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The Duel Arena Shield Slot Scam Player Substitution Scams

The entire point behind the Duel Arena is to permit player versus player combat in an environment where players can have some control over the risks they take. This includes letting each player avoid battles where they have no reasonable chance to win because their opponent is much more powerful. The problem is figuring out how powerful your opponent really is—it's not as easy as it may seem, and the game provides few tools to help you.

There are really two issues here: player levels and player equipment, both of which can easily deceive you into a grossly unfair fight. Again, neither type of deception is technically against the rules, so you must be aware and careful.

You can always see a player's combat level before you challenge them to a duel. In theory, this is supposed to represent the player's overall power. In practice, however, this is often not true—and in fact, lately I'd say it is usually not true.

The problem here is that the formula Jagex uses to calculate a player's overall combat level is simplistic and out of date. It was designed when most players had balanced characters, and does not accurately reflect the power of players who have very high ranged or mage levels, or those who have chosen not to train defense or prayer. Many players have exploited these flaws to create “killing machine” characters that are far stronger than their overall combat level indicates. These are sometimes called pures, because they are supposed to be strong “purely” in one or sometimes two combat levels, as opposed to being balanced.

Suppose, for example, that you're a balanced player who's level 69. Your attack, strength and defense levels are 55, 57 and 49 respectively; you have 61 hit points, level 43 prayer, 49 mage and 59 ranged, your highest skill. You go to the Duel Arena and see another player who is also level 69 and decide to duel him.

You go into the arena with your rune scimitar and magic short bow with rune arrows. Your opponent, however, pulls out a super-poisoned dragon dagger (DDS or DDP++), hits you with 4 specials, then switches to rune knives and finishes you off—the whole thing takes only seconds.

What happened? Well, your level 69 opponent had level 60 attack, 80 strength and 90 ranged. He also had 20 hit points more than you did. What? How's that possible? Simple: as I said, the RuneScape combat level formula is broken, so it grossly favors the creation of these types of unbalanced characters; an example is shown in Figure 103. Your opponent kept his combat level deceptively low by leaving his defense level low and his prayer at 1, since defense is less important in fast duels and prayer is usually turned off. You got tricked.

What can you do to prevent this from happening? Well, there is the RuneScape hi-scores feature, which you can use to look up the levels of your opponent. Unfortunately, this isn't perfect: it wasn't designed for this purpose, but rather to be a list of high scores in various levels as the name suggests.

One problem is duelers who create characters with deliberately deceptive names so they cannot be easily looked up in the scores list. Another problem is that you may find that your opponent's levels don't always show up, because only the top 1,000,000 scores in each skill are listed. In the example above, the hi-scores would have helped, as you could see the high strength (80) and ranged (90) levels of your opponent and refuse to fight him. But if you are say, level 54, you could be fighting a level 54 who has 60 attack and 60 strength—enough to demolish you with a DDS easily—and neither of those numbers will show up in the high scores.

So what should you do?

• Don't make assumptions based on your opponent's combat level.
  
  
• Beware of someone who offers a rich stake when he seems too low weak to beat you, as it's probably a trick.
  
  
• Try to use the hi-scores to check your opponent's levels. If you can't look the person up because of a deceptive name, or you don't find enough information to make you feel comfortable about the duel, don't fight that player.

Just as players will attempt to hide their levels from you, they will also try to disguise what equipment they have on them. Some will also try to make you think they are weaker than they are based on what they are wearing, or imply that they plan to use one combat style when they will really use a different one.

Remember that you cannot see your opponent's inventory, so he could be carrying almost anything. He can switch what he is wearing or wielding once the duel starts, or at any time in the middle.

One common way that people will trick you is by wearing low-level armor or weapons so you think the person's levels are lower than they are. For example, a pure might wield a rune scimitar so you think he can't use dragon weapons, and then switch after the fight begins. Or the opposite: someone might wear iron armor to make you think he's a low-defense pure, then switch to full dragon armor.

A dueler may also wear mage armor so you think he plans to mage; you assume you can beat him with ranged, but he switched to melee when the fight starts. Or he could be wearing mage gear and then switch to ranged. You also can't tell if someone is on regular or Ancient magic before the duel starts.

Your only defense against being tricked is to not assume anything based on what your opponent is wearing. It simply doesn't indicate the character's abilities or what else they may be carrying that you cannot see. Also remember that if you disable certain types of combat or equipment slots, that prevents some of these swaps from occurring (though your opponent may decline the duel, of course.)

The Duel Arena Shield Slot Scam Player Substitution Scams