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RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - Significant Content Improvements and Changes RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - Web Feature Updates

The preceding four sections all dealt with content additions and updates; now let’s move on to discuss interface updates. Sure, these aren’t as interesting as changes related to content, but they are also very important because they impact aspects of the game that you use every time you play. And there were some pretty big enhancements in terms of interfaces this year...

You’ll noticed that most of these entries have high grades, and that’s no surprise. Usually when Jagex takes the time to improve interfaces, it does a pretty good job. My biggest complaint in this area is basically that they often take too long to make these changes, and don’t do enough! J

Grade: A+

Throughout the year, Jagex continued to add many new convenient right-click options to various aspects of the game. While certainly not earth-shaking, these changes eliminated a variety of persistent annoyances from the game, such as the need to have a chat before every use of the gnome gliders or in order to pay farmers to watch crops. You can also finally skip that annoying interrogation from those overzealous monks in Port Sarim...

Grade: A

This long overdue update finally caused the game to remember what attack style and spell you were using when you logged out and back in. My only complaint is that I have been hoping for two years now that the game could also be made to remember the Walk/Run setting and it was passed over yet again!

Grade: A

My grade for this update is based entirely on the perceptions of others, nearly all of whom agree that it greatly improved the quality of in-game music. I always play RuneScape with sound off, so I can listen to my own music.

Grade: A+

It used to be the case that amulets of glory, combat bracelets and necklaces of skills had to be recharged one at a time. Jagex modified the code so that all of the jewelry in your inventory is now recharged at once—a simple change, but most welcome!

Grade: B+

On this date, Jagex announced that it had made significant game engine changes to better support future updates, and also implemented function keys to allow players to quickly shift between interface screens. Many people really appreciated this new feature, while a few hated it because they found it confusing. I like the concept but just can’t get in the habit of using it; I’m too accustomed to the mouse.

Grade: A+

This update is similar to the addition of many right-click options in various parts of RuneScape—on the surface it’s no big deal, but it eliminates a lot of annoyance from the game. Finally, an end to meaningless warnings we’ve all seen a hundred times!

Grade: B

Every “make-X” option brings with it some amount of controversy. Some players love them, because they save clicking and make multitasking easier; others hate them, because if you are fast it’s usually possible to do more through rapid clicking than letting the game do things one at a time. This particular update was a big one, affecting complex cooking (pies and pizzas), potion making, amulet stringing and fletching.

My personal view of this update is that it’s a mixed bag. Some of the “make-X” options are clear winners, especially ones where you had to right-click each item to use it on another, such as making tuna potatoes, which was very slow. On the other hand, potion making and fletching seem to be clearly slower now. Gem cutting has become very slow, suggesting a deliberate effort by Jagex to nerf that aspect of the Crafting skill.

Finally, a few of these “make-X” options just show plain old poor design, such as the ones for making bolts. Sorry, but only being able to select 10 sets of bolts at a time is a real nuisance, and since gem tips are made 12 at a time, they really should be added to bolts 12 at a time as well.

Grade: A

I think Jagex always knew that its support for clan communication was poor, but the company never realized just how many people were using third party workarounds until it tried to ban them. The uproar over that attempt led to a promise that RuneScape would have an integrated clan chat system, and true to its word, the feature arrived several months later. And I’m pleased to say that it was done very well.

Clan chat is not only useful for clans but any group of players with a common interest or who are involved in a particular activity. It is well designed, easy to use, and has many excellent features. It’s not perfect, but it’s a very nice addition to the game.

Grade: C

This feature, which builds on the clan chat system, is intended to fairly distribute the drops from difficult monsters killed by teams, such as the Kalphite Queen or the God Wars Dungeons bosses. When members of a clan or combat team enable the feature, drops are tracked by the game, which attempts to allocate them among the team in a fair way (as opposed to the default method of just giving the drop to the player who did the most damage). If one player gets a good drop, the system adjusts to give the other players a better chance of getting the drop the next time.

It sounds good, but unfortunately LootShare is another example of a sound concept with serious implementation problems. It works well as long as the monsters drop mostly items that are all of a similar value, but fails miserably when there are very rare, very high-value items—which, of course, are exactly the drops that teams of players are trying to get.

If I go fight the Kalphite Queen with my friend Joe, for example, does he really care that because I got a dragon chain drop he will now be more likely to get the next several drops of death runes and mithril arrows? Probably not. In the God Wars Dungeon the problem is even worse, since some of the drops there exceed 50 million or even 100 million gold in value.

It gets worse. LootShare provides no way to split the value of these expensive drops, so (honest) team players sell the items and split the proceeds manually, but this will be impossible come January when the new trading rules come into effect. If Jagex doesn’t want to see big monster hunting die out, it must revise LootShare to better handle rare, expensive drops obtained by teams.

Grade: B+

The Assist System allows players to temporarily “borrow” the skills of higher-level players. It is a nice feature on the whole, representing an anti-scam measure that replaces trust trades with an equivalent system that lets low-levels get things done for them while high-levels get free XP in transformation skills like Crafting and Smithing.

I did have several problems with the Assist System, some of which have been resolved. The main issue when it was first introduced was that it provided support for players asking for “assistance” on resource gathering skills like Fishing and Mining, which is really just another form of begging—and boy, did the beggars come out of the woodwork! Fortunately these skills were removed from the system.

Other problems have not been addressed, unfortunately, like the fact that the assist screen covers the entire gameplay window, leaving the one assisting no way to see what’s going on around him. Making this worse is the fact that the one asking for help cannot signal when he or she is done. Also, the XP limits on the Assist System make it of limited value for larger exchanges.

I also found it annoying that Jagex portrayed this system as having been introduced as an aid for players, when it became obvious weeks later that it is really part of Jagex’s all-out war on real world trading. We have the Assist System not because it’s a better way of doing trust trades, but because very soon trust trades will be impossible.

RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - Significant Content Improvements and Changes RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - Web Feature Updates