Tag: Rework

RuneScape Reduces DailyScape Grind


DailyScape is the not-exactly-positive name given to RuneScape by players who are somewhat fed up with the game’s daily grind. Not so much over the game itself, which is a massive grind no matter where you look in it, but over Jagex’s insistence on daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that start to feel more like busy work than something worth accomplishing.

This month Jagex took aim at daily challenges, a feature that is often long and tedious, requires the player to hand over their creations, and go out of their way to complete the task. Imagine being told to make hundreds of bows only to hand them over for a reward kinda worth the value of the goods that went into it. With this week’s update, RuneScape daily challenges will be more manageable and consistently rewarding;

“So, to solve this issue we’ve simply increased player agency. Instead of having several Challenges per skill, most of the time there will now be only one. This single Challenge will require you to interact with the skill in a manner of your choosing. You might be asked to run five laps of an Agility Course, but you’re free to pick which one. Or maybe you’ll need to cut 28 logs – if so, you’ll be able to choose from whichever trees you like.”

The daily challenge rework blog post can be found here.

RuneScape Bank Rework Has Been Canned For Time Being


Remember the bank rework? The one Jagex teased for release back in 2016? Temper your expectations, because it isn’t coming out.

Mod Shauny took the time to post over to Reddit a couple of days ago that the bank rework has been shelved and won’t be worked on for the foreseeable future. In short, the project turned out to be simply too complex, and the team decided to focus on smaller engine re-works that have been requested over the years.

As shauny summarized:

  • In short the bank rework as a whole is shelved; we are not working on it and will not be for foreseeable future.
  • We are investigating bank placeholders on its own as a feature you want. It is at this stage purely an investigation into feasibility, and we make no promises about being able to deliver this.

The announcement has left quite a few angry players over the fact that Jagex knew that the rework was not going to be possible “a few months” after Runefest 2016, but chose to wait over two years to communicate this to the customer base while still pretending that the update was still in the works.

RuneScape Preps For 2019 Premiere Club, Mining & Smithing Beta


The end of 2018 is nigh, and that can only mean one thing: The next annual Premiere Club package is going to be available from RuneScape. For the uninitiated, Premiere Club is an annual package of RuneScape membership that comes with extra goodies including an aura, exclusive outfits, pets, access to VIP worlds, chat badges, and more. This year the price is going up to $89.99, up from $79.99 in 2017 and still much lower than the $107.99 in 2015/2016. Details on the premiere club bonuses will be revealed later this week, while the membership itself likely won’t go on sale until the 15.

Meanwhile, Jagex is gearing up for another round of beta testing of the game’s mining & smithing rework. MMO Fallout previewed the last beta round way back in February, so hopefully Jagex is a bit further along in their development.

More information on this week’s updates at the link below.

(Source: RuneScape)

Beta Perspective: RuneScape’s Mining/Smithing Beta


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.