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muggiwhplar

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I think the real issue here is, people who work hard expect to be praised for their hard work. And then when someone else "achieves" the "same thing," they get offended. Keep in mind that getting 99 agility via SOF is not the same as getting 99 agility via adv. barb course, and it's not even the same thing as getting 99 agility via the wildy course. It looks the same, but they're completely different things. Yet people are treating them as if they're the same thing and getting all upset. You're essentially comparing apples to oranges.

 

I highly doubt that the majority of people who buy spins to train are doing so for the attention and respect of other players like you are. I'm sure they would simply rather pay $200 IRL (which didn't magically appear out of thin air, mind you) than sit in front of their computer for over 100 hours doing something incredibly boring. Sure you can probably cite a few examples of people who go around bragging about their "achievements" from SOF, or those spend thousands of dollars on SOF, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

 

Heh, no one gets 99s or even completionist's capes for "attention and respect of other players" any more, they're far too common. Sometimes I see more people at the ge in max capes than without them. For most people it's for a sense of personal achievement.

 

This has nothing to do with devaluation as such, more to do with just how unbalanced the SoF is, and how it isn't modified to account for different skills.

 

For example, spinning for prayer xp is actually slower than just training prayer. If the SoF must exist, then the lamps should be balanced to give say, 2x the current maximum xp rate in a skill, instead of being completely useless in some skills, and terribly OP in others.

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I don't need to be affected by something to see how it has a negative impact on a system I am a part of.

 

Let me give you an example. I can get around 240-270k xp/hr training thieving at PP. Someone can use an AHK script (or just be insanely good) and get 300k thieving xp/hr at Monkey Knife Fighters. They can get 99 or 200M thieving significantly faster than I can. This does not bother me, as it is still balanced in my opinion. The increase in xp/hr is only around 25%, and they still actually have to interact with the thieving skill to gain that experience.

 

So let's ask those two questions:

 

1. Is the SoF balanced, specifically can the increase in xp/hr be considered reasonable?

2. Does the player still have to interact with the skill to gain those increased xp rates?

 

In my opinion, and hopefully yours too, a 1000% increase in xp rate is not considered balanced.

Also, spinning a wheel and clicking a lamp does not constitute interacting with the skill in my book.

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I'd do prefer it if they can keep the micro stuff out of the game, so I do mind the wheel a bit. But I am also past the point where I particularly care how I stack up, and I'm not particularly competitive by nature. For the most part, I see a higher quality of updates with me paying the same membership I was paying in '07, plus $5 for some soloman stuff. If other people are going to subsidize the game for me, without really impacting how I play, then I'm all for it. It's like a perfect selective tax.

 

 

I do agree with fallstar though that there seems to be some heads in the sand about the SOF. If you goal is to compete, it becomes mandatory, unless you already have such a fantastic lead that people can only catch you by blowing obscene amounts of money.

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I don't need to be affected by something to see how it has a negative impact on a system I am a part of.

 

If it's having a negative impact on a system that you're apart of, then it's affecting you.

 

Let me give you an example. I can get around 240-270k xp/hr training thieving at PP. Someone can use an AHK script (or just be insanely good) and get 300k thieving xp/hr at Monkey Knife Fighters. They can get 99 or 200M thieving significantly faster than I can. This does not bother me, as it is still balanced in my opinion. The increase in xp/hr is only around 25%, and they still actually have to interact with the thieving skill to gain that experience.

 

So let's ask those two questions:

 

1. Is the SoF balanced, specifically can the increase in xp/hr be considered reasonable?

2. Does the player still have to interact with the skill to gain those increased xp rates?

 

In my opinion, and hopefully yours too, a 1000% increase in xp rate is not considered balanced.

Also, spinning a wheel and clicking a lamp does not constitute interacting with the skill in my book.

 

I agree with you that the SOF is imbalanced. But that's not what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that SOF is balanced. I'm saying that the SOF is irrelevant. SOF is only an issue if you consider your achievements to be threatened by its existence. I'm just waiting for you to admit that :P

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I'm not sure I agree. I think that the SoF does have a damaging effect on the game purely because of how unbalanced it is. Game balance is an important part of any game with a multiplayer aspect. Not because it 'devalues' your achievements. There is something nice about seeing someone with a skillcape you own, and knowing they went through broadly the same thing as you did, and for me there was a degree of respect there. Obviously as RS has progressed there have been balanced updates which have changed the methods used, but other than through RWT and irregular or one off boosts, the only way to train a skill involved training it at reasonable xp rates. Now, you don't need to train the skill at all. I see a low level with a slayer cape, I wonder whether they SW'd it or RWT'd it. I see someone get a 5M hunter day on runetracker, I always check to see if they bought spins. I don't know, I just see it as having had a damaging impact.

 

For the record, I don't care about Solomon's as it's just cosmetic. With the decline in the number of players, RWT of some sort is required to keep RS going, and since I still relatively enjoy the game, I see why it's needed. I just think SoF is vastly OP atm.

 

Like I said previously, it would be far better if spinning for an hour gave you say 2x the max xp/hr in a skill without RWT.

 

So the lamps were balanced so that at 99 agility you got 200k agility/hr spinning, 520k thieving/hr, 2M prayer/hr etc. I would also limit the number of spins a player could buy per year to say somewhere around 1-2k.

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I am fine with sgs' existance provided they don't overmarket/advertise it ingame too much.

 

What I don't like about sof is a) the gambling aspect and b) buying xp and gp

 

I always thought their excuse for why SoF wasn't gambling was a bit pathetic. You win something every time !

 

What if flower hosts gave you a needle with every bet, win or lose. You win something every time, so it isn't gambling anymore by Jagex's logic.

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I hate the SOF, but think the Solomon store is a good feature for the game in its current form. It adds no or little in game advantages but gives cool looking stuff. It is also clearly the model which works best, look at league of legends. I wish micro translations never arrived and I have not spent any money myself(have also never spent money on dlc or FarmVille games), but understand it is an important revenue source that is needed to keep runescape alive.

 

Without micro transactions and IVP investment we might never have seen SOF, EOC or POP... That would be fine by me, but I am one of those people who stopped liking any change years ago. I can't help but feel runescape is dieing, there is no way the record online member count is going to ever be broken that was set in like 2007, like 600k players online but now days at over 100k on bonus xp all the servers crash

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Point of interest, the 800k/hr figure is not true per-say anymore. With the recent changes to the SoF, you actually get fewer lamps and more pendants. Pendants don't impact your XP/hr as much.

 

The *total* xp/package of the highest spins (just counting lamps) is around 800k-1m maybe a bit more. However that includes lamps for all skills not just the lamps you can assign to skill of your choice. I wasn't able to spin all of the spins in 1hour. and the cost is ridiculous anyways. I believe the actual spin rate is maybe 400k/hr in the skill of your choice + xp in random skills + prismatic pendants you can use but won't as drastically change your xp rate.

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Subscriptions are irrelevant.

 

There would still be Solomon's store if RuneScape had the same number of players as WoW. The fact is that the video games industry, in contrast to many sectors because of the current economic situation we all find ourselves in, is one of few industries which has continued to grow in the past few years, and therefore companies in this industry also need to be growing in tough times and investing into products to sell to costumers in order to survive. Solomon's store is simply one of the many facets Jagex use to bring turnover into the company through its signature product so that it can achieve this aim.

 

It's not reasonable to conclude that because Solomon's store exists, RuneScape subscriptions (or rather, lack of them) are placing Jagex in jeopardy.

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I think the real issue here is, people who work hard expect to be praised for their hard work. And then when someone else "achieves" the "same thing," they get offended. Keep in mind that getting 99 agility via SOF is not the same as getting 99 agility via adv. barb course, and it's not even the same thing as getting 99 agility via the wildy course. It looks the same, but they're completely different things. Yet people are treating them as if they're the same thing and getting all upset. You're essentially comparing apples to oranges.

 

I highly doubt that the majority of people who buy spins to train are doing so for the attention and respect of other players like you are. I'm sure they would simply rather pay $200 IRL (which didn't magically appear out of thin air, mind you) than sit in front of their computer for over 100 hours doing something incredibly boring. Sure you can probably cite a few examples of people who go around bragging about their "achievements" from SOF, or those spend thousands of dollars on SOF, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

 

Just one of those cases where the upset players would probably be a lot happier if they quit focusing so much on other people.

 

besides if your playing for the respect of others and not for entertainment theres a bot for that anyways.

 

on a related note, Im not sure why people who buy spins knock botters when while they are "within the rules" they are far from legitimate.

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I'm interested in why you say Jagex can no longer survive on just RS subscriptions (not that there is a reason they have to) - is it because of lost members or increased expenses?

 

I think most people would say the single biggest member-losing decision they made was the years of no free trade - but during all (or almost all, idr) of those years, they survived without microtransactions.

 

With regard to increased expenses, I'd say that, with the exception of EoC, there was not a tremendous amount of content in a lot of this time either - an average of <1 quest per month (i.e. don't scape for a semester, come back and there is one new quest requiring you to fight an enemy above level 5) and maybe one boss per year (since the release of dungeoneering in april 2010 there weren't any besides nex, qbd, har'aken, and then the gwd remake accompanying eoc right?). I feel like the last couple years were dominated by very unexciting things like D&Ds, that presumably also require less development time.

 

Maybe I'm discounting the buildup of expenses like porting everything into different languages and different detail levels, but microtransactions seem to me more like an exploration of a new revenue source than an attempt to survive.

 

Or maybe they dropped too much on mechscape / stellar dawn / transformerscape :<

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Or maybe they dropped too much on mechscape / stellar dawn / transformerscape :<

That's definitely a big problem for them. I know they pretty much threw truckloads of money down the MechScape/Stellar Dawn money pit, so that money would have to be recouped somewhere.

 

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It's dying because Runescape can no longer survive on membership subscriptions alone.

 

This is entirely Jagex's fault. Server and bandwidth fees decrease every year, and the number of shards possible per server increases every year. One or two solid updates a month like was done years and years ago could easily maintain the game. IVP is greedy, plain and simple.

You make it sound like running through a few level 87 monsters is hard which it really shouldn't be at your level.

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This is entirely Jagex's fault. Server and bandwidth fees decrease every year, and the number of shards possible per server increases every year. One or two solid updates a month like was done years and years ago could easily maintain the game. IVP is greedy, plain and simple.

Yeah... No.

 

If Jagex has done anything wrong, it's that they never really adapted to changes in the game landscape. They were a very successful freemium MMO back when there weren't really any other freemium MMOs, nowadays you can find hundreds of games using the same model, but with better technology and gameplay behind them, and multiplayer games are omnipresent. Bigger MMOs than Runescape are finding that the subscription model isn't sustainable anymore.

 

They got complacent with their status as the "number one free game" and the rest of the world overtook them.

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It's dying because Runescape can no longer survive on membership subscriptions alone.

 

This is entirely Jagex's fault. Server and bandwidth fees decrease every year, and the number of shards possible per server increases every year. One or two solid updates a month like was done years and years ago could easily maintain the game. IVP is greedy, plain and simple.

 

There's a lot more to it than that. Without going too off-topic (again lol), consider RS in its "prime" which many would agree was around 2005-2006. A lot of the "best" updates at the time damaged the game in the long-run, but the damage wouldn't be notice until it had already been done. If Jagex quit making "game-changing" updates, then people would eventually get bored and move on to another game.

 

Examples include:

-"Choose the best world for me" feature, and sorting worlds by Ping: less people had "homeworlds," and instead hopped onto random worlds. Less "familiarity" and "community" feel at banks and popular training spots since you'd no longer bump into the same people every day while training

 

-Skill capes: People used to train skills to ~85 and quit. 99s became common and everyone wanted a fancy cape to show off. "High-leveled" content has lots its significance because so many people are maxed when high leveled updates are released now. As opposed to in the past where having 90+ in a skill such as runecrafting or slayer was pretty uncommon

 

-GWD/Nex: There used to be a small gap between the rich and the middle class. Rich items were generally cosmetic (dragon gear; rares), while the best gear was reasonably obtainable. You only had to work for about 15 hours with a modest income to get a whip or barrows. After GWD/Nex, PvM basically made skilling for cash obsolete. Nex exacerbated the problem by creating an incredibly overpowered set of equipment that required the same amount of time to "legitimately" obtain as training a skill 99

 

With more people wanting the best, out-of-reach gear and with maxing becoming a goal for the average scaper, rather than a tiny minority, people began obsessing over efficiency in order to make that goal as tolerable as possible. Spreadsheets and formulae become common knowledge. Every piece of existing content is heavily scrutinized and if it's not the best DPS or the best XP/hr, then it's immediately cast aside and considered useless or a waste of time. The game's variety and options are quickly narrowed down to only the "best."

 

...just my two cents on some of the more subtle changes over time in the RS community since the 2006ish. There's a whole lot more, but that should give you a good idea of what I'm saying. Feel free to reply to this in a new topic if you'd like to discuss it more in-depth though. I thought about writing a topic about this earlier, except without my own commentary, but I guess this'll do for now :P

 

tl;dr: "Solid updates" aren't always a good thing.

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There has never been 600k simultaneous players online. Seriously, where do these figures come from?

There has never been 600k simultaneous players online. Seriously, where do these figures come from?

Waaaaaaay back in like 2006-2007 they used to do an announcement whenever the record for online players was broken. I can't remember it may not have been as many as 600k, but it was huge, cant be bothered to go through archieves atm

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There has never been 600k simultaneous players online. Seriously, where do these figures come from?

There has never been 600k simultaneous players online. Seriously, where do these figures come from?

Waaaaaaay back in like 2006-2007 they used to do an announcement whenever the record for online players was broken. I can't remember it may not have been as many as 600k, but it was huge, cant be bothered to go through archieves atm

 

I remember those posts. Whilst I don't remember the figure I'm pretty certain it wasn't much more than 300k.

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though. I thought about writing a topic about this earlier, except without my own commentary, but I guess this'll do for now :P

 

tl;dr: "Solid updates" aren't always a good thing.

Hard to take you seriously when every single one of those was a good update, even long-term considered. It's not like adding Nex gear removed any existing training options from the game.

 

I'd be willing to bet more people quit over removing free trade / SoF than those things combined. Maybe some of them come back eventually but things like that really hurt the popularity of the game.

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You can't pretend that Nex gear doesn't exist when you're engaging in PvP against a person with Nex gear, or competing against someone w/ Nex gear in PvM.

 

And yes I'm sure more people quit over free trade/SoF, however whether or not people quit is irrelevant if they're still playing w/o having fun (or having less fun than prior to the updates).

 

Start another topic about this or PM me if you want to discuss this further, though. I don't want to get off-topic again.

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though. I thought about writing a topic about this earlier, except without my own commentary, but I guess this'll do for now :P

 

tl;dr: "Solid updates" aren't always a good thing.

Hard to take you seriously when every single one of those was a good update, even long-term considered. It's not like adding Nex gear removed any existing training options from the game.

 

I'd be willing to bet more people quit over removing free trade / SoF than those things combined. Maybe some of them come back eventually but things like that really hurt the popularity of the game.

From personal experience from "real life" people I know who played RuneScape and quit when they got to level 70-something, the most frequent complaint I observed was the general unwillingness of people to 'grind' their way up. Given a choice between spending hours sat at a computer screen getting one level after another, they'd rather play something else. If Jagex opened the doors to RWT completely and made a very clear transaction between real money spent and XP in-game received (although some argue such transactions still exist now, it's not made clear and certainly not advertised as such), it would be very appealing to those people who just want to do all the stuff maxed players can do, without the half-of-your-childhood journey to get there.

 

I don't support RWT necessarily, I'm just saying that it's not entirely discursive to only mention the people that quit because of SoF. Grinding on the other hand, and this links with the skillcapes, remains an incredibly unpopular feature of the game amongst people who don't play it. You might reflect on that and say, "[bleep] them, this game isn't their thing", but that is a problem for Jagex, as it would be a problem for any successful company in their position.

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