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

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #10 - Requiem for a Chompy Bird Hunter TruthScape Weighted Index of RuneScape Prices (TWIRP) Placeholder

Published: February 26, 2008

What would you say to a 90-year-old man who told you that he thought it was “unfair” that we now have indoor plumbing and flush toilets, when he had to use an outhouse as a child? You’d probably think he was nuts, or just overly bitter—after all, who wouldn’t want life to improve? Did he expect us to keep doing everything the hard way just because he did?

Well, it seems that some RuneScape players haven’t figured out that improvement and growth are also part of online life. Most recently, this has occurred with the Farming minigame Vinesweeper, with some high-level farmers complaining that it makes the skill “too easy” or that it is “ruined”.

Every time something new comes out that enables people to train a skill in a way that’s more efficient or enjoyable, folks come crawling out of the woodwork, whining that because they had to spend hours on miserable grinding, so should everyone else. Well, I’m sick and tired of the whole ordeal, and I’ve decided to say a few words on the subject.

Those who complain when new minigames and features are released that grant new ways of earning XP are not very good students of history. Whatever the most recent change is gets all the attention, and people forget that nearly every skill has been improved and made easier to level over the years. We have a word for this, incidentally: we call it progress.

Here’s just a quick look at the various skills and ways that they are now easier to train than they were years ago or when first released:

• Agility: New higher-level courses, and enhancers like summer pies.
  
  
• Construction: This is still a relatively new skill, so it hasn’t been enhanced too much yet. There have been a few quests granting Construction XP, and there’s also the crystal saw.
  
  
• Cooking: “Cook X” is the big one, along with new pies and potatoes, infinite Chef’s Delight barrels in houses and more.
  
  
• Crafting: Supplies are at much lower costs than they have been in the past, there are many more items that can be made, and ways to train like temple building in Mort’ton.
  
  
• Firemaking: Several minigames now give Firemaking XP, sometimes in rather large quantities.
  
  
• Fishing: One word: monkfish.
  
  
• Fletching: Crossbow bolts provide new options, and the “Make X” feature lets people fletch while reading forums or doing other tasks on the PC.
  
  
• Herblore: Herbs and many secondary ingredients are a fraction of their former costs or are much easier to get than in the past. Several minigames provide Herblore XP. The new Summoning familiar, the macaw, dramatically improves high-level herb yield.
  
  
• Hunter: This is a relatively new skill, but new features are added to it regularly. The Impetuous Impulses minigame doesn’t provide a lot of XP, but it gives XP along with some great item/monetary rewards.
  
  
• Mining: Many new mines, some with far greater selections of rocks, have been added over the years.
  
  
• Prayer: The Ectofuntus and especially gilded altars in houses have revolutionized this skill, making it a fraction of its former difficulty.
  
  
• Runecrafting: Pouches and the Ourania altar make getting XP far easier than when the skill first came out.
  
  
• Slayer: New slayer monsters, better weapons and especially the black mask.
  
  
• Smithing: This skill now has a “Make X” option, and crossbow bolts give smiths a superior option for items that are always in demand.
  
  
• Thieving: Pyramid Plunder—need I say more?
  
  
• Woodcutting: The dragon woodcutting axe, new tree types, extra locations, Farming patches for woodcutting and so on.

As for combat, the ways things have been made easier are too many to even list. There’s all sorts of new, high-hitting melee weapons like whips and godswords; improved crossbows and the dark bow for rangers; and mages have Ancients for power-training along with lower rune prices than ever before. Add to that dragon weapons and armor, Barrows gear, the Piety prayer, Lunar Magicks spells—I could go on and on. And of course, Pest Control. So should all the people who raised combat to high levels on RuneScape Classic now complain?

What’s particularly silly about the whole thing is that most of the people who are complaining about a particular new method of leveling, themselves benefited from earlier improvements that made skills easier for them. Even the people who are going on about Farming right now—most of them likely benefited from earlier improvements to this skill.

Did any of them grow herbs in My Arm’s disease-free patch? Or use a pair of enchanted secateurs to improve crop yield and XP? How many of these players got the benefit of large stocks of cheap pineapples in Catherby for making supercompost—which have now been removed from the game?

Change is inevitable, and usually welcome. Begrudging better methods for newer players when you yourself benefited from earlier improvements is hypocritical.

Now let’s look more into this issue of Vinesweeper itself.

For those who haven’t tried it yet, Vinesweeper is a minesweeper-like game where you dig in a field to try to locate seeds and then flag them. When a farmer digs up a flag, if a seed is in fact found, you get points that you can trade for either Farming XP or seeds.

When the game first came out, it was truly awful: difficult to play, with hyperactive rabbits that shot across the screen to eat up your overpriced flags. Even worse, the number of points needed to get seeds was astronomical, and the XP given was so low that even a top player could only get maybe 5k an hour.

Well, after what I sarcastically call this minigame’s “beta test week”—I continue to hope that Jagex will implement real beta testing, which could avoid these problems—the company made big changes to it. Seeds are now more affordable, but the big improvement is in the area of XP; where before you got only 1 XP for every 6 Vinesweeper points, now the ratio is 1 to 1.

Most people were pleased with this, naturally, but a few were not. Some high-level players started in with the same old whining that always happens when anything decent is added to the game. We heard all about the skill being “ruined”, and their cape being “cheapened”, and that there was “no point in regular farming” and so forth. I’ll tackle these issues below.

Before I do though, I think it’s important that I point out something that many players don’t realize: the maximum number of points you can get per hour depends not only on your skill at the game, but your Farming level as well. So when level 99 farmers start saying that they can get 40k XP per hour, bear in mind that this does not mean that a new player can get from level 1 to level 40 in that same amount of time.

Many of those who object to Vinesweeper are saying that it is like when Pest Control initially came out and lots of people used that minigame to level up combat skills. Sorry, but the comparison is invalid—in fact, it’s not even close, for two main reasons.

First and foremost, with the old style PC you could get much more XP than you ever can with Vinesweeper. You got XP while fighting and very generous XP rewards; it was so bad that many people realized they could train skills faster with PC than by engaging in regular combat.

That’s simply not the case here; you get less XP per hour at Vinesweeper than you do with routine farming (assuming you are smart about it.) You also get no Farming XP while you are doing the game—only if you trade in points for it—so if you use your points for seeds you get no XP at all.

Second, PC was abusive because you could train skills that normally require a cash outlay, like Magic and Prayer, while actually making money. In contrast, doing Vinesweeper for XP means you lose a small amount of money, even though you can actually make money Farming the old-fashioned way. It’s the opposite.

If Vinesweeper is like Pest Control, then it’s like the current version: a way to get XP doing something a bit different, while remaining in overall balance to the rest of the game. And what’s wrong with that?

I’ve always joked that I considered Farming the greatest test of intelligence and maturity in RuneScape. The reason is that it tends to be players who are smarter and older who recognize that the skill’s great strength: the fact that the skill requires little active work, just some patience to wait and then repeat the process of harvesting and replanting. It’s also one of the few real money-making skills (unlike faux money-makers like Fletching). So whenever I see someone say that Farming is “useless”, it’s a pretty good indication to me that I’m dealing with someone who is rather clueless.

Given that, it’s quite ironic to see high-level farmers now make the same mistake as those who hate the skill. The ones who now say that there’s “no point in regular farming” because of Vinesweeper miss the entire point, which is that you can do both. Just as you have always planted seeds and then done something else, you can now do the same—only the “something else” can be a way to get more seeds or XP.

The passive nature of the Farming skill makes complaints about Vinesweeper’s XP rewards even more laughable. While some folks carry on about players being able to get 25k per hour in the minigame, the simple truth is that you can get far more than that with regular farming.

This morning I did an herb run, harvesting my snapdragons and marigolds and planting more. I got 4,735 Farming XP, and it took me 7.5 minutes to do. That’s almost 38k XP per hour. In Vinesweeper, the best I can do is around 20k.

How about if I wanted to plant tree seeds? I could get up in the morning, plant 4 magic seeds, 5 palm seeds and 1 calquat seed. Then in the evening, check health on the magic seeds and plant 4 more. Total time required? Maybe 20 minutes. Farming XP? 175k.

And no, I can’t do those plantings continuously, but the fact is that by simply buying seeds, I could get my Farming level from its current 78 all the way up to 99 by spending less than an hour a day for two months. Why aren’t people complaining about that?

In my opinion, if anything needs an XP cap, it’s powerleveling using tree seeds—not Vinesweeper.

I get particularly annoyed when I run into people who tell me that Vinesweeper is “unfair” because they spent millions buying tree seeds to level up the skill, and now people can do it “for free” playing the new minigame. To these folks, I have three replies.

First, did anyone twist your arm and force you to spend millions buying seeds to level up this skill? I don’t think so. It’s completely not necessary to do this; in fact, if you aren’t in a huge rush, you can make millions from Farming, something not true of many other skills. You were in a hurry, so you chose to powerlevel—your choice, your problem.

Second, most players do not understand the time value of money. If I get 25k of XP in an hour of Vinesweeper, that’s not “free”—it comes at the cost of whatever else I could have been doing with that time. (This concept is called opportunity cost).

Let’s put it another way. Instead of spending an hour playing Vinesweeper, I could do one of a dozen different activities that earn me 500k worth of gold. I could then use this to buy a bunch of tree seeds and plant them in just a few minutes, and earn much more XP. The truth is that for a high-level player, Vinesweeper is not a cost-effective way of leveling the skill; it is just a way to do it that is fun.

Third, and finally, those who are complaining about Vinesweeper being unfair to players who paid a fortune for seeds should think about what they are really saying. In effect, this is an admission by these players that they bought the skill: they used money to powerlevel it. Do they seriously expect right-minded players to think that regular players spending time playing Vinesweeper for XP is not fair, but rich players exploiting their wealth to powerlevel Farming in just a few minutes a day is fair?

That’s what it pretty much boils down to: get over it. Everything in life changes, and it is Jagex’s job to make the game more enjoyable and fun. Anything that reduces the level of grinding in this game is fine by me, as long as it is reasonably balanced, and Vinesweeper is. (Before anyone points out that my prior soapbox article was complaining about something that made the game easier, a half hour of unlimited run energy was not balanced—Jagex did in fact reduce the duration of that feature. And the raw chompy meat issue really did ruin any financial incentive for chompy hunting.)

In closing, my advice is to embrace progress. Don’t expect the world to keep trudging through the snow to the outhouse just because you once had no other choice—rather, know that whatever your accomplishments before, they remain as valid as ever, and be glad that the next generation has a better option.

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #10 - Requiem for a Chompy Bird Hunter TruthScape Weighted Index of RuneScape Prices (TWIRP) Placeholder