Ring of stone should be on line with other jewelery like Fury - but that´s most likely not going to happen. So why not just make the ring transform you into Shooting Stars and that you can buy the level transformation in Loyalty programs? Why waste a update on recolour with rock change - when you can make a great transformation such as a Star? I think the main reason I look at you funny when you say that is because it comes completely out of left field. "Stone ring is boring and recoloring it is boring so it should do something different" is fine and makes sense to me, but "let's make it turn you into a shooting star!" seems kind of... random. Yeah, I'm hoping they do a toolbelt update within the month to fix all the little things they missed. Even if they don't address the whole "you can't take anything back out!" bit (or "the spade is nigh-useless!" bit), just update the thing so it'll work on everything it ought to.

This is one thing I don't understand. Things like knives, hatchets, etc all have a wide use in day-to-day activities. The pestle and mortar have only very specialized uses. Why, then, is it in the toolbelt? o_O Eh, it's a tool. And it's used for several herb secondaries. Also, a bolt mold isn't specialized? It makes a single item, lol.

But you have to wield the teasing stick, don't you? Yeah, it's unsurprising that they miss some, I'm just hoping they do actually add these uses in the near future and didn't skip over them on purpose.

Just to note, currently you still need a knife in inventory, not on the belt, to skin swamp snakes in Temple Trekking. Also, the rod mold, for making an Ivandis Rod, doesn't have a place on the belt (which is weird, cause the sickle and chain molds do go on there...).

I just found out the same thing after a 6-snake event. Boo. It works on everything else in the minigame though. Yeah, it sucks that I find this out and lose several thousand gp because of it, but meh. It does seem to work for everything else, so the dwarven hammer is no longer needed.

Well, the toolbelt just got a lot less useful for me... I can't use the knife in it to skin snakes while Temple Trekking. Boo. Edit: It does, at least, use a hammer to fix bridges. Dunno about other uses in this minigame yet.

I don't see the logic at all in wasting bankspace for coins now. The pouch is 100% safe, no lose on death and bank pin protected. Well, for those who have max coin piles, I suppose this is a way to double their cash on-hand. Though why you'd need more than 2b at a time anyway, I have no idea. Otherwise, yeah, I think it's basically an extra bank space given to us.

I have the goal of completionist eventually, but I have a lot of goals between here and there (1895 total, highest skill is 88 magic, lowest is 61 dungeoneering), such as lvl 70 in my lowest skill (I need... 4 slayer levels, 6 rc, 1 hunter, 9 dun), 99 magic/smithing/wc/fletching, etc. And I know it's gonna be a loooooong time before I get anywhere near there (heck, it'll probably be a year till I get my first 99), if only because I don't play on a regular basis. I agree though, intermediate goals matter a ton, and until you get relatively close making a thread about it is pointless, if only because the main reason to make a thread about it is to gain support from others, and for anyone to support you in any meaningful way you'll need to show them you mean business first. Edit: Totally forgot I had my levels in my siggy. Ah well.