Runescape: Bringing Home the Bacon just didn't Sizzle for me

Finally did the "Bringing Home the Bacon" quest.  Monique and I treat quests like a date, and enjoy them together.  But this time around, we've both been under the weather and way behind.  So it took a while to get around to this quest.

'Bacon' wasn't a serious quest on any level.  It was short, very easy (novice level) and emphasized humor.  In a world where pigs are mostly useless, only Eli Bacon and Martin the Master Farmer still raise them.  With the discovery of bacon (the food) Eli fears the remaining hog population will be decimated.  It's our job to discover a use for pigs that will make them popular.  Eli hopes that, once Pigs are safe from extinction, he can introduce bacon to the world (and get rich).

There's a lot of comedy.  Some of it deliberately creepy.  Puts me in mind of "Motel Hell".  The old scary movie with the tagline "It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent's Fritters!"

Anyway, it's pretty mellow.  You have to distract a few villagers, do a favor for Martin the Farmer... somebody's been pickpocketing him...  Now I'll never feel right about picking his pockets again!  Raise a piglet, train it, and show it off around Runescape.

Out of it all, you get a piggy pet, and some new summoning creatures, and access to bacon.  You can eat the bacon, or cook it into higher-level better-healing food.

The rewards are scalable, but to be honest, even the best of the rewards just aren't that 'rewarding' if you're a high-level player.  It was an easy quest for beginners, with rewards going up to somewhere about mid-level for cooking and summoning.

If you like pets, the pig is a pretty fair reward.  Bringing Home the Bacon had some light-hearted moments, but overall just didn't catch my fancy or hold my interest.  What the heck... you can't win them all.  At least it was a short quest.

Runescape: Last-minute Maintenance before RS3 Release

Recently, logging in and playing Runescape has been more adventurous than usual.  Lots of different problems, and many complaints on the forums.  Random disconnects make players afraid to do anything risky.  Who wants to risk all their gear in a boss fight if you might be disconnected during it?

Game-loading problems.  Loss or distortion of audio.  Black screens instead of the usual game screen.  Dramatic frame rate drops.  Quite the list, and coming at a very bad time considering Jagex is busily promoting the release of Runescape 3 next week.

Have you experienced any of these?  I've suffered the black screen. Had to close my browser and run CCleaner before it cleared up.  Some people were luckier, only needing to wait a bit, teleport somewhere, or log out and back in to fix it.  It's happened about 3 times for me.

Also had the loading problems.  Click to load the game into the browser window (using Google Chrome), the logo comes up, and then it just... sits there.  Apparently doing nothing.  Sometimes, if I go away and come back it's okay.  Other times, it's better to just click re-load and try again.  This happens fairly often currently.

The audio problems have happened more to Monique than to myself, though both of us experienced it while doing the new 'Bringing Home the Bacon' quest.  I often play without audio, so may not have noticed every time.

I haven't personally seen the fps problem, but several people on the forum report that it's tied to the 'bloom' lighting effect, and certain graphic-intensive actions like casting Barrage.  Some say if you turn 'bloom' off, the frame rate goes back up to a reasonable level.  As far as the random disconnects, we've been fortunate with those.  It's been a problem in the past, off and on.  But at the moment, not bothering us.

During all of this, not much has been heard from Jagex.  One forum thread.  As far as I can tell, it's not been kept updated, so all you see are pagefulls of people wondering what's going on.

Until today.  Today, there's an announcement on the News page about weekend-long maintenance.  It's for the 19th through the 22nd of July, with a specific list of times- looks like about two hours (at separate times) on Friday, and one hour per day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

There's a clear warning that, while the game will still be playable during these times, there's a risk of disconnection.  So play accordingly.  Don't risk things you can't afford to lose.

I'm glad on a couple of levels.  One, it's nice that they're letting us as players know what's going on.  Sometimes being left in the dark can magnify a problem.  Two, I'm glad to see they're making a serious effort to fix things.  Knowing they're working on it helps me stay patient.

Lastly, the timing is important.  The official RS3 release (but not the HTML5 version) is on July 22nd (2013).  That's less than 4 days away as I write this.  It would be immensely damaging to player satisfaction to have a grand release while plagued by problems.  Certainly there will be hiccups integrating the new systems.  Going through that without fixing existing issues would be very bad business practice.

In spite of all this, I'm excited about the upcoming launch.  Haven't spent much time on the HTML5 Beta, but the New Interface System (NIS) is a lot of fun.  Spent several evenings just playing around with differing layouts and seeing how they worked.

Here's hoping for a smooth transition!

Runescape New Interface System Coming Soon

If you play Runescape, then by now you've probably heard about Runescape 3 and the New Interface System, if not actively tried it out.  Jagex finally announced the official release date, which is July 22, 2013.  If you go to the main Runescape website, there's a countdown timer that shows exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left.

It's been a while since I've tried the RS3 Beta.  Had too many issues getting logged in the first time.  What was there, seemed nice but very slow.  I guess that's been fixed by now, or they wouldn't be announcing a release date... would they?

RS3 aside, I did spend a couple of evenings playing with the NIS this week.  It looks like a lot of fun.  I probably spent 5 hours straight just opening random menus and moving things around.  I can't speak much to the technical side of things.  What I experienced was stable, responsive, and looked good.  The bank was unavailable the first couple of times, and some of the features were still locked.  Last night the bank was working again, which was nice.  Looks like the 'equip from bank' screen is gone, though.

What is available, is pretty cool.  There's been plenty of times I wished for something very similar.  Especially the mini-map.  That's always been too small.  So the first thing to do was drag it out larger.  Now I can stand at the Grand Exchange and one-click on the Fairy Ring west of the wall.  I know, we could very nearly one-click it already.  But not quite, and it's one of my little pet peeves.

There are plenty of other places where that extra mini-map space makes a difference, but that was my 'measuring stick'.  I also like things to be squared off and neat.  So I shrunk the primary control bar and put it next to the mini-map.  (Kept it vertical.)

I've never liked the chat window at the bottom left, so it was the next subject.  Anywhere on the bottom just wasn't in my 'attention zone'.  After trying different places, it wound up on the right hand wall, about midway up.  Just under the mini-map, and above the Inventory management window... which gives away the next phase.

The bottom window contains the inventory, equipped items, prayers, and all the action bar abilities.  I may swap the chat and mini-map, we'll have to see.  All of these are squared off to take up a solid section on the right-hand side of the screen.

Lastly, the action bar.  It just didn't want to blend in smoothly.  One of the two bars with only limited resizability, it just wouldn't fit in cleanly.  The best fit was rotated vertically and sized tall.  Didn't like that... it just didn't look right.  So it's stretched out horizontally at the bottom of the screen.  Right next to the inventory window.  Doesn't exactly fit with all the rest, but it's easy to get to, and not in the way.

It took some thought to blend the prayer tabs and action bar tabs into the inventory window.  Would have been nice to break them out into their own space, but that just took up too much room on the screen.  Since it's very easy to drag them apart and put them back together, I may just tweak the screen on an as-needed basis.  Nothing says it has to be locked in, though locking the items in place is certainly optional.  :^)



I made the windows about halfway transparent.  It gives a feel of more screen area.  The Dungeoneering skill counters on the right, near the top of the chat window, can be turned off.  But every time I logged back in, they returned.  So I quit paying attention to them.  Hopefully that will be fixed in the official release.  The window titles (Minimap, Backpack, All Chat, etc...) can be removed.  But like the skill counters, they keep reappearing every time I log in.  Small details that I expect will be taken care of before the 22nd.

And that's my NIS setup.  So far.  It'll probably change a lot over time.  Or maybe not.  Maybe this is my perfect screen... Nah.   :^)
 

Runescape: Sinkhole Rage Management

I know I've written about this already recently.  But it still amazes me how rude and childish people can act on the internet in general.  And in Runescape in particular.  To be even more specific, in the Dungeoneering mini-game, Sinkholes.  As time passes, I see fewer and fewer people in world 77, my favorite world for Sinkholes.  Less random crowds, and more a regular core of players that are always there for the first sinkhole after the daily update.  For me, that's 8:30 pm.  Not to paint all players with the same brush, but more and more of them just don't play nicely.

The first time I noticed, it was a female player.  She was the top player (and she almost always is... she's very good at it).  I was the lowest player, had no better cards to use, and played a Beguiling Smoke Devil.  No reward is bad.  But there are lesser and better rewards.  My least favorite is the tokens.  I get plenty of those just by playing.  But if I wind up with tokens, it's STILL a good reward.  Same with the lamps.  I'd rather get a huge experience lamp, than a small one.  But small ones are good too.  Normally, a small lamp will make about 41,000 exp for me, for just a few minutes of play.  That's better than hunting all the Penguins on Tuesday, which can take 30 minutes or more.

The bigger lamps are even better.  It's all good.  Same for the competitive play aspect in the first part of the game.  I'm not a very good player.  I usually come in last, or next to last.  That's okay.  Typically, I run through all the rooms I can, collecting the exploratory tokens.  Then work backwards and get as many combat tokens as possible.  When when the monsters are gone, start collecting resources.  Check any unopened treasure boxes along the way.

Pretty simple procedure.  Not even a very good one, considering my usual final position.  We're all competing for a finite resource.  Nobody stands at the door, bows, and says "After you".  We all jam shoulder to shoulder at the door, trying our best to get the prize.

So it totally stunned me last night when someone declared in-game that they were "Not going to turn in their combat tokens because Techreader (me) is being selfish."  What?  What does that even mean?  We ALL play selfishly... nobody says "Hey... I want the smallest lamp!"  So he spent the rest of the time standing on his head by the drop bank.  (Literally- he's using that for his 'resting' animation.)  Spitefully crippling the final scores so nobody can get maxed rewards.

I finally realized it's not childish immaturity.  It's a specific strategy, designed to anger other players and put them off their game.  There was no sudden leap of logic for me.  Guess I'm not that smart.  Instead, I found it on a forum.  (Tip-it, I think.)  People were complaining about the occasional 'missing combat totem'.  I've always assumed someone was holding them.  Either out of spite, or for more time to hunt cards, or some other reason.  People often talk about a glitch, but that seemed like a convenient excuse.

Turns out, there IS a consistent glitch in the Sinkholes.  One of the signs of it happening is to have an empty room in the northernmost row of rooms.  No monsters, no Exploratory Totem, no resources.  Just a number of columns.  If this room shows up, chances are high that the Sinkhole will be short on Combat Totems.  That answered an ongoing question.  The rest of the conversation explained the comment about me being selfish.  At least two people in this conversation claimed they use that exact (or nearly exact) quote and randomly choose a player to blame.  Just to generate tons of mindless rage.  It works.  I was really bothered by it.  Spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I could have done to annoy him.

Oddly enough, I feel much better now.  :^)

It's a much harsher tactic than I would use.  But it's just an in-game tactic to break someone's concentration.  Now that I know it wasn't personal, it's not such a big deal.  Moving forward, it won't bother me any more.

Also, I've quite using world 77.  There's not always enough people there to get 2 separate Sinkholes in a row.  Switched to World 134, the official Sinkhole world.  It's overcrowded, and getting in can take a while.  But there's always enough people to play.