The Daily Bits

I figured I’d post my thoughts here rather than trying to get them in on the official forums. The official forums are so crowded now. I was not able to find any decent rants to take our minds off this update for this weeks show. I won’t be going into a detailed analysis but I’ll go through them and post my thoughts. I invite you to read the development diary article first.

I figure we’ll start with something a little more close to home. That is the upcoming trade and already implemented drop restrictions. Both of these new rules use the idea of a 3000gp limit just like the duel arena did. As of right now there are no trade restrictions. This move was quite clearly stated by Jagex as an opportunity to return borrowed items and give Christmas gifts. This is fine for this year and up until next Christmas. I hope that Jagex comes up with some sort of mechanism to give gifts come January. I know every so often I give out small seed packages to people to help with farming. The trade restriction will make it harder to do numerous things such as the above highlighted of giving gifts, trading raw for cooked shark (if the limit is not with 3000gp), trading herbs for herb seeds, simple item loans and many many other things. I think we could all learn to cope with this part of the update.

The drop restriction makes sense. Who is going to drop a party hat or 30M gp on the floor just for the heck of it? The only real disconcerting thing about this part is that it threw a wrench into our Christmas event plans. We had originally planned to do a drop party and a few other fun events. However now we are working on other alternatives. The drop party is no longer happening, seeing as we don’t want uninvited strangers coming in to visit us. We are however planning a circus of other events throughout the Christmas holidays. We will be handing out prizes for these events just as we normally do at the monthly RSBandB events. Another plus side I see to this is that when we die we’re now able to purchase a gravestone. These can hold our items for longer than the original 1 minute window. I plan on upgrading mine to one of the ones that costs 50k, possibly Armadyl. Overall I think for the most part we can learn to adapt to the trade and drop changes.

Next up is the most controversial topic in this update. The removal of the Wilderness as we knew it. The Wilderness has been replaced with Clan Wars and Bounty Hunter. Clan Wars and Bounty Hunter sounded fine as a standalone update earlier this month when the “Behind The Scenes” was published. Both these new “mini-games” have their problems. It seems from postings on the official Runescape forums Jagex is willing to work with the population in order to tweak these new areas to better serve the players. Clan Wars is exactly as it sounds. You can get together with your clan and fight another clan in a controlled area. Bounty Hunter allows you to search for someone and kill them off. You also have the ability to go rogue in Bounty Hunter and kill anyone you please. I’ll be highlighting something shortly about both of these new mini-games. Along with this part of the update the ability to attack players in the Wilderness was removed. Instead they added new random occurrences of “ghosts.” I have seen some of these ghosts and they do pose a good fight but there’s nothing like a fight against a real live flesh and blood person who can think and act for themselves. This is the aspect that most players are upset about, being able to not attack in the Wilderness. Personally it was kinda fun to run around the Wilderness and not have to worry about getting ice barraged. Once again this move was taken so that real world item traders could not take their customer into the wilderness and kill them. Finally I’d like to point out a bit of a contradiction. The most vocal opponents to the removal of PK’ing have been pures. Here is what I’d like to point out. If you take a look at both the Bounty Hunter highscores and the Bounty Hunter Rogues highscores you’ll notice that most of the top ranked players are pures and/or tanks. This is more prominent on the standard Bounty Hunter highscores, there are a few more tanks on the rogue highscores but nonetheless the ones doing the complaining are ranked nice and high on these two new tables.

Now anyone who knows me well enough will know that I hate pures. It seems as with this update Jagex has been able to start the slow death of pures. This’ll happen by the pures no longer being of any use in the real wild and not gravitating to the new Bounty Hunter area. I know that’s one thing I’m happy about with this update. Pures and their PK’ing ways are an essential part of the Runescape economy. If you take a look at Runescape from a high level perspective the entire game revolved around the wilderness and duel arena. Lets face it, pures need food, fishermen fish sharks, cooks cook it, then sell it. Pures need potions (pure sets for the most part) without the need for these potions Herblore prices will tank to a new low. People will be uninspired to farm their herbs. Runecrafting will have no use except for skillers. People will no longer buy combat based runes or nature runes to high-alch to 94 magic. People will no longer buy iron knives from player smiths in order for training ranged. The player smiths will no longer buy ore from the miners. Ultimately people will no longer fletch to get Fletching as their first skill cape. This will cause pain for yew and magic woodcutters. We’ll be seeing that people will only cut willows and maple for use in Firemaking skilling. In the end Runescape will be turned on it’s head and reformed for skilling. The only skills that really wouldn’t be effected are Construction, Thieving, Agility, Slayer.

One of two things will have to happen for this to not happen. Jagex will either have to make Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars worth using. Enough for people to continue training their skills and spending money on them. If Jagex refuses to tweak these mini games they will have to intertwine the skills more. For example, one course of action could be to create a new Runecrafting or Crafting potion for Herblore use. Expanding the lunar spell book to be more convenient and useful. Maybe Summoning in January will fix some of these problems? I’m not sure we’ll just have to wait and see.

All in all I think the negatives of this update far outweigh the positives. If I was at the helm of Jagex I would have spent more time looking for a less drastic solution. This update has been equated to many things such as a mass genocide, using a nuclear bomb to deal with a small problem, and using a huge bludgeoning device when only a small chisel is needed. Given time I feel a better solution could have been reached. Lots of people say their quitting, a small percentage do, but 70% or so of the “quitters” per say will come back in a few weeks or months.

Before anyone gets their hopes up that I’ll be quitting don’t go that far I have no plans to quit. We still have RSBandB and not everyone will quit. There’s still RSBANDBUpdate! which requires my weekly attention. So don’t worry. Right now just like lots of other people I’m taking a wait and see approach with the economy. Focusing on my mission which I set out to do at the end of August. I’ll be posting more about that in the coming days. In the meantime back to my Astronomy studying (4 more exams left, done Tuesday), then record episode 130 of RSBANDBUpdate!

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