Runescape has few skills that capitalize on satisfying the drive of every player. One of these is Slayer that, since the advent of Smoking Kills, has experienced a renaissance. Once a quiet skill with few benefits other than training time and variety of tasks (as versus camping one particular monster), Slayer has blossomed into a main source of revenue and a highly coveted cape for a large demographic of players - players that span every race and gender as well as age group.
So one might be well advised to consider his (or her) slaying habits and adjust them for the harsh truth of a changing tide. Let's face it, Slayer monsters everywhere are crowded. There's no magic world where you can have all the gargoyles to yourself. But, if you and your slaying partners of the moment adhere to some basic rules of etiquette, there's no reason that the sort of territorial, name-calling, trash-talking temper tantrums that we all have learned to equate with training Slayer should be the norm.
Just take what happened to me today as an example. Today I had the pleasure of listening to two very young men (and I use the term lightly) discussing whether their girlfriends (which I don't believe exist) were better used for one option or another. (Both options were quite disgusting, of course, and the conversation should have been had over pm, if at all.) I had the choice of turning chat off or hopping worlds - since our world had 4 slayers present, I chose to hop.
Keeping this experience in mind:
- Discussion should be appropriate. (If you must compare your girlfriend's talents, then please, do so over pm.)
- Count slayers in an area you enter. If you are the fifth slayer in a small room, it's not at all polite to stomp around declaring that Slayer is always crowded and you're using potions so people should give you precedence even though you've just arrived. Face the facts. We're all using potions if that's the usual way of slaying a monster. You aren't doing anything new or special. And if you are, then you should probably test it on a less crowded world, anyway.
- Don't set a cannon up in an already crowded area. Yes, I understand cannoning is faster, but rudely chasing everyone out of an area just because you've set yours up doesn't mean other people who also have one with them weren't waiting for the area to empty before utilizing it.
- Pick a spot and stay in it! I have no idea how many times I've found one area with one recurring monster and had someone who was monopolizing two or three hop over to happily slay mine, too. If I got a free nickel every time, I guarantee I'd have a year's worth of membership paid up by now. We all know the monsters spawn here, here, and here. So, for crying out loud, why do you need to hop through every spawn when there are two other people waiting as well? Do you think a magical new monster spawn is coming to save you? I never fail to laugh at slayers who race around the room, just missing every spawn because they couldn't stay in one place!
- This now leads us to emergencies. If you have something to do when you've logged on for Slayer, then log off again. Standing in an area doing nothing is risky for some monsters, and expecting people to watch out for you is asking to become a laughingstock. If your mom really needed the garbage to go out, then you should have done that before logging on and standing in the middle of aggressive monsters, shouldn't you? Yelling "I gotta take the trash out for my mom!" in Kuradal's dungeon at gargoyles is, well, not advisable. Not even if you run.
- When monster camping, such as with spiritual mages or abyssal demons, it's not really that great a hardship to get out of a slayer's way, and it only takes a simple question: "slayer?" to ascertain whether you should move into a different area to camp (or indeed, whether the slayer should change worlds.)
Remember, politeness is free, and usually far less difficult than defusing a swath of foul-mouthed garbage from a player who's determined to take his bad day out on the world. I'm not saying we need to consult Emily Post to slay together - she'd be far too obsessed with how many teaspoons it'd take to eat a shark, anyway - but the lack of manners in summer Slayers is appalling. We only have 171 worlds to share - let's work to keep them pleasant.
