As (I hope) some of you have noticed I have been gone for quite a time now. Mostly due to real life commitments, I just couldn’t put in significant time. Alright, I admit. I’m on a panel of people who write articles on RuneScape, and I haven’t touched the game in months. Not even the community in months. Even the front page has changed drastically, and breaking news regarding some sort of clan fight caught me by surprise. Although I know that the RSOF has a generally bad name, it amazes me that Jagex is actually trying to organize events through that venue: it seemed totally foreign to me. Upon logging in things had changed. Apart from my new computer that can actually play on HD, nothing specific was apparent at first glance, but the feel of the game had changed. From Direct X support, to people with slings, things seemed out of place. I looked down at my prayer list. Some sort of super rapid restore nonsense? Dungeoneering, which I’d just tried on the way out, had new updates. The list goes on. I can certainly understand all of these updates individually, given I have time to look through the forums, but many updates have unintended consequences, affect market prices, etc., which is something I just can’t understand while being gone.
Although I knew that I was clueless, the biggest shock came when I was actually writing this article. The line, “They would return to mining iron in a suboptimal way, now that there is a deposit box in the dwarven mines (or so I’ve heard).” was included. This made sense at the time, I’d heard of the bank deposit boxes, and new dungeoneering rewards. But somehow, I’d missed that they removed it. It is these small change updates, that have huge effects on all of us. The ‘make all’ feature has been expanded to more things. These are all good updates, but hard to understand without playing much more.
While I contend that updates are a positive thing, I feel like in my absence RuneScape has run from me, changing many key aspects, and manipulating the feel of the game. For many casual players, I’m sure these updates would mean little. However, for someone who wants to know the most efficient way, at this point it seems a forum post is the only way to get the message across.
This is especially true in P2P, but even to a certain extent F2P. My brother just started a pure, and he actually got 30 magic without runes. These kinds of implications are sort of bizarre to me, something I never would have expected. And although not praiseworthy or deserving criticism, they still don’t entirely register in my mind.
Now I will turn to the entire update and news system. Right now, updates occur on a semi-regular basis, and some change the game while others don’t. They introduce new items, change game prices, and more.
Additionally RuneScape is becoming less of a web than it used to be due to updates. It used to be near impossible to inflate prices: people would produce more to fill the hole. However, now in a position where many goods and services aren’t connected, these continued updates are causing subtle damage to the economy. The addition of new updates that can’t be made or connected to existing items hurts the economy. The strongest one includes inferior goods (ie. a Dragon Scimitar as opposed to an Abyssal Whip for attack training) , and comparable goods (Barrows Armour), and in a system where these become less and less frequent, potential damage to the economy could be incurred.
However, I still appreciate the updates created by Jagex. After all, we do pay them in one way or another. It seems to me, however, that a system where one could compare two updates, and see what has changed between them cumulatively could be of great help to players returning, and wanting to get a rough overview of what has occurred.
It just seems that in just three months RuneScape has run dramatically away from where I thought it was, and gone far, far away from my deep rooted past.
