RuneScape Unleashes Zodi-Yak Track Ahead of Archaeology


Get it? It’s a yak.

Continue reading “RuneScape Unleashes Zodi-Yak Track Ahead of Archaeology”

Diaries From Gielinor: The Yak Track Made Me Hate RuneScape


I’ve made several comments over the years about how Jagex seems to struggle with conflicting priorities, and nothing really exemplifies that in recent history more than the Yak Track.

For those of you who play RuneScape, the Yak Track ends today (January 5). I liked the idea of the Yak Track in theory; an alternative to the battle pass that was given away for free to those who shelled out additional money for the Premier Pack. It’s pure selfishness, but for people like me who are still grandfathered in at the $5 monthly subscription you kinda have to give us something in the bundle to make that price difference worth it.

The Yak Track was such an exercise in tedium that it made me resent RuneScape. I managed to swallow 25 of the 50 levels and theoretically can’t really “quit” the game because I have 600+ days accumulated in excess membership thanks to various giveaways over the past 15 years. I’ve just spent the last couple of months playing the Twisted League in Old School RuneScape.

Contextually the Yak Track couldn’t come out at a more ridiculous and dare I say stupidly contradictory time in RuneScape history. It represents a mind-numbing tedium that Jagex has gone back and forth on in terms of stamping out in the game.

The Yak Track is a battle pass that presents players with 50 tiers of rewards with each tier having its own option of one of two tasks. Some of the tiers are joke tasks, like collect 28 cabbages or talk to an NPC, something you can do it 5 minutes. The majority of the tasks however are ridiculously tedious. Fletch thousands of bows, make thousands of potions, invest endless hours into slayer, etc. It isn’t fun and it’s a stark reminder of one of Jagex’s worst business practices that the company has admitted it is trying to push away from.

Jagex, like Ubisoft, has a habit of creating a problem and then selling players the solution. Don’t want to slog through 30+ tiers of godawful grind for this time-limited event and cosmetics you’ll never be able to obtain again? Well Jagex will sell you bonds to skip the content that they artificially inflated the tedium for in order to sell you bonds to skip the grind that they artificially inflated to make you pay real cash to skip. Nothing stokes resentment quite like the company that has had numerous apology videos over the past few months about their predatory monetization practices doing exactly what they are apologizing for, while they are apologizing.

It also dampens the fact that two weeks after the Yak Track launched, Jagex overhauled the way daily quests in RuneScape work because they saw players getting indignant about the tedium of taking excessive time away every day for dailies that didn’t really reward them. Yep, Jagex will overhaul a system so you don’t need to talk to an NPC to turn in a daily task while at the same time instituting another system that forces you to mine three thousand coal for 1/50th of a reward tier.

I’d like to believe Jagex’s thousandth apology and promise to do better when it comes to predatory microtransactions, but they could at least wipe the crumbs off of their face before promising that they’ll stop stealing from the cookie jar.

Diaries From H1Z1: I Walked 100 Levels, And I Won’t Walk 100 More


I promise this is my last piece about H1Z1 for a while, because I officially quit.

Last week I reached the promised land, the deluxe apartment in the sky if you will. I hit level 100 on the H1Z1 battle pass. That’s right, praise me for accomplishing in roughly two months what most of you likely finished by the end of week three. Gaze upon my mediocrity and be amazed for all the wrong reasons. I won’t be coming back.

I could go on for hours about how absolutely incompetent the H1Z1 team is, but I think anyone reading this wouldn’t be too surprised that the same company that has fumbled the ball so many times with H1Z1 and its other projects would do it again. For more information on my gripes, please refer to my last rant. In the time since I wrote that article a few weeks back, H1Z1 has not improved. In fact, it has managed to continue degrading. The shotgun is so stupidly overpowered that it can one-shot someone at full health wearing armor, while the crossbow was severely buffed with an EMP explosion that will knock out cars for an extended amount of time, do a lot of damage, and basically ruin your enjoyment of the game.

Last time around I complained a lot about challenges. Week 8 challenges sound like someone at Daybreak saw all of the complaints about the challenges being stupid and decided to ratchet it up to 11 just to spite the players. We have;

  • Place in the top 10 while having 10 first aid kits in your inventory in fives
  • Go to the hospital in map grid B7 and get 7 kills
  • Destroy 20 camping tents
  • Get 10 kills with the RPG-7, grenades, crossbow, or air strike signals
  • Parachute into Cranberry

Nothing says fun like ridiculously convoluted “challenges.”

These top Week 7 having only two depraved challenges being two kills within the orchard in map grid J2 within a single match and getting to the transmission tower at the top of Spence Hills while specifically driving a pickup truck. Parachuting into Cranberry is a lot harder when you have no control over where you start and the game has still refused to drop you in that area after all this time. Getting 7 kills in the hospital in B7 is difficult enough as it is, assuming that (1) B7 isn’t part of the area immediately or shortly thereafter covered by fog and (2) you can even find people in there. I’ll add in a (3) for good measure, that the game doesn’t bug out and actually tracks the kills.

The same goes for getting 10 kills with the explosive weapons, it wouldn’t be on the list were it not for Daybreak’s shoddy programming meaning the challenge is basically broken. Going back to prior challenges has shown multiple that by all means I should have achieved by now that are either not properly tracking or just flat out broken. Daily challenges similarly seem to be riddled with bugs and many of them can’t be completed. The game for some reason absolutely abhors recognizing the player performing emotes, I noticed it has started handing out ridiculous daily challenges like “destroy 99 chairs within Cranberry” which is just fantastic and isn’t a tedious chore.

And it seems like the population in H1Z1 is dying fast as the ratio of full games to not full games during what should be relatively peak hours is declining. I played a few fives matches on Saturday afternoon this past weekend where the game couldn’t grab more than 70 players before the match began. Played a few free for all matches that same day that weren’t even half-full (some were as low as 11 people). H1Z1 hasn’t hosted an arcade mode in a loooooong time. Lag in matches seems to be getting worse as the game goes on, as I have seen numerous rounds where I die because the person is literally teleporting around the screen and can’t be shot. It’s like playing old Quake on dial-up. Had this been on the PC, I’d suspect foul play. Since it’s on the Playstation 4, I’m fairly certain it is the game. Obviously these are all anecdotal and from my own perspective.

So I am officially washing my hands of H1Z1, and will start posting Diaries From articles for games that I am actually enjoying playing.

Daybreak Announces H1Z1 Season 3: Beyond Royale


Daybreak Game Company today announced the third season of H1Z1 on Playstation 4. Dubbed Beyond Royale, the free expansion introduces a number of new features as well as a new 100-tier battle pass and various improvements to the quality of life for players.

Among the highlights, a new free for all deathmatch mode will pit 50 players against one another in a tight combat zone with respawning and a rotating arsenal of weaponry. The first player to 25 kills before the timer runs out wins. Joining the FFA deathmatch mode is a new leaderboard system that introduces ranks for singles, duos, groups, and tracks kills, matches played, and other statistics.

Season 3 battle pass features 100 levels and over 200 rewards, offering three tiers for free, paid, and PS+ members. Battle pass players will enjoy attendance rewards, additional challenges, and more this coming season.

Source: Daybreak Game Company press release.