The Tip.It Times


Issue 27999gp

Why the Wilderness Will Never Come Back Alive

Written by and edited by tripsis

Save for the occasional Band of Nodders and the odd weekly Penguin, is there any reason to go into the Wilderness? A Clue Troll? Agility training? Mining Runite ores?

It certainly isn't the King Black Dragon or the Corporeal Beast, as those can be reached in complete safety via the various teleportation methods.

A similar case can be made for most of the other features in The Wild. Nobody uses The Abyss to craft Runes anymore, The Runespan has completely replaced it as the dominant way of training Runecrafting. Most monsters that would be good to kill for their drops (Green Dragons, Revenants) are overshadowed by many others in terms of easiness to kill or worth of their drops.

So why would you go with decent gear into the Wilderness? To kill some Green Dragon bots perhaps? No you wouldn't, unless you've completely lost all of your imagination, and can only come up with this as the bestest moneymaker available to you right now.

No, the only thing you go fully armed into the Wilderness for is when you're participating in a raid on one of these Warbands. I say fully armed, but what I really mean is that you carry something that is worth killing you for. But even then, due to the herd-like behaviour of those that do the raiding, it isn't worth for any PK-er to pick you off. He (or she) is much better off participating in the raiding process as it reduces the chances of you ending up dead, and increase the chances of you returning home with something more valuable.

But when there are no targets to hit, it means there are no PK-ers, which means the entire food chain of teams, clans, alliances and clusters that depend on the lone PK-ers out there collapses. And this is what we see today.

So can it be revived?

Some would argue that it doesn't need reviving, that PK-ers have their own game these days in OSRS (07). But if the current trend is anything to go on, it will not take long before that chapter of RuneScape is closed as well. If anything, we can deduce that whatever 07 did for the PK-ing community (temporary or not), we can expect Legacy Mode to do the same for The Wilderness in RS3.

We need a permanent solution. Many people have put forward many suggestions to revitalize The Wilderness, but even something as convoluted as Warbands hasn't really done it. And there's a reason for that.

Let's take the reverse Runespan vs Abyss example. Apply it to any other aspect of RuneScape, and see what happens. What I mean by this is the following: Suppose you put a Bossmonster somewhere in the wild. You would HAVE to get to it through the wild, none of that fancy-nancy teleporting to and from it, and you make it drop something valuable without a bank like the one at Nex at the front door. All good you might think, as it would mean there are people in the wild now that can drop something of value. But there is a problem.

There are already many boss monsters with valuable drops in the rest of RuneScape. The risk vs reward equation is never going to come anything near the chart of what exists already in the rest of RuneScape, simply because of the risk of losing your high-end gear.

Similar logic can be applied to just about everything else that you may want to copy (while pressing the enhance button) from something already existing in RuneScape. So, the conclusion is that something new and, better yet, something unique must be invented that can draw people into The Wilderness.

I don't mean other over-rewarding once-a-day distractions. I mean something that sees a flow of people going in and out like it was the Rune Essence mine before the Pure Essence update. And it has to be essential, like the Sawmill was to Construction the moment the skill came out. And it has to remain unique, like Rocktails that could only be obtained in the Living Rock Caverns before they were put into Vorago and Divine Locations. Just imagine for a second; how different would the game be if you could only obtain Rocktails in the wild?

How fortunate it is that we have a new skill on the horizon.


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Tags: Clans Combat Economics Emergent Gameplay Minigames and Miniquests PvP Suggestions

Will you use Menaphos to train your skills?



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