TruthScape.com - The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #9 - Would You Like That on a Silver Platter?

RuneScape’s newest skill, Summoning, is interesting, multidimensional, complex and one that requires a lot of thought and consideration to get the most from. Which means that, naturally, many RuneScape players are trying to do everything they can to get Jagex to turn it into yet another boring, one-dimensional, overly-simplified skill—as if we didn’t have enough of those already!

Most of the complaints seem to boil down to one thing: people want the skill made easier. They want Jagex to nerf the skill so that it doesn’t require them to think about smart ways of getting the necessary components. They want to be level 99 tomorrow, and can’t conceive of a skill that is intended to take months to level up. And what’s worse is that some have decided that the skill is “not worth it” or “useless” before they’ve even given it a fair shot.

As usual, Jagex done a poor job of responding to the bulk of the comments from players—other than to give in to the “it’s too expensive” tantrums and reduce the cost of Summoning shards by 50%. Well, I’m not Jagex (obviously) but it seems to me that most of the limitations in Summoning are there for good reason, but people don’t understand them. In this article I’ll try to explain to you what Jagex will not, and also try to address some of what I feel are major misconceptions about this new skill.

If you’ve looked into Summoning at all, you’ve probably noticed that it has a lot of material requirements. The main XP-granting activity is creating pouches, and these require “blank” pouches, charms, spirit shards and secondary ingredients. Some might wonder, why did Jagex bother with so many “things” being needed just to summon a familiar?

The answer is what I call the two hurdles that slow down a skill and make it challenging: time and money. In some skills time is the main hurdle; it just takes a very long time to level up skills like Runecrafting, Slayer or Mining. In others, the primary hurdle is money, Construction being the most notable example.

Well, it seems that with Summoning, Jagex decided to implement both hurdles. The spirit shards represent a money hurdle, since they mean many of the familiars are rather costly to summon. In contrast, the untradeable charms are the time hurdle: they make it impossible to power-level the skill quickly, because you need a charm for every familiar. Finally, the secondary ingredients are mostly time hurdles, though some are easy to get but at a high cost (like the bars needed for minotaurs).

Most RuneScape players don’t seem to understand that these hurdles are both important and necessary. They aren’t “problems” that Jagex needs to “fix”. They are in place to make the skill challenging, to make it something you have to work for, and to justify the decent rewards at higher levels.

It took only hours from the time that Summoning was released for impatient players to start whining about how it was going to take “forever” to get the skill to level 99. They found out about the main time hurdle (the charms), realized that this wasn’t a skill they could mindlessly grind 16 hours a day to get to 99 in a week, and immediately went to Jagex to demand that they “fix Summoning”.

My immediate reaction to these protests forms the title of this subsection: “where’s the fire?”. It seems that some people only care about getting a new skill from level 1 to level 99 in the shortest possible span—these must be the RuneScape equivalent of folks who take a scenic train ride through the Alps but spend the whole thing reading a book. I mean, really—is the point of a game to play and enjoy it, or just to “get it over with”?

Players supposedly love new content, and Summoning has it in droves. Dozens of new familiars and special moves to explore, changes to many other skills, and lots of different impacts on combat. What’s wrong with taking a few months and slowly “getting familiar” (haha) with this new skill? Is it really better to have a skill like Hunter, where people got to level 99 in what, a week, and then said “that’s it?”—and then promptly got bored and started demanding more content again?

If there’s anything more ridiculous than the complaints about the time needed for Summoning, it would have to be the complaints about the money aspect. Not an hour had passed from the “System Update: 3:00” message before people started dividing shard costs by XP totals and announcing that it would cost “50 million” or “100 million” or “200 million” to get the skill to 99. “Zomg! Summoning is only for the rich! Panic! Aaaaahhh!!!”

It all reminded me of those studies that certain groups do about the cost of raising children. I saw one the other day that said that in the Western world, it costs $250,000 to raise a child from birth to the age of 18. Well, I’ve got three, so I guess that means I’m on the hook for three-quarters of a million dollars! I don’t have that kind of money, what am I going to do?!

Of course, I don’t need to come up with $750,000 on the spot; it’s something I’m going to pay over the course of many years. And the same goes for the cost of Summoning: even if it does eventually cost 100 million in gold, that will be spread out over many months or maybe even years. And part of the process of earning the charms and other ingredients will result in you earning money to pay for shards and other materials—if you’re smart about it, that is.

There’s another way the analogy to kids also applies, and that has to do with the ways we spend our money. If I had decided to not have kids, I would have a lot more money to buy luxury items, take trips and so forth. But I don’t regret being a father for a second; for me, it’s a part of what life is about.

And the same goes for skills in RuneScape, at least for most people. If you don’t spend millions on training Summoning, what will you spend it on? Goofy Burger King hats? Well, if that’s what you consider important, then go for it. Personally, I think RuneScape needs useful skills, activities and items that people can spend their money on, to help remove some of the excess gold from the game. And if that’s the case, why not spend it on something interesting?

Many of the current complaints with respect to Summoning have to do with the charms. Jagex made them untradeable, and they can take a fair amount of time to gather in quantity. Naturally, while people like myself have been out there for the last three days experimenting with different monsters and techniques to find the best ways of getting charms, others have decided instead to whine to Jagex that they “need” to make charms tradeable, or have them drop in larger quantities.

Now, in the case of lower-level players, I can understand the frustration; there aren’t that many mid-level monsters that drop charms in reasonable amounts, and low-level monsters pretty much drop none at all. But I keep finding even high-level players going on and on about how it’s “impossible” to get charms for training the skill.

If it’s so impossible, how is it that many players have already collected over 1,000 charms in just a few days? The Summoning high score leaders have over 500,000 XP already. Clearly they are getting the charms somehow, aren’t they? Well, the truth is that players have already identified more than one way of getting more than 100 charms an hour. I personally was able to collect almost 400 charms in two hours using a particular technique.

My charms collection at the time this article was published.

I’m sure there are many players who would love it if Fally guards dropped 10 of each charm type, but as I mentioned earlier, these charms are a hurdle to keep the skill challenging and the rewards worthwhile. If you want to get charms, be smart and try to research the matter, look into drop lists on third-party sites, and experiment with different monsters yourself. Don’t whine to Jagex to make them spawn in banks.

Another complaint about the Summoning charms is that they are only obtained through combat. Well, yes, they are. So what? Summoning is a combat-related skill, which we’ve known for a very long time. It’s not the only one, though; Slayer is entirely combat-oriented, and Prayer, which is the skill that many compare to Summoning, also pretty much relies on combat for its chief items (bones).

Would it be nice if there were other ways of getting charms? Certainly. I’d love to see charms in impling jars, thieving chests and the shade chests at Mort’ton, among other places. But those should be secondary to getting them through combat.

Then there is the matter of the familiars only being able to fight in multicombat areas. Some think this makes them “useless” and that familiars should work in the same way as death spawns do for nechryaels. That would be nice, in some respects, but I think there’s a rather simple reason why Jagex made this decision: allowing familiars to fight in single combat areas would have required Jagex to reconsider and adjust every monster and every dungeon in the game. By restricting things to multicombat, it allows Jagex to ensure that familiars aren’t too powerful, and can’t be abused. (There are probably technical reasons too, of course.)

Remember that there’s a reason why the chaos tunnels were introduced on the same day as the new skill! Go and check them out, they are quite neat, and enable new combat possibilities for many monsters. (Just be sure to bring a one-click teleport, antipoison and anti-dragon shield, just in case!)

I’ve seen some people complaining that Summoning relies too much on making pouches and “not enough on actually summoning monsters”. At first I thought there was some validity to this argument—many players think of the pouches as the “prep work” and using them as being the “real summoning”, since that’s when the familiar actually shows up. I’ve realized, though, that this compalint is really just a matter of how you look at the skill.

Jagex could have made Summoning so that instead of creating pouches, you use the ingredients to summon familiars directly. My belief is that there are mainly practical reasons why they didn’t choose this method. Consider the following:

My wife came up with the best analogy for pouches: magic tablets. In the case of tablets you must take runes and soft clay to a specific place, where you imbue the magical spell into the clay. The tablets are tradeable, but you get no XP for using them; the one who made the tablet gets the XP. The pouches are pretty much the same, and for the same basic reasons.

Kids are notorious for hating new things. My youngest will often declare that he “doesn’t like” a food that’s new to him before he has even tasted it. When we either bribe or coerce him to give it a try, he’ll take the tiniest bit of food and lick it with the tip of his tongue, and then announce that it’s “yucky”. Then, a few days later, amazingly, he’ll suddenly announce that he does like this food after all.

Well, I’m seeing the same thing happen with Summoning. Every day I go onto various forums, and see people going on and on about how Summoning is “useless” and that the familiars are a “waste” and that the skill is an “epic fail” (groan, that childish comment is getting so old). The truth is that this skill is still in its infancy, and anyone issuing these sorts of pronouncements of doom is speaking from a position of complete ignorance. Summoning has been around for just three days, and only a handful of people have even reached as high as level 60. So how can anyone know if it’s “useless” or not?

Remember chinchompas? For the first few months that Hunter was around, these elicited a collective yawn from most players. They were cheap because people caught them for XP but most players didn’t use them much. Then, one day, a clever person discovered a way to use them to get ungodly amounts of Ranged XP. Word about this got out and around, and suddenly red chinchompas were the “in thing” to have; the price tripled and nobody could get enough of them.

Well, that’s just one item. Consider that in Summoning, we already have about 50 familiars, and dozens more are due in February. The familiars all have special abilities and special moves, and they have the ability to change how every other skill works in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Nobody really knows what unique and amazing applications players will come up with for these monsters. The reality is that it is going to take months before we really are able to explore the full potential of Summoning.

I’ll gladly go right out on a limb here, though, and say this: Summoning will eventually come to be perceived by many players as the most interesting, dynamic and useful skill in the game. There is nothing else like it in terms of the breadth of possible ways it can be leveled and used.

However, this isn’t one of those mindless skills where you just take a quick peek and you have the whole thing figured out. If you want to keep your life simple, go back to mining iron ore for hundreds of hours or making 500,000 yew longbows. On the other hand, if you like the adventure of exploring a new skill and learning what makes it tick and how to put it to good use, Summoning has just opened the door to a new world.