TruthScape.com - RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - Significant Content Improvements and Changes

Now that we’ve covered all of the major new content additions, I’d like to move on to discussing updates to existing features. While not as exciting as new areas, skills and items, in some cases quality updates can rejuvenate features that had stagnated due to problems in their design. Let’s see how Jagex did in this area.

The very first content update of the year was to change the operation of Ava’s accumulator and attractor—rewards from the Animal Magnetism quest released late in 2006—so that instead of mainly generating arrows, they would retrieve most of the ammunition used by the player. This was a superb idea that made these items nearly indispensable—finally rangers can fight even with high quality arrows or bolts and know that Ava’s handiworks will pick up most of their ammo for them.

Until this update, the fishing trawler was a wretched, abandoned minigame; the rewards were poor and getting a game together nearly impossible. After this change, the minigame was much improved; finally you could get a decent load of fish—including the much desired manta rays and sea turtles—but there were still lots of problems.

The biggest issue at first was the ridiculous problem where if your inventory was full, all your fish got dumped on the floor for other players to steal (come on, this was play-tested?!) That finally got fixed, so the main issue with the trawler now is that while the group as a whole must work to keep the ship afloat, no individual is required to do anything. The first several weeks after this update featured hundreds of lazy players not only standing around alching notes or doing nothing at all, but many of those players actively taunting those doing the work (see Figure 66). It took Jagex about a month before finally eliminating the alching, but the ability to freeload still has not been addressed, close to a year after the update and despite ongoing complaints from literally thousands of players!

**Figure 66: Ya, It Works. :(**
While myself and one other player tended the net, and a bunch of players worked hard downstairs to plug holes and bail, this group of idiots stood around not only refusing to help, but acting like annoying twits (making stupid comments, overusing emotes and so forth.) Oh, and get this: *every single one* was over level 100 combat.

Exactly how many months does it take to fix such an obviously unfair situation?

Other problems include the short 60 seconds you have before the next ship goes, no convenient way to tell when the next game begins, and a lack of interest in the minigame as the market for high-end fish has slumped. And Jagex seems to have abandoned it once again after its half-hearted update, which is a shame.

In July 2006, Jagex developers introduced metal crossbows with a variety of metal bolts, gem tips and magical gem special effects—and nearly every aspect of this feature was promptly ignored, due to the high cost of the bolts, the slow speed of the crossbows and the rarity of the special attacks. It took almost a year, but Jagex finally adjusted the crossbows to have much greater ranged attack bonuses, and sped them up as well. The magic bolt effects are still a bit too infrequent, but on the whole this was a very welcome update.

Unfortunately, it seems that not much effort went into researching the effect that this change would have on other ranging gear, nor tweaking and adjusting the skill for balance. It quickly became obvious to most players that crossbows and bolts were clearly superior to the magic shortbow and arrows, which have now become almost as little used as crossbows were before the update.

Skeletal wyverns have always been rarely fought because they are one of the most difficult Slayer monsters in the game yet had awful drops. On June 18, as part of a series of game updates, Jagex announced that the wyverns would now drop “some more desirable loot”. As a high-level Slayer I was very excited by this—finally wyverns had been fixed! So I headed down there and started fighting them…

…and what I found was that this had to be some sort of cruel joke! Skeletal wyverns are more difficult than any dragon in the game aside from mithrils—they make steel dragons seem like a walk in the park by comparison. Yet while steels routinely drop runite items and 20 bloods and so forth, I was getting drops like low herbs, 14 air runes, 86 coins, 24 coins, marrentill seeds and bone bolts. I would use up more in food and potions than I got in drops—heck, the ice warriors outside the wyvern lair gave better loot! And this was after a so-called improvement?

But wait, it gets better. The update caused these monsters to get more attention, and people started talking about how the only effective way to kill them was using Verac’s set effect with Protection from Magic. This apparently had always been possible, but Jagex decided that this was a “bug” and fixed it a couple of weeks after the alleged drop improvement—yet didn’t touch the drop list.

The net effect is that the wyverns are arguably even less worth killing than before, and keep their place right next to terror dogs at the top of the “head straight to Burthorpe” list for high-level slayers. A real waste of a cool monster—I only give this update an “F” because I can’t give it a “G”. J

One of the complaints about player owned houses has always been the relatively small number of rooms that players were allowed to have. With this update, the hard limit of 20 rooms was raised to a variable figure, with a maximum of 30 at a Construction level of 99. This not only lets dedicated builders have more elaborate houses, it gives another tangible benefit to raising the skill. On the downside, you need 50 Construction before you get any increase at all.

Pest Control is a minigame that quickly turned into an XP mill after it was released. Not only was it being abused by players to get obscene amounts of XP for little work, but many “professional PCers" developed a snotty attitude towards lower-level players or anyone else who would slow down their efforts to get experience points as fast as possible. It took far too long (over a year) but Jagex finally did something about this mess, splitting the game into three boats for different levels, and reining in the XP totals.

This change led to lots of complaints and hysterics, naturally coming mostly from those who had abused the earlier system. And the more they whined and carried on and had “riots”, the more obvious it was that the change was desperately needed. Kudos to Jagex for sticking to its guns here.

With this change, Jagex split shops into “main stock” areas with infinite quantities of certain goods, and “player stock” areas of items sold to them by other players. Interfaces were also changed to allow easier buying and selling in large quantities (as opposed to the old limit of 10 at a time.) The goal of the update seems to have been two-fold: to make shops less annoying for regular players, and to eliminate bots who would stand around auto-buying items for hours on end.

There really are good and bad aspects to this update, and some players really liked it more than others. On the plus side, the interface changes clearly make life easier, allowing players to buy stackable items by the thousands in a few seconds. Also, the infinite stocks of common yet important items like water-filled vials and feathers meant an immediate end to players having to pay exorbitant prices for them or spending hours clicking.

The negative aspect of the update is that some of the items players used to buy from shops were removed, such as slime buckets for the Ectofuntus, soda ash, seaweed and pineapples from the charter ship stores (the latter two were added back later in a limited fashion.) I personally hated seeing baked potatoes with cheese, which had been 9 gp each in the Warriors’ Guild, increase in price by a factor of around 45 times! But I also admit that most of these changes were necessary for game balance, and to continue to encourage players to use their skills.

There were also some interesting side effects of the shop changes. For example, the bone crossbow saw a big surge in popularity now that it was easy to buy thousands of bone bolts for the bargain basement price of just 4 gp each.