Thursday, April 20, 2006

Old Runescape newsletter from 2001

Wow! While browsing through the Tip It forums I found M Oldfield's text of the old Runescape newsletter. Jagex no longer sends this newsletter (or any other email) so don't be fooled by imitations, but anyway look at the old news. Probably the most interesting parts are the hiscore lists.

Jan 21, 2001
RuneScape Newsletter - Issue #1
Welcome to the first
ever RuneScape newsletter.
Firsly a big thank-you to everyone who's been
playing, and has helped makeRuneScape a great success. We only launched just
over 2 weeks ago, and wealready have over 28000 signed up players, and the game
has been played for atotal time of over 4.5 years!

Help keep RuneScape free------------------------Renting a server to run
RuneScape is expensive! I really want to avoid chargingpeople to play, so please
please help me keep it free by visiting the websitebelow and signing up for a
few *free* offers. Thanks!
Want to win Free Cash every day? Try the
newest Freebie site on the Internettoday, FreebieClub.com. Of course it's loaded
with free loot: great vacations,magazines and samples galore!http://www.freebieclub.com/

What's new in Runescape-----------------------The RuneScape team has been
working very hard over the past 2 weeks to improvethe game and bring you new
features. Major new features are:

New desert city Al-kharid with:
-Scimitar shop: Buy and sell curvy
swords-Furnace: Conveniant for smelting ore from the desert-Silk trader: Buy
silk here and sell it in varrock for a profit. The amount youmake depends on how
many other people are silk trading.-General store: Another place to buy and sell
your items-Platemail Legs shop: A full range of leg armour to spend your money
on-Kebab shop: Eating kebabs has a random effect. They're normally good,
butrumour has it that a few of them are a bit dodgy. They'll never kill you
though
New Quest in Draynor Manor
Draynor Manor has been opened and
there's spooky things inside! There's avampire asleep in the cellar, and
Professor Oddenstein who lives in the attichas accidently turned someone into a
chicken! To make things worse gremlins havehidden the parts of his machine, so
he can't turn the chicken back. Can you findthe missing pieces to complete this
quest?
Plus over the past 2 weeks we've also
-Improved the map page to
show the locations of useful shops-Added a 'who's playing' page so you can see
if your friends are on-Made Lumbridge safe to give a place to hide from player
killers-Improved the shops to reduce queueing-Reduced the network requirements
so the game works over more connections-Fixed lots of little problems/bugs with
the game to make it more reliable

What's planned--------------We are of course working on many more
improvements to add to the game to make iteven better. We have nearly finished
work on the bank which will hopefully beadded to Varrock city tommorow. The bank
is a safe place to store your money,such that even if you die it can't be lost.
After that the magic system is duefor a big overhaul with lots of new spells
being added, plus we'll be addingsome entirely new professions such as crafting
and fishing to add even morevariety to the game. The next planned quest is 'The
vampire slayer quest' inwhich you must work out how to slay the evil vampire
currently sleeping inDraynor Manor.

Runescape hiscores------------------Below are the top scores as they
were at 3pm GMT on Sunday-21st. Only the top 25players are shown, but I'm
planning on adding a new page to the website soonwhich will allow you to search
for the ranking of any player and see how youcompare with everyone else.
The
hiscores are currently in 4 categories. If there are more categories whichyou
think should be included let me know and I'll consider putting them in thenext
newsletter.

Top 25 players - score is total of all skills
1: lightning - 506
2: Gugge - 436
3: Rab - 428
4: Sir - 415
5: ZAPTONE_Z - 352
5: hurkules - 352
7: Devil_Hunter - 329
8: merlin - 324
9: Rodrigo - 321
9: Hellbringer - 321
11: RattSabre - 320
12: The_Unknown - 319
13: stud690 - 317
14: Flex_10 - 312
15: Morfnak - 311
16: Day_Dream - 306
17: Lord_Soth - 305
18: TheReturnOfX - 302
19: Ashley - 301
20: Auxilus - 300
21: Sunjon - 288
22: terminator - 287
23: kancer - 283
23: Axebane_Hawk - 283
25: KingKong - 280

Top 25 fighters - score is total combat skill
1: lightning - 200
2: Gugge - 182
3: Rab - 178
4: Robin_Hood2 - 172
5: stud690 - 164
6: Sir - 163
7: Day_Dream - 160
8: terminator - 159
9: Ashley - 155
10: Morfnak - 149
11: merlin - 148
12: The_Unknown - 146
13: Flex_10 - 141
14: Lord_Soth - 138
15: hurkules - 136
16: ZAPTONE_Z - 134
17: LoneWolf_LD - 133
18: RattSabre - 131
18: TheReturnOfX - 131
18: constant - 131
21: SilencerLD - 130
22: Auxilus - 129
22: caramon - 129
24: Sir_Beachy - 128
24: Axebane_Hawk - 128

Top 25 player killers - score is number of kills
1: DaRk_RoCk - 100
2: SilencerLD - 953
: Robin_Hood2 - 83
3: Mortis - 83
5: EndBringer - 80
6: Phadera - 69
7: bomboy2328 - 68
8: donk - 67
9: Windstick - 65
10: Yemen - 64
11: Yokomon - 61
11: RCCBrasil - 61
13: lancelot24 - 60
14: Samhill - 58
14: Samikaze - 58
14: DecIll - 58
17: koma - 55
18: robsimons - 53
18: Rankka - 53
20: ace2you - 52
20: adam2000 - 52
22: plumaglob - 51
22: Wolf - 51
24: God - 50
24: crazy_joe75 - 50

Top 25 smiths - score is mining + smithing
1: lightning - 88
2: dmonik - 87
3: The_Unknown - 84
4: KPOBb - 81
5: Lord_Soth - 80
6: Rodrigo - 74
6: TheReturnOfX - 74
6: Silverion - 74
9: hurkules - 73
9: Garbages - 73
9: Deckchair - 73
12: Sir - 70
12: Auxilus - 70
14: Bubba_bobba - 68
14: Lordrlz - 68
16: Flurble - 67
16: Flex_10 - 67
16: stud690 - 67
16: Tiney - 67
20: Gugge - 66
20: natslayer - 66
20: Vit - 66
20: Sgt_Savage - 66
20: STarlude - 66
25: Arcon - 65

Thanks for reading this newsletter, have fun playing the game!Andrew Gower
(RuneScape
creator)
-----------------------------------------------------------------You
are receiving this newsletter because you asked to receive it whenyou created
your RuneScape character. We do not send unsolicited email.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

RS2: Blaming Miniclip for all the evils of Runescape

The golden age of Runescape

Long ago and far away in a land that time has forgotten there was a game called Runescape, which people eventually realized was NOT Run-escape but Rune-scape. In this fair land all were good, true, loyal, brave and polite.

Miniclip ends the age of innocence

Then came the evil known as Miniclip. Runescape was listed as the best free online world on this site. And lo! Evil newbies poured forth in uncountable numbers from tutorial island. The once fair land of Runescape was covered in darkness. Thenceforth good was vanquished forevermore. Scammers, beggars, trash talkers and the liked now ruled the once fair Lumbridge.

What is Meili babbling about this time??

Well, in plainer talk, there is currently a feeling or popular idea that the old Runescape used to be good until it was advertised in Miniclip, which caused it to be flooded with annoying 12 year olds. An example of this is this quote from Tip It:

I have been playin runescape for about a year now when i first started playing everyone was really kind and nice and the word noob was rarely used. varrock sq used to be full of people all lvls helping each other out it wasnt rare for a high lvl player to help out a lvl 3 the game wasnt about who had done the most quests or who had the highest lvls it was bout helpin ppl makin friends nd just avin a nice time on the computer. But now a year later that has all but vanished. There is no peace anymore Noob is the most common word in the Runescape dictionary people ask for help and they get called a noob there are no more helping other ppl u cnt even trust ur own friend ne more as you think theyll scam u. WHY HAS THE PEOPLE OF RUNESCAPE CHANGED?


I, for one, do not recall Runescape ever being noob-or-child-free. Never has everyone been always friendly and nice to me. Am I actually playing a different game from the person I quoted above? There have *always* been beggars, scammers, noobs, etc. for as long as I have been playing. Sorry, I don't removing Runescape from Miniclip would make the game nicer.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Evil pk clans are fun!

My first clan

I kinda miss being in an evil pk clan. My first clan was a skill clan, Runescape Dinasty (RSD) which I joined way back in RS1 (or Runescape Classic if you wanna call it that) without even thinking much about it after its leader Livinlarge21 asked me to. I was so clueless about it I just said "yes" despite the fact that I later had to ask my friends what clans actually do! IIRC there was as yet no website - Livin was still in the planning stage. :)

Anyway, RSD was pretty small then and just full of friendly, nice people. I really enjoyed my time there. We had our own private forums and we had fun with RS events and generally just hanging out at the forums. However, with more and more people joining the clan became bigger and the inevitable happened, people wanted to pk.

Prior to this, I had never pked with anyone but a few close friends and at the most we would have 4 people. That was already considered a big pk group as if you split a set between 4 people it isn't really worth it. Mostly I was alone or it was just me and one friend.

Why I left it

The pk trips with RSD were my first time to pk in a much larger group and I didn't like it. I finally quit after several times when RSD members would attack the person I was with. Since we had a rule that a member could not attack another member, I was forced to just watch as they would attack my friends.

That, and Sue Me told me to quit lol. Shortly after this he said he was quitting RS, which pissed me off. I complained that if he was going to quit, he shouldn't have made me quit a clan that I loved just because he didn't like them since he wouldn't even be around anymore.

Oh noes not not an evil clan!

Around this time, Sue Me and Adx1 hit upon the plan of forming a pk clan. They asked me to join and I accepted. In the beginning we had a private hidden forum in New Era, an old fan forum, now defunct. For quite some time we had no name. :) We had a thread going asking for name ideas and finally settled on "Malicious Intent" as an appropriately scary-scounding name. Now that we had a name, it was time to let everyone know that we existed and were recruiting. The leaders were Sue Me, Adx1 and Zorro Toy. The sole requirement for membership was simply "to be one of the best pkers" and there was no level requirement.

I'm not evil, just misunderstood!

This really amused me personally as although I pk, I have never been a "hardcore pker." I've always been a nice, friendly type of girl, why even when I pked noobs I would say "hi" to them first! There were only a few girls in MI, these were myself, Pepsi, Flower (I'm not sure but I think she was a member for a few days) and Marryn. Pepsi and Flower eventually quit the clan after a few days so it was just Marryn and myself then. The lowest level member was, I think, Da Killmasta (70s) and the hightest was Fist of God (121).

Yes, but the Iron Chef ownz you more

As the clan was made up of pkers, it had a lot of enemies, chiefly those who had been pked by members. Somebody made a sig which had "Malicious Intent - Death is a gift you give to your enemies" and some forum wag made this one as a joke:


What is this "peekay" you speak of???

In contrast to RSD, MI were allowed to pk each other. I recall some members even threatened to quit after Sue Me pked them.

Anyway, MI had some really cool pks, the pics are on my website:

http://www.anzwers.org/free/jagex/malicious.html

Ironically, although when I first added these to my website I considered them "new," now that it is 2006, these are considered old. How time flies!

The pks were really fun although, as I stated previously, it sucks when you have to share the kills with a lot of people. We also had a problem with stealing kills. Whenever a victim was close to dying, MI members would all start maging him so that they would get the kill. This was considered a somewhat cheap tactic and annnoyed the pker/s who had done all the work catching and also taking damage while the kill stealers just maged once or twice and got the kill. Still, unlike today, all kills were always shared.

Pepsi, the owner of the New Era forums, or one of her group (it might have been her real life daughter Flower or her online bf) quarreled with one of the MI members and demanded that he be kicked. The leaders refused and Pepsi's group left MI. The clan forums were moved.

Good vs Evil

The best time for me in MI was the war with RSD, my old clan. Before this I spoke to Livin and my other friends in RSD as this would be a war where I might have to attack my friends. We agreed that it was just for fun and no one should be hurt if they get killed. :)

The MI tactic for the war was basically "return until we win!" This was a crucial part of our plan as we knew RSD would outnumber us four to one. Members pledged to use up their whole bank if they had to, no mean feat as many had over 100 sets.

Due to this tactic, the war was the longest lasting one I have ever seen, lasting for several hours. RSD claimed they won the war due to controlling the altar while MI claimed to have won it because they got more kills.

Oergg has some pics of the MI vs RSD war:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/banditelli/mivsrsd/

RSD are in purple capes, MI are the ones in blue and black capes. Many of the people in the pics were actually random pkers though. All of the events I mentioned happened in RS1.