Category: RuneScape

It’s sad to see how they not only abuse children, but assume their community is primarily filled with ignorant people who don’t see through the real motives for this update. Was it a coincidence they introduced this as a bonus first, then later on added the option to spend real money on artificial (meaningless) spins? No. Is it really true the majority enjoys this content and wouldn’t want it deleted? No. They obviously realise people know what this is about: maximizing their profits and abusing slightly addicted children/teenagers in a very unethical way.

The most annoying part of it all is that they are too stubborn to stop believing their own excuses. The real Jagex from the past would have never thought about introducing this, but it’s a fact the people who really cared about this game, its principles and community have retired and sold it to people who see this as nothing more than a source of money.

Also, the little feedback they actually read and take into account is from people on their official boards, mostly people sucking major organ to get that green background and forum moderator status. They aren’t objective, nor do they represent the actual majority. The original idea wasn’t a bad one, and it’s their right to try and make people log in daily. They went a step too far, and from this post it seems they either 1) don’t realise or 2) don’t really give a stink what we have to say about it. Fine, but then they shouldn’t expect people to treat the game with any more respect than they do their players: bots, money farmers, lurers, scammers, hackers, etc.. that’s the kind of community they are creating. Years ago I hated every one of those, now I don’t even mind – the faster this game goes down the crapper and their unethical moneyhungry attitude is forced to end, the better.

Naturally the team and I are saddened that some players are upset about free spins and some also don’t like the ability to also purchase additional spins, however, the reality is 90% of our members are enjoying the Squeal of Fortune on a daily basis and over 70% of our free players utilise the Squeal of Fortune daily too – making it some of the most widely appreciated content release to date. The majority of our players also continue to take advantage of the many free ways to earn extra spins, so it’s certainly here to stay.

Don’t forget that from today onwards you can now equip the free community-chosen Thanksgiving title: the Stuffed! You can equip the title from the Customisation Interface in-game! Happy Thanksgiving!

Evolution of Combat Video Guide Competition

The Evolution of Combat community created video guides are still flooding in and there are so many great ones to watch! Be sure to check out this thread, kick back, watch and learn some great tactics from the community.

Combat-oriented Loyalty Programme auras have been overhauled for the Evolution of Combat and thanks to Xuan’s sale, are easier than ever to get your hands on! Here are a few of the best to whet your appetite:

• Inspiration: This will add extra adrenaline with every hit – great for opening up those ultimate abilities all the quicker, particularly with a fast-striking weapon.
• Invigorate: This aura will retain a chunk of the adrenaline you’d usually use when firing off an ultimate ability, so you’ll be ready to break another out all the sooner.
• Vampyrism: This fang-tastic favourite really comes into its own with the Evolution of Combat. It returns life points equivalent to 5% of the damage you deal, and the new EoC abilities mean that a skilled player can push DPS – and the healing from this aura – to lofty new heights.

If you’re eligible to receive the XP reward from taking the Combat Academy survey in the EoC beta period, he will tell you he has an item for you, and the XP can be acquired from the dusty tome he will hand over. Simply activate the item and choose the skill in which you wish to receive the XP reward, which will be ten times as much as you’d receive for redeeming a Jack of Trades reward in that skill!

If you’re a member, you’re immediately eligible to sign up for the Members’ Loyalty Programme. All you need to do is speak to Xuan in-game – found in Varrock market square and north-east Burthorpe.

Once you’ve done so, you’ll get a helping of loyalty points to spend in the store for each month that you’re a member, which increases the longer you’ve been a member. You’ll also be kept informed of updates to the Loyalty Shop, including future special offers and thanks to this limited-time sale, there have never been more rewards available in your first month of loyalty!

As the Christmas holiday season approaches, we’re braving icy winds and frostbite to ensure this year’s Christmas is aura-some, with the Festive Aura!

Not only does this aura look cool as ice; activating it gives you an incredible bonus every single day of December: 30 minutes to rake in XP with a massive 50% boost!

We’re proud to present two fully voice-acted quests featuring the adventuring enchantress Ariane: one for free players and members, replacing the old Rune Mysteries quest, and an all-new quest for members. If you like your quests full of magic and discovery, and your heroines as erudite as they are headstrong, read on.

Start the month with membership and you’ll get your hands on the aura on December 1st. Details of how you’ll get the aura are coming soon. Join on any other day of the month and it’ll be yours the moment your membership starts!

What’s more, every Saturday and Sunday in December is a Winter Weekend, each featuring a hearty bonus for members, starting with this weekend – December 1st and 2nd – with double drops on bosses! There are five weekends in total, with members’ bonuses including double Dungeoneering XP and double minigame rewards to come. Watch this space for further updates.

December is already set to be an incredible month with the launch of our Tzhaar Grandmaster Quest: The Brink of Extinction, Player-Owned Ports, plus our awesome Xmas 2012 Stray Dog event. To grab your aura – with its 50% XP boost every day in December – click here and become a member today.

You’ll delve deep into the ruins of the very first Wizards’ Tower, which was once home to four distinct orders: the serene Blue Wizards; the wise Green Wizards; the free-thinking Red Wizards and the analytical Grey Wizards. You’ll need to solve the puzzle of how to enter, and decide what sort of mage you are to unlock the old tower’s secrets and save the new one from its fiery fate.

Rewards include a magical staff that’s handy for low-level mages, as well as a unique wizard’s hat and title, both of which reflect the magical order you aligned yourself with in the old tower (you’ll have the opportunity to change this, if you wish).

Biohazard (Members’ Quest): This is the second part of our large ongoing quest. Elena has been rescued, but now she needs your help to find a cure for a plague that could kill hundreds!

Jungle Potion (Members’ Quest) Trufitus Shakaya requires that you collect five special jungle herbs for a potion so that he can commune with his gods.

New members town – Yanille: Explore this border town in the far south of Kandarin. Experienced Wizards will want to make use of the Wizards’ Guild (magic level 66 to enter). Yanille also contains, a bank, a cookery shop, an inn and various other features.

Every Saturday and Sunday in December is a Winter Weekend – that’s five weekends, each with its own bonus for RuneScape members!

We’re kicking things off with a weekend of double drops from bosses, the Barrows, and more. A whole range of bosses and other beasties are waiting to be taken down – emerge victorious and fill your inventory with double the rewards! What’s more, the Barrows chest will also yield double the bounty. That means you could end up with two pieces of much-coveted Barrows armour!

For full details of which enemies will give you double drops this weekend, see our FAQ.

This weekend of double drop mayhem runs from Saturday 1st December 00:00 GMT until Sunday 2nd December 23:59 GMT. Don’t forget that every Winter Weekend hosts a new bonus – next week there’ll there’ll be double rewards from minigames!

If you’re after more festive fun, anyone who becomes a member in December will get the awesome Festive Aura and receive a +50% XP boost for 30 minutes a day! To grab your aura, click here and become a member today.

New members spells – Enfeeble, stun, vulnerability: These are cast using the new “soul rune”, bought from the wizards’ guild.

New features: Dragon bones – Dragon bones can now be buried for a bigger prayer xp bonus than big bones.

Improved monster A.I. Monsters who are far weaker than you no longer auto attack. This also helps stop cheats who use programs to unfairly keep their character logged in at a respawn point, and gain combat xp unfairly.

Meg – a wannabe adventurer – can be found in the port, regardless of whether you have the levels to take over its management. Even those of you who do not have the levels to own a port will find that you can give Meg adventuring pointers, offering a taster of the player-owned port voyages. Even once you’ve taken control of your port, Meg will still hang around looking for advice – she needs all the help she can get!

Once a week, she’ll ask you a set of questions about adventuring scenarios and then head off to tackle dangerous dungeons and ferocious monsters. Depending on the quality of your advice, she’ll come back bright-eyed and beaming with a healthy cut of her profits for you, or bruised, abashed and with more meagre pickings to offer.

There’s months of amazing content and truly epic rewards here for high-level players, so what’re you waiting for? The East beckons!

The more you unlock, the more insight you’ll gain into the bizarre and beautiful wonders of the Eastern Lands. Certain adventurers will want to work with each other, so keep an eye out for combination voyages, which culminate with the end of a truly spectacular story arc.

Managing your Port
Those of you with level 90 in at least one of Fishing, Herblore, Prayer, Runecrafting, Thieving or Slayer (as well as RuneScape membership) can take ownership of your very own port town, accessed via a portal at the north end of Port Sarim. The place has seen better days, but – after a chat with worldly entrepreneur John Strum – you’ll soon have it up and running as a bustling, ever-evolving hub of commerce, sending ships to explore, do battle and find exotic treasures in the Eastern Lands.

Using the resources you bring back from the Eastern Lands, you’ll be able to build and upgrade structures within your port. As well as making your port truly distinct, these offer benefits when managing your captains and crews. If you want to attract potential crew members with better-than-average Seafaring stats, for example, adorn your port’s bar with nautical regalia to get the saltiest sea dogs in Gielinor on board.

Your port will grow to be a living town that’s well and truly yours. The content is fully voice-acted throughout, the decor and buildings are of your choosing, and your captains (whose appearance can also be customised) and adventurers can be found at the town bar for a chat.

The more you unlock, the more insight you’ll gain into the bizarre and beautiful wonders of the Eastern Lands. Certain adventurers will want to work with each other, so keep an eye out for combination voyages, which culminate with the end of a truly spectacular story arc.

Managing your Port

Using the resources you bring back from the Eastern Lands, you’ll be able to build and upgrade structures within your port. As well as making your port truly distinct, these offer benefits when managing your captains and crews. If you want to attract potential crew members with better-than-average Seafaring stats, for example, adorn your port’s bar with nautical regalia to get the saltiest sea dogs in Gielinor on board.

Your port will grow to be a living town that’s well and truly yours. The content is fully voice-acted throughout, the decor and buildings are of your choosing, and your captains (whose appearance can also be customised) and adventurers can be found at the town bar for a chat.

Depending on how many of the requisite skills you have at or over level 90, you’ll attract more of these wandering adventurers to your port. For example, 90 Runecrafting will unlock Zu Zu: a classy occultist looking to dispel an insidious curse, and 90 Fishing will unlock Hubbub: a boisterous whaler with scant regard for personal space, who’s dedicated his life to sparring with Shuma: a legendary white whale.

Forgotten scrolls, pieced together over the course of your voyages, will unlock the permanent ability for your character to make some of the best food and gear in the game.

Melee fighters will find themselves honour-bound to wear the lordly tetsu armour; eagle-eyed rangers will love the Death Lotus gear; and the elite mage will settle for nothing less than the sea singer’s robes. These come in both tradeable and non-tradeable versions. The non-tradeable versions have even better stats than the tradeable ones, making them not only the best armour in game, but true status symbols for RuneScape’s most dedicated players.

High-level fletchers can also make accessories known as scrimshaws, which fit into a new equipment slot called the pocket. These impart a range of benefits, many of which are geared towards increasing level gain during that steep curve towards level 99.

Finally, RuneScape’s best food – rocktail soup – can also be made in your port’s workshop, if you happen upon the recipe.

With the Evolution of Combat update we saw some truly impressive and creative entries. Fearsome warriors and vicious monsters flooded our inbox and brought panic into the Jagex office! If you’d like to be wowed and amazed as we were, head over to the Players’ Gallery section of the wiki, right here.

After many long discussions, we are happy to announce our winner: the incredible Berserker by Silniy Oryol! Two honourable mentions go to Dealiminator for the wicked illustration of the Dagannoth Kings, and to Apsitively’s Fire Breathing, which masterfully depicts one of the new combat abilities. Congratulations!

Submission Guide/Rules

• Email your pictures .
• It’s got to be completely your own work – no knock-offs, please!
• Make sure the files you send us are at least 1280 x 720 px – if they look pixellated or blurry, we won’t be able to display them.
• All files need to be attached to an email and in any of the following formats: .jpg, .gif or .png. No links to downloads, please!
• Include your account name with anything you submit to us so we can credit you appropriately.
• Make sure your artwork isn’t watermarked with website URLs or anything undesirable!

It is the time of the year when days become shorter and nights seem to have made a deal with the sun. This is the time of bundle-up fashion, hot chocolate and Christmas surprises – not to mention all-out snowball fights! Simply put, it’s a time to be jolly.

For the next Players’ Gallery, we’d like you talented artists to bring some colour, warmth and good festive cheer to the winter season to make these chilly days more enjoyable. It could be your character preparing for a perilous adventure to the Land of Snow, an NPC snowball fight, or a RuneScape Christmas feast, so grab your pencils, pens and brushes and let the celebration of winter begin!

We heard about of a really nice Christmassy idea from community member Will Miss It today. He wants to make a Community Christmas video featuring as many members of the RuneScape Community as possible.

It’s a lovely concept and something we’re really keen to help make happen. So, send us your super short video wishing your fellow Gielinorians a Merry Christmas  by December 20th and we’ll get them all over to Will Miss It so that he can make his great idea a reality. Your mini vids can be made with your phone camera, your webcam or anything else that able to capture that Christmas spirit. There’s already a queue of J-mods waiting to take part, so it would be great to get as many of you involved as possible!

Looking for an added personal touch to your newly acquired ship? Look no further than our Rename Your Ship competition in which we’ll be taking new ship names from the community and adding them into the game in the near future!

Our Winter Weekends continue, with double Dungeoneering XP and tokens being awarded for all completed floors. To top it off, we’re offering prizes to the top XP gainers who signup on our competition thread here.

You can find full details of how to get your message to Will Miss It, via us, over on a thread we’ve created, which you’ll find here.

It is the time of the year when days become shorter and nights seem to have made a deal with the sun. This is the time of bundle-up fashion, hot chocolate and Christmas surprises – not to mention all-out snowball fights! Simply put, it’s a time to be jolly.

For the next Players’ Gallery, we’d like you talented artists to bring some colour, warmth and good festive cheer to the winter season to make these chilly days more enjoyable. It could be your character preparing for a perilous adventure to the Land of Snow, an NPC snowball fight, or a RuneScape Christmas feast, so grab your pencils, pens and brushes and let the celebration of winter begin!

1. Updated World Activities

We’re updating the activity labels for many worlds to better reflect your interests and most popular activities. Mod Emilee has been running brainstorming workshops on the forums for the last month to gather ideas and feedback, and we think we’ve been able to accommodate the vast majority of your requests! We’re added a bunch of new activities and reducing the quantity of duplicates for the less popular activities. Of course, remember that the activity labels are just recommendations – you’re free to use the worlds however you wish!

2. Member/Free Player Distribution

Over the last few years, members have come to be a higher proportion of our player base. As such, we’re changing several previously free-to-play worlds to members’ worlds. Members should have the best possible experience, and we hope that this will allow members more breathing room and choice of worlds.

3. Server Load Balancing

We’ve re-examined which worlds are placed under heavier burden and are better configuring our server architecture around this. It should mean lower latency during busy periods.

We hope everyone can benefit from these changes, so please continue to give us your ideas and feedback on these topics on the forums.

FAQ

Are you removing any worlds?

No. We’re just relabelling or changing the configuration of existing worlds.

Is this because of the lag during the last Bonus XP Weekend?

In part, yes. The event really highlighted the need for us to better balance server load for events and peak times, and especially underscored the burden being placed on members’ worlds.

What else are you doing to address lag and server performance?

We’ve put renewed effort into code optimisation, and just in the past two months have improved script efficiency by around 20%, making “two-step lag” less likely to happen. We will continue to make these improvements in the future. We are also intending to update our server infrastructure again in the new year, to further improve performance.

Why did you switch some free worlds to members worlds?The majority of active players are members, and generally free worlds are less populated than their members’ equivalents. Also, we feel that those paying should get the best possible service and the most choice.

What about ___?

We’ve tried to fulfil as many requests as possible, but some activities haven’t had enough demand to warrant a specific label. Give us your feedback and we’ll make adjustments if there’s enough demand.

Why aren’t you adding any more skill total level worldsWe are still considering this. We aren’t yet decided on whether this is the right course of action, so we’re not making any such changes at this time.

We’ve relaunched our Recruit a Friend programme and now it’s better than ever! Here’s what you’ll get when one of your recruited friends becomes a member:

• You’ll earn yourself 30 days of membership free!
• When your recruited friend earns XP, you’ll receive an XP bonus!
• You’ll get a teamwork XP bonus whenever you and your recruited friend are on the same world and together!

Note that the XP bonuses mentioned above are given as increased XP gain, earned as you train your own skills, in the skills trained by your recruited friend.

Remember, you can recruit multiple friends and earn even more free membership and XP bonuses!

To get started, simply click here and click “Recruit Friends Now!” Once you’ve done so, your nominated friends will receive an email with details of how to get involved. There’s never been a better time to bring your friends to RuneScape, so start recruiting now!

Any questions? Check out our wiki page and FAQ here.