TruthScape.com - RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card

In the prior topic I described and rated the new areas, dungeons and skill additions that were made to RuneScape in 2007. Now, in this second topic on major new content for the game, I’ll take a look at new minigames and other features that were added during this past calendar year.

This safe, team-based minigame was much hyped by Jagex late in 2006, but was ultimately a disappointment when it finally was released. The concept itself was very interesting, with players in four different roles cooperating to defeat a set of monsters with varying capabilities, culminating with a showdown against a very tough boss. Unfortunately, though, the minigame is plagued with many serious problems that even a series of tweaks have not properly addressed.

The first big problem with this minigame is the lack of rewards. For starters, Jagex designed it so that you get absolutely no experience points for playing it, which immediately has led to a large chunk of the game’s population considering it a complete waste of time. On top of that, the points you do earn can only be traded for improvements to one’s skills within the game, or a limited set of item rewards, most of which are of dubious value. Beyond those items and upgrades, all you can do with points is gamble them, which usually yields a very frustratingly low-valued item reward.

The second big problem with the minigame is its complexity. Whether Jagex wants to admit it or not, a large percentage of RuneScape players are children and young teens, and this minigame is just really complicated. This leads to frustrated players who can’t figure out what to do, and annoyed teams whose efforts are thwarted by well-meaning team members who keep making the same mistakes.

This minigame has potential to be great, but it still needs a lot more work, and Jagex seems to have abandoned it.

Following hard on the heels of Barbarian Assault is another minigame that I feel likewise does not provide the necessary rewards to make it worthwhile. In this game you dash around mazes while avoiding guards, in an activity reminiscent of the “goutweed grab” at the end of the quest Eadger’s Ruse. The rewards are a small amount of Farming XP and a larger amount of Thieving XP.

My main issue with this minigame is that it is incredibly tedious and repetitive, and the XP rewards are uninspiring. Those below level 65 are limited to the more difficult Winter, Spring and Autumn gardens, while getting lower rewards; those level 65 can do the Summer garden, but those players generally can get much faster XP through Pyramid Plunder. This is another minigame that needs refinement.

Achievement Diaries are new features in RuneScape that reward you for completing a set of tasks associated with a particular area of the game; the Karamja one was the first. There are three sets of tasks—easy, medium and hard—each of which has a tangible reward, in this case XP lamps and gloves that provide a variety of benefits.

I personally am not a big fan of “gopher” type quests, and to me, that’s all that these diaries are. But many people really like them, and the rewards are certainly decent, so the grade I am giving here is based on the feedback I have read from others more than my own views.

This is a miniquest that involves performing various tasks for the museum located in central Varrock. It both tangible rewards (XP bonuses), and intangible benefits in the form of lots of interesting information about RuneScape and its history. It also has some really nice graphics and animations (Figure 63).

**Figure 63: Varrock Museum Display**
It’s clear that a great deal of work went into this feature...

While some of it gets a bit tedious, it’s a fun diversion and a nice change of pace from most of the rest of the game. It also seems likely, based on various hints that have been provided by Jagex, that completing most or all of this minigame will be necessary for future updates.

This is the first minigame that is based on the Hunter skill, and involves chasing flying implings around a wheatfield maze. You catch the implings in jars; when you release them, they give you a reward that can be anywhere from useless to amazing, depending on the level of impling caught and, naturally, your luck. This is the only way in the game to get the new dragon arrows (or arrowtips) and dragon darts used by the dark bow that was released the same day.

I like the minigame; it’s fun, which is much more than can be said for pretty much anything else associated with Hunter (a skill I get sleepy just thinking about.) The XP you get in the minigame is rather poor, so catching implings is much more about getting goodies than training the skill. And that, unfortunately, is where the problems begin.

When this minigame was first released, Jagex had, as usual, not properly playtested it. Within hours, players figured out that they could camp out in certain spots and catch huge numbers of the higher-level implings that provide valuable drops. There was much interest in dragon arrows and dragon darts (since they were new) and so many players got rich very quickly, while others had no chance to get any of the good stuff.

It took a couple of weeks before the minigame was finally tweaked to prevent abuses (it was “nerfed”, as some would say!) But at that point, players complained that it was now too difficult to get the good implings, and they have a point. I can spend an hour wandering around the maze and if I’m lucky I’ll see maybe two or three of the implings that have the good items. And this frustrates a lot of players, who feel their high Hunter level is not being properly rewarded.

This is the second achievement diary, and was the subject of one of Jagex’s guaranteed content polls. It is similar to the one described earlier for Karamja, but I’ve rated it a bit lower because the tasks seem a bit less interesting, and the rewards not as useful.

The duel tournaments minigame was introduced at the same time that Jagex made the decision to drastically limit duel arena staking as part of its war on real world trading. The idea is a nice one, enabling large groups of players to compete in a playoff-style showdown with the end winner getting the spoils. Unfortunately, it is yet another example of a great idea that has been crippled through poor implementation.

The initial release was clearly rushed to completion, and seems to have barely paused on the desks of the QA team before being sent to the “beta testers” (i.e., everyone who plays RuneScape). It was riddled with bugs and glaring design flaws, like a tie-breaker that chose a winner based on who could drink Sara brew potions fastest. It was also exasperating to find that tournaments couldn’t start unless there were a lot of people in the tournament area; at times there was not a single game going anywhere.

After a couple of weeks Jagex made some changes to fix the most obvious faults, but a long list of problems remains. Current issues, among others, include the ability of players to game the tournament rankings, the excessive cost of potion and food tournaments, long waits for tournaments to begin, poor rule combinations and lack of player options, and the inability of low-level players to have a chance to win. Unfortunately, Jagex has not indicated it will do anything further to correct and adjust this feature.

This much anticipated update promised to provide a central marketplace for buying and selling items across all players and servers, for the first time in the history of the game. I was extremely excited by it, going so far as to write a preview of the feature, where I said it could be “RuneScape’s most important update in years”.

On the plus side, there are many aspects of the GE that are very good. It has made many items very quick and easy to buy and sell. The GE will be particularly helpful for inexperienced players who collect low-valued items that previously were very difficult to sell on the forums, and of course, it’s a huge boon to F2P players who couldn’t access the forums at all.

My main complaint with the GE is that it had the potential to be not just good, but great. Unfortunately, I never anticipated that Jagex would hobble the exchange with poor interface design and draconian price control policies, which have left it partially crippled and unable to live up to its enormous potential. The company has indicated that it plans to improve the feature, so the overall grade of B reflects a bit of generosity on my part and hopefulness that that is the case.

Here are some grades for different aspects of the feature. For much more of my views on the Grand Exchange, please see Soapbox issues #3 and #5.

The idea behind the Grand Exchange is a fantastic one, and long overdue for the game as a whole.

The Grand Exchange is cumbersome and annoying to use; it is very obvious that whoever designed it never considered how much extra work he or she made for those who have to use it. It is loaded with unnecessary extra clicking (including three clicks just to start a purchase); there’s no ability to browse items; you can’t return to lists of search results; there are only six slots for buying and selling; you can’t even see open offers to buy or sell; and on and on it goes.

I give credit to the programmers who worked on implementing the core of the GE, because it has to do a lot of fairly complex coordinating of buy and sell offers. It is still plagued by certain annoyances (like spurious “your offer has been updated” messages) but overall, it seems to be a nice bit of coding, and I’m not aware of any serious bugs.

Jagex “sold” the Grand Exchange as being a feature primarily intended to make life easier for players, but when it actually arrived, we quickly learned that this is not at all its primary intention. The real purpose of the GE is to provide centralized price controls as part of Jagex’s war on real world trading. I very much did not appreciate this lack of forthrightness, nor do I care much for the very strong price controls Jagex has imposed. These restrictions that have made the GE nearly impossible to use for trading a wide variety of items.

Jagex proudly claimed that it performed “extensive price research” to come up with the “official” prices for items in the exchange, yet thousands of examples prove that whoever did this research clearly knew little about how the game works. These bogus prices—many of which still have not been corrected over a month later—have led to countless items being unsellable or unbuyable, and many players overpaying or underselling because they trust the incorrect prices.

Making matters worse is the fact that come January, even direct player trades will be tied to the GE prices, many of which are still off by a factor of 10 or more from real values. Jagex has shown no indication that it plans to loosen the tight 5% price control windows, and I am not hopeful as to what is going to happen as a result.

This feature was introduced on the day that Jagex removed the notion of PvP combat in the Wilderness, and was intended to be a replacement for it. My limited experience with it and the feedback I have received from others show it to have been poorly thought out and implemented. It is plagued with innumerable problems, especially teaming by large clans, which make it a wholly inadequate replacement for the old Wilderness, and was clearly not ready for prime time when released.

This feature is intended to be the group PvP activity to replace clan PKing in the old Wilderness. My experience with it personally is quite limited, but my research indicates that it has been much better thought out, though still in need of improvement.