RuneScape just recently went through a double experience weekend, and if you are anything like me you took really poor advantage of the boosted leveling. To show just how much productivity increased over the weekend, Jagex has released a comparable chart showing this weekend’s gains versus earlier in October. Summoning was the most popular skill across the board with prayer the least popular in experience gained and 99’s achieved.
In the latest Behind The Scenes post, Jagex has unveiled a list of updates set for release in November. The first, which will go live later today, is a double experience weekend lasting from midday October 31st to Monday, November 3rd. Members will receive double experience (3x experience for skills that have bonus experience) and 1.2x experience for free players. The first full content update of the month is the second part of the Elf City update introducing more of the city of Prifddinas. The city update includes training areas for agility, prayer, divination, slayer, the ability to craft crystal vials which hold two separate potions, and more.
Later in the month, treasure trails is set to receive an update adding in new rewards and updating clues with new puzzles and items needed to solve said puzzles. Players will also be able to reroll rewards for a chance at better loot. The first quest in the elder-god series is also set for release this month, tasking players with hunting down criminals with the use of a golem.
Throughout November, Jagex will also be opening the Well of Goodwill. Players are encouraged to donate gold, items, and bonds to charity, with Jagex donating $1 per five million gold donated as well as the full value of bonds. You’ll be able to choose which of the three charities your donation goes toward.
(Source: RuneScape)
Spanish speaking RuneScape players will log in today to discover some disappointing news about their game: Jagex is sunsetting the Spanish servers. In a post on the Spanish RuneScape website, Mod Pips announced that the Spanish server will no longer be supported as of today, and will shut down on November 3rd. The reason provided is that the service never grasped the level of income needed to justify the expense of translation.
In other words, we find it more expensive to produce and provide support in this version that the gain we get from it, so that as a business, we can not justify their maintenance.
Members coming from Axeso5 will receive an additional 30 days of game time and are encouraged to come over to the English, German, French, or Brazilian Portugese servers (characters can freely log between them). While future Jagex products may be translated into Spanish, with considerations to market prospects, there are no more plans to translate RuneScape any further.
(Source: RuneScape)
Jagex has declared this year’s Runefest, a convention for RuneScape fans, the most successful to date. At the festival held at London’s Tobacco Dock, Jagex revealed Chronicle, a collectible card game due to release next year. The convention played host to numerous presentations, Q&A sessions with developers, cosplay events, and other distractions.
At the center of the event, of course, was Jagex’s flagship title RuneScape. In addition to congratulating the game for its continued growth, a 20% bump in subscribers in July alone, design director Mark Oglive took to the stage to announce RuneLabs, an upcoming platform where players will be able to formally suggest ideas to be implemented, giving the community the chance to vote on said updates. RuneScape’s 2015 content schedule was partially revealed, with major updates including world events and a brand new client on their way.
Perhaps most impressive is the notation that 40% of Runefest attendees did not pay a dime of real money for their tickets, buying them using in-game wealth through RuneScape’s PLEX-esque Bond items.
The event also bore witness to an unprecedented broadening of RuneScape bonds usage. The digital currency allowed 40% of RuneFest attendees to obtain event tickets through their in-game wealth. Furthermore, a number of players used bonds to ‘pay’ for their accommodation and flights to the event, allowing them to attend RuneFest without spending a penny of real world money.
More details on Runefest revelations will be made available in the coming months.
(Source: Jagex press release)
Jagex just announced at RuneFest that the HTML5 client, originally planned for launch with RuneScape 3 last year, hasn’t worked out. The expectation was that the technology would be optimized in time, and sadly it has sorely lagged behind. Rather than pushing ahead with what is likely to be an unwinnable situation, Jagex has announced a new client for RuneScape that will hopefully rid the game of Java’s limitations. The beta is expected to go live in a few months, no precise ETA, that players will be able to join in on.
Stay tuned for more details.
Jagex has unveiled the October update list for RuneScape. As part of the regular weekly updates, players will be able to enjoy the much anticipated ironman modes, a new mini-game, and extra tweaks to existing content. The month will spin off with a Halloween themed event and quest, and players will be able to view the Runefest stream on October 11th.
(Source: RuneScape)
Jagex recently conducted a question and answer session with the VIP members (people who purchased the premiere club membership this year), and if you aren’t a member you can’t access the forums. The list is massive, so instead of reproducing the Q&A 1:1 and likely crashing this website, I’ve decided to consolidate the answers into an easily digestible list.
If you don’t play RuneScape, many of these answers will mean nothing to you. You can read the Q&A in its entirety at the Tip.It forums.
Today’s update to RuneScape makes it possible for players to reset select combat skills, only once, by talking to Nastroth in Lumbridge. Choosing either option will result in associated skills being reset to level 1, and all associated rewards and quests that required said skill being revoked. Jagex has cautioned that skill resets cannot, and will not, ever be reversed under any circumstance.
As a security precaution, players who have no intention of ever using this feature, but are afraid of the potential for malicious use, can talk to Nastroth in Lumbridge and disable the feature on their account permanently. This option, similarly, cannot be undone.
RuneScape’s combat system has never been the highlight of the game for me, not when I joined in 2004 and not when I’m still playing today in 2014. Before the addition of Evolution of Combat, fighting monsters was a boring system of clicking and watching your fighters trade blows, occasionally eating food or drinking potions along the way. Combat was simple, mostly because the engine couldn’t handle anything more complex, and the excitement came from receiving rare drops or finally out-damaging a high level boss.
The addition of Evolution of Combat simply took the elephant in the room and painted him neon pink, making him now impossible to avoid: The RuneScape engine is substandard at best, at worst it is incapable of supporting the game that Jagex wants it to be. Evolution of Combat added complexity to RuneScape, but is severely hampered by the fact that the game doesn’t operate on a level fast enough to support such a system.
The culprit is obvious: RuneScape runs on a 600ms tick, meaning the game only processes actions every 600 milliseconds. The result is a game that is unnecessarily clunky and unresponsive, and one that makes it blatantly obvious how poorly RuneScape has aged.
Jagex has stated previously that they are unwilling to commit to reducing RuneScape’s tick rate because it would be a costly venture that would take well over a year to create, not unlike the costly venture and multi-year project that was developing a real time combat system in an environment that doesn’t support real time actions, and then being forced to implement a version of your old combat system because player activity dropped through the floor.
The longer Jagex wait to address the problem of old code holding the game back, the more time-consuming and expensive the process will be. More so, the longer Jagex wait, the further behind RuneScape falls to its competition, and the less the game will be capable of bringing in new players.
But that’s just my opinion on th ematter.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from RuneScape, where players are finally getting access to the Lost City of Prifddinas (don’t bother trying to pronounce that). If you don’t play RuneScape, then you may not be aware of why this update is so significant. To put it short and swift, players have been waiting for this update for about ten years.
Tune into MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, beginning 2024.
MMO Fallout 