Tip.It Times - 20th November 2011

[tripsis]

Time for a new release of the: >>>Tip.It Times!<<<

 

NOW ACCEPTING ARTWORK/COMICS:

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When replying please make sure to clarify the article you are replying to! Thanks!

 

If you spot any typos or mistakes in the article then please PM them to me :)

 

Enjoy the articles!

[Kirschen]

Four articles this week, woo. This will give me something to do this week.

 

It doesn't surprise me there would be an article on the high score change, but this would give an interesting view considering the detail.

 

Well done as usual, Tip.It Times. :)

 

EDIT: So far, the fictional article by ForsakenMage is my favorite since I was liking the previous pieces he did prior. I cannot wait for more chapters!

[Sorator]

I very much liked sees_all1's pointing out the contradiction between what MMG said when he took his job and what the unspecified JMod said at Runefest - there was a rather stark contrast there (and between MMG's past words and recent actions) that I would love to see addressed by Jagex or MMG himself. (And in general, I really think there's more to this latest update than we've been told, and I would love for them to actually tell us what's going on.)

 

I'm not sure I agree that it's the end of everything for F2P/RS as a whole, though. It's a major step in that direction, but I don't think it's an irreversible or unsurpassable one. It is, though, the single hardest hit to F2P that I think I've seen in all my time here, and I've been in and out of RS for more than half of my life, I believe (there's a scary thought).

 

The idea of a Dungeoneering-like version of every skill sounds, to me, absolutely horrible - I loathe Dungeoneering with a passion, though I'll admit it's primarily because I hate going at it with a group, and Dungeoneering is incredibly sucky solo. Once I actually read the article, it sounded like a much better idea, though we already have a bit of things like that in RS already. (Sorceress's Garden can net you herbs, Dorgesh-Kaan has the different and more interesting agility course, the Gnome Stronghold gives an alternative way to train Cooking by delivering the stuff you make, etc.) I wouldn't mind seeing more like that, so long as we keep the option to do well on our own instead of being forced to join with a group. At the very least, it's an interesting idea.

 

I agree with Crocefisso that it's in large part my positive nostalgia, as he so aptly put it, which keeps me playing to this day, in addition to those personal goals I've set for myself that I have yet to actually achieve. And I mostly agree with the differences between the game of 2004 and 2011. However, I don't think I'd want to see a rerelease of the '04 version of the game - I think that would make more people angry than it would make happy, I doubt that many people would participate in it, and of course it would take a lot of resources on behalf of Jagex to manage that if it's possible at all. (while it would be good practice for Jagex to keep backlogs of old code, who knows if they actually do?)

 

Out of curiosity, what trouble did Crocefisso get into with readers for having an affinity for Construction?

[Crocefisso]

I agree with Crocefisso that it's in large part my positive nostalgia, as he so aptly put it, which keeps me playing to this day, in addition to those personal goals I've set for myself that I have yet to actually achieve. And I mostly agree with the differences between the game of 2004 and 2011. However, I don't think I'd want to see a rerelease of the '04 version of the game - I think that would make more people angry than it would make happy, I doubt that many people would participate in it, and of course it would take a lot of resources on behalf of Jagex to manage that if it's possible at all. (while it would be good practice for Jagex to keep backlogs of old code, who knows if they actually do?)

 

Out of curiosity, what trouble did Crocefisso get into with readers for having an affinity for Construction?

Thanks very much for your feedback, Sorator, it was most helpful. It's true that, given the resources Jagex is currently expending on bot nuking, legal action and so on, I'm not sure they'd be able to maintain it (I worked on the presumption that Jagex would backdate code, out of sheer optimism). Out of interest, in what way do you expect people would get angry if the proposal were to become a reality? I'm sure there's a valid logic to it (RS players being the volatile creatures that they are), but I can't see one.

 

As for the Construction question, see this article and then the associated discussion.

[Formerly_Deathknell]

As someone who regularly reads and posts on the forums, all the articles written I've read over the past month or so piece by piece. That being said, I still found the articles a little bland and uninteresting.

 

The fictional article was very good though.

[Erewhon2]

There is only 2 of the articles I want to comment on at the moment:

 

I think the "If Two Became Three" article posed an interesting idea, but for me the evolution from 4 yrs ago to now has felt natural and progressive, rather than a clear delineation between two very different games. Not comparable to RS classic and RS 2.

 

The article "Goodbye, Runescape" disappointed me in its content, it felt negative and derogatory towards a game that I am a fan of and I thought Tip.it was too. While constructive criticism is useful and meaningful, ongoing negativity that is extreme (basically that the game will die - dramatic, to say the least!) and serves no purpose is not helpful and is bad for morale all round.

 

I play on a F2P account as well as my members account. I have been on F2P quite a lot since the bot busting because there have been so many more people to talk to and it's been fantastic to see so many new players. My experiences recently bear no relation to the sweeping statements the article makes and I dispute them. I will not make any reference to the 'high scores' as that has been done to death in another thread. But I'm sure most of these new players I have been talking to probably don't even know the high scores exist. I am delighted that the bot busting appears to have brought new players in, possibly through recommendations but also just as likely to also be from other advertising.

[ForsakenMage]

EDIT: So far, the fictional article by ForsakenMage is my favorite since I was liking the previous pieces he did prior. I cannot wait for more chapters!

 

The fictional article was very good though.

 

Thanks guys. =) Oh, and I'm actually female. XD Common mistake though! Hopefully Chapter 3 meets your expectations. Things will have to slow down in some points in the story for purposes of character development, but other than that, get ready for more! =P (Please remember there may be some spoilers from Betrayal at Falador and Return to Canifis.)

 

:P Brb, going over RuneScape lore and practicing writing combat scenes again weee...!

[Formerly_Deathknell]

We know you're a girl. Few guys would be in a basket full of teddy bears.

[Helm_Lardar]

If 2 became 3: more of a natural progression, although of course the whole free trade/wildy thing has been a bit shocking, and we are now seeing some rather different styles of updates to skill training since then-less emphasis on releasing huge new content and more on improving and adding to what's already there, I think: the dominion tower, LRC/Lava flow, all those hunter updates and so on have all been part of that.

 

Goodbye Runescape: yes, I'll concur that Jagex have changed their attitude to the free version of the game. Is it good or bad? Well, I think time will tell, but given one comment on this thread F2P has plenty of new people gushing in-and anyway, highscores is used "mostly" by the pure f2p community-which is something I doubt Jagex is a fan of. A bit negative, if I'm honest-there are arguments for and against the hiscore update, but I don't see it as nearly a big deal as many people seem to.

 

Grinding doesn't have to be: yes, Jagex are working on this with things like the Jadinko Lair, LRC and other things which break up the long (it has to be long) process of training skills by making you move around, work with other players, and so on. I do think his suggestions are a little too combat-oriented, though: it would make training combat first more important than most other things, and since melee combat takes three times as long to train as any other skill (due to having 3 seperate skills, yes, I'll put defence in there) it seems unreasonable to have that happen-particularly given many member's enjoyment of a "pure" lifestyle.

 

In addition, things like a special weapon from dragonbones-what would be the point, since it would have to be remarkably good and untradeable to be worth making, and then it wouldn't be worth making to train as you wouldn't be able to sell it. If you could sell it it wouldn't be very expensive. Not great suggestions-I much prefer what Jagex is doing to what Alg suggests.

[Sorator]

I agree with Crocefisso that it's in large part my positive nostalgia, as he so aptly put it, which keeps me playing to this day, in addition to those personal goals I've set for myself that I have yet to actually achieve. And I mostly agree with the differences between the game of 2004 and 2011. However, I don't think I'd want to see a rerelease of the '04 version of the game - I think that would make more people angry than it would make happy, I doubt that many people would participate in it, and of course it would take a lot of resources on behalf of Jagex to manage that if it's possible at all. (while it would be good practice for Jagex to keep backlogs of old code, who knows if they actually do?)

 

Out of curiosity, what trouble did Crocefisso get into with readers for having an affinity for Construction?

Thanks very much for your feedback, Sorator, it was most helpful. It's true that, given the resources Jagex is currently expending on bot nuking, legal action and so on, I'm not sure they'd be able to maintain it (I worked on the presumption that Jagex would backdate code, out of sheer optimism). Out of interest, in what way do you expect people would get angry if the proposal were to become a reality? I'm sure there's a valid logic to it (RS players being the volatile creatures that they are), but I can't see one.

 

As for the Construction question, see this article and then the associated discussion.

 

Mm, well even beyond the whole group of people who like to rant about every single update (that's just a given for RS, it seems), I think that would attract a lot of flak from those who like the current game, specifically because it would take/would have taken a lot of resources to put up and then to maintain. After all, those are resources that could be going towards the current game. And it's not like Classic, where they just continued hosting the game when they made an upgrade - this would be going back and opening up something that until now had been closed completely. This would also weaken their standing as a company just a tad, since they'd effectively be saying 'we admit that some people really don't like the changes we've made, so here', and admitting something like that doesn't always work well.

 

Also, while they might backdate their code, it's veeery unlikely that they would keep the player's logs from that far back - I'd give that a shelf life of 6 months or so, at most. Thus they'd probably either start everyone fresh and noobish again, or they'd carry over your current skills. If the former, I suspect there'd be a lot of people who would like to play the old game but don't want to grind their way to where they can do what they want - it's a pretty big setback, to have to start over again. If they simply carried over everyone's current levels, of course that's horribly polluting the system they just purified. (If they did manage to use everyone's '04 stats, that's still a fair bit of a setback, and everyone since then will have missed out entirely - I think that was their reasoning to offer the Classic Cape and also immediately open RS Classic for new registration, so that current players wouldn't complain about not having a chance to get the newfangled stuffs. Even if they had open registration for the new 'old RS', new accounts would start from scratch, which wouldn't exactly be fair either... though it might be the best solution.) No matter how they handled that, they'd get some angry commentary (though again, they'll get some of that regardless of what they do).

 

I suppose that's all a lot of wishy-washy speculation; I just have a feeling it wouldn't be taken all too kindly.

 

Also, thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

 

Edit: Oh, and NukeMarine reminded me of another thing which would probably get angrily contested - exactly what the cutoff/changeover date would be for the RS2/RS3 switch. I'm sure many would want to have this or that thing which was released after whatever date Jagex picked to be included in the old version, or insist that some such feature that was included shouldn't have been.

[Kaida23]

Thank you for the thoughtful response to Croce's article, and thanks to everyone else for their kind words. <3:

We put a lot of work into each week, and this week's was more than most. At least for me. :P

 

We know you're a girl. Few guys would be in a basket full of teddy bears.

Don't knock teddy bears, they're a chick magnet. ;-)

[Formerly_Deathknell]

Thank you for the thoughtful response to Croce's article, and thanks to everyone else for their kind words. <3:

We put a lot of work into each week, and this week's was more than most. At least for me. :P

 

We know you're a girl. Few guys would be in a basket full of teddy bears.

Don't knock teddy bears, they're a chick magnet. ;-)

 

Exactly, they're a chick magnet. That's why sleeping in a basket of them says you're a girl. If it said, "Trying to lure some chicks into my basket of teddy bears," then we'd know you're a guy.

[Assume Nothing]

Thank you for the thoughtful response to Croce's article, and thanks to everyone else for their kind words. <3:

We put a lot of work into each week, and this week's was more than most. At least for me. :P

 

We know you're a girl. Few guys would be in a basket full of teddy bears.

Don't knock teddy bears, they're a chick magnet. ;-)

 

Exactly, they're a chick magnet. That's why sleeping in a basket of them says you're a girl. If it said, "Trying to lure some chicks into my basket of teddy bears," then we'd know you're a guy.

 

Not necessarily entailed, despite implicature - you're excluding bi-curious/lesbian females.

 

On Topic; I don't quite like the trend of doom-saying articles... I wonder whether that'll change.

[quitthegame]

Sees_all's article: Sorry, but anyone who proclaims they're quitting the game and then writes a forum post or editorial detailing why the game they're quitting will also soon die is committing the ultimate MMO forum cliche. Perhaps you didn't know that, but it's a real faux pas :( I could respond point by point to your vague claims with reams of data about profitability and lifespan of various MMOs and their payment structures, but I'll just make one amusing point. You claim that "RuneScape may stick around for several years, but unless Jagex supports the business model that brought them so much success, it won't be around for much longer."--several years? Converting from MMO years to human years, that's like saying RuneScape, currently aged 250 years old, will only live to be 400 years old. How is that even a criticism or negative conclusion?

[sees_all1]

Sees_all's article: Sorry, but anyone who proclaims they're quitting the game and then writes a forum post or editorial detailing why the game they're quitting will also soon die is committing the ultimate MMO forum cliche. Perhaps you didn't know that, but it's a real faux pas :( I could respond point by point to your vague claims with reams of data about profitability and lifespan of various MMOs and their payment structures, but I'll just make one amusing point. You claim that "RuneScape may stick around for several years, but unless Jagex supports the business model that brought them so much success, it won't be around for much longer."--several years? Converting from MMO years to human years, that's like saying RuneScape, currently aged 250 years old, will only live to be 400 years old. How is that even a criticism or negative conclusion?

"As a P2P player, I will quit over this"

Yep, I did say that. Means Jagex won't get my $6 / month. Why would anyone support a company that does exactly what you don't want them to?

 

 

Also, a game with a player base as large as RuneScape has won't disappear in a year. The point I'm trying to make that you might've missed is that Jagex needs to grow its F2P community fast, or it won't get new members. If you want to grow a game, you don't start by kicking your existing player base between the legs.

[Phox1515]

I'm proud to say I know the person with the #2 spot in pure f2p highscores... that is unless his place was taken in the last week or so. isthatok... aka issy.

 

I know it's nothing super special but it's kind of neat haha. I feel bad for him because he has put a lot of work into getting were he was but he got tired of jagex's poop and decided to quit. wasn't worth it to him anymore. I can't say I blame him jagex really has been hitting f2p hard and way going back on their words from when mmg released that future of rs article.

 

I said it beforw and i'll say it again, jagex is now owned by 3rd party investors (about 94% of it at least) and because of that they have to please them and what do investors care about more than anything else? money. they don;t care if it makes everyone else in the world mad at them as long as they are making money and it is because of that, that the game is going down the toilet like it has been. part of me is mad at the gower bros because they are the ones who had most of the stock and sold it off the other part of me sees it as a smart move because they knew the game wa going down the drain already and got out before they lost everything. Andrew started a new company and from what I hear is working on a new game.

[quitthegame]

"As a P2P player, I will quit over this"

Yep, I did say that. Means Jagex won't get my $6 / month. Why would anyone support a company that does exactly what you don't want them to?

 

Not sure what you're getting at here. I'm not objecting to you quitting, I'm saying that writing an article about how the game is dying right as you're quitting is a huge cliche in MMOdom. Heck, remove that concept from MMO's and it's probably a cliche thousands of years old. Perhaps that doesn't bother you.

 

Also, a game with a player base as large as RuneScape has won't disappear in a year. The point I'm trying to make that you might've missed is that Jagex needs to grow its F2P community fast, or it won't get new members. If you want to grow a game, you don't start by kicking your existing player base between the legs.

 

 

The point I'm trying to make that you might have missed is that RS is a very old game already, you talking about them trying to grow and establish the game sounds funny to the listener, as if you were telling us about how your grandfather will never grow up to be big and strong if he doesnt' eat his broccoli. Jagex's plans for the next 10 years already account for RS dying and being replaced, I'd wager.

[NukeMarine]

The first three articles were very good reads. The Goodbye Runescape article was a tad over the top with the doom and gloom predictions, but still points to the importance of F2P in the ongoing life of Runescape.

 

The article "When 2 becomes 3", though well thought out, I have to disagree with. Jagex should not consider making another dead end game by having an older version of the game with no updates purely for nostalgia. The "date" that's chosen will be arbitrary, the program could still contain exploitable code, and the game may have bugs that cannot be fixed without other updates that occured at later date.

 

That said, there's merit in releasing or converting servers with their own closed off economy. I made a thread about it last year called Runescape Reboot. In it, the discussion made me think there's merit in playing on an economically fresh server with many of the legacy issues gone. Like 2006, there would not be a grand exchange. In addition, there would not be high or low alchemy (maybe the lumbridge ring only). What makes it better than a 2006 version of RS is that these servers would be updated so the game population would not dwindle to nothing. If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what RS would be like with no support from F2P, not that that exists much now anyway.

 

The third article about grind reduction sounds interesting. If nothing else, the mini-games that Jagex has set-up (blast furnace, smithing guild, lumber yard, herblore habitat, pyramid plunder) do reduce grind. The one thing Jagex needs to keep in mind is reduce the amount of clicking. Imagine Livid Farms where each minute only requires 4 clicks from the player, each telling the area to do: plants, fence, binding, energy transfer. The time involved would still be the same, but the 'leveling' is more passive.

[ForsakenMage]

We know you're a girl. Few guys would be in a basket full of teddy bears.

Amorare called me a he. =P

[Formerly_Deathknell]

Thank you for the thoughtful response to Croce's article, and thanks to everyone else for their kind words. <3:

We put a lot of work into each week, and this week's was more than most. At least for me. :P

 

We know you're a girl. Few guys would be in a basket full of teddy bears.

Don't knock teddy bears, they're a chick magnet. ;-)

 

Exactly, they're a chick magnet. That's why sleeping in a basket of them says you're a girl. If it said, "Trying to lure some chicks into my basket of teddy bears," then we'd know you're a guy.

 

Not necessarily entailed, despite implicature - you're excluding bi-curious/lesbian females.

 

On Topic; I don't quite like the trend of doom-saying articles... I wonder whether that'll change.

 

I am a bi-sexual female and I included myself. Don't know about the butch lesbians though. And Amorare is a dummy for calling you a he. Your gender is obvious. If I had male genitalia I'd totally do you. ;)

[strilmus]

If you've got a basket of teddy bears and you're using it as a lure, wouldn't that make you a ped-

 

wait, off topic

 

Okay, good to be back after all that nonsense. Before I find a suitable thread to unload the unbridled righteous fury building up over the past few weeks of seeing people seriously discuss ideas that I have been championing for YEARS without anybody even batting an eye towards the notion and not being able to scream "YOU BASTARDS WHY DIDN'T YOU LISTEN TO ME BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE"

 

okay, maybe a little more bridled than that

 

I have to say here that whatever you've got to say about f2p, freeloading, and going downhill

 

Without a strong playerbase to interact with in f2p, it'll basically turn into rsc. Which is to say, barren and creepy.

 

While affecting the f2p game will surely cut off the life support, it won't immediately break the members game.

 

HOWEVER

 

If their goal is to pretty much bury this game in the next few years after ending the stories and bringing back Zaros, then fine. This is the first step towards winding the game down to something that doesn't cost as much until it dies, even though we're probably looking at minimal savings.

 

If the PLAYERS want this game to survive well into the future, the game either needs a radical overhaul which may not sit well with many or most of you, or....wait, there's no other option. You've run out of them. It needs the overhaul. Otherwise we can just archive this sucker and move on.

 

But we don't know if the community's goals and Jagex's goals are the same, do we? If the community can make their goals unified and articulate across a majority, there could be some communication that doesn't end up with everybody getting screwed over.

 

I seriously doubt that will happen though, so, perhaps this is goodbye for reals. It's not optimistic, but several years of optimism hasn't really gotten us anywhere except one really late bot ban (closing the barn door after the barn has burnt down), and a whole lot of quitters, not to mention a wholesale betrayal of trust across the board. If Jagex is "rebuilding" this trust so they can soften the deathblow, okay, fine, whatever. Stab me in the back already, you're not trying to get me in bed, you're just getting rid of a game in the most cold hearted way possible. If they really want the game to continue, then they really need to get serious about this, and have some discussion, which doesn't involve muting people for speaking their mind and publically shooting more or less their own player mods who were told to be players first, then claiming that they want to talk to people...at runefest...about the same subjects, so that they can stop stabbing common sense's cold corpse in the heart every single week.

 

Until then, every second leading up to that point is another second Jagex freeloads off of the remaining "goodwill" and the unwillingness of players to let go of all their past efforts, and it's every bit as disgusting as it sounds.

[ineedcash12]

In response to Grinding Doesn't Have To Be.

 

There is a game is current development, called Vortex, that is similar to Runescape in ways, but makes it have more flexibility and less grind.

 

This includes ways to not grind skills in a balanced way, FPS Mode + 3RD person, a combat system not based on dice rolls (similar to elder scrolls + Draken), Realistic aspects, HD Graphics.

 

The grinding in Runescape has led to this development game, to add aspects of some of historys greatest RPG's and combine them into one, where the players rule.

 

The games information can be found at www.dead-end-games.com.

 

This Game is still in the Development Process, so don't expect a demo till New Years.

 

 

^ In response to the above.

 

Maybe it is time for us to move away from a game where the company that makes it only cares about the money, which is leading to a seperating of the community.

 

It seems RS is beyond repair and the ship is sinking fast, with every month comes another blow to the community, with today going down in player history with the removal of the F2P High scores. IMO I would of made both scores seperate from the beginning and had an option to combine them to see how you stack agianst other players in the same ways.

 

 

^This is how I feel about RS as a player for several years and is why I have formed Dead End Games, to create a gaming community where players matter, not the money in the bank account. Come Join the Forums to gain a voice. And if this is bannable, to post a url, ban me, because I am done with RS over the action of the last month and will no longer be a part of this game, also since us players have lost our voice over the past few years.

 

Join me at www.dead-end-games.com Where the players rule.

[strilmus]

I'd be more agreeable if it didn't turn out that you're advertising a game you're working on, and looking at it, noticing how much of it isn't actually there yet, and that you've pretty much ripped a lot of concepts from RS, down to the names.

[Formerly_Deathknell]

As a 26 year old female, I could be lured into a bastket of teddy bears. As long as you send the chil'runs on their way, not a ped.

 

Can't speak for anybody with a basket of teddy bears over a RV though. :unsure:

[ixfd64]

Did I just read a eulogy for RuneScape?