Jagex has dropped the banhammer hard on six accounts found to be exploiting a bug in this past week’s clue scroll overhaul. Jagex posted on the RuneScape Subreddit to note that while six accounts were banned for utilizing the exploit, more than 50 other accounts were banned for attempting to trade said exploited goods for real money. The exploit involved a very specific set of circumstances and led to rewards being duplicated and then distributed around the economy.
In the post, Mod Infinity noted that Jagex is confident that most of the items have been swept up, that the impact on the economy would be negligible, and that items that were sold to other players will be removed with the gold reimbursed to the buyer.
It was indeed much harder to reproduce than just having a full inventory, that just sends excess loot to the bank. This required you to have a specific inventory set-up, a specific final clue step, and a specific final clue challenge. Those exact circumstances sadly did not manifest in testing.
As part of its ongoing quality of life updates, this week RuneScape players see the launch of an overhauled treasure trails mini-game. Treasure Trails are RuneScape’s answer to scavenger hunts, players are given a series of clues and are tasked with following coordinates, performing emotes, wearing specific items, and solving puzzles with the possibility of obtaining rare, much sought after rewards.
The update introduces a new master tier level along with 60 new rewards while also improving the experience for users on all levels. While the system previously restricted players to having one scroll of each tier at any given time, players can now collect unopened scrolls and complete them at their leisure with the knowledge that they are not missing potential opportunities. In addition, hidey-holes have popped up around the land offering players the opportunity to stash away items required for clue solutions in those areas.
Senior product manager Matt Casey had the following to say on the update:
“When we spoke to our players at RuneFest 2017, we wanted to make it clear that we would be delivering some of their most desired updates to RuneScape throughout 2018. With the full launch of the Clue Scroll rework we’re beginning to do just that, whether it’s the hardcore challenge of the Master Tier, or the incredibly desirable rewards at the end of the trails.”
Eager collectors will also find that an in-game book that tracks their entire collection, along with new highscores to compete toward and a reward point system for completing clue scrolls.
As MMO Fallout’s official only staffer and the internet’s number one games journalist, I’ve seen a lot. Betas, alphas, pre-alphas, day one patches, you name it. Last year I reviewed to rather poor reception the pre-release build of Shadow of War, and while the preview was condemned as “tone deaf” and “stupid,” I came out of that experience pretty sure that I would never encounter an odder product. And then this week I was sent what I can only assume is a beta build of Old School RuneScape Mobile.
Now I’ve been in some strange betas before, including one for [redacted] where the developer asked us to download a Torrent and then had the nerve to ask us to seed it for each other, but this takes the cake. My beta instructions came in a fancy little box which, upon opening, revealed its contents to be mostly powders and some strange doohickeys: stars and little bits of paper that say “RuneScape Old School” on them. The beta version I was sent is code named “Vanilla Cupcakes,” suggesting that someone at Jagex is taking cues from the Android style of naming updates.
A little bit odd, but I had a job to do.
Now I don’t know much about technology, being a tech journalist, but I do know that one of the basic tenets of mobile is that apps are supposed to be simple to start. Take the photo app I’m using to capture these pictures, I click once to start the app, then click once for every photo I want to take. The setup for this beta has eight steps, the first of which includes preheating the oven and creaming some butter.
Clearly this must be some kind of trial, after all RuneScape is about overcoming bigger foes and if I can’t 1v1 some butter, then what kind of scrub would I be to take on the full beta? This is like one of those Man Crates, that novelty item where the contents are delivered in an actual crate that you have to open with a crowbar. The first half of the tutorial asks you to solo pk some butter, followed by cupcake mix and two eggs at the same time. I’ve been playing RuneScape long enough to remember the Recipe for Disaster quest so none of this really blew my mind. I had to provide my own eggs though, I hope this is going to be fixed for the full release.
All this butter drops on death is more butter.
The OldSchool RuneScape beta comes in the form of six consumables, not unlike how Nintendo handles demos on its systems, and they appear to expire after a couple of days once loaded and you pretty much have to prepare them all at the same time, so I’ll have to make good use of each one. I went onto the RuneScape Reddit to see if anyone else was complaining about this style of beta build but couldn’t find a single person talking about it. I guess this business model is just accepted now.
And then I saw this note and everything became clear.
Silly me, this isn’t the beta itself, it’s a quest that will inevitably lead me to the beta. Just to show there was no hard feelings, I took the six “mobile devices” I was sent and decided to toss them in the oven to think about what they’d done. A good seventeen to nineteen minutes at 325 degrees will teach a valuable lesson about coming into my kitchen and bamboozling me to get my eggs. Boy does it smell like vanilla bean in my house.
While I let those hotheads cool off, a statement which I’m pretty sure doesn’t qualify as a pun, I went back to the task list. Next step was to cream more butter and beat it with the icing mix. You know it’s hard to fully comprehend just how much butter is in 200g of butter until you see it sitting out on a measuring plate. Hint: It’s a lot of butter.
As I creamed the second batch of butter, I got to thinking about the possibility that I’ve been doing this whole thing wrong and that the list of instructions may have just been a metaphor not meant to be taken literally, like I’d come to find that it’s not the cupcakes on the plate that matter but the cupcakes in my heart. Perhaps this was a sort of strange live event and, upon my completion, my door would be kicked in by Mod Ash who would grab the cupcakes and make a run for it. Maybe, just maybe, I was the target of the world’s most genius, not to mention expensive, plot to trick someone into baking snacks for some hungry, tired developers. Ocean’s Eleven, but British and with only six people.
The last two steps are to cover the cupcakes with icing and then decorate with the stars and those bits of paper with the RuneScape logo on them. The instructions call them “wafers” which apparently mean edible paper, as if implying that the stuff you use to print documents isn’t edible, but I digress. I’ve decided to dub these “ScapeCakes,” because it flows off the tongue easier than “CupScapes.” It might still need some workshopping, I tried to float the idea past my roommate but she was wholly uninterested in the ordeal and seemed more content with napping in front of the heat of the oven.
In conclusion, I’m 35% certain that I was never actually playing any OldSchool RuneScape during this whole process, but I learned some important life lessons along the way like how there’s really never a bad time for cupcakes, I should probably take a class in cupcake decoration, and that this crew of Jagex staffers will get their mitts on my cupcakes when they pull them out of my cold, cupcakeless hands. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t qualify as a preview since I didn’t play anything, but I’m frankly too full of cupcake to remember what the original intention of this article was.
Verdict/Disclosure: 4.5/5 – Jagex has discovered an innovative and delicious new way to deliver beta content, albeit this version isn’t as mobile as a game played straight from the phone. Thank you to Jagex for sending the cupcakes, this is not a sponsored post but more of an example on why I’m not allowed nice things. I don’t actually have access to the Old School Mobile Beta.
Time flies when you’re grinding for that 99 skillcape, and nobody knows that more than the players of Old School RuneScape which this month reaches its five year anniversary. It’s hard to believe that five years ago we were talking about Old School RuneScape (which MMO Fallout for some reason consistently referred to as ‘OldScape’) as this small project that we had no idea if it would be popular enough to be sustainable, with the high end of the hopes being that Jagex could commit just enough personnel to make very small content updates and ban some bots. But just as luck would have it, the game exploded in popularity over the next year and drew in enough people that it receives regular content updates and rather massive, exclusive additions.
In 2015, MMO Fallout managed to snag an interview with Matthew Kemp, product manager for Old School RuneScape not long after Deadman Mode, the game’s hardcore spinoff, originally launched. Deadman mode, where players can kill each other virtually anywhere and can lose large amounts of their belongings on death, in turn spawned its own massively successful eSports spinoff in the form of seasonal Deadman tournaments, with winners taking home $10 grand in cold hard cash.
Senior Product Manager Matthew Kemp (the very same) had the following to say on Old School RuneScape’s coming year:
“2018 is a huge year for Old School, and not only because of these anniversary celebrations and the launch of the game’s own dedicated Twitch channel. We are currently in the middle of a pipeline of closed beta tests for Old School RuneScape on mobile, and already are getting some excellent feedback from those lucky enough to receive an invitation. In fact, the feedback so far has more than validated our decision to make the full game available on mobile platforms for new, returning and current players later in the year.”
Both Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 are in the process of being ported to mobile devices.
Mining & Smithing are widely regarded as extremely antiquated skills in RuneScape, as Jagex essentially filled out the skill without much future proofing. Both skills were released in 2001 and have received sporadic updates throughout the years to boost their usefulness, but it can hardly be argued that either skill has been left behind as the game has progressed. Requiring 85 mining (of the 99 skill cap) to mine Rune and 85-99 smithing to create its equipment made a lot more sense in 2001 when rune was the best armor in the game (which it still is for non-members) and rune was incredibly rare with two very slowly spawning nodes deep in the player-vs-player wilderness.
One thing that’s obvious about this planned update is that both skills are see a slowdown in production,
Mining appears to be going for predictability and ease of access. In current RuneScape, mining is essentially handled by dice roll, with every strike giving the chance to collect an ore based on your mining level, the level of the rock, and your quality of pickaxe. For most ores in the game, the rock depletes after one strike and you have to wait for it to refresh before it can be struck again.
Under the new system, instead of offering a chance with each strike, Jagex is going for predictability by introducing a timed slider which grants an ore once it fills up, its speed decided by your level, quality of pickaxe, and quality of ore. In addition, it looks like all of the ore will be moved over to a community, non-competitive style with ore nodes that do not deplete. While this does mean that it’ll be more possible to mine while not paying full attention, you’ll still want to check in every so often and click the ore to restore your stamina bar, which will slow down gathering as it depletes.
Smithing on the other hand appears to be going for slower production but more returns per creation, so you won’t be pumping out hundreds of swords per hour but the experience you receive per sword will be better than the system that currently exists. Right now smithing is a simple operation of clicking on an anvil with the ore in your inventory, selecting what you want to create, and pressing a button. The new system appears to be promoting creating less items by putting more emphasis on re-smithing what you’ve already created. Items can be upgraded six times up to “decorated,” at which the item can no longer be equipped but can be traded in for a lump sum of experience. According to Jagex staff’s in-game comments, upgrading is intended to be the fast, expensive method of training with leveling by creating items from scratch being the slow, cheap method.
Smithing anvils will be situated next to forges, and now you have to keep your metal heated in order to work it into shape (for realism). This translates into a heat meter that depletes as your creation meter progresses, meaning you’ll occasionally need to stop and reheat the metal before continuing. Right now this process is incredibly slow, but there are planned changes to make your heat last longer as you level up. Coal has also been replaced with a new luminite ore as an ingredient to smith adamant and rune armor, and the existing equipment has been condensed down to level 50 with new ores/armor filling in the remaining levels.
Finally, there is an idea of convenience that has been sorely missing from mining and smithing since its inception. Since both skills are built around the idea of mass production, a lot of the time is currently spent running with limited inventory (28 spaces plus some limited options for holding coal) running to and from the bank. With this rework, players will be given an ore bag which can drastically increase the amount of time you spend mining before having to go bank. The numbers will most likely change before launch, however during the beta I could fit about 200 tin ore (level 1) and 100 living ore (top level) into the bag. On the smithing side, you’ll be able to fill a universal hopper with ore and bars that can be accessed from any anvil, removing the need to go to and from the bank with a sack full of ore.
Looking at some of Jagex’s available design documents, the company is taking into account all of the potential issues that this rework will create, including possible threats toward the value of existing, non-craftable equipment.
I’m looking forward to how this new system will shake up a system that has more or less stayed the same for the last seventeen years.
My first reaction to this week’s RuneScape update was “this may be the thing that gets me playing regularly again.”
If you asked me what my biggest gripe with RuneScape has been over the past four years, it’s the aura system. Auras are RuneScape’s temporary boons, they give bonuses to various parts of gameplay, and by golly are they a pain in the rear to keep track of. There are several dozen of them, and when they’re all given crazy names like “jack of all trades” or “Supremic Runic Accuracy,” managing a bank full of them, figuring out which you need to upgrade using loyalty points, and the best points to take them out is a nightmare.
Cue this week’s update, removing all of the auras from the bank and placing them in an easy to use, simple to manage interface. This system is about as close to perfect as you’re going to get, especially considering it can be accessed during combat and the interface allows you to easily extend and renew auras with vis wax. Functionally it lets people like me remember which auras we have, and keeps us engaged via a daily regimen of in-game tasks.
Old School RuneScape is celebrating its fifth year with the revival of a classic in the form of Dragon Slayer II. The long awaited sequel to one of the first quests released for RuneScape, Dragon Slayer II is only for high level players that have completed a long list of requirements and are ready to go up against some challenging enemies. The quest also sees the launch of the Myths Guild, a questing guild only accessible to players with 200 quest points who complete the new Dragon Slayer quest.
While Dragon Quest II is for members only, free to play content related to the release is also out today in the form of a novice quest, the Corsair Curse, and the settlement Corsair Cove.
“More than 16 years after the original Dragon Slayer quest launched and gave players their toughest challenge, we’re giving them an even grander challenge to overcome with Dragon Slayer II, one of our most memorable adventures yet!” said Mathew Kemp, Senior Product Manager, Old School RuneScape. “2018 is a real milestone year for Old School RuneScape; in addition to celebrating our fifth anniversary next month, we’re of course looking forward to the launch of Old School on mobile platforms soon!”
This week’s RuneScape update introduces a new mini-quest, ‘The G-Nome Project,’ and sees players searching for none other than Santa himself who has none other than gone missing. The G-Nome Project continues a storyline first started in November where players assisted in the building of a clockwork boy. Now Santa has gone on a journey to turn him into a real boy.
In addition to this festive mini-quest, the holiday aura is now active in RuneScape, offering a 50% experience bonus as well as a cosmetic effect.
Jagex late last week responded via Reddit to recent allegations against a member of the staff. According to posts on the Old School RuneScape Reddit forum, players have accused one of Jagex’s employees of leaking insider information and giving unfair assistance to members of a clan that they just happened to be a part of. The clan itself has also been accused of using underhanded tactics in Old School’s Deadman Mode tournaments.
The announcement states that Jagex going forward will evaluate whether or not employees will be allowed to have direct involvement in competitive clans.
What is clear is that there’s more we can do to convince you of the integrity of the team, and to ease any fears of dishonesty. Firstly, we will be assessing whether or not direct involvement in any competitive clan is the right thing for an employee of Jagex. You all want a development team who play and enjoy Old School as much as you do, and whilst clans are integral to RuneScape, our participation within them is something we’ll have to review. We are committed to ensuring that no one player (or clan) is given any treatment that could be seen as preferential in any way.
Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is actually pretty far away. If you thought Halloween was over in RuneScape, you were severely mistaken. This week marks the release of two updates for RuneScape and its Old School counterpart, to conclude the Halloween festivities. Over on the RuneScape side of things, players will assist a ghost named Closure by hunting down helping ghosts into the afterlife.
Track down nine ghosts and help them cross to the other side, then collect their last moments in The Ghastly Grimoire in exchange for a ghost treat(containing a small XP lamp or star, a toffee apple or sugar skull and various bones and ashes), this year’s Hallowe’en emote (Ghost Story) and a Headless Rider cosmetic override.
The quest includes five ghost stories from members of the community.
Over at Old School RuneScape, players are already taking part in their event. Adventurers will be enlisted to assist the Grim Reaper and head down to Sapphire Lagoon to stop the hockey mask wearing villain Jonas. Players will get their hands on a spooky mask and new skin shade as well as previous years’ Halloween items.
MMO Fallout 