Runehack123
2012-11-17 11:46:23
Hey there,
Welcome to the "Why play RS?" discussion! The title says it all.
I'll try to get the ball rolling with this intro and then hopefully things will go from there. If you don't play RS please do still leave a comment on your thoughts about the game (if any) or players who do play it. :)
This is merely an outspoken opinion so if you feel offended, by all means take it out on what I said, but please don't take it out on me or my bad grammar mistakes. :(
I'm going to start off with one of the most commonly asked in-game questions: "How do you make money?"
Well, how do you make money? How do you make enough cash to be able to afford that gear?
The only good way to make money these days seems to require extremely high levels (close to maximum!), hours invested into the game and whatnot: PVM and selling dungeons.
Flower hosting also requires a certain "cash stack" to be taken serious, which in turn leaves me to go on to my next point.
Money making is bad and skill training is grindy and repetitive! RS is likely to be the most repetitive game I've ever played. Why is this? How come the game developers encourage this type of game-play so much? It's as if they are leaving the average RS player no choice, but to buy an account online, use a bot to play for them or buy their RSGP for about 5$/10M last time I checked.
In my opinion, the RS game-mechanics are just begging to be exploited by hours of botting since no normal person (Yes, Suomi is technically a homo sapiens…emphasis lies on technically here!) could keep up with this type of game-play.
I highly admire those few patient people who will spend 3 hours on runescape a week and work their way up from there, but (hate to break this to you) RS is a game that feeds on addiction. There's always more to work towards to. Just got your max cape? Why not get 200m firemaking xp? Why not spend 3000 hours at castle wars and get an even cooler cape?
So with addiction, there's always going to be a longing for more!
Moving on, on the path to those maximum levels the average player will always find themselves scraping for money. Once they get those "maxed out" levels and find themselves making millions they no longer seem to have any more use for it other than gambling it in duels or buying themselves a collection of fancy hats. Problem Jagex?
What do people work for anyways in this game? Higher skills? More money? Some sort of cool item?
Strangely enough, RSGP will help in almost anything you train/buy. Except Agility.
So here we are back at our starting dilemma:
How Do I Make Money In Runescape??
To further clarify I mean that you are not Chuck Norris and still on your way to getting the maximum skills (which annoyingly are needed to make DECENT cash in the first place - 5m+/h).
Probably the most common path to take is making money while training a skill. This is often slow and not the best way to train it leaving you doing something more than you actually want to. While Mr.X is mining in the living rock caverns with his full mining suit, a titan, dragon pickaxe and casting low-alchemy on those precious gold ores, SillyWinny36 is having a hard time travelling back and forth from the heavily-competed Varrock mine.
Allow me to elaborate on this a bit more. The only way for SillyWinny36 to make money at this stage of the game is to do repetitive things like that or begging or… buying RSGP!
This in turn results in a great economic inflation of the RS economy due to botfarming…
…On one hand you have raw materials that players (all the way from newbie to being not too far off from reaching high levels) desperately need to be high (in order to fund all their skills, buy better gear and make their training more efficient), but that are dropping in price on a daily basis.
On a side note here - no they don't need those materials to be high. No you don't need money to train skills. e.g. burying bones found in the wilderness to 99 prayer is technically possible, but any player will seek to do the most efficient method in order to reduce the already exceedingly shocking amounts of repetitive tasks during game-play. Agreed?
…On the other hand you have items spiking and staying at extremely high prices e.g. rare items and godwars gear due to goldfarmers pumping RSGP into the system by selling it to players. Suddenly, all these items become affordable to anyone who can pay up and therefore this results in an increase in price due to higher demands.
So although goldfarmers are making less money due to overfarming money methods, these methods become less and less appealing to the average player, which then results in more players actually being forced to buy RSGP due to high prices of luxury items and no realistic way of getting them in their own time.
After spending your first 1000 hours in runescape you will still feel like you have so much further to go and that just about nothing has changed when it comes to making cash.
Let's face it. Where is the enjoyment factor?
Based on the state of the game it seems only ethical to be using bots or buying RS gold in order to avoid hours of potentially grueling repetitive tasks just to get a false sense of achievement.
Why false? Because none of it is real and quite frankly it is hardly deserved. Wasting your life like that when you could be doing so much more? Using it as a casual gateway to escaping reality on rare occasions is OK, but the sad truth is that a lot of people make their life about runescape.
I just don't get it! Believe me, I try. I really do.
Q&A
What do I believe has Jagex done to counter repetitive game mechanics?
Introducing "faster/easier" training methods such as barbarian fishing, burning vines or player-house altars Jagex has reduced gaming hours required to achieve certain skill levels.
Personally, I still believe what they are asking of players is extreme. At least make the skills more varied and enjoyable instead of them being all about hours of repetitive grinding!
What do I believe has Jagex done to counter goldfarming and bots?
Well, so far their general approach seems to have been mass-banning. I am extremely against mass-banning since they're just getting people to quit the game altogether. How can they expect someone to start from scratch after seeing his account permanently banned or stats reset?
Why not actually focus on the game mechanics themselves? Removing wilderness and free-trade would be one such option, but it will cause a lot of player dissatisfaction. So why not make this game less about repetition, hard-to-achieve goals and more about what an online MMORPG should really be!
So what key features do I look for in a perfect MMORPG scenario?
It's simple. Having fun! That doesn't mean being completely self-obsessed and trying to compensate for things that shall not be named by showing off skills and gear, but creating a game that moves away from the whole 'single-player, one man all to himself' concept.
Any game should be about sharing experiences with others. RS tries to achieve this through mini-games, clan-based activities and whatnot, but game-play seems to suit a rather self-centred character more than anything.
Welcome to the "Why play RS?" discussion! The title says it all.
I'll try to get the ball rolling with this intro and then hopefully things will go from there. If you don't play RS please do still leave a comment on your thoughts about the game (if any) or players who do play it. :)
This is merely an outspoken opinion so if you feel offended, by all means take it out on what I said, but please don't take it out on me or my bad grammar mistakes. :(
I'm going to start off with one of the most commonly asked in-game questions: "How do you make money?"
Well, how do you make money? How do you make enough cash to be able to afford that gear?
The only good way to make money these days seems to require extremely high levels (close to maximum!), hours invested into the game and whatnot: PVM and selling dungeons.
Flower hosting also requires a certain "cash stack" to be taken serious, which in turn leaves me to go on to my next point.
Money making is bad and skill training is grindy and repetitive! RS is likely to be the most repetitive game I've ever played. Why is this? How come the game developers encourage this type of game-play so much? It's as if they are leaving the average RS player no choice, but to buy an account online, use a bot to play for them or buy their RSGP for about 5$/10M last time I checked.
In my opinion, the RS game-mechanics are just begging to be exploited by hours of botting since no normal person (Yes, Suomi is technically a homo sapiens…emphasis lies on technically here!) could keep up with this type of game-play.
I highly admire those few patient people who will spend 3 hours on runescape a week and work their way up from there, but (hate to break this to you) RS is a game that feeds on addiction. There's always more to work towards to. Just got your max cape? Why not get 200m firemaking xp? Why not spend 3000 hours at castle wars and get an even cooler cape?
So with addiction, there's always going to be a longing for more!
Moving on, on the path to those maximum levels the average player will always find themselves scraping for money. Once they get those "maxed out" levels and find themselves making millions they no longer seem to have any more use for it other than gambling it in duels or buying themselves a collection of fancy hats. Problem Jagex?
What do people work for anyways in this game? Higher skills? More money? Some sort of cool item?
Strangely enough, RSGP will help in almost anything you train/buy. Except Agility.
So here we are back at our starting dilemma:
How Do I Make Money In Runescape??
To further clarify I mean that you are not Chuck Norris and still on your way to getting the maximum skills (which annoyingly are needed to make DECENT cash in the first place - 5m+/h).
Probably the most common path to take is making money while training a skill. This is often slow and not the best way to train it leaving you doing something more than you actually want to. While Mr.X is mining in the living rock caverns with his full mining suit, a titan, dragon pickaxe and casting low-alchemy on those precious gold ores, SillyWinny36 is having a hard time travelling back and forth from the heavily-competed Varrock mine.
Allow me to elaborate on this a bit more. The only way for SillyWinny36 to make money at this stage of the game is to do repetitive things like that or begging or… buying RSGP!
This in turn results in a great economic inflation of the RS economy due to botfarming…
…On one hand you have raw materials that players (all the way from newbie to being not too far off from reaching high levels) desperately need to be high (in order to fund all their skills, buy better gear and make their training more efficient), but that are dropping in price on a daily basis.
On a side note here - no they don't need those materials to be high. No you don't need money to train skills. e.g. burying bones found in the wilderness to 99 prayer is technically possible, but any player will seek to do the most efficient method in order to reduce the already exceedingly shocking amounts of repetitive tasks during game-play. Agreed?
…On the other hand you have items spiking and staying at extremely high prices e.g. rare items and godwars gear due to goldfarmers pumping RSGP into the system by selling it to players. Suddenly, all these items become affordable to anyone who can pay up and therefore this results in an increase in price due to higher demands.
So although goldfarmers are making less money due to overfarming money methods, these methods become less and less appealing to the average player, which then results in more players actually being forced to buy RSGP due to high prices of luxury items and no realistic way of getting them in their own time.
After spending your first 1000 hours in runescape you will still feel like you have so much further to go and that just about nothing has changed when it comes to making cash.
Let's face it. Where is the enjoyment factor?
Based on the state of the game it seems only ethical to be using bots or buying RS gold in order to avoid hours of potentially grueling repetitive tasks just to get a false sense of achievement.
Why false? Because none of it is real and quite frankly it is hardly deserved. Wasting your life like that when you could be doing so much more? Using it as a casual gateway to escaping reality on rare occasions is OK, but the sad truth is that a lot of people make their life about runescape.
I just don't get it! Believe me, I try. I really do.
Q&A
What do I believe has Jagex done to counter repetitive game mechanics?
Introducing "faster/easier" training methods such as barbarian fishing, burning vines or player-house altars Jagex has reduced gaming hours required to achieve certain skill levels.
Personally, I still believe what they are asking of players is extreme. At least make the skills more varied and enjoyable instead of them being all about hours of repetitive grinding!
What do I believe has Jagex done to counter goldfarming and bots?
Well, so far their general approach seems to have been mass-banning. I am extremely against mass-banning since they're just getting people to quit the game altogether. How can they expect someone to start from scratch after seeing his account permanently banned or stats reset?
Why not actually focus on the game mechanics themselves? Removing wilderness and free-trade would be one such option, but it will cause a lot of player dissatisfaction. So why not make this game less about repetition, hard-to-achieve goals and more about what an online MMORPG should really be!
So what key features do I look for in a perfect MMORPG scenario?
It's simple. Having fun! That doesn't mean being completely self-obsessed and trying to compensate for things that shall not be named by showing off skills and gear, but creating a game that moves away from the whole 'single-player, one man all to himself' concept.
Any game should be about sharing experiences with others. RS tries to achieve this through mini-games, clan-based activities and whatnot, but game-play seems to suit a rather self-centred character more than anything.
