The Tip.It Times


Issue 17099gp

Rebooting RuneScape (On a Few Servers)

Written by and edited by Hamtaro

Legacy issues are a bane to the current player. I mean issues that were a major problem and ended up being altered or patched, yet still leave footprints in the game. Item dupes, bot abuse, high alchemy, rares, infinite items, 76k exploitation, and no limit GE trading impact players to this day. Bot abuse and infinite items brought in enormous amounts of items allowing for relatively quick and cheap 99s. High alchemy, 76k, and climbing boots injected enormous amounts of gp into the game. A non-restricted GE, essentially a trade bot, allowed for rapid migration of items to a few players. There's no acceptable manner in the current game to remove any problems created by these issues that occurred over the past 10 years of the current game or existing accounts.

Right now, the only way to remove these legacy problems would be a complete reboot of all accounts and banks. Any player that didn't melt down in pure rage would then start with 1 in all skills and no bank or quests. Such a thing would be economic suicide if applied to all accounts on all servers. If applied on all servers.

However, Jagex in the last 8 years has shown players can have an account with the same character developing on two different paths: Classic and RS2. Classic was relegated to a few servers and eventually became limited to players that logged on during a certain time frame. In addition, Classic had virtually no upgrade. Aside from hard core enthusiasts, Classic is dead property. Still, it shows that having two character paths is possible. Many have a level 138 character in RS2 and started out the same character with fresh stats and bank on Classic when the servers opened.

Most have figured out where I'm heading by now. Jagex needs to offer RS2 servers, not just Classic, that are updated every week, where member players can start up a fresh character. Anybody that starts off on those servers knows that no one else fished, cut a tree, smelted a bar or whacked a goblin prior to a certain date. There's not trillions of gp in the system due to years of high alchemy, rares are non-existent, nobody has 99s thanks to some mechanic that existed 5 years ago. These servers would be like the Classic servers in that they'd form a closed off economy. In addition, these would be RuneScape servers with new updates and patches every week since it's still the same game. That ensures it would not become dead content like the Classic server.

What's amazing is that there'd be no down side. A member player is still a member player putting time into RS. If level 120 Ms Button doesn't want to play her character on these new servers on as level 3, she can go on the regular servers with Ms Button as a level 120 and maxed quests. Jagex would not need massive amounts of overhead to support it. In addition, Jagex gets a great gauge on players' willingness to start over from scratch, perhaps leading the way to create a new set of reboot servers in 2 to 3 years.

Gameplay, even though it's essentially the same game, would take a different path. There'd be no F2P backbone supporting the economy so all items would have to be collected by members. Beyond that, fewer players would take part in these servers meaning even fewer items would enter the game early on. Common tactics such as Dragonstone jewelry teleports, tele tabs, and grinding buyables would not be available. What would leveling be like without a mass of players making cannonballs, hunting chins, or chopping yews be like? Brave new world (servers?) right there.

Assuming such a thing came to pass, it would be important that there be some slight changes. The new servers should be updated two to four weeks after the main servers are updated (yeah, an actual beta phase). This would prevent catastrophic bugs from being introduced as commonly occurs with updates. With regard to old holiday events, the character would get access to all event rewards that the character has on the regular server. While it would be tempting to alter gameplay with new servers, that introduces the need to have two separate updates meaning fewer updates overall or one set getting updated less. Anything beyond that (making slayer item drops assigned task only, remove or reduce prayer protect, remove alchemy, restrict the Grand Exchange by a factor of 10, etc.) would be beyond the scope of this article. Remember, though, that the easier it would be to upkeep the new server, the more likely Jagex would be to implement the idea.

Prior to the bot nuke, such an idea, though tempting, would have been pointless. Member bots would be even more used on new servers due to the enormous demand of raw material. However, bots are being well controlled at the moment. In addition, this freed up quite a few servers that are not needed thanks to the decrease in the F2P playing population. The investment by Jagex would be minimal and the rewards would be great should the playing community embrace it. Jagex, reboot RuneScape (on a few servers).


Do you have any thoughts or comments about this week's articles? Want to discuss these articles with your fellow RuneScapers? We invite you to discuss them in this forum topic.


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Tags: Grand Exchange and RS Market Suggestions

Will you use Menaphos to train your skills?



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