Jagex – Page 38 – MMO Fallout

MMOrning Shots: Battle of Keldagrim

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from RuneScape. I took this screenshot during the quest Blood Runs Deep, where you uncover a plot by the race of sea creatures pictured above to take over the world (or at least a sizable portion of it). Upon returning to the port village of Keldagrim, you find its militia locked in battle. What follows is a very long and drawn out fight.

MMOrning Shots shows off interesting games and locales, and can be seen here at MMO Fallout every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To submit your own MMOrning Shot, send an email to contact@mmofallout.com.

RuneScape Beta Introduces Combat Tweaks

A news post has appeared on the RuneScape website detailing large updates coming to the game’s Evolution of Combat system. Currently in beta testing, the updates include adding weapon-specific special attacks back into the game as abilities. Also on the table is a function to queue abilities, action bar setups, quickly change loadouts, as well as multiple smaller changes.

These are some of the larger features we’re working on, but there are plenty of smaller improvements coming up too. With these changes, we hope Evolution of Combat will be more appealing to all types of players, adding more depth for experts, while making it more accessible to those just starting out. But that’ll be for you to decide.

Players interested in testing out the upcoming changes and giving their feedback can log in to the RuneScape beta servers, which you can find on the main website. The combat beta does not affect your progress in the live game.

(Source: RuneScape)

RuneScape: 2014 Power To The Players

Jagex has declared 2014 to be the year of player-developer collaboration, not unlike every other year that the developer has promised to listen to its community better. How do you accomplish this? Through things. Foremost, Jagex plans on implementing an in-game poll system to allow better opportunity for players to vote on upcoming content.

In mid-January, we’re going to launch a new in-game poll system, which will give members at least one new content poll to vote on each week. In total, there will be up to seven guaranteed content polls each month, covering a range of topics including quests, minigames, combat updates, skills, bosses, reworks, core gameplay changes and much more besides.

How else? More polls! The announcement does detail plans to add in more quests, high level content, and a continued effort to remove RuneScape’s niggling problems. The first poll launches January 13th.

(Source: RuneScape)

Jagex Reveals Premiere Club 2014

Last year, Jagex rolled out the Premiere Club. Players were able to buy limited packages of 3, 6, and 12 months of membership for a reduced price and receive added bonuses for doing so. In a post on the official website, Jagex has laid down the plans for 2013 Premiere Club. The packages are only available until “early 2014,” and the deal last year expired on February 4th. At the highest, gold tier full year package, players receive bonus loyalty points, exclusive pets, extra daily spins, access to VIP exclusive worlds, exclusive Q&A’s, chat and forum badges, and cosmetic promotional items that generally can only be obtained through special game cards.

This year’s deal is more expensive than last year, by a margin of about $12. It will be possible to redeem bonds for premiere membership, so dedicated players can get it all for free. You apparently need six, twelve, and twenty four bonds for each package respectively.

(Source: Jagex)

Lessons From 2013 #2: Triumph of Old School

You can only hope that other developers are paying attention to Jagex. This year marked the announcement and launch of RuneScape’s Old School server, a separate service that originally launched as a snapshot of the MMO way back from August 2007, but has since evolved into its own game entirely. Updates are based entirely off of polls, with each addition being voted on separately and requiring 75% approval in order to be implemented. Rather than vote on ideas from the standard RuneScape ruleset, Old School has gone in a completely different direction with the implementation of features such as pvp worlds, where players are able to fight it out all over the world instead of being relegated to the wilderness.

We can only hope that more developers will see the value of classic servers.

RuneScape's Services Disrupted By Denial of Service Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks are an ever-increasing problem over all sectors of the internet. What was once a rare occurrence has become nearly commonplace with many medium to large services. Most recently, the Extra Life charity event was brought down temporarily due to a denial of service attack. Google has launched Project Shield, a service to offer their own DDoS mitigation software to other websites.

In a news post released today, Jagex has revealed that RuneScape has come under heavy DDoS attacks over the past year, causing disruptions in service as well as heavy latency and disconnections for players. Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard posted an apology to players for the inconvenience caused by the attacks, laying the blame at the feet of gold farmers and bot makers. Gerhard stated that Jagex is boosting their infrastructure and is working with authorities to track down the source of the attacks.

I wanted to take this opportunity to assure you that we have, are and will continue to work tirelessly, preventing as many of these attacks from affecting your gameplay as we can. We have recently made a multi-million pound investment in our global IT infrastructure to deal with the continued attacks and are working with a number of service and security providers to eradicate the issue completely. We are also working closely with worldwide law enforcement agencies to bring the people responsible for these attacks to justice.

You can read the entire announcement at the link below.

(Source: RuneScape)

Jagex Highlights Runefest Revelations

Runefest has come and gone with attendees getting the chance to meet the developers, participate in activities, and test out upcoming updates. Jagex has sent us over a list of some big reveals from Runefest, including the name of the next skill, the 200th quest, world events, and more. Check out the list below:

The Invention Skill, which is a partner to the recently launched Divination skill and represents a technological leap forward within the game. This skill will allow players create their own gear and “soul weapons” which can be leveled up to increase their power as players progress through the game.
The RuneScape Community App, which will allow players to chat and access the Grand Exchange, RuneScape’s trading system, through their mobile devices.
A preview of the 2nd World Event which has been confirmed to involve the two gods Armadyl and Bandos, who will be travelling across the world map trying to gain followers and influence. Players will also be able to opt into innovative open world PVP.
Upgraded matchmaking which will allow players to easily find other player who are interested in playing specific social content, allowing them put together teams easily without interrupting their gameplay.
Players were shown a glimpse of two new quests – The 200th quest which will focus on the Elves and a new Master quest featuring the return of Zaros.
“The Church of YOU” – Over the past decade players have been central to all RuneScape content and are the world guardians, now they can start to amass their own followers to worship their in-game achievements.

(Source: Jagex Press Release)

[Community] RuneScape Prestige Mode Rejected

How violently can a person say no? RuneScape is a grinder’s game, there are over twenty five skills all of which require more than thirteen million experience in order to hit level 99, and one which goes further up to level 120. As far as even MMOs go, RuneScape takes a long time to hit high levels, and involves a lot of very tedious grinding. So I can’t imagine why someone at Jagex thought that prestige would be an appropriate suggestion to spitball to the community. The idea is simple, if you’ve played games like Modern Warfare 2. You prestige by resetting your level to one and starting all over again, but you do so with a cosmetic effect. For RuneScape, each prestige would increase the experience required to hit end-game by 100%, so 26 million experience to reach 99 a second time, etc.

The idea was put up to a vote and was summarily rejected, with 61% of 28,594 voting no. Since the requirement for implementation was 75% of the vote, prestige has been canned for now with the possibility of being reworked and sent back up for a vote in the future.

MMOrning Shots: Claymation

Whenever I look at Jagex’s screenshots and video for RuneScape, it always feels like I’m looking at a clay diorama. Today’s MMOrning Shot is a snapshot from RuneScape’s latest Behind The Scenes video, showing off one of the game’s distractions and diversions, the fishing contest.

MMOments: Slow And Steady Rebuilds Lumbridge

The Battle for Lumbridge was the first world event in RuneScape, taking place from July to the end of September, and pitting Saradomin Vs Zamorak in a massive battle of heavy resource grinding. In addition to helping out their chosen god, players aided the Duke of Lumbridge in deciding how to rebuild the village. The battle is over now and the combatants have left the field, leaving Lumbridge to build itself up from the ground.

Considering that the Lumbridge Rebuildathon is a daily event that you can finish in less than ten minutes, I didn’t think I would find it as engaging as I have. Not for the game itself, which involves picking up inventories of debris and putting them in a stack, but watching the area slowly transform as players complete tasks. Buildings are slowly being rebuilt and the battlefield cleaned of barricades, tents, and buildings. There is a feeling that your work is actually contributing, an improvement over the Battle of Lumbridge’s divine tear gathering.

And there are experience rewards.

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