|
February |
February 2 | February 3 | February 4 | February 10 | February 16 | February 17 | February 18 | February 25 February 25, 2004: As the new combat system gives different advantages to using different sorts of weapons, we have added a dragon dagger to the lost city market and a dragon mace to the heros guild shop. We have also added a map object to the Lumbridge general store, so that you can see where your character is located when in Asgarnia or Misthalin.
Due to a power failure at our hosting company, our master login server was offline today between 12:15 and 13:30 GMT, meaning that users could not log-in to the game or the website. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this. The login server is now fully operational once again, and everything should be back to normal.
February 18, 2004: Today, we have successfully linked the rs1 & rs2 friend lists together. This means whilst playing rs1 you can now talk to your friends playing rs2, and vice-versa! Also please note that from now on (as of yesterday in fact) any friends you add or remove from your friends-list in either game will instantly affect the other game too. This is because both games are now running from the same list. February 17, 2004: Today we have added the following updates to Runescape 2. Player routefinding has been greatly improved:
Most of the NPCs in the game no longer block movement. We have added the Shilo village quest. We have made some changes and improvements to the trawler
game. We have changed around which areas in the wilderness are now multicombat - multicombat now mostly affects areas in the east of the wilderness rather than the west. The pickaxes are now wieldable and can be used as weapons. You can now use a tinderbox on logs in your inventory and you will automatically drop them and light a fire. Spears have now been improved to be a good all around melee weapon which is useful for those wishing to train using the controlled combat style. Maces now have a small prayer bonus, making them more useful for people who want to specialize as a cleric. We have also fixed the following bugs:
February 16, 2004: Today we have made some important changes to the support service we are offering our free playing members. We have always maintained that our commitment is to give a priority level of full support to RuneScape members, but at the same time maintain a good level of essential support for our free playing members. RuneScape has grown at a very fast rate over the last 2 years and we have now over 660,000 active players. Due to the very fast growth of our player base we have decided to change some of the support categories for free players. Basically this means that our team which provides customer support to the free users, will be focusing more on important categories like password-support and stopping scamming, and less on trying to reply to every single suggestion and comment we receive! Don't worry, we won't be spending any less time on 'free user' support than we do now. We just obviously want to make sure our support team's efforts are focused on the most important types of help first. This change only effects free players but should benefit all players by allowing our customer support team to concentrate on the really important cases and deal with those quicker. RuneScape Members will of course still receive all types of support, and priority customer support over our non members. These changes are part of our ongoing efforts to constantly improve our service. Today we are officially launching the RuneScape Forums, that have been running in beta mode for a few months. The forums are very lively and there are regular contributions by several members of Jagex staff, even Andrew himself! This launch will affect players in two ways:
We have made this decision for two main reasons:
There are currently about 40 active player moderators on the forums whose efforts to maintain a fun and safe community are very much appreciated. We hope that everyone will enjoy using our forums and feel more a part of the RuneScape community. February 10, 2004: As you know we originally planned to add bank-to-bank trading to RS2, but we decided to change it because we didn't want to cause a huge bank overcrowding problem. Just imagine all the players from world-1 Varrock market, all crammed into one little bank, so they can bank-trade and you'll see the problem! Today we launched a new improved 'bank note' system instead. Which still takes all the tediousness out of using certs and doesn't cause horrible crowding problems. In RuneScape 2 when you withdraw items you can specify if you want them as an item or as a note, and it's a simple as that. So for example you can convert all the coal in your bank into 'coal notes' in one go, as you withdraw it! And when you put them back in your bank or sell them to a shop they automatically become items again. It's really very quick and easy to use We've called them 'notes' instead of 'certs' because they aren't quite the same. The main difference is 1 note = 1 item (not 5). So for example: 1 coal note = 1 coal. This is so you aren't restricted to only trading in multiples of 5. Also it is now possible to get notes for ALL tradeable non-stacking items, so for example you can get 'potion notes' and 'log notes' also. Today we have made many more changes and additions to Runescape 2. We have added the following quests:
We have added the rest of the wilderness including the mage arena and the wilderness agility course. You can now craft cosmic runes, nature runes and chaos runes. If you can find the rare talismans to do so. We added some fun new features to the Seers Village party hall (balloon drop & dancing knights). We have sped up the following aspects of game play:
We shrunk the chat font so you can see more text at once. Made 'attack' a left-click option for weaker NPCs and a right-click option for stronger NPCs Made the chat messages above the players heads automatically try to avoid overlapping each other Added bank notes (see today's other news post) We have fixed the following bugs:
February 4, 2004: This morning, while pursuing our usual website duties, we discovered that during the night somebody had burnt a large hole in our office wall, and left behind an envelope with an unusual odor and some faintly disturbing stains across it. As we cautiously opened the envelope, trying not to think about what the smell reminded us of, we discovered that this was the way Zamorak had chosen to inform us that he had taken it upon himself to answer some more of your letters. You can see what he has to say for himself in Letters 18, while we try and patch up what used to be our office wall. February 3, 2004: Microsoft has released a new critical Windows update called 'Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1'. This fixes a very important security hole with Internet-Explorer which could be exploited by scammers to create convincing scam websites, that appear to be runescape.com but actually steal your password. It is therefore very important that everyone makes it a priority to download this Windows update. We would recommend you go to www.windowsupdate.com and click the 'Scan for updates' link. You can then find the update within the 'critical updates and service packs' section. We would also highly recommend that you ensure you have downloaded and installed ALL of the critical updates for Windows as they all fix very important security flaws with the Windows operating system. Thanks, February 2, 2004: Today we fixed the following bugs:
Today we have done a huge update for Runescape 2 Many newly converted areas including:
Many newly converted quests:
Many animations, no longer cause unnecessary additional delays in game play. In 1 or 2 cases we have even removed an animation entirely. Things which we have speeded up with this update include:
None
of the above no longer take any more time than in Runescape 1. Last week, we launched a new password recovery system on our website. However we have discovered that it was being TOO strict about returning passwords. We obviously wanted to be sure passwords only went to the right people, but we went a bit far and made it harder than intended. We have now fixed this problem. So the password recovery system is now about the same strictness as it was before we updated it. Therefore if you have recently used our new Password Recovery System (i.e. in the last week) and have had your request denied, then you may wish to try again and submit another password support request. Hopefully this time you will be able to get your password back. Note this only affects RECENT queries, there is no need to resend password requests from over a week ago! Thanks, A number of players have pointed out a potential problem with our original plan of duplicating everyone's save-games to both RS1 and RS2. The problem is this idea effectively duplicates all the items in the game, and gives people a whole extra set of items. Say someone decides to keep playing RS2, and knows they are never going to play RS1 again, then that player then has a whole set of items in RS1 they don't want or need. They are likely to try to sell these 'spare' items or try to swap them for RS2 items, or just give them away. All these extra items being disposed of will cause complete havoc with the RuneScape economy! Another problem is that by having a cut-off point after which the account is copied, many players feel they have a 'time-limit' in which to gain as much as possible before the copy, and that after the copy it will be twice as hard to advance in both games at once as it was before it. This is clearly also a problem. Many players have suggested that we just keep RS1 and RS2 linked, so that item/stat changes in one game also affect the other. However this unfortunately has even more problems. Some things are inevitably going to be slightly easier to advance in RS1 and others slightly easier to advance in RS2. We will never be able to balance it EXACTLY. So if we share the stats between the games many players will continually switch between the games depending on what they are doing at the time. If everyone feels compelled to play both games together like this, then it is like it is just one game where the graphics vary depending on what you are doing! The whole argument for keeping RS1 was that it is a different game, and so shouldn't be scrapped. If we join them together into one giant game, it makes a nonsense of the whole reason for keeping RS1. Also another problem with joining them together is that as we develop RS2 further we will be forever restricted with how we can improve RS2 since we will be forced to try to keep it compatible with RS1. This sounds truly horrible! So here is what we are planning on doing instead:
|