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loqk

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  1. on the subject of, "These are a Few of my Favorite Things" you've read my mind :-D
  2. about "An Open Letter to Mr. Mark Gerhard" apparently, a lot of people missed the significance of the way the clan fortress was introduced. as a psychology student currently doing my phd, it was a fairly textbook example of applying psychological pressure using peer pressure. peer pressure is usually something we try to avoid, as it can be quite destructive, as is the case here. the points system introduced pressure to stay a member for longer. this was a clear psychological pressure to stay a member, in a complete break from the tradition of runescape. if there had been some sort of policy announcement, declaring the free game being removed, this would fit nicely with a winding down of the free game. instead, management got cross when people suggested that the free game was no longer world class. it was pressure, but it still put the power in your hands, the paying member or non member. the clan situation was much more underhanded and uses principles of psychology i expect of super villains, not world class games companies. first, clans were introduced, and every effort was made to accommodate free members. jagex practically went out of their way to make sure free members were included. after the praise had died down a bit, and everyone was settled into their clans, they introduced citadels. perfectly good, and all above board. oh, and by the way, they constantly degrade, and only paying members can do upkeep. all free players in clans were effectively being made into dead weight. using up precious clan numbers, while unable to contribute to the major piece of clan content. to maintain your citadel, you are forced to consider what all those free members in your clan really do, and are they worth it? as paying members, they could increase the upkeep of your citadel, and increase its quality. as soon as someone runs out of pocket money, or needs to take a break for whatever reason, their part of the upkeep is lost, and the clan suffers. if they had made citadels like houses, with non members able to contribute with gold, even though they could not visit since they were not members, there would be no problem. people could play as they could afford, without undue pressure. if they allowed the non members to visit and do upkeep, they would demonstrate their support of free players, while bonding the clan as a whole. instead, they added this subtle rift, tearing clans into two groups: members, who could upkeep, and non members who could not contribute at all. this is an unfair use of psychology to weaken the non members game. if they had announced that's what they were doing, that would be fine. instead, they pretend to support non members, while using psychology to make the clans apply peer pressure. do i stay a non member, and be unable to contribute to the clan? will i be kicked out of the clan? will there now be two clans, members and non members, slowly drifting apart? this was what we in psychology technically call "a dick move" i've been a paid member since i discovered i needed to be a member to get the cosmic talisman. i've been a continuous member for about 5 years, whether i had time to play, or not, and i believed in the game and supported it wholeheartedly. a couple of times, on a student scholarship, i have had my credit card denied, and re-established membership, as soon as my card was in balance again. i had thought some decisions were good, some bad, some indifferent. the new policy of shafting the free game, rather than just advertising the paid game is beyond mere meanness, or simply making a profit, and has moved into disreputable conduct. i left the paid game voluntarily when citadels were added, with their twisted psychology, and i will not become a member again until the injustice has been rectified. a simple, "we no longer have a free game" from management would be a simple solution, and seems to be what they want to do. however, they still want to win awards for being the best free game. they simply cannot have it both ways, and it is time for them to wake up to the fact.
  3. i think one of the most important questions you can ask about a game is, would i recommend this to my friends. at the beginning of this year, i was still recommending it to my friends. i no longer do that.
  4. instancing being used to combine people from different worlds would be awesome, and the technique itself sounds brilliantly implemented. at first i wondered why people would want instances as it would reduce the number of people playing, but this explanation sounds quite good. personally, i have seen only about 2 bots since the re-introduction of the wilderness. what i have seen more of is people accusing power levellers of being bots. what happens is that some power leveller is skilling as hard as they can, and not chatting. some pker comes along, demands that they talk, then kills them and claims they were a bot. confirmation bias means that these people see bots every where they go. they claim there are far more bots than there really are because each time they see someone who won't talk to them, they declare them a bot. each time they see a "bot" it just confirms that everyone around them is a bot. this is more a psychosis than a reality. there may be many bots, but if so, i have only seen 2, potential (not actual) bots once on a non members world. if there really are a lot of bots on non member's worlds, perhaps the players that fear them so much should just change to a member's world instead :-) if the people who can pay, do so, there will be fewer players to compete with those who can't and the bots won't be so much of a problem as total competition will reduce.
  5. like member rewards points, citadels are a new method of punishing players for being non members. in all previous updates, if you could pay, you got all the advantages of membership. if you could not, the advantages of membership would be reinstated as soon as you could pay. in these new updates, as soon as you can't pay, (for example you needed your pocket money to but Christmas presents or needed your pay for medical bills), you are punished. directly through reward points, as the points rate is reduced, and indirectly via citadels as your team mates become unable to maintain their work. these are both classic psychological torture methods designed to force you to continue paying jagex despite your economic situation. the rewards points are relatively mild and put pressure on players, but at least it is still their own decision. if citadels simply degraded visually, and maintained their level, this would be moot, but since the citadels lose real work, this forces clans to demand that clan members also become paying members to maintain the citadel. this use of psychology to put peer pressure on other players is unconscionable. in the past, i have always recommended runescape to my friends as an excellent game that allowed players the freedom to play as they wanted. as of the introduction of citadels, the management has shown themselves to use the kind of dark psychological techniques used by black mailers and fraudsters. i am very disappointed in the management and can no longer play a game that uses such underhanded techniques let alone recommend it to others.
  6. Crocefisso , brilliantly written article thanks for expressing the opinion we share so eloquently. Hamtaro's article, while sound advice, is now out of date. unless runescape allows the spamming of incorrect passwords like the banks used to, then a strong password is not worth the time cost to the average user. keyloggers simply make strong passwords as easy to find as weak ones. and, if you can't spam the passwords, a weak password is almost as strong as a strong password. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/2009/SoLongAndNoThanks.pdf
  7. Hi I saw someone do this at the grand exchange, then looked on the runescape wiki for confirmation http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Heal_Group i haven't managed to pull it off myself yet, and it takes a little organisation, but it seems that, if you use heal other on someone and then immediately use heal group, both effects may take place simultaneously, potentially killing you. it may be useful to have a note letting people know it is possibly to die by using these spells too closely together after recent changes to the effects of nightshade, rock cakes, nitroglycerin and other health reducing items, it is rather difficult to die in a nice safe spot to show off your grave. if this works, you should be able to die cleanly somewhere interesting, and if you have a friend nearby, keep it active for an hour. with a group of friends, you can sort out a mini graveyard around your house portal for Halloween.
  8. i'd be happier to see all level and experience caps removed. one thing you see at low levels is specialisation, with some people training crafting, some magic, others other forms of combat, ant others smithing, woodchopping etc. this diversification drives the economy, with people who specialise in one thing needing items from other specialists. as you go up levels, you begin to run into the caps and you become a generalist. in games other than runescape, you are forced into a role by your class, but runescape is unique in that your training path allows you to make your own class by training in the things you enjoy. raising the level caps to 120 simply gives more room to move, but doesn't solve the generalisation problem. since the levels are based of a mathematical formula, they theoretically go to infinity except for artificial caps. the main limiting factor is what to do at higher skill levels as there are not an infinite number of types of trees ore ores you can use, nor an infinite number of armour types. spells could be made continuously more powerful, as the damage from them is formula based, but the runes required would also need to be somehow formula based rather than depending on new runes every few levels. utility spells and teleport spells are also added level by level and have no way to have an infinite number of them to match the levels you could achieve. clearly, solving these issues is beyond me, as i am not integral to the development of a gaming system, but perhaps a committee of bright minds, like those at jagex could come up with some ideas :-)
  9. you can get hunting rocks for shattered heart while catching imps. as far as i know, i catch imps in the most efficient way possible (trade secret), and i only get 1 imp about every 30 to 45 seconds, so the time it takes to get the rocks is quite long, however, if you are catching imps for later use, this can be handy to know. now i'm off to catch imps, and get my rocks :-) see you in falador :-) ps. i may be really bad at keeping secrets that only benefit me :-)
  10. hi, according to the wiki (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Evil_tree#Rewards), "Players collecting the reward from a farming leprechaun afterwards will receive only half of the magical banking time.". since i seemed to have unexpectedly low magical banking times when i collected my rewards from the leprechaun (as i did 100% of the time) I changed to collecting my rewards from the tree. i believe i get the expected amount of time chopping trees now.
  11. oh, and an active player in a few games is known as "it"
  12. it looks cryptic to me cliff might mean edge, and an imp could be a villain, so I'm checking out edgeville, but since I've never done a cryptic crossword before, I'm not sure if I'm close
  13. Thanks Racheya, that was interesting and informative.
  14. That's very interesting, i never thought of it like that - but a 20GB hard drive for a multi-million international company, even a Terabyte drive... that's really not that expensive is it? lol true, but like I said, I made up those numbers. They could be bigger or smaller than I guessed, but they scale the same way, so if the files are larger than I guessed, then the hard drives will need to be bigger. I suspect that each update in our character profiles has been accompanied by the addition several months before of new additional or updated hard drives. the other possibility is that they simply rent space on central servers. this would incur a cost based on the database that would scale the same way for the changes I mentioned before. So adding new players would slowly increase their costs, but adding a new feature would multiply their costs for each player.
  15. oh, and on the topic of memory space for player profiles: i am an experienced programmer and have a good understanding of what exactly is required for each user account. each user account is a small database entry using 1 bit (1/8th of a byte for most of our recorded selections (most likely for most of our quest completions too) it also has a reasonably large entry recording the number of items of each typy in our banks and inventories. each of these entries is probably 3 numbers, one records the bank space number, one records the item type, one records the number of items. so far you have a record that you could probably print out in numbers on a single A4 sized page; a nothing compared to the space on your hard drive. the problem is that each account is unique. whereas each picture of each item and each landscape layout is sent to all players identically and uses up a fixed amount of space, each time you add a new player, you add to the space required for the player database. each time you add a new feature, you have to add it for every person, so you multiply your storage requirements. this means that once they know their storage requirements, and determine the player file size, adding new players isn't too much hassle, but adding a single yes/no selection can swamp their hard drives. for example, if each player entry takes up one kilobite and we have 1 million players, that's 1 million kilobite , or 1 gigabyte. each new player takes up 1 new kilobyte, so a 20 gigabyte drive will hold 20 million players. if we add 1 byte to the player file, that's 1 byte to every player file and thus potentially an extra 20 megabytes of storage. this means you can hold about 20,000 less potential players. all because of a tiny change. to add an extra bank space you are looking at about 12 bytes of space or 250,000 fewer players for your one bank space. since bank spaces are added in rows of 8, that's 2 million less players for one extra row of bank space. these numbers are made up, but representative. if runescape adds a few extra switches to your menus, it is nice for you, but it has potentially cost them millions of players. this is countered by getting bigger hard drives, but the hard drives cost more money. so next time you think you must have an extra feature, or must have more bank space, remember that it costs them money to do so, and it is you who ultimately pay that money :-) ps. some more bank space would be nice, i ran out again :-P
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