TruthScape.com  9  The TruthScape Soapbox - Opinion and Commentary on RuneScape and Beyond

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #9 - Would You Like That on a Silver Platter? The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #11 - Please Don’t Resent My Toilet

Published: January 30, 2008

NOTE: This article contains extensive reward spoilers for the new quest As a First Resort… Please read no further if you have yet to do the quest, and don’t wish to find out what the rewards are at this time.

Upon completing the new quest last night, As a First Resort…, I was saddened to discover the host of very useful rewards that the quest provides. Saddened? Yes—because the rewards are so unnecessarily powerful and unbalanced that they greatly undermine many skills and activities that already were far from popular or lucrative before.

Mostly, I was disappointed at what appears to be a cheap effort on Jagex’s part to “buy favor” on the part of players, at the cost of game balance. While many players are currently basking in the glow of these wonderful goodies, in a few days or weeks they too will come to realize the damage done by giving too much away for free.

Dating back to May 2004, Big Bird Chompy Hunting is one of the oldest minigames in RuneScape. It has also always been one of the most useless in terms of tangible rewards, especially considering the effort involved. Hunting the chompies is painstakingly slow and annoying—it requires special equipment, and you must go through the hassle of filling a bellows, catching toads (no more than three at a time!), placing the toads and waiting. Then it often takes two or more shots to kill the birds, even at a high Ranged level.

What do you get for this? The bird gives you raw chompy meat, feathers and bones, and you also ratchet up your chompy killcount. At one time, getting 20 or so feathers per bird was nice, but feathers are now dirt cheap and available in unlimited quantities, so who cares about those? Bones are, well, bones. And that leaves the raw chompy meat.

Once there was no use for raw chompy meat at all—other than cooking it, which was generally not worth the bother. But then, in February 2006, Jagex introduced new stat-boosting pies. One of the most popular of these was the wild pie, which used raw chompy meat as an ingredient. This excellent move finally gave some use for those heavy bird carcasses that chompy hunters either lugged around or left behind on the ground. It gave players at least a small financial benefit for all that time spent playing with toads and ogres.

Well, the town of Oo'glog took care of all that. After completing the quest you get access to a shop that sells unlimited quantities of raw chompy meat for the measly sum of 85 gp. Oh, and it’s right next to a bank, to boot.

So what does that leave as rewards for chompy hunters? Goofy hats. They have colored feathers, you see, which show off your prowess as a chompy bird hunter—except that so few people bother with this minigame now that almost nobody even knows what they are or what they represent.

The skill bonuses for these hats? Nothing. Nada. Zero. Not even a tiny bonus for Ranged, despite that skill being used while chompy hunting. You can spend hundreds of hours racking up thousands of chompy bird kills and for your trouble you get a silly hat that doesn’t even provide the lousy +1 Ranged of a leather cowl.

I speak to chompy hunters who point out that to be good chompy hunters, they have to take off their chompy hats while hunting to put on a real Ranged coif or hat. Does that make any sense? Of course not, but then neither does giving away nearly-free chompy meat.

Did nobody in Jagex’s content development team consider what this completely unnecessary reward would do to a minigame that has already been much neglected?

A friend of mine maintained a thread on the RuneScape forums for ages, making some suggestions for how to improve chompy hunting. These were good, common-sense ideas that would have made the minigame better without unbalancing it. The thread was lost due to thread spam when PKing was removed, but last night in discussing this issue, she stated simply and accurately: “I had asked for months to get some minor tweaks to improve one of the oldest mini-games. This is their answer. They've killed it.”

I’m sure some people will respond to this issue with apathy; who cares about a stupid minigame nobody uses anyway, right? Well, leaving aside one obvious answer—that nobody uses it because it doesn’t have decent rewards, which is the entire point—there are ripple effects of this sort of cheap move.

The immediately noticeable ripple effect has to do with Cooking. Not only does the food shop in Oo’glog sell dirt cheap raw chompy meat, it also sells cheap raw bear and rabbit meat. Gee, what do you know, all three components of wild pies. The difficulty in getting the ingredients for these pies is what made cooking them worthwhile for high-level chefs, and what kept the price high enough to balance the benefits they provide. Now the floodgates will be opened to dirt cheap wild pies galore.

Wild pies were one of the few non-fish items that people routinely cooked and sold to try to make a small amount of income using the Cooking skill. As we all know, cooking fish results in a loss, since raw fish costs more than cooked fish. Those who were clever enough to find smart ways of making pies, or who hunted chompies themselves, could get slower XP in exchange for making some money with the skill.

Well, not any more—that’s all been “nerfed”.

Next ripple effect: Slayer. This is one of the most difficult skills to raise, and high-level Slayers have resented the wild pie since it was introduced, because it allows lower-level players to slay higher-level monsters. The only thing keeping things in balance was the fact that the pies were difficult to make or expensive to buy. Well, no longer! Now anyone with a Slayer level of 81 or so and up can spend tons of time killing abyssal demons, for example. Level 78 is enough to get dragon boots. And so on.

More people slaying? Next effect: more drops in the prices of Slayer-specific items, further reducing the reward for players who raised this challenging skill.

And it goes on even further from there, but that should be enough to convey the point.

Still don’t care? Well, maybe you’re interested in raising the Herblore skill? Many people of late have been complaining that there is seemingly no way to make any money with this skill, since potions sell for less than their components cost. Well, the ogresses of Oo’glog hit the Herblore skill with a club to the head as well.

One of the “spa” pools in this new area conveys unlimited run energy for up to 25 minutes, from just a 5 second dip. Completely free. Doesn’t matter what you carry. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, how great is it to the player who spent hours gathering mort myre fungi to make super energy potions, the demand for which is now going to plummet?

As I write this article, the “average” price of a regular energy (3) potion on the Grand Exchange is 108 gp. The price of a water-filled vial is 98 gp! And now these potions will be less useful than ever before.

It gets better. One of the other pools provides a huge Hunter bonus—as high as +10, from what I hear. Hello, Jagex, did you forget that there’s a potion for this purpose? But it only gives a flat +3 bonus? And that making it requires getting kebbit teeth, which is very slow and annoying? Why would anyone bother with these potions now?

Is the entire game balance team asleep at the wheel, or what?

Since Summoning was released, I have seen countless players bemoan the “uselessness” of this new skill. I’ve been one of the few voices trying to point out that many familiars do have many fantastic uses. Two of my new favorites are the bull ant and spirit terrorbird; they have identical special move scrolls, which restore run energy.

Now, just two weeks later, Jagex has made these specials arguably useless. It takes more time and effort to keep a familiar alive, drag it around casting special moves, and then recharge Summoning points, than it does to jump into a pool every 20 minutes.

What is the point of releasing a new feature, and then two weeks later another feature that obviates the first one? It’s almost as if the content developers don’t communicate with each other any better than they communicate with us!

Players who runecraft using the Abyss are absolutely thrilled with this new quest’s rewards—and why shouldn’t they be, considering that it makes abyss runecrafting into a joke? I mean, Runecrafting has always been a tedious skill, but at least until now, you had to make decisions about what to bring with you into the Abyss. Would you carry armor to defend yourself or eschew it to save weight? Was it worth carrying a pickaxe for faster access to the inner ring, even if it consumed run energy?

Well, gee, none of that matters any more! Quick dip in the pool, and you can take everything! No need to think things through, or make smart decisions, or deal with tradeoffs. Bring lots of armor, so the danger of abyssal monsters is almost completely negated, and in fact, wear anything you like at all. Hey, you can even take a load of raw chompies with you! J

The same goes for other activities where run energy conservation used to be an issue—it no longer is.

I’m sure I’ll get lots of hate mail over this article, because I am actively calling on Jagex to “nerf” this quest’s rewards. I don’t care. As far as I am concerned, it is the quest that is doing the nerfing here—nerfing chompy hunting, nerfing Cooking, nerfing Herblore, nerfing Slayer, nerfing Hunter, nerfing Runecrafting. And mostly, nerfing thinking.

For those who will claim that the reward is fitting because of the difficulty of the quest and its requirements—please, don’t even bother. The quest is tedious, dull and annoying, but not difficult, even for a mid-level player. And the highest skill requirement is level 58 Woodcutting, and we all know how easy that is to get.

As for the difficulty of accessing this new area, that’s overstated as well. It’s less than a minute from a fairy ring. Or teleport to Camelot, run to Catherby, charter a ship and you’re in the spa in less than 60 seconds from any bank. And that’s just now… what happens when more content is added in the area, giving even more reason to be near these pools?

Is it possible that nobody at Jagex realized just how overpowered these quest rewards are? Well, I suppose so; I’ve ceased being surprised at what gets past Jagex’s QA department. But to be honest, I don’t think it’s a big coincidence that Jagex put out an easy quest with ridiculously powerful rewards this month. I see this as little more than a cheap attempt to placate unhappy players, like giving candy to an unhappy child. The problem is that in both cases there can be serious negative long-term consequences.

Some of you may remember that I’ve been using the example of raw chompies being stuck at a low price on the Grand Exchange as an example of how that feature didn’t work properly. Well, it turns out that this wasn’t a flaw; it was clearly intentional, since the same 85 gp that was the price limit on the GE for raw chompies for two months is the price for raw chompies in the shop in Oo’glog.

Not only are chompy hunters screwed now, Jagex “proactively screwed them” by preventing them from trading raw chompies at the former market price for over two months prior to this new shop even being released! Jagex of course knew that the quest was coming, but we did not. There was no reason to fix the price so far in advance while leaving everyone in the dark about why it was there. But hey, why bother explaining things to mere customers?

At any rate, anyone who can’t see the real point of the Grand Exchange by now, or who still buys the BS line about “players setting prices”, is actively delusional and likely beyond help.

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #9 - Would You Like That on a Silver Platter? The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #11 - Please Don’t Resent My Toilet