Adamfostas

I agree so much. while grammar rants are always educational, I didn't realise people liked them THAT much.

I would agree with the above poster who said that the first article lacked a tightly argued conclusion; you don't necessarily need to go into significant depth to provide one. While there's nothing wrong with providing an observational piece, inflation is something about which many articles have been written on tip.it already, and this one didn't go anywhere new. I'd be less critical if this weren't a highly interesting time for RS economically, and the subjects you could have written about being as diverse as: - The contrast between inflation caused by credit expansion (i.e. Alching) and inflation caused by lower output (i.e. Fewer bots) - The relationship between inflation, the cost of levels, and Jagex's freedom to make high level content - The role of pure essence as a credit expansion enabler While, to be fair, you do touch on the above you don't really explore them in depth. I'm convinced you could, so it's a shame that you didn't.

As the poster a little way up the thread said, socially maladjusted morons are socially maladjusted morons. I would however disagree with turning public chat off. Rather, you can use it as an opportunity to demonstrate to the insulting individual why this method of discourse is counterproductive. To give an example, the other day I ported to Seers to chop a single maple log for a quest. I went to the nearest two trees, one of which already had a chap chopping it, and started chopping the vacant tree. Just when I'd got my log, the other chap said, "please get away you loser." Startled by the juxtaposition of 'please' and 'loser', I tapped the teleport button by reflex. What I should've done is spent the next hour training firemaking and woodcutting using those trees, to demonstrate to the chap that insults are not a good way of getting people to do what you want.

God forbid I should take the mick out of something that other people might pay to see. I would advise you to not read my posts if you're certain you're not going to like them beforehand.

Let me tell you what this is. Investment bank chaps sit round a table figuring out how to extract money from their purchases. One of them says, 'Hey, I hear that warcraft game is being made into a movie. We own a game and a studio, let's do the same! We'll have a captive audience of 150 million teenage boys!' The other bankers agree, and go out to celebrate their idea by snorting coke off naked ladies. Meanwhile, some poor press spod turns their witterings into a press release. This movie will be dreadful. We're talking worse than that Final Fantasy movie. The bankers will piss money at their studio and some bitter hack of a director will spew out a cgi-drenched shouty-man fest. It'll go straight to DVD, and the magic weapon from it will be thrown into the game as a tie-in.

Wow. As someone who's just returned to the forums after several years of absence from RS, I'd like to compliment TiF on the high levels of drama it's developed in the interim. Best I remember from the old days is a guy who claimed Runescape was ruining our nation's youth and had to be stopped for the good of mankind. Now you've got a collection of sperglords who are genuinely upset that people are arguing with the fruits of their sperging (on the /internet/ of all places) and so in an effort to demonstrate their humility have set up a seperate site named after one of their number. Clearly, their egos are /tiny/ and will be adequately contained in a site with no search engine presence and a correspondingly lower level of traffic. This is awesome stuff guys, thanks for enlivening what would otherwise have been a very dull train journey.

Help no longer needed. RuneScape Name: Kraedorn I need a member of: Phoenix gang Quest: Shield of Arrav When I'll be on: Much of today and tomorrow World/Location: 23 How to contact me: PM me ingame.

Thanks for all your encouraging comments. I'm fascinated by the application of unusual perspectives against a wide variety of fields, to bring out elements they hold in common that would otherwise be lost. I'm thinking of putting together something about the social evolution of Runescape since its inception, but I fear I need a lot more data than I have now. I'd like to respond to some of your comments. I fully accept that the article was too short - it would have been improved by the addition of more examples of RS art, and at some point I may go back to look into this more. I'm thinking along the lines of examining the costumes and attitudes you find at the Catherby yews, which is always a great place to encounter new costumes. To the various people who appeared to take this article as a justification for playing the game - it's important to realise that Runescape actually is a real-life activity. When I choose to play Runescape, I choose to perform a real-life action that gives me, in the real world, pleasure. All I've aimed to do with this article is provide a different perspective on that pleasure. Beyond enjoying myself, no justification is necessary. If you need one, you're doing something wrong. To the people who wanted to see my friend's guitar: It didn't have strings on it at this point. When I quizzed my friend about this, he replied: @Rahila - no, it wasn't necessary, but regrettably my pomposity has limits.

After all, it's not like they did that with Farming in any way. Or had little shiny sparkles in the place fairy rings are now before FT 2 came out. Or, in fact, have just dumped an entire PET STORE into Yanille without telling anyone.

My, you have an amusingly relativistic argumentative style. In the cause of expressing my opinion, I'll categorise the relevant parts of your post: Sensible: Irrelevant ad hominem attack: In making the accusation that those complaining about the most recent round of updates are 'weak', you're claiming that their opinion is worth less as a consequence. You do not actually state this, but given what you believe debate to be ('going back and forth' between opinions) this is the only way in which your post can have a point. This is because you appear to be maintaining a version of the classic 'opinion' fallacy: 'I am entitled to my opinion'. What this cashes out as is 'I am entitled to have my own unanalysed emotional response to an issue and release it for public consumption'. Since you do not believe debate to be a dialectical process aimed at greater understanding of the truth, the only way you can possibly 'win' is by implying that opinions opposed to yours are lesser. The debate thus becomes alternating emotional reactions: "Runescape is ruined!" "No it isn't, and you're a wuss for saying so!" "Am not!" "Are too!" and so on. This is clearly a futile exercise, which is a pity, as the first half of your post contains an interesting point. Please consider amending your stance to allow a proper debate.

The addition of a picture to this thread has made the situation a great deal clearer. You're missing a couple of tricks. 1) Firstly, 'Get some respect you freaking loser' is a rubbish insult, and isn't going to do anything other than than give the interloper the knowledge that he's riled you. Since, potentially, this is why he's doing it, this is not a wise move. You're not going to have any impact with conventional insulting. The key is to make them feel uncomfortable. Tell them that you can see them, sitting there in their lonely room, trying to get kicks out of inconveniencing strangers. Tell them you bet it gets them off. Ask them if it makes them feel good. Continue along these lines. Given that RS is mostly populated with confused teenagers suffering from the onset of puberty, peculiar homoerotic undertones will usually make them run a mile. 2) Secondly, the more intelligent ones (down to about 10% by this point) will put you on ignore, which is when the next approach comes in handy. Fight for what's yours. If you've been camping at a spawn point for a while, you'll know where to position your mouse to catch it just as it spawns. Quick reactions will allow you to frustrate them. If your reactions aren't fast enough, play an FPS for a week. You've now got someone who feels a bit weird, doesn't seem to be annoying you, and is now only getting half the xp and drops they would otherwise be getting. They won't hang around for long. 3) Thirdly, accept that sometimes monster-stealing is acceptable. For example, the number of people at the green dragons in SW Wildy has, understandably, just shot through the roof. I haven't found a world without at least three people on it for quite a while. In this circumstance, the only way I can kill them in my preferred spot is to take someone else's monster. Do I want to do this? No. But if competition for the best spot precludes finding my own, I have no choice if I want to use it too. The moral here is that if you want such things as 'ethics' to be adhered to ingame, you have to enforce them yourself. While your fellow TipIters can tut about monster-stealing alongside you, it won't make a bit of difference unless you do something about it.

Just to be different, I'm working on my Smithing. The recent update to the Smithing interface left lots of obvious gaps, which points to an update in the near future. It's possible (disclaimer: I just made this up, I have no evidential basis for it other than guesswork) that we'll need to craft items such as bridles and collars for various of the summoned animals, which would fill the new blanks. Or, of course, the coming Smithing update could be nothing to do with Summoning, and could instead be a continuation of Devious Minds. So either I get to make Katanas, or I get easier access to high-level products. Either way, I'm going to have a shedload of Mith arrows by the end.

Awesome politicking there by Jagex. This clearly wasn't planned from the beginning, but is rather a rapid response to the furore over staking. While they should've been able to anticipate what the response was to their changes, at least it's clear they know how to minimise their losses. Plus, I'm looking forward to this one. It's possible that at least one of the animals will take the form of additional inventory space, which would make the majority of the game so much easier. There'll doubtless be a way to balance it, but I'll be there on the first day yelling, "Bag-Shaped Creature #14, I choose you!".

I do hope this thread isn't locked before I can make a response. There's been a certain amount of name calling, but largely the debate has been fairly reasonable by Interweb standards. Firstly, I wholly agree with Qeltar on the subject of the misunderstanding of depression that appears on this thread. I know the first time I met someone with depression my reaction was similar - "Oh, you're just being sad, get over it, this is dull." Over the next few months of getting to know this person I realised that it's not like the sadness I had experienced. The nearest analogy is physical disability - owing to the brain chemistry of people with depression, certain actions and choices are not open to them, in the same way that someone in a wheelchair is unable to get up and dance a merry jig. Oh, and to all those people advocating a bizarre form of Darwinism as a reason why this girl's suicide was acceptable? Let's see you live in the woods for a year armed with nothing but a stick. Either society takes care of all of its members or it degenerates into vicious tribalism. Secondly, I wholly disagree with Qeltar on the interpretation of this article. The internet is a wholly unprecedented communications medium that allows individuals to form various novel types of relationships with others of whom they have little or no information. In these new forms of relationship, there is little restraint upon what can and what cannot be said to one another. Anonymity assures a form of repercussion-free communication not available to real-world society. This has various impacts, one of which Qeltar is claiming is the suicide of this girl. What are the causes of this suicide? This appears to be the main source of contention on this thread. While on a very basic level, the direct cause of her suicide were the actions of the 'Josh' adults, this fails to take into account the various contributing factors that affected the outcome. I'll itemise what I believe them to be. 1) The actions of the adults who set up the 'Josh' account. The internet here acts as an enabling factor, in terms of permitting these actions. 2) The depression suffered by the girl. 3) The inability of the girl to make effective choices when confronted with the actions of the 'Josh' adults. Now, what contributed to (3)? Certainly, (2) was a factor, but along with this we have to consider the role of the parents in taking the responsibility for making choices away from the child. In doing this, they failed to educate her in - or, indeed, allowed her to find out for herself - ways of behaving on the internet that minimise the risk of this sort of occurrence. They thus exposed their child to unnecessary risk, ironically while trying to do the opposite. What Qeltar is arguing for is action to curtail the enabling factor in (1). It is to be noted that the only impact of this would be to remove the ease by which the actions of the 'Josh' adults were carried out - there were various other media available to them (kids, for example, do like to pass notes). It would not have necessarily prevented this case, merely made cases like it more unlikely. However, exactly the same could be said for better education regarding internet behaviour for both the parents and the child. Policing the internet removes its main benefit: unconstrained communication. For every child who kills themselves, I would suspect that I can find hundreds more children who were previously at risk of suicide through loneliness who have found more to live for via online communities who accept them. Indeed, if you want to find an enormous number of angsty teenagers who support each other in their angst, you've only got to look to LiveJournal. In the modern world, children are constantly bombarded with messages designed to play upon their inadequacy. We call it advertising. Many of the most popular shows for the teenage peer group focus around the antics of pretty and rich young things. It's not really surprising that when I play Runescape I am reminded of the school yard - I have been mocked for my stats, for my spelling, and for not having the 'right armour' (the last one amused me the most). Many children have yet to acquire an understanding of the social norms that constrain such behaviour. Bullying is rife in the school yard too - shall we keep our children away from there? No. We do not. What we do is tell our children how to look after themselves. We tell them not to talk to strangers. We tell them to tell their teachers if they're getting bullied. We give them advice and support, and let them choose. The world is fundamentally unsafe, and the best any loving parent can do is minimise the risk to their children by making sure that their child knows the best way to act. Qeltar's argument really falls down when he attempts to extend it to Runescape. Unlike the school yard, bullies can be switched off. If every parent whose child plays Runescape told them that if anyone made them unhappy to right-click them and hit the 'Ignore' button, I suspect we'd have a better community. Jagex has provided the tools to allow children a game experience uninterrupted by bullying - it's the responsibility of the parent to make sure that the children know how to best use those tools.

As the gentleman above me said, it's possible that they plan on having several storylines converge into a series of linked quests. For example, the events foreshadowed by Hazelmere in the Path of Glouphrie could easily refer to the next quest in the Desert Treasure, Plague City or Rise of the Red Axe questlines. Such a massive quest would take time to develop, of course, so it's understandable that in the mean time they implement several 'filler' quests to bring storylines like the Cave Goblin one up to a point where they can join in this convergence. That black square above the GWD has been there for a long time, after all...