The RuneScoop Soapbox

When I started playing RuneScape, I avoided the Slayer skill at first. The reason was that I didn’t like the idea of some game NPC telling me what to fight. I wanted to kill what I wanted to kill, not some “Slayer master”.

I eventually started to train Slayer because I realized that I would want, later on, to have access to some monsters that required particular Slayer levels. At first I kinda hated it, but after some time, I started to appreciate Slayer for its own merits. I liked the variety, and being essentially “forced” to fight monsters that I normally wouldn’t meant that I got to learn a lot more about what was in the game.

I also appreciated the variety in the monsters, and learning what made them tick. Some required special armor or equipment to be worn. Some had unique tricks you had to use in order to make them attackable or to kill them.

This variety—in tasks, gear, monster killing methods—is what made Slayer interesting to me. Unfortunately, it is all being systematically dismantled. The skill that once had so much breadth and diversity is being reduced to an ice cream shoppe that serves only vanilla.

The ability to “Burthorpe” tasks wasn’t a bad in and of itself. While “forcing” players to go outside the box and fight monsters they don’t really like is good, it’s nice to have an option to get out of tasks that one truly despises (for a cost in time and hassle). This was a good “get out of jail free card” that still allowed Slayer to mostly retain its essential character.

And then came Sumona.

She brought with her Slayer points, and the ability to cancel tasks using those points, and even to block entire categories of monsters entirely. This was the first step down the slippery slope to Slayer oblivion. What exactly is the point of a skill where the entire concept is that you must do what your master assigns, and you just say “no thanks, I don’t want to” with essentially no consequences?

With a large number of quest points, you can now entirely block five monsters. And using Kuradal as one’s Slayer master, you now get so many Slayer points that you can essentially skip 50% of the assignments for the non-blocked monsters with no penalty. Does this even remotely resemble what Slayer is supposed to be about?

While the variety in tasks was decreasing, at least the skill maintained an interesting diversity in the techniques needed to kill various monsters, but that’s now also being ruined. Sure, lots of players didn’t like killing warped terrorbirds and tortoises because of the need to chime them. So what?! That is what made those monsters unique! Both have had significant drop upgrades and were entirely worth fighting before the auto-chime was added. Now that it has been, what is interesting about these? You need to waste one inventory slot? They are now just another monster.

Same thing goes for gargoyles and rock slugs and the other monsters that require “finishing blows”. Finish a few tasks and then spend your ubiquitous Slayer points to turn these flavorful monsters into yet another serving of vanilla. Boring.

Look,  I am not the sort of player who rails against improvement for its own sake. I do not think that progress is bad, nor am I one of those “I had it tough when I was lower level so you should too” luddites. But these changes don’t just make Slayer easier, they make it dull. What we are being left with no longer resembles the unique, diverse skill we used to have, but rather just a way for players to rack up XP in another skill while doing pretty much whatever they want combat-wise.

I always knew that a large segment of the RS player population was composed of foolish players who will scream and carry on over just about anything. But I must say that even with that in mind, witnessing the sheer extent of the ranting and hysteria associated with the Hitpoints/Constitution change made by Jagex has been simply breathtaking.

Let’s leave aside for now the small immediate benefits associated with the change, such as effectively higher maximum hits, and the ability to get incremental increases in damage when boosting one’s stats. And we’ll be able to add to that whatever Jagex is able to do with this in the  future.

No, let’s look simply at the change as it has been presented at face value: health and damge have been increased by a factor of 10. Is this REALLY such a calamity?

I mean, I know that change is difficult for a lot of folks, but too many people seem to have lost all perspective here. I’ve seen comments from players that while getting hits in the 30s or 40s is “natural”, seeing numbers in the 300s and 400s is “unnatural”.

What a load of bunk. The truth is that what seems “natural” is entirely a matter of conditioning — what you are accustomed to.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, we use currencies that have fairly high values — pounds and dollars — and so we are used to seeing item prices a particular way. After years and years, we expect a candy bar to cost a figure somewhere in the low single numbers, often with a decimal fraction. We expect an Ipod to cost something in the hundreds. We expect a car to have a price like 10,000 or 30,000.

Well, what about Japan? Their currency, the yen, has a lower inherent exchange value. This doesn’t mean that the currency is weak, just that it is denominated in larger numbers. So in Tokyo, a candy bar doesn’t cost 1.25; instead it might cost 150. An Ipod could go for 20,000. And cars are priced in the millions!

Does this change anything about the candy bar, the Ipod or the car? Of course not.

Are Japanese people somehow inherently more clever than their Western counterparts because they can deal with these larger numbers? I don’t think so. Do people who move from the UK or the US to Japan find themselves bewildered and overwhelmed and unable to deal with the change in the currency? How silly.

Look, I find the new system a bit strange myself. Hitting an 80 on a bat takes some getting used to. And when I got breathed on by a dragon for a 76 earlier this evening, my first instinct was one of panic.

But really, folks, this is just because it is NEW. In a few weeks, we will get used to the new numbers, and they won’t seem like anything strange at all. Pretty soon we will start to expect hits in the hundreds, and we’ll view hits in the tens as being glancing blows — just as we currently view hits in the tens as solid contact and hits in the single numbers as near misses.

Everyone just relax, okay? It will be fine. I promise.

Jagex has wisely and fairly decided to implement a compromise with respect to the fire cape requirement for ice strykewyrms. This allows all high level Slayers an opportunity to fight these cool new monsters, and get a chance to earn a staff of light for themselves. At the same time, it maintains an advantage for those who have a fire cape. For this, I and many other players owe them our thanks.

This decision has, naturally, led to the usual hysterical blathering about how Jagex “caved” and they have “no spine” because they listened to “whiners”. Ironically, these people are whining themselves, but this time it is about the company’s alleged “weakness”. And this happens every time a change is made to an update.

Well, simply put, that’s a load of bullcrap.

Being willing to make changes and adjustments based on customer feedback is what smart companies are supposed to do. It is, in fact, one of the key differences between corporations that suceed, and those that fail. Being willing to accommodate people with limitations or problems with content is also not a weakness of Jagex, but rather a strength.

Does this mean every complaint should be listened to? Of course not. No matter what changes are made, someone will be unhappy. But just as reacting to every request for modification would be foolish, so would be ignoring every such request. It would be the equivalent of idiotic “zero tolerance” policies in places like schools, where where treating rulebooks like the bible becomes a pathetic substitute for intelligent assessment and wise judgment.

In this case, there were very legitimate reasons why a change was requested, reasons that Jagex likely never considered. Most of these came from among Jagex’s longest-term and most loyal customers. Making an accomodation in favor of these people was not only the right move, it was the obvious one.

Listening, cooperating, compromising – these are not weaknesses. Refusing to listen to your customers? That is weakness. Stubbornly insisting that changes are never necessary, because whatever initial decision one makes must be correct? Weakness. Refusing to acknowledge that people are different and that some have limitations or need assistance? Major weakness.

Kudos to Jagex for their flexibility and reasonableness on this issue. And shame on those who apparently place less value on their own ability to benefit from new content than they do on someone else’s inability to do so.

Note: This essay just expresses my feelings about the recent update and how it has made me view the Slayer skill. It is not intended to persuade anyone about anything, nor am I suggesting anyone else feels the same way I do. Take it for what it’s worth.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, both in real life and in virtual worlds like RuneScape. Sometimes they have common elements. In the real world, I am very poor under pressure – I have nerves of mush, not nerves of steel. I am also very risk averse. I have made some progress in these areas over my 20+ year adulthood, but not a great deal. Much of it is simply innate, and I have learned to live with these characteristics through my own lifestyle choices.

These attributes also carry through to RuneScape. I have maxed out melee combat stats, and am close to maxed out in Prayer, Ranged and Magic. But despite that, I have never been to the Dagannoth Kings. I briefly tried the God Wars Dungeon but found it nerve-wracking. (I actually solo’ed Graardor once and barely survived, shortly after GWD came out.) I am still working up the courage to try tormented demons.

It is for these reasons that I always liked the Slayer skill. Now that I write RuneScape guides and reviews full-time, I have to do lots of things in the game I don’t like, but when I wanted to take some personal time just for fun, Slayer was my most frequent choice. I enjoy casual combat, not fighting tough boss monsters. I appreciate variety and was attracted to the idea of being given different monsters to kill, some of which had special tricks involved, and then getting bonus XP in a separate skill for it. I liked the steady pace of the skill, the ability to do it at my leisure, and the new features that allowed me to block some of the monsters I didn’t care for.

When the dark bow was released, my Slayer level was around 86. I ate lots of wild pies to try to get one, and eventually got my level up to 90 so I could fight dark beasts without fancy pastry. I kept working at the skill, knowing eventually there would be a new level 95 monster (or whatever). I told myself that I should keep plugging away at it despite there being nothing above level 90, because some day they would release a higher level monster and I wouldn’t want to be locked out of it.

And so now we have a new monster, and I’m locked out of it anyway.

It’s a mistake to accept one’s limitations as carved in stone, and so I work to improve my weaknesses wherever possible. Until last week I had never seriously tried the fight caves, knowing how I tend to react in these sorts of situations. Jagex forced me to challenge myself in this area with the new strykewyrms update that requires the fire cape.

I have now tried to complete the fight caves a total of five times. I have made use of expensive gear and my high level Herblore to no avail. I have tried melee, ranging, halberds, poison, onyx bolts. In my most recent attempt, I blew 14,000,000+ gp on a strong PvP weapon that degrades after one hour, because some folks said it would allow me to kill Jad quickly, but that didn’t work either. I have now spent 20+ hours in the last week between doing the fight caves, working on strategy and discussing how to do it with various people.

While accepting limitations without challenge is a mistake, it’s just as foolish to deny essential elements of one’s physical characteristics or personality. And it is quite clear that I just don’t have what it takes to do this.

I noticed something interesting on my most recent attempt at Jad. I didn’t feel particularly nervous when he showed up, having a plan in place to try to take him down, which I executed on. But I looked down and realized that my left hand was shaking violently as I was in combat. This was already my fifth try, and I should have been more comfortable with the process. But subconsciously, my “fight or flight” reflex had kicked in, and there was really nothing I could do about it.

I used to love Slayer, but since last week’s update it just isn’t the same to me any more. Some people have tried to convince me that I “haven’t lost anything” because all the old monsters are still there. Which is true, on an objective level. But for me at least, the skill is no longer something relaxing and satisfying. It’s stressful. I’m approaching level 95 Slayer, but that will no longer seem to me an achievement, just a reminder of my own incapability.

Where before I felt a sense of excitement going to get a new assignment, now all I can think about is how much of a failure I am for my inability to get a fire cape. I used to love going to visit Kuradal, and now just thinking about her makes me see red. Every time I start a new task I think to myself: “If I didn’t suck so much, these might have been ice strykewyrms”. And then I keep wondering, “maybe if instead of working on Slayer I spent several more hours in the fight caves, I could somehow figure it out?” On a conscious level, though, I know this will just waste more of my time and frustrate me further.

Slayer has gone from my favorite skill to my personal albatross.

Jagex wanted these new Slayer monsters to be “elite” content. I guess I’m not elite. And I suppose RuneScape is now moving on and leaving people like me behind.

The previous soapbox article I posted was not specifically a complaint about the fire cape requirement for the new Slayer monsters. This one is. If you don’t like that, then don’t read it. You have been warned.

What strikes me most about the debate over this subject is that some players seem to have absolutely no capacity for understanding that people have differences. Getting a fire cape requires a specific skill set that some people have and some do not. This situation is not like having a high level in a particular skill, which just takes time and determination. There are some people who simply cannot do things like this.

I’ve also noticed something else: a disproportionate number of high level players who have issues with getting the fire cape are adults, sometimes older adults. Not all, of course, but a much higher percentage of players who have issues in this regard are older than those who are mocking them with idiotic comments about how they are “nubs” because “Jad is easy”.

I don’t have a fire cape. I’ve never tried to get one. I don’t want to get one. I have decided I may not even try to get one. In part because I am annoyed that Jagex is trying to force me to do it. But more because this is not the sort of content I play RuneScape for. (EDIT: I did try. It went as expected.)

I am not a twitch gamer. If I were, I would have no problem with Jad. But you know what? If I were a twitch gamer I also probably wouldn’t be on RuneScape. There are a lot of other players who are in exactly the same situation. They are in many cases, a lot of RuneScape’s longest-paying and most dedicated players.

RuneScape should provide a breadth of content for all sorts of players. I have no problem with there being aspects of the game that don’t appeal to me, and that I have no desire or even ability to do. I am fine with missing out on the direct rewards of that content. But I do have a problem with having those styles of gameplay shoved down my throat in order to do other things that have nothing to do with them.

If Jagex wants there to be “twitch” style gameplay in RuneScape fine—but don’t conflate it with the usual “achievement” style of gaming that is what drew many of us here in the first place. Getting 93 Slayer requires hours of time and dedication; we’ve earned the right to kill these monsters. Being deprived of one of the Slayer skill’s best rewards over a bad Internet connection or a physical lack of reaction speed is simply unfair. And no number of inconsiderate, childish “twitch gamers” deriding me will change that.

Jagex has spawned a great deal of controversy with its new strykewyrm monsters, the highest level of which requires a fire cape in order to kill. There are plenty of arguments going on about whether or not this is a reasonable requirement, if it should be removed, or if some alternative should be made available to those who either cannot or will not get a fire cape.

That’s not what this article is about, though. I want to step back from arguing over whether or not the fire cape prerequisite is fair, to why it was imposed in the first place.

I think some folks have lost sight of the fact that the fire cape isn’t just “an item” or “a piece of content”: it is the final reward of a difficult minigame. As such, it should be an item of high intrinsic value: it should be something that people want for its own sake.

There was a time when this was the case. Those who were able to get a fire cape wore it as a badge of honor, especially those with lower combat skills. From a practical standpoint, the cape itself also offered significant advantages within the game, because it was clearly better than any of the alternatives.

But times change, and the game evolves. Getting the cape is a lot easier than it used to be—at least for those who have a good Internet connection and the right mental makeup for this sort of content. Fire capes are no longer rare. Youtube videos showing players beating Jad while wielding flowers have removed much of the “respect” that once was afforded a fire cape bearer.

From a gameplay standpoint, the fire cape has also lost some of its luster. Several years ago, a cape with +11 to all defensive stats, +1 to attack stats, +4 to strength and +2 to prayer was a real gem, because the alternatives were so much worse. Then we got skillcapes, which offered a higher prayer bonus, even if they were worse in other areas. For lots of players, the final nail in having much interest in this item for its own sake was the Soul Wars cape: its +12 prayer bonus is, for me, much more appealing than +4 strength or a couple of extra defensive points—usually when I am fighting something where I care about stats, I am using prayer.

The minigame itself also very obviously holds little draw for most players. Some like the challenge, but a large percentage of ‘scapers simply don’t like that style of intense gameplay, assuming they have the ability to complete the task at hand at all. Even those who enjoy getting a fire cape once usually groan at the thought of having to do it again if they lose the cape.

Clearly, RuneScape players have lost much of their former taste for the fight caves and even the fire cape itself. The proper solution to this should have been to make the minigame more appealing. Unfortunately, Jagex has instead chosen to essentially force some players who don’t care about the minigame to do it because of something else they do care about: the Slayer skill. Instead of reformulating the fire cape and the fight caves as a whole so they “taste better” on their own, they have bombarded them with “artificial flavor”.

I think this is a short-sighted approach. Minigames should be both fun to play and have appealing rewards that stand on their own merits. If that’s not the case, the minigame should be reworked, not made more attractive artificially through arbitrary requirements for other areas of unrelated game content. And while it’s easy to come up with a rationale like “you need the heat of the cape to damage these ice wyrms”, make no mistake: this is an arbitrary attempt to link unrelated game content.

Sorry, but I don’t want to see a level 95 Slayer monster that requires a five-feather chompy hunting hat. I don’t think we need a new type of Farming tree that has to be treated with “the stuff” from Trouble Brewing. I cringe at the thought of a level 90 Woodcutting tree that you can only chop while wearing a full set of rogue’s clothing.

I don’t want to be forced to do these minigames. I’d like to see these minigames revitalized so that I want to do them for their own sake.

Schadenfreude is a German word that describes a feeling of happiness or satisfaction experienced as a result of the misfortune of others. And it’s been flowing at high volume in the RuneScape community over the last 24 hours, as a result of Jagex’s decision to make mint cakes a more common reward from the Gnome Cuisine minigame.

Mint cakes are simple food items that restore 100% of your run energy. While marginally useful in and of themselves, that use was not enough to make them exceptionally sought after—and that was even before the 2009 run energy update made all energy restoring mechanisms less valuable. Rather, mint cakes had come to be used as a substitute currency of sorts, allowing players to balance out trades of expensive items. By greatly increasing the supply of these items, Jagex has effectively devalued them, leading to a significant loss of apparent wealth on the part of those who owned them.

I was amused myself when this update came out, because I had warned players for a long time that something like this could happen. While they told me that mint cakes were a valid currency alternative, I pointed out that they were only rare because Jagex made them rare for no particular reason: most likely, they just never really thought anyone would care very much about them. And unlike real discontinued items, Jagex never made any representations that mint cakes would continue to be rare.

The comments I’ve been reading for the last 24 hours, though, suggest to me that a lot of players’ feelings on this subject go well beyond just chuckling at a bit of foolishness. They indicate an attitude of relief and even vindication of sorts at the thought of players getting stiffed due to this update. Most of this indignation seems to be directed at “merchants”, who are the convenient scapegoat for every situation related to trade in RuneScape these days.

But are these viewpoints really fair? Or even valid?

I have no problem with items like mint cakes being made more common, for a simple reason: they never should have been rare in the first place. An item like that is only useful (for its intended purpose) if it is available in a reasonable supply and/or at a reasonable cost; an item that restores run energy but costs 40k is of no use to me.

But I do have a problem with the reason why Jagex appears to have made this change. It seems quite clear that they made this item more common specifically to reduce its “alternate” use as a means of balancing trade. And that strikes me as both unfair and ineffective.

Contrary to popular opinion, mint cakes were not used by just “greedy merchants out to screw honest RuneScape players”. They were used by a lot of players who wanted to exchange items they got as drops or no longer needed for other items that they wanted. Like most forms of currency, mint cakes were usually obtained in a trade and then used in a subsequent trade, with most players not holding on to them for very long periods of time. By making this overnight change, Jagex has made this like a game of musical chairs: the music stopped, and the ones who happened to be holding mint cakes on the morning of February 1, 2010, were left holding the bag.

Beyond the fairness aspect, though, we really should ask ourselves honestly: why did anyone ever care about mint cakes anyway? Nobody gave a darn about them before the Grand Exchange. Why did merchants and other players use them?

The answer is simple: the dysfunctional state of the current economy. Mint cakes (and other substitutes) are used to allow players to try to get around the flawed prices in the Grand Exchange, which gum up trade. Their use was not a cause of the problems in the RuneScape economy, but rather a symptom of it.

It is a fundamental of economics that if you try to force someone to pay more or less for an item than he or she thinks it is worth, that person will try to find a way around the restrictions. And so, predictably, that’s what happened here. People like myself have been trying to get people to understand these basics of economics since the GE came on the scene, but apparently, nobody is paying attention.

“Fixing” mint cakes doesn’t really fix anything. Even if they start spawning on the ground in Lumbridge, players will just move on to some other substitute currency, or the use of other tricks to try to get around the real problem: a system that forces unbalanced trades on players in the name of enforcing balanced trade. Jagex can’t make every uncommon item more common; it simply won’t work.

I don’t blame Jagex for popping the mint cake balloon. But the company needs to recognize that the ultimate cause of this problem is its own policies. For over two years, we have been waiting for Jagex to correct the tight trade restrictions on the Grand Exchange that lead to these sorts of problems. For over two years, Jagex has claimed it would monitor and adjust item prices based on actual values, but has not followed through. Those are the fixes that we really need.

Published: January 27, 2010

On Tuesday, Jagex announced that due to unforeseen technical issues, the company was forced to delay the planned content update to the following week. This move was met by disappointment from some players who were looking forward to the update, which is reasonable enough. But it also led to the usual overreaction and hysterics by others, with plenty of the usual whining, protests and accusations—which is not reasonable. It’s also a pretty good indication that some people don’t understand anything about how software works.

I have a computer engineering degree, and I’ve been a programmer off and on for 30 years. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it is that creating software is at least as much an art as it is a science. There is a particular software engineering methodology that can be followed to ensure a good chance of a product or update being done on a particular schedule, but not every problem can be predicted, nor every contingency planned for. And the more significant a new feature is, the more difficult it is to ensure that it is fully tested and able to work properly on all systems.

If you write software, there will always come a time when something you planned to have done at a particular time is not ready. This does not mean that the developers are incompetent, or that the quality assurance department is inept—it is simply the nature of the beast. When this does occur, you only have three choices. First, you can just release the software anyway, flaws and all. Second, you can stall the customers by delaying the product day to day while trying to iron out all the bugs. Or third, you can acknowledge that the feature isn’t ready, and delay the release until it is done.

For a customer, none of these seems like a great outcome, but that’s life: you don’t always get the choices you want, and you have to make the best of them. Anyone who can’t handle that simply needs to grow up, because being unable to accept waiting or disappointment is behavior only tolerable in young children.

For the people who are unhappy about Jagex delaying a release, I have to ask: are you saying that would you prefer the alternatives? If so, you have pretty short memories, because two of the most common complaints about Jagex over the last few years have been buggy releases and lack of communication. In delaying a feature that isn’t ready, Jagex is doing the right thing, and even if players don’t like having to wait, they should give the company credit for choosing the best of the available options.

Part of why some people are upset is because they feel like they were “teased” about the new update by the by the “strange event” Jagex programmed into the game that some players experienced during the past weekend. But this simply shows that Jagex thinks this new update is something big, and the bigger the change, the more difficult it is to get everything working perfectly the first time. Does anyone really think that Jagex itself is happy about having to delay a big release after putting a teaser into the game about it?

Regardless, the bottom line is still the same: would you rather they released a game version filled with bugs, or just left us hanging day after day? Well, I’ve had to deal with companies that put out buggy software just to “hit their deadlines”, and others that just stalled releases endlessly without being straight with their customers about what was going on. And let me tell you, it is no fun at all.

Corporations don’t like to admit mistakes, and so in many cases the natural inclination is to go ahead with incomplete releases, or to stonewall and deny customers information. Jagex is going against this natural cover-up tendency of software companies, and so should be commended for the approach it now takes to dealing with these situations, not criticized.

You can’t hassle a company for buggy software releases and then also hassle them when they hold back releases to ensure they are bug-free. And you can’t demand better communication with customers and then constantly shoot the messenger when he or she tells you something you don’t want to hear.

During the 1970s, the renowned actor and director Orson Welles starred in a series of commercials for Paul Masson wineries. These spots featured a now-famous catchphrase: “We will sell no wine before its time”. This slogan conveys simply the idea that you can’t rush quality, and while software doesn’t need to be aged like wine, it too should not be released before it is ready.

Published: January 19, 2010

High level players who are unhappy with updates to RuneScape sometimes comment that they believe that “Jagex developers don’t play their own game”. I’ve said this once or twice in the past, and now regret doing so—it’s a pretty disrespectful accusation, and also one that makes no real sense. Obviously Jagex developers do play RuneScape: they have to play it as part of their work, and I’m sure most have personal accounts as well.

But while the “developers don’t play” comment might go too far, there’s a kernel of truth to it, expressed due to frustration by players who take the game seriously. Expert RS players feel that Jagex developers often make design and update decisions that reflect a lack of deep understanding of serious players. If they play the game, do they play it in the same way an experienced player does? How many of the managers who make key content and gameplay balance decisions are really involved in their product?

It’s not possible for any developer to make updates that everyone likes; human nature says that some people will find fault with just about anything. The problem is with updates that nearly everybody hates; with changes that just make no logical sense and are never adequately explained; and with modifications that will rather obviously make people unhappy but that seem to take Jagex by surprise. These are the actions that cause people to wonder what on earth is going on over there in Cambridge.

Here are a few relatively recent examples of the sort of game changes that cause experienced players to wonder whether the developers responsible for them really understand how the game works.

Painfully Slow Death Animations

A couple of years ago, Jagex embarked on a plan of some sort to make monsters die in a more “realistic” way. I’m sure some talented animators did excellent work in making monsters fall down or flip over smoothly, and then fade from view, as opposed to the old standard “fall to the knees and disappear”. The animation given to demons is particularly nifty.

The problem is that these death animations are slow to the point of interfering with gameplay. There are now monsters that take twice as long to die as it does to kill them! And during that time players have to sit there waiting for the drop, or spend time running around by killing other monsters and then returning for the drop later.

The classic example would be chaos druids. These are not training monsters: they are killed for only one reason, and that is for their herb drops. Most high level players can one-hit a chaos druid, but then they have to sit for 2.5 to 3 seconds waiting for it to die. And when you can kill several hundred of these per hour, those seconds add up: in my tests, I’ve found that the imposition of these death animations reduce the number of herbs I can get per hour by a solid 20-25%.

A standard principle of architectural design is form follows function, which means simply that the way something is designed should be based on how it is to be used. But here we have an example of a change made to form that inhibits function. It doesn’t matter how pretty the animation is—after you’ve seen it a few hundred times, you don’t notice it any more. And once you realize how much time you are wasting looking at these animations, you start to actively resent them.

Even more inexplicably, Jagex has imposed these animations on chaos druids twice. When the new death animations were initially added to several monsters, chaos druids were included, but when players complained the slow animation was removed. Then, sometime in the last year or so, they were added back again. I don’t know why, and I don’t know a single player who didn’t prefer the plainer, faster death sequence.

Font Changes, and Font Changes, and…

It seems that every few months, the company tries to change some of the fonts in the game, and the reaction is, nearly always, pretty universal irritation. And then most of the time the font changes are undone or further modified.

Even those who don’t dislike the font changes have the same question: “Why are they bothering with this anyway?” Is there a full-time “font developer” hiding somewhere in Jagex Towers who has to be kept busy? Maybe there are indeed good reasons why these font changes keep showing up, and perhaps Jagex could communicate them better. Right now, they just make players scratch their heads.

Strange Barbarian Assault Item Changes

Jagex just released what appears at first glance to be a pretty impressive overhaul of the Barbarian Assault minigame. However, as part of that update, they removed combat bonuses from several items: the strength bonus was taken off the fighter torso; the fighter hat now has no fighting bonuses, and most inexplicably of all, the ranger hat gives a penalty to ranged attack. These changes were apparently made because of other benefits that were given to these items, but have so far proven very unpopular with those who already got the items for the benefits they had before.

I happen to think that some of these people are engaging in needless hysterics over the loss of a couple of bonus points, and that we should wait to fully assess the new gear before jumping to conclusions. But that said, what surprises me here is that Jagex seems surprised. Did nobody there really understand that the strength bonus was the prime—if not only—reason most players worked to get a fighter torso? Did anyone there really think that a fighter hat with no attack bonuses, or a ranger hat with a ranged penalty, would go over well?

Super Instant Update! Literally as I was writing this editorial, Jagex decided to put the strength bonus back on the fighter torso, after a couple of hours of screeching and moaning from the usual suspects. I have mixed feelings about this—kudos to Jagex for correcting a bad update, though I hate to see tantrums rewarded—but the original point remains: couldn’t the whole situation have been foreseen and avoided?

Unhelpful, Unending, Unblockable Warning Messages

Last but certainly not least, the item that finally motivated me to write this editorial. Along with the Nomad’s Requiem quest that was added to the game on January 11, we got a bizarre “update” that causes a message to be put into the chat window every time you open a beast of burden. It warns you that any items the familiar is carrying will land on the floor when the familiar disappears.

This warning is such a pet peeve that I barely know where to start. But how about this: Summoning has been around for two years now, so is there anyone who uses a beast of burden that doesn’t know what happens if it is holding items when it disappears?

If there are people who don’t know, do they need to be reminded every time they open a beast of burden? Surely telling them once would be enough? Or maybe once per login? But no, you get it every time you open a beast of burden, even if you don’t do anything else. For some players this means literally dozens or even hundreds of these messages in a playing session.

Well, why not turn on the “in game spam filter” then? Oh, that doesn’t block the message either! (And even if it did, why should I have to remove all game messages to get rid of this stupid warning? I want to know if I catch a fish or cut a log—that is useful information, even if only modestly so. The 10,000th repetition of a warning about something I already know is not).

Is this warning a big deal? No, it’s not—it doesn’t make the game unplayable or anything. But neither do a lot of other things that drive people nuts. Suppose when you’re in your car, that every time you stepped on the brake pedal a warning appeared on the dashboard telling you “Don’t brake too quickly or you could lose control of the vehicle”. Okay, that’s a good reminder for some drivers, every once in a while. Still, how many times would you see that light up before you hurried over to the dealer and asked them to make it stop?

For me, this warning message is the epitome of a game update that makes me wonder if the guy who came up with it ever plays. If Jagex felt the need to give this warning, a simple one-time announcement on the forums, or as part of the patch notes, would have sufficed. I do not know a single real player who finds this anything but a pain in the butt.

In Closing…

I don’t really know how many Jagex developers are serious players, and neither do you. I hope there are a lot of them, but I have to wonder. And it’s true that Jagex does listen to complaints, and in some cases these sorts of weird changes end up being revised. But it still leaves the nagging question of why they were implemented in the first place.

I, among others, have been pleading with Jagex for years to set up a beta test system for RuneScape. Jagex’s position seems to be that they don’t feel this is necessary, or that it would be too difficult to implement. But changes like the ones above—and they are only a few recent examples of a long trend—strongly suggest to me that a beta test system is necessary. There’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to ensuring that content changes mesh well with how the game is actually played. I feel confident that any of these unfortunate changes, if shown to even a couple of dozen long-term serious players, could have been fixed or avoided before they ever saw the light of day.

Published: January 13, 2010

Warning: Contains mild spoilers for the quest Nomad’s Requiem.

Oh boy, here we go again.

It seems that every time Jagex releases a new quest that has any sort of reasonably high prerequisites, or poses any type of challenge, whining about capes starts up in earnest. Small but noisy groups of players who currently own the quest achievement cape and think that it is in mortal peril resume their plaintive chants: “The requirements are too high!” “The quest is too hard!” “If I get those levels it will wreck my pure!” And along with the moaning comes the demand that these alleged problems be “fixed” immediately (if not sooner).

And so it was with the release this week of Nomad’s Requiem. This time, for a change, most of the complaints were not the childish “pures” expecting the world to revolve around their efforts to exploit weaknesses in the combat level calculation. Instead, it’s been about the difficulty of the quest, especially the boss fight at the end. Some players started the quest, got beat by the boss, and did what they always do—run straight to “mommy” and demand that the challenge be made, well, less challenging. After all, if they can’t finish the quest, they lose their quest cape! Not fair!

Let’s start with a little secret: the boss fight isn’t really that hard. Sure, he hits for a lot of damage, and it requires plenty of supplies to beat him. So what? It’s a grandmaster quest where the fight is pretty much the only debatable challenge at all—were you expecting a rock crab? Jagex has balanced out his attacks by making the guy much easier than he should have been in a variety of ways. First of all, he tells you what he’s going to do before he does it. Should a boss really even do that? Second, his special attacks all come in a predictable, repeated sequence, with plenty of time to prepare. And third, some of his attacks can be dodged anyway.

If all that weren’t enough, Jagex added in a real gift to players: they took all the danger out of the fight, courtesy of a (cheesy, IMO) gravestone spawn right next to the bank if you die. Some would argue that a fight with no danger and no risk of loss is not a truly challenging fight, but more like a combat-related puzzle. And I would agree with them.

Even the developer of the quest feels it should have been more difficult. And I agree with him as well.

But that’s not really what this editorial is about. It is about the attitude that some players seem to have about quests, and especially the stupid quest cape. It seems that some players have come to believe that if they have ever owned the quest cape, that being able to wear it is forever more is their right. And that Jagex should arrange things so that are never be faced with the prospect of temporarily being without it.

Well, poppycock, I say! The quest cape is not an entitlement – it is a symbol that indicates that you have completed all the quests in the game. Not just the ones you find easy or fun to do or you have the levels to complete. All of them. And that means the quests as Jagex intended them to be, complete with—in some cases—difficult requirements and serious challenges. And it is only natural that as the game evolves, that will mean tougher quests, because otherwise the game would get boring, and the cape wouldn’t mean much anyway. (Does anyone view a fire cape with as much awe today as they did several years ago?)

The idea that Jagex should dumb down its quests for the sake of those who want to retain their quest capes is putting the cart before the horse—or in this case, the cape before the quest. They should pay absolutely no attention to the quest cape in designing quests. None.

Yesterday I heard rumors that “nerfing” the quest was being considered. This would have been a bad precedent that would have led to even more whining and complaining over future quests. I have to give Jagex mega-kudos for denying these rumors, saying clearly that they will not be making the quest easier just for the sake of making it easier.

To the whiners, I say simply this: if you are really that desperate to have a quest cape, then earn it. Fight Nomad a couple of times, learn his attacks and how to best deal with them. Try some different strategies, because that does matter. Or, here’s a radical thought: level up some skills. If all that fails, I assure you that within a week or two, every fan site will have detailed instructions telling you exactly how to beat this guy.

I guarantee that in no time we’ll see players with combat levels well below 100 wearing the quest cape again. And seeing them, we’ll then get to read a large number of complaints that the quest was too easy. You’ll see.