Runescape – Page 30 – MMO Fallout

Jagex Talks: RuneScape Deadman Mode

The past year or so has shown RuneScape to be one of the oddest games I’ve ever had to cover here at MMO Fallout. While traditional MMOs branch out with expansion packs, often times altering their names to match the latest version, RuneScape is one of the first that I’ve seen to actively spin itself off into new modes. Granted this has always been the case, with the original RuneScape existing alongside the updated version as RuneScape Classic, but what Jagex has done with these new titles is to create entirely separate entities, actively developed, with their own communities and economies.

Old School RuneScape popped up in 2013 with a crazy premise: Reboot the game as it was in late 2007 with active content development that would only be implemented if 75% of the (voting) community approved of it. In September this year, we saw the launch of DarkScape, a pvp-oriented mode with open fighting, multiple Grand Exchanges and banks, and a world very different than the one players were used to. Last month saw the launch of Deadman mode, a hardcore variant of Old School.

In Deadman mode, dying means not only losing the items in your inventory, but a notable amount of experience and a substantial number of items in your bank as well. Killing others is just as dangerous, as it means being stranded out in the open for a good half hour before you can get back into the safety of town, a marker over your head letting everyone know that you’re carrying goods on you.

I had a chance interview with Mat K, product manager for Old School RuneScape, to discuss how the game mode came to be, where it has been, and where it is going.

Connor: Deadman was community polled, correct?

Mat: That’s right, yea. When I started playing RuneScape back in 2004, and my wife introduced me to it, I sat there and thought you know what would be really good is if this game was a pvp game, there was pvp everywhere. Little did I know at the time it used to be back in classic, but it’s taken me ten, eleven years, but I finally got us a proper hardcore pvp version of the game out there, and it’s just great.

Connor: Was it difficult to pitch Deadman as something to put active developers on?

Mat: No, not at all. The biggest challenge for Deadman was the technical challenge behind actually making it work rather than the content challenge for content developer. Fortunately we’ve got Ian Gower on our team who does all the technical side of stuff, which we needed and he was up for it. It was a real big challenge for everybody but everybody wanted to make it work so they could see the value in it.

Connor: How closely connected are Deadman and Old School in terms of updates?

Mat: The way it currently works is that the basic game is going to be the same for both, so if we make an update on Old School that same update will be on Deadman as well. It doesn’t have to remain that way, we can put them on completely separate builds and develop them separately as things go forward, but right now it works on the same build mainly because it is easier for us to do it that way.

Connor: Do you see Deadman evolving into its own product the same way DarkScape was pitched?

Mat: It could do. Deadman’s been out for three weeks, it’s too early to say whether it will or it won’t. We’ve got the option to do it, and if it gets super big we can give it its own website and its own development team and everything else. But we don’t want to rush that too early, right now three weeks in we need to watch what’s going on to see how the players react to it, see what they’re doing in the long term, look at the viability of it in the long term, and if it needs more support we will do that, if it doesn’t then we won’t.

Connor: Speaking of players, has Deadman brought back players in the same way that Old School did?

Mat: Loads, and these players aren’t going anywhere else, they’re staying and playing the game which is wonderful.

Connor: So it does have good retention?

Mat: Absolutely. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of players and out of the core group of players who actually play the game, we’re talking a retention of over 90%. It shocked us when I got the report through today and I had to go back and double check it to make sure it was right, and it was so that’s how much it shocked us as well.

Connor: DarkScape was something that came out of Deadman, correct?

Mat: Not really. They were designed very separately. We had the idea first, we were developing what we wanted it to be and polling it through the community, and at the same time the same idea was going through RuneScape, can we make a pvp type of game work. They were developed completely independently and some of the mechanics we came up with arrived at completely separate places. So it wasn’t a result of Deadman mode, it arrived along the same sort of thinking.

Connor: From my own play time, it seemed that gold farmers were initially a problem but then disappeared. Is the Deadman environment too hostile?

Mat: There’s been no problem with gold farmers at all, there was a lot of noise on day one where I think they thought they could make a lot of money by selling stuff really expensively, but there’s been no large influx of bots at all since it came out. We track those numbers very carefully, it’s been much lower than we ever expected it to be. I think it’s because you just can’t farm gold in the game because you’d be killed doing it, if you tried to use a bot to do it you’d be dead in no time at all. It’s just not worth a bot farmer’s efforts to actually do that.

Connor: Have you seen a noticeable problem with players using mule accounts, alternate accounts to safely store items?

Mat: Not significantly, we’ve got some reports that run that as well. What a lot of people seem to be doing, we’re absolutely fine with, is they have multiple accounts that do multiple things. So you’ve got one account with a set of protected skills and another account with a different set of protected skills. They can trade between those accounts and move the items around there, that’s what most people seem to be doing, but mule accounts in themselves haven’t appeared yet.

Connor: Do you have any ideas for where the game is headed that you can share?

Mat: It all depends, we’re three weeks in, it is too early to say for sure where we’re going. We’ve got some great ideas of what we want to do, for example what we’re looking at doing next year is to run a tournament in Deadman worlds, so effectively we’ll create our own Deadman world for a four day long event, we’ll ramp up the exp so you’ll get ten, twenty times the exp, and throughout those four days we’ll start taking away the safe zones. At the end of the four days, we’ll put everybody in one spot, everybody will kill each other, and there will be a winner, and that winner will win a whole lot of cash.

The other big question that players are asking about is can we turn it into a seasonal thing? Again, that’s something we’re quite happy to do if it is the right thing to do, but three weeks in we don’t want to make those decisions yet because we don’t know how it’s going to be in another month’s time. We need to watch carefully, make the sensible decisions now, make the sensible changes now, but watch what the long term impact of making these changes will be and then we’ll make the decision.

Connor: What is the status of the Grand Exchange in Deadman mode?

Mat: There is no Grand Exchange in Deadman mode itself, what happens with the Grand Exchange in Old School is we take the value of items from that to work out the value of items when you die so players can get the most expensive items. We’ve got no plans to put the Grand Exchange into Deadman mode mainly because it will make the game too easy.

One of the core things we’re focusing on at the moment is to make sure that we’re supporting the players who want to play Deadman mode for what it is, so for the core group of players that is a very hardcore and difficult to play game and if you die you lose an awful lot of things. Now there’s some players that are coming to us and saying it’s too difficult, it’s too hard, but if we start looking at why people are not playing the game and are moving away to our other games, we then run the risk of turning Deadman into something that is too easy for our core group of players.

Connor: The game has been balanced where guards are more deadly, but there are also updates like health insurance. How do you decide what updates get polled, what goes past polling, and what isn’t up for debate?

Mat: The way we look at it, what is the best thing for the game long term. If there is an update which isn’t critical for the long term success of the game then we’re quite happy to poll it to the players and let it work out, but if it’s critical we have to make the decision of do we poll it to the players, will the players vote for it to start with, and then we can make that decision on a case by case basis, there is no hard rule.

For example, we made some changes to the death mechanics when people die in guarded zones, and that was something that was designed to stop a particular form of gameplay that was damaging to the game. So we made that change, we weren’t going to poll it because it was going to damage the game if we let it continue, and we will continue to do that. As long as it isn’t critical to the long term success of the game, we will poll the players on everything.

The hitpoint insurance, for example, was something that as far as we were concerned wasn’t going to be a major changeup to the game going forward. I think it was a good thing to have, but we let the players have the final decision on that one.

Connor: Do you keep stats on how much is being dropped and killed off of players?

Mat: We do, I can’t remember one off the top of my head. Everything in game is monitored so I have an analytic team that I send an email to and they come back to me with numbers, but we do monitor everything.

Connor: A few of the Jagex mods livestream Deadman mode. Do you as well?

Mat: Yes, I did it for the first week and it was very good fun. Nobody managed to kill me which was quite nice.

Connor: What is your greatest kill?

Mat: About twenty minutes chasing my wife all over the place until I finally killed her. We’ve got a very RuneScape family, I play it, my wife introduced me to it.

Connor: It sounds like many of the Jagex employees are people who have been playing the game for quite a while.

Mat: Everybody in the entire Old School team apart from Mod Gareth have played for ten years plus. We’ve all grown up with RuneScape and this is why we love doing what we’re doing, because this is a game we grew up with. None of us, apart from Ian obviously who started making it, thought we’d end up making the game that we loved playing, so it’s a dream come true for all of us.

I’d like to thank Mat K for taking the time out of his day to come talk to us about Deadman mode, and I would also like to thank everyone who put in the effort to make this interview possible.

RuneScape Deadman Mode Now Offers Health Insurance

The only guarantee in Deadman life is death and taxes, and I’m not so sure about the taxes. Today’s update to the hardcore PvP mode makes it possible to buy health insurance, the option to pay to keep your health from going below a certain level upon death. HP insurance is a one time, nonrefundable payment to keep your health at 25, 50, and 75 respectively with the cost going up for each level.

A strange woman named Gelin has appeared in Lumbridge graveyard selling life insurance. For a reasonable price you can insure your hitpoint stat to guarantee that it will not fall below a certain level when you die in Deadman mode.

Health insurance was voted in by 83% of players in a poll earlier this month. Also included in today’s update is a major change to experience loss on death. Dying to a player while unskulled will now result in a 25% experience loss in unprotected skills rather than 50%.

(Source: RuneScape)

DarkScape Drops Multiple Banks, Multiple Grand Exchanges

The whole point of experimenting is to test new ideas, and that means a high likelihood that those ideas will be scrapped as unusable for one reason or another. In DarkScape, today’s update marks the removal of the three separate bank and Grand Exchanges. In order to add danger to DarkScape, Jagex had separated the world into three separate ‘risk’ areas with three separate banks and three Grand Exchanges, requiring players to smuggle items between them in order to move resources around the world.

Beginning today, players will be able to access all three banks from anywhere, although they will remain as three separate tabs. In addition, the medium and high threat exchanges have been shut down, returning any items/gold from unfinished sales. It is also possible to teleport from lower risk to higher risk areas while carrying items, but not vice versa.

(Source: DarkScape)

Deadman Adds Attack Priority, Separate Your Victims

Yesterday’s update to Old School brought in some much needed, and popularly requested, changes to Deadman Mode, the recently released hardcore game mode for RuneScape. Players can now opt to separate how the game prioritizes targets, making it possible to navigate crowded areas without accidentally attacking another player. The update will come in handy in banks and guarded towns where a simple misclick can result in heavy losses.

The update also changes how looting on death works, with killers receiving the most valuable bank key from their victim rather than the oldest. Bank keys are dropped on death and allow the killer to steal twenty eight of the player’s most valuable item stacks from their bank. You can read the entire changelog at the link below.

(Source: Old School RuneScape)

MMOments: Deadman Is DarkScape Plus Punishment

Deadman Mode is DarkScape plus punishment, a statement that should be instantly endearing to anyone who tried out the RS3 mode and found it too accommodating to rushers and griefers. If you’re looking for Old School RuneScape with more rogue-like features, this is the place to be. If you’re not willing to lose a lot, and I do mean a lot, whenever you die, well there are other versions of RuneScape available to you.

It’s interesting to think of Deadman Mode as something that is hardcore in theory, not so much in practice. On paper, the game sounds devastating: Lose your inventory plus 28 of your most valuable stacks of items in the bank, plus 50% experience in all of your unprotected skills. And it is, death in Deadman is punishing in a way that only a masochist can love. But that, ultimately, is what seems to be preventing the game from becoming a grief-fest.

In DarkScape, a player with a decent stock of weapons can go around harassing players to no end and not end up risking anything. Griefing in Deadman means being willing to lose everything, and while I have seen a few players already throwing major tantrums and trying to harass other players, they quickly found themselves unequipped and powerless. Also unlike in DarkScape, it takes 30 minutes for a skull to disappear and players do not receive a skull when attacking a skull’d player. The entire world is open combat (3-126) and guards are level 1337. This makes attacking another player a massive risk, you basically become a target for EVERYONE who will kill you without a second thought.

To help you along, Deadman offers accelerated progression in the form of five times the usual amount of experience. What does this mean? At least in the early levels, the only thing getting in the way of your leveling will be the fact that you’re clicking through level up messages too often. Players are also able to store ten non-stackable, tradeable, items in a keepsake box that will remain safe if someone kills you and steals your stuff. You can’t store your cash, but you can store important items.

We’ll have to see how well Jagex can moderate the game, what with the company doubling down on its policy of not allowing mule accounts. There is also no grand exchange, making the accelerated progression all the more important because it will be easier to mass produce equipment or farm bosses sooner.

As with DarkScape, Deadman will change over time based on player feedback and (since this is Old School) anything approved by the community. Right now the community is voting in approval of changing non-skulled experience loss from 50% to 25%, as well as hitpoint insurance that will allow players to buy a minimum hitpoint level and the ability to separate left-click attacks on players and npcs. Currently up for vote but not approved (so far) are changes to team capes, the removal of the wilderness ditch, and reducing the skull timer.

So far, Deadman is turning out to be exactly what people wanted from DarkScape, not to mention being set in Old School. I hope to keep covering this game for a long time to come.

RuneScape Launches Deadman, Hardcore Mode

Following the launch of DarkScape, a hardcore mode for RuneScape, Old School is getting its own version with an even tougher twist. Deadman Mode offers open world player vs player combat with very rough penalties for those without the prerequisite survival skills.

Dying to another player in Deadman mode means losing half of your experience in unprotected skills, everything in your inventory, and twenty eight of the most valuable stacks of goods in your bank. In order to make the leveling process less excruciating, players gain experience at a rate of five times the normal amount.

(Source: RuneScape)

DarkScape Drops Experimental Update

This week’s DarkScape update is being dubbed “experimental,” in that it introduces a few new features to combat griefing through combat and in summoning shops. First of all, dying in RuneScape with the protect item prayer now results in a cooldown period where the prayer cannot be used. For skulled players (those who have recently attacked someone), the cooldown is five minutes. For non-skulled players, the cooldown is one minute.

Secondly, summoning shops have been reverted back to personal stock. A previous update had made shop inventories shared across all players, resulting in the stock of summoning shards (required for the summoning skill and virtually unobtainable elsewhere) being at or near zero across the game’s servers. The personal stock has also returned for waterskins.

There are more update details in the patch notes at the link below.

(Source: DarkScape)

DarkScape Drops High Alchemy

High alchemy is a spell in RuneScape that transforms items into cash, at the cost of fire and nature runes and with the benefit of being a potentially fast and profitable way of training magic. Incidentally, the spell has also been the root cause of much of RuneScape’s inflation in the past, a problem that the DarkScape team hopes to rectify with today’s update. DarkScape players logged in today to find that high alchemy has been removed from the spell book, although its limited uses still exist on the explorer’s ring.

Jagex has talked recently about how DarkScape’s new economy allows them to make more drastic changes to the game that wouldn’t be possible in RuneScape 3 or Old School. Considering the more hardcore nature of the game, Jagex plans on introducing a variety of extensive changes to fit the existing game around the new structure. Whether or not something will be introduced to replace high alchemy will be seen.

(Source: DarkScape)

Jagex Reveals 2016 Update Schedule

Runefest has come and gone, and with it has come the reveal of Jagex’s plans for RuneScape in 2016. Announced at Runefest and posted on the official website, Jagex’s stated goal next year is to make each update significant, and to involve players in the release schedule.

First, we want to change how we update the game, giving you more bang for your buck. Each month there will be a major release – something you can really get your teeth into. To support this, we’ll still have smaller, regular updates, keeping the game ticking over smoothly.

Updates next year include a new God Wars dungeon, a complete redesign to the mining and smithing skills, the conclusion to Sliske’s story line, new Barrows content, and more. Also up for release in 2016 is the NXT client, as announced one year ago, ushering in better performance, faster loading, and farther draw distances, as well as better graphics. More raids, more bosses, and more quests accompany the release of Invention, the first elite skill to be added into RuneScape.

Invention is similar to Dungeoneering in that it will draw from other skills and can be leveled up to 120. 2016 also marks RuneScape’s 15th anniversary, an event that the company hopes to celebrate in a big way.

(Source: RuneScape)

Top 5: More Tips For DarkScape Survival

[Update 10/2/15: A game update has rendered some of this list obsolete.]

The previous Top 5 tips for DarkScape has been insanely popular, but recent updates have made several options on the list either already obsolete or about to be obsolete. With that in mind, and considering I am further in the game than last week, I decided to go back and produce five more tips for survival in DarkScape.

5. Stay On Top Of Updates/Plans

This one is pretty important. Since content updates aren’t coming to DarkScape for a fair amount of time, you might be inclined to ignore patch notes during content updates. This isn’t advisable. For instance, if you didn’t check the patch notes you may not be aware that entering the abyss no longer skulls players, or that a toolbelt has been added, or why your interface has been set to retro by default after an update.

Right now Jagex are performing some heavy tweaks to the game in response to player feedback, tweaking certain features to make them easier in some areas and harder in others. If you don’t keep watch on update notes and particularly discussion on the developer streams (which you can find summaries of on the DarkScape subreddit), you won’t just be at a disadvantage against the game, but you’ll be at a disadvantage against other players.

It also helps to keep up with the forums to know what content is currently broken, because there is a fair amount of it (see #2). For further reference, the DarkScape wiki is slowly being populated.

4. Tier Bank Trading Made Easy

Three tiers of danger means three separate banks, each with their own supplies, each irretrievable in other areas. While DarkScape would like you to believe that moving items between banks is a matter of sheer danger, the truth is that there are enough routes to go down that finding one or two with minimal risk of player interaction, let alone players looking to randomly kill you, is pretty good.

When trading between low and medium risk areas, the closest route I’ve found is between Lumbridge and Al Kharid. Starting out at the Lumbridge Grand Exchange, you can head south and over the bridge to Al Kharid, reducing the amount of time spent in medium-tier areas. The level range in the low-risk portion of the travel only goes up to six while you spend, at most, six or seven seconds in the mid-risk zone before reaching the bank, which itself is patrolled by three guards in a very enclosed space. When trading back, just be aware that the medium-tier area extends to the end of the bridge on the Lumbridge side rather than the city entrance as it was when you came in.

For moving items to high risk zone, one of the safest routes that I’ve found so far is between Varrok and Canifis. If you haven’t been through the area before, you’ll need to kill a level 30 monster before you can proceed, but the travel from Varrok to Canifis is one that is sparsely populated with players and even less so with player killers. Cities like Ashdale, Zanaris, and Al Kharid have more open areas and lack choke points that pk’ers can nab you in, making them rife for smuggling goods between zones.

Initially this spot was supposed to discuss easy access to high-threat areas, due to the fact that the game automatically identified any zone as high risk until labeled otherwise. Areas like Death’s office offering easy access to your high risk bank have been fixed.

3. RuneSpan For Runecrafting/Nexus For Prayer

Runecrafting in DarkScape is a long, difficult, and dangerous affair, even more so before Jagex updated the Abyss so that it no longer skulls players effectively taking them out of towns for a full five minutes. If you’re looking at training runecrafting with a focus on pure experience, your best bet is to take on the RuneSpan activity. Available right off the bat at level 1 runecrafting, RuneSpan offers far better experience than it has any right to in DarkScape. Starting off at level 1, I managed to make my way to level 39 within an hour. Bear in mind, these experience rates are coming from a member with member experience rates, with no bonus experience.

While the entirety of RuneSpan is high threat (no guards, no limits on combat), I’ve found very little combat going on outside of the random troll. The time and resources required to move about in RuneSpan for the relatively low amount of players present makes player killing in the area a massive waste of time, even for the dedicated troll. Runecrafters in the area are more interested in crafting than killing. Which isn’t to say it is safe, I was killed once while writing this piece. After today’s update, your points are redeemed upon death.

Compared to RuneSpan, the Nexus is a lot more popular and prone to player killers coming in and ruining your day. That in mind, the mini-game is not far from the Lumbridge respawn point and is generally filled with enough other players that you should be able to slip around relatively unnoticed. Unlike Runespan, however, your experience at the Nexus is capped and will eventually come to an end. Once you receive 37 thousand experience, not counting the extra experience from bones, the event will no longer grant prayer experience.

On the plus side, thirty seven thousand experience will get you to level 40 assuming you begin the Nexus at level 1.

2. Taking Advantage of Oversights

JagexLauncher 2015-09-24 20-21-03-57

DarkScape is (to the best of my knowledge) officially considered “experimental,” another name meaning any issues that should have been considered have not, leaving players at the mercy of Jagex to eventually fix them. In this case, if you were looking to finish your achievement diaries or a number of quests, look again. While Jagex has been rolling out updates to fix these oversights, DarkScape’s restrictions on teleporting left players literally unable to complete quests because the game won’t move them with the quest rewards in their inventory.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t currently existing oversights that can be taken advantage of before they are fixed in the coming weeks/months. For instance, right now it is extremely easy to craft blisterwood weapons assuming you finish the quest line required to craft them. Jagex has detailed plans to make blisterwood weapons much more difficult and costly to craft, as right now they are high-tier equipment that can be mass produced with little effort (other than the quest line).

There are plenty of things to take advantage of outside of that example, including how easy it is currently to smuggle items between risk zones (see above). Keep an eye on the forums for other shortcuts.

1. Only Use What You Can Lose

This one likely goes without saying, but always play with the mentality that you will probably be killed and lose whatever you are carrying. That said, you don’t necessarily want to go out constantly with just a weapon/tool and no armor or food on you, you’ll just be easy pickings for even the least equipped killers. This is where welfare equipment, gear that is cheap and can be easily replaced, comes into play.

If you’re making a decent amount of money, you can go to shops or the Grand Exchange and buy your welfare gear in bulk. If not, your best bet may be to level up relevant skills (mining/smithing, crafting, fletching) and use the resources you gain leveling in order to build the equipment you’ll be using for your own protection. While it won’t deter everyone, a player wielding just a weapon is less likely to attack a decked out player with full armor and weapons of his own, and you’ll be better equipped to fight back/run away and get to a safe zone.

A few of your inventory slots should be dedicated to food to survive or teleportation to quickly escape, but be aware that teleportation is slower in DarkScape than it is in RuneScape, you can still be killed even using rune-based town teleports.

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: