Frozen

Will do! :)

It's been at least a year and a half since I've really played any RuneScape. I think a year before that I wrote one of these "I'm back" posts but never really became active. There are plenty of reasons why, but that's in the past! Hope you're all doing well! What really brought me back was discovering that OSRS (or 2007Scape) is up and (apparently) happily bubbling away... Definitely won't start to bash the EoC - I think in its own ways it can be enjoyable, and I won't toss in the can the many hours of training done by never playing it...I plan to at some point. Unhide the rest for a soapbox about 2007Scape <3: Feel free to add me up!

This may be some indication that people aren't buying spins as much as Jag would like (durr?) and expect spin buys to ramp up while people enter the "MUST-HAVE" delirium.

Ahem...*name change for the new title* Now I just wanna change it back, the novelty wore off fast :P

Nope, I misread that fair and square! My bad. :) In that case disregard my comments about the first article and I agree, let us put higher-tier tools in the outside-world toolbelt. As long as we can remove them again of course. :3

The aim of the first article was good. A agreed with several points. A few details, I thought, were kind of silly though. Namely the comment about not being able to bring your dragon pickaxe into Damonheim. Why? No other regular outside items are allowed inside, why the dragon pick? Is an eventual primal pick not good enough for dungeoneering purposes? It just doesn't make sense to say. Like I said, you made some decent points but overall I felt like your effectiveness and communication was affected by your good points being eclipsed by the err of other questionable statements. That's basically my only problem. I feel like something shouldn't be presented as a statement when there is still room for debate. It will all break down into meaningless abstraction. Other than that, as said, their entire team coherence can be improved greatly so good on you for pointing it out. Second/Third article: Agreed! I think everybody can relate to that. However my imagination is so overactive at times that even now, while people are understandably jaded about their RuneScape experience, I continue to experience immersion. I buy many supplies for example but in many ways I'm a quazi-diy'er and enjoy doing things on my own. When the QBD arrives I'm going in there without a hint because it will be exciting, to echo what Squakus said. My enjoyment isn't a result of the game "meeting me in the middle" either. I'm just a freak of nature with an unhealthily positive attitude whenever possible. I force the game to immerse me, namely by constantly shifting my perspective of things to gain a better awareness of what I am experiencing and looking at the brighter, less heavy-hearted side of things. A short version of what I related a friend recently: sadness isn't good enough, anger isn't good enough! But laughter, that is good enough. :) I agree that Jagex needs to work with us to retain and improve the game experience but I also believe that most of us need to lighten up a little.

That seems a pretty reasonable thought. I can't see them seeing fit to turn them into generic defensive shields either considering their place in the game but the worry was there. That does ease my mind a bit, thank you :)

I was reading a thread on RSOF about some specifics about how armor stats will be changed. There was mention of attack bonuses being removed from armors in favor of higher attack bonuses on weapons. Magic was referenced in particular, in that melee def bonuses on magic armor would be boosted, attack removed and attack on staves increased considerably. My main concern, having just bought an arcane (moving up in the world...again! :) ) would be the attack bonus being removed and thus the demand for it completely negated, causing it to crash along with my bank. Do any of you think there will be such alterations that the economy will go haywire and I'd be better off selling my gear until after the updates have settled?

I am intrigued to say the least :)

Mages' book is 4.2M mid atm :( Unfortunately.

Because it looks friggen cool in there!! :D

Exactly what I've been thinking lately. Jagex has made mistakes without a doubt but in many instances we're far too overzealous. Everyone needs to relax a little and just enjoy the game for what it is. Not a thing wrong with critique and voicing valid concerns and feelings but the attitude I've been seeing in the community is just terrible. That includes myself of course - I've lost my temper recently but I've started to think better of some things. I wouldn't be surprised if the people working in Cambridge have started to tire of it and truly are caring less and less about what we think because we surely haven't spared them all of the first nasty thoughts that come to our minds. Everything's become so much more dramatic even than when I left in 2008. It is always six of one and half a dozen of another but I really think that if we as the community want to see a change then we need to adopt a slightly more pragmatic view of our own behavior and our relationship with the developers. It's not really about defending Jagex, it's about not going with the first wild ideas and responses that pop up in our brains.

Depends on your level of patience and how disappointed you get when you don't score. It's not much different than monster drops really except for the tedium that can be involved. Believe it or not I actually finish elite clues faster than hard ones at times. I find the scan orb clues extremely easy as well as the "follow the arrow" ones. At first the track puzzles had me stumped until I realized how easily and quickly they can be "brute force hacked." I can finish a hard clue in ten minutes and elites generally take only slightly longer, I'd say about 20 minutes for me. Runescape is just SO easy to navigate now with all the various ways of teleporting, not to mention lodestones. I do a lot of clues and yes they are absolutely not the most reliable way of making money and hard+ aren't really worth farming. If you are patient and not easily discouraged they can reveal very pleasant surprises. I've made about 20-30m off the many hard's and few elite's I've done in the 4 months I have been back to Runescape and considering the time and effort involved for me personally, its been more than worth it. I also rarely get a clue worth less than 150K which isn't bad on top of the usual 200k min received from slayer tasks that I get the clues from (the only place I get them). It adds up quickly especially when it's usually a 10-15 min extension on top of a 30 min slayer task, which isn't very much. Obviously I've made a lot more from hard clues than elite's (zammy pages ftw!) because of the sheer volume of them. I can only find 2 screenshots of elite's I've done but I'll share em! One is pretty decent and the other was abysmal..ish. :P

First article: Meh. I can certainly relate to missing or being nostalgic of what once was. It's okay to look back. However dwelling on what you wish was still here accomplishes little. Plus, nobody is stopping anybody from traditional runecrafting. The fact that as a training method it is no longer the fastest, thank <insert deity> and obsolete in terms of xp rate doesn't mean people should or will just stop doing it. I'm still gonna craft the 15k pure ess in my bank into deaths through the abyss. Guthan's is obsolete as a regeneration technique on slayer assignments but I still use it on every task where I'm not using a protection prayer and need to heal. Things change but what existed before never just dissapears - kind of against thermodynamic law if you'll let me make a philosophical stretch. Things will continue to exist in an evolved or changed state, that's all. Second article: Almost fully agreed. I love that you point out that the behavior and psychology of each individual in the community affects the whole and vice versa. I've been waiting for someone to point out that the behavior of a population (for the record I consider the folks working at Jagex a part of the community as well) cannot be faulted to a single individual or even a large group of them. What exists is a result of the dynamic that exists between and around all parts of any given frame of reference. We can rag on Jagex as hard as we want and blame them for everything but the fact is that our behavior affects theirs as well and perhaps more powerfully than most of us would accept.

I agree but a man can hope :) I don't really ever see them making something like the Auspicious Katana commonly available for even a few hours even though it would be mostly useless for most combat.

Agreed! I am willing to bet that they are going to make some of those other useless rares (rest of the tattoos and horns, basically) available as the more common drops on the next weekend. They have 4 of em to use, so I am thinking they split up what drops will be available so we don't all get each one of them in the first weekend and then stop spinning. As if that would happen! XD I really, really, realllllllly want swagger stick ^_^

Jagex never openly or blatantly lied as far as I know so in that respect you are probably right. What is true is they have engaged in dishonest behavior through their actions. I'm one of the people who is offended because I feel like they went behind our back on the issue intentionally because they knew we wouldn't like it. They didn't do a good job of covering their tracks and we saw right through most of it. The ethics of the Squeal is one thing and I agree, I wouldn't waste much time talking about that. Discussing ethics of corporate behavior and organizational transparency is an issue that at least I am interested in. Most people like to leave it at the thought that we live in a capitalist globe and there isn't anything any of us can do about it but I plead with people to see that it's just not true and that if enough people are properly critical we can change things.

I can agree with that. I have mixed feelings on it all even now. I'm not even sure how much I'm against this particular case of micro transaction as long as the trend does not continue. I am in agreement with only one point Mod Gerhard made except that in the context of everything else he said, it made that one point meaningless. When he said I had a flash moment where I could see that side of things. Sometimes we do take our game and Jagex notions and performance much too seriously. However, they have handled the entire situation badly and I am of the opinion that they must communicate with us better (and us better with them - sometimes the playerbase can be harsh...) and include us in such things. No matter how it's rationalized, I cannot feel any sort of light-hearted air about it when Jagex is still treating us like we're dumb. Just like Sy said, if they had been up front from the get-go and didn't try to cover their tracks the way they did ((did they honestly think all of those details would slip by the huge community that Jagex is so proud of, cmon this is the information age and most of us are fairly smart ;) )) then I bet a majority of us would not have been nearly so insulted. No one likes to be patronized. Jagex, you weren't typically corporate once upon a time and I think I can speak for most of us when I say that it was one of your greatest and most respected qualities. Where RuneScape didn't quite match other games in graphics or content, I always felt like it was pretty bona-fide and special. Don't ruin it...Though that ship may have sailed.

So...Because it is "human nature" to exploit the fact that decoherent thought processes makes people easy to fool and manipulate, Jagex is suddenly behing open and honest? Your particular perspective and notions concerning "human nature" and ethics is no indication of any posts here being "right" or "wrong."

Stonewall: Off topic: Nice, 3337th post ;) The problem with statistics is they aren't always indicative of the trend the data gatherer would like them to. I might say today's fallacy by Jagex would be along the lines of an observational selection fallacy (counting the hits and forgetting the misses) but they're definitely on a slippery slope. They can't take from a high usage that there is high approval when every "hit" has a very low probability of not happening considering how the SoF works. It's in our face, it takes zero effort...Of course people will spare 4-6 clicks in a game of clicks. Many have pointed this out. It actually takes more effort to ignore it. Meh. Maybe we should send Jagex a list similar to this one so they can brush up: [hide] List borrowed from The Demon Haunted World by C. Sagan. -- Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts. -- Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view. -- Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities"). -- Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy. -- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours. -- Quantify, wherever possible. -- If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work. -- Occam's razor - if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well choose the simpler. -- Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result? Additional issues are: - Conduct control experiments - especially "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects. - Check for confounding factors - separate the variables. - Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric - Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument. - Argument from "authority". - Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision). - Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence). - Special pleading (typically referring to god's will). - Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased). - Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses). - Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes). - Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!) - Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved"). - Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down. - Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect. - Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?). - Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is). - Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?"). - Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile). - Confusion of correlation and causation. - Caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack. - Suppressed evidence or half-truths. - Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public" [/hide] Concerning Mr. Twain's remark about statistics being damned lies, the most common reason why this is at least partly true is under sampling problems. What Jagex' data gathering process entails is another question entirely (and a mystery to me) but Gerhard's comments are undoubtedly cause for some eyebrows to shoot up..

I wrote a somewhat-long post for the RSOF thread and despite the likelihood of it being completely pointless, it was pretty good if I can be allowed to say so about my own work. I got into the ramifications of public deception on all scales of the social dynamic, including a reference to how the Canadian Conservatives recently admitted lying about intentionally omitting 13 Billion dollars from our new fighter jet program budget report and the very similar ramifications of that kind of dishonest and anti-transparent behavior that can be seen in any organization. It may have possibly turned some heads at Jagex but then again, considering what prompted me to write it in the first place, probably not. I will only even attempt to write it again if I can garner some moral support ;), because on my way to my 12 hour night shift my laptop shut down for an update and I lost the notepads the posts were written on and I am somewhat depressed. Serves me right for not saving my work. K pls give moral boosts now ^_^

Looks like a pretty cool start, interested to see you develop it more :)

My FPS in max settings directly before update: 10-15 FPS now: 45-50 Yes that is my only complaint.

Shiny: Thanks! Some of the files need refurbishment though, after taking a break from photography I notice a lot of imperfections in my old stuff, not perfectly straight horizons, etc :P Yeah I really love to play with the different color channels in black and white :) As for the exposure times...It would take me forever to go look at all of the EXIF data but I know that some of the waterscapes are around .5 to 5 seconds (except for one which is, I think, over 2 minutes long), most of the landscapes are likely around 1/10-1/30 of a second, the wildlife frames, and possibly the ones of the moon are 1/500/sec and faster. The night sky frames are usually from 2-15 seconds. I use such fast shutter speeds at night because I was using a 2.8 wide at the time and the 5D II can produce printable frames at 6400 iso ^_^ If you're careful! Which, to be honest, I really wasn't on some of these starscapes...XD

I like the work you do, however the second last painting (regardless of whether it is referenced) is 100% my fav, something I'd want on my wall. :) I think I know what you mean about the balance. Something I learned while teaching myself portrait photography was it's perfectly okay to cut off body parts as long as you do it in the right place. The general rule is never ever cut a limb off at the joint. Since the bottom of the picture is very closely cropped to the persons knee joint, I think it might be creating the lack of tension and unbalance you referred to. Maybe if you crop a little higher above the knee it might balance it out but that could also unbalance other parts of the photo because I'm in love with the way the trees are framed. Might work, might not, either way - great photo's/Paintings :D