Note: This will be my last regularly scheduled blog post. I am now a member of the Editorial Panel on Rune Tips (website www.tip.it), and will post a link here when an article of mine is published there. I may also post occasional things on here, but they will not be scheduled regularly.
I'll make this short. For Christmas, I don't want a massive xp bonus, or a frozen ice mask, or free membership, or moderator status. I'm not merely stating this to avoid hypocrisy from my last post a mere week ago.
I've realized I neglected my friends. I prioritized mining experience, among other things, over doing something with my friends. And unfortunately, I didn't realize what I was doing until it was too late.
I've talked to some of them recently, and they're different. We have drifted apart. This anguish can never be fixed-not even by Santa.
Or can it?
Friday, December 16, 2011
Friday, December 9, 2011
A Christmas Story
This week I have decided to write a short RuneScape-themed holiday-themed narrative. Please enjoy!
You never believed in Santa, did you?
But that was...before. It was before the year you discovered the computer game RuneScape. It was before you spent nights routinely huddled in front of your computer screen in a quest to gain experience and levels. It was before you decided to spend your entire allowance on a game to buy membership because it was entirely that amazing. It was before you dreamed of such a powerful desire that certainly only Santa could fulfill. Yes, this year was certainly different.
You knew you were too big for Santa's lap, but that had not deterred you from writing him a letter anyway, in which you apologized for not believing and asked for your Christmas gift: to become the ultimate RuneScape player. And although you had planned on staying awake all night to greet Santa yourself, it was nearly midnight and your eyes drooped with sleep. Your chest began to fall forward, and you feel asleep so quickly that you didn't feel your face strike the keyboard in front of you.
Without even realizing that you had fallen asleep, you jerked violently awake. Indeed, the computer was still turned on and the RuneScape game screen illuminated your room. Squinting from the sudden exposure to bright light, you wondered where all the jibberish typed in the username box came from. Thinking nothing of it, you erased it and entered your login credentials as usual and notice two unread messages that greet you. With your heart pounding you click the hyperlink to your message inbox, but it fails to load. Returning to RuneScape, you see the connection has been lost and you are soon back to the login screen.
Paniced, you enter your login information but the connection to the login server cannot be established. You attempt to load a different page but nothing will load. You lift up your computer to fling it out the window but something stops you-you see that the wireless internet switch was off. Panting heavily, you turn it back on and navigate to your message center and cannot believe your eyes. The first message informs you that you have been granted player and forum moderator privileges, and the second is a personal note of congratulations on achieving the maximum experience possible in every skill. Returning to RuneScape you gasp in shock as hovering over your skills yields the total of 200,000,000 xp for each one. You type in your bank PIN to find a brimming money pouch, multiple partyhats, masks, spirits shields, chaotic weapons, edible rares, and a complete set of holiday items, even the yoyo that you tragically missed. And you realize something else has also changed: your username is "The_Ultimate" instead of your previous one.
"It's all very strange," you think, not realizing things are about to become even more so. People begin to follow you-everyone in sight on the game and will not leave. Incessantly you are peppered with requests for money, your training methods, and and assault of spam that begins to lag your computer. You turn on your private chat and realize none of your familiar friends remain on the list. Instantly a raging flood of messages conquers your chat window. You quickly turn off all your chats and recognize playing is impossible due to the onslaught of followers. You quickly switch to a nearly vacant world, but have less than a minute of silence before your frenzied followers are on your tail again. Pop-up ads begin to appear faster than you can close them.
You feel something cold touching the back of your neck and your hand snaps back to brush it away. But before you can attempt it, you feel a sharp pain searing down your neck, and everything blends into darkness.
Slowly the world emerges, and you realize you had been asleep the entire time. Although it was all a dream, the pain literally in your neck could not be more real. Slowly you understand what must have happened-the chair tipped backwards and hit the ground. Groaning slightly with the pain, you log back onto RuneScape on your awaiting computer. But instead of the familiar lobby screen, you are greeted by a message informing you that you have been chosen for dual player and forum moderator privileges, inspiring a horrible sense of deja vu. And at the bottom, it informs you that you will also be granted the maximum experience in all skills.
Your hands tremble and heart pounds, almost threatening to break free. There are options to accept or decline, and your mouse cursor is between them. You attempt to move the mouse, but your hand refuses to obey your brain and does not move. You try to strike the keyboard with your other hand, but it is equally unresponsive. You have an idea to turn off the power switch which is somewhere by your feet, but in horror you realize they are also paralyzed.
Completely unexpectedly, something taps you on the shoulder, but not menacingly-it is a soft, gentle pat. With a complete sense of calm you find yourself able to move and whip around. Your mouth hangs open at the incredible sight.
"Merry Christmas," says Santa, and winks before disappearing into the night.
You never believed in Santa, did you?
But that was...before. It was before the year you discovered the computer game RuneScape. It was before you spent nights routinely huddled in front of your computer screen in a quest to gain experience and levels. It was before you decided to spend your entire allowance on a game to buy membership because it was entirely that amazing. It was before you dreamed of such a powerful desire that certainly only Santa could fulfill. Yes, this year was certainly different.
You knew you were too big for Santa's lap, but that had not deterred you from writing him a letter anyway, in which you apologized for not believing and asked for your Christmas gift: to become the ultimate RuneScape player. And although you had planned on staying awake all night to greet Santa yourself, it was nearly midnight and your eyes drooped with sleep. Your chest began to fall forward, and you feel asleep so quickly that you didn't feel your face strike the keyboard in front of you.
Without even realizing that you had fallen asleep, you jerked violently awake. Indeed, the computer was still turned on and the RuneScape game screen illuminated your room. Squinting from the sudden exposure to bright light, you wondered where all the jibberish typed in the username box came from. Thinking nothing of it, you erased it and entered your login credentials as usual and notice two unread messages that greet you. With your heart pounding you click the hyperlink to your message inbox, but it fails to load. Returning to RuneScape, you see the connection has been lost and you are soon back to the login screen.
Paniced, you enter your login information but the connection to the login server cannot be established. You attempt to load a different page but nothing will load. You lift up your computer to fling it out the window but something stops you-you see that the wireless internet switch was off. Panting heavily, you turn it back on and navigate to your message center and cannot believe your eyes. The first message informs you that you have been granted player and forum moderator privileges, and the second is a personal note of congratulations on achieving the maximum experience possible in every skill. Returning to RuneScape you gasp in shock as hovering over your skills yields the total of 200,000,000 xp for each one. You type in your bank PIN to find a brimming money pouch, multiple partyhats, masks, spirits shields, chaotic weapons, edible rares, and a complete set of holiday items, even the yoyo that you tragically missed. And you realize something else has also changed: your username is "The_Ultimate" instead of your previous one.
"It's all very strange," you think, not realizing things are about to become even more so. People begin to follow you-everyone in sight on the game and will not leave. Incessantly you are peppered with requests for money, your training methods, and and assault of spam that begins to lag your computer. You turn on your private chat and realize none of your familiar friends remain on the list. Instantly a raging flood of messages conquers your chat window. You quickly turn off all your chats and recognize playing is impossible due to the onslaught of followers. You quickly switch to a nearly vacant world, but have less than a minute of silence before your frenzied followers are on your tail again. Pop-up ads begin to appear faster than you can close them.
You feel something cold touching the back of your neck and your hand snaps back to brush it away. But before you can attempt it, you feel a sharp pain searing down your neck, and everything blends into darkness.
Slowly the world emerges, and you realize you had been asleep the entire time. Although it was all a dream, the pain literally in your neck could not be more real. Slowly you understand what must have happened-the chair tipped backwards and hit the ground. Groaning slightly with the pain, you log back onto RuneScape on your awaiting computer. But instead of the familiar lobby screen, you are greeted by a message informing you that you have been chosen for dual player and forum moderator privileges, inspiring a horrible sense of deja vu. And at the bottom, it informs you that you will also be granted the maximum experience in all skills.
Your hands tremble and heart pounds, almost threatening to break free. There are options to accept or decline, and your mouse cursor is between them. You attempt to move the mouse, but your hand refuses to obey your brain and does not move. You try to strike the keyboard with your other hand, but it is equally unresponsive. You have an idea to turn off the power switch which is somewhere by your feet, but in horror you realize they are also paralyzed.
Completely unexpectedly, something taps you on the shoulder, but not menacingly-it is a soft, gentle pat. With a complete sense of calm you find yourself able to move and whip around. Your mouth hangs open at the incredible sight.
"Merry Christmas," says Santa, and winks before disappearing into the night.
Friday, December 2, 2011
The Dilemma of "Official"/"Unofficial" Worlds
For better or worse, one can certainly agree that organized player
activity has never been the same as prior to the release of "Themed
Worlds" [THEME] a full four years ago. Sometimes more themed worlds
have been created, and at other times they have been removed or
reshuffled. Nevertheless, through many other updates, such the removal
and reinstatement of free trade, they have remained standing. However,
many players seem dissatisfied with them, even though these worlds
accomplish the job, so to speak, and have created their own alternatives on non-themed worlds. But first I digress to explain a
little about these two types of worlds, and then proceed to compare
them.
Players can choose which server they want to play on. Each server is termed a "world" and accompanied by a brief description involving either a country or an activity, where the latter group of servers are collectively called "Themed Worlds." As a brief overview, the choice of which worlds became "themed," at Jagex's disposition, seems apparently conjured up in the same manner as generating random lottery tickets, with some notable exceptions. Currently, considering all worlds on the English version of the game, the themed worlds actually outnumber non-themed ones by a small margin of fifty-eight to fifty-four (yes, I counted them).
Indeed, players often refer to these worlds as "official" in comparison with "unofficial" worlds. On these unofficial worlds, a large community of players congregate in activities, much like on official worlds, somewhat "unexpectedly" because Jagex had probably marked another world for that activity. Some worlds marked for one purpose by Jagex may actually be used more extensively for another.
A relatively player may expect that an unofficial world would stand virtually no chance against an official one. After all, once players visit a themed world for some activity, and after seeing the vast quantity of fellow players there, why would they ever choose to go to or form another community on a different world? And furthermore, how would a substantial flow of traffic be maintained without exhaustive effort?
Consider, all debates about it aside, training Dungeoneering, particularly in free-to-play. After a petition, world 7 was officially crowned the world for this activity. For any experienced player who has not spent some time training on this world, I recommend that they do so themselves. Those who have will easily recall some of the frustrations of this world. One issue that more experienced players often bump into on this world is the high density of relatively inexperienced players who, the other players claim, impede their progress by making them wait or have different ideas of how to best complete a dungeon. And while everyone is new at some point, grouping similar levels of players together would seem more effective.
The natural conclusion might seem to be to create another Dungeoneering world with a required level. But aptitude does not necessarily correlate with level, especially in the case of players creating another account. Furthermore, such stratification has proved ineffective and/or unpopular before, and is manifested in the removal of the world for skill level 1,000 and over. This leaves it up to players to find a solution, which came in the form of creating an unofficial world, world 61, for training Dungeoneering.
The advantages of this world are probably already clear. To be succinct, players know what they are doing. Special arrangements for parties are set up, and long strings of floors are completed without breaks, resulting in far greater experience, for all party members, than one could hope to achieve with randomly selected people from the official world. No one will rant for ten minutes when an affectionately named "dinosaur" (bovimastyx) is accidentally killed or quit after a mistake results in a death.
However, these unofficial worlds often have disadvantages due to their very nature. For example, the focus on the Dungeoneering world is to gain experience as fast as humanly possible, which can turn some of its participants into elitists. A small mistake may be enough to elicit flaming and cause other players not to invite the victimized player to future parties. Generally, the treatment of intermediate level players is a little harsh, especially if one attempts something slightly unorthodox.
Finally, there is the issue of perpetuating traffic to this world. In this case, it is done mostly by word-of-mouth. I was told by a friend about it so I visited there and racked up a substantial amount of Dungeoneering experience over a few months. And although I told friends about it, no massive campaigning was required to have people there since they knew they could accomplish their goal-just as the title on the official world successfully lured a far greater number of people.
Not all official words have an unofficial counterpart. For example, the various official rune running worlds are adequate, and despite their sometimes low traffic, serve their purpose well. In such cases there is no need for an unofficial world.
Although it may seem strange, unofficial worlds owe their success due to the very fact that they are not official. Imagine if they were made official with the promotion of "high-level" but without entry requirements tomorrow. The consequence would be an inundation of new players and the old community would most likely migrate to another world. Of course new players can stumble upon unofficial worlds, but they are quite easily recognized, even by factors as innocuous as ignorance of slang. But as more and more themed game worlds are created, one should also recognize the increasing importance of unofficial worlds...unofficially, of course.
[1] "Update: Themed Worlds." Runescape Wiki, n.d. Web. 29 November 2011.
Players can choose which server they want to play on. Each server is termed a "world" and accompanied by a brief description involving either a country or an activity, where the latter group of servers are collectively called "Themed Worlds." As a brief overview, the choice of which worlds became "themed," at Jagex's disposition, seems apparently conjured up in the same manner as generating random lottery tickets, with some notable exceptions. Currently, considering all worlds on the English version of the game, the themed worlds actually outnumber non-themed ones by a small margin of fifty-eight to fifty-four (yes, I counted them).
Indeed, players often refer to these worlds as "official" in comparison with "unofficial" worlds. On these unofficial worlds, a large community of players congregate in activities, much like on official worlds, somewhat "unexpectedly" because Jagex had probably marked another world for that activity. Some worlds marked for one purpose by Jagex may actually be used more extensively for another.
A relatively player may expect that an unofficial world would stand virtually no chance against an official one. After all, once players visit a themed world for some activity, and after seeing the vast quantity of fellow players there, why would they ever choose to go to or form another community on a different world? And furthermore, how would a substantial flow of traffic be maintained without exhaustive effort?
Consider, all debates about it aside, training Dungeoneering, particularly in free-to-play. After a petition, world 7 was officially crowned the world for this activity. For any experienced player who has not spent some time training on this world, I recommend that they do so themselves. Those who have will easily recall some of the frustrations of this world. One issue that more experienced players often bump into on this world is the high density of relatively inexperienced players who, the other players claim, impede their progress by making them wait or have different ideas of how to best complete a dungeon. And while everyone is new at some point, grouping similar levels of players together would seem more effective.
The natural conclusion might seem to be to create another Dungeoneering world with a required level. But aptitude does not necessarily correlate with level, especially in the case of players creating another account. Furthermore, such stratification has proved ineffective and/or unpopular before, and is manifested in the removal of the world for skill level 1,000 and over. This leaves it up to players to find a solution, which came in the form of creating an unofficial world, world 61, for training Dungeoneering.
The advantages of this world are probably already clear. To be succinct, players know what they are doing. Special arrangements for parties are set up, and long strings of floors are completed without breaks, resulting in far greater experience, for all party members, than one could hope to achieve with randomly selected people from the official world. No one will rant for ten minutes when an affectionately named "dinosaur" (bovimastyx) is accidentally killed or quit after a mistake results in a death.
However, these unofficial worlds often have disadvantages due to their very nature. For example, the focus on the Dungeoneering world is to gain experience as fast as humanly possible, which can turn some of its participants into elitists. A small mistake may be enough to elicit flaming and cause other players not to invite the victimized player to future parties. Generally, the treatment of intermediate level players is a little harsh, especially if one attempts something slightly unorthodox.
Finally, there is the issue of perpetuating traffic to this world. In this case, it is done mostly by word-of-mouth. I was told by a friend about it so I visited there and racked up a substantial amount of Dungeoneering experience over a few months. And although I told friends about it, no massive campaigning was required to have people there since they knew they could accomplish their goal-just as the title on the official world successfully lured a far greater number of people.
Not all official words have an unofficial counterpart. For example, the various official rune running worlds are adequate, and despite their sometimes low traffic, serve their purpose well. In such cases there is no need for an unofficial world.
Although it may seem strange, unofficial worlds owe their success due to the very fact that they are not official. Imagine if they were made official with the promotion of "high-level" but without entry requirements tomorrow. The consequence would be an inundation of new players and the old community would most likely migrate to another world. Of course new players can stumble upon unofficial worlds, but they are quite easily recognized, even by factors as innocuous as ignorance of slang. But as more and more themed game worlds are created, one should also recognize the increasing importance of unofficial worlds...unofficially, of course.
[1] "Update: Themed Worlds." Runescape Wiki, n.d. Web. 29 November 2011.
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