On Runescape...

So I’ve mentioned Runescape. Unless you’re blind or oblivious you’ve probably noticed the RSS feed in the sidebar that lists “I killed Bork” and several other things that probably make no sense if you’ve
A. Never played a MMORPG
B. Never played Runescape.

Runescape is a fantasy game that permits you to wander the wide wide world, performing quests, slaughtering monsters and chickens, killing other players, or grinding away at an endless variety of skills. That’s the nutshell description. If you read on you’ll undoubtedly learn more but I’m afraid it won’t make a whole lot of sense if you don’t have a background for it. I could try to give you a background but that would make this blog much longer than I want to write and I would suggest you go try your hand at Runescape. You can play the free version for as long as you want and no I’m not getting any kickbacks from Runescape for directing people their way although I think they definitely should be.

I do quests. I didn’t realize my love for quests was unusual until B___(one of the people responsible for me playing this game) commented on my unusually high Quest Points for my level. So I can’t help it that a bit of story-telling overrides poking a sharp metal stick into stuff. Plus quests usually give cool rewards and open access to new areas blah blah blah.

After quests I skill. Some people with steady nerves and lightning fast reflexes go into the whole killing players for riches (and sometimes glory) business but the few times I’ve attempted it I’ve ended up donating everything I was wearing to the big empty Wilderness (so this was a long time ago when the Wildy was still a place for player killers to kill other player killers or, more likely, skillers. No, I have no bitterness at all from that episode of my RS existence). Some people band together to kill the ‘boss’ monsters around RS for their big dough.

And since I’m more inclined to skill I looked about for a skill to train once I ran out of quests. First I raised all my skills to 70, and then Construction came out and I fell in love with the whole concept of player houses. Actually, I was training Slayer but I realized that training Slayer would raise one or two of my combat skills to the highest level (99) before I got slayer to that level. And since everyone was running around with their untrimmed combat capes I decided for my first 99 to be Construction. This actually took longer than I thought it would.

I don’t recommend playing RS this way unless you either find it fun/relaxing/mind-numbing bliss/allows you to catch up on 10 seasons of Stargate, but I proceeded to hack thousands of mahogany logs for my very own Construction shop, where I sold flatpacked furniture to less able RS players for quite a few levels, managing to avoid the cash drain so many players training Con were suffering. Due to a sudden change in living situations and internet availability (i.e. getting booted out of the place I was living for really stupid reasons not my fault) forced me to close the shop and I hacked trees whenever I got the opportunity to be online. By the time I was ready to train Con again, Summoning had been released, and being the mildly compulsive person I am I had to train it. So I trained it to 82 (because I ended up with the charms for that level) and looked at the options for 99 Con again. Due to the introduction of the Grand Exchange and the elimination of free trade, all flatpack prices had dropped through the floor and meant that spending 2 mahogany planks (3000gp) to build a chair worth 10gp simply wasn’t going to cut it.

So I bought a shite ton of oak logs at a low price and proceeding to make the money to plank them. In January 2009 I finally had more gp than I had ever had in my RS career (a mere 40 mil to some of you) and I proceed to plank and level with the logs I had.

This took to July 25th, 2009.

That’s almost 7 months.

That’s a lot of time to do almost nothing in your gaming time but run back and forth building oak tables.

Untrimmed 99 Construction cape. I wore it with pride. People were awed. Etcetera etyada.

After that I got 99 woodcutting so I could get 99 fletch so I could spend it all getting some armor and supplies and then I most recently got 99 magic. Now I’m slaying. And actually, there is something refreshing about sticking sharp things into monsters.

But that’s only until the next quest.