June

June
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June 29, 2004:

Oops, it seems the friendlist server has run out of memory. I'm working on increasing the memory allocation now.

If you login at the moment your friendlist will appear empty, but don't worry it hasn't been lost, the server is just offline and will be back very shortly.

We've added a couple of new options to make it easier to keep the contents of your bank arranged (if you want to):

At the bottom of the bank screen you will see 2 new buttons marked 'insert' and 'swap'.

'Swap' mode is the mode you are used to, whereby when an item is dragged to a new slot it swaps places with the item already there. This works exactly the same way as before.

'Insert' mode is a new option. In this mode dragging an item to a new position causes it to be inserted at that point, and everything else is moved up one space to make room. This is useful for instance if you get a new rune, and you want to place it next to your existing runes without having to manually move everything else.
It is now easier to move items a long way across your bank. Now if you drag an item to the top or bottom of the bank window, the window will automatically scroll up or down for you. This makes it much easier to move items several rows at a time. (note: this particular feature has actually been online for about a week now, but wasn't mentioned before so is here for completeness.)

Priest In Peril Quest

King Roald of Varrock has recently found communications with the Temple guarding the Eastern border of Misthalin have been abruptly cut off.

Anxious that something may have happened to his close friend Drezel, he is seeking volunteers to go forth and discover what the problem may be.

Those in search of adventure should make their way to see King Roald in Varrock palace immediately, to set forth on the Priest In Peril quest!

June 28, 2004:

Today's update makes a variety of small improvements to RuneScape.

Bigger friends list for members! As a new members benefit, you now get twice as much space on your friend-list. Giving you a total of 200 slots.
Multiple hit-splats during combat: If a player or monster is being attacked by multiple opponents, or is taking damage very rapidly, the game will now show multiple damage indicators at once. This makes it much easier to see how much damage is being dealt. Note: the total damage received is the same, it's just shown more clearly now.
NPCs better at retreating: We've improved the intelligence of the NPCs a bit, such that if they are being attacked from beyond the edge of their wander zone, they will run away rather than just standing there stupidly.
Music & sounds work on more machines: We've found why the music & sounds sometimes weren't working when you select the SUN java plug-in. We're still working on reaching 100% compatibility, but a few more people should find it works for them now.
Fixed dragon-spear special attack: We've fixed the bug which meant attacking a player with the dragon-spear special attack didn't give a PK-skull in the wilderness.

June 25, 2004:

The number of people playing RuneScape is still increasing rapidly, with a record 36,000 simultaneous players last night.

To help cope with all these new players we've added another 3 game worlds. Due to popular demand we've put some of the new ones in the UK this time.

The new servers are as follows:

World-23: UK - free
World-24: UK - members
World-25: US - free

Enjoy!

June 23, 2004:

Today we have released an updated version of our RuneScape Windows client.

Use of this alternative client is entirely optional, and it doesn't add any extra features compared to playing through your web-browser at our website like normal. It does however allow you to play without all that browser clutter, which is particularly useful for low-memory or low-resolution machines.

The client can be found in the new Extra Files section on the front page. Unofficial downloads from other sites may contain malware, so to keep your account safe we recommend you only get the client from www.RuneScape.com

June 21, 2004:

Everybody's favorite lord of order Saradomin has deigned once more to answer a few of his loyal followers questions in Letters 21.

Those players curious to know what the future for the lands of RuneScape may hold for them, would be wise indeed to see what this curiously well informed deity has to say for himself by visiting the Library of Varrock immediately...

Today's update is just a small one to make a few minor tweaks to the game. Some of the more noticeable changes are:

The stone border around the edge of the game window is now narrower. This is to make the game fit better for people running at 800x600. The actual 3d view area is still the same size however. There is just less wasted space now.

The chat scroll is now slightly brighter, to make chat easier to read.

When you click to use an item, it now has a white outline to show that it is selected.

Fixed several cases where using 2 objects together only worked one way around. (the order objects were clicked in made difference)

Fixed a bug which meant the Iban-staff could be wielded at level 49, despite stating a requirement of 50.

Fixed a couple of digsite bugs where it sometimes didn't recognize you had the required items.

Fixed a bug with the treasure trail puzzle-box where it occasionally didn't recognize you had completed it.

Lots of other minor changes and fixes.

June 17, 2004:

It has come to our attention that a number of our players are receiving fake emails claiming to be from Jagex, offering players the chance to apply to be player moderators.

Remember, Jagex does NOT send out emails to players EVER! If we want to send you a message we instead send it to your message-centre here on this website, and then notify you about it next time you login to the game.

We have our own message centre system and so have no reason to use email to contact you! Email is fundamentally insecure and easy to forge which is why we never ever use it to contact players.

If you are a player and you receive any email from us, it doesn't matter how genuine it looks, or what it says, you should always assume it is a fake!

Please do NOT under any circumstances reply to these emails, just delete them immediately, they are not from Jagex and are an attempt to steal account passwords.

June 16, 2004:

One of our hosting providers accidentally rebooted some of the key servers that run the game and the website. Most of our services were down between 10:30 and 12:30 BST. Everything is now back online.

Unfortunately the servers' power was basically pulled without warning, so some didn't even get a chance to save their data to the disk. This means the last 15 minutes of your in-game activity may have been forgotten if you were playing at the time.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

June 14, 2004:

We have changed the way we are handling player reported bugs in order to more swiftly investigate and fix them.

The correct way to report RuneScape bugs now is to use the 'Bug reporting' section of the Customer Support menu (accessible via the Secure Menu). Here you can select the type of bug you are reporting and complete a form which will give our testers all the information they need to investigate the problem.

Within the Bug reporting section you will also be able to view the list of currently known bugs and their current status. You should check this list before sending in a bug report to make sure it's not an issue we are already aware of.

We have removed the bug forums on the RuneScape Forums and the bug categories within the Feedback section of Customer Support, as these are no longer needed.

Hopefully you won't need to use this section of the website very often! If you do come across a bug though, please give as much detail as possible. The more information you provide, the quicker we can track down and fix the problems.

Special Attacks:

Today we have introduced some special attacks to a variety of members only weapons. The dragon weapons, Excalibur, rune throwing axes and magic bows now all have different special attacks. There are many types of special attacks, from temporary boosts in stats, to strikes dealing extra damage. For full details see this page.

In the combat interfaces of these weapons you will now notice a new special attack bar. If you click on the bar, then your character will initiate a special attack and use up some of your special attack power. Different special attacks use up different amounts of power. If you do not have enough power for a special attack, then you can't do it. Your special attack power will slowly restore over time.

Expect more types of special attacks on future weapons.

Mining rocks and thieving from stalls:

The new RuneScape launch inadvertently made it harder to gain resources from these in competitive situations (where two or more people are trying to get the resource at once), since only one person could ever get the resource at a time. We have now fixed it back to the old behavior where if both people are successful at the exact same instant, they will both get the resource.

Treasure trail clues:

Two more npc types now drop treasure trail clues; happy hunting!

Strange fruit:

Strange fruit now heals more run energy than it did previously.

We are very pleased to announce today the introduction of In-Game Player Moderators!

These moderators are trusted RuneScape players who have been hand-picked by Jagex Staff to help keep the game a fun and safe environment for everyone else. As well as being normal players, they also have the privilege of sending in priority abuse reports, and can also mute players who are breaking our chat rules.

To help you spot moderators in-game, we have added two crown icons which will appear next to a moderators name in the chat log when they speak:

Player Moderators
Staff Moderators

If you would like to find out more about In-Game Player Moderators, please visit the new 'Player Moderators' section in our 'Rules and Security' area, accessible from the front page.

The Jagex Team

June 8, 2004:

Today we updated agility to be much more effective at helping you restore your run energy. The previous effect wasn't very noticeable so it's been improved. The same agility level now decreases the restore time by approximately 50% more than it did previously, so should hopefully be a bit more worthwhile now.

We also fixed the following bugs:

Fixed a bug with fishing, where the animation didn't always run in the right place, and where large crowds in one place made the fish vanish.
Made random-event npcs appear on top of other players in crowded situations so you don't accidently miss them.
Fixed a bug with the chat/friendlist sometimes failing to work reliably if you tried to use them and smith at the same time.
Fixed a bug which caused the client to ocassionally lock up.
Fixed a bug with the welcome screen sometimes displaying the wrong message.
Fixed a bug with the cinematic camera scenes sometimes pointing at the wrong height
Lots of other minor fixes

June 7, 2004:

We had a record number of concurrent players last weekend - over 30,000 people playing at once! And the percentage of members was higher than ever.

Thanks to everyone for supporting the game. To celebrate, and to prevent overcrowding we are pleased to put two new members worlds online. This now gives members a choice of eight different locations to connect to.

June 2, 2004:

Hundreds of years ago a mineral was found that had the ability to absorb, transform, or focus magic. For many years the knowledge of this material was lost, but now there has been talk of the rediscovery of this ore and the machinery to work it. See if you can reacquire the lost knowledge of elemental ore in the new Elemental Workshop Quest!

Thieving Changes:
We have also reduced the amount of time you are stunned for when you are caught thieving which should be good news for the kleptomaniacs amongst us.

June 1, 2004:

If you are noticing that the game suddenly seems to be lagging or taking longer to download than before, it's a temporary effect caused by everyone prefetching the music and maps all at once.

The huge number of files the server is sending to everyone combined is slowing it down a bit, but once everyone has them things should return to normal.

I've just temporarily slowed down the rate at which the server sends the maps and music which should reduce the in-game lag a bit, but it will probably still be about 24 hours before things calm down to normal levels. After which point I'll speed the download rate up again.

Of course the whole point of this update is to prevent this sort of problem repeatedly occurring every time we add new content in the future. So if we can just get through this one last big update things should run a lot smoother from then on.

That's right! Saradomin, our resident deity of order and virtue has deigned to allow himself to answer a few questions sent in by players in Letters 20.

As usual, those wishing to know what the gods of RuneScape have to say to their followers (and just players in general too) should make their way immediately to the Library of Varrock to see what mysteries and secrets may be revealed this time...

Today we have replaced the update system that RuneScape uses to grab updates from the server.

The new system has 3 main advantages:

Whilst this update will take a while to load, It will make all future updates much faster to download, up to 10x faster. Before if we updated a model the game redownloaded the entire model pack, now it just grabs the changed ones. You won't really see this improvement until our next update though, because for this update your system has to get all the models in the new incremental format.

The game now prefetches maps & music whilst you are playing, so when entering a new area for the first time there will be less of a delay for the map to load, and the music to start. Again you won't really see the benefit of this straight away because currently your computer will be missing quite a lot of files, but once you have fully downloaded the current update you should experience much shorter delays in the future

I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Well that's all good, but what we really want is content updates." Don't worry we have a new quest just around the corner, which we will release as soon as we are confident the new update system is running smoothly for everyone. There's a lot of new code here, so we just want to be certain it's working properly first.

Thanks,
Andrew

We have made some further improvements to the Hiscores system in addition to those made last week, with the introduction of a new way to see the hiscores.

Now when logging into the secure area of the site you can see a special set of hiscore tables with only you and your friends names in them, making it easier than ever to see how close you are to beating your friends in a skill.

You now have the perfect excuse to delete everyone on your friends list who is better than you and be the best in your circle of friends... unless everyone else you know does the same thing!