Wilderness – MMO Fallout

City of Steam Unveils The Wilderness

It feels like forever ago that Mechanist Games was running the last City of Steam closed beta weekend, so it’s easy to forget that the developer is still plugging away at its browser steampunk MMO, and boy do they have something cool to reveal. In the latest developer blog, we are given a look at a new feature coming to City of Steam: The wilderness. Those of you who played City of Steam during the beta weekends will be familiar with the basic structure of the game: Similar to games like Guild Wars, you have areas where players run around and trade, turn in quests, and buy and sell items, where there is no combat. Then you have the instanced areas where the action takes place.

So City of Steam really didn’t have any open world combat zones that you’d see in a traditional MMO, at least not until now. Mechanist has revealed the wilderness, an open zone where players can fight mobs, fight players, and not even be in a group.

Even though the basic concept of the wilderness is a giant open level with respawning mobs, there’s more to it. There are going to be public events in these areas, random rare mob spawns and some other things we’ll talk about soon.The areas being public also mean that you’ll sometimes be fighting for mobs; well, we might eventually have a way to settle your differences in there… We have some other ideas brewing that we may share at a later time.

City of Steam is still set for sometime after lunch, but before Duke Nukem For…no sorry that joke doesn’t work anymore.

(Source: City of Steam)

Mark Your Calendars, Runescape: February 1st Free Trade

Barrows_Brothers_1024x768 — For Morytania!

“Thank you to all those of you who took part in the historic RuneScape Referendum, which ended on Friday. We received an incredible 1.2 million votes, with a united 91% of you voting for the restoration of free trade and the Wilderness. We have heard your call and will be restoring these much loved features to RuneScape on Tuesday 1st February.”

Eventually someone will listen to me that the “vote” was nothing more than a publicity stunt, albeit a successful one, and that the return of free trade was guaranteed months ago when Jagex started coding it and working on the update. Far be it from me to say that the Jagex crew isn’t fast, but to think that they will be able to move features out of the wilderness, recode and script entire quests, redesign the entire area, code in free trade in regards to newer item functions, redesign the wilderness to work with items that are unusable in PvP scenarios, and more in two weeks is a little ridiculous.

But the official announcement is now dated. Mark your calendars for February 1st (note: allow for last minute delays) because that is when the Wilderness and free trade are returning after a good three year absence.

Of course, now is the greatest time to continue speculation. What will happen with overload potions, which dramatically raise combat stats and are unusable in dangerous player vs player combat? What about corrupt dragon and ancient warrior armor/weapons which are only capable of obtaining through current player vs player combat? Brawling gloves? Ancient artifacts? What about item lending? Where will the quests from the wilderness be placed? The activities from the wilderness? I think you get my point about this being in development far longer than December’s poll.

And more importantly: What is Jagex doing to keep the game from being swamped with bots and gold farmers like it was pre-trade? They seem to be very sure of themselves that their secret weapon can combat this.

Runescape: Voting The Wilderness Part 2

The_jagex_team.._and_paintball.. — Don't you wish your dev team was...

The announcement that free trade is coming back to Runescape has sent players into a frenzy, more so asking the question of what will remain in the game when this update goes live. There have been quite a few updates over the past three years that conflict with there being a dangerous wilderness, that Jagex is going to have to look at them on a case by case basis.

Luckily, on the new Runescape page, where Jagex has taken the liberty of actually requiring players to sign in to vote, which oddly enough only as 300,000 votes a couple days later (as opposed to the 1.2 million votes within 24 hours that the first poll achieved through no botting whatsoever).

There will be no limits on trade, both player to player, through the Grand Exchange, and via the party room.
Unlimited staking will return.
The item lending, assist, and lootshare/coinshare will remain.
The wilderness will be once again open to Player Vs Player combat.
Quests and activities in the wilderness will be moved to other areas.
There will be new ways to achieve PvP Gear.
Revenants will be relocated.
Gravestones will remain, but only outside of the wilderness.
PVP/Bounty Hunter worlds will be removed.
Wilderness content is being reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

It will be interesting to see what Jagex does with PvP gear, as gear like Corrupted Dragon (the highest tier armor for free players), brawling gloves, and ancient warrior equipment is only obtainable through random drops from other players.

Runescape: Clever Publicity Stunt To Bring Back The Wilderness

Back in 2007, in an attempt to combat rampant real world trading that threatened to knock Runescape out of existence, Jagex implemented a drastic series of updates that resulted in a dramatic change for the way Runescape functioned. Items were assigned numerical values, and trade restricted based on those values. Players no longer dropped items for others to see upon death, and gravestones were implemented to safe-guard their belongings for a temporary period of time. Player vs Player combat in the “wilderness” was removed completely, replaced by PvP mini-games.

Since then, Jagex has restructured the rules slightly. The bounty hunter mini-game was removed completely, and replaced with special worlds where player vs player combat can take place anywhere, as well as other special PvP worlds. The trade restrictions have been lessened in some circumstances, and between players who have been friends for a long time, as well as a membership perk. Still, many players long for a time when it was possible to loot someone upon death, or for the ability to gank someone in the wilderness.

Jagex launched a new page asking players if they would like the Wilderness back, as well as free trade, and the “yes” answers are flooding in, literally, at a rate of about a hundred fifty per second (I took the screenshot as I was writing the first sentence. At this point the vote is now up to 407 thousand). If enough [citation needed] players vote yes, Jagex will apparently return to the old practices. No idea on how many votes will be required. (409,000 votes)

If you hadn’t noticed by the manner in which the voting is taking place, this is essentially a publicity stunt and the decision has already been made as to whether or not the updates will be reversed. There is no method of preventing flooding, you need a valid username but you don’t have to login or provide any real account details, and there is no option to press “no,” other than to not vote. (415,000 votes)

Still, this is a fun publicity stunt. The voting ends on the 14th of January, which at this rate will result in probably around every one of Runescape’s 130 million registered usernames being thrown into the pot, whether or not that person actually wants the update. (423,000 votes)

More on Runescape as it appears (424,000 votes). Head here to vote:

http://www.runescape.com/wilderness