All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise – without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

www.rshistory.com [email protected]

Copyright © Gunter De Groodt, 2015

You write history each time you play RuneScape. Keep playing.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface 7

1 RuneScape 1 13

2 The Community 35

3 The World of Gielinor 57

4 Player versus Monster 78

5 Player versus Player 122

6 Skilling 163

7 Quests 223

8 Influential People 249

9 Miscellania Etceteria 275

Appendix I: Revival of the Wilderness 297

Image Library 311

Sources 312

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The final version of The History of RuneScape is the result of a process that took multiple years to complete. Many people have contributed to this final version, for which I owe them eternal gratitude.

I would like to dedicate some space to former RuneScape player The Pain105 for inspiring me to start this project. It is because of his stories about the early days of the game that I had initially set out on the mission of learning as much as possible about the history of RuneScape.

I would also like to explicitly express my gratitude towards Andrew Gower, co-creator of RuneScape and co-founder of Jagex Limited, for responding in great detail to the many e-mails and even more questions that I have been able to ask him.

Furthermore, I would like to thank Jagex employee Mod Balance, head of the community management team, for voluntarily assuming the role of communicator between Jagex and myself.

Many players have been a source of major help in the form of information gained through either interviewing them, asking multiple questions regarding any chapter in this book or any other way that stood out. In alphabetical order, these players are Castle Wars, King Sabre, Leta, LovveL, Metalmaniac9, November, Rab, Suomi, Thehate, Whitemagem and Zparanoid.

The High-Level Forum has also been a place where I looked for help during the creation of this book. I would like to thank all members of that community who have contributed and whose information I used in this book. These players are Carosali, Dardan, Gwynrwyn, Jaro, Nat, Poultrychamp, Rsvapd, Spoon, Uwfootball1 and Zparanoid.

In 2011 I posted a first version of this project on the RuneScape forums. The players who provided information for the 2011 version are, in alphabetical order and not already mentioned above: 1st, 3 Hit U, Acknowledged, Andrewthestly, Angel2002, Annia, Arcane Rift, Big Hotsauce, Caj, Council Tax, Deeri, DemClawSpecs, Diabolize, Diyer, Drew, Epic Celt, Fade to Blaq, Fonzi, Furious Fox4, Gugge, Hehasnoidea, InsaneDemNS, Ixiolirion, Lilyuffie88, Love Addict, LtAngel, Mexk, Microfy, Mrschrystler, Prue, Reaping, Shadow Fox99, Tameelf, The Rock 31, w77 and Water.

For minor contributions in the form of one-time or limited help, I would also like to express my gratitude towards Agent833, Allar, Dusty 125, His Lordship, Jebrim, Mattfoxyy, Mukade, Ore Sabre, Quest Luke, the MaSoRS clan, Vonte and Zarfot.

Furthermore, I owe a lot of gratitude to RuneScape players mSL, for setting up the official website www.rshistory.com for me; and Nat, for drawing the cover illustrations and taking care of the final cover design.

Several members of the RuneScape community have also submitted their authentic screenshots to me and have allowed me to incorporate those pictures in my book. The players whose screenshots I have used are Agent833, Castle Wars, Gwynrwyn and Leta.

Last but not least, thank you to anyone else who has offered their help Or supported this project in any other way.

Preface

Let me ask you a question. If you could go back in time to any era or period when you enjoyed playing RuneScape the most, in what year would you end up?

Perhaps you have been having a great year and there is no need for a time machine, or maybe you are a veteran player who misses the joys of training Agility with energy potions, of identifying herbs, makings lines of fires and running through the Abyss to craft nature runes. – Or maybe you loved the fatigue system, being stuck in three rounds of combat, or the times when wearing a rune platebody was the preferred option for magic combat.

The game has changed. What we see in RuneScape today is the result of one a half decade of evolution. We all have our preferences. We like some things, dislike other things. That balance or imbalance is what, for a part, determined your answer to my question.

However, if you want to compare different years or different periods, you need the big picture. You need to know every important detail about each year before you can make an accurate judgment. Which do you prefer: the first or the final installment of the Harry Potter series? That is not a fair question if you can remember only a few chapters of each book. Similarly, I could not possibly let you choose a favourite year if you do not know everything about those years.

So let’s make a deal here. I will do my best to teach you as much as possible about the history of the game, but afterwards you will re-evaluate your answer. Do we have a deal? You might be hesitant, because why should you trust that I will give you the right information? What makes me qualified to share all of that information with you? – If you are anything like me, whenever I start reading a book that is supposed to teach me something, the first question that I ask myself is always: Will this be worth my time? – If you plan to read this entire book, you will be stuck with me for quite a few hours, so that is a fair question to ask. I know how precious time is and I do not want to steal any of yours, so to help you decide whether or not you should read this book, consider the following information:

If seeing the title of this book gave you any prospect of reading about the lore of the game, about the different gods and other quest-related characters, then… well… tough luck. There will be none of that in this book, so I apologize if I accidentally gave you the wrong expectations. Please stay, though. This book is about the development of the game, and that viewed from different perspectives in a chronological manner. For example, one chapter describes the geographical - 7 - transformation of the game, whereas another chapter reveals more information about quests and how they have influenced the gameplay experience. This book is for you if any or more of the following apply to you:

 You like reading anything about RuneScape.  You are a new player who wants to find out more about the game’s past.  You hope to experience some serious RuneScape nostalgia.  You are curious about the evolution of the game.  You are a veteran player who misses the good old days.  You are Jagex and you want to find out if there is anything for which I could be sued. ;)

If one or more of these potential reasons to read this book applies to you, then you should be able to enjoy the majority of the next 300 pages. Before we get to chapter one, however, I would like to share with you why I wrote this book and why this has been very important to me, but I first need to tell you a little bit about myself for that. So let’s dive straight into it.

If we define a veteran player as someone who played the game before the release of RuneScape 2 in 2004, then I have to admit that I am not a veteran player. Now it is possible that that is a major red flag for you and that you feel like aborting your plans to read this book. However, I can assure you that what you will be reading is of decent quality, for reasons that I will explain over the course of the next pages. As a bonus of reading the preface, you will also get to know me better. I am not going tell you in what year my personal RuneScape journey began because of account security reasons, but I did not really take RuneScape seriously before 2008.

At that time I was in high school and I was going through a rough phase in real life. RuneScape had been a place where I had met great friends and indulging myself in the fantasy world that RuneScape had to offer seemed like a much better alternative than having to deal with the actual world. My first RuneScape addiction was the consequence of that. By the summer of 2008 I was playing more than hundred hours per week. My life revolved around RuneScape at that time, so it has played an important role in my life. I took this game more seriously than I was supposed to and that has definitely been a major factor in why ended up knowing a lot about the game of that time.

2008 is also when a regularly visited the friends chat of Gertjaars. I am from Belgium and so is he, which is why I chose his friends chat. Gertjaars is an interesting player from a historical point of view because he is one of the very few people who have managed to hold total rank one for more than twelve consecutive months. In 2008, however, he was not at the top yet. I spent many hours in his friends chat and that was my first encounter with the RuneScape community on a larger scale because I had never joined a friend chat before. It taught me more about the community and the different types of people. I wanted to be like Gertjaars. I wanted to be as good as he was, but I realized that I needed to surround myself with the right people for that.

After founding my own skilling clan to meet like-minded people – I never liked combat – an important event happened to me in 2009. A friend invited me to join the Divination skilling clan. They were regarded as being at the top of the hierarchy in the skilling clan world, so I felt honoured. Even though I did not last very long there, it had sparked my interest in the clan world and, disregarding periods when I was not playing RuneScape, I spent the next years in various clans, so I have always had some sort of connection with the community. Furthermore, I was interested in the RuneScape forums, so let’s say that I had developed a pretty good image of the overall community by 2010. - 8 -

More relevant to this project is that I had met someone during that time and he has been the direct cause of me writing this book. If I had never met him, you would not be reading this book right now. You would be doing whatever you usually do at this time of the day: Playing RuneScape, watching television, going for a walk, wondering about the mysteries of nature or popping bubble wrap because it is just so awesome, but you would not be doing what you are doing right now. So who is that person?

His name is The Pain105. You probably do not know him. The Pain105 began playing RuneScape in 2001, but on a different account. By the end of the 2010 he had become my best friend and we often talked about a variety of topics. Every now and then he shared some of his earliest RuneScape experiences with me. I am an extremely curious person and each of his stories fascinated me. I regularly bugged him with questions and I often caught myself wishing that I had discovered RuneScape much earlier. It really annoyed me that I had missed so many years.

At some point, early in 2011, I began to realize that my interest in the history of the game had reached unhealthy proportions. That is when I had begun reading RuneScape articles while playing the game. In fact, I even decided to go through the entire news archive on the RuneScape website just to find out what had happened on each day of each year. It had kind of become an obsession, but that did not really matter to me. The fact is that I liked the game and I liked reading about it. That is when I realized that other players might also like reading about the early years of RuneScape, so I decided to write a thread with basic information about the history of the game. It was around six pages long on the RuneScape forums and, despite the horrible English, many people actually liked it. That surprised me because the thread definitely lacked a lot of information.

So if the RuneScape community liked reading half-complete information about the game that had been written in mediocre English, then they must have a latent craving for the real thing. That is what I thought and that is why I genuinely wanted to test my abilities to see if I could give the community what it wanted, or did not know it wanted but clearly wanted. In what I in retrospect still do not fully comprehend, I somehow managed to turn those six pages into almost fourty pages in under four months. Even today I still wonder how I did that, it must have been my addiction to the game, but I will never know for sure.

RuneScape History V2 is even to this day the longest thread that has ever been posted on the RuneScape forums. Luckily, it was worth it. The reception was overwhelmingly positive and the realization that I had been able to give the community something that it enjoyed reading gave me an indescribable feeling of satisfaction. The V2 was far from perfect and the English was not much better than mediocre, but altogether it was an important moment in my life. I have always been an extremely ambitious person, but that moment taught me that every goal is worth the effort; and the more work it takes, the more you will learn and get from it.

" I could have sworn I felt a tiny tear trickle down my cheek while reading this. Oh how I miss the good old days! Thanks for the memories!” - Isabelline

I suddenly realized that I could achieve whatever I wanted as long as I set my mind to it and promised myself that I would try to make progress every day. No matter how small or slow, because in the end, all progress is progress, and even small steps will eventually get me to my destination. That is when I decided that I wanted to learn Spanish. I already spoke Dutch, English, French and German at that time, and I had always liked Spanish. So why not Spanish too, right?

The thread was a great personal achievement, and it was acknowledged as such when it became the thread of the week, but it had given me much more than I had hoped for. It was a - 9 - revelation on a personal level. I mean, it had encouraged me to study Spanish at a university, so it had surely made a big impact on my life. The thread remained on the forums for a year, until June 2012. That is when it got eaten by the page fifty monster. A while later I discovered that I had lost it completely because I had reformatted my laptop without saving the thread somewhere. Luckily, two clan mates at that time helped me and recovered it by using Google’s cached pages. As a token of gratitude, I donated almost my entire RuneScape bank to them. That is how much the thread meant to me. In the next months I barely gave it any attention and at that moment I was pretty sure that I would never get back to it...

Something remarkable is that several people recognized me in-game for writing that thread. A turning point was when someone told me, “It would be insane if you didn’t publish that or turn that into a book”. I had never considered the option, but that remark made me think about it. The problem was that my addiction to the game had faded. Furthermore, university demanded a big part of my attention, so I was not sure if it would be realistic, but then I remembered what I had told myself earlier: “All progress is progress, and even small steps will eventually get me to my destination”.

It was summer of 2013 when I decided to pick up my old thread and update it, but this time it had to be as complete as possible, and in good English. Furthermore, I had enjoyed teaching the RuneScape community about the early days of the game, so I wanted to do that again. I wanted to give the members of the community something that they had never been given before. It was the beginning of what would become a bumpy ride. It turned out that combining university with the project (I had begun to refer to it as a project) seemed almost impossible. I was essentially sacrificing my spare time for it, so I needed a break every now and then. Sometimes the break lasted a month, sometimes many months, but each time I got back to the project, knowing that my goal would eventually be reached.

By halfway 2014 it had become a mindset that I had started to apply to everything I did in my life. Unless something is actually physically impossible, why should we accept something as being impossible? For example, if I wanted to work for Jagex, purely hypothetically speaking, which is improbable but not impossible, then why be pessimistic and consider it impossible instead of optimistic and improbable?

One of my personal goals has been to become an entrepreneur at some point, but for a long time that never appeared likely to happen. Not only because I was studying the wrong thing for it (Spanish), but also because I was crazy enough to start studying psychology too. So I ended up studying two things and having to combine that with the RuneScape project. My double studies jeopardized both my entrepreneurial dream and my project, but did I let that stop me? Well, the fact that you are reading this right now kind of answers that.

I never like it when people call my goals unrealistic just because they seem difficult. By the end of 2014 my RuneScape History Project had become part of a bigger goal. Of course I still wanted to teach the community why the game is what it is today and how it got to that point, but I had also turned that project into an important step in my personal development. I wanted to prove to myself that hard work always pays off and that dedication can get you anywhere you want to get to, no matter the goal.

It is now July in 2015. I have worked more than thousand hours on the project over the course of the last four and a half years and I need you, the reader, to understand that this project is not just a book to me. It has been the focal point of my life because it has taught me so many lessons. It set me on my path of wanting to achieve personal enlightenment, full self-actualization without unnecessarily restricting myself to the here and now. - 10 -

Is it not funny how a game can end up transforming someone’s life? Deciding to play RuneScape is by far one of the better decisions I have made in my life. If I had not decided to play it, I would not have made so many friends, I would not have gotten to know other cultures, my general knowledge about the world would never have been so extensive as it is today, my English would not be as good as it is now, I would never have decided to study Spanish, I would never have been able to give this to the community and I probably would never have adopted the mindset that got me to achieve all of that.

RuneScape has given me experiences that I could not have imagined before. Whatever happens next, that is something that life can never take away from me. Unless, of course, I happen to somehow pass away, but then life itself would be gone and so would everything that I am be, but let’s not ponder about those things.

Many other players have offered their help for this project. Being able to talk to them made some chapters much easier for me. For example, as a skiller I had little knowledge about the PvP clan world, which has played a central role in the success of the game. Luckily, I could fall back upon the forums to ask for help and many have helped me. I was fortunate enough to be able to contact the right people at the right time. As shown in the acknowledgements, over sixty people in total have helped for both the 2011 and the 2015 versions combined. Some with only limited information to offer, while I had hour-long conversations with other people, and that multiple times. It does not matter how much someone helped, I am glad that they did and it is something that I will never forget.

The book is divided into different themes, with the contents of each chapter being laid out in a chronological order, where possible. I have tried to add relevant screenshots to each page to provide some visual support. Several players have submitted screenshots. A list with their names and the screenshots that they have sent me has been added after the appendix about the revival of the Wilderness. I have tried to work out a (possible) solution that could succeed in reviving the Wilderness. It is probably not perfect, but members of the PvM, PvP and skilling communities liked the proposal, so I am sure that it offers at least a decent foundation for any alternative solution. A copy of this proposal has been added to my website and can be discussed on the forum board.

I would like to interject a word about the copyright here. Everyone is free to use my screenshots without asking permission, but keep in mind that other screenshots are not mine and have been added to this book only after being granted permission. Obviously, these cannot be used by anyone else. To find out which screenshots are mine and which ones are not, please have a look at the list to which I referred in the paragraph above. Concerning the written contents of this book, entire chapters may not be copied. Individual paragraphs, on the other hand, may be copied without prior permission, but only on the condition that you add a link to this original book and original source. I am not going to actively scan the Internet to see if someone is using my work, but please respect the copyright.

My mission for this project consisted of two segments: one being the personal challenge and to prove to myself that I can do this, the other one being that I want to teach the RuneScape community as much as possible about the history of the game that they have enjoyed playing. I have to admit that I did not succeed in covering all possible themes and every notable event. This is why, despite the size, the book is at best a very extensive summary of the main aspects of RuneScape’s rich history. I have even had to remove around fifty pages just because I thought that 300 pages were perhaps already too many.

- 11 -

I will share a secret with you: I am extremely perfectionistic, which is generally a bad thing. It is why this project took me years to complete, but the positive side of that is that I always tried to make sure that my information is correct and detailed. I even asked the same question to the same person multiple times, and then also to other people. That does not mean that this book is perfect, though, but I did try my best. In fact, in the weeks leading up to the release of this book, I spent around eighty hours per week just on perfecting everything that I had written and on fact-checking information that I had probably already checked at an earlier time.

The fact that writing this book has been an inspirational and instructive journey for myself is why this book is so meaningful to me. But I want it to be meaningful to you, the reader, too. I have worked on this for years. Not only to make this as complete as possible, but also to make sure that this trip down memory lane will be an unforgettable one for you. If by now I have not convinced you yet that the next 300 pages will be worth your time, then I apologize. I have dedicated over thousand hours to writing this book, many people have helped me in the process and I am convinced that this work is at least of reasonable quality, so you should still give it a try.

I invite you to join the forums on my website (www.rshistory.com), where you will be able to discuss the contents of this book and to ask any questions. Alternatively, you may send me an email at [email protected] if you would rather not join the forums. I also invite you to follow my Twitter account https://twitter.com/RsHistoryJuly - I look forward to hearing from you!

If you like reading this book or if you appreciate the many hours of work that I have put into it, a donation would always be nice. I might use it to expand the website, so that I will be able to add the entire book to it. I thank you for your time and attention, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my book as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Gunter, July on RuneScape, 15th July 2015

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. -Eleanor Roosevelt

- 12 -

1

RuneScape 1

We currently know RuneScape as a game that was released in 2001. The history of this game can be traced back to a much earlier date, though. In 1998 Andrew Gower, Paul Gower and Ian Gower (three brothers) set out to create a game, called DeviousMUD, with MUD standing for Multi-User Dungeon. Andrew was the main developer and he initially was the only person involved in his new game. Paul and Ian followed later on because they did not possess the required programming skills at that time. The game had many features that would later be implemented in RuneScape. When using today’s standards, it would be a euphemism to say that the graphics of DeviousMUD were not great. But that is logical because gaming technology was far more primitive back then. However, the game was a graphical MUD and those were quite revolutionary because the majority of the first online games were all text-based at that time. Not surprisingly, the game that inspired Andrew to create DeviousMUD was Nanvaent, a text-based MUD. It was one of Andrew’s favourite games because it was an online game and nothing needed to be installed to play it. At one moment Andrew decided to create his own MUD with as goal to produce the best MUD game, and that by making it have graphics.

The first version of DeviousMUD was written in Java in 1998 by Andrew, but it was never released. Andrew initially did not know much about Java, but a friend of his was interested in adding Java games to his game website. Andrew wanted to help, so he started teaching himself the basics of programming in Java. In 1999 both Andrew and Paul started working on a second version. Paul would end up the designing the world map for DeviousMUD. Later on, Ian Gower joined in to draw the graphics together with Andrew. Ian also designed the player ID kid. In the same year, they released a test version of the game, but it was out for only a couple of days. Apparently Andrew and Paul wanted to make it a very large game; the game had an auto-save feature, the game window was resizable and players could interact with each other. The game also contained a lot of features that look similar to what we can find in RuneScape Classic today and in the current RuneScape version: monsters, weapons, multiplayer activities, skills, (two) shops, a quest, multiple-choice conversations and a communication system. Also the technical part of the game looked similar to what we know today: a right-click option that could display a take-, talk-, drop-, trade- and use-option. Remarkably, the DeviousMUD server could be used by 2500 players, which is more than the current RuneScape servers.

- 13 -

The skills that were present in DeviousMUD would eventually be used in RuneScape as well. These include the combat skills, Cooking, Firemaking, Fishing, Fletching, Mining and Woodcutting. Of course all these skills were much smaller in DeviousMUD than in RuneScape. A combat level system had not been created yet and the only available quest was Sheep Shearer, which had not even been fully developed yet. It gets even better: the game was hardly playable and Andrew admitted at RuneFest 2010 that it was just rubbish. That is why the Gower brothers decided to stop the development of DeviousMUD.

Andrew published a world map of DeviousMUD and it shows us that the earliest version of RuneScape was based on DeviousMUD. Cities that carried (almost) the same names as cities in RuneScape are Al-Kharid, Falador, Monastery, Port Sarim, Varrock, and there is also a location, called Oracle, the Snowy Mountain. Today there is a Non-Player Character (NPC), called Oracle, that resides on the Ice Mountain. It can therefore be assumed that this NPC was named after the DeviousMUD area. Varrock was the centre of the map and there was no Wilderness yet. Falador could be found west of Varrock and the Snowy Mountain north of Varrock. All these places had a slightly different location compared with where they are currently situated in Gielinor, the world in which RuneScape is played. Also remarkable: Port Sarim was located where Al-Kharid is today and Al-Kharid was located where Port Sarim is today. There is a rather funny reason for that. The map editor that Andrew had written for Paul contained a bug which mirrored the areas on the map. Large areas in DeviousMUD had simple names, such as Caves, Dungeon and Tunnels. Falador and Varrock, on the other hand, were limited in size.

A bit later in 1999 Andrew and Paul closed DeviousMUD and started to work on RuneScape. This game would eventually include a lot of elements that had previously been used in DeviousMUD (as told in the previous paragraphs). The entire year of 2000 was dedicated to the development of RuneScape and the four beta testers were there from the very start (February 2000). Game content that was created in 2000 included six quests, fighting/combat systems, monsters, camera motion, locations, skills, magic spells and NPCs. The monsters were not very tough ones and they carried simple names, such as chicken, bear and rat. The RuneScape website itself was created on 10th January 2000. The beta testers were Andrew’s friends and they had met him via Cyber Wars, a game hosted on Games Domain at that time. These beta testers were Gugge, Lightning, Merlin and Rab.

The transition from 2000 to 2001 was not a calm one for the Gower brothers. They were preparing everything for the release of RuneScape and the last changes were being made to the game. On 4th January 2001 they released RuneScape as a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). However, how did Paul and Andrew find the name 'RuneScape'? Before RuneScape was created, Andrew wanted it to be related to fantasy, so he started writing down all simple words, like magic, stone etc., that could have something to do with fantasy and that could fit as a nice name for their game. After he had finished searching for all those words, he wrote a programme which combined all those fantasy-related words together into every possible closed compound word (all combinations of maximum two words). RuneScape was one of those compound words and, as we can tell today, Andrew must have liked that particular combination. So there you have it, the birth of RuneScape.

- 14 -

Upon the public launch of RuneScape on 4th January 2001, many of the currently existing game features were not present yet. Just to give you a better idea, here is a quick list containing some of the game features that were not part of the game when it had first been released: There was no Wilderness, no option to run, no option to rest, no bank notes, no tutorial, many of the skills had not been released yet, the best type of armour was adamant, banks could be used only for storing money, there were only six quests, there was no lodestone teleportation network and no home teleport spell, trading had to be done face-to-face because there was no Grand Exchange yet, etc. Andrew and Paul called this the beta launch of RuneScape. And then we are talking about the superficial limitations in comparison with today, but there are many more differences that need to be discussed in-depth, which is what I will attempt to do in this PDF in a clear and entertaining manner.

Before I proceed, I should also mention that I will look at the game mechanisms and the in-game features in this chapter, but not at the community or player base yet. The next chapter is about the community, which is where I will thoroughly discuss the first communities of the game. I have chosen to separate these two topics (the game and the community) so that it easier to provide a clear and structured description for each of the topics. I should also mention that Andrew and Paul Gower were the main developers of RuneScape 1, which was just called RuneScape at the time. Ian was busy with his studies and his university did not allow its students to have a job outside of the school hours. This became important once the game had grown a bit. Ian eventually ended up helping his two brothers with the development of RuneScape during the holidays, but not during his school days. This is why only Andrew and Paul are frequently considered to be the creators of RuneScape, without any mention of Ian, although he did contribute as well. For example, the first RuneScape logo was designed by Ian and he also took care of the graphics and 3d-modelling. That the creation of RuneScape is the result of family effort is also visible in the sense that the Gower brothers’ mother also designed some of the visuals aspect as she produced some of the monster graphics, such as bears. None of the brothers was extremely ambitious about RuneScape, though. In a RuneScape livestream held on 11th February 2015 Ian confirmed that rune armour (unlocked at level 40 in the Melee skills) was the best armour at such a low level because none of the brothers thought that the game would survive for a long time, let alone that anyone would ever reach level 99 in a skill.

The game on 4th January 2001, the day on which RuneScape was officially released, was limited not only in the number of available game features, but also in size. The geography was restricted to Draynor Village, Ghost Town, Lumbridge and Varrock as the four corners of the world map. Ghost Town was the initial name for what is now called Edgeville. Al-Kharid, Canifis, Falador, the Wilderness and everything beyond those locations did not exist yet. In order words, the available space for the players was small, but the Gower brother tried to get around this by adding a lot of inconveniently placed fences between the cities, so that the world would feel a lot bigger than it actually was. Most of these fences currently either no longer exist or Jagex added gaps to them so that we no longer have to walk around them. More about the geography will be discussed in-depth in the chapter that is dedicated the development of the game’s world. In the next paragraphs I will - 15 - attempt to discuss the biggest differences with regard to in-game features in a somewhat systematical order, starting with the game mechanics that each player was automatically subjected to, and followed by the in-game content that is characteristic of the earliest RuneScape version.

Let’s start off with a stand-alone fact, but a very important one: there was no Grand Exchange in RS1 and there would not be one in the game until November of 2007. The absence of the Grand Exchange has implications with regard to the community because it meant that trading could only be done by face-to-face trading. More about this will follow in the chapter about the RuneScape community. So what other differences deserve to be mentioned? Well, there was no P2P or F2P in 2001, everyone was a free player because Andrew did not want his players to pay for the game. He stated very clearly that he had created the game for fun purposes and that he did not want anyone to pay in order to enjoy the game. However, at that moment Andrew and Paul were convinced that the game would never become extremely popular. Eventually maintenance of the newly added servers to accommodate to the growing player base made it impossible to keep the game completely free- to-play. By early 2002 it had become clear that they had to find a way to make money, so on 27th February 2002 they released the option to pay for additional content, including several new skills and access to P2P-only area, which was limited to a small area west of the wall north of Falador.

After creating an account during the period January 2001 – July 2002, every player had to choose to which class he or she wanted to belong. There initially were five classes: Adventurer, Necromancer, Ranger, Warrior and Wizard. A sixth class, Miner, followed a couple of months later. Each class determined the skill focus of your account to help you on your way. For example, a Miner account would start with level seven in the Mining skill, as opposed to the normal level one. The player would also automatically be given a regular pickaxe. Warriors, on the other hand, started their RuneScape adventure with level three in each of the Melee skills, as well as level twelve in the Hitpoints skill (Constitution used to be called Hitpoints). Each warrior would also automatically be equipped with a wooden shield and a bronze dagger. Similar perks applied to the other four classes, but you can see that these skill focuses offered only very minimal advantages. Regardless of class, each player started in Lumbridge and there were no other advantages specific to each class. Furthermore, there were no interclass restrictions, so each player could interact or engage with other players of any class. In July of 2002 this system of classes was removed because the differences between the classes were too negligible and because the advantages offered by each class did very little anyway. In addition to that, Andrew did not like games that force a player to make a choice before that player is able to fully comprehend the consequences of that choice, so he was not a fan of those classes in the first place.

Another predetermined game mechanism in the first half of 2001 consisted of the option to become a player-killer or a non-player-killer. These should not be mistaken with what we currently refer to when we are talking about player killers or players who do not participate in such activities. Today the affiliation with either the player killer community or any other community is not forced by the game, everyone at any given moment can voluntarily participate in any or multiple communities. This was different at the start of 2001, when each new player was forced by game mechanisms to choose to be either a player-killer or non-player-killer. At the moment a Wilderness did not exist yet. However, if a player had selected to become a player- killer, he or she could attack (or be attacked by) any other player-killer anywhere in RuneScape, with a few safe zones as exception. Non-player-killers, on the other hand, could not attack anyone - 16 - else, but they also could not be attacked by anyone, not even by player-killers. They were essentially safe everywhere in RuneScape (of course they could still die as a result of engaging in combat with a NPC). Non-player-killers usually fulfilled a role that we would now describe as being a skiller. Each player had the possibility to switch two times between these two styles of playing. After switching for a second time, whichever option was active on your account would be your permanent status until 13th August 2001. That is when the Gower brothers abolished the player-killer and non-player-killer game mechanism because many of the players had been asking the game developers if they could switch their status one more time. Furthermore, most players had chosen to be a non-player-killer because they did not want to play with the permanent risk of getting killed and losing their items to other players. On 3rd May of that same year Andrew and Paul had released a poll to ask what the community thought about that system and the vast majority turned out to be in favour of implementing the concept of the Wilderness, which was included in the same news post, containing the same mechanisms that it does today, minus multi-combat areas. On the same day as the release of the Wilderness, a stake-option was added for those who still wanted to fight other people outside of the Wilderness. The player who wanted to challenge someone to a duel would need to send a simple invitation and then the other person could either accept or refuse. The Duel Arena did not exist yet.

That takes me to the next topic: combat was completely different than it is today, in a way that had huge implications for every player killer and that renders every contemporary strategy useless. From now on when I use the term player killer, I am referring to the voluntary affiliation of a player with the player killing community, and not to the abolished system that was used in the first half of 2001. RS1’s combat system was fully automated in the sense that abilities did not exist yet, so it was essentially a primitive version of what we now know as legacy combat. The combat system that was present at the beginning of the game could easily be described as being quite peculiar, among several other things. A so-called three-round combat system was in effect, which each round referring to one cycle of a player attacking an opponent and the opponent retaliating. This, of course, is not weird because it is also how combat works today. However, the reason why it was called the three-round combat system is because three consecutive cycles had to be completed before the act of engaging in combat with a NPC or another player could be interrupted. In other words, each player was bound to their spot by game mechanics for as long as it took the game to complete three consecutive cycles of a player attacking (once) and the opponent retaliating (once). As you can probably image, this had this far-going consequences for the player killers. There is an entire chapter dedicated to player killing in this PDF, so I will leave it as this for now.

Today there is a combat triangle in RuneScape, which was designed to create a balance between each of the three combat types (Magic, Melee, Ranged) by making them vulnerable to one other combat type, but superior to the remaining third combat type. For example, Ranged is weak against Melee, but strong against Magic. This combat triangle system did not exist until the release of RS2. The consequence of that was that there was a power imbalance between the three combat types from 2001 until 2004. Melee, Magic and Ranged also played different roles because Ranged could be used only for attacking from afar. Close-distance combat (with no space between the player and its opponent) was possible only by using Melee or Magic. What might come as surprise is that Magic spells could be - 17 - fired while doing Melee attacks, allowing the player to attack twice at the same time. In other worlds, Magic served a supplement, rather than a substitution for Melee. Furthermore, for a long time there was no limit on how many combat spells could be cast within any given time window. This made it possible to launch three to five spells at your opponent in just one second, and while also attacking with Melee. Despite the high susceptibility for abuse in player-killing activities, the lack of a casting speed for Magic spells was not a priority issue because runes could initially not be bought in large quantities, leading to the entire Magic skill itself not being extremely popular. As a consequence of this, it took the community a while to even figure out that there actually was no limit on the casting speed. The choice of not adding a limit was also the result of Andrew being the only engine developer and subsequently having a considerable backlog of work, so there was not enough time to give attention to a game mechanism that was not used much anyway. Nevertheless, after the implementation of the membership system in early 2002, as well as its member content, Andrew finally modified the spell-casting mechanism so that the amount of casts per any given time window would be limited. Regardless of all of that, the combination of Magic and Melee was not popular, possibly due to the high click-intensity. Runecrafting had not been released yet, but runes could be bought in Varrock’s runes shop. However, a supply of runes in general was still much harder to obtain than in RS2, which is a factor that also contributed to the use of Magic combat not being popular. Melee was generally the preferred way of engaging in close-distance combat and Magic/Ranged from a distance (evidently, Melee could not be used to attack from attack from afar). Both the three-round combat system and the above mechanisms for the combat types would continue to exist until the release of RS2 in March of 2004.

It should be noted, however, that Magic (present from the start of RuneScape) was initially divided into two skills: Evil Magic and Good Magic. You might intuitively think that Evil Magic would contain all the Combat spells and Good Magic all the non-combat spells, but that is not true. Both contained a mixture of spells and could be trained separately (so that you would have two Magic levels). I am not sure why Magic was split up like that, but by March 2001 Good Magic and Evil Magic had been merged into one skill, containing only the regular spellbook that we know today (of course with fewer spells available at that time). On a final note for all things Magic I should mention that it was possible to fail at casting a spell. Failure would result in the inability to cast another spell for twenty seconds. A similar situation applied to Prayer before the Prayer book had been released in May 2001. There was Good and Evil Prayer, but the community did not know what they were used for. Both could be trained by burying bones, but none of the levels was of any use considering that no prayer had been released yet. Upon the release of the first prayers, both types of Prayer were merged into one and the same skill, with a regular Prayer book offering a limited set of prayers. The reason why Andrew merged the Magic skills, and also the Prayer skills, is because he had realized that the RS1 game engine was not capable of supporting a sufficiently high amount of Magic spells to justify the existence of the Evil and Good Magic versions, and likewise for Prayer.

You might remember Andrew and Paul’s attempt at creating the illusion of a big world map. Not only was this done by adding a lot of walls and fences to the game, the process was also aided by the absence of the ability to run. You heard that right, players could walk around in RuneScape, but they could not run around until the release of RuneScape 2. As a consequence, journeys to other villages were dreaded by many and completion of nearly all activities took much longer than it does today. If that was not demotivating enough yet to train the resource-gathering skills, in the first - 18 - months of 2001 it was not possible to see how much xp a player had accumulated in a skill. The level was visible, the xp was not. And it gets even better (or worse): For about four to five months after the release of RuneScape, coins were the only items that could be stored in a bank. It seems like the Gower brothers wanted to follow real-life logic there. Of course this added a difficulty to the gameplay because it meant that a player had no way of protecting their belongings. This must have been frightening, especially for player killers. The risk of dying was high and the best armour, adamant, was relatively expensive, so playing the game in the early days was primarily about consolidating a nice a sum of money in the bank. It is true that the game contained fewer items, but we all know how quickly inventories fill up, and the initial bank system made it inconvenient to train resource-gathering (e.g. Mining) skills and item-production (e.g. Smithing) skills separately. On 26th July 2001 the banks expanded the services to include items as well, which was perceived as a Guthix-sent gift from heaven.

It is important to mention that even at that moment items could not be noted yet by banks. A different system, completely unrelated to banks, was in effect for this. Certificates, also commonly called certs in RS1, were the precursor of bank notes. At various locations in RuneScape so-called certers could be found who would turn five unstackable items in your inventory into one certificate (for the five items), reducing the number of occupied inventory slots from five to one. So if a player wanted to make 150 iron ores stackable (for example, in preparation for a trade), the player was forced to make a few trips from the bank to the correct certer in order to obtain thirty stackable iron ore certificates. Keep in mind, by walking, not by running, so this process could take a while. In addition to that, only a few types of objects could be turned into certificates and it was not as simple as going to any one certer because each certer had their own skill focus. Have a look at the image below, it displays each certer, where he or she could be found and what items could be certed at each location.

The names of cities and villages on the horizontal axis are in chronological order of release. Brimhaven, Catherby and Zanaris were released on 27th February 2002. This means that only bars, ores and F2P fish could be turned into certificates in 2001. And not even all types of fish, only lobster and swordfish. The types of P2P fish were limited to bass and shark; the types of logs were limited to maple, willow and yew; and the types of ores and bar were limited to coal, gold, iron, mithril, silver and steel. The certer in Yanille was slightly more generous as he would not only accept super attack, super strength and super defence potions, but also prayer potions, dragon bones and limpwurt roots. Some of you might have recognized the names Miles, Niles and Giles. Indeed, these are the characters that could also be found in RS2 in three random events. If you are a new player, you might never have witnessed the random event system. Do not worry, I will explain what

- 19 - it was later in this PDF. For those of you who have been playing since 2011 or longer, random events did not exist in RS1, which explains why these three fellows could appear in Draynor without being in their random event habitat. The certificate system, including its certers, was removed and replaced by the current bank notes system during the transition from RS1 to RS2. Miles, Niles and Giles would later become characters in random events.

The word that follows after this sentence might trigger a state of catatonia in many veteran RuneScape players. Fatigue. Oh, the joys of RS1. The much-dreaded fatigue system, an arguably clumsy attempt to combat the increase of bots in 2002. I will provide an in-depth description of the fatigue system later in the project when we are having a look at how the skills have evolved since the rise of Gielinor. For now I will stick to a synopsis that contains the most important details. By 2002 the presence of bots had become noticeable in the game. Considering the unfair nature of botting, it was evident that the game developers had to do something about those bots. Their main solution came in November 2002 in the form of the fatigue system. So how did this fatigue system work? Well, bots cannot think for themselves. They are preprogrammed to carry out either one or a very small set of tasks. In other words, a bot cannot respond when it is prompted to carry out another task. A player can, and this difference lies at the foundation of the fatigue system. The way it worked is that your character would start to get tired after a while until it had become too tired to continue gaining xp or to gather resources. In order to be able to gain xp again, the character would have to rest in any of the new beds that had been placed at various locations in Gielinor. After recovering in one of the beds, a second and final task had to be carried out: copying a CAPTCHA verification code. A bot would not be able to do this while a real player could easily relocate to the nearest bed and return. However, many players did not like that system just because they were forced to relocate and, as we know by now, a player could not run, only walk. Many sighs were heard across the land in May of 2003 when the bed system was replaced with a system of portable sleeping bags, eliminating the need to relocate. This made the entire fatigue system more bearable, but also easier for the bots. Eventually the fatigue system was removed during the transition from RS1 to RS2, the bot-breaking random event system had been implemented instead.

- 20 -

For many years there was an island that played a crucial role in the gaming experience of every player. A place where every newcomer learned the ropes of the game. The Tutorial Island was released in September of 2002 with the intention of introducing new players to the game. If you, the reader, are someone who started playing in 2012 or later, you might think that I am referring to Ashdale, which is the current tutorial island. However, Tutorial Island was an entirely different place that no longer exists today. The image to the right indicates where it was located from 2002 until 2012, after which it was removed in order to free up space for the Wizards’ Tower expansion. Although it is no longer available in the main game, with little effort the old tutorial can easily be replayed by creating an account for Old School RuneScape. If you are a RuneScape player who has never played the original tutorial, I highly recommend that you try Old School RuneScape, so that you can experience that what once was the very first RuneScape experience for millions of players. The only way to reach the main land was by completing the tutorial, after which the player would be teleported to Lumbridge. This is primarily why Lumbridge has always been a city of high historical importance. For many years it was the place where new players flocked together and formed friendships to explore the game with their new comrades.

I have already briefly discussed in this chapter what combat used to be like in RS1 (more about this will follow later in this PDF). However, I have not mentioned much yet about the preferred weapons and armour, nor have I said anything about how armour affected your in-fight performance. In RS1 each weapon had a WeaponAim and WeaponPower bonus, which determined your overall accuracy and your highest hit, respectively. Shields, helms and other armour only carried a Defence bonus. Unlike today, Melee armour did not affect your WeaponAim and WeaponPower when you were using Magic or Ranged to fight your opponent. The only thing that mattered was the Defence bonus, and the platebody and platelegs of the highest available Melee armour carried the highest Defence bonus. As a consequence, rangers and magers alike wore Melee armour because it did not have a negative impact on their WeaponAim or WeaponPower. There also was a bonus for the Magic combat type, but the benefits of the Magic bonus that accompanied the Magic armour were not high enough to justify not wearing Melee armour. For Ranged there was no bonus, the only determinant factor of Ranged hits and their accuracy was the type of arrow that was being used.

So what weapons and armour did the players use? At the release of RuneScape that best Melee weapons and armour was adamant. Rune items were released in - 21 -

July of 2001. Dragon armour and better types of armour were never release in RS1, although dragon weapons were. Before the release of these dragon weapons in February 2002, the preferred type of Melee weapon was the 2h-sword, the best type of Melee weapon at that time. For any type of Melee weapon, the WeaponAim and WeaponPower bonus of the 2h-sword was 64% higher than the second best type of weapon, the scimitar. This changed after the release of the dragon weapons. The dragon sword and the dragon axe are the only dragon-type weapons that were ever released in RS1. The sword, what is now referred to as the longsword, carried the highest WeaponAim bonus, but the (battle)axe had the highest WeaponPower bonus. Both ended up becoming frequently used weapons, with the balance slightly tipping in favour of the axe. At the end of 2003, a few months before the release of RS2, a well-prepared warrior would wear a rune platebody, rune platelegs, a dragon medium helmet, a dragonstone amulet, a dragon square shield and either a dragon (long)sword or a dragon (battle)axe.

For the Magic combat type it was usually the Melee armour that was preferred to wear because of its Defence bonus. However, at lower levels it did pay off to wear actual Magic armour because it significantly affected the failure rate of casting Magic spells. At high Magic levels failure to cast a Magic spell was a rare occurrence, so Magic armour was not needed. For what follows next it should be noted that the item names in this paragraph are the original names and do not include any typographical errors. In order to obtain the highest Magic bonus, a player would have had to wear a blue wizardshat, a blue wizards robe, a robe of Zamorak, a sapphire amulet of magic, a god cape (e.g. Saradomin cape) and either a battlestaff or an enchanted battlestaff. However, the god staves, which have a lower Magic bonus, were more commonly used because they were required to cast the god spells. Even though I have now listed the preferred types of Magic armour, keep in mind that Melee armour was usually worn, and not Magic armour. For the Ranged combat type the only important factor that the determined a player’s maximum hit was the level in the Ranged skill, although the type of bow did matter for accuracy. The different types of arrows did not exist until March 2002, so there used to be only one type of arrows before that month, simply called arrows. The types of bow that were available are the crossbow, the longbow and the shortbow. Ranged bonus did not exist in RS1, so it was again Melee armour that was worn instead. Longbows are called shieldbows in RuneScape today.

Training non-combat skills was quite the experience back in the day. Even before the aforementioned fatigue system began to affect skilling (November 2002), the different training methods were not only limited in number, but also slow because of various reasons: a run-option did not exist yet, there was competition between the players at the locations where the resource- gathering skills could be trained and many skills were characterized as having a high click-intensity because a lot of activities were not automated yet (for example, a lack of x-options). For the first half year of 2001, when only coins could be stored in banks, the activity of skilling usually implied either a do-it-yourself approach for training the item-production skills or close relationships with player killers, with the skiller acting as a supplier of the useful PvP items (armour, food, weapons etc.). On the following pages I will attempt to provide a clear image of what skilling in RS1 was - 22 - like. Some of the arguable less important skills, like Agility and Thieving, will be skipped for now. I might also provide xp rates every now and then, but it should be noted that those xp rates include the existence of the fatigue system. Therefore, they are accurate only for the period November 2002 – March 2004. In the chapter about the development of each skill later in this book, I will provide more information about each skill, including the skills that I am going to skip now. What follows below could be considered a preview.

The resource-gathering skills, which fill up your inventory, were supported by different mechanisms and that was visible in the gameplay experience. In RS1 the resource-gathering skills were Fishing, Mining and Woodcutting. On the other hand there were the item-production skills. These require an input in the form of the objects obtained from the resource-gathering skills or from monster drops. In RS1 the item-production skills were Cooking, Crafting, Fletching, Herblaw and Smithing. The remaining skills were the combat skills, which we have already discussed earlier in this chapter, and a few other skills that do not really belong to any category. These are Agility, Firemaking and Thieving, and are characterized by yielding neither a type of resource nor a predetermined end product.

One element that the three resource- gathering skills had in common and that is different from the current situation in RS3, is that a player could continue to train the skill with a full inventory. In RS1 any additional resource would be dropped automatically. This was convenient for the powerskillers, the players who cared about gaining levels and xp. However, not banking the resources was considered to be extremely inefficient in RS1 because of a few reasons: the economy was primitive, looking for trade partners was a time- consuming activity and resources were relatively expensive. It was advised and preferred by many to bank the resources, so that they could either be sold or kept for personal use.

Fishing in RS1 contained many of the currently existing types of fish. Shark was released on the same day as the membership option, 27th February 2002, and manta ray followed in July of 2003, the best type of fish that could be caught. As far as game mechanics are concerned, there are two differences specific to Fishing that should be mentioned. First of all, fishing spots never moved in RS1. Today a player is forced to move from spot to spot every now and then, especially for the less popular and/or lower-levelled fishing methods outside of the Living Rock Cavern. Back in the day the players never had to relocate to another fishing spot. However, this apparent benefit was outbalanced by the second noteworthy difference in game mechanics: a player’s character would stop fishing as soon as a fish had been caught. In other words, those fisherman needed to reclick on the fishing spot in order to start catching the next fish. Depending on the type of fish, this caused to skill to vary in intensity. For example, shark is caught at a slow pace, fly fish at a faster pace.

Catching fly fish, lobster and shark were the most popular fishing methods in RS1. As you will find out later in this book, the RS1 community generally did not give much attention to skilling, so the fly fishing method was only popular in those subcommunities that did care about fast xp rates. For the majority, however, the primary ways of training the skill was by catching lobster. Relatively speaking, not many people had a sufficiently high Fishing level to catch shark. This explains the popularity of lobster as opposed shark, but those who did have the required level, caught shark instead. At high Fishing levels, 35k to 50k xp per hour could be gained for the fly fish method and up to 25k xp per hour for lobster-catching. However, those are high estimations. The average xp rates were usually lower. Lobster was most often caught in Catherby and the Fishing guild (for - 23 - those who had the required level of 68 to enter). Fly fish was usually caught in the Barbarian Village or at the lake north of Seers’ Village’s bank. The types of fish that could be turned into certificates (to make trading faster) were bass, lobster, shark and swordfish.

Today we can examine rocks to find out what type of ore they hold, but there is an interesting story about that. Today we can see when a rock contains ore and when it does not. However, in RS1 there was no visual way of knowing whether or not the rock contained ore. Perhaps the creators of the game thought that it would not be clear that players were supposed to examine the rock in order to find out if it contained an ore and what type of ore it contained, so what the developers did instead was adding a prospect option to the right- click menu. A player could easily have attempted to mine the rock to find out all of that information, the only real advantage of the prospect option seems to have been to avoid wasting a little bit of time, but then again, the prospect option did not instantly yield a response, but only after a second or two. Later in RS1, following a series of updates to the fatigue system after November 2002, the developers of the game decided to introduce a visual way of determining whether or not the rocks did contain ore. The prospect option, however, was still available. In fact, it would stay in the game for a more than a decade, after which Jagex seemed to have realized that the option had become redundant.

The best type of pickaxe that was available is the one made of rune, even though that type of pickaxe did not exist until mid-2003. In the recent years the Elf City and the Living Rock Cavern have revolutionized Mining in a way which makes the skill very different from what used it be like, but if you image the current game without the city or the cavern, it would help to create a better mental image of what Mining used to be like in the early years of the game. The driving mechanism behind pickaxes was based on a system which assigned a predetermined number of swings to each type of pickaxe. For example, a player wielding an adamant pickaxe had ten attempts, or ten swings, to extract the ore from the rock. If after ten swings the player had failed to obtain the ore, the character would stop mining and the player would have to click the rock again. It worked liked this for all types of pickaxe, with the lower-level pickaxes granting a lower number of swings. While the type of pickaxe determined the amount of swings, it was the Mining level that determined the success rate. The skill itself was fairly slow. At high levels around 16.5k xp per hour could be obtained at the best places. These included the iron mine south of Ardougne and the gold mine in Brimhaven, both providing similar xp rates, and that without banking the ore. The Woodcutting landscape in RS1 was not so different. In fact, imagine the game without all the currently existing high-level woodcutting methods and what is left is RS1. These high-level methods are, in order of release, teak, mahogany, arctic pine, ivy, crystal etc. - 24 -

The best type of tree in the first three years of the game was the magic tree. However, until the release of Fletching in March 2002, the only type of tree that could be chopped were normal trees and there was a formula that determined the xp that a player would receive. More about this will follow in the chapter about the development of each skill. The release of Fletching went hand in hand with the removal of that formula as well as with a newly added possibility of chopping the other trees. The most popular places to train Woodcutting included Draynor Village and Seers’ Village for willow, maple and yew. Xp rates varied depending on the location that the player had chosen, but at high levels 40k xp per hour could be obtained from willows. Lower xp rates applied to the other types of trees and are similar the current xp rates of the same methods.

As for the item-production skills, there is not extremely much that can be said about Cooking. Noteworthy would be the fact there was no x-option in RS1, which made Cooking a click-intensive skill. The cooking gauntlets from the Family Crest quest (released in 2002) were often used to reduce the amount of burnt food. The activity of cooking itself was usually done as part of a bigger image: to provide yourself or player killers with food. Despite its importance, the skill itself was not extremely popular because of how much clicking it required. Until the release of the membership option, the best type of food that could be cooked was the swordfish. Later shark and manta ray would follow. It was not uncommon for players to combine Cooking with Fishing. This was usually done in Catherby or the Fishing Guild because of the presence of a cooking range near the bank. Xp rates were lower in RS1 than they are now, possibly because the process is automated now, so it is not possible to waste time as a result of misclicks or being distracted. At high levels cooking lobster provided around 90k-110k xp/hour. Lobster was the most popular choice because many players did not have a sufficiently high level too cook better food without burning the food too often.

The last item-production skill that I would like to introduce for now is Smithing, arguably the most important non-combat skill in RS1. It will be no surprise by now anymore when I say that also Smithing used to be a lot more click-intensive. Good weapons and armour were in a state of constant demand. In addition to that, not many players were able to smith the rune items because skill requirements (85+) were considered to be extremely high at that time. The entire concept of skilling was not popular and Smithing was regarded as one of the more difficult skills to train. Luckily, even as early as 2001, rune platelegs and rune platebodies could already be bought in the Champions’ Guild. The weapons, however, could not, and there was a high demand for rune 2h- swords and rune kiteshields, requiring a Smithing level of 99 and 97, respectively. The lucky few high-level smiths could easily make a lot of money just from Smithing the rune 2h sword, for a while the strongest weapon in RS1, and usually the bars were provided by the player who needed the weapon.

Even though Smithing could be profitable even at lower levels, the act of training the skill was usually done on a do-it-yourself basis. If combined with Mining, it was common to mine iron at the South-Ardougne mine and to smith it into platebodies, granting 11k Mining xp and 6k Smithing xp per hour. Another alternative was smelting bars at the Al-Kharid furnace. Smelting steel ore was good for an xp rate of just under 10k xp per hour. Smelting rune ore provided 12k xp per hour. The small difference can be explained by the fact that smithing rune bars requires more coal than does smelting steel ore. For example, at Al-Kharid it was possible to make around 550 steel bars per - 25 - hour, but only 240 rune bars. A next step either involved selling the bars or turning them into items, usually the steels bars were turned into steel platebodies or arrowheads. Smithing steel platebodies could earn up to around 90k Smithing xp per hour, and a little under 50k xp per hour for making steel arrowheads. The extremely rich players could turn high-level bars into items as a legitimate means of training the skill, although keep in mind that only a few people were fortunate enough for that. Making adamant platebodies could yield xp rates of around 150k xp per hour and it was possible to generate 180k xp per hour from rune platebodies.

Firemaking, the last skill that I will discuss in this chapter, was quite the horror back in RS1. I should probably start by saying that bonfires did not exist yet and that training the skill was extremely click-intensive. A player needed to have a tinderbox in their inventory to light each log, one by one. There was no automated process behind the skill. Line firemaking is also characteristic of RS2, but in RS1 there was one minor difference which could cause a lot of frustration. While in RS2 it was possible to use the tinderbox on the logs (in the inventory itself) to drop that log, in RS1 the player first had to drop the log (manually) and then use the tinderbox on the dropped log, and that for each log. However, this could be bypassed by combining Firemaking with Woodcutting. You might remember that I mentioned that new resources are automatically dropped onto the ground when the inventory is full. This was also the case for Woodcutting, so a commonly used training method was to cut normal trees (which give only one log) with a full inventory and to immediately light the dropped log. You might think that was quite convenient, but there was another little difference: it was also possible for players to fail at setting the logs on fire. The player would simply have to retry, but it was not a pleasant experience. For a good year Firemaking was very similar to Woodcutting in the sense that only normal logs could be lit, even after the release of Fletching in March 2002, and a similar formula applied. In other words, the xp rates were based on the Firemaking level. At level 90-99 running in circles through the forest (to train Woodcutting + Firemaking together at normal trees) could provide up to 105k Firemaking xp per hour (as well as 13k Woodcutting xp). The other skills that I have not discussed in this chapter will be described in detail in the chapter about the development of each skill. The ones I did discuss will be explored more in-depth as well.

Before I proceed with the second part of this chapter, which will be about the RS2 beta period, I would quickly like to interject something. As you may or may not have noticed, so far I have not used the acronym Jagex very often. The reason for that is because Jagex is now commonly used to refer to the company Jagex Ltd., but that company did not exist yet for the most part of 2001. However, even though Andrew and his brothers had already been referring to themselves as Jagex for quite a while prior to founding the company, I still decided to abstain from using that name on multiple occasions to avoid confusion about whether or not Jagex Ltd., the company, had already been founded. My initial plan for the project included dedicating an entire chapter to Jagex Ltd. However, I have decided not pursue that idea because the project was becoming too big and because my work for university had been considerably slowing down my progress on this project. Eventually I decided to leave out several parts, starting with the least relevant ones for the game itself. These include a chapter about Jagex Ltd., Old School RuneScape and several other subjects. However, I would still like to mention more about how the term Jagex came to be and how it has evolved over the course of the years.

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Jagex Ltd. was founded in December of 2001, which was a hectic period for the game developers because of RuneScape’s unexpected success. Consequently, none of the Gower brothers had any time to properly prepare for life as founders of a company. The game and the company grew so fast that Andrew Gower spent the first years just learning as he went along, to quote his words, mostly by relying on the Internet for tips and information. In my emails with Andrew he shared with me that for his first interviews with job candidates, he was sometimes more nervous for having to lead the interviews than the candidates were for being on the receiving end of the questions. Many believe that Jagex initially stood for Java Gaming Experts, which it did for many years, but it had another meaning even prior to founding the company. Initially Jagex was the name of a software library that Andrew had created in 1998 to facilitate the act of developing games. At that moment it stood for Java Audio Graphics Extension and was originally capitalized as JAGEx. Later this changed to JAGeX after designing the logo for it. Andrew used that library for many of his games and eventually he decided that he would officially trade under the name Jagex Software because, at that moment, he already owned the domain jagex.com and because the JAGeX logo was already displayed at the start of many of his games. Andrew and his brothers would continue using the name Jagex Software until Jagex Ltd. was founded. Shortly afterwards the meaning of Jagex was changed to Java Gaming Experts, a slogan which would continue to be used until the turn of the decade, when the new slogan became Just About the Game Experience. And that is the history behind the name.

On 1st December 2003 the RS2 beta was launched, available only to member accounts. This was the start of the transition from RS1 to RS2. Keep in mind that term RuneScape Classic did not exist yet as the game was just called RuneScape. In the first few months before this beta launch, RuneScape received almost no content updates because Jagex wanted to focus on RS2. This was also the first time that the developers of RuneScape chose for a public beta in preparation of a big update. Bugs were inevitable, but by releasing a beta Jagex would manage to squash the bugs before they had a chance to enter the live game. From the start it had been decided that all progress made on the beta accounts in the beta would be removed at the end of the beta period, which means that each player would have their account reverted to the state of prior to the beta’s release. However, this was not a problem because many players were extremely excited about the new graphics, which were significantly different than the RS1 ones. At the release of the beta Jagex had still not decided what to do with the original version of the game. Continue its existence or remove it? This is something that was settled at the end of January; the original game would continue to exist. However, the initial uncertainty led to Jagex having to make several modifications to the beta with regard to whether or not stats and items should be transferred.

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So it was 31st January 2004 when Jagex announced that RS1 would continue to exist. On the same day Jagex provided more details about the beta accounts. They had decided that all beta accounts would be deleted upon the release of RS2 and that the RS1 accounts of all players would then be copied to RS2, so that everyone would essentially end up with two accounts, one for each version of the game. Progress in one game would not affect the progress in the other game, but both games would share the same friends list, so that players could continue to communicate with each other when playing the different versions. Making a new account would automatically create a profile in both games. That all seemed great to Jagex, but what they had failed to realize at that moment was that by creating a RS2 copy of already existing RS1 accounts at the end of the beta, all items would effectively be duplicated as each player would possess their items on both accounts, while progress in one game would not affect progress in the other. In addition to that, RS2 players could then decide to sell their RS1 items for RS2 items after the beta (through trust trades, there was never a trading system between RS1 and RS2). Why would you keep your RS1 items if you are not going to be playing that version of the game, right? How these trades would then have to take place is very similar to how RS3 players sell their items for Old School RuneScape items these days.

Luckily, none of that ever happened. When Jagex announced their initial plans, the community was quick to point out the flaws mentioned in the paragraph above, as well as the implications for the economy. Jagex of course agreed as they realized that they could not just create a RS2 copy of everyone’s RS1 account, so a couple of days later Jagex came with a new plan. No longer would anyone get a copy of their account for both games, but Jagex would allow everyone to move their account from RS1 to RS2 (or vice versa) once every three days. This solution would eliminate the possibility of both item duplication and intergame trading (between the two versions of the game). At the same time it would still allow the community to test the new version of the game and to return to RS1 if they did not really like RS2. Some people were so curious about what all their items would look like in RS1 that they transferred all items to their RS2 account and then back to their RS1 account. This was quite funny, but it was also nice to see how excited people were about the new version of the game. However, there was one problem. It had been announced that a new skill, called Runecrafting, would be released during the beta (or officially on the day of RuneScape 2’s full release). This was a problem because in RS1 there was no way to make runes, meaning that it was a lot more difficult to obtain runes in RS1. In other words, runes in RS1 were supposed to have a higher value than runes crafted in RS2’s beta. By allowing players to craft their own runes during the beta period and to go back and forth between the two versions of the game, a player would be able to sell their RS2 runes in RS1. The impact of this on the RS1 economy would be disastrous, so the developers of the game had to find a way to prevent this. Jagex did come up with something, although it did not prevent abuse, it just reduced the effect. Upon switching from RS2 to RS1 during the beta, the amount of runes that a player possessed would be halved.

A rather funny story exists about what we could call plate pures. In RS1 a player could not complete the Dragon Slayer quest without having level 33 in Magic, because that is the requirement for telekinetic grab Magic spell, which was needed to obtain Lozar’s map piece in the quest. Wormbrain is a goblin who resides in the jail of Port Sarim, but it is not possible for any player to - 28 - enter his prison. In RS1 everyone needed to kill the goblin and cast the telekinetic grab spell on the dropped map piece. However, today there is an option to buy the map piece from the goblin to avoid having to use Magic. This alternative method of obtaining the map piece was added during the RS2 beta. As I have explained above, during the beta it was possible to transfer items back and forth between both versions of the game. This had as consequence that a player could complete Dragon Slayer during the beta period at Magic level one, unlocking the ability to wear rune platebodies. If that player then switched back to RS 1, he or she would be able to wear the rune platebody, despite the normal requirement of 33 Magic to complete the quest and to unlock that ability. Therefore, the few players who succeeded in completing the quest during the beta so that they could wear the rune platebody in RS1, despite having a Magic level of just one, would be called plate pures, referring to a player in RS1 who wears a rune platebody at Magic level one.

One of the purposes of having a beta was to be able to test all content before it would go live. Jagex had at first made available only a little bit of content, so that everyone would test that particular piece of content first. They later systematically made more content available to ensure that everything would be tested. However, there was a minor problem. It was possible to train Woodcutting multiple times, or to kill hill giants for an extended period, to see if there were no bugs, but it was not possible to replay quests. Of course, all the quests needed to be tested in the RS2 beta as well to make sure that there were no glitches, but many players had usually already done most of the easy quests and even some of the harder quests. On 9th March, a few weeks before the full release of the new version, Jagex released a new NPC, called Erasmus. Every player could speak to him in Lumbridge Castle if they wanted to do the quests Dragon Slayer, Legend’s Quest and Shilo Village again. This was a unique opportunity for those who had already completed those quests, so it was evident that many took the bait. Erasmus would remain in the game for twenty days, until the release of the full game. The RS2 beta served as a testing ground for several big updates. I have already mentioned the release of the Runecrafting skill, but there was much more. Another one of Jagex’s plans was to replace the certificates system with a bank-to-bank trading system. However, one of the consequences of this would have been that a lot of players would flock together in banks to trade with other people. I bet you can already see the problem with that: it would be like trying to fit the whole of RuneScape into a few popular banks, and that would have been too chaotic. Jagex decided not to pursue the idea. Later they found another solution that could be used as replacement for the certificates: bank notes, as we know them today. I have already discussed the certificates earlier in this chapter, the main differences with the bank notes is that the bank notes could be used for all items and that there is no limit on how many items you can turn into bank notes at once (for the certificates there was a limit of five at a time).

Some other noteworthy updates during the beta include the release of emotes, the addition of a run option and the auto-retaliate option when in combat, the birth of the Duel Arena in Al-Kharid, several changes to pickpocketing and Firemaking to make the activities slightly less click-intensive, and Jagex’s decision to gradually reduce the amount of NPCs that block your path, meaning that a - 29 - player cannot run through them. That was one particular inconvenience in RS1. If a NPC was standing in a door opening, a player could not leave or enter the room. It worked like that for monsters too, which means that a player could become trapped between aggressive monsters. A whole array of big updates were made to the game as well. These updates are for the most part combat-related and will be discussed in other chapters. These big and historically significant updates include the release of the combat triangle system, more armour for each combat type, the removal of the three-round combat system, the addition of multi-combat and a diversification of the attack options for each attack style. For the non-combat part the most important changes include the removal of the much-criticized fatigue system, the introduction of random events and the ones I have already mentioned above, such as the option to run.

Eventually the day had arrived: 29th March 2004 went into the history books as one of the most important days in the history of this game. Jagex released RS2 and that version became the new RuneScape. The original version of the game that was also called RuneScape, was renamed to RuneScape Classic, or RS-Classic. The veteran players would later prefer to call the initial version RuneScape 1, instead of RuneScape Classic. Jagex decided to keep RuneScape Classic available to other players for nostalgia's sake. On 29th March players could choose if they wanted to keep on playing RS1 or the new version of the game. If they had chosen to play the new version, all items and stats would be transferred from RS1 to RS2 and they would no longer have any items in RS1. This meant that if the player logged in to RS1, they would still have stats, but all of their items would be gone. On the other hand, if they had chosen to stay in RS1, their account's stats and items would remain in RS1 and none of that would be transferred to the new version. In this book I will from now on refer to each specific era in the game’s long-term development by using the following name system:

RS1: 2001 – March 2004 RS2: March 2004 – summer 2013 RS3: summer 2013 – present RSC: The original version of the game played from March 2004 until today

RSC would remain open to new players until 3rd August 2005. Already existing member accounts could still log in, but free players could not. In January 2006 Jagex disabled the option to create a new RSC accounts because too many new RSC players had been causing unnecessary trouble. RS2 had become to new main game and it received all of Jagex’s attention. RS1 was mostly ignored, unless for necessary updates in the form of maintenance or bug fixes. RSC could still be accessed directly via the front page of the website, but this changed on 1st July 2008 when Jagex released HD and a new lay-out for the website. Some people considered this be the definitive end of any support for the original game, which was of course not true. RuneScape had just grown so much that it was more efficient for Jagex to use the space on the front page for other things, instead of adding a link to RSC. Additionally, in 2009 Jagex responded not only to the old community, but also to a curious new community by re-opening RSC for new sign-ups. Of course RSC had never really been closed, but at that moment it was not possible to create new accounts for it. The re- opening, which happened on 11th November 2009, gave anyone the opportunity to try out RSC. For the most part this was done for those players who had never played the original game, so that they could give it a try as well. Another reason for this re-opening was that Jagex wanted to see how - 30 - much interest there was in the original version of the game. And apparently the interest in it was definitely there because Jagex would end up re-opening the game another two times in the next two years. This happened on 26th May 2010 and 15th September 2011, but during the last re-opening it was also announced that there would be no more re-openings in the near future.

Jagex’s initial decision to disable the RSC sign-up feature in 2006 was accompanied with more information regarding Jagex’s opinion about it. Their main reason for keeping RSC around was to support some of the loyal players who had been playing the game since the early days and wanted to play it again every now and then. The final straw, which made them disable the sign-up option, was that Jagex’s bot detection system in RSC had flagged nearly 5000 accounts as using bots. RSC was actually taken offline for a couple of days so that Jagex could ban all the cheaters. In the same update they mentioned that 99% of the player base was playing RS2 at that time, so RSC was not incredibly popular anymore. Early in 2009 Mod Mark Gerhard, the CEO of Jagex at that time, indicated that re-opening RSC would be an interesting idea, but the primary problem with that plan was that the anti-bot system of RSC was bad (for 2009 standards) and that all features for credit card fraud and real-world trading were still present in RSC. In other words, Jagex would have had to make many changes before a re-opening could be deemed possible. Mod Mark Gerhard at one point even toyed with the idea of a re-opening in which Jagex would provide actual cheat codes, so that no one would be at a disadvantage. Luckily this never happened. At that moment the former CEO also confirmed that there were no plans of closing RSC, but they did not have any plans of updating the old game either because they felt that all development activities should focus on improving the latest version of their products. The first re-opening would follow a good half year later, and without cheat codes.

In 2011 Mod Mark (another Mark, not Mark Gerhard) announced that there would be no more re- opening after the last one of September 2011. Jagex wanted its players to invest time in the products that Jagex updates and maintains. RSC is not one of those products and it is not the game on which that they want their players to be spending a lot of time. The actual RSC players at that time responded enthusiastically to the re-openings. They were a great opportunity to show new players the game that they had loved spending their time on. Unfortunately, and eventually also the RSC players realized this, these re-openings allowed bots to re-appear on the RSC landscape. This is perhaps one reason why there were no more re-openings after the 2011 one. Also in 2011, but a half year before the last re-opening, Jagex had released a classic cape in RS2, a cape that could be worn by all players who had logged in to RSC back in the day or during one of the re-openings. This was one way for the veteran players to show both their loyalty to and pride of RSC.

So far I have described the major RS1 game features. The next chapter is dedicated to the RuneScape community and contains an extensive description. As a way of creating a bridge between this chapter and the next chapter, I would like to give a bit of attention to the RSC community of the recent years. While most of us have chosen to play RS3 or Old School RuneScape, there are still a few players who log in to RSC on a daily or weekly basis. I have already mentioned that the few re-openings were positive for RSC and its community. It showed the rest of the community that it was still game worthy of being played. The re-openings were exciting opportunities to advertise the game that has now, for the most part, been forgotten. Unfortunately, I have not had the time to become a part of this modern RSC community, so I realized that I would not be the best person to provide a description about it. There are a few people out there who actually have been enjoying the first version of this game for the last few years and are, therefore, more suitable for this task. This is why I asked an acquaintance of mine to write something for me. Her name is Leta. She been a regular RSC player for the last few years and is a respected member of the current RSC community. The text below in italics is how she described the current community as well as RSC (this is a raw copy-paste).

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RuneScape Classic today is a very unique place, despite popular believe I would not classify RuneScape Classic as a 'dead game'. There is still a community, still an economy, though it is a fair bit slower than even a few years ago. There are still stakes and still banter in Draynor on most days, depending on the time. Though it cannot be denied that what is left of the RuneScape Classic community is shrinking. I cannot foresee the community ever completely dying, but there is a perceivable... lessening. Thinking back to just a few years back, there was always a solid group of players in the field at Draynor w2, chatting, buying, selling, bartering, staking, and just having fun.

Nowadays there may be no one save a few certing bots. Currently there are seven players, myself included, at Draynor - and no bots! While that may not seem like many compared to the other versions of the game, there is chatting, there is bartering, there are greetings. Even someone is planting mithril seeds (which turn into trees rather than flowers on RuneScape Classic). It is a good day. When there are people online, it can be counted on that they will be friendly. If you are new, you will likely have items thrown your way. But not too much, just enough to set you off on a good start. People (other than bots) will talk to you, they will answer your questions, and they will get to know you. They are generous with their time, and often their belongings as well. It is a very tightly knit community and has been for as long as I can remember. While in RuneScape 3 your greetings may be returned with silence, in RuneScape Classic they will be answered with not only a greeting, but likely a conversation as well. There may be a few bad apples, as with any bunch, but the RuneScape Classic community, despite its small size, is truly wonderful, and unlike any other.

While RuneScape Classic and its community have been hanging on remarkably well over the years, there is one aspect of the game which has totally ceased to exist. Pk’ing, once the activity RuneScape Classic, and RuneScape for that matter, was best known for, now has vanished. Why? There are simply not enough players. While some of the best combat training spots, rune rocks, the best Agility course, and King Black Dragon are in the Wilderness, there is not anyone but a handful of bots to utilize these things any longer. On my occasional Wilderness patrols if I do find a player I am usually so shocked that I end up stopping to have a chat with them rather than killing them! Generally my only available quarry has been rune bots, red dragon bots, or King Black Dragon bots. No challenge there. It is a shame really, as RuneScape Classic Pk’ing is so unique compared to other versions of the game. The three-hit combat system, as well as needing the ability to 'catch' your opponent, a skill that takes timing. Plus fewer spells, much less armour selection, basically only two combat styles, and only the most rudimentary of poisoning systems. It is so much simpler but at the same time still so very complex. If I had a magic wand, I would do two things. Get rid of the bots, and revive the Wilderness, for in my eyes, the Wilderness is the soul of this game. The Wilderness is tied directly to not only players, but to clans. I would love very much to see the days where clans patrolled the Wilderness once again, all in their matching capes. It is quite the sight.

I am happy to say that Pk’ing lived on once again during the re-openings - at least in a stunted form. From 2009 - late 2012 it was not uncommon to see a player with a skull. Deathmatches were organized, King Black Dragon events, and even a skirmish or two (I would hesitate to call them wars). There was even a well-established modern-day RuneScape Classic clan, as well as a few other upstart clans. Note that this time period coincides almost directly with the first and last RuneScape Classic re-openings. But, it can only last so long without the hope and promise of regular re-openings. Most choose to stay around Draynor nowadays, chatting to whoever else happens to log in. I still patrol the Wilderness occasionally, as it holds the best memories of my RuneScape career. Though it is now but an empty shell of its former glory. Personally, I would love to see a re-opening. As with everything, there are pros and cons, and I am no economist, so all that I can speak from is my experience with RuneScape Classic and its community, seeing the effects of the re-openings first-hand. I also know that Jagex must operate as a business, first and foremost. - 32 -

But I believe the pros far outweigh the cons at this point in time. During the re-openings RuneScape Classic was vibrant, almost pulsing with life. It was amazing to see. Though even then it could not compare to the population of RuneScape 3, or now Old School RuneScape, but should it have to? RuneScape Classic seems to be very low maintenance as is, so even if there are not thousands, there are still hundreds of players who wish to experience the game as it once was and many who would get membership just for this chance.

RuneScape Classic is the roots and history of all things since, and that is something that should be cherished, and even shown off as it is a great game in its own right, even all these years later. I remember reading a sorrowful article about RuneScape Classic shortly before the last re-opening in a retro gaming magazine. While RuneScape Classic may seem insignificant, the world takes notice, showing just how important RuneScape Classic is not only to Runescape, but for the history of all online games, MMORPGs, and gaming in general. Unfortunately over the years, many players have quit, the legitimate players being hit the hardest. While I do not share this view, many have felt that there is no point in playing an unmoderated Classic. Though they love the game, they did not feel it was right that their achievements were undermined by those who choose to cheat, a story I have heard countless times over the years. And this perhaps may also be a con of a re- opening. More re-openings could mean more bots in theory, but I would still argue that the benefit outweighs this risk. Many more chose to leave after the promise of regular re-openings gave hope, but were then discontinued. Though some, myself included, have hope still, but without the promise of regular re-openings the game cannot thrive. I have no doubts that the game will survive, so I would say it is less about 'saving' RuneScape Classic, as some may put it, but more about benefitting the community as a whole, across all three versions of the game. Allowing the community to experience the history of the game they love, and giving some of the oldest veterans of the game a reason to come back. 'If you build it, they will come' or in this case, they will come… back. :)

I have been around staking quite a lot, but never participated much as my character is designed for Pk’ing rather than staking. One interesting thing I could add is that RuneScape Classic is a highly superstitious place, especially so among stakers and somewhat Pk’ers as well. Many stakers believe certain stat numbers work better than others. For example, 92 attack is a common one. Or 98 is another common mark to stop at. I do not think this has ever been proven but many still believe in this age-old superstition and train their characters accordingly. Also, some dislike sharing their Combat stats (myself included) because they believe not knowing another's stats, is all part of the game, since RuneScape Classic has no hiscores. But of course some do not mind and will tell you. Random story: There was a bit of an annoyance when a few years ago an infamous bot player made a bot that captured and posted players’ Hitpoints online without their consent. The bot did this by seeing their Hitpoints levels when in combat I assume, as a player needed to be in combat near the bot to have it read their Hitpoints. Staking usually takes place in Draynor, but if there will be many stakes taking place they will often move to Lumbridge as that is where the losing player will respawn, this saves them from needing to teleport back to Draynor with a dragonstone amulet after each fight. Most fights usually do not allow Magic unless it is a ‘godmage stake’ where both parties are using it (another reason why I do not stake, I am primarily a mage). Rares, dragon medium helms, and shields are most often staked, more so than cash. Certs and runes are rarely staked, in comparison.

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The economy is slow nowadays. While it has never been especially fast, RuneScape Classic trading has always involved a lot of standing around, waiting, bartering, and hoping, but with less people on at any given time, the chances of finding a buyer/seller and having them be online at the same time as you, have shrunk. A fair bit of trading has moved away from Draynor w2 (the traditional gathering/trading place in recent times) and more onto the forums. This also means it is much easier for individuals to manipulate prices as there is less competition at any given time, making prices more unstable than in the past, this is especially apparent with rares. Rares have skyrocketed in recent times. For example, the pink hat (usually considered the most expensive hat in RuneScape, though it has swapped places with blue a few times) has went from 200m or less in 2010 to 820m in 2014. This could be due to many reasons, such as an increase in botting bringing more cash into the game, hoarding, or is likely a combination of things, but still an interesting fact nonetheless. Stakers fuelled the economy for a long time, buying potions, rares, and dragon armour to stake but nowadays there are fewer stakers, further contributing to the decline of the RuneScape economy.

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2

The community

The RuneScape community. When I regularly visited the RuneScape forums in 2014, I was surprised with the many threads that were about the community. Some focused on the positive aspects of it, while others served as a rant, with the author claiming that the current state of the community is appalling. Regardless of the perspective from which the author reasoned, discussions were inevitable. So what has been going on? Why is it impossible to reach the same conclusions? Perhaps we can find our answer if we return to the early years of the game. In the previous chapter I explained the RS1 was radically different from the current game. This is important to keep in mind because it means that players would set other priorities, in function of what type of a player they were. The game in early 2001 featured a predetermined community system consisting of two classes: on the one hand there were the player-killers and the other hand there were non-player- killers. The existence of these classes was not decided upon nor created naturally by the player themselves, but they were determined by game mechanism. This is important to keep in mind for several reasons: Not only did it force the community into these roles, the two classes also attracted players to the game who liked how the system worked when they first tried the game. That does not mean that everyone was ecstatic about the two-class system, though. It implies that some RuneScape players could have easily decided after a few days or weeks not to play the game anymore simple because the two-class system did not appeal to them. As a consequence, we should assume that the earliest RuneScape players generally accepted the presence of the two aforementioned classes.

While being unable to determine how the game worked, players did have the power to build a community in function of that environment. However, it should be noted that that specific environment of the two classes created a completely different atmosphere (than there is today) because a player could be exposed to combat and danger anywhere in the game. While the geography of Misthalin and Asgarnia (two of the kingdoms in RuneScape) in 2001 has generally remained the same over the course of the years until this day, the substantially different environment and atmosphere essentially causes an effect of RS1 being a different game than RuneScape is now. Different games have different communities. RS3, for example, has a community that is not built in function of a game in which there are two predetermined classes. The point that I am trying to make here is that the average player of RS1 had a different mindset towards the game than the average RS3 player does today. Or to demonstrate it differently: Just like two - 35 -

RS3 players are equal, two RS1 are equal as well. However, a RS1 player and a RS3 player are not equal due to the different circumstances. This also makes it problematic to make comparisons on an individual level.

One of the most challenging tasks for any game developer is recruiting players. As I have told in the paragraphs above, a player who likes a game is a player who will stay. For RS1 these players were the ones who liked the system of player-killers and non-player-killers. Before the public release of the game, almost a handful of people already had access to the game. These players were Rab, Gugge, Lightning and Merlin, and are today referred to as the beta-testers of RuneScape. How these four ended up testing the game is a bit of a story. In 1999 Rab and Andrew Gower met each other on Games Domain, a site which used to host other games and which no longer exists. Andrew was a moderator at Games Domain and contributed to some of the games that had been released on the website. In early 2000 Andrew invited Rab to test a new game that he had been developing. At that time Gugge and Lightning were Rab’s friends at Games Domain and he invited both of them to test Andrew’s new game. A while later Lightning invited her friend Merlin, also at Games Domain, and ended up completing the team. At that time Andrew’s brothers, Paul and Ian, had become involved in the project as well.

On 4th January 2001 the brothers released their new game, RuneScape, to the public and recruited the first players from Games Domain. One of the games on that site was called Cyber Wars, which hosted a clan consisting of a few hundreds of players, called The Sabres. This clan eventually decided to quit Cyber Wars so that they could establish themselves in RuneScape as the first clan of the game, still on 4th January. Right at the start Andrew was lucky to immediately have two (very) small communities: on the one hand there was Rab and his friends from the beta testing period and on the other hand there was The Sabres clan, ready to conquer RuneScape. Both of these communities ended up developing themselves separately, with Rab and his friends blending in with the new players. The Sabres ended up becoming the enemies of a clan, called The Messiahs while Lightning had founded her own clan, called The Wanderers. The clans that gave colour to the early days of RuneScape will be discussed in other chapters. For now it suffices to remember that these two communities were at the foundation of the game and helped to shape to first interpersonal relationships.

As the community grew, so did the amount of clans and the variations between them. Clans for player killing were dominant, skilling clans functioned in the background as a resource-gathering necessity, which included providing food to the player killers. It is important to keep in mind that a Wilderness did not exist yet and that the player-killers could kill each other anywhere in RuneScape, with a few safe zones as exception. Non-player-killers, or the skillers, could not be attacked anywhere, but could not attack anyone else either. In the first half of 2001 the communication between these two groups of players was characterized by what I would like to call real-time interaction: Coins were the only items that could be stored in banks, leading to every player buying what they needed right now and not at a later moment. In this context it is understandable that player-killers and non-player-killers usually preferred to work together. Player- killers of course also had the option of catching their own fish, but buying it from other players was a lot more convenient at a time when the tools for Fishing and other resource-gathering skills could not be stored in banks. On 13th August 2001 the system of the two classes was removed so that everyone would become a regular player. As part of the same update, a huge area was added to the north of Edgeville and Varrock to become the only place where every player had the possibility to attack any other player. Any region south of the Wilderness would henceforth be safe.

Just two weeks earlier, on 26th July, banks had expanded their services to allow other items than coins to be deposited as well. This came as a huge relief because it meant that player killers would no longer have to carry all their stuff with them. From now on I will refer to player killers by using - 36 - the acronym Pk’ers in order to avoid confusion with the player-killers game mode that was removed on 13th August. The relationship between Pk’ers and skillers remained intact. Pk’ers could now more easily provide their own food, but they still relied on skillers for armour and weaponry. I will give a few examples to demonstrate the community dynamics. In RS1 only a few people had the level that is required for smithing rune weapons and armour. Rune smiths were usually willing to make rune items for other people as long as the other people provided the necessary rune bars. The entire process consisted of the player buying runite ore from another player, which was priced at around 10k gp. The player would then find someone else to turn the ore into a bar. A popular weapon in RS1 was the rune 2h sword, which required three rune bars. Once the player had obtained the three rune bars, he or she would ask a rune smith to turn the bars into a rune 2h sword. The rune smith usually also charged a fee.

A similar situation existed for Herblore. The high level herblorist would provide a potion in exchange for the materials that were required to make the potion. This was a good way for them train to skill and often a small fee was asked as well, although sometimes extra resources were asked instead of a monetary fee. The situation was slightly different for Cooking, though. If a player was lucky, it was possible to reach a high Cooking level without having to spend a coin, so to speak. Raw and cooked food were usually traded at a one-to-one ratio, without any fee applied. A fee was not necessary or not logical because the trade itself was already a win-win situation for both parties. In the rare event that a fee was charged, however, it was usually in the form of more resources. So now that we have established that there was a healthy relationship between these two parties, we can have a closer look at the overall image and attempt to find out how close and how big, or small, this community actually was.

During my interviews with many veteran RS1 players, all of them would indicate that the community was tight and that the community could be summarized as one in which almost everyone knew each other. This could be true for the first months and maybe even the first year because there were only a few severs. So the community must have been small, but was it really? By May 2001 more than 2,000 players were recorded online at the same time and by December 2003 this number had grown to 22,000. To put that into perspective, while I am writing this chapter on a European evening, the players online counter on the front page of the website indicates 67,000. In other words, the RS1 community was not that small anymore after a while. What was likely the case is that a subcommunity of either competitive or top players (or both) relied on its individual members to assist each other in any need, while interacting with the lower-levelled community to a much a lesser extent. Nevertheless, the veteran RS1 players pointed out that the first communities in RuneScape were more altruistic than the community of today. An example of that is that new players could always ask for help in RS1 and they would almost certainly receive that help. Due to the absence of hiscores (for a while) and the absence of a no xp waste mentality, the RS1 community was likely more inclined to empathize with other members of the community. The hiscores were introduced in 2002, but a no xp waste mentality was never present because RS1 was a game which revolved around Pk’ing at that time.

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Today there is a lot of interaction between the community and the Jagex moderators. However, it is difficult to speak of a close relationship because of how big the community is and because there are over 140 servers that can be used. Randomly encountering Jagex moderators in-game is therefore close to impossible. Now if we return to 2001, the situation is quite different. At that moment Jagex (the company) had not been founded yet, so it would technically be more correct to use the term administrator instead of Jagex moderator. With RuneScape being a new game, the amount of administrators was initially limited to Andrew Gower, Paul Gower and Ian Gower. At the same time Rab had been given the role as (only) moderator, assisted by the administrators. Even in the small community it became necessary to have a moderator as some people had started to cause trouble, ranging from immature behavior to exploiting bugs and botting.

A unique system in 2001 consisted of suspected rule breakers being manually teleported to what would become known as the moderator’s office in Al-Kharid. Rab’s moderator account was conveniently called ‘Moderator’. Sometimes when the player was on the verge of getting banned or when the administrators were not sure whether a ban was the right punishment, Rab teleported that person to the moderator’s office, a normally inaccessible room in the palace of Al-Kharid (the room no longer exists today). Inside that room, which did not have a door or any other way of exiting, Rab would have a chat with the teleported person to see what his or her intentions were or had been. If the player chose to log out in order to avoid the conversation, he or she would essentially be temporarily banned since the player would be stuck in a room with no way of exiting when the player logged back in. Teleporting was not possible in that room. The only way to leave the room was by Rab’s intervention, so it was better for the player to just face the conversation, after which Rab would decide to ban or save the player. In December of 2001 Rab resigned as the only moderator because the job had become too big to handle for one person. The account “Moderator” was a regular account with all of the in-game administrator powers (banning, teleporting, item spawning, etc.), but it was not a Jagex moderator account and Rab himself was not a Jagex moderator either.

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Evidently, the administrators were as excited about their new game as the new players were. This was visible especially in 2001 when the administrators would randomly pick a server and log in to interact with the community every now and then. At the beginning there was only one server and the second server was added either in February or March. By the end of the year the players had four or five servers to pick from. With only a few servers being available and with RuneScape’s geography being limited to most of the current F2P area at the end of 2001, it was relatively easy to accidentally encounter one of those administrators. This created the impression that the administrators were extremely involved, especially for anyone who had many friends and could thus be told by their friends if there was an administrator interacting with the community somewhere. Andrew and Paul Gower appeared to be engaging more often with the community than Ian Gower. That the administrators tried to build some form of relationship with the community is very clear from the following screenshot, which was taken in the news archive on the RuneScape website.

A news post like this one is unimaginable today, but that’s because the evolution of social media has allowed the use of much more efficient alternatives. Other examples of how the game developers attempted to establish a close connection with the community include news posts about an in-game marriage between PugXSi and Jenstarr, a real life wedding of a Jagex moderator, the passing away of a player, called Siw Midtrud, warnings concerning account and player safety, frequent updates regarding big updates and a more personalized, informal writing style in general. It is clear that there was a certain degree of closeness which is not present today. Or, at least, not in the same way.

2004 was a pivotal year for the development of the game. RS1, which was just called RuneScape at that time, received a metamorphosis on multiple levels with the release of RS2. Not only were there the much-improved new graphics, but also quite a few game mechanisms were altered. For example, the three-round PvP system was abolished, which radically changed the way that PvP worked as well as the strategies that should be used. Earlier in this chapter I told that a player who likes the game is a player who will stay. Keeping that in mind, the drastic transformation of RuneScape was problematic in the sense that there were quite a few players who preferred the old - 39 - game with the old mechanisms. Jagex gave everyone the choice to either stay in the old version or to have their account transferred to the new version of the game. The latter option implies that the account’s progress in the old version of the game would be erased. As the new version of the game made its entrance, the old version was renamed RuneScape Classic.

The actual changes that were made to the game are described in the chapter about RS1, so I am going to ignore those for now and focus only the community. The release of the new version caused a split in the community. Although I do not know the exact numbers, many players happily transferred to the new version, but there were still players, Pk’ers in particular, who preferred to stay in RSC. Some others even quit the game. Based on the eventual success of RuneScape it is reasonable to assume that the release of the new version (RS2) was beneficial to the game, but, nevertheless, it should be noted that it caused a disruption in the community as the RSC and RS2 communities went their own way. This is likely also the last time that we can speak of a close relationship between Jagex and the player community. Not necessarily because of this split in the community, but because of a sudden, spectacular growth of the community, as demonstrated in the image below.

The image above displays when a new record was reached of players online simultaneously. Eight of these numbers are taken directly from news posts in the news archive on the RuneScape website, the remaining two have been taken from other websites. It took the community a good three years to grow towards the point at which 22,000 people were playing RuneScape simultaneously. In the next year this number increased to 100,000 players. Is it the release of RS2 that caused this spectacular growth?

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The answer to that is yes and no, depending on your perspective. Back in 2004 there was a popular website, called Miniclip (which still exists). A quick visit to the website teaches us that Miniclip is a place that hosts various games and where other (external) games are voluntarily advertised by the website’s owner. This was also the case in 2004, when Miniclip started advertising RuneScape as one of the top online games, a section displayed on the front page of the website. The spectacular growth of the RuneScape community began at around July 2004 and then accelerated in the next two months. Miniclip advertised RuneScape for around three years in August 2004, so it could be inferred that Miniclip has played an important role in the development of the RuneScape community.

The term Miniclip generation was coined almost immediately, and that to refer to the players who had discovered RuneScape either as a result of Miniclip or per coincidence in that period. Due to the nature of the games that were hosted on Miniclip, the website attracted a younger community, which I saw more than once described as a community primarily consisting of eight to twelve year olds. At that time RuneScape had a minimum age of thirteen. Anyone younger than that age would not be allowed to create an account. Of course it is safe to assume that many children circumvented this by lying about their age, but I am merely pointing out here that RuneScape and Miniclip had a different target audience. As a result of this it makes sense to reason that the Miniclip generation had a lower average age than the already existing RuneScape community of that time. Whether or not this had any influence on the behaviour of the newly formed community will be discussed later in this chapter.

RS1 was a game which revolved around PvP. This changed in RS2, and I am still not entirely sure why, although the release of more content for skillers in RS2 clearly played an important role. To avoid confusion, PvP remained an extremely popular activity, but regular skilling gradually started to infiltrate the RuneScape scenery. At some moment between March 2004 and December 2007 a remarkable shift in the community took place: PvP became less popular and regular skilling became a more prominent activity. From a personal perspective I had the impression that PvP was still a popular activity at the end of 2007, so in all likelihood, the actual scenario is probably that, while skilling did gain popularity over the course of the years, PvP always did remain more popular. Explanations for the increase of popularity of regular skilling are quite easy to find, though.

In RS1 skilling for the sake of skilling was not convenient. At first because money was the only thing that could be stored in banks, but there are various other elements to consider: There was no run option in RS1 while runes were expensive because Runecrafting had not been released yet. Having to move from one location to another, which is what resource-gathering skills required, was often time-consuming and inconvenient. Frankly, it was annoying. On top of that there also was a fatigue system in RS1, which means that your character would need to rest after repetitively performing certain activities in RuneScape (including all regular skilling methods). Additionally, the number of available training methods in RS1 was limited; a lot of content that exists today had not been released yet by the end the RS1 era. Between 2004 and the end of 2007, skillers were given more content to choose from and all of the aforementioned inconveniences were absent. So considering that information, it is logical that skilling gained popularity after RS2 had been released.

If you are one of the newer players who discovered RuneScape only in the last few years, you are by now probably wondering why I keep saying the end of 2007. Of course there is a reason for that. In fact, December 2007 is one of the most important months in the history of this game. There are three major events that happened in that period of the year, which all had a dramatic impact on the community. The first event was the removal of free trade. This affected the community in the sense that new players could no longer request monetary or material help from other players and, vice versa, that high-level players became limited in how they could help these new players. The second - 41 - major event, which went hand in hand with the first event and occurred at the exact same moment, was the removal of Wilderness PvP in an attempt to stop real-world trading. This event had a devastating impact on the community, immediately killing most of the PvP clans and sending a shockwave through the entire community. More about the removal of Wilderness PvP will follow in the chapter about PvP.

The third major event occurred a few days before December when Jagex released the Grand Exchange. This event in itself was enough to promote regular skilling because the Grand Exchange would make trading a lot more convenient and a lot less time-consuming. Face- to-face trading had suddenly become a thing of the past. This update felt like heaven, both for the resource-gathering skillers (Fishing, Mining, etc.) as well as for the item-production skillers (Crafting, Herblore, etc.). Combine this third event with the other two of the previous paragraph and it is pretty clear that PvP would no longer be at the top of the hierarchy as of 2008. Skilling and PvM (player versus monsters) became the two new popular activities and they would keep each in balance for a couple of years.

The fact that regular skilling had toppled PvP in popularity had several big implications for the entire community. First of all, Jagex’s updates started to become more tailored for the skilling community. A good example of that is, ironically enough, the release of the combat skill Summoning in January 2008, a skill which facilitates skilling as well as combat by introducing familiars that have beneficial special effects for many activities. However, since almost all skills contained multiple skilling methods that would be positively affected by the release of Summoning, the effect on regular skilling appeared to be bigger than the effect on combat, which was limited to familiars helping to kill opponents.

Skilling clans flourished in 2008, which was great if you were a skiller, but it brought along a new mentality that was visible only in the background prior to 2008: the no xp waste mentality. The best example to demonstrate that RuneScape had by that moment evolved into the perfect game for skillers is by having a look at some xp gains. Zezima was the first person to achieve one billion xp, which happened in June 2007, or six years after he had started playing RuneScape. Gertjaars achieved 1 billion xp in October of 2008 (which is when the Grand Exchange had been out for eleven months) and from that moment it took him only 18 months to reach two billion xp, in March 2010. The existence of the Grand Exchange had significantly facilitated the accessibility to the item-production skills, also commonly referred to as the buyable skills today. That was visible not only in xp gains, but also in the way that the community looked at skilling. Prior to the release of the Grand Exchange, the majority of the community would probably have agreed that the prospect of having to buy all the necessary resources to reach level 99 in the item-production skills was particularly daunting because of the amount of time-consuming face-to-face trading that it would involve. This feeling disappeared as the Grand Exchange allowed the community to buy all the necessary resources without having to spend much time and effort on it, and the same story applies to selling the produced items.

With regular skilling having become more accessible due to the presence of the Grand Exchange, 2008 and 2009 were the first years that a no xp waste mentality would be clearly visible in the community. Although everyone has their own definition of the word fun, in the next years the term fun would for many imply every activity in RuneScape that does not involve trying to gain as much xp as possible in as little time as possible, driven by the no xp waste mentality. Despite skilling - 42 - becoming more popular, there was this general assumption that having fun cannot be achieved if you approach skilling with a no xp waste mentality. Even skilling clans sometimes shared this opinion. Skilling is great, but why grind for xp and not just have fun while you skill? From a personal perspective this has always baffled me because I used to be one of those people who cared about gaining xp, and nothing else. But gaining xp at fast rates and being able to track my progress was my way of having fun. Even today it happens every now and then that I see players say something along the lines of people should play for fun, not for xp, but saying something like this is not logical at all because the notion of fun is subjective, it implies different things for different people.

Anyway, while the whole of RuneScape was forming their own opinion about skilling, the PvM community was thriving in 2008. The God Wars Dungeon released in 2007 (without Nex until 2011) had created a hype about the godswords, the best weapons in RuneScape at that time. Then 2008 also saw the release of the dragon claws (Tormented Demons) and the spirit shields (Corporeal Beasts). For a long time before 2008, PvP and staking in the Duel Arena were considered to be the most profitable pursuits in RuneScape. In 2008 PvM acquired this role, with only Runecrafting for the skillers being extremely profitable. The PvM and skilling communities evolved independently from each other with their own pros and cons. While PvM was the preferred activity for many who wanted to make some money, achieving the highest total level was considered to be a great achievement. Both communities had different priorities and there appeared to be a certain balance between them. Back in RS1 the PvP community was drowning out any other, but that cannot really be said for either the PvM or the skilling community in 2008 and 2009.

In 2009 Mark Gerhard became the new CEO of Jagex. So what? you might think. Well, as of late 2009 and early 2010 it seemed that Jagex started to focus more and more on the community. Today Jagex’s interaction with the community is characterized by countless Jagex-organized in-game events. With exception of the Jagex Clan Cup, this type of interaction was non-existent in 2008 and 2009, but started to appear more and more in 2010 and later. I had the impression that it was a part of Mark Gerhard’s plans to engage more with the community and to listen more to the community. However, Andrew Gower shared with me that the stress was on forum communication with regard to general interaction with the community at that time (as opposed to in-game interaction). And that was a deliberate choice because the lack of social media, or general popularity thereof, caused the forums to be an effective tool for communication with the player. Today the forums are much less active. Nevertheless, Power to the Players or RuneLabs were unthinkable at that time.

By late 2009 it was clear that also Jagex had formed an opinion about the no xp waste mentality and hardcore skilling, a high-intensity form of skilling that it was often associated with. In September 2009 the Living Rock Cavern and ivy were released, both being AFK (away from keyboard) skilling methods for Fishing, Mining and Woodcutting. At the same time or a bit later, the high- intensity Quarry Mining method was nerfed as Jagex removed a rock from a spot which would normally provide extremely high xp rates (up to 75k xp per hour). This event serves as circumstantial evidence for the hypothesis that Jagex at that time disapproved of a mentality maintained by many of the competitive skillers. In the high-level skilling community there also was this opinion that effort should equal reward, meaning that high-intensity training activities should yield the highest xp rates. The removal of the rock at the Quarry right when the Living Rock Cavern had been released was a significant event because it was the first time that Jagex released content for skillers that was not in compliance with the effort should equal reward opinion.

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In retrospect this event signified a crucial turning point in the evolution of skills. In the years to follow, Jagex would gradually release content for skillers that was less intensive than already existing skilling methods, but that provided better xp rates. And that for quite a few skills. Several examples are the release of the Jadinko Hunter method in 2010, doubling the until then highest xp rate for the skill; the bonfire method for Firemaking in 2012, replacing the traditional high-intensity method of making lines of fires; the release of Runespan in 2012, replacing traditional altar running and providing xp rates of up to three times higher; the more recent Agility, Mining and Thieving methods released as part of Elf City, of which all three offer much higher xp rates for either slightly or significantly reduced intensity. During the period 2009-2012/2013 Jagex also started automating many skilling mechanisms by adding an x-option to their corresponding manual high-intensity activity. A few examples include the addition of an x-option to the activities of offering bones at gilded altars and to the process of cleaning herbs.

In the period 2009-2015 hardcore skilling was gradually replaced by what could be considered social skilling. The removal of that one rock at the Quarry symbolizes the start of the process, in my opinion. The grinding aspect was slowly removed from skilling and gave way to a more relaxed and less intensive environment of skilling, which is now characterized by allowing the skillers to socialize with each other without any subsequent decrease in the xp rates. Jagex’s intentions were probably of a good nature, though. Considering the fact that Jagex seemed to focus more and more on the in-game aspect of the community as of 2009, it is actually logical that they would also promote the social element of the game, which does not go hand in hand with high-intensity skilling. In addition to that, it may also have been a matter of wanting to provide a healthier gaming environment. I used to be part of highly competitive skilling communities which revolved around hardcore skilling and I know quite a few players who at some point developed RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) or suspected Carpal Tunnel Syndrome as a consequence of the constant clicking for many consecutive hours.

At the end of 2010 hope was rekindled in the PvP community, or what was left of it. In December of that year Jagex announced that free trade and Wilderness PvP might return to RuneScape, on the condition that it passed a couple of referendums. The support for the return was overwhelming and many PvP clans as well as former members of the PvP community were counting on the return of what had been abruptly stolen from them at the end of 2007. However, shortly after traditional Wilderness PvP had made its re-entrance, it was clear that the golden PvP days would never return. Too much had changed in the years prior to the referendums. PvM and skilling had become too profitable and too advanced; PvP would never be able to compete. Disappointment in the PvP community arose as the Pk’ers started to realize that it would take a lot more than just the reinstatement of the old PvP system to revive the PvP community. More about the removal and the return of the traditional RS2 PvP system will follow in the chapter about PvP.

The PvM community, on the other hand, was at the brink of several big combat-related updates that would take place during the period 2010-2015. The most significant update was, of course, the release of Evolution of Combat (EoC) in November 2012. Until that month combat had been a fairly automated and simplistic process. The only thing a player had to do to kill a monster was - 44 - clicking the targeted monster just once, followed by waiting until that target’s life points had been reduced to 0. This is what combat used to be like for almost twelve years from 2001 until 2012. Combat abilities were added to combat upon the release of EoC, a much-hyped update by the PvM community. It transformed combat and revolutionized the strategic aspect for a more exciting gameplay experience. Evidently, the release of EoC gave a great boost to the PvM community, at least, to those who were in favour of it. Just like the situation when RS2 was released, also this time there were players from the PvP community who actually supported the old combat system much more. The Legacy Mode was not available at the release of EoC, so everyone was forced to use the system of abilities.

As it eventually turned out, a big part of the community was dissatisfied with the removal of the old combat system and Jagex ended up losing members because of it. There are graphs on the internet that suggest that RuneScape lost over a million of members due to the release of EoC, but that is probably not true because at that time Jagex also stopped the trial system that offered two weeks of membership to each new account. EoC is definitely also responsible for the drop in membership count, but to what extent? That is something that only Jagex knows. A part of the dissatisfied players switched from RuneScape to Old School RuneScape, which was released in February 2013, just because they did not want to use the new combat system. Although EoC was a good update for combat, the PvM community ended up losing members. However, this is based on interviews with players who often engage in PvM activity and I do not have any hard evidence to support that statement. As the time passed, the demand for the old combat system did not diminish. Eventually it led to Jagex announcing that the traditional combat system might return as part of the Legacy Mode on the condition that it passed a poll for it, which it did in 2014.

It was not just EoC and Legacy Mode that the PvM community could celebrate, though. At Jagex’s side there seemed to be a rather strong focus on PvM as an incredible amount of armour, weapons and bosses were released during the period 2010-2014. In fact, I had the impression that promoting PvM had become a priority. The release of Nex, Queen Black Dragon, Kalphite King, Rise of the Six, Vorago, Araxxor as well as the new high-level armour made available upon the release of Dungeoneering and Player-Owned Ports, leads me to believe that Jagex had indeed taken an exceptional interest in PvM. Nevertheless, the PvM and the skilling communities always appeared to keep each other in balance in terms of popularity. The change from hardcore to social skilling with higher xp rates had caused an increase in popularity for the skilling community. Likewise, combat had been made more attractive. The very critical reader might have noticed an oddity by now. In the course of the last three to four years, combat has become more attractive, more interactive and more challenging. However, skilling has undergone the exact opposite evolution. It is no longer challenging and the interaction with the actual content has disappeared as well. That does not really make sense if you think about it. I guess that is the necessary sacrifice that had to be made to allow skilling to become a more social undertaking, but then you might wonder why that did not happen to combat.

What I have tried to do for past ten pages is compare three communities and discuss how they evolved: PvP, PvM and skilling. The conclusion to be made here is that PvP ruled RuneScape until 2007, when it was replaced by PvM and skilling, which had gradually become more popular since the release of RS2 in 2004. During the period 2008-2015 both communities developed in a parallel fashion, without us really being able to indicate that one was more popular than the other. The PvM - 45 - community underwent a huge and quick transformation in 2012 with the release of EoC, while skilling slowly evolved from hardcore high-intensity skilling to low-intensity social skilling since 2009. With the release of Elf City, it looks like this gradual metamorphosis might have come to an end for now. In comparison to skilling and PvM, the PvP community is almost non-existent today as it failed to recover from an absence of a good three years.

A positive change for the general community since 2011 is that Jagex has slowly been giving more and more attention to the needs of the community. In the last years Jagex has listened to the community and released content that appeals more to the average RuneScape player. This manifested itself in easier and xp-wise more rewarding training methods, tougher bosses with more expensive rare drops, quests that give huge chunks of xp upon completion, and in a not-so-distant past the power to decide whether Bandos or Armadyl should bite the dust in the battle of the gods. The current in-game polls as part of the Power to the Players initiative are another example of how Jagex has tried to involve us in the decision-making process of new content for several years now, an initiative which might reach its culmination in 2015 with the somewhat recently introduced RuneLabs.

Let’s head back to RS1 now. It was a primitive version of what RuneScape is today, but there is a particular community-related aspect that I have skipped until now, and that is the role of forums. First of all, throughout most of RS1 there were no forums at all. All communication was done via news posts or and newsletters. Player could give feedback only by directly contacting Jagex. Paying members could make use of forums starting from December 2003, after which the forums would serve as a good way for players to give feedback about the game and/or to ask advice from other players. It also was an easy way to get in touch with the Jagex moderators. Quickly an active forum community was established in which the most active people started to get to know each other. Of course there was the regular swearing or other immature behaviour which had to be dealt with by the forum moderators.

That is all obvious information, but where it really gets interesting is when Jagex added a section for high-levelled players to the forums in 2008. The High Level Forums (HLF) is a section that can be accessed once a player has achieved level 99 in all skills. Access is kept upon release of a new skill. The reason why this is so interesting is because the mere presence of this forum section served as a stimulus for those hardcore skillers back in 2008 and 2009. The HLF offered a way to identify with the absolute top of the game, a place where the most esoteric knowledge of the game would be - 46 - shared. However, as I was granted access to the HLF in 2011, that is not really what I encountered there. In fact, I recall that Mod Mat K, who managed the HLF at that moment, at one point decided to impose new, stricter rules because of general behaviour issues. I found that quite interesting because such behaviour was not visible anywhere else on the forums, not even in the public General forum, which quite often was targeted by a forum troll. Now four years later as I am writing this PDF, I can see that much has improved, though. One thing that you need to know is that players can post links and images on the HLF, and that forum moderators are asked not to moderate there. The consequence of that is that threads often contain memes, non-serious replies or other irrelevant information. This is why at least some moderation is necessary and it should serve as a cautionary tale for any plans with regard to expanding the HLF privileges to other forum sections.

Although the paragraphs above seem more like a rant about the HLF rather than a constructive piece of information that is relevant for the history of RuneScape, I should mention that it is not a rant at all. In fact, many players from the HLF community have helped me with this project, especially for the clan world parts. I just wanted to bring this up because over the course of the years I have noticed that genuinely nice people sometimes end up being mean towards lower-level players once they have attained a high Overall level. I am not sure why that is, although based on feedback that players provide on the HLF, the HLF community is often dissatisfied with new content that it not aimed at high-level players. In other words, the HLF community seems to systematically ignore the fact that the HLF community comprises only about 3% of the total RuneScape community. Let’s take have a look at the actual distribution based on the hiscores:

- 47 -

What is interesting is that around 88% of the community has as Overall level of below 2000, which corresponds with an average skill level of only 77. However, there are a few notes that should be made. First of all, the majority of the accounts with a total level of 35, 36 or 37 do not appear in the hiscores, possibly because they have not left Ashdale (I am not entirely sure how this works), so these players have been excluded. This means that the 2.7% is an overestimation and the 88% is an underestimation. Secondly, from a November 2011 until March 2014 the hiscores were a members- only feature. Any free player prior to November 2011 would be removed from the hiscores, but they would not be re-added automatically after March 2014. The requirement for any free player to be listed again was that the player had to log in and log out at least once after the re-addition. This means that the chart above lacks an undetermined amount of free accounts. However, it also implies that this chart is a somewhat accurate representation of the active or recently active player base.

Now back to the regular public forums. Over the course of the past years the popularity of the forums has decreased due to the rise of social media. These days Jagex communicates with their players through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., and the need for forums has decreased because the players themselves appear to have no problems with communicating with Jagex through use of social media. A first decrease in the use of forums, however, was not due to social media. From 2004 until 2007 many players used to turn to the forums for buying and selling items. The market section of forums was flooded with threads as players attempted to find a good deal via face-to-face trading. The release of the Grand Exchange eliminated the need for the market forums, so a subsequent significant decrease in forum use was logical and expected. The second decrease in forum use occurred simultaneously with Jagex’s increased participation in the social media between 2012 until now. Jagex’s activity on these social media is quite extreme, with them posting multiple updates every day. Twitter and Facebook are usually the first places where players get to hear exciting news about upcoming events or updates. Many community competitions organized by Jagex also require the use of such social media. Some players have argued that this entire shift from the RuneScape forums to the social media is not right. According to them the RuneScape website should be the first place where news is shared and active use of the forums should be sufficient to participate in the competitions that would normally require the use of social media. From a personal perspective I tend to agree with these players, but then again, the use of social media might practically be more convenient, so in the end it is really a matter of preference with which the players will have to deal.

In the introduction of this chapter I mentioned that quite a few threads about the state of the community have been posted on the RuneScape forums. More specifically, some of the complaints suggested that the community of today is less mature and less social. I will attempt to shed some light on that topic by having a look at the RS1 and RS3 communities, but you need to understand that this is problematic because not only was the RS1 community very different from the current community, RS1 was actually a different game with different game mechanics. The following questions indicate what we what are going to have a look on the following pages:

-Is the community less social today than it was in RSC? -Is the community less mature today than it was in RSC?

Last year I posted a poll on Facebook and on the RuneScape forums to ask what the players think about the community. More specifically, I asked whether they think that the community has become better or worse, and I deliberately did not define what better or worse would imply. My intention was that everyone would use their own definition in order to recreate a more natural image (when people discuss the community, they do so by using their own definition, their own frame of reference). A total of 73 players (53 on Facebook, 20 on the forums) participated in the poll. An important note is that the Facebook group required a minimum age of 18 and the forum participants had all been playing RuneScape for more than four years. The results are as follows: - 48 -

A simplified chart of the results, showing opinions about the RuneScape community of today. (n=73)

The full results, representing the actual poll options (n=73)

It looks like the current community suffers from a negative self-image. Almost 73% of the respondents share the opinion that the community has deteriorated over the course of the years. Only 8% saw a positive evolution while the remaining 19% reported no significant change at all. In the section of the chapter you will find out if those results can be justified or not.

One of the aspects at which we are going to look is whether the community has become less social or not. Less social is very vague. What most of the complainers meant is that these days there appears to be less on-the-spot chatting going on with strangers wherever someone is training their levels. For example, if someone is training Woodcutting at a willow tree, today that person is more likely to be ignored when attempting to start a conversation than back in the day. But is this correct? A while ago I was training Fishing in the Living Rock Cavern and there was a lot of chatting going on. However, that cavern is a place, and maybe the only place, in RuneScape where possibly more than hundred players are packed together at any given moment, so perhaps the Living Rock Cavern is not representative for this potential issue.

- 49 -

One thing that you need to be aware of before I proceed is the substantial difference between the RS1 community and the current community: In RS1 everything revolved around PvP, while these days PvP is almost gone. PvM and regular skilling are the most popular activities today. This is important to keep in mind because a PvP community requires more communication. First of all, PvP in RS1 was often done in groups and clans. Internal communication (between group/clan members) was necessary on a daily basis. PvP was not possible without this kind of communication. Secondly, skillers and Pk’ers tended to work together in RS1 because they needed each other: The Pk’er needed someone to make armour, weapons, potions, cooked food, etc. for them; the skiller needed someone to either sell their resources to or to sell the items produced through skilling. The latter type of items included armour, weapons, potions, cooked food, etc. All of which the Pk’er needed. In other words, the groups/clans of Pk’ers engaged in a lot of external communication, and that because it was necessary for both parties.

Flash-forward to RS2: Without meaning to objectify the players, friends in RuneScape tended to have two uses: the first use is the recreational one, for entertainment; the second one is a functional use, for when the players needs something. Before the release of the Grand Exchange at the end of 2007, a person on your friends list could be considered a potential buyer or seller for anything you wanted to buy or sell before turning to the forums or the public in-game trading locations (Falador and Varrock at that time). In other words, friends (also) served a purely functional purpose. With the release of the Grand Exchange, the need for that kind of friend disappeared. At the same time the removal of free trade and traditional Wilderness Pk’ing abruptly ended the cycle of natural communication that existed between skillers and Pk’ers. Altogether, the actual need for in-game socialization has decreased. However, I think the above contributed only a little bit the fact that some people now think that the RuneScape community is less social. I really think that we need to look somewhere else.

Today we can communicate in-game with other players through public chat, friend chats, clan chats and group chats. Before 2007 a player could communicate with others only through public chat because the other types of chat did not exist yet. In other words, at any moment before the release of friend chats in 2007, striking up conversations with random people was the only in-game way of making friends. The friend chat provided a new and easy way to connect with other people. Of course, you still had to find the right friend chats. The mere presence of the friends chat decreased the need to socialize with random people outside of the friends chat. In addition to that, clans started to recruit more prominently on the forums because a friend chat would offer the ideal environment for clan members to chat with each other. At that moment a first decline in spontaneous out-of-clan social interaction will probably have been a noticeable consequence. Then in 2011 Jagex started to focus more on clans. In May they released the clan camp, the citadel and, most importantly, the clan chat. As a result of this major clan world promotion, one clan after the other was quickly established. Shortly after that, the main way for people to connect with each other became through clan chats. As clans became more popular, there was less and less need for players to socialize in the public chat. Especially if the clan member was also already participating in friend chats.

Eventually this led to one big community divided in thousands of subcommunities, with clan members whose need for social contact would be easily met by the clan of which they had become a part. The social need of players to interact with random strangers vanished as clan chats and friend chats had begun to offer the necessary amount of social stimuli. In addition to that, people are social creatures who seek social stimulation. Variety is preferred to remain socially satisfied and the - 50 - constant influx of new members in clans takes care of that need. So by the end of 2011, talking to people outside of clan or friend chats had become completely redundant for anyone who had joined a clan. The world of clans became extremely popular after Jagex’s heavy promotion of it in 2011. Today I have the impression that the majority of the P2P players are part of a clan.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that players who claim that the community has become less social in public chat are right. However, they are not right when they claim that people are less social today in general. As of 2007, the social activity has migrated from the public chat to friend chats and later the clan chats. While before 2007 the use of the public chat was the only in-game way of making friends, today friends appear to be made mainly in friend and clan chats, and the public chat now appears to fulfill only a purely functional role. The public chat has become completely redundant for many players, whose need for social interaction is now easily met by participating in friend and clan chats. That random stranger at the willow tree? Well, he has become redundant. The harsh reality is that a player might even be too busy chatting in friend and clan chats now to be able to talk in the public chat.

So now that we have taken a close look at the level of social activity in RuneScape at different moments in the past, we can do the same for the level of maturity. Mature behaviour includes any type of behaviour that is not anti-social. In other words, mature behaviour is in line with the social norms of showing respect and consideration for the integrity of other people, with the intention to act accordingly at any given moment. Anti-social behaviour includes but is not limited to swearing, botting, hacking, as well as passive-aggressive behaviour, such as lying and ignoring. The RuneScape community usually links the concept of maturity only to whether or not other people engage in name-calling, and to the degree at which other players engage in discussions, debates or any other type of argument by maintaining an open-minded, polite and respectful attitude. It does not really make sense to discuss maturity in this PDF if I am going to be using another definition than the one that the RuneScape community had envisioned. Therefore, only the following factors will be taken into account to discuss the level of maturity in the communities of today and the past:

-Whether or not other people engage in name-calling. -The degree to which other players engage in discussions, debates or any other type of argument by maintaining an open-minded, polite and respectful attitude.

At the end of 2014 I investigated the Tip.It forums. Tip.It is a Jagex-supported RuneScape fansite that has been around since RS1. The reason why I had a close look at their forum board is because it contains threads that date back to 2004, making those forums an invaluable place for information about RS1. I scanned around 250-300 threads that were posted during the period 2004-2006 in an attempt to find more information about the state of the RS1 community, which includes the level of maturity. What I noticed is that almost everyone seemed to agree with the claim that the RS1 community displayed, on average, better behaviour than the community of 2004-2006. That is a fairly good reason to assume that the RS1 community might have consisted of a more mature (behaviour-wise) player base, but that does not prove anything.

On the previous pages when I talked about how social the community is, I mentioned internal and external communication being important in RS1. In other words, communication in general was important because there was a lot of trading going on between skillers and Pk’ers. I also mentioned that both of these groups needed each other and depended on each other to a certain degree. In other words, for the competitive or otherwise serious RS1 players it was important to get along with the other members of the community. There are several testimonials about RS1 which mention that trust trades were not rare in RS1. This means that there must have been a certain degree of respect and trust between the players that is not present in the community of today. Of course we have to be careful with generalizing, because there are also plenty of testimonials that indicate that - 51 - disrespectful behaviour was also present in the RS1 community. That is also the case today, it is not rare to run into disrespectful behaviour of any kind, but trust trades, on the other hand, are as good as non-existent these days. From this information it can be derived that there is a minor indication that the RS1 did indeed exhibit a higher level of maturity, but there are still insufficient data to prove that.

The Miniclip generation might give us more clues. What follows next is an unedited copy-paste of something that I posted at the beginning of this chapter: “[…]Due the nature of the games that were hosted on Miniclip, the website attracted a younger community, which I saw more than once described as a community primarily consisting of eight to twelve year olds. At that time RuneScape had a minimum age of thirteen. Anyone younger than that age would not be allowed to create an account. Of course it is safe to assume that many children circumvented this by lying about their age, but I am merely pointing out here that RuneScape and Miniclip had a different target audience. As a result of this it makes sense to reason that the Miniclip generation had a lower average age than the already existing RuneScape community.”

So now the question to pose is: does a younger community behave in a less mature manner? In September of 2014 I posted a poll in the General RuneScape forum to find out what the current community thinks. The exact question that I asked was: Consider the following statement: When the average age of a community decreases, so does the quality of it. [End of statement] Do you agree with this? Unfortunately, only 20 people responded to this question, so the results should be taken lightly. 13/20 (or 65%) agreed with the statement while the remaining 35% did not. These results are in line with what I expected, but they cannot be generalized because of the small amount of the respondents and because I do not have any demographic data about the respondents.

So does that mean that we are stuck? No, not at all. In fact, a simple session of introspection can provide more clarity. If you compare your childhood with the stage of development in which you are right now, I am sure that you will agree with the statement that you as a child lacked a certain awareness of what mature behaviour implies. And this is confirmed by neuroscientific models, describing the growth of the brain. Impulsivity and emotional reactivity are linked to the prefrontal cortex. This is the anterior part of the brain and it is also the last part of the brain to develop. The growth of the brain, also called neurogenesis, continues until the early twenties. With the prefrontal cortex being the last part of the brain to reach its final stage of development, it is logical that children and adolescents are more impulsive and more emotionally reactive than adults. This is important information because this can be used as supporting evidence for the hypothesis that a community with a younger average age is a community with a less mature (behaviour-wise) player base.

If we relate that information to what was said about the influence of the Miniclip generation on the community (it caused a decline in average age due to different target audiences), then it is reasonable to assume that the RS1 community indeed did exhibit immature behaviour less frequently (on average) than the community of 2005. Now you might think If RS1 players never quit the game and continued playing RS in 2004 and 2005, should that not increase the average age because those RS1 players have become older? That is a good question, but the answer to that is no. - 52 -

If you recall the graph I showed earlier, which indicated of the records of players online simultaneously at different moments from May 2001 until March 2006, you might also remember that this record had reached only 30,000 players by May 2004. In the next twelve months that number increased to 132,000. In other words, the influx of the Miniclip generation not only nullified but also reversed the effect of RS1 players becoming older, leading to a general decrease of the average age.

So now that we have enough information to assume that there indeed might have been a difference in the level of maturity between the RS1 and the 2005 communities, maybe we should try to see if we can make a comparison between the 2005 and the current community. So far we have had a look only at internal factors, related to the game itself, but a lot of things have changed in the real world in the last ten years. First of all, there has been a lot technological advancement. Secondly, social media started to flourish. Both of these factors might have had more far-going consequences for the RuneScape community than we would think. I will first have a look at the technological advancement by describing the situation.

In 2005 computers and laptops already existed, but Smartphones, iPads, tablets did not. Mobile phones did not have touchscreen yet and the screen itself was very small. In other words, RuneScape could be played only on computers and laptops. But that is not all. Those computers and laptops were not as good as they are today and, based on quick Google searches, the average price for a laptop was two times higher than it is today. In the last four to five years, Smartphones, iPads and tablets have gradually started to appear more prominently in the society. Today the old school mobile phone has made way for the highly advanced Smartphones and tablets, which allow easy access to RuneScape. Now here is where it gets interesting: Laptops are a lot bigger than Smartphones and tablets. These days, children are given these modern gadgets at an astonishing rate. I am sure that you have already seen some children with these gadgets and thought to yourself Are they not too young for this? Of course this also happened in 2005, but to a less frequent extent and mobile phones did not have access to RuneScape.

So the point that I want to make is that the Internet in general has become more accessible to children and adolescents due to several reasons: the average price of laptops has decreased, allowing parents to buy laptops for their children, and the number of media that can be used to access the internet (and RuneScape) has increased to the point at which the majority of the modern society owns an easily portable device that has access to RuneScape. So are we headed for another Miniclip-style situation? It does not look like that and here is why: The only reason why the average age of the community decreased in 2004 was because of the overwhelming influx of new players. - 53 -

This kind of influx has been present in the last seven years. In fact, based on a chart which indicated that the amount of members decreased from 1.2 million members in December of 2008 to 800k members in December of 2012, it would be reasonable to state that there was no relative influx at all. This would mean that any absolute influx of young player will not have led to a decreased average age because the normal ageing of already existing young players in RuneScape would counterbalance the age-decreasing effect of the new young RuneScape player.

That seems logical, but what does not seem logical then is that there are players out there who think that the current community is less mature (behaviour-wise) than the community of 2005-2009. This is according to players who discovered RuneScape in that period and did not play RS1. What is going on here? It turns out that we missed something important, but I will get to that later. What I first need to do is explain that second external factor (the rise of social media). Back in the day when the concept social media was very primitive, companies like Jagex had no need to become a part of them because those websites were not popular enough. What you see these days is that RuneScape players have a whole network of friends and acquaintances, especially on Twitter and Facebook. Some of those friends may or may not have been made through RuneScape while others might actually be friends of friends who became the player’s friend at one point.

What I am on about is that the level of exposure (to anything, not just RuneScape) had increased as all sorts of media became more widely used. I know people who use Facebook as a news source. Now imagine that you are one of those people and you are following the Facebook pages of multiple news channels. What news channels tend to do is show sensational topics, dramatic topics and sometimes even horrifying events that shock the world. For example, there has been non-stop reporting about terrorism in the Middle-East Western Asia, or about tragic car accidents, or about public shootings. The news channels rarely report about anything positive. I mean, who cares about the fact that in the recent years a cure for chronic Hepatitis C was developed that could save over 300,000 lives per year? Surely that is not exciting enough! It is mostly negative news that is spread on news channels. Now imagine again that you are one of those people who follows multiple news channels on Facebook. How easy would it be to think that world in which you live is doomed? That there is no hope left? That we live in a horrible world?

Well, here is the thing: a similar situation has been happening in RuneScape. Sure, there are no news channels in RuneScape, but there are mechanics which resemble social media. These game mechanics being the public chat, the friend chat and the clan chat. Of course you will rarely see discussions about bad news, but there is something else going on. The release of friend chats in 2007 and the release of clan chats in 2011, which have both become extremely popular, has significantly increased the risk of exposure to negative, immature behaviour. Try to think about the last five times that you encountered immature behaviour in RuneScape. Where did that take place? In the public chat? Your answer is probably going to be no. Would you have encountered that same immature behaviour if friend chats and clan chats did not exist? Maybe, because, as I have indicated earlier in this chapter, the decrease in the use of the public chat is the consequence of the other two chats being introduced to RuneScape.

- 54 -

However, as most veteran players will know, fluent hours-long group chats in the public chat were a rare thing even before the friend chat had been released. In other words, you might still have encountered immature behaviour in the public chat, but definitely to a less frequent extent. Now if we reconsider the complaint of the current community exhibiting immature behaviour more frequently than the community of 2005 (or that era), we might have to conclude that this is a wrong impression due to the aforementioned exposure effect. As a consequence, it would be logical that immature behaviour is more frequently observed in RuneScape, but that does not mean that the RuneScape community has, behaviour-wise, become more immature.

The overall conclusion to be drawn from the whole maturity debate is that the RS1 community was probably a behaviour-wise more mature community than the community of 2005 or of today, but we cannot tell how much more mature. For all we know, the difference might be so small that it does not merit a discussion, although through use of neuroscientific facts and data about the average age of the communities, it is fair to assume that there was, indeed, a certain difference. On the other hand, after considering the exposure effect due to the existence of the friend chat and the clan chat, there is no objective reason to assume that the community of today is more immature than the community of 2005. While it might be true that immature behaviour is more easily and more frequently observed these days, that is no evidence at all and it should be considered unreliable information.

If we should talk about the RuneScape community, then the topic of RuneFest is inevitable. RuneFest is an annually recurring real-life event in the United Kingdom, hosted by Jagex. The first edition was organized in 2010. RuneFest is a big opportunity for the RuneScape community to connect to the Jagex moderators and to meet their RuneScape friends in real life. Each year RuneScape players from all over the world become frustrated with London’s traffic in eager anticipation of the big day. One of my friends even referred to RuneFest as her one happy moment of the year. American players, who form a substantial amount of the global RuneScape community, have requested a RuneFest in the United States, but Jagex has confirmed that it would be financially and organizationally too demanding, so that option has been ruled out, for now. Nevertheless, that does not stop American players from travelling to the Land of Hope and Glory, likewise for players from Australia and other remote regions on this planet. The fact that people are willing to spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars, euros or pounds on a game- related one-day real-life event shows how much enthusiasm and sheer joy RuneFest can give to the RuneScape community.

Unfortunately, despite living in Europe, I have never been able to attend RuneFest. That is why I cannot tell extremely much about it and why I will limit myself to the most essential information. Let’s start with the obvious first: RuneFest is an event that brings the community and Jagex closer to each other. Both current and former Jagex employees have used RuneFest’s insider sessions to talk to the community about anything related to the game. For example, Andrew and Paul Gower spoke at RuneFest 2010 about the early days of the game, which was good for me because I have used some of their information in this PDF. Initially these insider sessions were exclusive to the attendees, but in the recent years some of them have been livestreamed on RuneScape’s Twitch channel. One of the more interesting sessions is about the future of the game, because everyone wants to know what is going to happen the next years. Jagex has often used RuneFest to reveal new information about upcoming additions to the game or other updates. Literally a couple of examples - 55 - are the Invention skill and the Tuska world event. For the 2015 edition Jagex has announced that they will reveal more information about their upcoming RuneScape documentary film, for which Jagex may always contact me if they would like to use some of my work.

The Golden Gnome Awards are another highlight of RuneFest. The most talented RuneScape players have a chance of being rewarded for their exceptional video-making and art skills, or for having been a source of quality entertainment. A golden gnome can also be won for RuneScape accomplishments. That is how Zezima was awarded a golden gnome in the category lifetime achievement during the 2013 edition. As of 2014 there is also a community champion category, for those who have been of great value to the community in one way or another. Aside from the RuneScape talk, RuneFest is of course an opportunity for every attendee to have a good time, to celebrate the evolution of the game and to throw a great party. And that will be no different for the following editions. I have never been able to attend RuneFest, but I would definitely love to, so I hereby subtly drop the hint that Jagex may always invite me if they appreciate the effort that I have put into this PDF.

- 56 -

3

The world of Gielinor

If you open your world map in-game, you will notice that you need to do a lot of dragging to go from one side to the other. The map is useful when you are lost and do not know where to go. However, today we have quite some advantages compared with RS1. First of all, there was no world map available in RS1. At least, not in-game. Once lost, good luck finding your way back. The easiest solution was dying and respawning in Lumbridge. Of course this was not the ideal solution as you would lose all of your unprotected items, so finding your way back sometimes consisted of wandering around and hoping that you would recognize something. Of course it helped a lot if you were a RuneScape expert who knew every single location in-game, but the majority of the people did not happen to possess that knowledge in the first days and weeks of the game. The in-game world map was added in 2007, but even then it did not have all features that it does today: shops etc. were not mentioned at all and the You are here marker did not exist either until 2008. So getting lost actually meant the same as in RS1, but in RS2 you could compare parts of your minimap to parts on your world map. And admit it, we all used this method in our early days.

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Of course that is not what I want to talk about regarding the world map. In this chapter I am going to talk about the cities/areas in the world of RuneScape and about when they were added to the game. I could start off by saying that the world of RuneScape is called Gielinor. What you can currently see on the world map are kingdoms, cities, provinces, islands, dungeons, rivers, lakes and of course seas/oceans. Each of those areas plays an important role in the development of Gielinor, and therefore we can say that if we removed one area, certain training methods would be removed as well. In RS1 there were much fewer areas and therefore also fewer training possibilities, with as logical consequence that some skills could be a lot slower to level up than today. For the part that is coming now, a bit of general knowledge about skilling and combat methods, and especially about where to train them, could come in handy. I will be listing all possible areas and their release dates and then it is up to you to imagine or realize what the absence of those locations would mean for training the skills that currently exist. That should make the reading experience more interactive.

Just like in real life, each province/kingdom in RuneScape consists of multiple cities. I will try to mention everything in chronological order, but have left out the release dates of. The capital of each kingdom/province is written in capital letters. After the list you can find two summaries from two different perspectives. I advise that you read both of them because they discussion of transformation of Gielinor by using a completely different approach.

Kingdom of Misthalin

-Lumbridge: 4th January 2001 -Lumbridge Swamp: 4th January 2001 -Wizards’ Tower: 4th January 2001 -Barbarian Village: 4th January 2001 -Ghost Town*: 4th January 2001 -VARROCK: 4th January 2001 -Draynor Village: 21st January 2001 -Draynor Manor: 28th January 2001 -Digsite: 9th July 2003 -Exam Centre: 9th July 2003 -Lumber Yard: 28th July 2003 -Grand Exchange: 26th November 2007

*Ghost Town's name was later (in early RS1) changed to Edgeville.

Kingdom of Asgarnia

-FALADOR: 6th April 2001 -Port Sarim: 6th April 2001 -Rimmington: 6th April 2001 -Mudskipper Point: 6th April 2001 -Goblin Village: 6th April 2001 -Ice Mountain: 6th April 2001 -Taverley: 27th February 2002 -Burthorpe: 9th August 2004 -Clan Camp: 12th April 2011

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Kingdom of Kandarin

-Catherby: 27th February 2002 -Camelot: 27th February 2002 -Keep Le Faye: 27th February 2002 -Seers' Village: 25th March 2002 -Barbarian Outpost: 25th March 2002 -EAST ARDOUGNE: 30th April 2002 -Hemenster: 28th May 2002 -McGrubor's Wood: 28th May 2002 -Tree Gnome Village: 23rd July 2002 -Fight Arena: 23rd July 2002 -West Ardougne: 27th August 2002 -Baxtorian Falls: 24th September 2002 -Yanille: 23rd October 2002 -Grand Tree: 12th December 2002 -Tree Gnome Stronghold: 12th December 2002 -Port Khazard: 28th July 2003 -Castle Wars: 13th December 2004 -Piscatoris Area: 2nd May 2006 -Piscatoris Fishing Colony: 2nd May 2006 -Whichaven: 20th September 2006 -Eagles' Peak: 28th November 2006

Kharidian Desert

-Al-Kharid: 21st January 2001 -Bedabin Camp: 14th April 2003 -Desert Mining Camp: 14th April 2003 -Duel Arena: 29th March 2004 -Pollnivneach: 4th April 2005 -Uzer: 11th April 2005 -Pyramid: 18th April 2005 -Menaphos: 26th April 2005 -Sophanem: 26th April 2005 -Nardah: 5th December 2005 -Mage Training Arena: 4th January 2006 -Agility Pyramid: 16th January 2006 -Quarry: 23rd January 2006 -Archaeologists' Camp: 2nd January 2008 -Citharede Abbey: 7th November 2011

Karamja

-Musa Point: 11th June 2001 -Brimhaven: 27th February 2002 -Shipyard: 12th December 2002 -Shilo Village: 27th January 2003 -Khazari Jungle: 20th August 2003 -Tai Bwo Wannai: 14th September 2004 - 59 -

Tirannwn

-Underground Pass: 3rd March 2003 -Isafdar: 20th September 2004 -Tyras Camp: 20th September 2004 -Port Tyras: 20th September 2004 -Elf Camp: 20th September 2004 -PRIFDDINAS: 20th September 2004* -Arandar: 20th September 2004 -Lletya: 19th July 2005

*This city was considered to have no content until September 2014, as it was inaccessible until that moment. The addition of content to Prifddinas and the release of the area was Jagex’s biggest project of 2014, which had taken many months to develop.

Kingdom of Morytania

Canifis: 29th June 2004 Mort Myre Swamp: 14th October 2004 Mort'ton: 18th October 2004 Abandoned Mine: 21st December 2004 Slayer Tower: 26th January 2005 Fenkenstrain's Castle: 31st January 2005 Haunted Woods: 15th February 2005 Port Phasmatys: 15th February 2005 Barrows: 9th May 2005 Burgh de Rott: 22nd March 2006 Meiyerditch: 4th September 2006 Castle Drakan: 4th September 2006 DARKMEYER: 31st August 2011

Feldip Hills

-GU'TANOTH: 7th May 2003 -Jiggig: 17th May 2005 -Feldip Jungle: 21st November 2006 -Oo'Glog: 29th January 2008 -Mobilising Armies: 8th July 2009

Fremennik Province

-RELLEKKA: 2nd November 2004 -Lighthouse: 17th November 2004 -Mountain Camp: 7th March 2005 -Waterbirth Island: 1st August 2005 -Fremennik Hunter Area: 21st November 2006

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Wilderness

-Chaos Temple: 13th August 2001 -Graveyard of Shadows: 13th August 2001 -Lava Maze: 13th August 2001 -Ruins (west): 13th August 2001 -Bandit Camp: 27th February 2002 -Dark Warriors' Fortress: 27th February 2002 -Red Dragon Isle: 27th February 2002 -Scorpion Pit: 8th May 2002 -Pirates' Hideout: 8th May 2002 -Rogues' Castle: 8th May 2002 -Deserted Keep: 8th May 2002 -Agility Training Area: 28th January 2003 -Mage Arena: 22nd September 2003 -Clan Wars: 10th December 2007 -Wilderness Volcano: 10th December 2007

Other non-island areas (on the surface)

-White Wolf Mountain: 27th February 2002 -Death Plateau: 9th August 2004 -Trollheim: 24th August 2004 -Troll Stronghold: 24th August 2004 -Trollweiss Mountain: 5th January 2005 -Ice Path: 18th April 2005 -Daemonheim: 12th April 2010

Islands

-Crandor: 23rd September 2001 -Entrana: 27th February 2002 -Fishing Platform: 9th September 2002 -Tutorial Island: 24th September 2002 -Miscellania: 2nd November 2004 -Etceteria: 2nd November 2004 -Crash Island: 6th December 2004 -Ape Atoll: 6th December 2004 -Dragontooth Island: 15th February 2005 -Braindeath Island: 31st October 2005 -Mos Le'Harmless: 7th February 2006 -Pest Control: 18th April 2006 -Void Knights' Outpost: 18th April 2006 -Pirates' Cove: 24th July 2006 -Lunar Isle: 24th July 2006 -Iceberg: 29th January 2007 -Neitiznot: 6th February 2007 -Jatiszo: 6th February 2007 -Harmony: 6th March 2007 - 61 -

-Soul Wars: 10th February 2009 -Isla Anglerina: 23rd March 2010 -Botany Bay: 26th September 2012 -Ashdale: 26th November 2013

Rivers

-Lum: Wilderness, Kingdom of Misthalin (Edgeville - Lumbridge) -Dougne: Kingdom of Kandarin (Baxtorian Falls – Castle Wars) -Elid: Kharidian Desert -Salve: Border between Kingdom of Misthalin and Morytania -Kelda: Keldagrim

Unofficial rivers

-Karamja's river: North Karamja – Cairn Isle -Tirannwn's river: Arandar – Elf Camp -Piscatoris' River: Tree Gnome Stronghold - Piscatoris -Fremennik river: Sinclair Mansion – Fremennik Province

Just listing the dates does not really make it interesting for you, I have decided to write two texts about the development of Gielinor. Now you are probably wondering why two there are texts. Well, one text should be enough, but the second text will be from a different perspective. In the first text I am going to describe the development of Gielinor as a whole. In the second text I am going to focus on the development of the actual kingdoms, provinces, islands within this whole. So the second text is a more detailed version in which I focus only on one specific area at a time. The difference in perspective is that text one is completely chronological, switching from area to area, whereas text two is chronological only on the level of each specific area that is being discussed. It may be useful to open a world map for visual support as you are reading.

Text one

At the start of RuneScape, 4th January 2001, the only kingdom that existed in the world of Gielinor was the Kingdom of Misthalin. This area stretched from Lumbridge to the Wizards’ Tower, to Varrock and to Ghost Town, which was the initial name of Edgeville. Draynor Village and Draynor Manor did not exist yet. These last two areas were added to the game three to four weeks later (at end of January). That is when the first city of the Kharidian Desert was released as well: Al- Kharid. On 6th April 2001, the Kingdom of Asgarnia was added to the game. Initially this area stretched from Mudskipper Point and Rimmington to the Goblin Village and the Monastery west of Edgeville. The Wilderness did not exist yet, so the corners of the world map were at that time were Goblin Village, Varrock, Al Kharid and Rimmington. That large area is - 62 - currently most of the world map that is available to free players. Musa Point (now a part of Karamja) was the first island in Gielinor and it was added on the same day as the Fishing skill (11th June 2001). If you are an experienced RuneScape player, you now wonder if there is not supposed to be a Tutorial Island as well at this stage. The Tutorial Island was not there from the start of RuneScape. For some people who grew up in RuneScape when the Tutorial Island was always the starting point, this may be hard to believe because they might consider the Tutorial Island to be something 'obvious' that logically has always existed, but it has not.

Keep in mind that all of the aforementioned areas were available to free players because the membership option did not exist until 27th February 2002. The introduction of membership went hand in hand with the addition of many areas. First of all, Taverley was added to the Kingdom of Asgarnia (Burthorpe did not exist in RS1). The new Kingdom of Kandarin that was added on the same day could be reached only by crossing the dangerous White Wolf Mountain. This made Kandarin almost inaccessible for low-level players. The White Wolf Mountain forms the natural border between the Kingdom of Asgarnia and the Kingdom of Kandarin, therefore this mountain does not belong to any of these two kingdoms. On 30th April 2002 the corners of Kandarin were East Ardougne, Catherby and Seers’ Village. Any place ‘behind’ that did not exist yet. The third Island, Entrana, was added after the release of membership and after Musa Point had received an extension to the west, called Brimhaven. The careful reader might have noticed how I went from island one to island three, so where is our second island then? Is it finally the Tutorial Island? No, not yet... Our second Island, called Crandor, was added to the game on 23rd September 2001 for the Dragon Slayer quest. By the summer of 2002, the corners of Gielinor were Al-Kharid, West Ardougne, Seers’ Village and Varrock. The Tree Gnome Stronghold was added at the end of the year when Jagex released Agility. At this stage, the Kingdoms or other large areas that did not exist yet were Morytania, the Fremennik Province, the Feldip Hills, Tirannwn and a whole series of islands.

Okay, now it is finally time for the famous Tutorial Island. It took a while, but in September 2002 Jagex decided to release an area where a payer learn the basics of the game. Unfortunately, the Tutorial Island cannot be visited again after leaving. We can assume that this island belonged to the Kingdom of Misthalin based on its location near the Wizards’ Tower. In 2003 the addition of the Lumber Yard, the Digsite and the Exam Centre completed the Kingdom of Misthalin. In that year the world map also received an expansion to the south. In April 2003 the Desert Mining Camp, the Bedabin Camp and the Bandit Camp enlarged the Kharidian Desert. And these were not the only hot areas that were added in that year. The Island of Karamja received an exotic metamorphosis as well: Shilo Village and the Khazari Jungle were added to the southern part of the island. Oh, we skipped something, though. The Wilderness had already received its first, skilling-wise, useful area at the start of 2003 with introduction the Wilderness Agility Course. That might not seem important, but the course offered great xp gains and was a first choice at that time. The first area of the Feldip Hills, Gu’Tanoth, was release in May 2003, so we could summarize 2003 as the year of extensions to the southern part of the world map.

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The year of 2004 brought some nice additions to the world map as well. The first and immediately largest addition was the introduction of Morytania in June, but keep in mind that this included only Canifis at the time. The Mort Myre Swamp, Mort'ton and the Abandoned Mine were added later in 2004. Also the Slayer Tower did not exist because skill had not been released yet. All areas to the east of Canafis did not exist either. Some areas were added to the north of Asgarnia as well, but these do not belong to any official kingdom. You could, however, give it 'Troll Kingdom' as unofficial name. Does that ring a bell already? The month of August added Burthorpe, Death Plateau, Trollheim and the Troll Stronghold to the world of RuneScape. Burthorpe did and still does belong to Asgarnia, though. In September 2004 a region with many dangerous traps was discovered by brave adventurers. The name of the location indicates that some odd language must be spoken there. Tirannwn, the new kingdom released on that day, is ruled by elves and it certainly is not the most human-friendly environment, with its many traps and dense forests. Unlike you would expect, Lletya was not a part of it yet. Tirannwn consisted of Isafdar, Tyras Camp, Port Tyras, Elf Camp, Prifddinas and Arandar at that moment, although Prifddinas could not be accessed for a decade. Another important addition in 2004 was the Castle Wars minigame. Quite a few islands were released as well in the second half of 2004. These islands are Miscellania, Waterbirth Island, Ape Atoll and Crash Island. The first two islands belong to the Fremennik region. This means that the Fremennik Province was another large addition to the world map in November 2004. Other areas included the capital, Rellekka, and the areas surrounding it, which do not really have a name. As the world map has expanded quite a bit now, we are not going to look at the corners of the map anymore, but at the wind directions of the world map. By using this method, the most remote areas according to their respective wind direction at the end of 2004, excluding the Wilderness, were Miscellania (north), Canifis (east), Ape Atoll (south) and Tyras Camp/Elf Camp (west). With that information we can say that the world map of December 2004 already looked similar to the world map of today, just some areas to the south, west and north were still missing. 2004 definitely was an important year for Gielinor.

Of course it did not stop after 2004. First of all, February 2005 included the addition of an island which is located to the very east of RuneScape. Dragontooth Island was part of a large expansion to the Kingdom of Morytania. During the same month, the Haunted Woods and Port Phasmatys were added to the game as well. Note that the areas to the south of this new port did not exist yet. The Fremennik Province received a whole mountain in the next month, and there is a camp on that mountain, so the name of this area conveniently became Mountain Camp. The fourth month of 2005, April, is called the Desert month for the obvious reason that several important areas were added to the Kharidian Desert. These areas were Uzer, Menaphos, Sophanem and the (Desert Treasure) Pyramid. All in one month. At that time the Feldip Hills region was the smallest area, so Jiggig was added in May of 2005 to make it a little bit bigger. The Kingdom of Morytania was slightly expanded with the introduction of Barrows in the same month. A large part of Barrows is located underground, though. In July Jagex finally added the city of Lletya to Tirannwn. The second half of 2005 was a quiet one. Only two areas were released, but the first of them, in October, was a quite remarkable one... Apparently that area must be so far away from the main land of RuneScape that it had to be put on a separate map. This island can now be accessed on - 64 - the world map at the dungeon icon to the north of Port Phasmatys. Questers will by now already know about which island I am talking: Braindeath Island... Let your imagination do its thing. The addition of Nardah was the second and last large geography-related update of 2005. The most important thing to remember about 2005 is that The Kharidian Desert became more than twice as big.

The second part of the first RuneScape decade started in 2006. The updates to the Kharidian Desert continued after the addition of Nardah in December 2005. In January of the new year, two areas with as main function to entertain the community were added to the Kharidian Desert as well. The first of these was the Mage Training Area north of Al Kharid and the second location was the Agility Pyramid. In March of the same year Burgh de Rott was added to the south of Mort'ton, quite a dead-looking place, but is there any place that does not look like that in Morytania? For the first time in a while we can return to the Kingdom of Kandarin for a large new area. In May 2006 Piscatoris was added to the northwest of the Gnome Stronghold. Piscatoris used to be a peninsula that could be reach only by boat at that time. For our next update in chronological order we have to return to Morytania in September of the same year. A couple of areas were added to the Kingdom of Morytania. These areas were Meiyerditch (Sanguinesti Region) and Drakan Castle. Meiyerditch stood out because looked like a piece of art when it was first released, other areas in RuneScape simply did not have that kind of sophistication yet at that moment. The release of the Hunter skill would have been useless without areas to catch the animals, so in November 2006 the Feldip Hills region received a large expansion to the south with the introduction of the Feldip Jungle. Also The Fremennik Province was given a big Hunter area. Furthermore, area to the south of the Piscatoris Fishing Colony became accessible so a boat would no longer be needed, enabled by the addition of the Piscatoris Hunter area. The Eagles' Peak mountain was added to the area a week later as a final touch. The islands released in 2006 are Mos Le Harmless, Pest Control, Void Knights Outpost, Pirates' Cove and Lunar Isle. The addition of large new areas sort of ended in 2007. In the first three months of this year it was only islands that were introduced to RuneScape. One more important than the other. One of the islands hosts a rather funny Agility course. This island was Iceberg and we can immediately stay in the same environment for the next islands. Jatiszo and Neitiznot were added to the game in February, followed by Harmony Island shortly after that. And that is all for 2007.

2008 takes us to a geological platform. The new Archaeologists' Camp gave the most south eastern part of the Kharidian Desert a function. It is also the only place in the Desert where you can see something green (besides cacti), more specifically, a swamp. The darker- coloured platform and the presence of this swamp may actually hint at the possibility that this area is not a part of the desert anymore, geographically speaking at least. Still in January the same happened to the Feldip Hills: the most southwestern corner of the area was given a function with the addition of Oo'Glog. That is the last area that was released in 2008. Only - 65 - one area per year was added in the following six years (2009-2014). These areas are Mobilising Armies in the southwestern corner of the Feldip Jungle in 2009; Daemonheim, the peninsula to the west of the Wilderness in 2010 (but it does not belong to the Wilderness); the Clan Camp, south of Falador, in 2011; Botany Bay, the island to which caught bots are sent, in 2012; Ashdale in 2013; and Prifddinas revealed of its secrets no earlier than in September of 2014. if the trend continues we can expect to see a new area in 2015 as well. There have been several other notable changes to the world of Gielinor in the last few years as well, though. For example, in September of 2012 the area of Menaphos was completed. This city had previously been unfinished, leaving behind a black area, both on the world map and in the city itself. A month later, in November, the Wizards’ Tower received a graphical update, which included increasing the size of the island. The problem there, however, was that the Tutorial Island was in the way, so Jagex decided to remove the Tutorial Island, despite opposition from a minority group. Although Prifddinas technically already existed when Jagex granted us access to the city in 2014, I will still consider it to be last city that was released in RuneScape.

Text 2

In the second text I am going to focus on the development of the specific areas that I mentioned in text one. In the list that contains the release dates at the beginning of this chapter you will have noticed that I started with the oldest kingdom and ended with the youngest large areas. Now I will be discussing the internal development of those kingdoms and areas without switching from one kingdom to another. This means that I will start with the oldest kingdom and that is the Kingdom of Misthalin. Text two should be easier to follow, partly because you are already acquainted with the material now that you have read text one. Also a quick reminder that understanding and following the text will be easier if you look at the world map as you are reading.

Upon the public release of RuneScape the only available area was the Kingdom of Misthalin, which was far less developed than it is now. The towns and cities that were present on 4th January 2001 were Lumbridge (+ Swamp), the Wizards' Tower, Barbarian Village, Ghost Town and Varrock. That is all, there was nothing else. Ghost Town was the name of the town that we call Edgeville today. Its name was changed in the early stages of RS1, but I did not manage to find out why Jagex did that. Furthermore, you would expect that Lumbridge was the capital of Misthalin, but that is not true. It would make sense that it is considering that Lumbridge for a long time was the first place on the main land that a player would visit after creating an account. The capital of Misthalin, however, was and still is the city of Varrock. Draynor Village was added three weeks later, but keep in mind that it did not have a bank for a long time. The actual manor was released a week after that. The areas that I have mentioned so far are the only areas of which Misthalin consisted until late 2002. The corners of Gielinor on 28th January 2001 were Ghost Town, Varrock, the Wizards' Tower and Al Kharid. The latter was released on the say same day as Draynor Village, but it is part of the Kharidian Desert. This desert will be discussed later on in the text. The favourite island of any RuneScape historian was added in the second half of 2002. Yes, it is the Tutorial Island. Although a player could not revisit the island after leaving it to access the main land, it would be reasonable to consider it a part of Misthalin because of its former location. On 9th July - 66 -

2003 the Digsite and the Exam Centre were added to the east of the Kingdom of Misthalin. The Digsite is a large archaeological site which would end up being used in several quests. At the end of the month the Lumber Yard was released and it would end up being the most northeastern point of Gielinor for two years (excluding the Wilderness). For the years after that, no more additions to the Kingdom of Misthalin would be made. However, the Grand Exchange can be considered a part of this kingdom too. The Grand Exchange was released on 26th November 2007 and its location makes it reasonable to consider it a part of the kingdom, regardless of its completely independent function, which is stressed by the walls around it. What you should remember about this kingdom is that it is the oldest one and that Varrock, and not Lumbridge, is its capital. Also note how the river Lum does not form a natural border between two kingdoms. This is something that you would be tempted to assume if you open the world map, but Edgeville is located at the other side of the river and it is still a part of the Kingdom of Misthalin. Furthermore, I would like to point out that there is a place in the kingdom that carries the name of its kingdom. This place is called the Misthalin Training Centre of Excellence, which is more commonly denominated as the Stronghold of Player Safety today.

Even though there was a gap of one and half year when we are talking about additions to the Kingdom of Misthalin, luckily the players did not have to wait that long for new areas in 2001. The Kingdom of Asgarnia is a huge expansion to the west that happened on 6th April 2001. A lot of quests were added on that day too, but more about that will be discussed in chapter about quests. Falador, Goblin Village, Ice Mountain, Mudskipper Point, Port Sarim and Rimmington are the six areas that were added on that day. The corners of Gielinor on that day expanded to become Varrock, Al-Kharid, Goblin Village and Musa Point, an island that had been released on 11th June 2001 alongside the Fishing skill. Musa Point would later become part a huge kingdom-sized area, called Karamja. And Karamja will be discussed later in this text. In April 2001 the Kingdom of Asgarnia and the Kingdom of Misthalin formed around 90% of the current safe F2P area. Just Al-Kharid, Taverley and Burthorpe formed the other 10% (but the latter two had not been released yet). That means that the current F2P area was more or less complete on 6th April 2001. So no other areas were added to Asgarnia until the release of membership on 27th February 2002. Taverley and Entrana became two new cities of Asgarnia on that day. Entrana, which is an island, was the first place that would be considered annoying to get to. The reason for that is that the monks are extremely strict (or scared?) and do not allow any type of weapons and armour. In the years after that, only two more areas would be added to the Kingdom of Asgarnia. The first one was Burthorpe in August 2004 and much later the Clan Camp in April 2011. This last area was added to south of Falador, the capital of the Kingdom of Asgarnia. A last update happened in November of 2012, when Jagex removed the iconic Tutorial Island to create space for the new Wizards’ Tower island.

The next area will complete the three most important Kingdoms. So far we have had the Kingdom of Misthalin, the Kingdom of Asgarnia and the next area is the Kingdom of Kandarin. This kingdom was released on the same day as the membership option (27th February 2002) and it is currently as big as the first two kingdoms combined. I would like to start by saying that I did not manage to find out when the Baxtorian Falls were released. It features prominently in the Waterfall quest, but that does not mean that the area did not exist before the release of that quest. The Baxtorian falls is a key element in the development of Gielinor since because locations converge at that point. Nevertheless, for this PDF I have assumed that it was released on the same day as the Waterfall - 67 - quest. It is important to know that the wall west of Burthorpe and Taverley does not form the border between the Kingdom of Asgarnia and the Kingdom of Kandarin. As stated above, Taverley is a part of Asgarnia. So where does Kandarin begin then? The White Wolf Mountain forms the natural border between the two aforementioned kingdoms. However, it does not belong to any of them. When the membership options was released, the only areas that Kandarin received were Catherby, Keep Le Faye and the Castle of Camelot. Seers' Village did not exist yet. It is hard to determine where exactly the world of Gielinor ended to the west because everything south of the castle (and west of Keep Le Faye) was just plain field. There is no indication whatsoever of where exactly it all ended, but just keep in mind that only those two areas existed. At the end of March Kandarin received its first expansion, with Seers' Village being the new location. On 30th April an important city was added to the south. Today we call it East Ardougne. However, West Ardougne did not exist yet when it was released back in 2002, so it was just released as 'Ardougne'. This immediately fills up that vague gap southwest of Keep Le Faye and Catherby. The McGrubor's Wood and the Hemenster fishing area south of it were released at the end of May. Another two areas were added a month later to the south of Ardougne. These areas are the Fight Arena and Tree Gnome Village, but Yanille did not exist yet. On 27th August 2002, Ardougne would finally receive its expansion to the west, called... West Ardougne. The first and only off-continent location was released in September, although it was not an island, but a Fishing platform east of Ardougne that carried the same name as the thing that it is. The big city of Yanille was the last expansion to the south of Kandarin, which happened on 23rd October 2002. It would also end up being the most southwestern point of Gielinor for a long while. In December the Agility skill was released as part of a huge expansion to the Kingdom of Kandarin. On 12th December 2002 The Gnome Stronghold and The Grand Tree received the honour of being the first place where Agility could be trained. This was the last update of 2002 to Kandarin. The 'corners' of Kandarin at that moment were Catherby, Yanille and The Gnome Stronghold. Kandarin would eventually end up remaining unupdated until December 2004, when the famous Castle Wars game was released. The last updates to this extremely large kingdom took place in 2006. First there was the Piscatoris Fishing Colony at the start of May, but keep in mind that the Hunter area did not exist yet since Hunter would not be released until 21st November of that year. The last update to Kandarin happened exactly seven days later when the Eagles' Peak was added to the southern point of that Hunter area. The capital of the Kingdom of Kandarin is East Ardougne, but it was not the initial capital because the city did not exist when the Kingdom of Kandarin made its introduction to Gielinor. It is reasonable to assume that Catherby was the first capital, but I could not find any sources that confirm that.

Now it is time to have a look at the more exotic regions. Do you remember that one lonely island, called Musa Point? Let's have a look at how that place transformed into a huge kingdom-sized area that we call Karamja today. Musa Point was released on 11th June 2001 and it became a popular island for fishermen. It was technically just an island at first, but because it is not anymore, I have not added it to the list of island. Musa Point was quite 'lonely' on the world map, and that for several months, because it was so far away from the main land. However, even when the next new area in its vicinity was released, the situation remained the same because that new area was also just a relatively small island, namely Crandor. It features in the famous Dragon Slayer quest, so Crandor ended up becoming important because the majority of the players wanted to wear rune armour at - 68 - some point (and the ability to wear a rune platebody requires completion of Dragon Slayer). So Musa Point and Crandor had become a group of islands which belonged together. We can prove this because in the aforementioned quest your character discovers a tunnel that connects the two islands with each other. When membership was released on the date that you should know by now (27th February 2002), almost every existing region was given a geographical expansion. This also counted for our group of islands. Musa point received an expansion to the west and it became a relatively big island. Brimhaven is the name of this new area, but the docks were not present yet when it was released. The problem that I faced with what later would be called Karamja is that the island consists of quite some space that is not a civilized town, city or a village. This made it extremely difficult to find out how big Karamja actually was between the release of Brimhaven and our next location. However, as I dug deeper, I noticed that the Ship Yard workers were added to the NPC database in December of 2002. That is good reason to assume that the Ship Yard itself was added to Karamja on the same day, 12th December 2002. This is the time that we can refer to Karamja as an independent subcontinent, rather than a group of islands. However, the exact size of Karamja at that moment was still difficult to determine. Shilo Village, the next important location, was released on 27th January 2003 and now we finally have some clarity about the actual size of Karamja. It had become extremely big by then, including the western part of Karamja. Eight months later, on 20th August 2003, Jagex released the Khazari Jungle and it was added to be the most southern point of Karamja. This shows how Karamja was (and still is) built in layers from north to south with an increasing level of danger as you travel south. Tai Bwo Wannai is place of which I am not sure when it was added, but I assume that its addition took place in September 2004 when the quest Tai Bwo Wannai Trio was released. Cairn Isle is the last remaining area of Karamja that we have not discussed yet. Unfortunately, I did not manage to find the exact release date of this isle. It features in the Shilo Village quest, which means that the isle was released on or before 27th January 2003. To conclude I would like to add that Karamja is not a kingdom or a governed area of any other kind, and thus it does not have a capital.

To stay in the warmer regions it would be a good idea to switch to the Kharidian Desert, which is a desert that initially consisted only of Al-Kharid. The city was released on 21st January 2001 and it would stay the only part of the Kharidian Desert for more than two years, until the Bedabin Camp and the Desert Mining Camp were released in April of 2003. These two areas, and almost every area in the Desert that would follow, were not safe. Animals are aggressive and the desert heat takes its toll on a player’s body when sticking around for too long. This did not count for Al-Kharid, though. Its northern location made the warm temperatures bearable, allowing a thriving community to be established. It is important to note that the enchanted water tiara and the tome of frost did not exist yet. This means that the use of waterskins was the only way to protect yourself from the heat. White desert clothing would help, but not enough to prevent damage. The Duel Arena, which was released right after the RS2 beta had ended in March 2004, was also located in the north, but it has always been a dangerous area for other known reasons... In April 2005 a whole series of locations were added to the Kharidian Desert, which makes it fair to dub April the desert month. Pollnivneach was released at the beginning of April and it would form the most western point of the Desert for exactly one week until Uzer was released, which was a large expansion to the west. Another week later, on 18th April, the Desert Treasure Pyramid would expand the Kharidian Desert a bit more towards the south. Last but not least, Sophanem and Menaphos were both released on the same day at the end of the month and they would eventually form the most southern point of the Kharidian - 69 -

Desert. However, for a good eight years until late in 2012, Menaphos did not fully appear on the world map. A part of what is now depicted as yellow desert sand on the world map (in Menaphos) used to be black instead, indicating that it did not exist yet. So, now we have reached the south, but keep in mind that we have not talked about Nardah yet and the simple reason for that is that it did not exist until 5th December 2005. You could say that this is quite remarkable, because that either means that everything between Uzer and Sophanem used to be just sand without anything else or that there was just not anything at all, not even desert sand (and that it was a black, undeveloped/unreleased zone instead). The Mage Training Arena was added north of the Duel Arena at the start of 2006, and because of its location, it’s safe to assume that it will always form the most northern point of the Kharidian Desert. A desert with only a few pyramids would not be a real desert and that is why Jagex added a third pyramid (the second one can be found in Sophanem) in the same month. This pyramid was unique in that it would function as an Agility course. A week after that, on 23rd January, the Quarry was added to the desert and this would end up being the most southwestern point of the Kharidian Desert. The special thing about this quarry is that it is the only place where you can mine sandstone and granite. Despite its remote location, the Quarry became an extremely popular place to train Mining. Especially after the release of the enchanted water tiara and the humidify spell in the Lunar spellbook, as they were two alternative ways to protect yourself from to heat. The difference with waterskins is that the tiara and the spell would not force you to interrupt your skilling as much as either banking or refilling the waterskins would. In January 2008 Jagex released the Archaeologists' Camp and it was placed in the southeastern corner of the Kharidian Desert. It can be considered an independent area because it features prominently in the quest Dealing with Scabaras. Purely geographically, it is not actually desert anymore because there is a swamp as well, though. Halfway in 2010 Al-Kharid received a small expansion to the west. The new area that was released would be used for Slayer as it became the place where desert strykewyrms reside. The last addition to the Kharidian Desert happened in November 2011 when a religious building was added west of the strykewyrm location: the release of the Citharede Abbey.

The Feldip hills initially used to be extremely small. In fact, it must have had another name at first because there initially were no hills at all. Gu'Tanoth was the first area of what we call the Feldip Hills today and it was released on 7th May 2003. What makes the settlement eccentric is that is not easily accessible. Even though I call it a settlement, I am not sure if it can actually be classified as such. The region remained unupdated for two years. And then when it was finally expanded in May 2005, people had to face the fact that also - 70 - the new area was a small quest area. It was on 21st November 2006 when Jagex finally decided to add a large useful area. The Hunter skill was released on this day, a joyful day for any fauna and flora lover. A large area, called the Feldip Jungle, was a new place where people could start training Hunter. This is also when the hills were added to the game, so now we can finally call the region Feldip Hills. And it gets even better. Not only were there hills, it also contained two lakes. However, the two southern corners of the Feldip Hills still served little purpose at that time, so Jagex decided to do something about that. First they added the city of Oo'Glog to the southeastern corner in January 2008. Ogres would be the only inhabitants, but they were so kind to build a port that the humans could use for travelling. The lodestone teleportation system did not exist yet. One and half year later, in July 2009, Jagex gave the other corner a function as well. Mobilising Armies was a new minigame, but because of its remote location, a teleport option to get there was added to the ring of dueling.

We have been hopping from one location to the next without an apparent connection and that will not be any different for the next region. Morytania is our next destination and it is a kingdom that has undergone some major changes as well. Just like the Kharidian Desert, it started off with only one city. For Morytania this was Canifis, which was released on 29th June 2004. Canifis was the first capital of Morytania and it looked relatively peaceful in comparison with the places that would follow. In October 2004, the Mort Myre Swamp was added to Morytania. Not only would it be a horrible place where wandering ghasts spoil your food, this swamp also created a natural river between the Kingdom of Morytania, the Kingdom of Misthalin and the Kharidian Desert. The name of the river? The Salve. The addition of Mort'ton four days later made the river a little bit longer. At that point, Morytania was one stretched out area from north to south with Canifis being the most eastern place. At the beginning of 2005 Jagex released the Slayer Tower. Although that is not entirely correct. The castle was already there, but it served no use until it was announced that the release of the Slayer skill would fill it with many different creatures. Slayer also immediately was the only reason to visit Morytania if you were not there for a quest. A scary place without a castle is not scary enough, would you not agree with that? Five days later, on 31st January, the developers of the game released a castle that is based on one that we know quite well. Fenkenstrain's Castle is the name that it was given in Gielinor. In the next month, the Haunted Woods were released and this area formed a large and dangerous expansion to the west. On the same day, halfway in February, the first island was added to Morytania. Unlike the name may imply, there are no dragons at all on this island. Therefore, it is a mystery why it was named Dragontooth Island. However, the most important update of the day was that Morytania received its first port. Port Phasmatys immediately became the biggest port in Gielinor. The Kingdom of Morytania looked like a diagonally flipped L-shape at that moment with Port Phasmatys, the Slayer Tower and Mort'ton being the corners of it. Just to remind you, we are still in 2005. To fill up this gap (a tiny bit) that the L-shape had created, Jagex released the Barrows site on 9th May 2005. A good move because it made Morytania a lot more popular. Morytania remained unupdated for almost a year. In March 2006 the mysterious town of Burgh de Rott was added to the kingdom, but without much non-quest-related use. Half a year later in September of 2006, two important large areas were added to the southwestern corner of - 71 - the kingdom. One of them was Castle Drakan, but the most remarkable new place was the city of Meiyerditch. Many people would agree if you said that this city was, aesthetically speaking, simply stunning, it even became the new capital of Morytania, but that is probably more because of its size and lore. The last addition to the kingdom took place on 31st August 2011 and in this case the saying last, but not least is quite appropriate. Darkmeyer was added to the north of Meiyerditch in order to fill up the gap between Meiyerditch and the Haunted Woods. To emphasize the importance of the city, a bank was added and it became the new capital of the kingdom. This means that the kingdom of Morytania has had three capitals so far. In March 2012 Jagex made it possible for lower-level players to enter Morytania. From that moment and onwards, the Priest in Peril quest would no longer be a requirement to access the Kingdom of Morytania. The last region to be added to the Morytania is Botany Bay, and island released in September of 2012 to which bots are sent after being caught.

How do you pronounce nnwn? I am not sure, but you better think of something fast because the next region that we are going to visit is called Tirannwn. If you thought that the Kingdom of Morytania was the only dangerous place, then you are wrong. Tirannwn is dangerous as well, but in a completely different way. No ghasts or vampires, but traps galore. It all started when the Underground Pass was released on 3rd March 2003. This pass would lead you from West Ardougne to what would later become Tirannwn. The Underground Pass is an extremely dangerous and large area in which it is easy to get lost. Even though it is underground and therefore technically has nothing to do with the world map, I still decided to add it because of its important function: connecting a kingdom with another region. The area with the abundance of traps, called Isafdar, was not released until 20th September 2004. This is also the day when Tyras Camp, Port Tyras, Elf Camp, Prifddinas and Arandar were added to the game, so quite a bit happened on just one day. Prifddinas was never made accessible to humans, though. A big part of Tirannwn is now known for its Hunter spots, but keep in mind that Hunter did not exist for another two years, so the area was pretty much only used in quests until then. The whole region had or still has a king, so it is officially a kingdom. Now which of the aforementioned areas to do you think got the honour of being its capital? Remarkably enough, the only incomplete and inaccessible area of the kingdom at that time was appointed the capital of Tirannwn. And that area is Prifddinas, which is located in the northwestern corner of the kingdom. Until the grand opening of Prifddinas in 2014, almost everyone used to access Tirannwn by teleporting to Lletya, so you might be surprised that I have not mentioned this name yet. It simply did not exist yet and thus people needed to get to Tirannwn the hard way. Lletya was released on 19th July 2005 and it made accessing the kingdom much more convenient. On that day the last addition to the Kingdom of Tirannwn happened. However, I have not mentioned the Poison Waste area yet. There is absolutely no source that mentions the release date of this area, but it would be reasonable to assume that it was released on the same day as Isafdar and those other five areas. Something else I would like you to know is that Hunter has an important function in Tirannwn. And then I am not referring to the traps that are set up to catch humans. Between 2009 and 2015 skillers would sometimes hunt in Isafdar because of the relatively lucrative grenwall hunting method, although in the last couple years this skilling method hast lost some of its popularity due to lower - 72 - prices of grenwall spikes and due to being superseded by new content. The last change to happen to the Land of the Elves is immediately the biggest geographical update of the last seven years. The area of Prifddinas was turned into a high-level content hotspot in September of 2014.

With Tirannwn being located in the southwestern corner of Gielinor, we still have not visited to the north yet. So far we have had kingdoms, a desert and large regions. Now it is time for our first province. The Fremennik Province is located north of the Kingdom of Kandarin. Initially it consisted only of Rellekka, which was released on 2nd November 2004. Rellekka contains more than one port and it is quite civilized. Therefore, it is no surprise that it is the capital of the Fremennik Province. One way to go from Kandarin to Rellekka (and vice versa) is via a set of stepping stones and a rocky path north of the Barbarian Outpost. This path as well as the Lighthouse on it was released on 17th November and both are part of the province. Not a lot happened to the province afterwards and we have to wait till March 2005 for the next area. A camp on a mountain and was discovered and conveniently named Mountain Camp. Apparently the rulers of every large region wanted an island and that also counted for the Fremennik Province. Waterbirth Island was added to the province in August of 2005. The last addition that happened to this province took place on the same day as the release of the Hunter skill, with the Fremennik Hunter Area being added to the northwestern corner in November 2006.

I am not sure if you have noticed it, but we have been skipping the largest area in Gielinor. And it is the most dangerous area, namely the Wilderness. The Wilderness was released on 13th August 2001 and it contains a lot more locations than you might think. Unfortunately, I did not manage to find the release dates of many Wilderness locations. These places are The Forgotten Cemetery, Ruins (east), Boneyard, Demonic Ruins, Volcano (north east) and the Frozen Waste Plateau. Anyway, because of this inconvenience it is quite difficult to provide a clear image of what the Wilderness looked like at first. However, if you now open the world map, you will see a fence going from west to east at Wilderness level 51-53. Everything north of this fence did not exist until 8th May 2002. Areas that were added on that day were the Rogues Castle, Scorpion Pit, Deserted Keep, Pirates' Hideout and possibly also the Volcano which can be found northeast. Other locations that can be found north of that fence were not added until 2003 or later. The most useful facility, the Agility Training Area, was released 28th January 2003 and it attracted many players because of its high Agility xp rates. The Mage Arena was not there until August 2003 and I am not sure when the Frozen Waste Plateau was released. The presence of a gate in the fence, however, might indicate that it was added on 8th May 2002 as well. Especially since the other gates are extremely far away. Now we need to rewind to 13th August 2001. I am not sure which areas existed on that day, but I am convinced that some areas that I mentioned at the top of this paragraph did not exist until a later date. I have just explained that anything north of the fence in Wilderness was not there yet, but some areas south of that fence were not there yet either. When the membership option was released on 27th February 2002, Jagex also added several new areas to the Wilderness. These are Bandit Camp, Dark Warriors' Fortress, Red Dragon Isle and possibly more locations. Questers amongst you might remember that the Chaos Temple (southeast) is used in the Defender of Varrock quest. However, the actual altar has existed since 2001. Pk'ers used it quite often in their strategy because it was easy to trap other people there with the lava surrounding almost the entire area. I would also like to clarify that Daemonheim is not part of the Wilderness because it is a safe area. The notorious - 73 - update that removed free trade from the game also included the addition of Clan Wars and the Wilderness Volcano. This update happened on 10th December 2007. However, The Wilderness Volcano was named Bounty Hunter until its removal in early 2011, when free trade and the traditional RS2 PvP system returned to the game.

All of the main areas have been discussed now. Some locations that are left are islands and places on the continent that do not really belong to a kingdom. Let's start with the islands. It is important to know that by island I mean islands that do not belong to any kingdom. However, some of these islands do form island groups. The first four islands were Musa Point, Crandor, Entrana and the Tutorial Island, in that order, but those do belong to a kingdom or other large areas in general. Let me start off by saying that no islands were released in 2003. The first islands that were added northwest of the Fremennik Province were Miscellania and Etceteria. Both were released on 2nd November 2004. A month later two other islands were added on the same day. The least known island of these is Crash Island, a necessary complement to Ape Atoll. At the end of October 2005, a rather bizarre island was released. It was named Braindeath Island and it does not appear on the world map. Note that this island is not part of the Kingdom of Morytania. And neither is the next island that was released in February of 2006: Mos Le Harmless. This island is located west of the Kharidian Desert. On 18th April 2006 Jagex introduced a new minigame to RuneScape, playable by visiting two islands. One of them is the Void Knights' Outpost and the other one is the Pest Control minigame area. These two islands are the most southern islands in Gielinor. A while later the Pirates' Cove and Lunar Isle were added to form the most northwestern point in Gielinor. Lunar Isle would eventually become an important location for Runecrafters. Not only because of the presence of the Astral altar, but also because quite some ZMI runecrafters would use the island to bank. More about ZMI can be read in the chapter about skills. On 29th January 2007 the Iceberg was released and if you visit it, you will find that it is quite an entertaining place because of its eccentric Agility course. A week after that, two new islands which belong together were added to fill up the space in the northwestern ocean a little bit. These islands are Neitiznot and Jatiszo, which are connected to each other by a snowy and for a long time dangerous area to the north. The trolls use to be aggressive to all players and many of the trolls would attack at the same time. Our next island's name is one with a positive first connotation. Harmony is not only a much-wanted state that people try to obtain, it is also the name of the island that was released on 6th March 2007. It forms the most south eastern location in Gielinor, but it does not belong to any kingdom. One of the last islands that was released is almost as large as the Feldip Hills. Not only is it almost as large, it also looks like it was initially attached to the western coast of the Feldip Hills. At least, that is what you would think when you open the world map. The island that I am speaking of is Soul Wars and the area functions as a large-sized minigame. Eventually at the end of 2013 a, for now, final island was introduced to Gielinor. Ashdale could perhaps be considered a substitute of the original Tutorial Island as both serve the same purpose. However, Ashdale was not added to the King of Misthalin, but as an independent island south of the Feldip Hills.

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I would also like to talk about certain areas which do not belong to any kingdom or any large region. The first of these areas is the White Wolf Mountain, which was released on 27th February 2002. This mountain forms the natural border between the Kingdom of Asgarnia and the Kingdom of Kandarin. August 2004 added several of such areas to Gielinor and all of them are related to the land of the trolls. At the start of the month there was the Death Plateau. On the 24th day, the Troll Stronghold and Trollheim were released to expand this area. A later expansion, which happened in January 2005, would connect the stronghold with a region in the northwest: Trollweiss. This is the snowy part of the Troll site. Weiss is German for white, which explains the name of the area. The next location, the Ice Path, was released as part of the Desert Treasure quest on 18th April 2005, in which it features prominently. Daemonheim is the only place where Dungeoneering can be trained and quite logically it was released on the same day as the skill. This day was 12th April 2010 and it immediately is our last area. Despite its location, it is not part of the Wilderness and thus it is safe. At least, if you are not scared of the few wandering chickens over there. It is technically not an island, but a peninsula and you do not need to go through the Wilderness to reach it. Without a teleport option this place can also be reached by boat.

To conclude this chapter it might be interesting to have a look at the formation of the rivers in Gielinor. RuneScape currently counts five official rivers and four unofficial rivers. The river Lum is the only river that was there from the very start of the game and it separated Ghost Town from the rest of the Kingdom of Misthalin. Its source is located in Wilderness level six and unlike you may think, the river was already big enough to actually consider it a river at that time. The reason for that is that the Kingdom of Asgarnia was partially already there, but you just could not access it until 6th April 2001. However, I do not know how far it stretched exactly. It is likely that the river was already complete from the start, especially if you know that the Lumbridge Swamps and Al- Kharid have also always been there and that that is where the river ends. Our next river does not really have a source, but it does contain a waterfall and we could say that it forms the starting point of the river. First of all, that starting point is the Baxtorian Falls and I am not sure when these falls were added. Eastwards the river immediately flows into a larger water area, but southwards it passes through several cities, of which some were not present when the Kingdom of Kandarin was released. The flow of water of which I am speaking could not really be considered a river until 12th December 2002. This is when the Gnome Stronghold was released, but I did not manage to find out whether there already was land prior to that day or not. If not, it that means that the water flow was not big enough yet to consider it a river until the day mentioned above. On that day it became an official river and it was named the Dougne. The reason for that is that the most important city through which the river passes is Ardougne, which was released long time before that. However, the river does not split Ardougne into East and West Ardougne. That honour goes to a simple wall that was built around West Ardougne. We know that the Tree Gnome Village was already there at the start of 2003. However, that is not how far the river may have stretched at that moment because the Underground - 75 -

Pass (and thus also Tirannwn), Observatory and Castle Wars had not been released yet. However, this is only a vague gap of three months since the Observatory was released in March 2003, which is located on land at the other side of the river. The river was made complete by the addition of Castle Wars in December 2004. The part of the river southeast of this minigame is the only place where the river forms a natural border between two kingdoms. In this case that is between the Kingdom of Kandarin and the Kingdom of Tirannwn.

The next river on the list is the Elid. This river runs through only one large area, namely the Kharidian Desert. The Elid did not exist for a long time. In fact, the only part of the desert that existed until 2005 was the northeastern part, to which we can now refer as the part north of the mountains that are located west of Pollnivneach. The release of Uzer on 11th April 2005 signified the birth of the river Elid and it would immediately stretch from its source (south of Al-Kharid) to Pollnivneach. Jagex released Menaphos and Sophanem a few weeks after that, causing the river's length to be extended significantly. Altogether this means that entire river was born and made complete in two weeks' time. This demonstrates the radical transformation that the Kharidian Desert underwent in just a couple of weeks. Earlier we referred to this period by calling April 2005 the desert month. Also note how the Elid forms the natural border between Menaphos and Sophanem. I wonder if that area would have had only one name if there had not been a river that splits it... Next we have the river Salve, which forms the natural border between the Kingdom of Misthalin, the Kingdom of Morytania and also the Kharidian Desert. As we know, the Kingdom of Misthalin was there from the very start, but the Kingdom of Morytania was not and thus the river did not exist for an extremely long while, more than three years to be more specific. Canifis was the first area of that kingdom. However, only when the More Myre Swamp was added to the kingdom in October of 2004, can we finally speak of a river being visible. And it immediately was a big one that already stretched all the way towards the Kharidian Desert. In fact, the river was already complete for around 85% at that moment. The only place that was missing at that moment to make it complete was the Citharede Abbey, which was released in November 2011. Our last official river is one that can be found in Keldagrim. It is the first time that I mention Keldagrim here and that is because this is a city which is located underground. It does not belong to any kingdom, but it does have a river. We can be brief about this: the river that runs through the city was already complete on the day that the city was released and it splits the city into two almost equally sized parts. The river is called the Kelda and it was released on 31st May 2005.

There are still four less important rivers left. However, the one that can be found on Karamja is quite big today. Technically there are two rivers, but it will be easier to discuss them if we just consider them to be one river. With a probability bordering on certainty we can say that there was no river until late 2002. As told earlier, the Shipyard was released in December 2002. However, I do not know if that eastern island of Karamja already existed or not prior to that date. Anyway, starting from December 2002, we can be sure that there was a river which split Karamja into two parts: a big western part and a smaller eastern part. Shilo Village and the Khazari Jungle did not exist yet, so there was no southern part of the river yet. That part, which stretches from east to west, made its introduction to Gielinor when Shilo Village was added in January 2003. It split Shilo Village itself into a northern and a southern part. We also have a small river in the northwestern corner of the - 76 -

Kingdom of Kandarin. This one runs from the southwestern corner of the Gnome Stronghold towards the northwestern corner of it. The river, however, did not exist until 2006, when first Piscatoris and later its Hunter area were added. The river itself can be used to get to Piscatoris by boat. Our very last river is also one that involves the Kingdom of Kandarin. The river about which I am talking stretches from the Sinclair Mansion all the way to the west, towards the sea. Its source is the lake which is located north of the Camelot Castle and east of the Sinclair Mansion. The lake itself, and thus also the river, did not exist until August 2005, when the Troll Stronghold was released.

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4

Player versus Monster

Today RuneScape is home to many high-level monsters and some of them are popular because of their valuable drops. Throughout the history of RuneScape the excitement of slaying the toughest creatures and running off with a drop that is worth millions of coins caused combat to become a highly popular activity in RuneScape. Killing bosses has always revolved around trying to obtain that new piece of combat armour and weaponry, which in turn can be used to restart the slaughtering. PvM, or Player versus Monster, has evolved to become one of the most popular activities in RuneScape today. However, its past is far less glorious. In the chapter about the RuneScape community I indicated more than once that PvP used to be the central activity in RuneScape for years. PvM, on the other hand, did probably not even exist in RS1 because the early years lacked in strong bosses. Sure, there was the King Black Dragon and many of the players with a high combat level enjoyed fighting the toughest monsters that existed at that time, but we cannot really speak of PvM in this case. At least, not in the way we would describe PvM as today. The King Black Dragon posed a serious threat in the early years, but there was nothing else of the same magnitude. The most challenging monsters, other than the dragon, could be killed fairly quickly, within a minute. Their status is very similar to what we would consider monsters like airuts to be at this moment: a tough high-level training opportunity (for most of us), but not a challenging boss with elaborate fighting techniques and different phases, such as Nex, requiring quite a few minutes to be killed. In the literal meaning of the term, even fighting a chicken would be classified as PvM, but if we use today’s standards of what PvM is supposed to be, then we should say that there was no such thing as PvM in RS1. There was the King Black Dragon and that is where it ended.

In this chapter I will discuss the high-level monsters that lurk in Gielinor and the equipment that was used to fight them at their time, of course from the perspective of various moments in the past. The King Black Dragon is not a tough monster for today’s standards, but back in RS1 it was the strongest monster of the game, and it did pose a serious threat because many of the types of weapons and armour that exist today were not part of the game yet. Today we could slay the dragon very easily by using the weapons that were released in the recent years, but of course those weapons are much stronger than those that were available in the first few years of RuneScape. For the reader it might be an interesting idea to fight each of the monsters described in this chapter by using only the weapons, armour and other items that were available shortly after those monsters had been added to the game. Of course you would have to kill them in legacy mode then because combat abilities did not exist yet when most of these monsters were released. In order to fully understand

- 78 - the addition of each new boss or other high-level monster to the game, we must first have a look at the evolution of the combat system itself. So before discussing the various bosses and monsters, I will first give a description of how combat evolved over the course of the years, from the perspectives of all of the combat and PvM-related skills.

Combat plays an important role in the lives of many RuneScape players. There are various ways (PvM, PvP) to train combat and an equal several options that you can use to fight. These are Magic, Melee and Ranged. Melee in RS1 used to be primitive and the first types of armour were released in two batches. The first batch, which was released upon the launch of RuneScape, contained bronze, iron, steel and mithril armour. The only types of Melee weapons that existed were daggers, maces, swords, longswords, battleaxes and 2h-swords. The second batch was released on 23rd September 2001. This batch contained black, adamant and rune armour. Adamant and rune used to be rare and expensive because of the fact that there were not many high-level smiths. Fights could take a while because of these now-considered weak items, yet they formed the strongest armour and weaponry that was available in the early days of RuneScape. Worth repeating is the fact running, as opposed to walking, was not possible in RS1. So if someone or a monster attacked a player in any way, they would walk after you. There was also this so-called three-round combat system, which prevented anyone from running away from their opponent in RS1 until each player had performed three attacks. It did not matter if that opponent was another person or a NPC, but if a player ever happened to lose a fight and wanted to retreat as fast as possible, he or she could do that only after every three attacks (one round = one attack). The game mechanics would simply prevent that player from running away and there was no way to bypass that.

Popular ways to train combat in RS1 consisted of fighting monsters in Varrock Sewers, the chaos druids for herb drops in Taverley dungeon and any monster that had a low amount of hitpoints, but a reasonable combat level. Of course high-level monsters were good too if their amount of hitpoints was not extremely high, but at some combat levels, monster that could be killed in one hit were preferred. This is because combat xp gain was initially based on the combat level of the monster. Most of the currently existing monsters did not exist yet. This means that combat was slow to train, which contributed to the popularity of PvP in the first years. Something that I would like to point out and have done quite a few times already, is that RS1 was all about PvP. The community was extremely PvP-minded simply because it was one of the more convenient (I am not saying easy) things to do. It was by far the most popular and most practiced activity in the game. However, it was still slow. Also the way that combat worked was totally different: there was an entirely different combat formula than there is now, which caused the highest combat level to be level 123 in RS1. Only four people managed to reach this level before RS2 was released in 2004. These people were Gearshifter, S A X, Lillyuffie88 and Arc Druid (in this order). For the technical part we can say that modern gaming technology did not exist yet. As a result of this, every weapon used to have the same attack speed. A second important factor to mention is that the xp that a player received from killing monsters was not based on the amount of hitpoints that the monster had. The aforementioned training methods were popular because of this. The experience that a player received was similar to the Slayer system of today, meaning that the experience points are obtained after killing the monster. Now you might think but hey, does it not work for combat like that too at this moment? - - 79 -

Yes it does, but that was not the case for more than eight years, from 2004 till 2012. Back to RS1, if multiple players were trying to kill the same monster, the xp would be divided based on the amount of damage that each player had inflicted. Attack, Defence and Strength already had the same function as they do now, though. Attack represented accuracy, Defence represented the chances of getting hit and Strength represented aggression. In September of 2004 Jagex released dragon chainbodies, followed by the abyssal whips in January of 2005. These items were extremely expensive and the vast majority of the players could not afford them at that time. For example, the first abyssal whip was sold for around 100M gp, while others would be traded for partyhats (which were much cheaper in 2005).

Auto-retaliate (fighting back automatically) was a feature in RS1 that could not be switched off, as a result of the three-round combat system. This means that everyone would always automatically defend themselves if someone or something was attacking them. Of course that was particularly annoying when a player was trying to escape from a high-level monster or when someone or a monster suddenly attacked a skiller who did not have the intention of engaging in combat. And that is what it used to be like for three years. In 2004 Jagex finally added the option to turn off auto- retaliate alongside the release of RS2. So combat in RS1 was different in comparison with combat after the release of RS2. The full release of RS2 on 29th March 2004 brought some major combat updates. First of all, the maximum combat level was increased from 123 to 126. RS1 did not have enough variety in weapons, so new ones for every part of the combat triangle were added to the game. Speaking of which, the combat triangle did not exist in RS1. This was supposed to be a system to would create a balance between Magic, Melee and Ranged. Each with its own strengths and weaknesses relative to another combat type. For example, after the transition from RS1 to RS2, Ranged became effective for fighting against magers, but archers became weak and vulnerable against Melee attacks. The combat triangle made Magic and Ranged stronger in order to balance all combat types and to promote each different type by making it the preferred option against another specific type. Another update that was part of the RS2 release was the introduction of multi-combat. Previously two or more players could not fight the same monster at the same time. This update changed that so that it would become possible to team up in order to bring a monster to its knees. The western side of the Wilderness was the first area where multi-combat was made possible. Additionally, many monsters used to block a player’s path in RS1. So if a NPC was standing in front of a gate, that player would not be able to go through it until the NPC had moved away. This made questing a bit tricky because navigating your way past dangerous enemies was not the easiest thing to do. After the release of RS2 Jagex gradually started to reduce the amount of monsters that would block a player’s path and eventually no monster would block paths anymore. However, today several quest- specific NPCs still have this ability. For example, the gorilla guards in the prison on Ape Atoll.

The best way to level up combat in RS1 was sometimes by fighting low-level monsters. I explained that in one of previous paragraphs. Of course that did not really make sense, so Jagex changed it to the current combat system where more xp is gained from fighting harder high-level monsters. This meant that efficient combat training became more difficult and more dangerous. In June 2004 special attacks for members-only weapons were added to the game. This update made combat more exciting and challenging, and each special attack had its own unique function. In a sense you can call special attacks the precursor of combat abilities. The first type of weapons to receive special - 80 - attacks were dragon weapons, the excalibur, rune throwing axes and magic bows. At that point dragon armour/weaponry was the best type available to the community. The first new weapons to carry a special attack were the abyssal whip (released on 26th January 2005) and the dragon scimitar (released on 29th March 2005). Abyssal whips were released on the same day as the Slayer skill. The release of this Slayer skill included the addition of many new monsters, so logically it had a huge effect on combat. Players discovered new ways to make money and many campers soon noticed the advantages that the new high-level monsters had to offer. And then I am referring to the new expensive items as possible monster drop, such as the abyssal whip at that time. More information about Slayer will be mentioned later in this chapter.

The addition of the Barrows minigame to the game on 9th May 2005 introduced new, stronger and better combat gear to RuneScape. Barrows gear was revolutionary because it was the first type of armour that could degrade, after which a player would have to visit Bob the axe man in Lumbridge to have it repaired, for a fee. There initially was Ahrim, Dharok, Guthan, Karil, Torag and Verac armour. Ahrim was Magic armour; Karil was Ranged armour; and Guthan, Dharok, Verac and Torag were Melee armour. They became the strongest type of armour in their corresponding combat type at that time. A seventh type of armour, called Akrisae armour, was added to the Barrows minigame in September 2010 as part of the Ritual of the Mahjarrat quest update. Each type of Barrows armour had its own unique special function, or passive effect, if we could call it that. These unique effects can probably be considered special attacks, although there is no way to control them because the effects trigger randomly. All these new Barrows items definitely added an extra value to combat and the armour would remain popular for many years, until at least the release of the God Wars Dungeon in 2007. Also nice to know, on the same day, spears were given a higher attack speed and they became as fast as maces and longswords. In June 2006 the Warrior's Guilds was released, where players could participate in several minigames. A reward for successfully finishing or completing this minigame is access to the defenders (only up to rune at that time), which can be used as a replacement for shields. Using the old combat system, the difference was that those defenders had more Attack and Strength bonuses at the cost of Defence bonus. Therefore, the new defenders were considered an ideal alternative to fight monsters that were not strong and that most likely were not able to cause a player to die. The rune defender ended up becoming extremely popular for many years. In June 2007 a new type of shield, called the dragonfire shield, was added to the game. It protects a player from fire breath attacks exhaled towards the player by dragons. The dragonfire shield became highly popular because of this unique form of protection in combination with carrying a Strength bonus and high defensive stats in general. The price of the dragonfire shield varied between 10m and 40m gp for years, but since the end of 2011 it has always been below 10m gp. That is mainly because the competition with other new armour became unbearable for the shield to remain popular. By early 2013 the price of the shield had dropped to around its high-level alchemy value of 1.2m gp. The high prices of before 2010 indicate that the shield truly was a valuable addition to combat.

On 28th August 2007 the famous God Wars Dungeon was added to the game. This update introduced a series of powerful high-level weapons and armour to RuneScape. The new weapons, godswords, were insanely strong in comparison to other weapons that existed at that time. Mainly because of their extraordinary special attack. The strength of these weapons was so great that the prices of godswords reached peeks of up to 150m gp for the armadyl godsword. This means that the God Wars Dungeon was not only a place where courageous adventurers could hang out, but it also - 81 - became a popular moneymaking method. Of course not only weapons, but also new Melee and Ranged gear with high Attack, Strength and Defence bonuses was part of the update. Bandos and Armadyl armour, for Melee and Ranged respectively, emerged as the new most desired types of armour for their respective combat type. However, Torag remained the type of armour with the highest Defence stats. Bandos and Armadyl armour are not used a lot anymore, but both did carry a high status for several years. I know some people whose goals consisted of wearing Bandos armour at some point in their RuneScape career. The release of the God Wars Dungeon also added a new monster to the game that would drop a new type of boots. Spiritual Mages frequently drop a pair of dragon boots and upon the release they became the strongest boots available (when looking at the offensive stats). At the end of 2007 Jagex released the LootShare option. As the name already implies, this option made it possible for archers, magers and warriors to share the loot of the monsters that they had killed in a fair manner. However, there were restrictions to avoid abuse and several conditions needed to be fulfilled: first of all, LootShare only worked in multi-combat areas. Secondly, each player had to stand in a range of maximum sixteen squares away from the monster in order to be able to receive any loot from the system. Another requirement was that each player needed to inflict damage, as a way of guaranteeing that they were actually actively participating and not just making profit from someone else's effort. The players also had to be in the same friends chat, with the LootShare option switched on, of course. This update stimulated group combat and it encouraged more players to try their luck. On 4th March 2008 Jagex added CoinShare to the LootShare system as the monetary equivalent of the LootShare option. With the CoinShare option enabled, tradeable items that a player would normally receive as a drop were immediately sold or put in the Grand Exchange and the profit was shared. The CoinShare feature worked only for items with a high value, though. Other items that were dropped were divided among the team according to the LootShare system. Altogether, both systems gave the community an incentive to go on social killing sprees.

The Stronghold of Security was released in July 2006. This stronghold contains a wide variety of different monsters, which were suitable for both low- and high-level players when it was added to the game. Fighting the ankous on the deepest floor of the stronghold became a relatively good training and moneymaking method. Unique to this dungeon is that everyone needs to navigate their way through a maze that is filled with gates. These can be passed only by correctly answering several questions related to account security. The unique aspect here is that it was the first attempt of Jagex to instill some sense of awareness about account security, and that by integrating this process in in-game content, instead of posting regular warnings on the front page of the website, which is what Jagex used to do every now and then. In March 2008 Jagex added a sort of 'sequel' to it by releasing the Stronghold of Player Safety. This stronghold does not contain mazes or gates, but a player first has to pass a security/player safety exam in order to be granted access to the Misthalin Training Centre of Excellence, the official in-game denomination for the Stronghold of Player

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Safety. This stronghold contains cockroaches of various levels and they were good training methods for the average player because the cockroach soldiers regularly drop Summoning charms and rune scimitars. This immediately serves as a nice bridge to an import piece of combat content. Summoning is a combat skill that was released on 15th January 2008. More about the skill will be discussed later in this chapter, but for combat itself it caused the maximum level to increase from 126 to 138. Since Summoning is a members-only skill, the maximum combat level in F2P remained 126. The skill introduced many combat familiars to the game, of which some ended up becoming extremely popular for fighting tough monsters. Especially the Summoning familiars that require a level of 90 or higher are capable of inflicting a nice amount of damage, such as the steel titan. The combat familiars became particularly useful to fight bosses or any other high-level monsters, but other families were also a valuable asset because of their healing abilities, such as the spirit bunyip and the unicorn stallion. On 15th October 2008 a rather remarkable change to combat levels was made alongside the release of PvP worlds. Jagex made it possible to see how much the combat level of a player was influenced by their Summoning level. Combat levels would appear as, for example, level: 126+12 if the player had gained 12 combat levels because of their Summoning level. This was only useful in PvP, which is why many players complained about it. Later on Jagex reverted it to the pre-update system.

Extreme attack, strength and defence potions were released in October 2009. These potions made fighting tough monsters and bosses significantly easier by making it possible to boost to a virtual level of 126 in each of those skills. This was the first step to godswords becoming less necessary. The following update was step two and it was perhaps the crucial step that finished this process. The release of the Dungeoneering skill on 12th April 2010 added new powerful weapons and armour to the game. The new weapons carried high stats and would eventually replace the popular abyssal whip and other high-level weapons of that time. Especially the new chaotic rapier ended up becoming a popular weapon. The chaotic rapier enabled players to kill monsters much faster, although keep in mind that dual wielding was not possible until the release of EoC in 2012. In December of 2010 Jagex added damage soaking to the game. After the update a player’s character would automatically absorb a certain percentage of any type of damage dealt to them that was over 200 life points. This was done in order to rebalance the combat triangle. Magic would generally soak more damage than Melee because Melee was still considered to be overpowered after all those years. Any soaked damage would be returned to the opponent as an additional hit. Damage soaking was removed from the game when Jagex released EoC. The year of 2011 began with an update that added revolutionary armour to the game for each combat type. First of all, there was a new strongest monster, called Nex (1001 combat), who could be found in a new area of the God Wars Dungeons. Possible drops upon slaying her are the powerful types of armour, called pernix, torva and virtus; a new strongest type of armour for every part of the combat triangle. The torva platebody eventually peaked at a price of 640m gp, which proves how good the new armour was considered to be. A new type of bow was released on top of - 83 - that. The new Zaryte bow became the strongest bow of the game at that time, although it had to compete with the chaotic bow. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but the Zaryte one is the only tradeable bow of the two. Its price remained above 100m gp for a good year. The year of 2012 was entirely devoted to Evolution of Combat (EoC). However, I will skip EoC for now and discuss it later in light of the PvM community. The same applies to the Legacy mode.

We have now focused primarily on Melee, but of course there is more to combat than just Melee. Let’s have a look at Ranged now. Like any other skill Ranged was primitive in RS1. A player could make use of it only when standing far away from the opponent, so in close-distance combat (= when there is no square between the two players) it was not possible to use Ranged (or Magic), only Melee. There are plenty of other differences too when we compare RS1 Ranged with RS2 Ranged. For example, for each successful Ranged attack a player would get Ranged xp, but no Hitpoints or optional Defence xp. Types of bows up to magic and arrows up to rune were already available in RS1. However, there were only two types of crossbows that existed. These were the standard crossbow and the phoenix crossbow that could be obtained from the Shield of Arrav quest. Today there is an accuracy bonus and damage bonus for each type of combat. However, prior to the release of EoC, each combat type had its own bonus: For Ranged this was the Ranged Attack bonus and Ranged Strength bonus in RS2, which were called WeaponAim bonus and WeaponPower bonus in RS1. Just like today, the higher these bonuses, the more damage the player would inflict. A rather funny aspect of Ranged in RS1 is missiles that are flying through the air were displayed as green stars. Sometimes this was confusing because flying Magic spells were displayed as blue stars. Fletching initially did not exist yet, so arrows, bolts etc. had to be made by using the Smithing skill. Darts and throwing knives were also some of the available Ranged weapons in RS1. Generally speaking, we can say that Ranged was quite weak in comparison to the other two combat types. The only factors that affected a player’s accuracy in RS1 was the Ranged level and the type of bow that was being used. The armour that the player was wearing had no effect at all. Despite Ranged being a poor choice for engaging in one-on-one combat, teaming up with other archers was sometimes a useful strategy in PvP.

The release of RS2 introduced some major changes to Ranged. First of all, the skill was made stronger in comparison with Melee, and that was a necessary change. Secondly, as of RS2 a player would also be able to fight with Ranged when engaged in close-distance combat, and Ranged gear started having an effect on the accuracy too. This was an important step to rebalancing combat. To acknowledge that Ranged was a worthy combat skill, Jagex also released the Ranging Guild (south of McGrubor's Wood) that week. Furthermore, they changed how gaining xp from successful Ranged attacks worked so that a player would also gain Hitpoints xp and not only Ranged xp. In addition to that, it became possible to gain Defence xp when using Ranged in the defensive mode. Another important update for the skill was the introduction of new Ranged armour to the game. The introduction of the combat triangle led to having to make more adjustments to combat-related content. Ranged was also affected by this: First of all, more Ranged weaponry was made available for free players and new Ranged amour was released for members (blue, red and black dragonhide). There were also new types of javelins, darts, throwing knives and arrows. All these changes were supposed to improve the Ranged skill, and that is exactly what happened, at the cost of the popularity of Melee, or a bit of it. The dwarf multi-cannons that had been released in May 2003 became extremely useful because of the new multi-combat areas that were released along with RS2. This cannon has always played an important role in RuneScape - 84 - because it increases the Ranged xp/h rate significantly when set up in multi-combat areas. Especially since 2005, when the Slayer skill was released, has the dwarf multi-cannon been extremely popular, even to this day.

No other major changes to the Ranged skill were made until 31st July 2006. On that day Jagex released seven new types of crossbows and more types of bolts that a player could enchant so that the bolts would have a sort of special effect. Ranged grapples were another update of that day, but this was and still is mainly useful for shortcuts, so its use is fairly limited. The introduction of Treasure Trials in December 2006 added another type of Ranged armour to the game: 3rd Age armour. This extremely expensive type of armour was never considered to be functional because the existing Barrows Ranged armour was better and much cheaper. Also crossbows were not as strong as they are today. On 18th June 2007, however, this changed. Jagex updated and rebalanced crossbows so that they would fire faster and hit harder. In the same month the powerful dark bow was added to the drop table of dark beasts, this bow would become the strongest bow in RuneScape for several years. The Hunter skill was released on 21st November 2006. One of the new Hunter animals that could be caught was the carnivorous red chinchompa. Jagex probably wanted to make Ranged more appealing by making chinchompas more useful for Ranged. The red chinchompas are stackable and can be wielded to function as Ranged ammo Today, using these chinchompas to train Ranged is the fastest training method of the game, offering xp gains of up to 600k xp/h in the tunnel below Ape Atoll, although the xp rate used to be lower before the release of EoC. After the release of the Chaos Tunnels in 2008, training Ranged by using this method at mummies became an alternative for Ape Atoll's dangerous tunnel. For the majority of the time, with the exception of a year before and after EoC's release, the prices of red chinchompas fluctuated between 600 and 800 gp each, making this Ranged method a costly one. Initially there were people that did not like this method because it neglected the bow & arrow stereotype for this skill. However, the huge xp gains that it offered made well up for it.

The introduction of red chinchompas immediately signified the beginning of a long no-update period for the Ranged skill. We have to jump to the release of Dungeoneering in April 2010 to find something new about Ranged. At first Ranged within Daemonheim was not as popular because of the limited amount of bows and arrow types. As one of the rewards from Dungeoneering, a player is able to buy the powerful chaotic crossbow. Being a lot better than the crystal bow and rune crossbow, the chaotic crossbow remained the strongest bow in Gielinor until the Zaryte bow was released in 2011. However, the latter would end up settling at an extremely high price, which is why the chaotic crossbow did not lose any popularity. The introduction of the hexhunter bow and the Sagittarian arrows added an extra value to Ranged within Daemonheim. Even though Melee was and remained the most popular combat type within Daemonheim, this bow and its arrows started to play an important role too. People soon discovered that using Ranged could be effective, especially on certain bosses. This shows that Jagex had really been trying to rebalance combat as much as possible. Time to abandon Dungeoneering for now. A strong type of bolts was released on 20th March 2012. The new bakriminel bolts that have a requirement of level 80 Ranged became the third best type of Ranged ammunition in RuneScape. Unfortunately, this high-level content was never popular simply because it could not compete with other Ranged methods, such as the dwarf cannon - 85 - and the red chinchompa training options. The royal crossbow was released on 29th May 2012 and it immediately become the strongest bow in RuneScape, replacing the chaotic crossbow, which had been the strongest bow for two years. In the last few years even stronger Ranged equipment was added to the game, in the form of the ascension bow and the noxious bow for the weaponry, and death lotus armour and sirenic armour to cover the main body parts.

We have now seen how Ranged has transformed over the course of the course. Let’s find out whether Magic has undergone the same kind of surgery as well. And I think that the next few sentences will immediately give a clear answer to that. Magic was there from the start of the game, but it consisted of an entirely different system than it does today. There initially were only a few Magic spells, but on 24th May 2001 Jagex released the Good and Evil Magic system, which added new Magic spells to the game. So how did this system work? First of all, it was possible to fail at casting a spell. When that happened the player would not lose the runes, though, but the game would prevent the player from casting any spell for about twenty seconds. Magic spells that were flying through the air were displayed as a blue star, which caused confusion because flying missiles (Ranged) were displayed as a green star. You might expect that the Evil spells comprised all the combat spells and the Good spells all the other spells, but that was not true. Both types of spell were present in the Evil and Good Magic system and everyone could use all of them, provided that the players had reached the required level in the skill. Training Magic used to be extremely tedious in RS1. And there is an obvious reason for. To train Magic you need runes. Runes can be made via the Runecrafting skill, but Runecrafting was released in 2004. This means that no one was able to make runes for over three years. All runes had to be bought from stores or other players and because there was only little supply, most types of runes had a high price. This made Magic an expensive skill that could be trained only by people with considerable wealth. To add to that, not all runes could be bought in the rune shop. Nature, law and other high-level runes could be obtained only by killing the correct monsters or by finding a place where the runes spawned.

Just like how Ranged used to work, using combat spells would not give any Hitpoints xp until RS2. However, if a player did have all the runes that were needed in RS1, Magic was a faster skill than in RS2. For instance, high-level alchemy offered up to140k Magic xp/hour because every spell gave twice as much xp as in RS2. Using the crumble undead spell on warriors in the Wizards' Guild in Yanille would give 130k-150k Magic xp/hour. The different game engines also made Magic generally faster than the same method in RS2. Magic did not receive many updates in RS1 and therefore we can immediately make a jump to the period in which RS2 was released (March 2004). One of the changes that were made to the skill was that combat spells would also give Hitpoints xp from now on. The introduction of the new combat system also affected Magic. The combat triangle was the first step to rebalancing combat. For Magic this meant that the skill would become stronger compared to Melee. At first Jagex had made Magic too strong, so they decided to nerf it by reducing the stats of most Magic armour and by introducing a new defence system for Magic. A player’s defence against Magic in RS1 completely depended on their own Magic level and not on the Defence level. This caused Magic to be a very strong combat type because most people were not rich enough to reach a high level in Magic, thus making them more vulnerable to Magic attacks. After the release of RS2, Jagex changed this so that both the Magic and Defence level would

- 86 - determine how much damage a player would take. For example, if someone had a high Defence level, but a low Magic level, the defence against Magic attacks would be better than in RS1. Also the xp that you would normally gain from all spells was halved. As compensation for that, all runes that a player owned were doubled in amount. This was a controversial update because doubling the amount of runes, or any item for that matter, is something that would have to be done carefully, and only after analysis of the effects on the economy of the game.

On 31st March 2004, Jagex released a development plan and what I am going tell next might even surprise some of the experienced RuneScape players. That particular 31st March was the first day that Jagex publicly used the term Summoning (in a non-random way). However, they did not say that Summoning was going to be skill. They had not even been planning to make such a skill. In that development plan Jagex talked about releasing Summoning spells, following the exact same concept of the Summoning skill that we know today. This is a quote taken from their plan: “Summoning spells - summon skeletons, demons, etc...!”. At that moment they were not talking about a Summoning skill at all, though. The plan was to add new spells to the Magic skill that everyone could use to summon monsters (familiars) with. They had even already designed a new rune for it, called the life rune. Those Summoning spells as well as the life rune were never released, probably because the project had become so big that Jagex thought that it would be better to turn it into a skill... without life runes. I have mainly discussed the combat part of the Magic skill, but of course there is also a non-combat part. In April of 2004 Jagex released the ability to enchant rings. This surely was quite an addition to the Magic skill, considering that superheating, teleporting and alchemy were the only non-combat ways to train Magic at that time. The ability to enchant rings did not only mean that there would be an extra option to train Magic, but of course also the effects of the enchanted rings were new to the game. A player could now craft rings of wealth, rings of dueling, recoil rings etc., but amulets could not be enchanted yet. In October of 2004 new Magic armour was released. This new type of armour was called splitbark armour. Even though it was an addition to the Magic skill, it never became a successful type of Magic gear. The Mystic armour that was released on 25th January 2005 had more success and it still is popular among the low-level players. On 18th April 2005 a big change was made to the Magic skill. The release of the Desert Treasure quest added a new combat-based Magic spellbook to the game: Ancient Magicks. This spellbook already contained many strong spells that would become useful in multi-combat. The notorious ice barrage spell became a great success, not only to kill other players with, but also to train Magic with in general. Today an xp rate of more than 600k Magic xp/hour can be achieved. The Ancient Magicks spellbook also consisted of several teleport spells. Later on after the release of the Barrows minigame, this spellbook became a real danger to anyone because of the new Ahrim's Magic armour that would reinforce the strength of the spells. That happened in May of 2005. More than one year later, in July 2006, the third Magic spellbook was released. Access to that spellbook is the reward that is received upon completion of the Lunar Diplomacy quest and it offers many new Magic spells. However, the Lunar spells were released in two batches: the only Magic spells available in the initial Lunar spellbook were teleport spells, cure & heal spells and only a few skill- - 87 - related spells. The second batch was released in May 2007. To unlock these new spells a player had to complete the Dream Mentor quest, after which he or she would be able to use eight new skill- related Magic spells.

In January of 2009 Jagex improved the user-friendliness of the Magic interface. The update of that day changed the interface so that the players were allowed to arrange the Magic spells in any order that they preferred. The update made it possible to choose which categories and in which order a player wanted the spells to be displayed in the Magic interface. This slightly improved certain activities, such as alchemy, superheating and teleporting in general. It does not stop here, though. Eight months later, in September 2009, Jagex also improved how autocasting worked. A player was no longer required to wield a staff and the autocasting itself became an option displayed in the spellbook. Furthermore, because a player no longer needed a staff to autocast spells, Jagex gave some high-level staves the ability to cause 10% more damage. A month later Jagex released extreme Magic potions as well extreme Ranged potions, but more about that is included in the chapter about skilling. In September of the same year Jagex added the Living Rock Cavern to the game. This was meant to be a place for Mining, Fishing and Slayer, but several clever players soon discovered that Magic and Smithing could be trained there as well. All they had to do was cast the superheat spell while mining. This method, which still exists, is quite click-intensive, but the fact that superheating does not interrupt Mining makes it a bit easier. Xp rates of around 65k Magic xp per hour can be achieved by using this method. It is true that there are other training methods that give more Magic xp/hour, but whilst superheating in the Living Rock Cavern, a player is actually training thee skills at the same time: Magic, Mining and Smithing. This made the superheating method relatively popular in the high-level skilling community as it was good for a total xp rate of around 150k xp per hour.

Halfway in November of 2009 Jagex tried to rebalance Magic again by releasing powerful combat spells for the standard spellbook. The strongest of these was the fire surge spell, which is still a commonly used spell today. The spell became a worthy competitor for the Ancient Magicks combat spells. However, the new surge spells were not strong enough, apparently, because Jagex released a new powerful Magic staff in February of 2010. The staff of light was a valuable addition to the combat part of Magic. Not only was it extremely strong at that moment, it would also give the player a one in eight chance of keeping the used runes and it offered a Magic damage bonus of 15% in addition to that. The staff, only dropped by Ice Strykewyrms that were released the same day, used to be extremely powerful when used in combination with the fire surge spell at that time. The release of Dungeoneering a month later gave us more useful Magic gear: the arcane stream necklace, offering 15% damage boost; the magic blastbox and the celestial surgebox. In April 2011 a new batch of Lunar spells was released. Six new spells could be unlocked by playing the Livid Farm minigame. The unlocking of these new spells does not go as fast as it did in the previous two badges, though. All six spells have to be unlocked in a fixed order and, according to rough calculations, it is estimated that a player needs around 45 hours to unlock all these spells. A few of these new spells are disruption shield, which reduces the next hit of your opponent to 0; a repair rune pouch spell, which can used to repair Runecrafting pouches; and the vengeance group spell. The last Magic update of 2011 happened in September when first a new rune and two months later a new staff was released. The new rune can be crafted by using an item dropped by the glacors, a new - 88 - challenging type of monster. The new rune was given the name Armadyl rune and it is needed to cast the storm of Armadyl combat spell. The new polypore staff that was released on the same day ended up becoming one of the most powerful staves in-game for that period. Even more powerful Magic weapons be were added over the course of the next years with the introduction of the seismic wand and the noxious staff. At the same time Player-Owned Ports allowed the community to unlock the high-level seasinger’s Magic equipment.

As many of you probably know, the skill that we call Constitution today used to be called Hitpoints until March 2010. And even that name (Hitpoints) is not the original name. In RS1 it used to be called Hits, a skill which obviously was available from the beginning of RuneScape. In order to avoid confusion, it will use the term Hitpoints where I am actually supposed to use Hits. The main thing that we can discuss is how Hitpoints worked in RS1 and how it works today, and there have been some far-going changes. First of all, I need to say that you could gain Hitpoints xp only from fighting with Melee. Using Ranged and Magic combat did not give any Hitpoints xp at all. The amount of Hitpoints xp you that would receive differed from monster to monster. It was not based on the amount of hitpoints that the NPC had, but on its combat level. A low-level monster could have a high amount of hitpoints, which would make it bad to train combat at. The ideal monster for combat training had a high combat level and a low amount of hitpoints. Alternatively, monsters that could be killed in one hit but still had an acceptable combat level were good too, such as pirates. These had 20 hitpoints, but a combat level of 27. Even though that might seem low, the guaranteed one-hit kill indirectly saved some time. Imagine it like this: if you constantly hit 25, it would be better to kill a Monster A that has 20 hitpoints and 30 combat than a Monster B that has 30 hitpoints and 50 combat a slightly higher combat level. Monster A would give you the xp from one attack while Monster B would give the xp after two attacks because after each first attack, the monster still had 5 hitpoints remaining, and you get no xp until the monster is dead.

Just like now, the amount of Hitpoints xp that you would receive was ¼ that of the total amount of combat experience that you eventually ended up gaining. Attack styles like crush, slash, stab etc. did not exist yet, so it did not really matter whether you were fighting a player or monster in aggressive, controlled, accurate or defensive mode. You would always gain the same amount of xp, but in a different Melee skill. For example, the aggressive combat style is for when a player wanted to train Attack and the controlled combat style for when a player wanted to train all three Melee skills at the same time. As part of the release of RS2, the Hitpoints skill was updated to make it look more logical: High-level monsters were given a high amount of hitpoints and low-level monsters a low amount of hitpoints. Combat xp gain would now be based on the amount of hitpoints and no longer on the combat level. That was not the only update that affected the Hitpoints skill during the transition from RS1 to RS2. In addition to it being renamed Hitpoints, the new combat formula caused everyone to have a slightly lower Hitpoints level. Therefore, if someone had not gained any Hitpoints xp in RS1, their new Hitpoints level would be level 9 instead of 10. The combat level would not be affected by that, though. There are currently still some players with level 9 Hitpoints, but today it is not possible anymore to create that has fewer than 10 Hitpoints. Anyone who is the possession of a level 9 Hitpoints today, had their Hitpoints level lowered as a result of the transition to RS2. Jagex also tried to rebalance the combat types during that transition, which is why they decided that Ranged and Magic should also give Hitpoints xp. - 89 -

Hitpoints is a skill that cannot really be updated or expanded without touching the core of the combat system. That is why it is the least updated skill of the game. This immediately explains why it is until March 2010 that we have to wait for another update to the skill. And it immediately was a big update. First of all, Jagex renamed Hitpoints to Constitution. Their reason for doing that was because the name Hitpoints could cause confusion and it did not really represent what the skill was. The skill's name was changed to Constitution and the amount of damage that a player takes or deals would no longer be called Hitpoints, but life points. Prior to this update, the ratio of how many life points a player lost in comparison to how many levels their actual hitpoints (as displayed in the skills' interface) were lowered with, was 1:1. The new Constitution update changed that ratio to a 10:1. This means, for example, that if a player’s Constitution level (as displayed in the skills' interface) had been lowered by 25, someone or something had made that player lose 250 life points. And the same applied to healing. Many players needed some time to get used to this new system. Today there are still a lot of people who do not know or understand why it had to be changed. In fact, over the course of the years, there have been several requests to revert the name change because many people have kept referring to the skill by using the name Hitpoints, and some still do today. It is quite remarkable that this change happened six years after the release of RS2 and that it had not happened much earlier.

2010 was a good year for Constitution. There was not only one update, but there were two. In December of that year, the way that hits are displayed when engaged in combat was changed. First of all, you would no longer see a 0 appear when you had not dealt or taken any damage. Instead a new symbol replaced this 0. If other people hit 0 on someone or something else, you would not see anything appear at all above that monster, only the player who was fighting the monster, could see something when they had not dealt any damage. The update also made it possible for players to see what the combat type was that someone or a monster was using to attack. If the opponent hit with Melee, you would see a sword appear next to the hit. For Magic attacks this was a Magic hat and for Ranged this was a bow. Jagex also made it possible to see what your max hit was without needing a special calculator for it. Before the release of EoC, if you had inflicted a max hit on someone, it would appear in yellow/orange (others would see your max hit appear as dark orange). After EoC’s addition to the game, the orange hit splash was assigned to the new critical hits. Note that your max hit depends on what you are wearing, what attack style you are using, whether you have Combat stats boosted etc... Dealt damage would still appear as a red hit, but others would see it as a darker shade of red. The main idea behind this was so to make your own hits easily identifiable. If you are an older RuneScape player, then you surely must have wondered at some point which of the many displayed numbers was your own hit while playing Castle Wars, Pest Control or anything else that revolved around multi-combat. Despite all the changes concerning the terminology of the skill, many players still refer to both life points and the name of skill as Hitpoints.

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Prayer is another combat skill that has quite a rich history. A remarkable fact to start off with is that it could already be trained before a single prayer had been released. The skill was released on 24th May 2001 and it was quite similar to the Magic skill because also the Prayer skill had been divided in two different sets of prayers: PrayerGood and PrayerEvil, and they could have a different level. Later on, but still in RS1, Jagex decided to unite all Evil and Good Prayers. A player’s new Prayer level would be the same as whichever used to be their highest Prayer level (PrayerGood or PrayerEvil). The only way to train Prayer in RS1 was by burying the bones that monsters had dropped or by burying bones that respawned at certain locations. Scattering ashes, (gilded) altars and the ectofuntus Prayers methods did not exist yet. Furthermore, bones used to give a lower amount of xp than they do today. For example, big bones now give 15 xp when buried, but in RS1 they gave only 12.5 xp when buried. It was like this for both of the other two available types of bones too (normal bones, bat bones). As you had probably already expected, the initial Prayer book did not contain many of the prayers that it does today. The powerful protection from Melee prayer did not exist yet, but protection from missiles was already there, though. Note that Magic attacks as well as Ranged attack were considered missiles, so that prayer worked for both of them. There was also a Prayer, called paralyse monster, which did exactly what the name says it did. Of course this did not work for Pk'ing. A total of fourteen prayers were available in RS1. Chickens and other one- hit monsters were an excellent way to train the skill at that time. For the higher-levelled players, killing hill giants and jogres was a good method as well. Of course it was also possible to buy the bones, but that would have cost quite a bit. Lilyuffie88 became famous for doing 40m Prayer xp (during 2001-2006) by burying and only by burying bones. On 23rd October 2002 Jagex added a new type of bone to the game: dragon bones. These would give 60 Prayer xp and could be obtained by either buying them from other players or by killing dragons. With the weak armour that was available in 2002, the Prayer skill itself was extremely useful. Some extra Attack, Defence of Strength was always welcome. The way in which Prayer points drained was almost the same as it is today. The more prayers enabled at the same time, the faster the Prayer points decrease; the higher the level that the prayer requires, the faster the Prayer points decrease. Wearing armour that gives Prayer bonuses can be used to slow down the process. Monk robes would fulfill this role in RS1. Each bonus point would extend the drain rate by 3%. This means that the Prayer drain rate would be ½ of the original drain rate when at a Prayer bonus of 33. Even though dragon had existed for more than a year already, in the RS2 Jagex added the baby dragon bones to the game.

For the first RS2 Prayer update we have to wait till 15th February 2005. On that day the ectofuntus Prayer method was released. Players were supposed to worship the ectofuntus and in return they would receive four times the normal xp of whatever type of bones that they had been using. Four times may sound excellent, but everyone first had to go through a process of collecting slime and grinding the bones in order to receive the xp. So in reality it was not really four times faster. However, this method made Prayer four times cheaper and for many players that reason was sufficiently convincing to start using it to get their Prayer level up. Seven months later (September - 91 -

2005) Jagex released three new prayers. These were the redemption, retribution and smite prayers. In 2006 the combat triangle was still a hot topic and the community felt that one or more changes had to be made to it, which eventually happened in the form of several new prayers. These new prayers affected only Magic and Ranged in order to rebalance combat a tiny bit. Also in 2006, Jagex released the gilded altars as part of the Construction skill. This would end becoming the most significant update to the skill. From that moment and onwards, Prayer would become one of the fastest skills of the game. However, Summoning had not been released yet, so there were no Beasts of Burden that could be used to carry more bones to the altar in on trip. The gilded altar was an addition to the Construction and Prayer skills. Once the gilded altar has been built, the player can choose if they want to light one, two or no incense burners. The more incense burners lit, the more xp the bones will give. With both incense burners lit, a player will receive 300% of the normal xp, which of course is a great xp rate boost. In other words, for rich people this meant that Prayer had become three times faster, although until early 2009 the gilder altar Prayer method would not have an offer-x bones option. The absence of the x-option made the Prayer method extremely click- intensive, and when it was finally added, it slightly slowed down the method. However, the intensity was not really a problem because the other Prayer methods required a lot of clicking too. Nowadays, using the gilded altar is the most popular way to train Prayer among the mid and high- level players.

In December of 2009 Jagex released a new Prayer book, called Ancient Curses. This Prayer book can be unlocked after completing the Temple at Senntisten quest that was released on the same day. The Ancient Curses Prayer book has similar, but stronger spells than the original Prayer book. Also the effects are slightly different. For example, in the original Prayer book there are protection prayers. In the Ancient Curses Prayer book the equivalent of these protection prayers is called deflection prayers. Not only do they protect a player from a certain combat type, they also deflect a part of the damage (that the player would normally have taken) onto the opponent. Soul split became a highly popular prayer because of its healing ability. Using that prayer was a great way for players with a high combat level to regulate their own life points when fighting tough monsters. Turmoil became the new equivalent of piety, but with a positive twist. Not only does it have the same effect as piety, it is also stronger and the player absorbs 10% of the opponent’s Strength level. Altogether it is logical that the Ancient Curses Prayer book became the favourite option of the two available books.

The release of Dungeoneering on 12th April 2010 did not really affect Prayer, although several new prayers could be unlocked by exchanging Dungeoneering tokens. Later that year rigour became a popular new normal prayer for Ranged, especially after the release of Nex a few months later in 2011. It is the Ranged equivalent of the piety (Melee) and augury (Magic) normal prayers, which had already been released in 2007. One of the rewards that can be obtained with the Dungeoneering tokens is the bonecrusher. This item automatically crushes all bones that are dropped as result of combat or Hunter. This is why the release of the bonecrusher was considered a welcome extra to the Prayer skill. For poorer players who could not afford to buy bones, the bonecrusher made the skill - 92 - more convenient to train. No more manually picking up and burying the bones. Quite some slayers began to add the bonecrusher to their inventory set-up, with the risk of accidentally taking it to dragons (most players preferred to bank dragon bones by using a pack yak familiar and the effect of the bonecrusher cannot be disabled). While altogether the bonecrusher was a relatively small update, the release of the resource dungeons in July 2010, on the other hand, did have a great effect on the Prayer skill. At level 85 Dungeoneering the player is able to unlock the frost dragon resource dungeon. The frost dragons that reside inside of it would drop a new type of bones, called frost dragon bones. These give a lot more Prayer than regular dragon bones do, but the other side of the coin is that frost dragon bones have always been extremely expansive. Only players with several hundreds of millions of coins would eventually make use of these frost dragon bones to train Prayer. For others, killing frost dragons became a great way to make money. To give a clearer image of how much better they are than other bones, frost dragon bones give more than twice the amount of Prayer xp that dragon bones give. For the much-used gilded altar method this means that Prayer could exceed the 600k xp/hour rate, making it one of the fastest training methods across all, with a not-so-nice price tag attached to it, though.

On 15th February 2011 a remarkable Prayer update took place. Demons in Gielinor previously never dropped bones or any other type of remains. Since demons cannot just disappear after dying, it makes sense that Jagex changed something about that. Instead of making demons drop bones after being defeated, Jagex decided to use ashes. Probably because demons are commonly associated with flames and hell, so the idea that the bones could be incinerated is not too far-fetched. The addition of ashes to the drop table of demons (as a 100% drop) also signified the introduction of a new Prayer method: scattering ashes. Although it is technically possible to bury ashes in reality, scattering them is a lot more fun and disrespectful. The ashes that demons drop can be used for four Prayer methods: They can be taken to the ectofuntus (they will work as pre-ground bones there, so a player can skip the process of having the grind them), they can be used on the gilded altar, they can be used for the Prayer urns or a player can just scatter them wherever they like. The Prayer urns were released on the same day as the scattering ashes training method. These urns give players additional xp, they cannot be used on the gilded altar, which is why Prayer urns never became popular. A good half year later, in September, Jagex released the Prayer renewal potion, high-level Herblore content. A dose of the potion restores more Prayer points than a dose of the lower-tier Prayer potions, but Prayer renewal has a slightly different mechanism: it does not immediately restore the points. Instead it happens gradually, spread across a few minutes, which is why the Prayer renewal potion is not ideal in every situation. The lower-tier Prayer potions therefore remained commonly used potions.

Just as with Constitution, Jagex decided to multiply the displayed Prayer points by a factor of ten. This happened on the same day that the Prayer renewal potion was released. The change means that someone with level 99 in Prayer would no longer have 99 Prayer points, but 990. This had a dramatic impact on a particular combat strategy that was sometimes used by high-level players. The strategy that I am referring to is a particular phenomenon that had become increasingly popular after the release of the Ancient Curses prayer book: prayer flashing. This is the act of continuously switching prayers off and back on at that right moments in order to significantly slow down the rate at which Prayer points are drained. When done perfectly, it even used to be possible to start a Slayer task with 99 Prayer points and to end it with 99 Prayer points while the player had been flashing a - 93 - prayer all task long. As a result of multiplying all points by ten, it became impossible to flash prayers without losing any points. That might actually be the reason why Jagex decided to multiple Prayer points by ten in the first place, but we will never know. The release of the soul split prayer in 2009 (as part of the Ancient Curses prayer book) was the main reason why people had started to resort to flashing prayers. Not only did it offer a free way of restoring a player’s health, it also created more space in the inventory because it allowed players to bring less food, or even no food at all.

13th May 2013 was an important day for new players and everyone who had a low Prayer level. The Nexus, a new minigame aimed at low-level players, made it a lot easier for new players to unlock many of the basic and useful prayers. You have to keep in mind that new players often cannot buy any bones to bury or ashes to scatter. Furthermore, burying the bones that are dropped upon killing monsters is a painfully slow method of training Prayer, so the Nexus ended up becoming a great alternative. A total of a bit more than 37k Prayer xp can be gained as a one-time reward for playing the Nexus. This means that new players can easily and in no time reach level 40 in the Prayer skill, which is enough to unlock some of the extremely popular protection prayers. This update generally made combat more easily accessible for the low-level community.

For Prayer the addition of the Elf City, officially known as Prifddinas, on 22nd September 2014 was not very significant. The only related thing that it added was a simple Prayer altar, but that was alright because Prayer updates had been planned for batch two, which was released on 10th November. For Prayer this update included the Corrupted Seren stone, a new high-level method of training Prayer, which, of course, is also expensive. The xp rates of this new method are estimated at around 270k xp/hour, while costing more than training Prayer with frost dragon bones. A remark to make about this new training method, however, is that it allows players to socialize with each other because it is more public and not click-intensive. That is not possible with gilded altars because they are located in Played-Owned Houses and require regular teleportation. However, a free new Prayer method had also sprung into existence with the release of the Elf City. One of the rewards for completing laps on the new Agility course in Prifddinas is some xp in the Prayer skill. While the xp rate is not amazing, about 60k xp per hour, it is a free and the xp is obtained from training Agility, on top of receiving Agility xp. In other words, this new way of training Prayer is actually a more than decent method and perhaps even recommend for anyone who is not very rich. Below you can find a quick skill summary, although I have not included every Prayer-related update.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Prayer skill 4th January 2001 First prayers 24th May 2001 Big bones 13th August 2001 Bat bones 27th February 2002 Dragon bones 23rd October 2002 Jogre bones 27th January 2003 Baby dragon bones 29th March 2004 Ectofuntus 15th February 2005 Gilded altar 31st May 2006 X-option gilded altar 25th March 2009 Ancient cursus 3rd December 2009 Bonecrusher 12th April 2010 Frost dragon bones 19th July 2010 Scattering ashes 15th February 2011

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The Nexus 13th May 2013 Corrupted Seren stone 10th November 2014

Summoning is one of the newest skills and it was released on 15th January 2008. However, it was initially supposed to be an extension to the Magic skill. If you have ever heard of the life rune, it was supposed to be integrated in the Magic skill so that players could use it to summon monsters. It is possible that this project became so big, that Jagex thought it would be better to release it as a new skill. However, the first concepts for it were made in 2004, maybe even in 2003, so another possibility is that Jagex just could not turn their idea into reality yet because of technical limitations. So even though the first plans of releasing 'something like Summoning' were made in 2004, the actual skill development started at the end of 2006. Eventually it was released in January 2008. Can we consider the skill an update that was delayed for almost four years? Only Jagex knows the answer to that. Anyway, the release of Summoning was not a surprise because Jagex had announced it earlier and also because it had been anticipated by quite some players. Therefore, it was already known before the actual release of the skill that Summoning would affect the combat level. For members this meant that the maximum combat level increased from 126 to 138. For non-members it stayed at 126 because Summoning is a members-only skill. If a member enters a free-to-play world, their combat level will become unaffected by Summoning. The skill also used to have a separate menu to the left of the friends list in the pre-EoC interface. What is so special about Summoning is its original use. As a player gains Summoning levels, he or she will be able to make use of more and more familiars that are designed to assist that player with their skilling or killing. It is also one of the three skills that used to require the completion of a quest in order to make use of it. However, in January 2012, this requirement was removed. Prior to January 2012 a player’s character would not know what to do with the Summoning materials if the Wolf Whistle quest had not been completed. Summoning was released in two batches, with the second batch containing most of the familiars that are used today. In order to train Summoning a player needs charms that are dropped by a lot of monsters all over RuneScape. In order to actually train the skill and to get some xp, Summoning pouches have to be created at a Summoning obelisk by using the required type of charms, Summoning shards and second ingredients (the latter determines what pouch you will be making). This means that the skill was a semi-buyable skill. Initially, the price of Summoning shards were 50 gp each, but many players complained about that price, so Jagex halved it two days later. Players who had already used some of those shards would receive a compensation. The second ingredients were initially difficult to obtain because everyone wanted or needed them. This caused the most popular items among them to skyrocket in the Grand Exchange, which made it almost impossible to buy them in large amounts. One of the temporary changes that was made to the Grand Exchange in order to make obtaining second ingredients easier, was increasing the maximum amount of any item that a player could buy in a period of four hours. Jagex also increased the price of several items that were needed to train the skill, which made Summoning even more expensive.

On 31st March 2008 Jagex released the second batch of the Summoning skill, which consisted of several updates. First of all, the life span of all familiars was extended so that a player no longer needed to take many Summoning pouches with them whenever they were going to train a skill for which a familiar could be used. Secondly, Jagex gave all familiars a stand-out ability so that the Summoning pouches would be used a lot more often, rather than seeing them being sold or - 95 - subjected to alchemy. Summoning scrolls are needed to use such abilities that are now referred to as the familiar's special move. Combat familiars would now also give combat xp when they had inflicted damage to an opponent and they were also made more powerful in general, causing them to become extremely useful for fighting bosses or any other tough opponents (steel titans were given a combat level of 118). Furthermore, Summoning charms were added to the drop table of over twenty Slayer creatures and also mini-obelisks were added to Gielinor in order to make recharging the Summoning points less inconvenient. These mini-obelisks were placed at strategic locations so that everyone would be able to find one without any struggle. One of the mini-obelisks was placed right on the route that runecrafters of nature runes would use. The spirit graahk is a familiar that teleports a player to the start of the Runecrafting route, so the fact that a mini-obelisk was placed right on that route indicates that Jagex wanted to stimulate the use of familiars not only by releasing mini-obelisks, but also by placing them at locations where familiars could and would effectively be used. By the way, the release of the spirit graahk had a big impact on RuneScape. Prior to its release the majority of the nature rune runecrafter used the Abyss to reach the nature altar, but the spirit graahk offered a faster and safer alternative. This significantly altered the landscape of Runecrafting, but more about that skill is included in the chapter about skilling.

Another update of batch two was that some of the new familiars would now also give invisible stat boosts to several skills. For example, the lava titan gives an invisible Mining boost of +10. A major inconvenience that still existed at that moment is that there was no way to avoid that your Beast of Burden would drop the items that are stored in it. When the timer for the familiar was about to run out and a player wanted to summon a new Beast of Burden instead, they had no option but to wait till the first familiar had dropped its items, after which that player would have to pick them up one by one. Of course many players just decided to bank right before each Beast of Burden was going to die because of that. Also as part of batch 2, so still in March of 2008, Jagex introduced a solution to this. They added a renew-option to the Summoning interface so that a player could replenish the familiar's timer to 100% by sacrificing a Summoning pouch of the same familiar. Altogether this means that this second batch is what formed a major component of what the skill is like today. In May 2008 Jagex gave us an alternative for selling Summoning pouches in the Grand Exchange. Sometimes the price of the pouches would be so low that the financial loss could be a bit painful. Therefore, Jagex made it possible to sell Summoning pouches to Bogrog, who can be found north of Gu'Tanoth. In July of 2009 Jagex moved the Summoning interface from a separate location next to the friends list to a separate button to the right of the minimap, below the run energy icon. In August 2009 they improved this interface again by adding the ability to select the action that a player wanted the in-game character or the familiar to perform when left-clicking on the interface. This would make the Summoning interface easier to use during combat.

12th October 2010 was an important day for those who do not like combat. Summoning was released as a combat skill that can be trained by collecting charms that are dropped by monsters. In other words, Summoning was a purely combat-focused skill. Aside from the fact that it contributes to up to twelve combat levels, at that moment there was no effective way to bypass the need of killing monsters if a player wanted to train the skill, so on 12th October Jagex released charm sprite hunting, a minigame which combines Hunter and Summoning. The reward for catching charm - 96 - sprites are slices of charms, which can be combined to create Summoning charms of all types. This makes it possible to collect the charms that a player needs without having to engage in combat. I did not manage to find out what the xp rate of the actual Hunter method used to be, but an update in April 2013 made some changes to the minigame. These included an increase in the xp rate to make it more competitive with other Hunter methods at that level (72+). The eventual xp rate ended up becoming around 100k xp/h, which is remarkably good for a minigame that was actually released to help skillers in their Summoning adventures, or anyone else who is not a fan of combat.

That relatively big update for Summoning was followed by a series of smaller updates, with the first one being an update to how familiars interacted with the players and the world around them: it was May 2011 when Jagex gave familiars to ability to run. This seems like a meaningless update, but it did cause familiars to get stuck behind obstacles less often. In January 2012 the F2P world was expanded to include Taverley and Burthorpe. Alongside the many graphical changes to these locations, a lot of content over there was updated as well, which had a relatively small impact on Summoning. Together with Herblore it was one of the skills that used to require completion of a quest to be able to gain xp in the skill. However, this requirement was removed during that update. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out what the exact reason for that was. More than a year later an update took place that was probably caused by the common complaint of having to manually pick up every charm that was dropped by a monster. It was 2nd April 2013 when Jagex added the charming imp to the reward shop of the Dungeoneering skill. The imp automatically picks up Summoning charms that are dropped by monsters after defeating them in combat. The intention for this update, according to the announcement on the front page, was that the imp would save valuable time on prolonged combat trips.

Several big changes were made to skill at the start of December in 2013. First of all, a change to the way that Summoning pouches are made caused the activity of training the skill to become more convenient. Instead of having to take the pouches, the shards, the charms and the tertiary ingredients to a Summoning obelisk, it now became possible to combine all but the actual charm into an uncharged pouch, which could then together with the charm be taken to an obelisk. The reason for this update was to ease up much of the inventory wrangling. Secondly, also part of that update was the introduction of spirit gems to the world of Gielinor. These spirit gems could be used to store uncharged pouches, so that a player could take many more to a Summoning obelisk. The reason why new players, and even experienced players, at this point might think that they do not remember any such update, is because these changes were reverted at the end of the month as a result of player feedback. The system of making uncharged pouches was abolished at that moment (but already existing uncharged pouches could still be used). This was quite problematic because the spirit gems update revolved entirely around uncharged pouches. As a consequence, Jagex also updated the spirit gems to make them work like they do today: equip them to have a chance of saving a Summoning charm when infusing at a Summoning obelisk.

Another update to mention in this section took place on 6th May 2014, as part of a big Divination update. On top of releasing an extremely useful Divination Beast of Burden (nightmare muspah) that quickly reached a street price of over 100k gp, Jagex also added the option to transmute charms to the Summoning skills. To transmute means to turn one type of charm into another type of charm, which requires divination energy to do. Gold charms are almost never used by high-level players because of the relatively low xp rates. The transmute option was an attempt to solve that problem so that players could turn their gold charms into other types of charms. In June of the same year Mod - 97 -

Krista posted a thread on the forums to ask for player feedback about the entire Summoning skill. In her post she mentioned that she had several plans to change how the skill works and she also listed a few questions that everyone was invited to answer. The questions served to identify what the community liked or disliked about the skill, how the skill could be improved and how useful the skill was perceived to be as a whole. A specific question was whether or not the readers agreed with the statement, Beasts of Burden are the only reason to train Summoning. The mere fact that this question was asked is an indication of the possibility that Mod Krista considered other familiars to be less useful, as well as other features of the skill. While no changes had been announced yet by the time that I wrote this part of the PDF, mod Krista did mention that there were many players who agreed with the aforementioned statement, but also many who disagreed. We will see what happens next...

Slayer was released on 26th January 2005 and it has undergone some major changes as well. First of all, at its release there was no Slayer points system yet and each player had no other option than doing all tasks that they had been assigned. Just like today a player needed to go to a Slayer master and the NPC would tell how many of a specific monster the player was supposed to kill before returning. However, only five Slayer masters were available. Today they can be found in the Edgeville dungeon, Burthorpe, Morytania, Zanaris and Shilo Village. Similar to how gaining regular combat xp works, is that Slayer xp is gained only after killing any of the assigned monsters, and not during the actual fight itself. In 2005 this meant that in multi-combat areas where a same monster can be attacked by multiple players at once, the Slayer xp would go the person who had dealt the final hit. Other players would not receive any Slayer xp, despite being assigned to kill the same monster as well. Also on the day of the skill's release, Jagex made the Slayer Tower (northwest of Canifis) and the Slayer Cave (southeast of the Fremennik Province) accessible used those locations to group together many different Slayer monsters. The actual building that would be used for this Slayer Tower was already present in RuneScape before the skill's release, but it had no function. Also keep in mind that weapons like abyssal whips, godswords, Bandos armour, chaotic weapons etc. did not exist yet, which made combat quite a bit tougher. A few days later the first player feedback was clear: there were players who considered it to be unfair that the person who had dealt the last hit would receive all of the Slayer xp. Therefore, Jagex changed the system so that the person who had dealt the most damage would receive the Slayer xp, shared with the person who had dealt the last hit. In other words, the Slayer xp would be split and divided in this situation. Some monsters' names were changed as well in order to make it clearer which monsters a player could kill for the Slayer task. Jagex also increased the population of some monsters at several locations to speed up Slayer a bit (especially when using a dwarf cannon). Important to keep in mind is that Slayer was an extremely slow skill at that time. Maximum xp rates of 20k xp/h for many players were common. Especially since the task system offered no way yet of cancelling a task, so everyone would be forced to do slow tasks at some point. Three weeks after the release of Slayer, Jagex finally changed the task system so that players could now get a replacement task if they really did not like the task that they had initially been assigned. However, this replacement task could not be cancelled and it - 98 - always consisted of low-level monsters, which have always offered a low xp rate. By releasing Slayer Jagex wanted to encourage everyone to explore the variety of monsters in RuneScape. This is why players could cancel their task only once.

In October 2005 new Slayer monsters, called mogres and dark beasts, were added to the Slayer skill, but these Dark beasts did not drop dark bows until June 2007, though. Two months later, in December 2005, one of the most feared Slayer creatures was added to the Slayer skill. The skeletal wyvern can be found deep in the dungeon of Mudskipper Point and for a long time this skeletal wyvern was by many considered to be the most challenging Slayer monster. However, the reward would merit the effort as the new granite platelegs drop had a more than decent price at that time. In July 2006, the second quest of the fairytales storyline was released. The reward from the quest included a new teleport option, called fairy rings, which became extremely useful for getting to many of the Slayer locations. Using the fairy rings sped up the skill quite a bit because it reduced the time that was needed to get from one Slayer task to the next.

The Barbarian training methods were released on 3rd July 2007. After completing various tasks for Otto, a player is granted permanent access to the Ancient Cavern. This cavern became an important place for high-level slayers. Keep in mind that the Chaos Tunnels did not exist yet. New monsters, such as mithril dragons and waterfiends, were added to the list of possible Slayer tasks. A potential reward for killing a mithril dragon is the famous dragon full helm that could make a player extremely rich at that time. The helm was considered to be more than 'just an item'; it became an item of prestige because of its rarity. On 11th June 2007,Jagex added a new item to the drop table of dark beasts. These giant creatures were notorious for having many Hitpoints, so it could take a while to kill. They could also attack with Magic and Melee, which made it even more challenging to kill them. Despite these difficulties, dark beasts did not have any good drops. However, they were still popular slayer tasks because a dwarf cannon could be set up in the area, which in combination with their high amount of hitpoints allowed great xp rates. The dark bow was added to the drop table of dark beasts to make the task more attractive. This new weapon immediately was a nice addition to the Ranged skill because of how strong it was in comparison with the other Ranged weapons that were available at that time. Furthermore, the dark bow was the only bow that could fire dragon arrows. Important to keep in mind at this stage is that the only place where dark beasts could be killed used to be inside the Temple of Light (which required completion of the Mourning's End – Part 2 quest).

The Chaos Tunnels were released on the same day as the Summoning skill (15th January 2008). This new multi- combat dungeon immediately signified a great addition to the Slayer skill. Not only do these Chaos Tunnels contain a lot of Slayer creatures, the tunnels also have five entrances, of which one is relatively close to the bank of Edgeville. Today some commonly assigned Slayer task monsters that are mainly killed in the Chaos Tunnels are dust devils and fire giants. However, the list used to be a lot longer in 2008 due to lack of better alternatives, such as Kuradal's dungeon, which did not exist yet. The introduction of Summoning itself also introduced combat familiars to - 99 - the game, which were later given a special ability and became extremely powerful and useful for Slayer. Today Summoning still has a great impact on the Slayer skill. A few examples of that are how pack yaks are used to bank dragon bones and other valuable items, how a unicorn stallion can be used to heal a player and how a steel titan can cause havoc for the monster that a player has been attacking. Probably the largest change that has ever happened to the Slayer skill was the release of the Smoking Kills quest on 5th June 2008. The reward from this quest is a whole new Slayer system based on Slayer points. From now on each player would receive a fixed amount of Slayer points (that differs from Slayer master to Slayer master), with bonus points awarded for each 10th, 50th, 100th... task. With these points it became possible to permanently block Slayer tasks, to cancel Slayer tasks, to learn new Slayer methods and much more. This means that a player could cancel any task that they did not like and that they would be able to ask for a new task. Sumona, a new female Slayer master, was released on the same day. On that same 5th June, a new Slayer item was released and it immediately became the most important Slayer-related item of the game: the Slayer helmet. This helmet combined protective gear into one item, which made it an extremely useful item. A spiny helmet, ear muffs, a nose peg and a face mask… the Slayer helmet could now be used as all of that. In January 2009 the community was given the option to add Summoning scrolls to that helmet so that they could save an inventory slot. Another year later people could add the new focus sight and hexcrest to the helm. Those two items drops from the strykewyrms that had been released.

On 8th December 2009 Jagex added a new high-level Slayer master to RuneScape. Those who were strong enough to survive a trip past dragons and through the Ancient Cavern, would be able to receive new tasks from Kuradal. At that time she would offer the same tasks as Duradel, but she would do so in higher quantities so that players could stay longer at the same place. In addition to that, she would also grant everyone access to her personal Slayer Dungeon as long as they had been assigned a task by her and on the condition that the assigned monsters could be found in her dungeon. It is not possible attack any monster in the dungeon that is not part of the Slayer task, or after the task has ended. Upon her addition to the game it meant that real slayers would no longer have to deal with campers and all that Slayer spots would become less crowded. In February 2010 a new Slayer monster was added to the task list of Kuradal. The new Strykewyrms was a unique type of monster at that moment. Jungle, ice and desert strykewyrms were added to the Slayer skill, which drop a hexcrest, staff of light and focus sight, respectively. Especially the staff of light drop made the ice strykewyrms a beloved task among most slayers. Ironically, one of the favourite ways of killing these ice strykewyrms was by using a staff of light for a long time. A month later a few changes were made to the Slayer skill. Some of them were the ability to hit two times more on ice strykewyrms when wearing a fire cape, a possibility to unlock/buy these strykewyrms and the new aquanites as a Slayer task, and an option to unlock a new Slayer method for delivering the final blow faster. In April of 2010 Jagex added unique (optional) Slayer challenges to the skill to create a bit of variation in the tasks. For some tasks a Slayer master could ask if the player wants a unique challenge instead, such as trying to take down the TzTok-Jad or destroying the Kalphite Queen and her army.

The Polypore Dungeon is an enormous high-level Slayer dungeon that Jagex released on 28th November 2011. The dungeon is inhabited by various monsters that are made of fungi and all of - 100 - them can resist Melee and Ranged attacks. That means that using Magic is the only way to kill these. What made this update so good is that a player can use some of the items that those new monsters drop to create the new polypore staff. The strongest monster inside this Polypore dungeon is the ganodermic beast. It has a combat level of 112 and requires a Slayer level of 95 to kill. The dungeon is mostly used for Slayer tasks, although it is possible to camp there for some money too. The first bot nuke day in RuneScape took place on 25th October 2011 and was celebrated by Jagex organizing several special events. One of those 'events' was that the respawn rates for some Slayer monsters were going to be temporarily increased so that they would respawn faster. At the end of January 2012, Jagex decided to re-increase those respawn rates so that they would be closer to those that were being used in October for the celebration. The next Slayer update happened on 22nd May 2012 and again it was new dungeon for Gielinor. The Grotworm Lair contains several grotworm creatures that were added to task list of the Slayer masters.

At the start of the July a new Slayer feature was introduced to RuneScape. The new social Slayer feature made it possible for slayers to team up with another player. To prevent abuse Jagex limited the system in the sense that xp and drops are not shared. The only advantage of social slayer is that Slayer tasks will take less time to complete, which is useful when one of the players does not like the task that has been assigned to them. The Slayer Tower underwent a big graphical overhaul on 12th February 2013 to make it easier and faster to get to the monsters that a players wants to kill. Initially the Slayer Tower was designed in a way that forced everyone to run past all monsters as there way only one path to reach the next floor. The update of 12th February changed that because the only thing that the detour caused was feelings of frustration, especially for the low-level players who would risk their lives at certain places in the tower. However, the graphical update was not the only Slayer change. On the same Jagex released Slayer contracts that can be completed at the same time as regular Slayer assignments. Both are similar, but the contracts must be completed within the Slayer Tower and the monsters assigned give only 20% of the normal Slayer xp. However, when the contract contains the same monsters as a Slayer assignment, both can be combined to obtain 120% of the regular Slayer xp. Slayer contracts also give additional rewards (coins and combat xp) upon completion, so all in all the contract can be considered a good update for players who regularly have Slayer tasks that can be completed in the Slayer Tower.

On 4th June 2013 Jagex released a set of new high-level Slayer monsters. With requirements varying from level 81 to 95 Slayer, these Guthix followers and members of The Order of Ascension were designed to promote co-op Slayer (called social Slayer in this PDF), or teaming up with another player to complete a Slayer task. This is clearly visible in that several of the new monsters take less damage when attacked from the front or the sides. However, pairing up is not a requirement to kill the monsters, although it will be tougher on your own. Killing these members of the Order of Ascension eventually ended up becoming a great way to make money, with average profit rates of vastly over 1m gp per hour. At the end of the year, in December, another high-level Slayer monster was released. Requiring 92 Slayer the new airuts were advertised as being among the strongest opponents that can be encountered in the open world. Top-end gear and high combat skills were highly recommended by Jagex. A little bit odd is one of the locations where they can be killed: the Piscatoris Hunter area. Well, not exactly in that area, but on a new small peninsula that is still considered to be part of the general Piscatoris area.

At the end of January in 2014 the Slayer rewards store was upgraded to contain better rewards. This is the store that could be accessed after completing the Smoking Kills quest, but that requirement - 101 - was removed on that day too. The heavy promotion of social Slayer when the Order of Ascension was released already suggested that social Slayer was not as successful as it was intended to be. Still on that same January day, Jagex tried to make social Slayer more attractive by making it more rewarding, in the form of adding a Social Slayer tab to Slayer rewards store. In addition to that, the commonly used Slayer helmet was upgraded to make it more multifunctional with the inclusion of enchanted gem's functions and the ability to fuse Slayer-related rings with the helm. The helmet was also made a little bit stronger.

The next Slayer update took place on 18th August 2014. Soul Reaper, a combat minigame, was released as a more challenging way of gaining Slayer xp. Instead of being assigned regular monsters, once per day everyone can play Soul Reaper to get a specific assignment of killing bosses. These include all of the toughest creatures, up to Vorago, and the assignment itself offers a nice chunk of Slayer xp as reward. Furthermore, the player will also be rewarded reaper points, which can be exchanged for even more Slayer xp. However, since this update is clearly aimed at the high-level combat community, the majority of the RuneScape players should not attempt to complete such a task. The release of the Elf City in September 2014 introduced a new Slayer master to the game. Movran, located in the Iowerth clan, was the new high-level Slayer master, with requirements of 85 Slayer and a combat level 120.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Slayer skill 26th January 2005 Dark beasts 17th October 2005 Skeleton wyvern 12th December 2005 Ancient Cavern 3rd July 2007 Chaos Tunnels 15th January 2008 Slayer points system 5th June 2008 Sumona Slayer master 5th June 2008 Kuradal Slayer master 8th December 2009 Strykewyrms 8th February 2010 Polypore Dungeon 28th November 2011 Grotworm Lair 22nd May 2012 Social Slayer 11th July 2012 Monastery of Ascension 4th June 2013 Airut 3rd December 2013 Soul Reaper 18th August 2014 Movran Slayer master 22nd September 2014

We have now taken a closer look at how all of the combat skills have evolved over the course of the years. This should give us a better understanding for what follows below, which a brief overview of the central monsters in the PvM world for every era. I will describe all of those monsters in chronological order. It is also possible that information already mentioned in this chapter will have to be repeated in order to create a completer image. Just a reminder, feel free to visit these high- level monsters today to fight them with the combat gear that was available at the time of the monsters’ release. Make sure to do that in legacy mode, though, otherwise it is not really the same.

Released on 24th September 2002, the King Black Dragon was the strongest monster in RS1. And if that was not enough yet, this monster's lair could be reached only by visiting the Lava Maze, deep in the Wilderness, so it could be argued that fighting the dragon was a dual challenge: surviving the journey to the lair in which the dragon resides and then actually fighting it. Today the King Black

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Dragon is characterized by having three heads, but it had only one head in RS1, the two other heads were added during the RS2 beta early in 2004. The lair of this dragon was also much smaller in the first version of this game. Different than in RS2 and RS3, in RS1 only one warrior could attack the dragon because of the three-round system and the lack of modern multi-combat. The number or archers and magers that could attack the dragon was unrestricted, though. The strongest armour available at the time was rune for Melee and the preferred weapon was either the dragon longsword or the dragon battleaxe, so killing the King Black Dragon was not a fast process. Another remarkable thing is that the anti-dragonfire shield was needed only at the start of the fight, but that is because the antifire potions did not exist until the RS2 beta. Later in the fight the player could switch to a rune kiteshield or any other shield (do not try this today, though). In RS1 there was a different combat formula, so the combat level of this dragon used to 245 while it is at 276 today. Those who were brave enough wanted to kill this dragon to have a chance of obtaining the two unique King Black Dragon drops: the dragon medium helmet and the dragon square shield (left half). At that time these two items were not dropped by any other monster. The draconic visages did not exist yet, which is why it was not one of the two items. The two rare drops were later, in RS2, added to the drop table of several other monsters, effectively eliminating the need of killing this dragon. The Construction skill was released on 31st May 2006. As part of the update there was the ability to mount stuffed monster heads in the new Player-Owned Houses. Upon slaying some of the most fearsome creatures in RuneScape, a player has a small chance of obtaining their heads, which can then be used in the Player-Owned Houses. The King Black Dragon was one of those few monsters for which Jagex had made a unique Kbd head drop. Perhaps intentionally, this update gave the community a new incentive to restart fighting this three-headed dragon. Today the King Black Dragon can also be reached by using the King Black Dragon Artefact in Edgeville, this artefact was added to the game in October of 2009 as (only) safe travel alternative. On the same day the dragon’s lair as well as the dragon itself received a facelift and the dragon rider items were added to its drop table. Altogether the update had taken place in an attempt to make the King Black Dragon more popular again, although the new drops (dragon rider gloves and boots) were not as strong as already existing alternatives at that moment, such as the dragon boots and Klank’s gauntlets.

The King Black Dragon would remain the strongest monster for almost two years. On 7th September 2004, the notorious Kalphite Queen started to make the Kharidian Desert's underground areas unsafe as she immediately outclassed the King Black Dragon. At that moment the transition from RS1 to RS2 had already taken place, so the combat system of RS2 (with the combat triangle), was already in use. To reach her lair each player has to enter the desert via the Shantay Pass and then - 103 - proceed west until encountering a tunnel. At the end of this dangerous tunnel, guarded by kalphite workers and soldiers, a path leading to the Kalphite Queen's lair. Inside of this lair: a large female insect with a combat level of 333, not happy with anyone’s presence... At that time a player still had to use rune armour when using Melee or dragonhide when using Ranged for the best protection and bonuses. Dragon chainbodies were released on the same day as a unique drop from the Kalphite Queen. However, the dragon chainbody would never become a popular item because of how expensive it remained for a long time. Remarkable about the Kalphite Queen is that she has a 100% accuracy rate for Magic and Ranged attacks, so regardless of the type of armour that the players are wearing, they will always take damage. However, it is unknown whether or not it already had a 100% accuracy for Ranged attacks immediately after being released. Today the insect queen attacks with all three combat types, but at first she would only use Ranged and Melee. The initial strategy to kill her consisted of using Ranged attacks or a dragon halberd to attack from afar whilst using the correct protection prayer. Also the Kalphite Queen was one of the monsters that was given the questionable privilege of sometimes losing the head upon being killed after the release of Construction.

The Barrows brothers were unleashed on 9th May 2005. At that moment the best Melee armour was still regular rune armour. The dragon scimitar had been released a good week earlier and the abyssal whip had already been in existence for a couple of months. The whip would eventually become one of the most frequently used high-level weapons in RuneScape for the next five years, while the dragon scimitar would end up becoming the preferred weapon for the poorer players in the community, followed by the dragon longsword. The release of the Barrows minigame brought along a revolution for combat equipment because the new weapons and armour were essentially a higher tier of equipment, with strengths and effects that until then had never been seen before in RuneScape. I have already discussed the new equipment and its effects earlier in this chapter, so I am not going to repeat them here. However, I should repeat that the Dharok set became the new strongest Melee set, Ahrim the new strongest Magic set and Karil the new strongest Ranged set. Also for the first time in RuneScape were players introduced to the concept of degradeable armour. The enormous strength and unique armour effects did not come without a cost. In line with already existing items that degraded at that time, the Mining pickaxe and Woodcutting axe (although by using a completely different mechanism), Bob in Lumbridge was the man to visit to repair fully degraded Barrows armour, for a fee, of course. In November of 2013 the entire minigame received a major overhaul. First of all, the minigame received a multiplayer option, with stronger versions of the Barrows brothers. In addition to that, the rewards were improved by releasing level 90 shields, the strongest in RuneScape. However, these new items of protection, the malevolent, merciless and vengeful kiteshields, were released in an era in which the vast majority of the combat community already preferred to wield non-defensive items in their other hand, so the shields never had a fair chance to compete with other protective items.

A good half year later, on 4th October 2005, the TzTok-Jad (commonly called Jad) was released. This monster's addition immediately doubled the highest combat level that a NPC had in the game. With an impressive combat level of 702, this monster seemed almost impossible to beat in a solo fight at first sight. The Jad is part of the last stage in the TzHaar Fight Caves, a location where combat fans could face a new challenge at that time. The Jad could use all combat types of combat triangle and its max hit was 98 at that time, enough to knock a player out in one hit with the RS2 - 104 - combat system (the highest amount of hitpoints/life points that a player could have was 99 at that time). Every player first has to withstand 62 waves of high-level monsters before they can reach this Jad. An inexperienced player would stand no chance at all. High Ranged, Melee and/or combat was necessary to take down the Jad, although several individuals succeeded in defeating the Jad without extremely high stats (at a combat level of around 80-90). What this tells us is that strategy was extremely important. Attempting to kill the Jad without a proper preparation significantly reduced a player’s chances of success because many of the weapons that are considered strong by today's standards had not been released yet. Anyone who was up to the challenge would use the Barrows Karil (Ranged) armour that had been released five months earlier. Defeating the Jad between 2005 and 2010 was considered to be an important step in the evolution of any individual’s PvM career because enduring the waves and then slaying the Jad proved mastery in several of the desirable combat traits, such as endurance, the ability to maintain a cool composure and the ability to execute predetermined strategies. The reason for attempting to slay this monster in the first place can be ascribed to the reward. After defeating the Jad a guaranteed reward is the fire cape, which remained the strongest cape in RuneScape until 2010. Losing it was particularly annoying because it implied that the player would have to go through the entire procedure of obtaining the cape again. The fire cape ended up becoming an item of prestige. In December 2010, the damage soaking update indirectly nerfed the Jad's max hit because most armour types were given a sufficiently high damage-soaking percentage to negate at least a part of the damage dealt by the TzTok-Jad. According to the TzHaar language, TzTok-Jad can be translated as Obsidian fire elemental. The TzTok-Jad would remain the strongest monster for almost three years. On an additional note I should mention that the strong amulet of fury was released on the same day as the Jad. However, it was not a drop, but had to be purchased in the new TzHaar city. This amulet would eventually be used by the majority of the high-level players, and that for more than half a decade.

A month after the fire cape had become the focal point for many combat-minded players, three Dagannoth kings were discovered in the deepest depths of the Waterbirth Island. A king for each combat type, all three having a combat level of 303. Although a nice update for the PvM community, this day was also important for skillers because the dragon axe (hatchet) had been released on the same day and it could be obtained only by killing any of the three Dagannoth kings. However, that was not the only reason why people wanted to defeat the kings. Each of them can also drop a strong combat ring for its respective combat type. For Magic there is the Dagannoth Prime, who drops the seers’ ring; for ranged there is the Dagannoth Supreme, who drops the archers’ ring; and for Melee there is the Dagannoth Rex, who drops the berserker ring. The rings for - 105 -

Melee and Ranged would eventually have a value of several million gp for the next few years. In fact, it was not until 2014 that their value plummeted to what they are worth today. Obtaining the berserker ring was the primary reason for attempting to kill the Dagannoth kings because of how popular the ring was for many years. Almost every high-level slayer would, without a doubt, wear the berserker ring, but the new combat equipment of the recent years has caused the ring to become more or less obsolete. At that moment the most challenging monsters in RuneScape were the King Black Dragon, the Kalphite Queen, the Barrows Brothers, the Jad and these three kings.

While the King Black Dragon could be reached only by travelling through the Wilderness, there was no high-level creature in the Land of the Blood itself yet. This changed in February of 2006 when the Chaos Elemental began to terrorize the members-only area of the Wilderness. Being located near the Rogues’ Castle, at a Wilderness level of around 53, this dark purple cloud would pose an extra challenge to the PvM community. With Pk’ing still being a popular activity at that moment, trying to kill the Chaos Elemental was more than just a difficult feat. Either good Pk’ing skills or killing the Chaos Elemental in group was strongly recommended, especially since the best armour available at that time was Barrows (as a much better alternative to rune), which was very expensive at that time. Was it work the risk then? Yes, it was because the Chaos Elemental’s drop table contained the long-awaited dragon 2h sword. Perhaps unfortunately, this new sword was immediately also added to the drop table of the Kalphite Queen, which, considering the circumstances, was a better alternative than the Chaos Elemental. Five years later, in February 2011 upon the return of free trade and the old RS2 PvP system, the Chaos Elemental received a graphical facelift so that it no longer looked like a cloud. Many more items were also added to the drop table, primarily the new corrupt armour pieces, ancient artefacts and brawler gloves. The return of the old Wilderness Pk’ing system did not succeed in reviving the PvP community. As a consequence it is now easier to kill the Chaos Elemental, even when not considering the fact that there are much better weapons and armour today. Every now and then a Pk’er might pop up, but it is not uncommon to be the only player there for extended periods of time.

Just a month after the Chaos Elemental’s first appearance in Gielinor, the ground beneath Falador Park was invaded by a giant mole, conveniently named Giant Mole. With a combat level of 230, this mole was not as strong as most of the other bosses in RuneScape, but the interesting part here is the general concept. Despite not having any good drops whatsoever, this boss came along with a high level of entertainment due to the hide-and-seek game that had been integrated in it. At somewhat random intervals during the fight with the mole, she digs into ground to move to another location below Falador Park and then each player has to find her again. Nevertheless, the fact that the Giant Mole lacked any decent drops caused its popularity to be very short-lived, essentially limited to what we could call the typical post- update hype period. In order to blast some new life into the activity, Jagex updated the mole in January of 2014. Despite still not adding any valuable drops, Jagex did release a hard mode for it in which players get better rewards in general. One of the new rewards was aimed at skillers as the improved mole would also start to - 106 - drop ultra-growth potions, allowing farmers to skip growth stages of trees. While this does seem like a decent update, it is important to mention that the Giant Mole was never a popular PvM boss, not even with the new rewards, simply because it never had any valuable drops.

Next in line are the high-level monsters inside the God Wars Dungeon, although without Nex, who was not yet part of the update that added the dungeon to the game on 28th August 2007. Back in 2005 the Barrows minigame signified a revolution in the world of high-level combat. The release of the God Wars Dungeon could be considered the next revolution, one that had an even greater impact on the combat landscape than the Barrows minigame had. That 28th August was what led to a spectacular growth of the PvM community. The monsters responsible for that were Commander Zilyana, General Graardor, K’ril Tsutsaroth and Kree’arra; representing the gods Saradomin, Bandos, Zamorak and Armadyl, respectively. Why this update was unlike any of the previous boss releases is because in this update almost every aspect was brought to the next level. Even reaching the dungeon was not considered to be a pleasant experience due to a mandatory trip through Trollheim and a short snowy area in which the run energy is reduced to zero. The God Wars Dungeon was introduced as a place where inexperienced players could easily die before even reaching the boss that they wanted to kill in the first place. If you have never visited the dungeon before, you might want to know that the dungeon’s point of entry leads to a central room in which several monsters attack the player at the same time. A player will die if standing inside the central area for too long, although that was not the only inconveniencing feature of the dungeon. For the first time a player was also required to kill a certain amount of other monsters before being able to enter to boss room. For each boss a kill count of fourty was required in the adjacent room. At that moment the timer on gravestones could not be extended yet. This means that dying inside the boss room led to a player losing every unprotected item because it would take too long to get back to the dungeon and to kill fourty monsters before the gravestone collapsed. And even inside the boss room the boss is aided by several other high-level monsters, who could easily deal a lot of damage, especially with Barrows armour being the best option at that time. In other words, just the mere act of slaying the bosses was already enough to deserve bragging rights, so to speak. The four bosses ended up becoming extremely popular due to their drops. A new highest tier of armour and weaponry was launched into the game. For Melee there was Bandos armour and for Ranged there was Armadyl armour. The new weapons included the Saradomin sword and the Zamorakian spear, but the true eye catchers were the new godswords, built from various godsword pieces dropped by the bosses. These godswords were more than just extraordinarily strong weapons with powerful special attacks for that era, they were items of prestige. If a player did not have a partyhat, then the next best thing to have was any of the godswords, preferably the Armadyl one. The prices offered for these weapons varied from 30m to more than 100m for the Armadyl godsword shortly after being released. The Bandos godsword would eventually settle at around 20m-40m gp, the Zamorak godsword at around 25m-45m gp, but the prices of the Saradomin and Armadyl godswords would fluctuate between 45m-120m gp. The vast majority could not afford these godswords and even the armour was relatively expensive, with the Bandos pieces being more expensive than 10m gp each for a long time. Over the course of the recent years many more strong weapons and armour have been added to the drop table of the bosses. These items include the Armadyl crossbow, robes of subjugation and warpriest armour. All godswords are now at an all-time low because of the stronger weapons that have been released since Dungeoneering in 2010 and yet the godswords have still not lost all of their value. In fact, at the moment of writing (early 2015) the Saradomin godsword cost almost 11m gp. This should suffice to demonstrate the magnitude and impact of the original update in 2007 on the game. In 2011 a new monster was added to the God Wars Dungeon, but I will tell - 107 - about more about that in one of the following paragraphs to respect the chronological order of events.

On 15th September 2008 the Corporeal Beast revealed all of its secrets. This beast is similar to the King Black Dragon in the sense that a player must travel through the Wilderness to reach its lair. What was so unique about this boss is that for the first time completion of a quest (Summer’s End) was a direct requirement of unlocking the ability to enter the Corporeal Beast’s lair. It became the new strongest monster in-game, surpassing the Jad, at a combat level of 785. The interesting part for the PvM community was, as always, the drops. And the drops were definitely worth the effort of slaying the beast. Players wanted to kill this monster because of the various sigil drops, worth hundreds of millions of gold coins at first, that could be turned into strong high-level shields. The divine sigil, the most expensive one, immediately skyrocketed to a price of 200m gp and topped in 2011 at a price of an astonishing 916m gp. Its corresponding shield at that moment reached its peak of 1001 million (one billion) gp. It goes without saying that the Corporeal Beast became extremely popular. Solo fighters would opt for a Zamorakian spear and a statius’s warhammer to defeat this beast, although teaming up with others was usually the preferred strategy. The warhammer was used to reduce the Corporeal Beast’s defence. However, it was quite expensive and it would degrade, so the warhammer was not always used. For a long time barrows armour was a good alternative as well. A funny story is that for a short period some of people who had not killed this gigantic beast yet thought that the name was Corporal instead of Corporeal.

Two months later a new high-level monster was discovered in Gielinor and also this time it required completion of a quest. After completion of the first grandmaster quest, While Guthix Sleeps, access to a deep underground area with Tormented Demons is unlocked. One of the possible drops was a new, strong weapon that could be obtained only from killing the demons. The new dragon claws caused a major and long-lasting hype because of its extremely strong special attack, essentially combining four attacks into one, similar to how the dragon dagger’s special attack works, but much stronger. At that moment off-hand weapons and combat abilities did not exist yet, and neither did the dragon limbs. The only other noteworthy drops are the very rare pieces of ruined dragon armour that are necessary to smith the new dragon platebody that had been released on the same day. The dragon platebody would never become a popular item of protection due to being outclassed by the already existing Bandos chestplate. Nevertheless, those who did fight the Tormented Demons were there only for the dragon claws drops. The demons always switch between protection prayers, so combat equipment for two combat types is necessary. Back in 2008 the combination was usually Melee and Ranged. Karil’s armour was used when fighting with Ranged and it would also be worn for the Melee parts, for which a player usually opted to use the Saradomin godsword. In September of 2009 the release of the quest Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf introduced the hand cannon and its hand cannon shots to RuneScape. Some players started to use this weapon to fight the Tormented Demons. In November 2012, when Evolution of Combat was released, the dragon limbs and the off-hand - 108 - dragon claw were added to the drop table of the Tormented Demon, but by that moment the price of the dragon claws had already dropped to below a few 100k. This is unfortunate for a weapon whose price peaked at 40m gp in 2009, which made killing the Tormented Demons a more than decent moneymaker. The release of these hellish demons was followed by a relatively long period without any boss releases, or other high-level monsters. A period in which Dungeoneering was released (April 2010), as well as its many rewards, including the chaotic weapons. The release of chaotic weaponry signified a key moment in the evolution of PvM. The abyssal whip, the Zamorakian spear and the godswords had until been the most frequently used Melee weapons in the high-level community. This changed as each of the new chaotic weapons was better than its pre-2010 counterpart. This is the point at which the more traditional weapons were pushed into the background, with dramatic effects on their price. None of these weapons would ever recover. What is left as a remnant is their cheap price.

The period of no-boss releases came to an end when Jagex caused a major hype in January of 2011 by releasing Nex, the fifth boss of the God Wars Dungeon, representing Zaros. Her addition on 10th January 2011 made her the strongest monster in-game, with an amazing combat level of 1001. Just like a player needed to spend some time inside the God Wars Dungeon before being able to enter the boss rooms, so did they for Nex, which requires the use of the ancient key that can be made by collecting the key parts in the dungeon. Shortly after Nex’s release, Ranged-based teams would opt for void armour and ruby bolts + dragon claws, while Melee-based teams would opt for any armour that increases the Melee attack bonuses. Use of both Ranged and Melee was highly recommended in both cases. It initially was advised to kill her in teams consisting of six to nine people and it was even claimed that this monster could not be killed in a solo fight. Nex was a revolutionary monster because it was the first monster to work with 'phases'. In order to kill her the team needs to go through five phases, which have their own strengths and weaknesses. She also has many special attacks that can inflict a lot of damage and, just like the other bosses in the dungeon, also Nex is assisted by several other monsters. The difference, however, is that her minions are considerably stronger. If it was Dungeoneering that had rendered the traditional weapons redundant, then the release of Nex was the equivalent for the traditional types of armour. Not only did it release new types of armour for each combat type, but each of those new sets of armour was also stronger than the already existing traditional armour, such as Bandos or Barrows armour. With torva, pernix and virtus armour there was no longer a need for the older types armour. At least, for the rich people, because these new types of armour became relatively expensive in a short period of time. For example, the torva platebody (for Melee) would reach a peak of just over 600m gp, and then we are talking about just the platebody. In other words, the traditional types of armour would continue to be frequently used by the people who were not extremely rich.

In February of 2012 the TzHaar city was updated and enriched with new content, such as the Elder Kiln quest and the Fight Kiln minigame, which is similar to the TzHaar fight cave, but it has only 37 waves. In this last wave, however, Har-Aken awaits. With a combat level of 800, this new monster not only superseded the TzTok-Jad, but also offered the PvM community a new, better cape than the fire cape. This cape had been the strongest one since 2005, but would fall short in comparison to the three new TokHaar-Kal capes, one for each combat type. Three months later, in May, a new boss was released that had already been announced at RuneFest 2011. Almost a decade after the King Black Dragon’s release, his female counterpart emerged to show her glory for the first time. The long-awaited Queen Black Dragon, combat level 900, was found lurking inside - 109 -

Rimmington’s Grotworm Lair. What was so fascinating about this new boss is the history behind it. Quite some players had throughout the years already wondered if there should not be a queen too. Where normally the community responded with great excitement to new bosses, this time it was different. The PvM community was still extremely excited, but in a different way. There appeared to be this general Yes! Finally!-feeling as if something that had been missing from the game was finally added to it. Despite not having any extremely valuable drops, there was still something among the rewards that was important for the PvM community. The Queen Black Dragon was the first and only monster to drop the items and the resources that are needed to craft royal dragonhide armour. While this set of Ranged armour was not as good as other already existing high-level Ranged gear, it was cheap and still good. This made it possible for the not-so-wealthy players in the community to equip themselves with decent Ranged armour without having to spend much money. Of course there was Karil’s armour from the Barrows minigame, but that is a set of armour that degrades and even today it is not nearly as cheap as the royal armour.

Also the Kalphite King had been announced at RuneFest 2011 and it was January 2013 when he first appeared below the sand of the Kharidian Desert. With a staggering combat level of 2500 the king of insects would pose a serious challenge to even the bravest players out there, and with the weapons and armour available at that time it was not possible to kill this king in a solo fight. Ever since Nex PvM in group had become significantly more present in the foreground. The release of the Kalphite King served as an additional stimulus to that trend. Also the quality of the newer weapons and armour had reached a level of which RS1 players could only have dreamt. Together with a friend I tried to take down the Kalphite King by wearing nothing but rune armour. We did not stand a chance. Our rune scimitars were ineffective and I am still not sure if the protection offered by our rune armour actually made any difference. This shows how much better weapons and armour have become over the course of the year, and Kalphite King’s release contributed to that by introducing a new type of high-level weapons. The new drygore weaponry is the potential reward for killing the Kalphite King. At the moment of the boss’s release, it was primarily the chaotic weaponry, especially the rapier, to which the PvM community would resort. The drygore weapons, all for Melee, would beat the chaotic weaponry by a longshot. The prices for the three new Melee weapons would eventually settle at just below 100m gp between the period May 2013 – January 2014, so it was only the rich part of the PvM community that could afford to purchase these weapons (keep in mind, these prices are for just the main-hand weapon). As a consequence, the chaotic weapons would remain a popular first choice for players without much wealth. On the same day as the release of the Kalphite King, a more difficult version of the Kalphite Queen was added to the game as well. The new version, called the Exiled Kalphite Queen, was not a substitution of the original queen, but an addition. Consequently, she is located at a different place in the Kharidian Desert. While the regular queen can be found in the dungeon just southwest of the Shantay Pass, the Exiled Kalphite Queen is situated deep in the Desert, north of Sophanem. The reason for releasing this version was to update the original queen and to make everything in line with the power of the new weapons. I am not sure why Jagex did not just replace the original version or added a hard mode to it. The Exiled Kalphite - 110 -

Queen would drop better rewards in general, but no new items and also none of the drygore weaponry.

A half later, in July 2013, an exceptionally powerful subterrestrial boss was added to the Kingdom of Asgarnia. Listening to the name Vorago, this fearsome entity immediately became the strongest monster, with a whopping combat level of no less than 10,000. It makes one wonder how well the King Black Dragon, with a measly combat level of 276 and yet the strongest monster in RS1, would fare in a fight against Vorago. Evidently, it was and still is not possible to kill this boss in a solo fight, also because Vorago is the first boss which required a team by game mechanism as it is not possible to start a fight without inviting other people. Where the Kalphite King introduced a new and higher tier of Melee weapons to the game, Vorago did exactly the same, but for the Magic combat type. Two possible drops include the seismic wand (main-hand weapon) and the seismic singularity (off-hand weapon), which outclassed any other Magic weapon at that moment and require a Magic level of ninety to wield. Their excess in power was visible in the price. In the next ten months the seismic wand would climb in price to eventually peak at a price of more than 1.3 billion gp in April of 2014. Never before in the history of RuneScape had a weapon reached such an astronomically high price. This probably also tells us a lot about the economy of the game. Even today, in early 2015, the seismic wand has been sitting at the price of around 500m gp. Its off-hand counterpart is cheaper, relatively speaking of course, with a current price of just over 150m gp. It goes without saying these weapons belong to the elite of the PvM community, to the lucky few who have been able to accumulate a lot of wealth in their RuneScape career. Other interesting drops include the ancient summoning stone, which can be used to obtain the vitalis pet, and crystal triskelion fragments, which can be used to unlock a reward similarly to how crystal keys can be used to obtain a somewhat random reward from the crystal chests in Taverley and Prifddinas.

Araxxor and Araxxi are two bosses of the arachnid family that were added to the game in July of 2014. Their impact on the PvM world was minimal in the sense that the strength of the new noxious weapons was completely in line with the drygore and seismic weapons. The excitement and the hype following the update was still very visible, though. This is because the concept of killing a spider boss seemed intriguing to most people, to say the least. Even more so when the community soon discovered that slaying Araxxor was just the beginning. The real fun began when Araxxi appeared on the scene with an impressive animation, and that after killing Araxxor. This was also the first time that the level of difficulty would increase if the player brought someone else to help. Initially many players complained about the difficulty, but this was largely due to not understanding the boss’s combat mechanics. Nevertheless, it may or may not have been what led to Jagex releasing the araxyte pheromone in January of 2015, which can be used to reset the enrage counter, just one of the unique features that these bosses have to offer. The new noxious weapons, one for each combat type, would be as strong as the drygore and seismic weapons. The last boss or high-level monster to report about in - 111 - this chapter is the WildyWyrm, first temporarily released in 2011 as part of a Jagex-hosted event, but in 2015 it was released permanently. For the PvM chapter we are really only interested in the 2015 release because that was when the three expensive wyrm items were added to the drop table. These could be used to make the new lava whip, staff of darkness and strykebow. Although the strykebow would become the strongest shieldbow, or longbow for those who prefer the old terminology, of the game, the other two weapons would be relatively weak in comparison to the already existing drygore and seismic equivalents for their respective combat type.

You might have noticed how I have addressed only the weapons and armour dropped by bosses, but throughout the history of the game there has been quite a bit of good armour that could be unlocked only by playing minigames or D&Ds (Distractions and Diversions). I will have a look at those weapons and armour below, although I am going to skip the ones that were significantly weaker than already existing armour or weapons when they were released.

For Melee there is not an extreme lot of noteworthy equipment that is still missing. Evidently, and as I have indicated in other chapters, the best available type of Melee armour was adamant until September 2001, after which rune armour was released. Rune armour remained the strongest armour until 2004 and 2005, when it was replaced by the dragon chainbody and Barrows armour. In May 2006 the quest The Slug Menace was released. One of its rewards is the ability to wear proselyte armour, which is particularly interesting because of the extremely high Prayer bonus that the armour used to offer in comparison with the other best available armour, which was primarily Barrows armour for the rich people in the community. Others would use rune armour. Strength-wise the proselyte armour paled in comparison with Barrows armour, though. A month later the defenders up to the rune type were released. The general concept behind this was to replace the shields with an item that provides Attack and Strength bonuses, which turned out to be a great idea because the rune defender would become one of the most used items for training Slayer and for doing other combat-related activities. At the end of 2006 the extremely powerful third-age Melee set was added to the reward table of clue scrolls. Its combined stats were superior to those of almost any other Melee armour set, but due the extreme rarity of third-age equipment, only the most wealthy players could offer to buy a piece of the armour. Consequently, Barrows armour remained the favourite choice. The first month of 2007 saw the addition of the fighter torso as reward from the new Barbarian Assault minigame. Being only slightly worse than rune platebody, it was mainly its +4 Strength bonus that attracted the mid- level players (the rune platebody did not have this bonus), and it would ever since that moment be a decent alternative. One of the most influential Melee items, however, is the dragonfire shield. Released in June of 2007, it was embraced by the high-level community as a gift from Guthix. The dragonfire shield would eventually become one of the most used Slayer items in the game. The final piece of Melee equipment followed much later, at the end of 2012, when the Player-Owned Ports added the power level 90 tetsu armour to the game. At that moment the strongest Melee armour was torva, which was too expensive for many players. The Tetsu armour would serve as a free, but equally strong alternative.

For the Ranged combat type there has always been one item that stood out in comparison to anything else: the dwarf multicannon. It was first released in May 2003 as reward from the Dwarf - 112 -

Cannon quest. In the first years after the update it was extremely expensive to use this cannon for Ranged training, but the cost gradually decreased over the course of the years. Eventually it became possible without wasting a lot of money to train Range to 99 while doing Slayer tasks, only by using the dwarf multicannon. The rather funny consequence of that is that today there are many players with level 99 Ranged who have used the traditional bow and arrow for probably less than 500k of their xp (level 99 requires 13m xp). However, the release of the Hunter skill in November of 2006 also contributed to that because of the red chinchompas that were released on the same day. Today the red chinchompas still provide the highest Ranged xp rates and that was no different back in 2006. However, only the very rich players were usually able to use this method as a way of gaining millions of xp in the skill. If we return to the beginning of time in RuneScape, then you might be surprised to notice that no archer would wear dragonhide armour. The best available Ranged armour in RS1 was hard leather (used in combination with the magic crossbow or longbow) and dragonhide armour did not exist until March 2004, when RS2 was officially released. For a decade both the high- and mid-level players would make use of this dragonhide armour when training Ranged, although a good alternative was released in early 2006 when Jagex added Pest Control to the game. Its void knight equipment for Ranged quickly became popular because of the set’s effect that applies when wearing the entire set of armour (+20% damage and +10% accuracy). Even though it was more popular in the mid-level community, occasionally high-level players would make use of the set as well when they could not cover the cost of the Barrows’ Karil’s armour or the third-age Ranged armour set, which had been released at the same time as its Melee equivalent. The last two sets of armour are fairly recent additions. The sirenic armour set was released in October 2013 and immediately became the strongest Ranged armour of RuneScape, it still is today. A little earlier its untradeable and free counterpart had been added to the game as part of the Player-Owned Ports update: the death lotus armour, which is almost as strong as sirenic.

For the Magic combat type I should mention the release of the infinity armour set in January of 2006 as part of the Mage Training Arena minigame. It certainly was not as good as the already existing Barrows Ahrim’s equipment, but it did offer a nice alternative to those who could not afford to purchase the Barrows armour. Unlocking the infinity robes through the minigame required spending many hours inside the arena, though. The master wand is another reward that can be unlocked by playing the Magic Training Arena minigame. When the minigame was added to the game, the strongest staves were Ahrim’s staff and the ancient staff, each offering a Magic attack and Magic strength bonus of +15, but the new master wand would have superior stats, +20 in each of the two. While the master wand was clearly stronger for training Magic itself, unlike the other two weapons it did lack any other type of bonus, though. This is why the Ahrim’s staff, the ancient staff and the master wand were generally considered to be the three best Magic weapons at the same time until 2010. The remainder of the notable Magic equipment is similar to what was mentioned in the Melee and Ranged paragraphs. There was the third-age Magic set in December of 2006, but almost no one could afford it, so the community generally kept on using Ahrim’s, infinity or even something else that is not as good. Also for Magic there is a set of armour that can be unlocked through Player-Owned Ports, called seasinger’s armour. It requires level 90 to wear and it has been the strongest Magic armour in RuneScape, together with the tectonic armour Magic set that was released In July of 2013, as part of the Vorago boss release.

After reading all of that information, it should be clear that combat and its equipment have undergone major transformations since this game was first launched in 2001. For more than two years rune armour used to be strongest available armour. Today its strength and protection is dwarfed by the torva and tetsu Melee sets. The same has happened for Magic and Ranged. In order - 113 - to provide a nice overview of this evolution of armour, if we could call it that, I have made some sort of timeline that displays the best weapons and armour that were available at specific moments

The evolution of Melee equipment Year Month Armour Weapon(s) 2001 July -Adamant -Adamant 2h sword December -Rune -Rune longsword 2002 July -Rune -Rune 2h sword December -Rune -Dragon longsword -Dragon medium helm -Dragon battleaxe 2003 July -Rune -Rune 2h sword December -Dragon medium helm -Dragon longsword -Dragon battleaxe 2004 July -Dragon chainbody -Rune 2h sword December -Dragon medium helm -Dragon weaponry -Rune platelegs 2005 July -Barrows -Abyssal whip December -Barrows -Dragon weaponry 2006 July -Barrows -Abyssal whip December -Barrows -Dragon weaponry 2007 July -Barrows -Abyssal whip -Third-age -Barrows -Dragon weaponry December -Barrows -Abyssal whip -Third-age -Barrows -Bandos -Dragon weaponry -Godswords 2008 July -Barrows -Abyssal whip December -Third-age -Barrows -Bandos -Dragon weaponry -Godswords 2009 July -Barrows -Abyssal whip December -Third-age -Barrows -Bandos -Dragon weaponry -Godswords 2010 July -Barrows -Chaotic weaponry December -Third-age -Godswords -Bandos 2011 July -Torva -Chaotic weaponry December -Godswords 2012 July -Torva -Chaotic weaponry -Godswords December -Torva -Chaotic weaponry -Tetsu 2013 July -Torva -Drygore weaponry -Tetsu December -Torva -Tetsu -Malevolent

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2014 July -Torva -Drygore weaponry December -Tetsu -Drygore weaponry -Malevolent -Noxious scythe

The evolution of Ranged equipment Year Month Armour Weapon(s) 2001 July -Hard leather -Crossbow December -Phoenix crossbow 2002 July -Hard leather -Magic crossbow December -Magic longbow 2003 July -Hard leather -Magic crossbow December -Magic longbow 2004 July -Black dragonhide -Magic crossbow December -Magic longbow 2005 July -Black dragonhide -Crystal bow December -Karil’s -Karil’s crossbow 2006 July -Black dragonhide -Crystal bow December -Karil’s -Karil’s crossbow -Void Knight 2007 July -Black dragonhide -Crystal bow -Karil’s -Karil’s crossbow -Void Knight -Rune crossbow December -Black dragonhide -Crystal bow -Karil’s -Karil’s crossbow -Void Knight -Rune crossbow -Armadyl -Dark bow 2008 July -Black dragonhide -Crystal bow December -Karil’s -Karil’s crossbow -Void Knight -Rune crossbow -Armadyl -Dark bow 2009 July -Black dragonhide -Crystal bow December -Karil’s -Karil’s crossbow -Void Knight -Rune crossbow -Armadyl -Dark bow 2010 July -Black dragonhide -Chaotic crossbow December -Karil’s -Void Knight -Armadyl 2011 July -Pernix -Chaotic crossbow December -Zaryte bow 2012 July -Pernix -Chaotic crossbow December -Royal dragonhide -Zaryte bow -Royal crossbow 2013 July -Death lotus -Ascension crossbow December -Death lotus -Sirenic 2014 July -Death lotus -Ascension crossbow December -Sirenic -Ascension crossbow -Noxious bow The dwarf multicannon and the hand cannon have been omitted. - 115 -

The evolution of Magic equipment Year Month Armour Weapon(s) 2001 July -Adamant -regular Magic staves -Wizard robes December -Rune -Wizard robes 2002 July -Rune -Battlestaves December -Wizard robes -Mystic staves 2003 July -Rune -Battlestaves December -Wizard robes -Mystic staves -Iban’s staff 2004 July -Wizard robes -Battlestaves December -Splitbark -Mystic staves -Iban’s staff 2005 July -Ahrim’s -Ahrim’s staff December -Mystic robes -Ancient staff 2006 July -Ahrim’s -Ahrim’s staff December -Infinity -Ancient staff -Master wand 2007 July -Ahrim’s -Ahrim’s staff December -Infinity -Ancient staff -Third-age -Master wand 2008 July -Ahrim’s -Ahrim’s staff December -Infinity -Ancient staff -Third-age -Master wand 2009 July -Ahrim’s -Ahrim’s staff December -Infinity -Ancient staff -Third-age -Master wand 2010 July -Ahrim’s -Chaotic staff December -Infinity -Third-age 2011 July -Virtus -Chaotic staff December -Virus -Ganodermic 2012 July -Virtus -Chaotic staff -Ganodermic December -Virtus -Chaotic staff -Ganodermic -Virtus wand -Subjugation 2013 July -Seasinger’s -Chaotic staff -Virtus wand December -Tectonic -Seismic wand -Seasinger’s 2014 July -Tectonic -Seismic wand December -Seasinger’s -Seismic wand -Noxious staff

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Maybe now is a good moment to find out when the PvM community became noticeably present in the game for the first time, although that is quite difficult. PvP was there from the start and so was skilling, but modern PvM was not, for reasons I have explained earlier in this chapter and in this book. The focus in RS1 was primarily on PvP, with skilling fulfilling a necessary auxiliary role. The only high-level boss was the King Black Dragon and other monsters were regarded as training material. Of course there were also players who did not get involved with PvP or skilling and focused only on slaying the various monsters in Gielinor, but the vast majority was either a Pk’er, a skiller or both. With combat becoming more flexible after the release of RuneScape 2 in 2004 (combat triangle, attack styles, more weapons and armour, etc.), a first revolution of the entire combat environment had taken place. In the next year much was about to change for that exclusive PvM minority with the help of Jagex. Kalphite Queen’s addition to the game in September was a significant event because it was the first monster that would drop an extremely expensive item (the dragon chainbody). Of course, as a Grand Exchange was still absent, the initial price was decided by the community, so it is the community that suddenly attached a value of a never-before-seen magnitude to a monster drop. More than 20m gp was being offered in a time when the economy was still relatively primitive, although its growth had begun to accelerate as a consequence of the first so-called Miniclip RuneScape players, as explained in the chapter about the community. The fact that the community was willing to offer such a high price for the dragon chainbody is important because it means that the act of killing monsters in general had essentially become more meaningful. The high value of the chainbody of course triggered an intense interest. Suddenly the majority of the high-level players wanted to test their luck. Perhaps this when a first PvM community was born. The King Black Dragon did not have any extremely valuable drops when it was added to the game in 2002.

Three months after the beginning of the Kalphite Queen hype, Jagex released the Slayer skill in January of 2005. This went hand in hand with the addition of new monsters and new weapons. The abyssal demons with their high-level abyssal whip drop would probably be the best example of this. Then there also were the gargoyles with their granite maul drop. Shortly afterwards dust devils followed as the second monster to drop the dragon chainbody. The release of Slayer was an update for players who loved fighting monsters because that is all that the skill was about. In order words, the release of Slayer was a huge stimulus for the growth of the PvM community. In May of 2005 the Barrows minigame was released. This was an update that benefited the PvM community for the most part because the new Barrows armour was by the majority of the community considered to be too expensive to take into the Wilderness. And that is actually a problem that the PvP community would end up facing with every new release of high-level weapons and armour, whereas the PvM community would continue to grow after all of the four boss releases between May 2005 and April 2006. The PvP community was still by far the bigger community, so it might not have felt the impact caused by the new weapons and armour that were actually too expensive or otherwise too valuable (e.g. the fire cape) to risk losing in the Wilderness. In 2005 and 2006 PvM gradually became more popular while no updates were being made to the Wilderness. The release of the God Wars Dungeon in August of 2007 was perhaps the culmination of this general image, this general trend which had caused more and more players to engage in player versus monster fighting.

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The breakthrough for PvM, however, can probably only be ascribed to the saddening events of December 2007, though. The introduction of restricted trading and the removal of the Wilderness PvP system at that time caused a dramatic and instantaneous downfall of the PvP community. More about this will be discussed in the PvP chapter, but these events were of invaluable nature for the PvM community. At that moment the main focus was still on PvP and general skilling had already gained a lot of popularity due to an increased number of players competing against each other in the hiscores (also here is this the direct consequence of the Miniclip generation). The abrupt near- disappearance of the PvP community created room for both the skilling and PvM communities. This was a unique opportunity for the PvM community to recruit more people. Of course this happened largely in a passive manner because the PvM community was equally uncertain about the immediate future of the game. While many Pk’ers quit, others tried to find a new passion or accepted the new Pk’ing system. The switch from PvP to PvM was easily made considering the nature of both activities, whereas skilling involved no or very little combat. Former Pk’ers were more likely to join the PvM community than its skilling counterpart.

In the years that followed the PvM world managed to attain a certain status while the size of PvP community shrank to early RS1 proportions. By 2011 both skilling and PvM had become the primary activities by which everything else was defined. You were either a skiller or a PvM’er. Even though Pk’ing was still there, it had clearly been pushed into the background. Little did the fans of monster-slaying know, however, that the best was yet to come. When Jagex announced their plans for EoC it was clear as crystal that their focus had shifted toward the PvM community. This was already visible early in 2012 when Nex’s introduction to the game was accompanied by new sets of high-level armour, stronger than any already existing types. The tables a few pages ago clearly show how the last four years have been dedicated to introducing new weapons and armour to the game, with level 80, 85 and 90 weapons and armour.

While all of that was happening there, of course, still was EoC and its beta. While initially the PvM community responded with great enthusiasm to the idea of a new combat system, the EoC beta tempered this feeling due to a part of the community disliking the concept of combat abilities. This division of opinion remained throughout the entire beta period, despite Jagex changing their mind on several of the key topics. For example, Jagex’s original plan consisted of removing special attacks because the various combat abilities would in essence fulfill exactly the same role. However, the opposition to that idea was persistent and eventually Jagex decided to keep special attacks in the game, although tweaked or nerfed where necessary. While such concessions might have helped a bit, many players had difficulties with adjusting to the new combat system (the old combat system had been removed completely at this stage). I am the best example of that as I died more than twenty times during the quest Brink of Extinction, and that at a combat level of 138. Those who could not successfully adapt made sure to voice their opinion and within weeks thousands of players were asking Jagex to restore the old system. This demand would be repeated for months, so eventually Jagex released a poll to ask if they should make the old combat system available again.

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This poll was launched at the end of January. Almost 250k votes were cast, with just over 200k of them being in favour of restoring what would be called Legacy mode. However, it should be noted that this does not mean that 200k people were against EoC or that they would even play in Legacy mode. Many people voted to help their friends, without the intention of playing Legacy mode at all. As a consequence, it is not known how many players were truly in favour and were not simply engaging in sympathy voting. There were also players who did not like the idea of two combat modes, though. They argued that it would unnecessarily segregate the community. This might be why Jagex waited so long (fifteen months) with releasing the Legacy mode poll, but this is just a personal guess. Another factor, without a doubt, would also be the difficult act of balancing the two systems, so that could be another reason. Either way, the full release of Legacy mode took place on 14th July 2014, divided opinions were still present in the economy.

Nevertheless, overall it is clear that last half decade has been dedicated to PvM, and also to skilling to a somewhat lesser extent. The release of many types of weapons and armour alongside a handful a high-level bosses has made combat more challenging than ever. The combat abilities introduced by EoC added more excitement and more diversity to PvM. The story of PvM is similar to how a low-level player finally becomes the rank one of the game, after years fighting an uphill battle against other players, those being PvP and skilling in this case. In the end it might be reasonable to assume that the PvM clan world, as we know it today, was born on the day Jagex released the God Wars Dungeon in the summer of 2007. Earlier PvM clans had a different goal, more in function of the Slayer skill and with little focus on killing the handful of top tier monsters in the RuneScape because they were limited to the Barrows brothers, the Dagannoth kings and the Kalphite Queen. Even though I would gladly try to paint a good overall image of the PvM clan world and its evolution, a problem that I encountered is that there is little information available. My only sources have been the anecdotes of currently active players in the PvM community. I will be able to write a little bit about PvM clans, but it should be kept in mind that there will be multiple errors of omission due to the difficulties that I have encountered while trying do the research for this topic. My endeavors to find any PvM clan that specialized in God Wars Dungeon PvM in 2007 and 2008 did not yield anything that I was looking for. However, it did seem like any group activity in the God Wars Dungeon at that time was for the most part organized in the form of teams, and not clans. That is not to say that clans for it did not exist, but perhaps it was more convenient to go as a team and not an official clan. Either way, it is reasonable to assume that the first modern-day PvM wars took place in the God Wars Dungeon. A PvM war is an interclan event in which two or more clans attempt to kill the selected boss as fast as possible for a predetermined amount of times.

A pivotal moment for the PvM clan world was the release of the LootShare system in October of 2007. It was a key event that directly led to a new type of competition between PvM clans. The presence of the LootShare systems allowed multiple clans to simultaneously fight the same boss while also offering a way for all clans to see which clan had inflicted the most damage. It took a while for this type of competition to become possible because the best bosses at the end of 2007 either could be killed relatively fast (in comparison with modern-day bosses, such as Vorago) or did not offer the right environment. For example, the release of the God Wars Dungeon was a great stimulus for the PvM world, but the dungeon itself was not ideal for clan competitions because of the kill count requirement to enter the boss rooms. The other bosses, such as the Kalphite Queen, were not ideal either because their amount of life points could be reduced to zero at a fairly fast pace when fighting with two clans of more than thirty people each. The first good boss for LootShare competition-based wars was the 119

Corporeal Beast, added to the game in September of 2008. With almost ten times more hitpoints than the Kalphite Queen at that time, it gave the members of all clans involved in the PvM war a chance to contribute to the war. A PvM war itself was usually set up between two clans, with specific rules that could vary from war to war. The clans would use a friends chat with the LootShare option switched on and attack the chosen boss at the same time (so no turn-taking). The LootShare system announces in the friend chat who receives the drops from the defeated monsters. However, when two and more friends chats are competing, the drop announcement logically only appears in one friends chat because only one person can get the drop. The friends chat who deals the most damage is the friends chat who will receive the drop. When two PvM clans were competing, they would look at whether or not there was a drop announcement in the friend chat after slaying a boss. If no message appeared, it meant that the other clan had inflicted more damage, and thus got the kill. In the situation of the Corporeal Beast, it was usually decided that the winner of the PvM war is the first clan to reach fifteen or twenty kills. With the Corporeal Beast being the only ideal boss for this type of competition, the PvM clan world was particularly pleased when Jagex released Nex at the beginning of 2011. Nex was designed to be killed by groups of players, as opposed to other already existing bosses that could be defeated by a single person. The new boss was therefore ideal for PvM clans and, although reaching Nex also does require obtaining a specific kill count, Nex has always been one of the preferred bosses with regard to the organization of PvM wars. Nex and the Corporeal Beast have made an important contribution to development of the PvM clan world, and not just the PvM content in RuneScape.

It is generally known that the release of EoC in November of 2012 was met with both great enthusiasm and harsh criticism, and that was no different in the PvM clan world. Some PvM clans liked EoC, others did not. There was no consensus, other than that EoC would change everything. Those who disliked EoC argued that it changed the one thing that was unique to RuneScape (the old combat system without abilities) and that bosses were easier to kill in EoC than before. The release of EoC also caused some items to crash in price, such as shields due to the introduction of dual wielding and the off-hand weapons. The people or the clans who liked EoC shared the opinion that the implementation of combat abilities added skill to combat, whereas previously the combat system had operated on the basis of a click-and-wait principle. EoC made combat more interactive and made the players much more in control of the fights. Mastering EoC combat and its system with combat abilities became another way of showing one’s superiority on an individual level. Some PvM clans attempted to achieve the same on a collective level and allowed only experienced combatants to enter their clan, systematically refusing inexperienced players. The EoC era itself, the years after the release of EoC, turned out to be positive for PvM. More team bosses were added to the game, each with their unique mechanisms, which stimulated people to find a PvM clan or team. The best example of such a boss is, of course, Vorago.

Nevertheless, today a lot is different than in 2011 for the PvM clan world. The Corporeal Beast and Nex have become too easy to kill due to the array of high-level weapons that have been released in the recent years. The new generation of bosses (since Nex) have different mechanics that are generally not ideal for PvM clan wars. The few members of the PvM community whom I interviewed also reported that the bigger PvM clan do not seem to get along with each other anymore. All of those factors have caused PvM clans wars to become a rare occurrence these days. The bigger PvM clans are generally no longer interested in participating in PvM wars. However, they still do want to be better than the other PvM clans, but they have found other ways to express themselves. Instead of engaging in PvM clan wars, the clan now tend to post videos on forums or on YouTube in which several clan members kill a boss at a record speed. However, that does not necessarily show that the clan is better than other PvM clans, but only that the particular clan has at least several members who excel in PvM. In other words, uploading videos about fast kills is not a valid method of judging a clan when trying to determine who the better clans are. Furthermore, there are not many big PvM clans. There are definitely more PvM clans than in 2011, but most of 120 those are smaller ones and tend to be unique in one way or another. Someone well-acquainted with the PvM clan world shared with me that a lot of clans are being made as spin-offs of other clans due to many players wanting their own clan with their own rules. Communication between PvM clans is minimal nowadays and a lot more attention is dedicated to creating a unique identity, with a strong internal focus. That does not mean that the competition between the clans has disappeared, it just different today than it was several years ago. Although the PvM world and clan world are relatively satisfied with the combat-related additions to the game in the recent years, the PvM clan world still wishes that there would be a little bit more attention for them as they would like the idea of a PvM minigame that is similar to clan wars, but then for PvM clans in which bosses can be spawned and killed by multiple clans. Perhaps this is an idea for Jagex?

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5

Player versus player

Today PvP is most often associated with the Warbands D&D, and that is extremely unfortunate because it used to be so much more than that. In fact, considering its ever-lasting impact on the game it still is more than that, for without the PvP tradition, the game would probably not exist today. In the first chapters about RuneScape 1 and the RuneScape community I showed that the game revolved around PvP for the first six years. The PvP community used to be so big that even in RS2 it still dwarfed the skilling and PvM communities. So then why is it that none of that is left today? That many players are probably not even aware that there still is a traditional PvP community? The answer is obvious for anyone who has been playing since 2007 or earlier, but the relatively new players are probably not aware of the historic events that took place in 2007 and 2011. From a personal standpoint I find the creation of this chapter extremely important because the PvP tradition has such a rich history that it just does not deserve to be forgotten, or to be unheard of by the newer players. Included at the end of the PDF is an appendix with a possible solution that I worked out for the revival of the Wilderness. Although it is not going to be considered a perfect solution, the proposal has been read and approved by members of the PvM, PvP and skilling communities. That is probably step one to trying to find any good solution. Even if my proposal does not turn out to be ideal, then I at least hope it will re-open any discussion regarding the Wilderness and PvP in general.

Strategies and good knowledge of all types of armour is required to excel in the art of player killing, but one should keep in mind that the content of today is a lot more diversified than it used to be in the early years. What this means is that strategy was even more important in RS1 because Pk’ers would often wear the same armour and wield the same weapons. The combat system with abilities did not exist until 2012, which was a change at the core of the game that greatly diversified the general activity of engaging in Combat. Other important PvP-related elements that were absent in RS1 include the combat triangle, special attacks, different attack speeds, combat familiars, all of the high-level armour and weapons, multi-combat areas, and the combat system was entirely different.

Until 13th August 2001 every players had to choose whether they wanted the status of their account to be a Player-killer or a Non-player-killer. I have already extensively discussed these two modes, but I will quickly summarize it below for those who have forgotten most of it by now. Being a Non- player-killer meant that the players could not attack nor get attacked by other players. Being a Player-killer meant that the player could both attack and get attacked by other players. However, an 122 important detail to consider here is the fact that player-killers could kill each other anywhere in RuneScape as long as the other player was not more than three Combat levels higher or lower. The only exception was Lumbridge to prevent so-called spawn-Pk'ing after a player had died and respawned in Lumbridge, and all banks were safe areas too, of course. This also meant that if a player chose to be a Player-killer, they would have to keep in mind that every other Player-killer could attack them even when the first Player-killer wanted to train non-combat skills. Non-player killers did not have to worry about that. This system stayed in RuneScape until 13th August 2001, when Jagex replaced it with the current Wilderness Pk'ing system. However, they kept the possibility of PvP outside the Wilderness by adding a 'stake-option' to the right-click interface that appears when clicking on a player. This option allowed the players to fight each other after sending and accepting the invitation, regardless of their location. It could be considered the primitive precursor of the Dueling Arena, except without an arena, but anywhere in RuneScape. Even then it was already possible to stake for money or items and the winner would get all of it. Remarkably enough, and I think that this is quite funny, some skillers used this method to decide which of the two persons would have to leave a certain training spot.

An interesting fact about the Wilderness is that there was no Wilderness ditch in RS1. This means that there was a realistic chance that a player could accidentally venture into the Land of Blood and get killed because of not recognizing where the Wilderness started. Of course this was something that those with bad intentions eagerly made use of and caused innocent players to be lured into the Wilderness, especially since a warning message was not added until the release RS2. Surprisingly, the community had to wait six years for Jagex to add the Wilderness ditch, which happened on 18th April 2007. Later, in 2010, the ditch received a facelift and was turned into the current wall. If we return to RS1 to have a closer look at armour, then the first thing to say is that mithril was the best Melee armour until 23rd September 2001, when rune armour stole that honour. Another big difference compared with today is that there was no combat triangle in RS1, so a player could attack anyone else with the attack style and combat type that they preferred, without having any advantages or disadvantage. However, the attack style for Melee did determine which of the three Melee skills would be trained.

When considering RS1 and RS2 Pk’ing, generally there could be made a distinction between four types of Pk’ing. These are random Pk’ing, Anti-Pk’ing, dueling and warring. Random Pk’ers, also abbreviated as RPk’ers, formed the majority of the active Pk’ers and were referred to as Pk’ers, without the Random in front of it. These RPk’ers tended to be players who would enter the Wilderness without any goals or expectations, ready for whoever crosses their path. Clans could be RPk clans too. These clans would go on regular Wilderness trips with as goal to kill as many players as possible. Anti-Pk’ing, on the other hand, consisted of defending the victims of Pk’ers. Whereas RPk’er fought really anyone within reach, Anti-Pk’ers would attack RPk’ers in an attempt to protect the players who were in the Wilderness without the intention of killing someone. The best

123 example of this type of players are skillers, who would often enter the Wilderness to mine runite ore. Anti-Pk’ing clans actively patrolled in the Wilderness and sometimes fought RPk’ing clans, but they would never attack skillers or anyone else who clearly did not want to fight. A clan that became well-known for having a strong Anti-Pk’ing policy is The Wilderness Guardians, founded in the later years of RS1. The third category, dueling, should in this context not be confused with dueling in the Duel Arena. Duelists in the Wilderness were similar to RPk’ers, with the only difference that they first asked permission to attack. These players formed a minority and any duel was usually done between friends who wanted to have hang out in the Wilderness without bothering other people. The most popular place to organize a duel at was anywhere in the first five levels of the Wilderness or near the Dark Warriors Fortress. Warring is of a whole different level than the previous three types of Pk’ing. Clans often waged war on one another because they wanted to prove their superiority. These clan wars occurred in a very controlled manner, and not at random. It was customary for clans to contact the leaders of other clans to make official war declarations. The invited clan could decline or accept after thinking about it for several hours, or sometimes even several days. Accepting the invitation set in motion a procedure of agreeing on the specific war rules that each clan member of the clans involved (could be more than one clan) had to respect. Eventually the clans would agree on a date for the war to take place, usually giving themselves some time to train and prepare a strategy. Sometimes a clan managed to rally more than hundred members, causing the war to be a relatively spectacular event that could sometimes last many hours. Solo Pk’ers (can be RPk’ers or Anti-Pk’ers) rarely interfered because they would almost certainly be killed.

In the chapter about RS1 I already discussed the armour and weaponry that was available in the early days of the game, but I will repeat some of that information here, with a focus on the PvP preferences. Let’s begin with the obvious: there was much less combat gear in RS1, but that did not mean that strategy was not important. In fact, it might even have been more important because, as I have already pointed out in one of previous paragraphs, less combat gear to choose from leads to less diversity. In addition to that, all weapons had the same attack speed, so a Pk’er tended to focus only on the stats of weapons and armour. For a warrior it was the norm to opt for the best possible equipment that the player could weird. This was the rune plate mail body (the original name for the rune platebody) after 23rd September 2001, as well as rune plate mail legs, a large rune helmet and a rune 2h sword. People who found rune armour too expensive usually went for monk robes instead because it would be better for their Prayer points. Melee was the most used combat type and there were several reasons for that: Melee was the strongest combat type, Magic was expensive because Runecrafting had not been released yet and xp in Hitpoints (old name for Constitution) could not be gained from Magic and Ranged, which could also only be used in far-distance Combat.

Wearing melee armour in RS1 did not decrease a player’s Magic bonus. It did not raise it either, but it did offer the best protection. Another fact to keep in mind is that it was possible to fail at casting a spell, resulting in not being able to cast any spell for around twenty seconds. This made Magic almost useless for Pk'ing at a low or medium level and it was therefore advised to use another combat type. Ranged was ideal for catching (definition follows below) or for quickly killing someone whose Hitpoints were low. Long-distance combat was also ideal for surprising an opponent, especially in crowds. A player would get a message in their inbox in that said Someone is shooting at you! when someone was attacking with Ranged, but the message did not say who. The best cost-efficient method for Pk’ing with Ranged was by using the best bow that a player could wield, plus bronze, iron or steel arrows (before March 2002 only one type of arrows existed, called ‘arrows’). Even though this may all sound nice, we should not forget the main disadvantage of using Ranged: the fact that it could not be used in close-distance combat. So altogether it was usually Melee that was the preferred combat type for Pk’ing. The equipment of the average Pk’er, after all the member-related combat updates of February and March 2002, consisted of a large rune helmet, a rune plate mail body, rune plate mail legs, a dragonstone amulet and a dragon battleaxe. 124

Magers usually wore the same outfit, but with the weapons replaced by a god staff and a god cape.

Combat itself used to work with a tricky system, called three-round Combat. As you might remember, once a player had attacked another player or a monster, or had become under attack by another player or monster, he or she could not move for the duration of three rounds. A round refers to two consecutive attacks in the duel, so one hit by player A and the retaliating hit by player B together form one round. If a player did manage to escape after three rounds, that player could not just run away, though, because there was no run-option in RS1. Walking away was the only option, which may or may not have been a disadvantage. It probably depended on the situation. The presence of the three-round system lied at the basis of a PvP phenomenon that existed only in RS1: catching. The act of catching consisted of tagging another player by using a Melee/Ranged/Magic attack, so that the other player would be forced to engage in three-round combat with the catcher. However, that was not as easy as it sounds and by most Pk’ers catching was considered to be a skill that required practice. Some Pk’ers even became well-known just because they were exceptionally good at catching.

Often in a fight the losing player, or the one who had taken a lot of damage during the three rounds, tried to run away (read as: walk away) so that he or she would have time to eat before the other Pk’er could attack again, triggering a new three- rounds session during which nothing else but combat could be done, not even eating or a drinking. The goal of catching was not only to engage in three rounds of combat with someone who was trying to escape, but also to catch the other player as fast as possible, granting the opponent very little time to restore their health. Good catchers therefore had a significant advantage as they could minimize the risk of their opponent healing fully. You might think that that seems quite simple, but there is more than meets the eye. Before I can demonstrate what catching looked like, I will first have to tell a few things about the technical background of catching in the paragraphs below. I should first explain that there could be only one catcher in any fight between two players. Catching, per definition, happened from a distance, but the non-catcher could still initiate a fight with a player who was escaping on the condition that there was no space between the two players. Catching, with one or more squares between the players, could also be done by using Melee. In this sense it is crucial to understand that catching does not mean attacking the other player, but that it refers to the act of forcing the other player into combat.

The technical aspect of catching is a little bit difficult to illustrate, but I will try my best. The ability to catch someone (or not) was based on the ping of both players on the server to which they had logged in. Ping is used to indicate the quality of the connection to the server in terms of how fast it responds. A high ping means that the connection speed is low and that the quality of the connection itself is bad in comparison with worlds that have a lower ping. Today everyone can see their ping for each server by using the ‘world select’ interface in the lobby. However, these ping values were not displayed in RS1. The role that ping played for catching is that only the player with the lowest ping in the fight could catch their opponent. The other player could not. Considering that the ping value could greatly differ for each person, the majority of the good Pk’ers had a homeworld for Pk’ing, or a couple of worlds with the lowest ping. There were a couple of ways to find out what the 125 most suitable servers for Pk’ing were. First of all, the ping time, the time it takes for the server to respond, is proportional to the distance (in real life) between the location of the server and the place where the player lives. The higher the distance, the higher the ping. This is why a European player will find that the game does not run smoothly on an Australian server.

Therefore, in RS1 it helped to know where each of the game servers was located and then a player could just pick the server that was the closest to where they lived. Of course, the various ping times per server could be decreased by having a good Internet provider. Anyway, even if a player knew what the best world was, he or she still did not know anything about the ping of their opponent. Luckily there was a little trick that could be used, although it was a risky one. A player could use the follow-option to follow the opponent. The distance between the two players would be a good indicator of who can catch whom. If the distance was one or two squares, the player who was following could not catch. If the distance was three or four squares, the player who was following could catch the other person. The game would automatically adjust the distance. For example, if a player with the ability to catch stood just one square behind his potential victim and then clicked the ‘follow’ option, the first payer would automatically run backwards to increase the distance to three or four squares, indicating that the first player had the ability to catch and that the other player did not. In other words, the first player had catch on the other player, as it was often called. However, by knowing whether or not a player had catch, they had still not caught the other person. So how did the catching part itself work?

For that, imagine a situation with two Pk’ers. One of them is a good catcher and is clearly winning the duel while her opponent is wishing he had never logged in that day. It is also the good Pk’er who has catch on the second player, the bad Pk’er. As soon as the three-round system allows it, the second player attempts to run away as far as possible in a non-diagonal line (this is important). Of course the first Pk’er cannot let that happen, so she attempts to catch him. However, she is a good catcher and she knows that she cannot just run after him. She knows that her timing must be perfect, so she waits until there are two squares between her and the other player, this corresponds with the time needed for the health bar (over the players’ heads) to disappear. At that moment she can click the attack-option on the other player to catch him at the instant. He would automatically be forced into three rounds of combat, regardless of the space in between them (when one of them is using Melee, the player who was caught will automatically, as determined by game mechanics, walk towards the opponent). However, if he, the second player, had run away in a diagonal line, she would not have been able to catch him simply by attacking him. Instead she would have had to click on any of the squares in front of him, immediately followed by clicking the attack-option, and then she would have caught him. Now imagine that the situation was slightly different and it is the bad Pk’er, he, who has catch on the good Pk’er, she. In this case she would have not have been able to catch him. Instead, when clicking to catch the opponent, she would automatically stop following the opponent and just stand still, while the opponent could continue to run away.

So far we have discussed solo Pk'ing, but of course there also existed several Pk'ing clans. Some strategies and armour mentioned earlier in this chapter were not the best option to make use of in such clans. A good team consisted of high-level magers who could cast the Charge and Guthix spell, high-level archers and a bunch of warriors who used their best melee armour or monk robes. The warriors sometimes also carried some death runes for combat spells. Combat between two warriors could be done only in a one-vs-one fight, but something that I have not mentioned yet is that this counted only for Melee, not for Ranged and Magic. I am going to use a short example to demonstrate when this one-vs-one rule did not count: during a one-vs-one fight between two warriors, anyone else could still attack the warriors by using Ranged or Magic, but the two warriors were not able to retaliate as they were still fighting each other. Additionally, there was no limit on the amount of rangers and magers that could attack a warrior simultaneously. So if a warrior came

126 face-to-face with three archers, leading to a one-vs-tree battle, the warrior could attack only one archer while all archers could attack the warrior. That is why having archers and magers on the team or clan was a good and preferable strategy for Pk'ing in groups. Furthermore, it was advised that Pk'ers also brought sharks and a superset (a set of strong potions). However, supersets were extremely expensive in RS1 (sometimes up to 500k gp was paid for them), so they were often replaced by regular potions.

An interesting aspect of PvP is the PvP clan world, so I would first like to have a closer look at the PvP clan world of RS1. It is important to keep in mind that RS1 revolved around PvP. Skilling was present as a necessity, but it is difficult to speak of PvM due to a lack of bosses or other high- levelled monsters. The first clans that joined the game organized themselves in function of the system with the player-killer and non-player-killer statuses. This is how the game was initially split up into two communities: the Pk’er and the skillers, but the skillers were in the minority because there was not much content available yet. The first PvP-driven community was therefore inevitable. The inclusion of a section about PvP clans was quite a mammoth task due to many sources being available, for both the recent years and the RS1 years. Thankfully, for the RS1 years I have received help from Rab, the first registered RuneScape player, and King Sabre, the founder and former owner of the very first clan in RuneScape. Furthermore, in what I assume to be a stroke of luck, the history of RS1 PvP is extremely well-documented, thanks to a group of players, all of them being former clan leaders, who wrote a review about the clan history in 2003. The author of it is RuneScape player TimmyMWD, who received help from King Sabre, Militant, Osiris BK and Zei. The vast majority of the information about the RS1 PvP clan world is based on their work. I should also mention that the reader needs to take into account a certain degree of subjectivity, especially for the early years of the game. As a consequence it is possible that important clan names have omitted, whereas less important ones might have been included. The PvP clan world description that is included in this chapter is based on all the information that I could find and I am sure that the general story behind it is accurate. Details, however, might sometimes be erroneous. From a personal point of view I have to admit that writing about the PvP clan work has been the most difficult task I have had to do for this project. Being a skiller myself, my knowledge of anything PvP was non-existent. I owe a lot of gratitude to the players of the High Level Forum community who were able to provide information about RS2 and RS3 PvP, and PvP clans. Without their help, and patience, I would probably not have been able to write anything about the PvP clan world of RS2 and later. But that is for later, RS1 PvP clans is where we should begin.

It all started a few years before the existence of RuneScape, in a game, called Cyber Wars on Games Domain (which no longer exists today). A group of people had founded The Sabres clan in that game and soon established themselves as one of the biggest clan, with several hundreds of members. Then at one moment in 1999 or 2000 RuneScape’s co-developer Andrew Gower, who was an administrator on Games Domain at that time, started to discuss his latest project with the Cyber Wars community, including The Sabres clan. His new project was RuneScape and The Sabres decided to keep an eye on the website until eventually the game was officially released on 4th January 2001. It is estimated that about half the players who created an account during the first few days of RuneScape’s existence were members of The Sabres, who had decided to leave Cyber Wars behind and play RuneScape instead. This means that the first RuneScape clan was already present from day one. King Sabre, the founder of the clan, encountered his first enemy when he and his 127 friend were attacked by a player, called Messiah. His friend died, but King Sabre survived. His friend had lost all of his items during the assault because banks at that time could not hold items yet. Altogether the attack was a reason for King Sabre to decide that his clan should focus on fighting RPk’ers, Random Player Killers. With The Sabres becoming Anti-RPk, Messiah decided to found his own clan so that he could protect himself from The Sabres. His clan, which he called the Messiahs, became the first RPk clan of the game, with its members attacking random players in group, mostly by using bow. The Sabres (anti-RPk) and The Messiahs (RPk) are generally considered to be the first two clans of the game, and they immediately became sworn enemies.

During their raging rivalry other clans slowly established themselves in Gielinor. Completely unaware of The Sabres’s and Messiahs’s existence, these newer clans formed the first alliance, called ANKA, or A New Kind of Alliance. One of its clans was BlacKnights, founded by Osiris BK. This person would later play an important role in the clan PvP world. Meanwhile the Messiahs had started to use dirty tactics in an attempt to spoil the reputation of The Sabres. It had from the very beginning been agreed that each member of The Sabres should have the word Sabre in their name. The Messiahs harshly abused this by making fake Sabre accounts and randomly attacking players, creating the impression that The Sabres clan was one of the bad guys. The situation escalated when one of the fake Sabres attacked a member of ANKA, who in response decided to fight the actual Sabres clan, unaware of the fact these imposters were not part of The Sabres. Nevertheless, the fight took place and ANKA was crushed by The Sabres, leading to the disbanding of ANKA. Meanwhile the clan scenery had witnessed the birth of The Gladiatorz clan. After several fights in Varrock’s palace against The Sabres, both clans ended up becoming powerful allies. A welcome move, as it turned out later, because another new clan, called Anfibian, created the Anti-Sabres Alliance (ASA) because at that moment it was still assumed that the fake Sabres were actual Sabres. Quite a few clans joined ASA, including another clan that had made the transition from Cyber Wars to RuneScape, although much later, called THE, founded by Militant. They were The Sabres’s enemies in Cyber Wars and continued to fulfill that role in RuneScape. At that moment, ASA, consisting of multiple clans, was the enemy of the alliance formed between The Sabres and The Gladiatorz. Not much later ASA discovered that the fake Sabres were in fact fake and thus ASA had no longer a reason to exist. ASA was renamed EARTH and peace was established between EARTH and The Sabres. EARTH stood for Eternal Alliance of Rationality, Truth and Honor. This paragraph demonstrates that clan world was certainly a harsh environment in its early stages.

As more and more clans gradually sprang into existence, the big clans began to see a need to form more alliances. This led Osiris BK to founding an alliance with the name of Syndicate, which EARTH, The Sabres, The Gladiatorz and BlacKnights ended up joining. Meanwhile another player set out to unite all evil clans. This was person was Zei and she responded appropriately by founding Dark Syndicate, which welcomed the Messiahs and several other clans who were not aware yet that The Sabres were actually the good guys. It goes without saying that a war between Syndicate and Dark Syndicate was inevitable, so eventually Dark Syndicate declared war on Syndicate, but Zei was let down by her followers. In what was supposed to become the most spectacular display of collective power, only six players showed up to fight at Zei’s side. They were no match for the more than 150 Syndicate members. Syndicate forced Zei to leave RuneScape, after which King Rage became the new leader of Dark Syndicate. All of the rivalries so far have revolved around The Sabres clan. However, at one point The Gladiatorz declared war on Death Corps, which was easily won one by the former clan after Death Corps had made an error in their preparation and accidentally revealed their strategy. Of course Death Corps wanted revenge, so they declared war on The Gladiatorz again. Karamja’s volcano would feature as the setting of, until then, one of the biggest wars in the history of the game. The Gladiatorz and the Syndicate’s allies, who were there in support, were defeated. It was clear that Syndicate had lost some of its power. Luckily for them, King Sabre acted as a diplomat and convinced Dark Syndicate that there was no reason to fight the Sabres. Syndicate and Dark Syndicate successfully established peace. 128

Shortly before the release of the Wilderness in the summer of 2001, a new clan emerged and declared war on The Sabres. Mithril, the name of the new clan, must have either been extremely courageous or unaware of the forces supporting The Sabres. At that point EARTH, Syndicate, Dark Syndicate and NKKA were ready to fight alongside The Sabres. NKKA, Newbie-Killer Killers Alliance, had been created during the wars between The Gladiatorz and DeathCorps. It was a big alliance that revolved around protecting the weak and standing up for them when necessary. The world of Gielinor prepared for what would be called The Battle for RuneScape. It is estimated that more than 1,000 players showed up, the largest war to occur in RS1. The Sabres and its allies marched up to the Barbarian Village, which is where the battle was supposed to take place, but they were surprised to see that the only people present were a group of random PK’ers. Not sure what was going on, Militant (founder of THE and by then no longer the enemy of The Sabres) ordered the allied clans to retreat to Edgeville. However, hidden among the random Pk’er were a couple of Mithril members and they decided to attack as the allied forces were retreating. Militant then decided that every member in the alliance should meet up in Lumbridge, one of the few safe zones at that moment. What had happened? No one knew until Can Not, founder of Mithril, explained that there was never a Mithril clan and that the entire battle was a hoax. Not much later Zei returned to RuneScape and was shocked to see that Syndicate and Dark Syndicate had become allies. What followed was a series of meaningful events, starting with King Rage dissolving Dark Syndicate, an alliance that has initially been founded to oppose The Sabres clan. However, since they had established peace, there was no longer a reason for Dark Syndicate to exist. Militant, founder of THE, resigned from clan life after a dispute with King Sabre. Osiris BK, founder of BlacKnights and the Syndicate alliance, followed Militant and also turned his back on the clan world. While all of that was going on between the aforementioned clans, there was another big clan spectating the show without meddling themselves in any unnecessary drama. The Wanderers was founded early in 2001 and was generally considered to be the strongest clan of the first half of 2001. No clan dared to battle The Wanderers, their power was well-respected and The Wanderers themselves had no intention of going to war with other clans, which was a relief for the other clans. However, the clan fell apart shortly after the Wilderness had been added to the game in August of 2001. A notable member of that clan was Lightning, one of the beta testers of the game.

The release of the Wilderness meant that PvP elsewhere in RuneScape would no longer be possible, if ignore the stake-option here. With the Wilderness being an area where players are supposed to kill each other, it suddenly became very difficult to protect players from RPk’ers. This was a problem for many clans because their policy revolved around protecting innocent players. One of these clans was The Sabres and its members failed to agree on a new policy, so the clan split into two parts: Light Sabres, with King Sabre, and Dark Sabres, with anyone who did not support King Sabre’s suggested policy. Meanwhile the Phalanx clan had been created and they sided with Light Sabres. A while later Militant returned to RuneScape to defend King Sabre in the daily skirmishes between the two Sabre clans. Nevertheless, the first Wilderness war was not between these clans. In fact, Light Sabres and Dark Sabres teamed up in the first Wilderness war to fight Death Corps, who had returned stronger than ever and declared war on both Sabre clans. The war was easily won by the Sabres, but that did not make both Sabre clans get along any better. The clash between Light and Dark was just a matter of time. Ironically, it was a secret attempt to negotiate peace between these clans that set everything in motion. The secret attempt by Orkman2k1, member of the Light Sabres, 129 was not appreciated by King Sabre and eventually Orkman2k1 was forced out of the clan. Infuriated with this drastic measure, Orkman2k1 founded Clan Hellion, but disguised it under the name of Miners Inc. He then declared war on Light Sabres and the Phalanx clan, hoping that Dark Sabres would support him. However, both Orkman2k1 and Light Sabres were not aware of the fact that Dark Sabres had ceased to exist until one of its members revealed the truth to King Sabre. Even though Orkman2k1 received no support, he still managed to push the Phalanx clan with their backs against the wall. The Wilderness had its fair share in causing tension between various clans, but the new Pk’ing system was just not the same as the original one. From the perspective of the clans at that moment, it is said that August 2001 is when the Golden Age of RuneScape ended.

Between August 2001 and February 2002, when the membership option and the Kingdom of Kandarin were added to the game, the big clans slowly dissolved, died or disappeared otherwise. New clans slowly replaced them, although THE continued to exist. A little later, completely out of nowhere, a renaissance of the old clans surprised many. King Sabre returned and revived The Sabres. Also Osiris BK returned to reestablish BlacKnights and Syndicate, and not much later also the alliance EARTH arose from its ashes. Two of the new clans were Ninja and Dark Forces. The return of the old clans frightened them, so they decide unite by founding the Alliance of Darkness. However, this might not have been necessary because an unprecedented amount of drama in the Syndicate led to THE and RuneScape Dinasty leaving Syndicate. RuneScape Dinasty had been founded in 2001 by Dravenstorm, but operated mainly in the background until late 2002. The Sabres and Syndicate declared war on THE and RuneScape Dinasty, but the plans were aborted at the last minute and a treaty was signed instead. However, that did not solve much. RuneScape Dinasty was still angry with The Gladiatorz, who had earlier been the direct cause of RuneScape Dinasty leaving Syndicate, so they decided to declare war on The Gladiatorz. Evidently, Syndicate showed up to support The Gladiatorz, but that was not the only thing going on in Gielinor at that moment. Another new clan, called RuneScape Mob, had challenged Ninjas to a war. Meanwhile Golden Helms (another new clan) left Syndicate, also due to The Gladiatorz, and allied with THE. Never before had there been so much tension in the clan world. Syndicate, with The Sabres, was once again the target of multiple alliances: the Alliance of Darkness (Ninja + Dark Forces) and the unofficial alliance between THE, RuneScape Dinasty and Golden Helms. This last alliance started to prepare in the Wilderness on the day of the way, waiting for Syndicate to battle them. Syndicate was primarily represented by members of The Gladiatorz and BlacKnights, although other clans were present in support as well. The war went on for hours, but it was eventually RuneScape Dinasty and its allies that claimed victory. This was a tragedy for Syndicate and eventually total chaos ensued when the clans in Syndicate began to cause trouble for each other. Osiris BK stepped down in BlacKnights and dissolved Syndicate. The once so powerful Syndicate had been reduced to a house of complete madness. Shutting it down was the only solution. The Sabres were not spared as one of their members had started a revolt against King Sabre. Luckily, that did not have a significant impact on the clan. In response to Syndicate’s downfall, the Neo Syndicate was founded to revive the alliance.

Alliance of Darkness had initially been founded for defensive purposes in case the old clans would become a threat again. However, with the Syndicate no longer present in-game, and thus the old clans no longer being in control, Alliance of Darkness had become redundant, so they decided that they no longer wanted to battle. Nevertheless, Gladiatorz challenged them multiple times, but Alliance of Darkness refused to battle each time. Meanwhile Neo Syndicate was struggling as well. NATO, founded by Zei and Tom Ato, left Neo Syndicate to become an independent alliance, consisting of several other clans. An internal dispute in Alliance of Darkness caused the Ninjas clan to leave the alliance. Ninjas did not survive this move and was shut down not much later. Two relatively new clans, The Musketeers and Runite Knights, challenged Alliance of Darkness, which they accepted. The Gladiatorz decided to help out and defended the two newer clans. Meanwhile Orbital2, leader of Golden Helms, had founded the RuneScape Federation of Knights, a new 130 alliance consisting of several big clans, such as THE, BlacKnights and RS Mob. The RuneScape Federation of Knights decided to participate in the war as well, so things were about to turn very ugly for Alliance of Darkness. However, the war would never take place because Gladiatorz had, for unknown reasons, decided to attack BlacKnights, despite being on the same side. This event caused the immediate collapse of the RuneScape Federation of Knights. Their success was short- lived and Allegiance of Darkness got away without a war.

As the PvP clan world tumbled from one dramatic event right into the next one, another clan took to opportunity to rise to power. Black Dragon Knights slowly became the most powerful clan in RS1, crushing one clan after the other. Their victory over The Gladiatorz inspired the latter to attempt the formation of an ultimate alliance to fight Black Dragon Knights, but this alliance was never established due to conflicting interests. At the same time RS Mob challenged RuneScape Dinasty to a war, but RS Mob was no match for them. RuneScape Dinasty had become one of the strongest clans of the game, although their popularity was also caused by the fact that they had started to focus on non-combat as well. It is not a coincidence that the first skilling clans began to arise at around that time, summer 2003. Slowly but steadily the skilling clans started to exert their influence. It was generally considered a smart move for combat clans to focus on non-combat as well. This is because traditional warring had become more or less pointless. With the original Pk’ing system (before the release of the Wilderness in August of 2001), the focus was on protecting innocent players from RPk’ers. A second objective was to fend off RPk’ing clans. Both of these activities became a lot more difficult when the Wilderness was added to the game because it caused the amount of RPk’ing to increase dramatically. The majority of the clan wars after August 2001 had as main purpose to establish some sort of hierarchy and to show one’s dominance. This was doomed from the start just because there was never a need for that. The amount of clan drama that followed proved that clan wars were for the most part nothing but a source of stress. As new game content was added to RuneScape, the need for assistance with skilling gradually increased over the course of the years. Eventually this need became apparent. More and more players started to realize what the importance of skilling was, which caused skilling clans to operate more and more in the foreground as well, alongside the PvP clans. However, it should be noted that Pk’ing was still extremely popular at that time, more than skilling was, but it was still necessary that the PvP clans adapted to being more skill-focused too.

While all of that was going on, Black Dragon Knights were still causing havoc. A second attempt to form an alliance against them was successful. Unholy Syndicate was founded and consisted of BlacKnights, The Gladiatorz, THE, The Darq Syde and several smaller clans. Their goal was obvious: to protect each other. However, The Gladiatorz could not fall back upon its allies in their next war because it had been agreed between the clans that no allies could participate. Their opponent was Mystic Knights, a clan founded by former The Gladiatorz members who were not happy with the state of the clan. The Mystic Knights clan was driven by frustration and they desperately wanted to prove that The Gladiatorz had made a mistake. Eventually they managed to defeat The Gladiatorz and got what they wanted. Mystic Knights was part of the alliance, called Empire. Other clans in Empire were 3v0luti0n, Exercitum, RS Mob and several smaller clans. However, Empire soon began to lose members. Eventually only Exercitum and RS Mob were left in the alliance, but they did not get along, so eventually the entire alliance collapsed. Unholy Syndicate saw that as an opportunity to wage war against RS Mob. This war was different than other wars because Unholy Syndicate had by then become somewhat skill-focused as well, where RS Mob was still completely Pk-oriented. Clan Jaguar, Exercitum, Guardians of Honor and The Sabres decided to assist Unholy Syndicate, whereas RS Mob’s only support came from the clan Corruption. Mystics Knights had initially offered to help RS Mob as well, but the clan disbanded shortly before the war was supposed to the place. In the end RS Mob and Corruption were outnumbered by their opponents and did not stand a chance. In the last months and weeks of RS1, everything calmed down a little bit as clans were preparing for RS2’s release. Black Dragon 131

Knights’s reign lasted only a couple of months, the clans in pole position for RS2 seemed to be BlacKnights, Clan Jaguar, Corruption, Exercitum, The Gladiatorz, RuneScape Dinasty, THE and The Sabres. A lot of changes were made to combat during the RS2 beta and therefore also to Pk'ing itself. The most radical combat changes that affected PvP are as follows:

-The three-round combat system was removed. The consequence of this update was that a player could try to escape from their aggressor at any time, which increased the difficulty of Pk'ing. At that time many Pk'ers quit playing RuneScape as a result of this change. This is also means that catching would no longer work. However, Jagex solved this issue, if it could considered to be one, by releasing the Magic spells that can bind an opponent to their spot, such as the Entangle spell. The disappearance of catching was not Jagex’s only reason for adding the spells, though. During the beta they had also released the run-option, so that players were no longer forced to walk all the time. Of course this would make it easier for players to run away from Pk’ers, so in a sense those Magic spells could be considered a compensation.

-The auto-retaliate-option was introduced. In RS1 a player’s character would automatically retaliate when under attack. This was particularly annoying because of the three-round system. However, the removal of this three-round system allowed the introduction of a toggleable auto-retaliate option, so that a player could choose to ignore the aggressor.

-The combat triangle was added to RuneScape: As part of arguably the biggest combat-related update in the beta, every combat type (Magic, Melee, Ranged) was given its own strengths and weaknesses in comparison with other combat types. For Magic this meant that the combat type would become stronger compared to Melee. At first, however, Jagex had made Magic overpowered, so they soon decided to nerf it by reducing the stats of most Magic armour and by introducing a new defence system for Magic. Furthermore, Ranged and Magic could now be used in close-combat as well. The main purpose of this combat triangle was to balance combat. However, it had a major impact on PvP because the traditional choices for armour and weapons would no longer be ideal. The presence of the combat triangle increased the diversity of combat in general, which was probably a good thing for PvP, although some might disagree. Another consequence of introducing the combat triangle is that Melee gear ended up being indirectly nerfed, in a way. In RS1 a player was able to attack with Ranged and Magic whilst wearing Melee armour and they would not lose accuracy or any hits because of it. This changed in RS2 because Melee armour for protection would now have negative effects when using Magic spells and/or being targeted by Magic attacks. Furthermore, Ranged and Magic were now possible to be used in close-combat as well.

-Attack styles were added to the game. If a player in RS2 opened the combat tab when wielding, for example, a Melee weapon, they could choose whether they wanted to use stab, crush, hack, slash, chop, hack, smash, etc... Those were the attacks styles for the combat type Melee. Each type of weapon had its own attack styles, usually two or. The same counts for the Ranged and Magic combat types. These different attack styles did not exist in RS1. The main purpose of their existence was to make combat more strategic in RS2. Each attack style had its own strength/weakness against certain types of armour. Not only was each weapon given specific attack styles, Jagex also added different attack speeds to all the weapons. This made combat more complex as a Pk’er would now have to consider not only weapon/armour stats, but also attack styles and attack speeds, on the top of the effects imposed by the combat triangle.

-New Combat gear was added to the game. This update went hand in hand with the combat triangle system and with the strategy aspect of combat. For archers armour up to dragonhide armour was added. This dragonhide armour had the same Defence stats as a rune platebody, but it also provided a Ranged bonus. This meant that the rune platebody would no longer be the best chest piece to wear for PvP. Consequently, it was replaced by the new dragonhide armour. 132

-Multi-way Combat was added to RuneScape: Players were given the ability to pile their opponent and vice versa. For Ranged and Magic this was already possible in RS1, more or less, but it was not exactly the same because warriors had previously been left out. Two warriors could engage only in one-vs-one fights in RS1. The new combat system made it possible for them to switch targets at will. The only place where this would be possible, however, was in the new multi-combat areas. The eastern part of the Wilderness ended up becoming the designated area for multi-way combat, although the Dark Warriors’ Fortress and the Bandit Camp, both of which are located in the eastern part of the Wilderness, were turned into multi-way Combat zones too. This part of the update was quite confusing and therefore some people did not know that also multiple monsters could simultaneously attack in multi-combat areas, even when those players were engaged in combat with other Pk’ers.

Along with the release of RS2, a new area was added that had as main purpose to replace the on-the-spot challenge system for Pk'ing that existed in safe areas in RS1. The area that I am speaking of is the Duel Arena. This arena introduced a new activity to RuneScape, called 'staking'. Today staking still exists, but it has become quite an isolated activity, so I will quickly explain what it looked like shortly after the release of RS2. Any player could challenge anyone else to a duel while putting any items of choice at stake. The winner would receive the staked items from both parties, but nothing else. Unbalanced stakes were already possible as well. It is unbalanced when someone, for example, offers 500k gp to stake, while the opponent offers only 200k gp. This kind of staking was not possible from December 2007- February 2011 as a result of the temporary free trade removal. More about that will follow later in this chapter. Many of the Pk'ing aspects were also present in Duel Arena fights, so staking ended up becoming a successful alternative to Wilderness Pk'ing for anyone who was not happy after the changes that PvP had undergone in the RS2 beta. 24th April 2006 was the day on which the Wilderness teleportation obelisks were added to the game. The role that these played in Pk’ing strategy, however, was restricted to P2P in the clan world. The obelisks would be used for getting to the Rogues’ Castle very fast, deep in the Wilderness. These teleportation obelisks can be found at several levels in the Wilderness. When a player is standing in one of these portals, he or she can activate one of its pillars to be teleported to another randomly chosen obelisk in the Wilderness. However, casting a teleblock spell on a player prevents them from being teleported by the obelisk. So if a Pk’er wanted to, they could just wait with the teleblock spell at one of the obelisks until an unlucky victim appeared. This method of Pk'ing was not popular, though; because it was relatively inefficient and too passive. The important contribution of the obelisks is that they made travelling much faster in the Wilderness.

RS2 spans many years and the PvP world underwent several major changes during that time. Instead of the RS2 PvP clan world in its entirety, it might be better to split it up into two parts. The first part will comprise the period January 2004 – January 2008, when several drastic changes were made to the game. More about that will follow later. In the chapter about the RuneScape community we learnt about the Miniclip generation and a sudden explosive growth in the player base. One of the consequences was that the amount of clans significantly increased, with the vast majority of them staying relatively unknown. It is therefore not possible to create a complete image of the clan world of RS2 and RS3 because I will be necessarily restricted to those clans for which a lot of information was stored online. This coincides with the top clans, representing not even a one-digit 133 percentage of the entire clan world. So due to the large number of clans and the limited availability of information about any clan that was never at the top of the PvP community, I saw myself necessarily restricted to focusing on the top PvP clans. These top clans usually had the habit of writing an autobiography, with a strong focus on how powerful they were and on their position at the top of the clan community, or not at all. These clans also documented their most significant wars. The clans at the top of the PvP community from 2004 till the end of 2007 (not necessarily for the entire duration of the indicated period), in alphabetical order, were Corruption, Damage Incorporated, Divine Forces, Dark Slayers, RuneScape Dinasty, Silent Assassins, THE, The Gladiatorz. Unfortunately, the clan autobiographies for Dark Slayers and Silent Assassins were no longer available when I started writing this chapter, so I could focus only on the other five clans. This is why there will be relatively little information about these two clans, but it should be kept in mind that these two were for a long time considered top five clans. In fact, Dark Slayers were considered to be the undisputed number one clan in 2006 and in the first half of 2007. Due to all of these eight clans regularly waging war against other clans, there will still be mention of many more clans and how they related to each other.

The PvP clan world has the habit of abbreviating clan names. I will refrain from doing that, otherwise it might lead to confusion. However, I will shorten Damage Incorporated to Damage Inc. and RuneScape Dinasty to RS Dinasty. Furthermore, even though I have been calling these clans PvP clans, some of these were just community clans who happened to be very good at PvP. The Gladiatorz and THE are two examples of that. Also RS Dinasty was initially a clan for both skillers and Pk’ers, although they did become entirely PvP-focused later on. The information on the next twenty pages is essentially an analysis and summary of the clan autobiographies that were available. Surprisingly, the information in each autobiography generally overlapped nicely with information in any of the other autobiographies, which indicates that these clans were relatively honest in their reflection about the clan’s history. However, there were several cases where either information in multiple sources was contradictory or where the same event was assigned to different periods. When I could not succeed in figuring out which source the correct one was, my only remaining option was to make a logical guess and to go for the version that was probably the correct one. This is why there might be several errors in the summary, although these errors should be minor of nature, most often restricted to the quantity of players who participated in war or the wrong order of two consecutive wars.

Especially since the release of RS2 have the PvP clans used ranking systems on external websites to determine who the best PvP clans were. These rankings were called warring ladders and consisted of a system similar to leagues in which points can be won for defeating the opponent. The most important warring ladder for RS2 was considered to be the one on, what was then called, the RuneScape Community website. Whenever I mention that a clan has a certain rank, you can assume that the rank is based on the RuneScape Community warring ladder. I will not go into detail about these warring ladders, I just wanted to let you know that any of the ranks mentioned in the summary are based on an actual ranking system and are not in some way made up in order to provide an easier mental representation of the hierarchy. The warring ladders is also why the eight aforementioned clans were, amongst others, considered to be the top PvP clans. Usually the difference between top five and top ten was noticeable on the battlefield, although in rare cases a top twenty clan would surprise the clan community and defeat a high-ranked clan.

In the early months of 2004, before RS2 was released, several wars were still being fought in RS1. One of these wars was between Gladiatorz and Zeonic Force. The former was part of an alliance, called The Alliance. This is the same alliance as the Unholy Syndicate, but at some point it was decided to rename the alliance. The clans BlacKnights, The Gladiatorz, The Darq Syde and THE were part of that alliance when The Gladiatorz faced Zeonic Force at the beginning of 2004. Both clans managed to pull a high amount of options, a term which I have avoided until now. Options, as 134 they were called, is the on-screen indicator of the amount of options that is visible when you right- click on a pile of players. For a long time, I do not know when this was updated, the box with the options displayed the total number of options, limited to 399. At the end of RS1 and in RS2 there were three options for each person, when right-clicked. In other words, when right-clicking a pile of players and the option box indicates that there are 300 options, it means that 100 people are standing on the same spot. Before and after clan wars each clan would do an option count. The clan members were asked to stand on the same square. Due to the primitive graphics before July 2008 (when Jagex released HD gameplay), it was visible that the ground beneath a player’s feet was an area consisting of squares, with a square being as big as a spot to stand on. In other words, a square is as big as the space occupied by a person or human-sized NPCs. Bigger NPCs, such as the King Black Dragon or even hill giants, take up multiple squares. An option count implied that each member was asked to stand on the same square, so that the amount of participating clan members in the war could be deduced from the number of options, with three options for one player. However, this was capped at 399 options, but that was not a problem because the clan could simply use two piles of players for the member count instead of one to bypass the cap. Although no specific numbers were provided, both The Gladiatorz and Zeonic Force managed to pull a high amount of options, as it was referred to neo-idiomatically. Eventually it was The Gladiatorz clan who won the war, despite the war being crashed by Malicious Intent, a clan notoriously known for crashing wars at that time. I should mention that over the course of the years many new clans have adopted the name Malicious Intent, so if you happen to know a clan with that name, it is probably not the same Malicious Intent that crashed wars in RS1 and RS2.

The Darq Syde left The Alliance in February. At around the same time Clan Jaguar became an ally of The Gladiatorz and joined The Alliance to replace the clan that had left. March 2004 was an important month for RuneScape and the clan world. First of all, the clan Damage Inc. was founded by X Bigaboys X and would by May accumulate hundred members. At the end of March the game developers released RS2 and introduced multi-combat to the Wilderness. The impact on the PvP clan world was enormous because of several reasons. First of all, the introduction of multi-combat caused Wilderness PvP to become entirely different, with as consequence that new strategies had to be devised. Additionally, the new combat triangle and the many changes made to Combat armour and weaponry (as described earlier in this chapter), reinforced the need for different strategies. Furthermore, many players were hesitant about playing the new version of the game and decided to stay in RS1. This caused a division in the community, with as unfortunate consequence that many clans either did not survive the transition to RS2 or lost a lot of power. A few of these clans are RS Mob, The Darq Syde and The Sabres. None of those would ever play an important role again in the world of the top PvP clans. Exercitum and RS Dinasty, on the other hand, rose to power and were quickly joined by Damage Inc. The Gladiatorz, who were not as powerful at that time, was declared war upon by Mystic Dynasty. Both clans agreed that no allies could be brought, but Mystic Dynasty bypassed this rule by merging with several other clans and thus becoming stronger. Despite this strategic move, The Gladiatorz showed that they were good clan and defeated Mystic Dynasty.

At around the same time Corruption ran into a miniwar between Exercitum and The Gladiatorz. With the latter being one of their worst enemies, Corruption decided to help Exercitum, which sufficed to secure the victory. Both clans got along quite well, developed a good friendship and eventually decided to form an alliance, under the name of Exercitum of Corruption. Their objective was simple: to defeat The Alliance, which they did. RS Dinasty and Damage Inc. both fell victim to the combined power of Exercitum of Corruption as they were defeated in several P2P miniwars. RS Dinasty was considered to be the best F2P PvP clan at that moment, so the newly formed alliance was strong. However, not strong enough, so during the early summer the clans Anarchy and Mystic Dinasty joined the Exercitum of Corruption alliance, which then proceeded to change the alliance’s name to The Golden Alliance. Random Pk’ers would often wear the same yellow capes that members of The Golden Alliance wore to avoid being attacked by them, because that is how strong 135

The Golden Alliance was. Meanwhile The Alliance decided that they could not let that happen, so together with The Mighty Red Dragon, The Alliance declared war on Corruption, Exercitum and any ally that they wished to bring. The clan Golden Helms decided to help out Corruption and Exercitum, while Damage Inc. and the clan Legendary Knights also attended the war. The Mighty Red Dragons were not part of The Alliance, but had been an ally of all four clans within the alliance (BlacKnights, Clan Jaguar, THE, The Gladiatorz). Eventually The Alliance outnumbered Corruption and co. and won the war.

That event proved to be a turning point for The Golden Alliance. Tension grew as Mystic Dynasty, one of the allies, was provoked by other clans who claimed that Mystic Dynasty relied too much on its allies and could not win a war on their own. This on-going negative stimulus convinced Mystic Dynasty to pretend that they had pulled out of the alliance (of course the allies were aware of that). A fatal move because, for some reason, it was the beginning of the end for the clan. Mystic Dynasty imploded shortly afterwards, so eventually there were only three clans left in The Golden Alliance. One of them was Anarchy, but Corruption did not like them. No longer willing to cooperate with them, Corruption decided to attack Anarchy during one of their Pk’ing trips, which caused Anarchy to leave the alliance. Eventually The Golden Alliance had been reduced to the same two clans that it was founded by: Corruption and Exercitum. However, due to other clans having grown in the meantime, they noticed that the alliance was not strong enough anymore, but the problems did not end there for them. Zeonic Force was one of Corruption’s allies, but they failed to sustain their friendship in the long run. Several conflicts were enough for a war declaration to be brought forward. By July 2004 Zeonic Force had established a relatively good bond with The Alliance, so Corruption expected that The Alliance would help Zeonic Force, which would almost certainly have erased any possibility for Corruption to win. However, to their own surprise, Zeonic Force showed up alone and Corruption had no problem with defeating them. In the weeks following this victory, Corruption started losing war after war. The low point was when Clan Jaguar needed nothing more than a minute to present Corruption with a humiliating defeat. The Golden Alliance consisted of two clans at that moment, so with Corruption having become significantly weaker, The Golden Alliance itself was in trouble as well. Their solution was to look for help elsewhere. Legendary Knights volunteered and were let in.

With regained power, The Golden Alliance, and especially Corruption, restarted doing what they did best: crashing wars and Pk’ing trips. All good for some entertainment, but their mistake was to crash a war that was being fought by The Alliance, who could not laugh with this move and were infuriated. The Alliance, with The Mighty Red Dragons in support and thus five clans strong, declared war against The Golden Alliance, who had only just allowed a third clan in after serious struggles. As The Alliance saw no reason to fulfill Corruption’s request of entering the battlefield with only three clans, several of Corruption’s former allies offered to help The Golden Alliance. These clans were Anarchy, perhaps a surprise, Damage Inc. and The Dark Legends. However, after a series of mix-ups in The Golden Alliance, eventually only Corruption and Damage Inc. were willing to take on The Alliance. Where did Exercitum and Legendary Knights go? With only two clans remaining, both of them decided that it was not worth the effort and decided to cancel the war. Cancelling a war was a big deal. Not only did it equate to admitting defeat on an ex-ante basis, it was also seen as a cowardly act for not being willing to suffer the actual defeat. Going to war and losing was more honourable than cancelling the war. As for the other two clans in The Golden Alliance, the clan Legendary Knights died shortly after the war and Exercitum went inactive at the same time. Both of these events heralded the end for The Golden Alliance, which collapsed, leaving Corruption all by themselves.

RS Dinasty somehow managed to recruit over hundred people in June and July of 2004. This immediately turned them into the rank one of the F2P PvP clan world. RS Dinasty was quite reluctant about going to war, they were involved in fewer wars than their direct competition, but 136 they always won. In 2004 RS Dinasty was an extremely strong clan. Damage Inc., who had also established themselves near the top of the PvP clan world, decided to challenge RS Dinasty with rank one as the stake. However, the war declaration happened in June, before RS Dinasty had recruited so many people, while the actual war did not take place until late July, which is after RS Dinasty had almost doubled in size to just over 250 members. Meanwhile Damage Inc. was stuck at a member count of just over 150. The only logical outcome of the war was that RS Dinasty was going to win, and they did. Damage Inc. stood no chance against the 150 combatants who had shown up for RS Dinasty. About fifteen to thirty minutes was all the time needed to claim victory at the greater demon spot in the Wilderness. Despite the blatant difference in clan size, this victory was not predictable during the war itself. Damage Inc. was a clan that had been founded in RS2 and became successful by using the RS2 Wilderness system. RS Dinasty, on the other hand, rose to the top of the PvP clan world before 2004 and had to adapt to the RS2 Wilderness system. Many clans had not survived the transition between the two versions of the game. RS Dinasty, on the other hand, had survived while a new generation of started to appear more frequently as mid-2004. The future was looking bright for RS Dinasty, but then the unthinkable and the completely unexpected happened. LivinLarge21, their leader at that time, closed the clan and quit the game. This took place almost immediately after the war against Damage Inc., so the latter still managed to attain that precious rank one, although not in the way that they had anticipated. RS2 Pk’ing started to revolve more and more around F2P Pk’ing as more diverse armour and weaponry was added to the game. It seemed most fair to war in F2P because all players generally had access to the best combat gear of the F2P world, but not always of the P2P world, especially late in RS2 and even today. This is why the majority of RuneScape PvP clans revolved around F2P Pk’ing, but there were also clans who did both or specialized in P2P Pk’ing, the latter of which was a regarded as an activity for the experienced or hardcore Pk’ers. Damage Inc. was considered one of the best P2P PvP clans in RS2, but they were also good in F2P. All of those clans, no matter their focus, organized Pk’ing trips on a daily basis, while clan wars were usually only held on Saturdays, the most convenient time of the week with the highest likelihood of seeing many clan members logged in at the same time. Timing was extremely important. Organizing a war at two in the afternoon or at eight in the evening could easily make the difference between winning and losing. Especially when warring against a clan from a completely different time zone (= majority of members from a different time zone).

One of the first wars of the year was repeated in October when The Gladiatorz declared war against Zeonic Force. Gladiatorz had become stronger over the course of the seasons, so after previously defeating Zeonic Force, they expected the same result. Both clans were enemies, so the stakes were high and neither of them felt like they could afford to lose. Zeonic Force attracted eighty clan members to the war, whereas The Gladiatorz managed to rally as many as 120. Nevertheless, there was no clear favourite because the average Zeonic Force member was considerably stronger, perhaps strong enough to make up for the numeric difference at the beginning of the war. Both clans had reasons to be optimistic, but eventually it was The Gladiatorz clan that prevailed. Zeonic Force put up a good fight and would continue to be a strong clan for many more months, in 2005 they would even succeed in defeating Damage Inc., but it is clear that The Gladiatorz were just stronger. By November 2004 the once powerful Black Dragon Knights had returned to Gielinor, but they were no longer as strong, which was proven in an easy defeat inflicted upon them by Damage Inc. At that moment another clan was slowly emerging, one that would attain a high status in the years to come. This clan being Echo of Silence, who also suffered a defeat against Damage Inc. at the around the same time as the Black Dragon Knights clan did. In the last week of November Damage Inc. and Mystic Knights challenged each other to a war. Damage Inc. amassed 300 options (so hundred members), whereas Mystic Knights managed to summon over 400 options. The fact that Damage Inc. destroyed Mystic Knights within fifteen minutes, despite being outnumbered, was simply a confirmation of their power and skill on the battlefield.

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The end of the year was particularly dramatic for Corruption. With virtually everything having gone wrong since the collapse of The Golden Alliance, the clan was a wounded animal hoping to be rescued. The only problem for that was that Corruption had a bad reputation due to their habit of crashing Pk’ing trips. Karma struck with the most horrible timing when The Devils, a rank five clan at moment, decided to start crashing Corruption’s Pk’ing trips. The clan gradually began to fall apart, which was painfully demonstrated when just thirty members of a clan, called Empire of Honor defeated Corruption. Empire of Honor was spin-off of RS Dinasty. Corruption was suffering from an internal crisis, causing several important members to go inactive. There was a lot of tension in the clan, especially between the older and the newer clan members. Eventually the clan split when a high-ranked member left the clan. Around ten members followed and decided to start their own clan, called Loyal Raiders. A miniwar between the two clans took place within a matter of weeks, but Corruption managed to win the war. Nevertheless, the clan had lost many ranks in the clan ranking, so Corruption decided to declare war on around ten clans, but all of them declined. Eventually a relatively unknown clan accepted the challenge. Legendary Crew showed up with almost twice as many combatants as Corruption, so Corruption suffered an obvious defeat. They realized that they were stuck in a relatively hopeless situation, so in December they decided to form an alliance with Lord of Chaos, one of Corruption’s former allies.

The first notable event of 2005 involved The Gladiatorz. They were about to battle Empire of Honor. One of the agreed upon rules was that neither clan could resort to last-minute recruiting, so both clans were supposed to exchange their member lists prior to the war. However, Empire of Honor collapsed after their website had fallen victim to a series of DDoS attacks. One of the members of the Empire of Honor subsequently proceeded to found a new clan, called The Empire, which offered The Gladiatorz to replace Empire of Honor for the war. However, The Empire was unable to meet the terms of the war that had been set, so eventually no war took place. Corruption considered the start of the new year to be a new start for the clan. Sometimes all that is needed to get going is luck and that is exactly what happened for Corruption as several former members decided to return to the clan. By February the clan had grown in strength, so it had become high time to subject the clan to a test. They warred several clans in February, with one of the most prominent opponents being Rune Raiders, a name to remember for the following years. Rune Raiders had been one of Corruption’s enemies since RS1, but Rune Raiders sort of tended to operate in the background for the most part at that time, just like Corruption. However, the day had arrived and Corruption’s disappointment was big when one only 47 of their members showed up, much fewer than the expected 60. Meanwhile Rune Raiders had managed to gather 75 combatants, so Corruption’s first big test of the year ended in a logical defeat. With this dissatisfying outcome, Corruption challenged a clan with the name of ReBirth. Both clans rallied around fifty members, so a good war was among the expectations. Once on the battlefield, Corruption noticed that ReBirth needed a lot more time to prepare, but instead of waiting they just rushed in and succeeded in quickly killing ReBirth’s leaders. ReBirth could have complained, but instead they accepted Corruption’s move as being part of the game. However, just honour does not win wars, so in the end it was Corruption’s organization that made the difference. Corruption won, a victory that was of considerable importance because several clans began to think that Corruption had become good enough to re-enter the top twenty. However, there were still clans who disagreed.

A little later The Devils challenged Damage Inc. to a war. The Devils had become much stronger over the course of the previous months and they had more members that Damage Inc. This is why some were hesitant about picking a clear favourite, which would under normal circumstances have been Damage Inc. Shortly before the war tension arose in The Devils clans, convincing several of their stronger members to leave the clan. This might have been why only 25 of their members showed up at the war, while Damage Inc. could count on 117 of its combatants… Needless to say that Damage Inc. annihilated the 25 Devils. March had come and Corruption had regained most of its hope after several more wars, one of which was against DeathRow. However, that war was 138 different because it sparked a mutual hate between the clans. After their war, both clans claimed victory and were too stubborn to change their opinion, so the next step was to redo the war. This time Corruption clearly took the upper hand and sent DeathRow back home in no time. However, many of DeathRow’s members accused Corruption of cheating and began throwing insults at them. Although DeathRow’s leader accepted defeat, many of their members did not. A lesson from the past is that when one annoys Corruption, they will do what one would expect them to do. Corruption sent spies into DeathRow with the sole intention of crashing them during their Pk’ing trips. This would make DeathRow challenge Corruption several more times, but Corruption always won, pushing DeathRow into a state of crisis. Ironically, a similar situation occurred just weeks later in a miniwar between Corruption and Echo of Silence. Both clans claimed victory, but the eventual outcome was not settled with the official war, so both clans ended up becoming enemies. Not much later Corruption’s member count increased to 150 and the clan was able to enter the top fifteen.

April 2005 was an important month for the PvP clan world. You might remember The Alliance, which consisted of BlacKnights, Clan Jaguar, THE and The Gladiatorz. Another clan, called The Mighty Red Dragons, had been an ally of all four clans and would regularly help them out in wars. After a year of assisting them, The Alliance found that The Mighty Red Dragons should be one of them, so they let the clan join the alliance. This is also when a new clan was founded. New clans generally do not fulfill an important role in the first weeks of their existence, which was also the case for our new clan, called Dark Slayers. Although not immediately important yet, Dark Slayers would become the best clan of 2005 and 2006, and become one of The Gladiatorz’s biggest rivals. Still in April, however, Zeonic Force declared war on Damage Inc. in a surprise move. In arguably the biggest war of the year so far, Zeonic Force managed to pull more than 400 options while Damage Inc. could get to only 350. However, we have learnt from Damage Inc.’s war against Mystic Knights in 2004 that being outnumbered does not necessarily mean that the war will be lost. After a fairly even but tough battle, it was Damage Inc. who emerged victorious, although the margin was small. Nevertheless, this was yet another confirmation of Damage Inc.’s dominance, especially since Zeonic Force was a very strong clan too.

May was a big month for Corruption. Surprisingly, they had built a friendship with Rune Raiders since their war in February. Both clans decided to become allies of each other, but there was two clans who did not like that at all. DeathRow and Echo of Silence had become Corruption’s enemies. However, both of those clans were allies of Rune Raiders. I think that the problem is clear here. As expected, Corruption just did not care and continued working on their clan ranking. One of the leaders thought that Corruption had finally become strong enough to deserve a spot in the top ten, so they challenged THE to a war. THE was considered to be the rank eight at that time, good enough for Corruption. Unfortunately for them, they were significantly outnumbered by THE, who managed pull 110 members, whereas Corruption got to only just over sixty. THE quite easily defeated Corruption, so perhaps they were not ready yet for a top ten spot. At that time Clan Jaguar had been trying to find a new opponent. With Corruption realizing that they needed practice, they more than happily accepted Clan Jaguar’s invitation. Clan Jaguar could count on eighty of their members on the important day. Corruption just slightly fewer, but they proved to be much stronger than Clan Jaguar. Corruption ended the war with more than thirty members remaining. Clan Jaguar accused Corruption of cheating, but soon decided to let it go and to accept defeat. Another notable event of May came as a surprise to The Alliance. BlacKnights were not happy with The Alliance anymore, so they took the decision of leaving the alliance in an attempt to find out how well they could function on their own. Meanwhile RS Dinasty re-opened its doors after an absence of ten months. Their former leader returned to RuneScape and wanted to give the clan another try. Remarkably, many other clans tried to demoralize RS Dinasty by actively targeting them in the Wilderness. It is likely that these clans were scared of RS Dinasty because they used to be the strongest clan of the game at some point before closing in July of 2004.

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At around the same time, another clan started to appear on the foreground more prominently in the clan world. The Titans, as they were called, had gained power and seemed to have a lot of potential. Their first encounter with Corruption occurred during a Pk’ing trip in June. Corrupted managed to kill The Titans without many problems, but they still became very interested in The Titans. And that is a euphemism for Corruption’s decision to send spies into The Titans and to start crashing their Pk’ing trips. For some reason Corruption seemed a lot more eager than usual as they turned pretty hardcore, crashing everything The Titans did. The Titans went as far as visiting Corruption’s website to ask Corruption to stop crashing them, but that request was ignored. Why had Corruption become so dead set on bullying The Titans? Because that is essentially what they were doing. The Titans were a fast-growing clan, so perhaps Corruption considered them to be a serious threat. Whatever the reason, Corruption was not entirely obsessed with crashing them as they still made some time for wars. Mystic Knights had a lot some of their power, so Corruption considered them to be an ideal next opponent. They challenged Mystic Knights to a war, for which both clans managed to attract sixty of their members. Despite the even numbers, it took Corruption only fifteen minutes to dismantle Mystic Knights. June was also an important month for The Gladiatorz. They had become stronger and wanted to find out if the difference was noticeable. The first clan whom they challenged was The Dynasty, a relatively new clan that had become quite strong in a short period of time. The Dynasty won, but The Gladiatorz thought that there might have been some cheating. Dark Slayers attended the war, meaning that they were just there to spectate, but it was rumoured that they had provided food to The Dynasty during the war and hid among their members, so that it was difficult to see for The Gladiatorz if an opponent was a member of The Dynasty or Dark Slayers. Gladiatorz admitted defeat, but given the circumstances, they did not give this defeat much attention and decided to fight another clan. Anarchy is clan that had been losing some of its power at that time, but they were still a top ten clan. The Gladiatorz thought that they would make the perfect opponent, so The Gladiatorz declared war on them. Anarchy accepted, but they did not expect to be outnumbered by Gladiatorz. Nevertheless, Anarchy defended very well and gave The Gladiatorz a good fight. Although not good enough because Anarchy lost. Gladiatorz had clearly become stronger and were now satisfied with their status.

In July Mystic Knights decided that they wanted a rematch against Corruption, so they declared war on them. However, only 73 of Mystic Knights’s members showed up, whereas Corruption stood 90 members strong. Corruption slaughtered Mystic Knights and suffered minimal losses themselves. Coincidence or not, Dead on Arrival, one of Mystic Knights’s allies, was playing around just south of where the war had taken place. Corruption was aware of that, so the remaining members, those who had not died in the war, run south towards the chaos dwarves and started attacking the Dead on Arrival members. This was clearly something Corruption enjoyed doing, because afterwards they turned crashing Dead on Arrival’s Pk’ing trips into one of their new pastimes, which brings us to The Titans. They had become fed up with Corruption, particularly with not being able to defend very well against them, so they started to bring their ally DeathRow on their Pk’ing trips to provide protection. A successful decision because it turned out that Corruption was not strong enough to handle two clans at the same time. That would have been a great time for Rune Raiders to help Corruption, but Corruption’s newest ally had been struggling as well. Not much later, Rune Raiders lost around hundred members in just a week, so The Titans started crashing Corruption – sweet revenge – and eventually deemed the timing right to declare war on Rune Raiders, severely weakened by then. Even though Corruption assisted Rune Raiders throughout the entire war, victory went to The Titans, but that was not enough for them. The Titans and DeathRow would continue to crash most of Corruption’s wars and Rune Raiders would each time send fewer and fewer members to Corruption to help. That was not satisfactory for Corruption, so they decided to end their alliance with Rune Raiders. All of these events had made The Titans much stronger, so they gained more respect from the clan community.

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At the first dawn of August, Damage Inc. was considered to be the number one clan, followed by The Devils. This is also when The Gladiatorz and BlacKnights went head to head in what would be the biggest war ever held in RS2 until that moment. BlacKnights had started to build a diplomatic relationship with Zeonic Force, one of The Gladiatorz’s big rivals. This was the direct cause for the relationship between BlacKnights and The Gladiatorz to deteriorate, until the situation escalated into a war declaration. The Gladiatorz had fought Anarchy and The Dynasty in June, both of those wars were nothing in comparison to what was going to happen between The Gladiatorz and BlacKnights. Both clans set up training practices and competitions to prepare for this highly anticipated war. They had not just become enemies of each other, but much more. There was a mutual feeling of hatred, which fueled the tension and the prewar excitement even more. When the day had arrived, both clans managed to pull 200 members, or more than 1200 options combined. More than 400 brave warriors attacked and defended for hours, but it was the BlacKnights clan who snatched victory. The Gladiatorz clan was not satisfied and began to accuse BlacKnights of cheating. They claimed that the leaders of BlacKnights had logged in to their secondary accounts after they had been killed. This way they could prolong the war and help the other clan members, even though that was against the war rules. The accusations, and the denial thereof in the other camp, continued for a long time. This was the beginning of an extremely intense rivalry between the two clans that would continue for years.

Meanwhile Corruption had begun to crash the Pk’ing trips of Dead on Arrival again. After one of their trips, Corruption ran into Anarchy and killed Anarchy’s leader. Anarchy was angry and challenged Corruption to a miniwar. Both clans started to insult one another as they could not agree on the terms. In the end the miniwar turned into a regular war. Anarchy managed to rally 125 of their members, ten more than Corruption did, and its members had a slightly higher average combat level as well. Corruption knew that a tough battle was awaiting them, and indeed, Anarchy won quite easily. By September Corruption had sent spies into Dead on Arrival and they discovered that Dead on Arrival had been devising a plan to teach Corruption a lesson. Dead on Arrival had been planning to challenge Corruption to a war on a two days’ notice… while giving its own members three weeks to prepare for it. That was not very fair, but Corruption did not bother because thanks to spies they could prepare for the full three weeks as well, awaiting Dead on Arrival to declare on them. Eventually Corruption decided to leak Dead on Arrival’s dishonorable plan to other clans. This significantly harmed the reputation of Dead on Arrival, so it looks like it is not Corruption who was going to be taught a lesson after all. Being slightly outnumbered by Dead on Arrival, Corruption pulled of an impressive feat and claimed victory with more than sixty members left standing. Even though Dead on Arrival would afterwards begin to show more respect for Corruption, that was no reason for Corruption to stop crashing Dead on Arrival. They should not have messed with Corruption. The Titans, another one of Corruption’s rivals, had become stuck in a downward spiral. A quarter of their members had left the clan, but Corruption continued to bully The Titans. Meanwhile another clan was beginning to appear more prominently on the clan world scenery: Silent Assassins, a clan that would demonstrate its power in 2006, but managed to give the clan community a nice preview during the remainder of 2005. Still in September, however, Dark Slayers, just half a year old, surprisingly challenged Damage Inc. to a war, which was determined to be fought later in September. Damage Inc. was at the top of the clan ranking, so the only acceptable outcome was a victory. However, on the day of the war the 120 Damage Inc. combatants were stumped when they saw that Dark Slayers had amassed 160 members of their own clan members. Dark Slayers, being in an exceptionally good situation, did not give this 141 out of hand and defeated Damage Inc. Despite neither clans having come in contact with each other prior to the war, this unexpected defeat ignited an intense rivalry between the two clans. The clan community, also impressed by Dark Slayers, continued to rank Damage Inc. as the number one clan because after the war Damage Inc. would succeed in regularly killing Dark Slayers members on their Pk’ing trips.

October of 2005 was an important month for Corruption, with several important wars in store for them. The first one was a P2P miniwar against Anarchy, with a preparation period of just one day. Anarchy managed to pull 280 options, Corruption only 200, but Anarchy did not have much experience with P2P wars and it showed during the battle. They were very badly prepared and for some reason they had decided that their combatants should use the best F2P Ranged weaponry… in P2P. Corruption, on the other hand, decided to rely on Melee for the most part by using the best available weapon at that time. That weapon is the abyssal whip, but it was extremely expensive in 2005, costing several millions of gp. The high prices of P2P armour and weaponry is why the majority of clans preferred to fight in F2P, and why Anarchy was so badly prepared and got slaughtered by Corruption. In the next weeks Corruption invited several other clans to fight them, but all of them declined, so eventually their only other option was challenging one of the top clans. The Gladiatorz was interested and showed up with more than 400 options. Corruption was significantly outnumbered, being able to amass only 330 options, and suffered an expected defeat. Corruption was just not strong enough yet to take on a top five clan. A while later Corruption heard that Lithuanian Forces, a country clan, had defeated Anarchy in a war. Corruption took the opportunity to challenge Lithuanian Forces in attempt to beat them and, by doing so, show Anarchy who the better clan was of the two. Corruption managed to pull 340 options, or 70% of their clan at that time, and was confident that they were going to win with so many members present. However, that confidence sank to their feet when Lithuanian Forces showed up with no fewer than 450 options. Corruption now understood why Anarchy had lost the war and eventually they suffered the same fate. By that time The Titans had reached a low point in their clan history and were down to just 150 members after also their new leader had become inactive. His successor set up a poll in which it was decided that The Titans would close in November. While quite of few of its members joined Damage Inc., DeathRow, Sacred Templars and RS Dinasty, the vast majority decided to join a relatively new clan, called Divine Forces, increasing the clan’s size from thirty to hundred members. Memorize that name because it will pop up quite a few times on the next pages.

Silent Assassins had become a strong clan by the start of November. They were now as strong as Corruption and some ranked them even higher than Corruption, so the leaders of Corruptions wanted to check the actual status and challenged Silent Assassins to a miniwar. Due to the fact that the war took place on a weekday, both clans failed to amass many members, but Corruption still pulled eighty more option than Silent Assassins did and they easily won the war. Silent Assassins was not satisfied because the war had taken place on a weekday, which was highly unusual. Even though they had initially agreed to have the war take place during the week, they still demanded a rematch. So just two days later the recent history was repeated as Corruption slaughtered Silent Assassins. It looks like Corruption was still the stronger clan, which is all they wanted to find out prior to the wars. December was a busy month for several clans, one of them being Corruption. They wanted to try a more difficult opponent, so they challenged RS Dinasty. Both clans pulled the around the same amount of options, 345 for Corruption and 330 for RS Dinasty, but this balance was completely absent on the battlefield. RS Dinasty’s organization was described by Corruption as being excellent and Corruption had a significantly lower average combat level. Corruption did not just lose the war, they were outclassed on many levels. Slightly disappointed and in need of an ego boost, they turned their attention to Anarchy once again. The clan had grown to a size of around 210 members. Corruption counted just over 160 members, but they desperately wanted to show Anarchy that having a high member count does not necessarily mean that the clan is better, so they declared war on them. Given their intense past as rivals, both clans made a long list of rules. The war would 142 for sure be the most closely watched war ever to be organized, with six neutral players (three for each clan) recording everything so that any attempt at cheating would be caught on tape, so to speak. 140 players showed up at Anarchy’s side and 120 at Corruption’s. Anarchy had recently recruited many players, Corruption had not, so Corruption had more experience as a solid group and that proved sufficient. They destroyed Anarchy within half an hour, with more than fifty of Corruption’s combatants surviving. Corruption demonstrated that they were better than Anarchy.

Divine Forces, having recently gained many members after The Titans closed its door, wanted to test their warring abilities and picked a clan with the name of The Unforgotten as their first opponent, a clan they had recently encountered during one of their Pk’ing trips. The Unforgotten showed little resistance during the war. All of its members were sent to Lumbridge within ten minutes. The Unforgotten was clearly not hard enough for Divine Forces, so they were left behind unsatisfied. Quite impulsively, they challenged a clan with the name of Awaken to a war, with just one hour to prepare for it. Awaken was stronger and definitely more experienced, so coming up with a good strategy in just one hour seemed like an impossible task for Divine Forces. Even though they managed to put up a great fight, it was indeed Awaken who won the war. Perhaps they should not have rushed it, which they realized, so they wanted another opponent, but this time with a week to prepare for the war. The Mighty Red Dragons, a member of The Alliance, had become somewhat inactive over the course of the months, so Divine Forces was confident that they could beat them and challenged them to a war. The Mighty Red Dragons accepted and completely surprised Divine Forces when they showed up with 240 options, whereas Divine Forces could count on only 180 options. Divine Forces was defeated and realized that there was still a lot of work to be done if they wanted to become one of the best clans of the game. Their first move was to form an alliance with the RuneScape Valor clan, called Divine Valor. RuneScape Valor was the product of a merge between the clans Brotherhood of the Forsaken and Crusaders of Blood. With combined forces they had been a medium-strong clan and had enjoyed going on Pk’ing trips with Divine Forces, which ultimately led to the formation of Divine Valor. At the end of 2005 Damage Inc. was considered to be one of the top clans of the game. The Gladiatorz had gotten much stronger over the course of the year and was now enjoying a spot in the top five, as were Dark Slayers. THE settled in the top 10, just like Corruption and RS Dinasty, although Corruption was not as strong yet. 2006 was going to be the year of Damage Inc. Vs Dark Slayers.

I have used the clan archive on Zybez, a community and fansite, to have a look at the old clan rankings. At the end of 2005 Zybez posted a thread in which anyone could provide their personal top five or top ten F2P and P2P clans. Only 66 players responded, so the results might not be extremely representative. However, after analyzing all votes, I noticed that the information at the bottom of the previous paragraph was reproduced for the most part by the votes. In the table below you can see that the abbreviated names of all clans are listed vertically, splitting the table into two halves. Displayed to the right of the list is a matrix with the absolute frequencies at which a clan was listed as rank one, two, three etc. until rank ten. This matrix is used to calculate the average position in the ranking for each clan, from which the actual position is derived to create, in this case, the top thirteen. The column named ‘TOT. FREQ.’ displays how often a clan was voted on, as any top ten rank.

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The clans in order (1-13): Dark Slayers, Damage Inc., The Gladiatorz, Silent Assassins, RuneScape Dinasty, THE, Anarchy, Corruption, BlacKnights, Mystic Knights, Followers of Malkav, Exercitum, The RuneScape Warhungers Federation.

The table suggests that Dark Slayers and Damage Inc. were comfortably enjoying a top two spot at the end of 2005, without being threatened by any of the other clans in the top five. For the clans at the bottom of the ranking I have also taken into account the total frequency, which is primarily why The RuneScape Warhungers Federation is rank thirteen and not rank eleven. Unfortunately, there are no data available for the years 2006, 2007 and 2008 on the Zybez forums, so it not possible to make a comparison with the next years to see how the situation evolved.

Divine Forces was considered a potential top ten clan for 2006, but the year started out badly for them. An ex-staff member of Divine Forces was accused of keylogging the clan members on the clan site. Around ten to fifteen members panicked and decided to leave the clan. Eventually it turned out that the accusations were false, but the damage had been dealt. The clan, now reduced to just eighty members, was pushed into the midst of a crisis, there were even rumours that the clan was going to close, but that did not happen. Nevertheless, the clan had entered a dark period and it took a couple of successful Pk’ing trips and miniwars to restore the balance and to regain some power. Divine Forces used a similar approach as in December to build morale. First they were challenged by a relatively unknown clan, called The Filipscapes Clan, they were a decent challenge because the Divine Forces clan was in a severely weakened state, but in the end Divine Forces claimed victory over the clan from the Philippines. Just like they had challenged Awaken to a war with just one hour of preparation in December, they did exactly the same in January, but this time with the Fear clan at the receiving end of the miniwar invitation. Fear accepted the challenge, but stood no chance at all. The easy victory left Divine Forces unsatisfied, so they looked for a third opponent. Mystic Knights was a top clan that had recently defeated Echo of Silence, so Divine Forces knew that it would be difficult to beat them, but they still challenged them to a war. However, at the agreed upon time Mystic Knights was not present at the warring location. Communication between the clans, by using external programmes, revealed that Mystic Knights were trying to stall because not enough members had logged in yet and they knew that more would log in soon due to the changing hour of the day. At the same time they were hoping that Divine Forces would lose some of its members because Divine Forces had pulled 150 options. The stalling went on for an hour, a dishonorable act. Divine Forces should have been given an automatic win, but they still decided to let the war take place, although an hour later when Mystic Knights had, indeed, managed to amass more clan members. Eventually Mystic Knights showed up with around 175 options, but it looked karma was also attending the war because Divine Forces cleared the battlefield of any Mystic Knights members within fifteen minutes, and surprised the clan community by doing so.

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Echo of Silence was not pleased with Divine Forces’ victory because they had previously lost to Mystic Knights. On top of that, Echo of Silence and Corruption were bitter enemies (Corruption had many), so Echo of Silence was not amused with the growing rapprochement between Divine Forces and Corruption. In response Echo of Silence started Pk’ing Divine Forces’s members, who decided to do exactly the same. This would go on for a short while until Divine Forces and Corruption decided to start an alliance, called Corrupted Forces. Both clans had been helping each other when needed, so it seemed like a logical move. Meanwhile Echo of Silence and Divine Forces had declared war on each other, but the war was later cancelled out of fear that it would not be a clean fight. The formation of Corrupted Forces shocked the clan world and took even members of Divine Forces off guard. In 2005 an intense rivalry existed between The Titans and Corruption. When The Titans closed in November of 2005, the majority of its members joined… Divine Forces. Of course the ex-members of The Titans were in a state of utter disbelief when the leaders of their new clan, Divine Forces, announced the news of starting an alliance with Corruption. Many of them decided to leave the clan, but they were not the only ones who were dissatisfied with the creation of Corrupted Forces. RuneScape Valor, a clan with whom Divine Forces had created the Divine Valor alliance, was not happy with that news either. After several discussions, RuneScape Valor left the alliance. The leaders of Divine Forces had clearly not thought this through. The unexpected move harmed the clan in ways no one could ever have imagined. Eventually the leaders were forced to drop the alliance with Corruption, which, of course, outraged the leaders of Corruption. Serious threats were thrown at Divine Forces, such as Corruption’s leaders vowing to destroy Divine Forces. The next day Corruption’s troop were already awaiting Divine Forces in the Wilderness and succeeded in ousting them out of the Wilderness. What had started as a good-hearted attempt to provide a source of help for each other, ended just a couple of days later with both clans becoming fierce enemies.

March approached when RS Dinasty decided to show themselves again. They did not war very often, even though they had a record of having won every official war in which they had participated (they had lost unofficial wars, though). Anarchy decided to challenge them and RS Dinasty accepted because, on paper, RS Dinasty was slightly stronger than they were. Not many details are available about the war, but RS Dinasty obliterated Anarchy and walked away with more than 300 options, or 100 members, remaining. In the first weeks of March The Gladiatorz and Dark Slayers prepared for a war against each other. Dark Slayer was at that point considered to be the best clan of the PvP world and The Gladiatorz were a strong top three clan. This war, which would be the biggest and most important war in the history of The Gladiatorz, was arguably the war that would decide about which clan would be the new rank one. Dark Slayers counted 224 members with an average Combat level of 118.5 (at that time 126 was the highest possible level because Summoning did not exist yet). The Gladiatorz was the underdog, so they held many practice events to prepare for the war. The Gladiatorz managed to amass 220 combatants, or 660 options. That was many more than Dark Slayers, but they were known for their excellent organization. However, Dark Slayers could not retaliate well enough and were simply outclassed. Eventually The Gladiatorz remained behind as the victor, with just over 250 options left. The Gladiatorz claimed rank one, although other clans did not completely agree with that.

While all of that was going on, Divine Forces had been attempting to obtain a top fifteen spot in a war against Demonic Empire. Divine Forces initially wanted to war Rune Raiders, but Demonic Empire suddenly declared on them. Divine Forces decided to accept the challenge because it would be a good exercise. The situation was hopeless from the start for Demonic Empire, though. They had pulled only 180 options, whereas Divine Forces showed up with 100 more. Divine Forces were never going to give this one away, but as both clans were fighting near the red dragons, THE showed up out of nowhere and started attacking Demonic Empire. THE was not aware that a war was going on and they did not stop fighting until Divine Forces finally told them to stay away. Both 145

Divine Forces and Demonic Empire decided to regroup and to restart the war, but eventually Demonic Empire pulled out and the war never took place. Divine Forces was angry with them for revoking Divine Forces of the opportunity to defeat them, so a while later Divine Forces declared a new war against them. Demonic Empire accepted, but this time Demonic Empire managed to rally many more clan members. Both clans started with around 285 options. For a while it looked like Divine Forces was going to lose, but they managed to reorganize and turned the situation around. Divine Forces won and officially entered the top fifteen.

Eager as they were, Divine Forces defeated several other clans in the next weeks, such as Chivalry Legions, Echo of Silence, Fear and RuneScape Valor, until the clans out of the top ten no longer wanted to battle Divine Forces. Suddenly Mystic Knights saved the day by telling the Divine Forces leaders that they wanted a rematch (after losing to them in January). Mystic Knights, still a top ten clan, managed to pull 240 options; Divine Forces, fifteen more. Divine Forces dominated the war from start to finish, partly due to their upgraded hybriding strategy. Divine Forces entered the top ten after their victory, something that the BlacKnights clan, who were fairly inactively at that moment, did not agree with (as they were presumably pushed out of the top ten). They showed their disagreement by hurling an array of insults at Divine Forces. A war seemed inevitable. Eventually one was declared, but it never took place, out of fear that the war was not going to be clean. Over the course of the next one to two weeks, a whole lot of drama happened between the two clans, eventually culminating in Divine Forces losing fifteen members after BlacKnights had succeeded in causing internal conflict. Divine Forces was on the brink of a crisis, all because BlacKnights could not stand the thought of Divine Forces being a top ten clan. In April Divine Forces climbed out of their slump and challenged Rune Raiders to a war. Both clans wanted to keep the details secret out of fear of being crashed. However, BlacKnights had sent spies into Divine Forces, so that did not work for very long. Luckily, other clans offered to help Divine Forces and Rune Raider by sending so-called anti-crash teams to assist the two clans. The purpose of those two teams was to fend off any crashing clans without participating in the war. Both clans felt safe enough with the presence of these anti-crashing teams, so the war could take place as planned. Divine Forces managed to rally over 300 options. Rune Raiders could get to only 250 and that difference was noticeable on the battlefield. Divine Forces defeated Rune Raiders, proving that they had survived the clan drama and were back in the game.

Divine Forces was still angry with BlacKnights, so they challenged them to a war with a short preparation time, and that several times. BlacKnights had more members, so a short preparation was required if Divine Forces wanted to have a shot at winning. However, BlacKnights, equally aware of the situation, declined all challenges because they wanted a preparation time of at least a week. The only option for Divine Forces was to recruit more players. However, meanwhile BlacKnights kept annoying them on the external forums. At one point Divine Forces could no longer resist the urge and decided to declare on them, with a long preparation time, despite not having recruited a satisfying amount of players yet. Surprisingly, BlacKnights agreed on a miniwar with a preparation time of just one day, but the war was cancelled just a couple of hours before it was supposed to begin because BlacKnights had started to accuse Divine Forces of account sharing. Perhaps this had been their strategy all along when they agreed on the miniwar. Tension grew (even more) between the two clans over the next days until Divine Forces decided that an official war was the only way to settle this. They were dead set on battling BlacKnights and they were willing to go very far in their attempt to convince BlacKnights. This willingness proved necessary during their negotiations because BlacKnights wanted to war only under ridiculous conditions, all of which significantly favoured BlacKnights. Eventually they agreed to have the war take place near the red dragons. Divine Forces was up to a difficult task after all of the concessions made during the negotiations. They decided to prepare for BlacKnights by first having a war against Damage Inc. to practice. Both clans started with around 240 options. The fight was remarkably even for the entire duration of the war. A winner could not be predicted until the end, when Divine Forces was the last clan 146 standing with only eleven of their combatants surviving. Damage Inc. was a top three clan at that time, so defeating them was quite impressive, but most importantly, it gave them a major mental boost for their fight against BlacKnights. Once at the red dragons, BlacKnights showed up with 360 options, fourty more than Divine Forces. So it seemed like the war was going to start badly, which it might have, but Divine Forces’s organization was excellent and they ended up slaughtering BlacKnights with more than 200 options remaining. A rematch would take place in the next months, with the same outcome. Divine Forces would enter the top five.

The Gladiatorz had lost several members in early spring due to setting higher requirements. They even lost a war against Lithuanian Forces, who were not even in the top ten. The Gladiatorz decided to spend the summer on fixing the situation and remained relatively inactive on the battlefield until September. Violent Resolution, a new clan, and The Gladiatorz set up war against each other, but the war was cancelled on the spot because there were too many crashers. The war simply could not take place. 2006 was not an extremely good year for RS Dinasty. They had earlier defeated Anarchy in March and had succeeded in slaying several top clans on their Pk’ing trips (such as Damage Inc. and Dark Slayers), but the clan just lacked a good member count, and numbers were important in the PvP clan world. The reason why they were able to maintain their high ranking is because they were extremely organized and skilled at Pk’ing. Late in 2006 The RuneScape Warhungers Federation, a top fifteen clan who regularly entered the top ten for a short period, declared war against RS Dinasty. A good test for RS Dinasty because they had been relatively inactive in the Land of Blood, so they accepted the challenge and defeated The RuneScape Warhungers Federation with more than 130 options remaining. It was clear that RS Dinasty was still a strong clan, something that they would confirm in 2007. Still in 2006, however, The Alliance was challenged to a war by Dark Slayers. The Alliance still consisted of Clan Jaguar, THE, The Gladiatorz, and The Mighty Red Dragons at that moment. The Alliance managed to pull 700 options (or more than 230 players), but Dark Slayers emerged victorious. Dark Slayers had been the dominant clan for many months and did not hesitate to demonstrate this. The last big war of 2006 took place in December between The Gladiatorz and Divine Forces. Even to their own surprise, The Gladiatorz showed up with more than 370 options. The clan had not been experiencing the greatest times of its history, so this turnout really was a surprise to them. The outcome of the war, however, was not. Divine Forces’s good organization sufficed to defeat The Gladiatorz, despite starting the war with only 321 options. This victory was enough to secure a spot in the top five. At the end of the year Dark Slayers was the clear rank one, followed by Damage Inc. on spot two. Corruption, Divine Forces, RS Dinasty, THE and The Gladiatorz battled for the remaining three place in the top five.

2007 started with a drastic decision taken in the RS Dinasty clan. Even though the clan was still up there high in the rankings, the future was not looking bright for them. Members had gradually been leaving and none came to replace them. Instead of focusing on F2P/P2P Pk’ing, RS Dinasty took the decision to participate more prominently in the Mage Bank Pk community, as it was called. Just like rune rock Pk’ing consisted of killing rune rock miners near the Lava Maze, Mage bank Pk’ing consisted of killing players anywhere near the Mage Arena, deep in the Wilderness. At the Mage 147 bank RS Dinasty would often encounter Damage Inc., with whom they regularly engaged in a fight, but there was one big problem. No Honour Pk’ers are Pk’ers who attack whomever they want, as opposed to Honor Pk’ers, who generally first ask permission or follow other rules before attacking someone. A couple of good No Honour clans at that time were Noobs Incorporated and Exercitum. This is the same Exercitum that was mentioned a couple of times for the RS1 and early RS2 eras. Unfortunately, not much information is available about that clan for any period after 2005, which is why they have been omitted. However, they were still active and had its place in the top ten or top fifteen. Other clans in the top fifteen included Anarchy, Echo of Silence, Eternal Honor, Followers of Malkav, Mystic Knights, The Mighty Red Dragons, and The RuneScape Warhungers Federation. At the beginning of 2007 No Honour Pk’ing was a growing trend and the presence of such Pk’ers at the Mage Arena was noticeable. This made it difficult for clans to organize themselves. RS Dinasty was also affected by this. The clan members started to dislike the Mage bank community, some of them left the clan and that was something that RS Dinasty could not allow to happen, so the leaders reverted their decision and began to focus on F2P/P2P Pk’ing again. However, by doing so they would face the same problem of having a low member count. In the months to follow RS Dinasty would lose a lot of its power and even drop out of the top ten.

Still quite early in 2007, though, Divine Forces had been working on recruiting more players. After a while they began to challenge Corruption during Pk trips. Corruption resisted and managed to win most of the encounters. However, this gradually changed as Divine Forces kept on growing and started to claim more wins. Corruption became suspicious of this evolution and accused Divine Forces of bringing friends with them. This created a major stir between the two clans and that is all that was needed for a new rivalry to be born. Corruption decided to stop fighting Divine Forces after too many losses. That was the beginning of a bad period in Corruption’s history, with limited successes and many setbacks, one of which was having to close their junior clan, called The Corrupted. A little bit later The RuneScape Warhungers Federation challenged them to a war. Corruption, in its weakest state since 2004, accepted on the principle that they should never back down for a fight. While that seems like a very honorable mindset, it does open to door to humiliating defeats, which was the case against The RuneScape Warhungers Federation. The war was over in minutes. Corruption was tragically outnumbered and could offer no resistance whatsoever. The clan was in a slump, but they could not really find a reason for that. Something had changed and they urgently needed to discover what that something was. Meanwhile Divine Forces was thriving and enjoying their position as rank three, but they noticed that no one wanted to battle them anymore. Divine Forces could still challenge Dark Slayers or Damage Inc., the ranks one and two, but they knew that that was not a good idea because Dark Slayers and Damage Inc. were still much stronger, so they would almost certainly lose. Divine Forces decided to try their luck with The Mighty Red Dragon, with whom they were on relatively good terms and because they were still a strong clan. Both clans managed to agree on a war with a preparation time of two weeks. Divine Forces pulled 300 options, fewer than the 330 of The Mighty Red Dragons, but that did not seem to affect them at all. Divine Forces experienced little trouble with The Mighty Red Dragons and won the war with more than 100 options left. Divine Forces had definitely shown why they were the rank three, but what next? Surely no other clan would battle them… A clan that had been struggling to maintain their spot high in the ranking was The Gladiatorz. The growing tension in the clan certainly did not aid them in overcoming the situation, so BlacKnights’s war declaration against them did not come at a good time. The Gladiatorz decided to decline the war, but offered a miniwar as a counterproposal, even though the clan was in no state to go to war. BlacKnights accepted and, as expected, defeated Gladiatorz. However, the victory had not come as easily as The Gladiatorz 148 had anticipated, so they regained some hope, despite losing. That hope quickly disappeared as The Gladiatorz would start to lose most wars and Pk’ing encounters, suffering the same fate as RS Dinasty and slowly being pushed into the background of the PvP world scenery. By March RS Dinasty’s member count had dropped to just 55 and they were even considered dead by several clans.

Spring had arrived and had some surprising events in store. Dark Slayers and Damage Inc. had fought each other more than twenty times over the course of the recent months, erasing any confusion about the hierarchy. Damage Inc. had suffered sixteen consecutive losses to Dark Slayers, who were quite lonely at the top and craving some real action. Damage Inc. was determined to give them that action and actively worked on improving their strategy to be used in a new war. After six hours of fighting them, it looked like there would be no seventeenth consecutive loss. However, Damage Inc.’s leader suddenly decided to withdraw because the war had been going on for too long. This move granted Dark Slayers a seventeenth consecutive win, but Damage Inc. knew that the next war would be theirs. Corruption, in a less happy state, attempted to set their recovery in motion by challenging Anarchy to a war. They had been rivals for years, so given the current state of Corruption, Anarchy happily accepted the invitation. Anarchy started with 240 options, twenty more than Corruption, but were slaughtered in less fifteen minutes. Corruption emerged victorious with more than 170 options left, something that they had not expected. It looked like Corruption was crawling out of the slump. Anarchy wanted a rematch because the defeat was quite humiliating, Corruption accepted. Both clans pulled around 240 options and the result was the same. Anarchy was defeated for a second in a row and many of Corruption’s combatants survived the war. Anarchy’s leader angrily announced that the clan would refuse to battle Corruption again at any moment in the future. A while later Corruption wanted to check if they had successfully recovered, so they challenged Damage Inc. to a war in an attempt to reclaim their spot in the top five of the clan world. Corruption managed to pull maximum options (399+), which by itself is clear sign that Corruption had, in fact, recovered. Damage Inc. could get to only 357, so they were clearly outnumbered. To make things worse, many crashers were present at the war and it seemed like they were only targeting Damage Inc. Their leader made that clear to Corruption, but they did not wanted to have any of that because of a rule on which they had agreed prior to the war. Both clans knew that crashers were inevitably going to try to do their thing, so both clans had agreed to null the war if either clan was able to win with less than a predetermined amount of options left. In the end Corruption won with 120 options remaining and they considered this high number to be proof of their dominance, although Damage Inc.’s leader blamed their loss on their perception that the crashers had attacked only the Damage Inc. members. As a consequence, Damage Inc. refused to acknowledge the defeat.

Later during the spring of 2007, RS Dinasty attempted to arise from its ashes by taking on random clans that they encountered during their Pk trips. Despite being outnumbered most of the time, this proved to be a good strategy as they slowly won more and more fights. A monumental achievement for them was a victory over Clan Europe without suffering a single death. They continued to win more fights, even one at Castle Wars (yes, the safe minigame) against Damage Inc. The willpower was there, but they still needed more members if they wanted to compete with the top five clans again. This was confirmed in a major defeat against Echo of Silence, who managed to win because they used snipers, something RS Dinasty did not do. In RS2 most big clans tended to have a snipe unit. The role of a snipe unit was to disrupt the enemy lines by creating diversions in any way possible. However, this was extremely dangerous, so usually only high skilled Pk’ers were part of the clan’s snipe unit. This defeat made RS Dinasty realize what the importance is of having snipers on the team, so they began to incorporate snipers in their strategy. This was a major first step towards reacquiring a high rank. Meanwhile Divine Forces regularly challenged Dark Slayers, still comfortable at the top of the hierarchy. Dark Slayers won every time again, just like against Damage Inc., but Divine Forces gained their respect because they at least tried and often kept up a 149 good fight. Dark Slayers was just too good, and no one seemed capable of doing anything about that. Well, that is excluding several persons: the leaders of the clan. In a move that rendered the entire PvP clan world speechless, Dark Slayers closed its doors. No person was capable of comprehending why this had happened. It just did not make sense. Damage Inc. optimistically believed that they were the cause, because both clans had still not battled after Damage Inc. withdrew during a war that had actually been theirs. Perhaps Dark Slayers knew that there would not be an eighteenth consecutive victory? Damage Inc. reasoned that they were scared and that, even if it was not the main reason, it definitely played a role in the decision. Other clans, however, tried to maintain a more realistic attitude and accepted Dark Slayers’ official story of wanting to focus on life. Whatever the true reason(s), the closure of Dark Slayers automatically promoted Damage Inc. to the new rank one. But the question was, for how long? Many Dark Slayers’ members decided to join Divine Forces, the next big clan after Damage Inc. if we go by ranking. Was this enough for Divine Forces to dethrone Damage Inc.? We will find out later, but for sure is that Corruption was extremely dissatisfied with this event because Divine Forces was their enemy. With Damage Inc. at rank one and them winning virtually all fights in the next weeks, many of their members began to become bored. The clan had gotten used to their rivalry with Dark Slayers. With the rivalry gone, so was a big part of their motivation. The competition was not good enough, fights were one-sided, so in the end it is no surprise that Damage Inc. lost about fourty members over the next two months.

In May of 2007 Divine Forces challenged Damage Inc., to a war that would change the PvP landscape forever. Damage Inc. had suffered a decrease in member count and was subsequently no longer guaranteed to win a war. They still managed to pull 399+ options, but so did Divine Forces and that for the first time in their history. Several hours went by and it was clear that Divine Forces had taken full control. Damage Inc. was eventually defeated and Divine Forces had around 390 options remaining, which means that they must have been able to amass an insanely high amount of clan members. Divine Forces kept its feet on the ground, though, and was reluctant to claim rank one. They knew that they needed to beat Damage Inc. several more times. Years of experience had taught every clan that it was dangerous to draw conclusions from just one war. Not much later a rematch took place. Both clans pulled slightly fewer options, but the outcome was the same, Divine Forces had survived again. A few weeks passed and Damage Inc. had lost even more members. The consequences were devastating for them. They lost most wars or other PvP encounters to Divine Forces, who now had the right the claim rank one, and they did.

The month of June started with a war between The Gladiatorz and Genesis Dynasty, a Clan Jaguar spin-off. The Gladiatorz had gotten stuck in a negative period and they were essentially a weakened version of their former selves when the war took place. Their member count had even dropped to just eighty. Never before had it been so low in RS2. The Gladiatorz managed to pull around 200 options for the war, or just over sixty members, which they considered to be impressive, given the state of the clan. The amount Genesis Dynasty options is unknown, but The Gladiatorz’s 200 were strong enough. They defeated Genesis Dynasty within minutes. Was this the turning point for The Gladiatorz? – Divine Forces, the rank one, and Corruption had been taunting each for weeks. Corruption had become a lot stronger during that time, so they felt like they were actually strong enough for a rank one position. A lot of tension arose between the two clans, with insults being thrown back and forth. Eventually Divine Forces declared on Corruption, with rank one at stake. This much anticipated war had the potential of ending the discussion between the two clans, so Divine Forces felt like it was the right thing to do. Divine Forces pulled around 340 options, whereas Corruption showed up with 360 options. Divine Forces was slightly outnumbered, but they had prepared an excellent strategy. It took a long time before Corruption could show a lot of resistance, but by then it was already too late. Divine Forces won and the discussion finally ended: Divine Forces at one, Corruption at two.

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A few months passed and in July The Gladiatorz thought that they were ready to make their reappearance on the battlefield against some of the stronger clans. They decided the challenge The Titans, who had re-opened and had become a respectable clan, to put themselves to the test. Both clans pulled around the same amount of options, so The Gladiatorz would have no good excuse if they lost. Luckily for them, The Gladiatorz took the upper hand during the war and was convinced that a victory was not going to escape, but suddenly another clan appeared and crashed the war. This clan was Reign of Terror, a clan that would rise to the top late in RS2 and RS3. In 2007, however, they played a less important role in F2P, but were competing for rank one in P2P PvP against Damage Inc. (other clans were not extremely interested in P2P, which is why a weakened Damage Inc. could still compete at the top in P2P). Reign of Terror succeeded in ruining the war. The Titans withdrew, giving The Gladiatorz a win by default, but The Gladiatorz realized that they would have won even without the interference of Reign of Terror. This victory marked the beginning of a successful post-recovery era in which The Gladiatorz would prevail during the majority of their Pk trips. A new opportunity for a war arose after 3v0luti0n, a stable top fifteen clan that had existed since late RS1, began to insult The Gladiatorz because they felt like The Gladiatorz were hiding too much behind The Alliance. 3v0luti0n declared a war on The Gladiatorz, who were eager to prove 3v0luti0n wrong. The Gladiatorz disappointingly pulled only 210 options, but luckily 3v0luti0n was not a top clan and they could amass only 180 options. Nevertheless, 3v0luti0n managed to disorganize The Gladiatorz during the war, but the latter succeeded in turning the situation around. The Gladiatorz won with 150 options remaining and proved that they were not dependent on The Alliance. Remarkably, RS Dinasty had been recovering as well, almost completely in synchrony with The Gladiatorz. RS Dinasty was regarded top ten material again and had been competing with clans like Echo of Silence and Rune Raiders. Divine Forces experienced more difficulties late in the summer because of the increasing impact of No Honour clans. Divine forces was a so-called anti-crashing clan, which means that they protected other clans from crashers and no honour Pk’ers. The consequence of that is that Divine Forces suddenly became a big target and no hour clans or Pk’ers started to crash Divine Forces’s Pk trips more frequently. The real problem arose when these crashers interfered during encounters with Corruption, who started to defeat Divine Forces more regularly because of the crashing. However, Divine Forces never really lost control over the situation and could maintain their rank, although the gap with Corruption, in the second spot, was closing. After several more losses the public opinion was that Corruption was the real rank one, and that might well have been the case, although Divine Forces refused to acknowledge that. Corruption was now 200 members strong and clans would refuse to fight them, out of fear of losing.

Fall of 2007 was a period in which RS Dinasty made several important decisions, such as shifting their attention to rune rock Pk’ing. Damage Inc. and Aggression were among the controlling forces at the Mage bank, but RS Dinasty could not compete there. At rune rocks, P2P-based, they were successful, fighting and defeating several smaller clans or teams, such as Knights of RuneScape and The Stricken Cards. RS Dinasty and Rune Raiders had been rivals for a long time. After several attempts of trying to get Rune Raiders to war them, the clan finally accepted. RS Dinasty had fewer members, but managed to pull off a convincing victory. That was enough for Rune Raiders to realize that they were just not as good as RS Dinasty, which caused the rivalry to die down. RS Dinasty had regained its motivation and now wanted to defeated subtop clans, such as Damage Inc., Eternal Honor and Violent Resolution. They defeated Damage Inc. and Eternal Honor, but lost to Violent Resolution. Despite the loss, RS Dinasty was generally satisfied because they released that the clan was on the road of becoming one of the top clans again. At the around to same time, Divine Forces began challenging Corruption again, but the latter won most of the time. Several clans started to team up an in attempt to beat Corruption, but the fights were never fair, according to Corruption. Over the course of the next weeks Corruption’s member dropped to 160. Divine Forces noticed the decrease, so they continued to exert pressure on Corruption. Eternal Honor and Violent 151

Resolution would voluntarily assist Divine Forces. Damage Inc. and Echo of Silence responded by assisting Corruption and focusing on keeping Eternal Honor and Violent Resolution out of the fights. In the end this situation caused a great deal of controversy because the fights had become one big mess.

Corruption could not stand it anymore and decided to declare war on Divine Forces, who unknowingly accepted a historical war invitation. The war would eventually involve around ten clans. On Corruption’s side there were Damage Inc. and The Titans to help out. The Titans had also brought their ally Collision. Divine Forces could count on the help of Eternal Honor, Shadow Elves (a top ten clan) and Violent Resolution. In addition to that, several no honour clans, such as Noobs Incorporated and Reign of Terror, decided to assist Corruption because of their mutual feelings of dislike towards Divine Forces. Corruption’s side consisted of more than 800 options, but they were still outnumbered by the allies of Divine Forces. Chaos ensued almost immediately after the war had started because, not surprisingly, it was not easy to coordinate five or more clans at the same time. Corruption’s side took control shortly after the beginning of the war and the clans supporting Divine Forces had to regroup several times. As time passed Damage Inc. members (on Corruption’s side) started to log out while the members of one of Divine Forces’s allies started to log in. The ally was an Australian clan, whose members gradually logged in as the Australian morning sun rose. The loss of members on Corruption’s side and the influx of them on Divine Forces’s side was the turning point in the war. Corruption lost control and after hours of battling, Divine Forces and co. claimed victory.

In November The Gladiatorz challenged Lithuanian Forces to a war. This was an important war for The Gladiatorz because they were in high need of several convincing victories. They organized practice events and training competitions to get everyone in shape for the war. Almost eighty of their members participated in the war. Lithuanian Forces could count on only around seventy of their combatants, but the war was quite even, nonetheless. Eventually The Gladiatorz’s organization had an edge over that of Lithuanian Forces’s, and they walked out with 110 options remaining. The Gladiatorz was ranked near the bottom of the top ten at that moment. At around that time The Alliance went on a Pk trip for the first time in a while. The Alliance still consisted of Clan Jaguar, THE, The Gladiatorz and The Mighty Red Dragons at that moment, but THE had become very inactive. The Alliance marched into the Wilderness with around 320 options, or just over 100 players, hoping to get involved in some great fights. Their first opponent immediately was a major player, Divine Forces, who had re-obtained their position at the top of the hierarchy at that moment. But were they strong enough to face the four clans of The Alliance? It turned out that they were not, so they decided to leave within minutes. A little bit later Shadow Elves and The Rising ran into them. The Rising had been founded earlier in 2007 and had been gaining power. The Alliance was able to handle the two clans, but not much later the clans Adelais and Echo of Silence rushed in to attack The Alliance as well. The battle had suddenly become a whole lot more difficult, but The Alliance managed to resist as The Titans had jumped into assist them.

The Alliance wanted to prove a point by going on this Pk trip because many clans thought that The Alliance had died. Both sides were making for an entertaining fight, but suddenly Violent Resolution showed up to support the clans fighting The Alliance. Corruption, one of Violent Resolution’s enemies, got word of this, so they did not hesitate to join in and to assist The Alliance. At that moment The Alliance’s side had become heavily outnumbered, but they refused to back down. The fact that many other clans got involved in their Pk trip was only positive because the only thing that The Alliance wanted to achieve was to prove that they were still alive. RS Dinasty had used the previous weeks to recruit more members and to work on their F2P warring skills and strategies. After several fights they had become a force to be reckoned with again. Ambitious as they were, they wanted to defeat Divine Forces and Corruption, the two clans at the top of the F2P ranking. RS Dinasty respected the logical order and first declared war on Corruption. The eighty RS 152

Dinasty Combatants were significantly outnumbered by almost hundred Corruption members, so RS Dinasty’s organization had to be better than ever before if they wanted to win this. The war took eight hours and was balanced between the two sides for a long time, until eventually RS Dinasty took over and pulled off an incredible feat by surviving with more than 200 options remaining. In December of 2007 RS Dinasty challenged Divine Forces, but then tragedy happened. Jagex announced their plans to combat Real-World Trading. The plans included removing free trade and making PvP in the Wilderness impossible, with exception of two new areas: Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars. At that moment the F2P top five consisted of Divine Forces, Corruption, RS Dinasty, Damage Inc., Shadow Elves. The other spots in the top ten were being fought for by clans like The Titans, Eternal Honor, Echo of Silence, The Gladiatorz, Rune Raiders, Violent Resolution and a couple of other clans. The PvP clan world went from being at its culmination to being absolutely devastated in just a couple of days. It was a decision that cost Jagex tens of thousands of member subscription, most of them Pk’ers, whose main reason for playing the game had been revoked. All PvP clans took a hit and not many survived.

The update had far-going consequences for other communities as well. First of all, the removal of the Wilderness Pk'ing system sort of was a consequence of the removal of free trade, both of which had to go hand in hand to be effective. The update revolved around posing restrictions as to how the trading system worked. These restrictions would not be effective unless the mechanisms for drop trading or item trades upon death were radically changed too. One of the changes was that a player would no longer be able to kill other players within the Wilderness, with a few places as exception. These exceptions were Clan Wars and Bounty Hunter, which were released on the same day. However, in accordance with the newly imposed trading restriction, a person playing the Bounty Hunter minigame could not receive the items that the opponent had been wearing and carrying, but they would receive a random loot instead. This loot could also be of little value. The realization that players were no longer guaranteed to receive decent or good drops had a big impact on the solo Pk’ers. Only some of them would still Pk (in the Bounty Hunter area), hoping that they would receive something valuable, which they eventually would. With Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars becoming the only places in the Wilderness where a player could kill other people, the overwhelmingly large remainder of the Wilderness area would have become safe, and therefore without function. Jagex added revenants to the Wilderness to maintain a certain level of risk. These revenants were aggressive monsters that were supposed to replace the threat caused by the presence of Pk'ers. These revenants possessed all of the abilities that a regular Pk'er had at their disposal: revenants could freeze or teleblock opponents, attack with all combat types and the highest-level revenant, the dragon revenant, could also poison players. Wilderness remained a dangerous place, but the risk posed by Pk’ers could never be replaced.

Later Jagex also released Stealing Creation and Fist of Guthix, two minigames that included many of the traditional PvP characteristics. Other locations where players could still kill each other were the POH (Player-Owned-House) and the Duel Arena, but these two places had also been affected by the aforementioned measures. The following rule counted for POH and any other non-minigame place in RuneScape: any item that was dropped and that had a higher Grand Exchange value than 3k gp would not appear to other players. In case the dropped items consisted of multiple items with a total value of more than 3k gp, but not individually, another player was able to see only 3k gp worth in items, selected randomly by game mechanics. For example, if player A dropped six items

153 worth 800 gp each, only three of them would appear to Player B because the total value of the 'trade' could not exceed 3k gp (3 * 800 = 2,400; 4 * 800 = 3,200). a similar system applied to stackable or noted drops. For example, if Player A dropped 10k air runes with a value of 10gp each (100k gp in total), only 300 air runes would appear to other players. A similar system applied to offering stakes in the Duel Arena. The reason for all those updates was to counter real-world trading. The combat system itself remained unchanged, though: no combat types, attack styles or combat gear was changed in any way, but new equipment, such as Corrupt and Stattius items, were released as possible drops from revenants.

The PvP clan world in its entirety suffered under these changes, which formed an important turning point in the evolution of the community. Over the course of the next years PvP would be reduced to almost nothing but a clan activity. The PvP clan world itself shrunk dramatically, with many clans closing. The changes reformed the entire PvP clan competition and the damage was tragically noticeable, with the truth being harsh: PvP would no longer be the most popular activity in RuneScape. Due to the rise of skilling and PvM since 2008, with PvP being pushed into the background, I have decided not to discuss the PvP clan world for the remaining years in great detail. To conclude this chapter I will discuss several important PvP-related updates and have a look at the evolution of the clan hierarchy between 2008 and 2015. Before doing all of that, however, I will first provide an overview of what happened to the big PvP clans as a result of the updates that were made to the game in December and January. However, I should first mention another important update for many clans that happened in February of 2008. That is when Jagex changed Bounty Hunter from multi- combat to single-combat. As a consequence, clans could no longer war against each another in Bounty Hunter and were forced to move to the Clan Wars minigame that had been released a few weeks earlier.

RS Dinasty survived that turbulent phase, but lost some of its power within months. Other clans started to defeat them more frequently, but RS Dinasty persisted and continued its existence until January 2013, when they voluntarily closed. Many other clans had been less lucky and were forced to close in 2008 already. Divine Forces was not one of them, though. They had difficulty adjusting the new Clan Wars era and lost several wars to clans whom they considered to be weaker. Their luck further diminished when two of their most valuable members left the clan. Divine Forces had become more vulnerable, but still succeeded in maintaining a spot at or near the top of the PvP clan world. After the release of Evolution of Combat and Old School RuneScape, Divine Forces decided to migrate to that new version of the game, leaving the main game behind forever. Corruption was another powerful clan at the end of 2007. The clan almost died due to enormous issues with adapting to the many changes. Internal tension arose and the clan suffered under the many disagreements between the leaders. Eventually the clan would up being no stronger than they were in 2003 and they were forced to rebuild. Nevertheless, Corruption was one of the few clans who benefited from Jagex’s decision to make Bounty Hunter single-combat. Corruption used that update as a catalyst to revive themselves and after a few months they would appear more frequently on the foreground again.

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Those three clans were primarily F2P clans, Damage Inc. specialized in P2P, so they automatically had less competition. Of course the changes to the game affected Damage Inc. too, but not as much as the F2P clans. Damage Inc. remained a top clan in P2P and focused on the single-combat Bounty Hunter minigame, not just on Clan Wars. Reign of Terror became Damage Inc.’s biggest competitor. Damage Inc. ended up becoming the number one Bounty Hunter clan, but they were not as successful in Clan Wars. Eventually Damage Inc. closed its doors in 2009, but re-opened after the release of Old School RuneScape in 2013. The Gladiatorz had lost a substantial amount of power and had been reduced to a top ten clan (instead of top five) at the end of 2007. They did not appear to be affected by the changes as much as the other clans and they just decided to make the best of the situation, with activity in both Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars. The Gladiatorz lost members as well, but continued to exist without many problems. The clan still exists today and is possibly the oldest clan of the game at this moment in 2015. The Alliance was still very much alive at the end of 2007. One of its members, The Mighty Red Dragons, could not adjust to the two new minigames. After a couple of months they left the PvP clan world to become a community clan. Another of its allies, THE, had lost a lot of its power by 2008. Although they survived all of the updates, the clan did lose many members and could no longer return to become one of the stronger PvP clans.

Yet at the beginning of 2008 the PvP clan world did not dislike Bounty Hunter. Of course all Pk’ers would have preferred the traditional Wilderness Pk’ing system, but Bounty Hunter was okay because it was initially a multi-combat area, or essentially a PvP miniversion of the non-PvP Wilderness. The disappointment was big when Jagex removed this multiway aspect in February and turned Bounty Hunter into a solo-Pk minigame. Solo players had been at a significant disadvantage in Bounty Hunter. Due to the greatly reduced size of the PvP area, it had become easier to run into Pk’ing groups or clans. The consequence of that was that solo Pk’ers ended up being killed more often as groups of Pk’ers attacked solo Pk’ers more frequently, making it difficult for the solo Pk’ers to be successful on their trips in the Bounty Hunter arena. That was not something that Jagex had intended, so their decision to make the minigame a single-combat activity was made in an attempt to give solo players a fairer chance. The PvP clans were forced to move to the Clan Wars minigame, but that was a disappointing alternative to them. It was not possible to go on Pk’ing trips in Clan Wars and the minigame itself was perceived as lacking the thrills and spontaneity of traditional PvP.

On 15th August 2008 a significant PvP update happened. Until that day a player had been able to receive valuable loot only from Pk'ing in Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars. That changed on 15th August when PvP worlds were added to the game. In these worlds anyone could Pk anywhere they wanted (with several safe spots as exception). The mechanism which determined the loot that a player would receive from the defeated opponent was also changed during this update: A player would no longer receive random loots, but at the same time they would not receive anything that the opponent had been wearing or carrying either. Instead they would receive a loot that was based on a mixture of these two elements, so there was still no guarantee that a player would receive valuable items, but it was not completely random anymore either. In order to increase the odds of getting better loot, Jagex added Drop Potential/Earning Potential to the game. This potential was represented as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more likely a player was to receive better loot. The places where players could kill each other in these worlds were called hot zones. Earning Potential could be increased by spending time in these hot zones, where players were exposed to the risk of getting Pk’d. However, the opposite was true for more cowardly behaviour. It was also possible to lose Earning Potential. For example: when a player teleported away whilst in combat, that player would lose 20% of their Earning Potential. 155

Once a player had reached 100% Earning Potential, the odds of receiving good loot increased significantly. On top of that, the player also had a higher chance of receiving better loot when both of the players were carrying a risked wealth of over 75k gp (in member worlds). This part of the update unintentionally added a new money making method to the game, called 76k'ing. Having more than 75k gp + a high Earning Potential would result in valuable drops every now and then. A consequence of this was that players would invite friends to '76k' with them in order to benefit as much as possible from the update. Jagex did not like this because the 75k system was not intended to be used like that and it was not in the spirit of the game. However, they could not remove it because it was a key element in the whole concept of the new PvP worlds. On 6th May 2009 the Bounty Hunter Wilderness worlds were added to RuneScape. Bounty Hunter initially used to be

limited to a certain location within the Wilderness. This update changed that by expanding the area to the entire Wilderness area. The only use of Bounty Hunter worlds was to let players kill each other in the Wilderness, which is why these worlds could be accessed only by already being in the Wilderness or Edgeville prior to logging in. Edgeville was the only non-Wilderness area that a player could access in these worlds, with the bank as safe area. The drop system remained unchanged, though, so all drops would still be random.

In June 2009 several changes were made to the PvP worlds system. Some of them were changes to the drop table and to the Drop Potential system. Another change was the reduction of the effectiveness of protection prayers; they would no longer block 100% of the damage. For the first eight and half years of the game’s existence, it was not possible to inflict any damage if the opponent had the right protection player enabled for it. This means that when someone was attacking another player with Ranged and that second player had the Protection from Missiles prayer activated, that the first player would always fail to deal any damage. In October of the same year Jagex took some anti-76k'ing measures to discourage the act of abusing it: players who traded kills, which was essentially what happened when 76k’ing, would be punished for doing so by receiving a less valuable drop. Trading kills meant the two players would constantly attack only each other (instead of random players). This update had one major side-effect, though: when a player wanted to take revenge after being killed and decided to re-attack their killer, that player would not receive the full loot that they would otherwise have received prior to the measures.

On 21st December 2010 the first of a series of surprising and remarkable updates took place. The first one was the release of a petition. This petition was launched by Jagex themselves and they wanted to know how many players would like to see the return of free trade and the pre-2008 Wilderness system (like it was before December 2007). There were several reasons for the release of this petition, some were confirmed by Jagex, others were not. The ones that were confirmed by Jagex are that Jagex never really managed to stop real-world trading after the new Wilderness system in 2007. Another reason is that its replacements (revenants, Bounty Hunter, PvP Worlds) 156 never brought back to same feeling of 'the good old days'. One of the unconfirmed reasons is that Jagex wanted it back to generate more profit from subscriptions (as it was thought that the re- introduction would mean lead to an increase in the amount of members). Jagex never confirmed this, but there was a factor that suggested this to be true: When players wanted to sign the petition, they were taken to a page on which only one button could be clicked. The fact there was only one button led some people to think that it was a login button, while it actually was the 'yes-button' for the petition. Accidental clicks on that button could not be done, which created a lot of commotion of the RuneScape forums. Many players thought that this system was extremely misleading and unfair because there was no option to log in.

A few days later Jagex stated that the petition was not official, and that it had been released just to see what the majority of RuneScape wanted. Jagex, however, did use the result of that petition to launch an official poll/referendum in which Jagex asked whether free trade (without restrictions) and the traditional Pk'ing system of pre-December 2007 should return or not. This time the poll had a fair and clear lay-out, and each player also had to log in to vote. The condition to be met for the return of the above-mentioned features was that at least one million different accounts had to vote in favour of the return. This initially seemed like an impossible task, but several hundred thousand votes were cast within 24 hours. At certain moments the amount of cast votes exceeded a speed of hundred votes per second. This speed declined as soon as the vast majority of RuneScape had participated in the referendum. It was up to friends and other remaining players to finish the task by either voting Yes, No or I Don't Care. Two days before the referendum was scheduled to be closed, the magical mark of one million votes in favour of the return had been reached. This happened at 6:25 pm GMT (on 12th January 2011). For many this was one of the most memorable moments in the entire history of RuneScape. It certainly was for me. The RuneScape forums were joyfully spammed with the generally good news (as 91% had voted in favour of the return) and clan chats of several Jagex Moderators were flooded immediately after the vote had hit one million yes-votes. On 17th January 2011 Jagex confirmed the return of unrestricted free trade and traditional Wilderness Pk'ing.

The date was decided to be 1st February 2011. The whole of RuneScape began counting down for what was going to be a historic update... and then it happened... More than three years of changes to the Wilderness and PvP was undone in just one system update as Jagex reverted the Wilderness PvP system to what it used to be like for the first four years of RS2. That went hand in hand with the removal of the PvP Worlds and Bounty Hunter minigame. No more Drop Potential, 76k'ing, random loots... Everything had been reverted to the situation of before January 2008. For the first time in years, when a player died in the Wilderness, the victor would receive every tradable unprotected item that the defeated had been carrying or wearing. The Duel Arena in Al-Kharid re-introduced unrestricted stakes as well. Revenants were still present, but they were moved to a new dungeon (Forinthry Dungeon) where both revenants and players could attack each other. The only problem was that some Wilderness contents had been added during the period December 2007 – January 2011, but Jagex came up with a simple solution for that: all of that content was moved to safe areas and some of the minigames became accessible via the new Gamers' Grotto north of Falador. The Crucible replaced the Bounty Hunter minigame, but that was relatively unimportant on that unforgettable first day of February. Everyone, Pk’er and skillers alike, were ecstatic and grateful for what was deemed the best update in years. 157

It was an update that rekindled hope in the PvP community. Could traditional PvP be brought back to life? Many were optimistic, because why not? PvP had for many years been the core of the game and many players loved Pk’ing, but it soon appeared that too many of them had left the game. Although there was initially a lot of excitement in the PvP world, and rightfully so, in the months that followed it became clear that the Wilderness had lost its appeal. Not to Pk’ers, but to skillers. Since the introduction of the trade limit much better content for skillers had been released in the safe regions of Gielinor. For example, the Living Rock Cavern for Mining and Fishing, the Spirit Graahk familiar for safe nature runes, Ivy for Woodcutting, etc. There was no longer a good incentive for skillers to enter the Wilderness, but the same applied to members of the PvM community. In other words, it was only the PvP community, and nobody else, to whom the Wilderness held any real value. Of course the problem was that there were not many Pk’ers left in 2011. Some had quit, some had become skillers and other had joined the PvM community. By 2012 it had become clear that the PvP community was too small to handle the task of reviving the Wilderness. With no other community seeing any need to change anything about that, a group of PvP clans eventually bundled their strength in an attempt to devise a proposal for Jagex, containing ideas with regard to how the Wilderness could be revived. A clan, called The Wilderness Guardians, who had been around since 2003, uploaded a video in 2012 to share the story of PvP and to draw Jagex’s attention to the problem of a dead Wilderness. I invite you to watch what I consider to be one of the best RuneScape videos that has ever been uploaded to YouTube, in terms of both content and editing. I have tried to embed the video in this PDF, but it is unfortunately restricted from playback here and cannot be played in this PDF. However, I would still like you to pause reading to watch the video on YouTube, which can be accessed by using the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU8-mtY5ZKg – If the URL for some reason does not work anymore, the title of the video is The Wilderness - An Unauthorised Biography [Part I].

Jagex took into consideration the proposal, but everyone knew that reviving the Wilderness would be an extremely difficult task, especially because the community had changed so much. The end of 2012 and the first months of 2013 were particularly interesting for the PvP community. Evolution of Combat was released in November of 2012. The introduction of combat abilities that replaced the automated combat system caused tension in the PvP community. Many of them did not like that way of combat, at least not when it comes to Pk’ing. Although the reasons were never entirely clear, it seemed to be a problem of not wanting to learn and adapt to a new way of Pk’ing and PvP strategies. The true depth of this problem was revealed early in 2013 when Jagex released Old School RuneScape. After a while some members of the PvP community migrated from RuneScape 158

(the main game) to Old School RuneScape, until eventually entire clans followed. That, however, did not mean that PvP in the main game had died completely. A new generation of Pk’ers arose and, although they were small in numbers, they did enjoy the combat abilities for their Pk’ing adventures. Furthermore, at the around the same time Jagex released the Warbands D&D, which was supposed to attract players to the Wilderness at certain times of the day. Due to its mechanism of being playable only several times a day, at specific intervals of seven hours, Warbands became the biggest contemporary PvP activity, significantly increasing the Wilderness activity for a short period every so many hours. Yet is still did not effectively address the problem of a dead Wilderness because the D&D can be played only once every seven hours. By late 2013 it seemed as if the PvP community had accepted that traditional Pk’ing was never going to return to the game to become one of the popular activities. But it was not Jagex’s fault. In fact, there is no one to blame. Jagex had imposed a trade limit and replaced traditional Pk’ing with Bounty Hunter in an attempt to stop real-world traders from harming the integrity of the game. What they did cost them a lot in potential membership revenue as they were aware that Pk’ers could and would leave the game. In the next years the game changed drastically, in favour of the skilling and PvM communities, and so did the player base. A new generation of players was born in era when training methods generally became more rewarding and less click-intensive. By the time free trade returned, too much had changed. However, one thing is for sure: The Wilderness can still be revived if Jagex is able to make the area attractive to skillers and members of the other communities. Maybe the right ideas for it will never come, or maybe they will. Either way it seems like achieving such a feat would require a drastic transformation of the Wilderness. I have thought a while about how something like this could be accomplished and I have added the personal proposal as an appendix to this PDF, as mentioned in the introduction of this chapter.

PvP has lost its glory and is now an activity in which only a one digit percentage of the community participated, if we exclude the Warbands D&D. It is because of that reason that I have decided not to discuss any clan war or any clan in particular for the era 2008-2015. PvP was the central activity for the first seven years of this game’s existence. The PvP clans fighting each other in the later years were given little attention in general as the game gradually revolved more and more around skilling and PvM. At the end of 2009 the clans at the top of the F2P PvP ranking were Violent Resolution, RS Dinasty and The Titans. I have used Zybez’s clan archive to make a 2009 version of the PvP ranking table that I included earlier in this chapter for the year of 2005. More than 14,000 posts were made in the poll thread for the 2009 version. Evidently, too many for me, so I resorted to quota sampling to arrive at the table below. I am aware that it is not a very scientific approach, but what I did was tracking the results on a random page and instead of continuing on the next page, I left an interval of x pages. I made sure that half of the posts that I incorporated listed a top ten and the other half at least a top five. At times it was also clear that several votes were extremely biased, expressing a negative attitude towards several clans. Those posts have been left out, even if they met the requirement of a containing a top five. This also means that I might accidentally have allowed the incorporation of posts that were biased, but not in a clear manner. Nevertheless, I assume that the results for the year 2009 displayed in the table below are representative to a fairly big extent.

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Clans in order (1-12): Violent Resolution, RuneScape Dinasty, The Titans, Corruption, Echo of Silence, Divine Forces, Reign of Terror, Chivalry Legions, The Rising, Crimson Raiders, Future of Old Style and The RuneScape Warhungers Federation.

As you can see, there can be no discussion regarding the top three. From the sampled pages Violent Resolution was voted the number one F2P PvP clan almost unanimously. Many of these top twelve clans also existed before the removal of the traditional Pk’ing system, so a new generation of clans did not succeed in overthrowing the clans of old. I have done the same for the year of 2011. This time over 5,000 posts were made in the official thread. I used the same method to arrive at the following analysis and the ranking of top clans at the end of 2011.

Clans in order (1-11): Divine Forces, Violent Resolution, RuneScape Dinasty, Echo of Silence, The Titans, Solace, Corruption, The Rising, Forsaken, Pure Hatred, Downfall.

I encountered a small problem for the 2013 version. The vast majority of the replies contained only a top six, nothing more. This means that we have to be careful with interpreting the positions of the clans ranked sixth, seventh or lower. Furthermore, the clan Cheer Up has an average position of 4.31, significantly lower than Violent Resolution. Yet Cheer Up’s correct position is at one rank below Violent Resolution’s position because Cheer Up was mentioned only 29 times in the votes. The table below could not be any clearer for the top three. Reign of Terror was the undisputed rank one at the end of 2013, followed by Divine Forces and Damage Inc. Additionally, it should be noted that new clans entered the top ten and several of the traditional clans (such as Corruption, Echo of Silence and The Titans) were kicked out of the top ten. RS Dinasty had closed its doors earlier that year.

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Clans in order (1-9): Reign of Terror, Divine Forces, Damage Inc., Ancient Fury, Violent Resolution, Cheer Up, Critical Damage, Poison, Vitality.

Many Pk’ing clans have come and gone over the course of the years. Although it is impossible to list all of them, there is a fair amount of clans who gained the respect of many other clans in one way or another, or became known to a certain extent. I thought that it would be reasonable to make a list with the names of these clans, especially to honour the ones who did not get a mention in the chapter. The PvP clans who left a footprint, no matter how big or small, are as follows below, in alphabetical order. This list has a strong focus on the F2P world.

-3v0luti0n -Dead on Arrival -Legendz -Adelais -DeathCorps -Lethal Blades -Anarchy -Deathrow -Lithuanian Forces -Ancient Fury -Demolition -Lords of Chaos -Anfibians -Demonic Empire -Lunar Wolves -Anonymous Community -Divine Forces -Malicious Intent -Ascension -Downfall -Massive Metal Attack -Australian Army -Dragon Hunters -Master of Dragons -Awaken -DragonWood -Mayhem Makers -B0rn -Dynasty -Mystic Dynasty -Bearz -Echo of Silence -Mystic Knights -Black Dragon Knights -Elite Warriors -Nemesis -BlacKnights -Empire of Honor -Ninjas -Blades of Serenity -Eternal Brethren -Northern Gods -Brotherhood of the Forsaken -Eternal Honor -Of The Gods -Brutality -Euphoria -Phalanx Clan -Chaotic Legions -Exercitum -Phoenix Elite -Cheer Up -Exodus -Poison -Chivalry Legions -Fear -Proximity -Clan Envy -Final Ownage Elite -Pure Hatred -Clan Europe -Flip Flops -Pure Rune -Clan Hellion -Followers of Malkav -ReBirth -Clan Jaguar -Forsaken -Red Armies -Collision -Future of Old Style -Red Blade Hunters -Corruption -Genesis -Red Devil Clan -Court of Dragons -Golden Helms -Reign of Terror -Crimson Knights -Guardians of Honor -Retaliation -Crimson Raiders -Hell Army -Ronin -Critical Damage -Jaja -RS Mob -Crusaders of Blood -Knights of Order -Rune Raiders -Damage Incorporated -Legendary Crew -RuneScape Dynasty -Dark Slayers -Legendary Knights -RuneScape Elites 161

-RuneScape Valor -The Death Monkeys -The Unforsaken -Runite Knights -The Devils -The Wanderers -Sacred Templars -The Dynasty -Torment -Shadow Elves -The Gladiatorz -Triforce -Shining Paladins -The Messiahs -True Ownage -Silent Assassins -The Mighty Red Dragons -Valhalla -Solace -The Moon Clan Family -Violent Resolution -Sovereign -The Moriquendi -Vitality -Supremacy -The Musketeers -Warriors of Fury -Syndicate -The Outlaws -Wicked Fury -Team Trinity -The Rising -Wilderland -THE -The RuneScape -Wilderness Guardians -The Call of Legends Warhungers Federation -WolfPack -The Dark Legends -The Sabres -Zeonic Force -The Darq Syde -The Titans

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6

Skilling

Skilling has been present since the beginning of the game, but to a limited extent. This is why there were not really any skilling clans in the first two years of the game, although there were several clans that revolved around one specific skill. However, these were not actual clans, but guilds or otherwise separate communities. For example, LtAngel, the first person to reach level 99 in the Crafting skill, founded an organization in 2002, called LTAngel’s Crafting and Enchantment Services. Anyone who was in need of jewelry, battlestaves and other Crafting-related products, but did not have the required Crafting level could make use of her service. The only requirement was that each player had to provide the resources that were needed to craft the item. Although it is not known whether or not she charged anything for doing this at first, in RS2 she would offer these services for free, also for the new dragonhide armour and onyx crafting that followed in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

For Smithing there was Bluerose13x’s Smithing service in 2001 and early 2002. She was the first person to reach level 99 Smithing and offered her services for free. Bluerose13x was among the first people to smith steel and mithril, which required much higher levels at first. For example, mithril required a level of 80 in the Smithing skill, but the requirements were later lowered to what they are today. The downside of offering free services is that scammers took that as an opportunity to create fake names that looked like Bluerose13x’s. Not only were those who needed the help the victim of that, but also Bluerose13x herself because the scammed people thought that it was the real Bluerose13x with whom they had traded. LtAngel did not suffer from this, or not for a long time, because the Tutorial Island that was released in the second half of 2002 was effective for putting an end to the name scamming. However, this happened after Bluerose13x had temporarily quit the game. Her friends were part of the Wanderers clan. This was a PvP clan that was in competition with Robin Hood2’s guild, who was a famous Pk’er in RS1. As a result of Bluerose13x’s monopoly, the Wanderers clan had the luck of being able to make shields, where Robin Hood2’s guild did not. This is one example of how knowing the right skillers in RS1 could be positive for the PvP clans. Most skillers stopped smithing at around level 50 or 60, but Bluerose13x did not and went on to 99. This how she eventually ended up in a monopoly, where she was one of the only people that could smith rune items.

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She temporarily quit during the summer of 2002, which is when Musashi22 was able to overtake her in the hiscores to become the new rank one in Smithing. That was also when he followed Bluerose13x’s example and started his own Smithing service, also for free, but only for rune items and he would convert only rune bars into items, not ore into bars because he generally did not have enough time for that. Generally all rune armour and weapons were still very expensive, though. In the early stages of the RS1, the high-level players who could smith the best rune items tended to agree with each other on keeping the price high. Of course there were exceptions, but they were a minority and did not have much influence on the price-fixing. Evidently, the community was dissatisfied with the monopoly in the market of rune items. However, that was not the main problem, although it was an important factor. The demand for runite items far outweighed the supply of it and even the effort of all the high-level players combined would never suffice to provide everyone with rune weaponry. The Runite Revolution was a reaction to this, organized by a couple of people, not only in an attempt to break the monopoly, but also to establish more reasonable market prices. It was estimated that more than 25,000 of each runite items had to be created in order to meet the demand for the most part. Considering that the few high-level smiths could never do that, no matter how hard they would try, it was necessary to look for an alternative. The solution was free smithing of rune items. A small segment in the community offered to train Smithing and agreed that they would not charge anything for the smithing of any runite items as soon as those players had reached the required levels. The reaction was that people began to voluntarily donate money to these smiths, so that they could buy the resources to train the skill. Keep in mind that that the price of a runite item usually consisted of the market price + a fee for the smithing service. The goal of the Runite Revolution was not to make runite items completely free, but to significantly reduce the fee for the service so that fairer prices would be established. Eventually this movement, because that is what it was, led to the existence of two competing camps: those who tried to popularize freesmithing and those, many of the high-levelled players, who preferred price fixing because it would be more profitable for them. The latter’s reaction was to produce more runite items in order to make as much profit as possible before the freesmithing community could exert an influence on the price. Ironically, it was exactly that decision that accelerated the success of the Runite Revolution. The goal was to pump more runite items into the game so that lower prices could be established, so the high-level smiths who wanted to make as much profit as possible only helped to achieve this goal by producing many runite items in an attempt to maximize their profit while feeling the freesmithing community breathing in their neck. In hindsight, the success was inevitable. The only requirement for the freesmiths to succeed was that a sufficiently high amount of players would participate.

Although we have not talked about clans yet, these services for the various skills played an important role in the birth of the clan community, because it is those services that created a sense of being united, either before or against something. A notable skilling clan emerged in 2003. Ronnie89 and Adidas founded the clan Miners and Smithers of RuneScape (MaSoRS) on 30th August 2003. Although there were several other communities that revolved around Mining and Smithing at that time, MaSoRS was among the first of those to be an actual clan that was dedicated to skilling together and having fun in general. Interesting about this clan is how they ended up recruiting. At first MaSoRS resorted to the traditional form of recruiting on the RS1 forums and by talking to people in-game, but their most successful strategy was something entirely different. Many of their clan events involved the formation of a conga line near the different mining sites in RuneScape. After a couple of weeks one of their members got the idea of using all the ore that had been 164 collected during the mining events to organize drop parties. And people love drop parties. The news of the first drop party organized by MaSoRS attracted around thirty people, of which most were not clan members. Only mithril, adamant and coal was dropped at that time, but Smithing resources had a much higher intrinsic value at that time. Their second drop party was scheduled for Thanksgiving of 2003 and attracted around hundred people, with the value of all dropped items totaling around two million gp (all items being related to Mining or Smithing). This was a lot of money at that time. By that day it had become clear that organizing drop parties was a remarkably efficient recruitment method, so a third drop party was inevitable. In January 2004 possibly up to two hundred people participated in MaSoRS’s biggest event yet. With four million gp worth of items being dropped in Edgeville, MaSoRS was on the road to becoming the biggest skill-specific clan of RuneScape, at a time when PvP had dominated the landscape for years. In the next five years another four drops parties would be organized, with the dropped items totaling at a value of no less than 300m gp. It is evident that MaSoRS was an important milestone in the evolution of skilling clans. The clan still exists today, but as a community clan that has decided to keep the name.

It was in the spring of 2004 that Larryr would set up one of the most iconic skilling businesses in the history of the game. Larryr was just a regular player who enjoyed training Runecrafting for money when she suddenly got the idea of recruiting other people to bring essence to her in the nature rune altar in return for a monetary compensation. Runecrafting was only a couple of months old and no one had achieved level 99 in the skill yet when Larryr started to recruit the first players in May of 2004. Although her plan was to train Runecrafting as fast as possible, she did have good intentions as well. By recruiting other people to help her train the skill, she also tried to provide a good moneymaking method to her helpers. This is what allowed the quick establishment of a popular runecrafting business that had a remarkably professional internal structure. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the runners (= the helpers). They were supposed to bring unnoted essence to nature rune altar, which is located on Karamja, where collectors would accept the essence in a trade and give the runners 25 noted essence and 10,525 gp. The runners’ job was essentially to turn noted essence into unnoted essence and to bring it the nature rune altar, where Larryr would be waiting to receive the unnoted essence from the collectors. A popular method of unnoting essence to train the skill by making nature runes consisted of travelling to the general store just north Tai Bwo Wannai. A player could sell some of their noted essence to general store, after which he or she had to buy it again in order to end up with 25 unnoted essence.

Meanwhile the security staff of the business supervised and carefully checked if no one was trying to ‘steal’ the essence that someone else had sold to the general store. The security was also present inside the nature altar to make sure that no one would cut the line. While all of that was going on, several recruiters were adverting the business as a good moneymaking method at various locations in RuneScape. However, every player first had to go through some sort of trial process before they could join the business and become a runner. This trial consisted of an actual training session, in which the trainers would explain what the runners were supposed to do, and an interview to get to know the new players better. At the top of the hierarchy were the managers and the CEO. The managers can be compared to what regular clan leaders are now. They make everything run smoothly and solve problems where any arise. Meanwhile the CEO, who was not Larryr by the 165 way, sold the nature runes that Larryr had crafted and bought more essence with it (that the collectors would then give to the runners in noted form). Keep in mind, we are still in 2004 at that time. The Grand Exchange did not exist yet, so the CEO had to sell runes and buy essence by using the forums or by visiting the popular trading locations in world 2. Larryr paid a fixed sum of money to all the non-runners in the business. As you can see, instead of letting everyone go through the entire process of runecrafting (up to the point at which the essence is supposed to be traded to Larryr), the entire business was broken down into many subtasks, in which the players could specialize, which is also an effective production strategy in real life. Larryr’s business would continue to exist until 2006, when she quit RuneScape, and any attempt to keep the business alive failed. However, an alternative was on its way…

In March of 2007 Masterdez and Sword Kill11 founded Fast Free Double Nats, also commonly abbreviated as FFDN. Even at that time nature runecrafting was still the fastest method of training the skill, but could be sped up by hiring runners. Both runners and crafters were welcome to freely make use of FFDN, without any sort of requirements or trials. A runner’s job was to bring essence to the nature rune altar in world 36, where the crafter would give natures in return, at a rate of two nature runes for each essence. Crafters could usually be recognized by their clothing as it was asked that all crafters wore yellow robes. The two main ways of rune running were by going through the Abyss, which had been released in 2005, or by using the general store in Tai Bwo Wannai to convert noted essence into unnoticed essence, although that had become significantly less popular because of how much slower it was in comparison to using the Abyss. This is how FFDN continued to operate until the end of 2007, when they were forced to change the entire runecrafting procedure as a consequence of the removal of free trade. Two nature runes were a lot more expensive than essence, so the crafters could no longer give the runners nature runes in exchange for the essence due to the trade limit.

This appeared to be a big problem at first, but a solution soon followed thanks to the release of the assists system just a few months earlier. Instead of trading nature runes for essence, the crafter would now accept requests for assistance (by using the new system) until they had filled their daily cap of 30k Runecrafting xp. The runners would still not receive any xp, but at the same time they still did obtain two nature runes for every essence. The only difference here is that the assist system allows the runner to craft the nature runes (without getting xp), so no trading was required. January 2008 saw the introduction of the Summoning skill and a new runecrafting method, called graahking. The spirit graahk familiar teleports the players to a location near the nature rune altar. This slightly affected FFDN in the sense that several runners switched from using the Abyss to using the graahk method, which was considerably faster and led to runners spawning inside the altar at two different locations instead of just one. Most of the time there was at least one crafter active inside the nature altar, so there was little waiting and almost none in the European and American evenings. FFDN’s services were so popular, however, that sometimes the altar would be filled with people waiting in lines, even when three or four crafters were active.

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However, it was the same assist system that saved FFDN at the end of 2007 that would eventually lead to the downfall in June 2010. The new ancient effigies had a devastating impact on FFDN’s services. People who did not have a sufficiently high level to claim the Runecrafting xp from their effigy began to make use of FFDN’s runecrafters inside the nature altar. This would immediately fill the daily cap of the crafter, so that no other runner was able to make use of that crafter. There was no way to check in advance whether a person standing in the line was someone with an effigy or an actual runner, so eventually all crafters would reach their daily cap too fast, leaving behind many waiting runners. FFDN struggled, but did not die and just hanged in there. However, the final blow was delivered in 2012 when traditional altar running was made almost obsolete when Jagex added Runespan to the game. With Runespan offering much higher xp rates and being a lot less click-intensive, traditional runecrafting stood no chance and became a thing of the past, for the most part. At around that time FFDN decided to continue operating as clan that promotes Runecrafting, but welcomes players for other activities as well. Therefore, they changed the abbreviation’s meaning to become Famous for Double Natures. Today the original FFDN tradition lives on in Old School RuneScape, in exactly the same way as it did in 2007.

Enough about Runecrafting. There was this tendency to create clans or teams for activities that were considered boring or hard at that time. One of those skills was Agility, so it is no surprise that eventually also this skill would follow the tradition. The biggest and most significant Agility community to have existed in the history of the game is W46 Ape Atoll Agility Team, also called W46 AAAT. It was founded in April 2007 by Minminpu for exactly the reason that I have mentioned above, although it important to note here that W46 AAAT was a team and no a clan, so anyone could freely join and leave. If a player was training Agility in world 46 at the Ape Atoll course, they were considered to be training with the team. Especially if they had also joined the official friends chat for it. From 2007 until June 2009, the two courses that provided the best xp rates were Ape Atoll and Dorgesh-Kaan. The majority of the people generally preferred Ape Atoll, so it should come as no surprise that W46 AAAT ended up becoming a popular team. The leaders would organize Official Running Times (ORT) every now and then, similar to clan events. Everyone was welcome to join. The more, the merrier. I remember seeing around thirty people at peak times and many of them were there to train until level 99. Just over a year after founding the clan, around 15% of all level 99 agilitizers of the game had made use of W46 AAAT for extended periods of time and many more infrequent users were not counted. That is pretty impressive considering that Agility has been around since RS1.

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The Advanced Agility courses (at the Barbarian Outpost and the Gnome Stronghold) released in June 2009 presented W46 AAAT with a problem. The new courses were significantly faster than Ape Atoll (about 15k-20k xp more per hour), so those who had the level for it naturally preferred to make use of the new courses and to stop training at Ape Atoll. With that course becoming less popular, the team saw it necessary to change the name to W46 ATAT, standing for W46 All Terrain Agility Team, and to organize ORTs at multiple Agility courses by alternating between them. The fact that multiple courses were not being used did cause a split in the team, but W46 ATAT continued to exist with frequent ORTs. However, over the course of the last years, W46 ATAT’s popularity has gradually decreased to the point at which the leaders stopped organizing ORTs. Even though the team still exists today in 2015, it is nothing but a place for people to chat with each other.

Jagex added the Living Rock Cavern to the game in September of 2009. This drastically changed the Mining skill and it was the first of a series of updates that would turn skilling into a less click- intensive activity over the course of the years. The Living Rock Cavern at that time revolutionized Mining because until then best method to train the skill had been the granite and sandstone one in the Kharidian Desert. The release of the cavern introduced concentrated gold mining to the game, a mining method that is not click-intensive and that offered xp rates of over 70k xp per hour at that time. The only problem at first was that the living rock creatures inside the cavern could easily kill low-level players and inflict serious damage to high-level players. Zetris found a solution to this at the end of 2009 by founding a clan that would focus on extracting concentrated gold in one and the same world. This turned out to be a good strategy to minimize the risk of being attacked by any of the creatures. The new clan, called Mining Golds, immediately gained a lot of popularity, at a rate that had never been seen before in the game. Just a couple of months later, hundreds of players relied on Mining Golds to mine safely in the Living Rock Cavern. At that time Mining Golds used a friends chat that anyone could join as a guest if they wanted to train in world 84. Ranks, and sometimes guests voluntarily as well, would frequently announce which gold rocks were down and which ones were up, so just being in the friends chat was already sufficient to benefit from the clan. The success of Mining Golds at that time can largely be ascribed to the fact that training the skill in the Living Rock Cavern was considered to be the only good high-level mining method. And that for years, until late in 2014, when Jagex released the Elf City. Mining Golds ended up becoming so successful that some players could not stand the lag inside the Living Rock Cavern caused by the sheer amount of players there. Also the friends chat had started to become completely full at a certain moment, so the clan decided to create a second friends chat and to pick a second world where the activity could be trained. World 77 was turned into a new world where considerably fewer players would train in the Living Rock Cavern, but still enough to withstand the living rock creatures. After clan chats and the official clan system has been released in 2011, Mining Golds became an official skilling clan, but also continued to exist as clan of which guests could make use to train in the Living Rock Cavern.

With Dungeoneering, released in April 2010, being a skill that was supposed to promote teamwork, it is only logical that Dungeoneering clans started to appear in Gielinor with the intention of finding the right partners more conveniently. This was a great opportunity to connect to other players, but it also made it possible for lazy skillers to turn into freeloaders, letting the other team members do all the work. Another problem was that, after a while, the experienced dungeoneers got frustrated when 168 they had someone in their team who was just not as good as they were and who actually slowed everything down. A solution to that sprang into existence in October 2010 when Lemar founded the high-level Dungeoneering clan 3 Binds Only, most commonly referred to as 3BO. As the name suggests, the requirement to join is that a player could bind three items in Daemonheim, which required a Dungeoneering level of 100 at that time and therefore guaranteed that all team members would be experienced dungeoneers. The goal of founding this clan was to unite the fast dungeoneers so that every clan member could train the skill as fast as possible. 3BO became an extremely popular Dungeoneering clan, with eventually many of the high-ranked players in Dungeoneering making use of the clan in order to make sure that they would not waste time with inexperienced players. Many of the people who obtained 200M xp in Dungeoneering in the first two years, did so by being part of 3BO. Those were great times for the clan, but in the end it was driven by nothing but a hype and, as is the case with hypes, at some point they end. This is also happened for 3BO when the majority of the high-level community had reached level 120 in the skill, and had no reason to train the skill anymore. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment for that, but as of 2013 there has been a noticeable decrease in Dungeoneering interest, to the point at which some would go as far as saying that the skill is dead. Perhaps this is why solo Dungeoneering was given higher xp rates at some point. 3BO still continued to exist as a Dungeoneering clan, welcoming everyone who met the requirements, but eventually they expanded their function to include the teaching of PvM and PvP, and by early 2015 the amount of clan members had decreased by a fivefold in comparison to early 2013.

So far we have had a look only at the clans that revolved around a particular skill. This type of skilling communities was the most commonly present one for many years. Of course in RS1 there also were actual skilling clans, or guilds as they used to be called, in which the focus was not on one particular activity, but on skilling in general. However, their presence was not prominent at a time when PvP clans ruled Gielinor. Skilling in general gained popularity in RS2, partly because the new game mechanics had made skilling more convenient. Apart from MaSoRS’s presence, I could find very little about skilling clans in 2004. However, in 2005 there were two particular skilling clans that gained popularity. These were called Serenity and Peacefull (no typographical error). Serenity was a clan aimed at skillers and it had amassed more than fifty members by early 2006. They were considered to be one of the two best clans of 2006, partly because Amarajah and Villandra were two of their members, two top skillers at that time. Peacefull, the other of the two clans, was founded in January of 2005 as clan for players with a low combat level and they became Serenity’s biggest competitor, also thanks to some great skillers that were part of the clan. For example, Quickness22, Soul in Pain and Zzzamorak. Despite being a clan that consisted primarily of level three skillers, they were sometimes regarded as being better than Serenity. Both clans continued to be strongly present at the top of the skilling communities for another year, but then slowly lost their grip as of 2008, when three other clans rose to power.

Between early 2006 and late 2008 three clans were founded that would take skilling competition to the next level and give rise to one of the greatest rivalries in the history of skilling clans. The first of these clans is Supreme Skiller, founded by Calorius and Lovvel in July of 2006. At that time Peacefull and Serenity were still reigning, but Supreme Skillers were quick to join them. In fact, they were a big skilling clan right from the start. Calorius was a top skiller and Lovvel was well- known because of his activity on several external sites, such as Zybez. By the end of 2006 Supreme Skillers were competing at the time with Serenity and Peacefull. Skilling wars between Serenity and Supreme Skillers were most often won by Serenity, but that was long before Supreme Skillers would reach their full potential. The second new clan to appear in the skilling scenery was Skillers United, founded in January 2007 by KngKyle. They quickly established themselves as a top skilling clan because the founders were relatively good skillers who were able to recruit the right people. For the most part of 2007 Supreme Skillers and Skillers United reinforced their position at the top of the skilling world as Peacefull and Serenity slowly started to lose some of their power. The third 169 new clan to write history was Divination, founded by Jeff Damaori in March 2008. Within months they attained a high status in the skilling community with many top skillers joining the clan, such as Da Broman1, KingGeorgeIV, Timlahaye and Zhho; all of whom would either break xp records or appear on the first pages of the hiscores. With Supreme Skillers, Skillers United and Divination establishing themselves at the top of the skilling clan hierarchy, Gielinor was ready for what would eventually turn into the most historic rivalry between skilling clans.

The removal of free trade and the original Wilderness Pk’ing system in December of 2007 gave regular skilling a major boost. As a consequence of that, many more skilling clans were founded as of 2008. At this point is becomes very difficult to focus on the entire community of skilling clans, so I will focus only on those that dominated at the top of the skilling world. As of 2008 those clans were Divination, Skillers United and Supreme Skillers. This is also when an entirely new era of skilling was born, what would later be referred to as hardcore skilling. Whereas PvM clans cared about killing as many bosses as possible in as little time as possible, skilling clans started to focus more and more on gaining as much xp as possible in as little time as possible. Hardcore skilling still exists, but in a drastically different form. In 2008 and 2009 high-level skilling content was characterized as being extremely click-intensive. For example, Mining was usually done in the Quarry, which is located in the southwestern corner of the Kharidian Desert; Thieving was trained in the Pyramid Plunder minigame; and Runecrafting by using the ZMI altar or by crafting nature runes. There was no such thing as social skilling and, even though many people did talk a lot, there were also people who considered talking to be a waste of xp. That does not mean that those clans were not tight communities, though. It means that when they were skilling (and not doing something else), the focus was on skilling and on gaining xp. It was common for those people to test how much xp they could do in an hour or in a day, fully concentrating on the activity.

By 2008 sites that tracked xp gains had become very popular among skilling clans. The consequence of this is that each of those three clans would attempt to break xp records in various skills and the top twenty of daily Overall xp gain almost always featured members of all three clans. These clans would regularly offer to organize skilling wars, which revolve around gaining as much xp as possible in a given period of time. Mostly the duration was either a day, two days or a week, and that for just one specific skill. At that time Peacefull and Serenity were still actively defending their status as well. It was not uncommon for the clans’ skillers to play for the entire duration of the war without taking a break if it had been decided that the war should be 24 or 48 hours long. At that time skilling was still highly click-intensive. I remember a Thieving skilling between Divination, Skillers United and Supreme Skillers in which several of the clan members would gain 5m Thieving xp in 24 hours. That was very impressive considering the click-intensity and the normal xp rate of around 230k-240k xp per hour. It was not uncommon that someone would set a new xp record during a skilling war, but the biggest reward was being able to claim victory. It was more about prestige and status than it was about the actual xp gained, though. When Jagex announced that they would hold the first Jagex Clan Cup in 2009, the three happily accepted the challenge to prove once and for all who the number one skilling clan was

84 skilling clans had signed up to participate in the prestigious Jagex Skilling Cup. Both Calorius and LovveL had quit playing RuneScape, a loss for the Supreme Skillers, but luckily their new leaders were top skillers as well. One of them was Aasiwat (currently known as Allar), former rank 170 two of the game, and the other one was Neo Qdon, an excellent skiller in general. Furthermore, in 2009 Gertjaars, Aasiwat and Lucipher6 were part of Supreme Skillers. These players formed the top three of RuneScape for a while, and in that order. After weeks of optimizing training methods and racking up xp in Fishing and Woodcutting, only one clan could have the highest average xp per hour; only one of them could win. While Supreme Skillers and Skillers United were nowhere to be seen in the top three, Divination proved their superiority as the only clan to achieve an average xp rate of over 70k xp per hour across both skills, and they would only become stronger in the next years. All three clans would continue to have regular skilling wars against each other, but Divination’s hegemony was yet again confirmed in the Jagex Skilling Cup of 2010 as they obliterated the other competitors. This time, however, Supreme Skillers did not participate.

Divination entered the year of 2011 with soaring confidence while Skillers United and Supreme Skillers had informally recognized Divination as the best skilling clan of the game, although it should be mentioned that Skillers United and Supreme Skillers were slightly less competition-minded than Divination. Their position at the top of the hierarchy was pretty hard to deny, considering their two consecutive wins in the Jagex Skilling Cup. Now the big question was… could they pull off a third victory? The future did not look bright for them because an internal dispute had caused a group of clan members to leave and to found their own clan, called Divine Skillers. Their goal for 2011: beating Divination in the Jagex Skilling Cup, even though the 2011 clan cup would take place fewer than two months after the clan had been founded. With Divination having lost some of their power and with Divine Skillers eager to teach them a lesson, the summer of 2011 would be nothing less than an extremely exciting period for all clans involved in the skilling competition. Meanwhile Skillers United had decided not to participate. It turned out that the Jagex Cup of 2011 had come too soon for Divine Skillers as Divination secured their third victory in a row. Divine Skillers dominated Agility, one of the selected skills, but could not live up to the expectations for the other skills and would not participate in any of the following Jagex Cups. Divination, on the hand, was dead set on trying to win it for the fourth time in 2012. None of their old rivals were still in the race, so another victory seemed obvious and inevitable. However, their own confidence might have been what led to underestimating the competitors because it surprisingly was not Divination who won the cup, but a relatively new clan, called Skill Shock, founded in June 2011 by ShySteph. The 2012 edition was the last Jagex Cup in which Divination

would participate and they eventually closed their doors in 2013. Meanwhile Skillers United was the only surviving clan of the big three as also Supreme Skillers had gone inactive.

The Jagex Cup of 2013 was not organized by Jagex. A direct consequence of this was that the players could not accurately and reliably track xp gains. This is why it was decided that the skilling competition should consist of playing Stealing Creation games without using combat. Despite the obvious role of tactics in that minigame, it is entirely different than judging skilling clans by

171 looking at their xp gains, so the skilling cup of 2013 cannot be considered a valid method of assigning a rating to the top skilling clans if we previously only took xp gains into account for this. Skilling inside Stealing Creation is hardly comparable to skilling elsewhere in Gielinor. With none of the Big Three clans participating in the Jagex Skilling Cup of 2014, which was organized by Jagex again, it was hard to predict who would win. Perhaps Skill Shock again? Another possibility at that time appeared to be the Efficiency Experts clan, founded by Dragonseance. Although they had never managed to win the Jagex Skilling Cup, Efficiency Experts ended second in the very first cup in 2009, before Skillers United and Supreme Skillers. Ever since Divination closed, Efficiency Experts have often been referred to as the number one skilling clan due to their rank in the official clan hiscores. However, it should be taken into account that this clan ranking is highly influenced by the amount of members in the clan, so it is hardly representative when want to look at average xp gains and at the potential to maximize that average, which is exactly what the Jagex Skilling Cup measures. The clan that eventually won the 2014 edition was none of the clans that I have mentioned so far, but a small skilling clan going by the amiable name of Hola Amigos, founded by Rowley and Vonte in January of 2013. Surprisingly, Hola Amigos was just a group of friends who seemingly casually participated in the Jagex Skill Cup without any profound preparation or ambition to win. Whereas Divination revolved around hardcore skilling, the entirely opposite was true for Hola Amigos, with the focus being on having fun together. We can only wait and see how they will do in the 2015 edition.

When RuneScape was released on 4th January 2001, the game counted eleven skills. This means that throughout the history of RuneScape fifteen skills have been added to the game and many skills have undergone major changes. Before discussing these changes, I will first provide a quick overview of when those skills were added to the game.

Crafting: 8th May 2001 Prayer: 24th May 2001 Fishing: 11th June 2001 Herblore: 12th February 2002 Fletching: 25th March 2002 Thieving: 30th April 2002 Agility: 12th December 2002 Runecrafting: 29th March 2004 Slayer: 26th January 2005 Farming: 11th July 2005 Construction: 31st May 2006 Hunter: 21st November 2006 Summoning: 15th January 2008 Dungeoneering: 12th April 2010 Divination: 20th August 2013

The Grand Exchange is a place where players can buy and sell items through an automated system that takes care of the trade offer in a way that allows those players to do something else, or even go offline, while the Grand Exchange tries to complete their trade offer. Prices are based entirely on supply and demand, and are updated automatically at (almost) random intervals. It kind of works like a stock exchange in real life. You offer to either sell or buy a share and then the stock exchange takes care of it, or your stock broker executes the trade for you, who could be considered to be the real life equivalent of a Grand Exchange clerk. By many the Grand Exchange is considered an obvious feature of the game, especially among the newer players. For them it is something that should logically be part of RuneScape. Where else would you get your resources from to train all the skills? However, those of you who created their RuneScape account in 2007 or earlier will know that it is perfectly possible to play RuneScape without the presence of the Grand Exchange. In fact, 172 even today there still are some (although not many) veteran players who wish that the Grand Exchange had never been released.

So what does the Grand Exchange have to do with any of the skills? Well, the release of it had a major indirect impact on how several skills would be trained. Before attempting to explain this, I should start off by describing the situation of RuneScape prior to the release of the Grand Exchange. Before is release, which happened in November 2007, every was supposed to obtain the resources for their skilling either by training the resource-gathering skills (e.g. Mining, Woodcutting) or the player could buy resources in one-on-one trades with other people. If the player chose for the latter, he or she had several options: the player could check the forums and/or post a thread with their trade offer, the player could go through the friends list to check if there was anyone who could help, or the player could go to world 1 or world 2. These two worlds are the official worlds for trading, but world 1 used to be for free players and world 2 for members. Falador and later Varrock used to be packed with hundreds of players spamming their trade offer.

The point that I am trying to make is that the landscape was radically different when it comes to skilling, and that because of one major difference: not only did players have to spend time on training the skills, before the release of the Grand Exchange they also had to spend a considerable amount of time on trying to obtain or buy the resources. This is often forgotten when comparisons are made between how fast skilling is today and how fast it used to be before 2008. The best way to demonstrate this is by using an example of a skilling method that offers the same xp rate today as it did in 2007. Assume that air rune runecrafting provides around 5k xp per hour today, just like it did in 2007. Today you can buy the rune essence in the Grand Exchange while doing other activities, such as runecrafting. However, back in 2007 that same player would have had to spend a while in Falador world 2 to see if anyone was selling rune essence at a reasonable price. Should we exclude the time that is takes to buy the essence just because it is not part of the actual runecrafting process? Of course not, we should look at the big picture here. Regardless of the xp rates being exactly the same, air rune runecrafting in 2007 was slower because the time spent on buying the rune essence should be taken into account as well. Time spent on preparation is equally important as the time spent on the actual process of training the skill.

That is one way of how the Grand Exchange has had an indirect effect on how skills are trained, but there is another way too. Merchanting is something of all times. Quite simply explained, merchanting is the act of buying an item and selling it a higher price in order to make profit. With the Grand Exchange being an automated trading process, also merchanting became somewhat automated and would suddenly require much less manual input from the player than it did before the Grand Exchange had been released. This is an extremely important fact because it led to the Grand Exchange becoming an efficient moneymaking tool for the most proficient merchants. A remarkable trend that was visible in 2008 and later is that the top players could suddenly afford to switch from the less expensive buyable skills (Cooking, Firemaking) to training the more expensive ones (Crafting, Prayer). But that was not a coincidence, or not so sudden at all. It was a logical consequence of how the Grand Exchange had unintentionally introduced a more or less automated and passive moneymaking method. The release of the Grand Exchange caused the growth of the economy to accelerate because more trades could be conducted in a shorter period of time. It is like the game of supply and demand had suddenly been put on steroids. It was mind-blowing to see how popular even the most expensive buyable skills became in a relatively short period of time. And today we can see the direct consequences of that. Remove the Grand Exchange from the game's entire history and you can be sure that all of the top players would have a lot less total xp than they do now.

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Another system that used to play an important role in the fatigue system. While many of you who are reading this probably have no idea what this is or was, the few readers who do will look back at it without much enthusiasm. The fatigue system was released in November of 2002 in response to the growing amount of botters in the game. At that moment there already was a bot-detection system, but apparently it did not work sufficiently well. It was never mentioned whether the fatigue system replaced the other system or if it was just added to serve as a complementary system. The latter option seems likely because the fatigue system would serve more as bot-catching system, rather than a bot-detection system. However, the fatigue system was radically different because it interfered directly with the gaming experience of the players. So how did this fatigue system work? Jagex must have realized at that moment that the best way to distinguish between bots and real players is to have them perform an action. The real player would be able to carry out a task or instructions without problems while it was assumed that the bot – unable to think for itself – would get stuck. The way it worked is that your character would start to get tired after a while until it had become too tired to continue gaining xp. In order to be able to gain xp again, the character would have to rest in any of the new beds that had been placed at various locations in RuneScape. Jagex's logic was that real players would easily be able to do this while bots would struggle with this task. When a player's character had become too tired, a message would appear in the chat box to warn the player that they would no longer gain xp.

In addition to no longer gaining xp, no resources could be obtained from the resource-gathering skills anymore. In other words, those skills could essentially not be trained anymore until the player had rested on one of the beds. The resource-gathering skills in RS1 included Fishing, Mining and Woodcutting. However, all other activities could still be done, but without gaining xp. So activities like turning resources into end products (Fletching, Herblore, Smithing, etc.) could still be done. A player could also still engage in combat, but without gaining xp. I should also mention that your character's level of fatigue could be tracked as it was displayed in percentages. Your character would have to rest once 100% had been reached. However, I was told that for Mining the percentage would sometimes get stuck at any random value between 93 and 97%. That did not mean that the player would never have to rest, though. In fact, quite the opposite is true as that player would have to rest once the counter had become stuck at that particular value. Apparently this was not a glitch, but an intentional anomaly integrated in the system in an attempt to confuse bots.

A major concern raised by the community, which generally reacted negatively towards the release of the fatigue system, is that training skills seemed to have become slower. However, Jagex denied this and said that testing had been done at each level, although a few days later the fatigue rates for 174

Fishing and Mining were decreased. That does not mean that Jagex had initially lied about the xp rates. The problem that might have arisen instead is not that the xp rates had decreased, but that the players wasted too much time travelling between the beds' locations and wherever they had been skilling or killing. This might be why Jagex updated the fatigue system on 27th May 2003. Not only by reducing the fatigue rates, but also by changing how it worked. To solve the problem of players wasting time while attempting to reduce their fatigue, Jagex replaced the bed system with another system consisting of sleeping bags that a player could carry with them in their inventory. This eliminated the need of relocating, but that also made it easier for bots to prevent getting caught. So as an additional change, Jagex added a verification code (the notorious CAPTCHA ones) that had to be copied correctly each time after a player had reduced their fatigue.

I have mentioned it above already, but it is true that the community was generally displeased with the release of the fatigue system, and that for a few reasons. First of all, the system demanded time of legitimate players while it had been designed to catch bots. There were players who thought that this was not right or fair. Secondly, it was a nuisance in the sense that it interrupted whatever the players had been doing, especially with the bed system. As a third reason there is the fact that it did slow down xp rates for those people who had trouble relocating to the nearest bed or for those who were just not extremely motivated to relocate at all. A fourth reason for the negative reception of this fatigue system is that it did not always work. Several bot designers had found ways to survive the CAPTCHA challenge, although a player could still submit a report. Nevertheless, the system was not ideal, not perfect and not what the community wanted.

I spoke with several RS1 players just before releasing this PDF and one of them said that the fatigue system was okay because it added a certain charm to the game. While several other RS1 players might also share that opinion, by the majority this system was perceived as an inconvenience. It should therefore not come as a surprise that it was eventually abolished and replaced with something else. This happened during the transition from RS1 to RS2 in early 2004. The new system would still directly interact with the players, but in a less annoying manner because a player’s in-game character would no longer become tired to the degree at which xp gains are blocked. The system that I am speaking of right now consisted of the random events, which were part of RuneScape until October 2012. I will not go into detail about random events right now because there are several pages dedicated to the random event system in the final chapter of this PDF. If you are a relatively new player who was never forced to participate in a random event, then what you need to know for now is that those events had little impact on a player’s skilling adventures. Also, if you are not sure what a random event is, then you are probably one of the relatively new players to whom I have just referred.

The Summoning skill is described in detail in the PvM chapter, but I quickly want to mention something about it separately in this chapter because it is a skill that affects many other skills due to its countless familiars. What I would like to say for now is that the skill was released on 15th January 2008. The familiars that can be made by training the skill all offer special moves that can be useful on and off the battlefield. When using their corresponding Summoning scroll, a special move is triggered that offers a multitude of different helpful effects for all kinds of in-game activities. There is something for every skill, but to give several examples I will limit myself to the familiars that are used the most. Let's start off with combat. Every familiar can be involved in combat, but there are also familiars that are created with the purpose of actively helping out during combat activities. All of those familiars will automatically help to defeat the opponent(s). The most used familiars that people would use for quicker killing are the iron titan and the steel titan. They have a combat level of 112 and 118, 175 respectively. Their combat level is high and their regular attacks do contribute to faster killing. Both of the titans also provide an invisible Defence boost. As you can see, Summoning had a huge effect on combat, but there is more. There is also a non-combat part to Summoning as many of the familiars also provide advantages for regular non-combat skilling. There are two categories in which we can put those familiars: familiars that give invisible boosts and familiars that provide other significant advantages. It is logical that most of them are used for skills that are generally considered to be hard. Runecrafting used to be one of those skills and it is the best example to demonstrate that. There are the abyssal parasite and the abyssal lurker. Both of them are Runecrafting Beasts of Burden and they can only carry essence. Runecrafting used to a relatively slow skill until 2012, so runecrafters did not hesitate to use these special beasts of burden as they contributed to a higher amount of crafted runes per hour. Then there also is the graahk runecrafting method. Nature runes were always an extremely profitable runecrafting method. The spirit graahk has a teleport option that will teleport the player to the natural habitat of the graahks. This habitat happens to be located close to the nature rune altar, so as of 2008 people have used the spirit graahk familiar to craft nature runes and it eventually became one of the best moneymaking methods of the game, for a couple of years, that is. In the other category there are the familiars that offer invisible boosts. These boosts tend to be very high and they have quite an effect on whichever skill for which the familiar is being used. A few examples are the lava titan that offers a Mining boost of +10 levels, the arctic bear with a Hunter boost of +7 levels and the granite lobster with a Fishing boost of +4 levels. There are also beasts of burden that can be used for combat and non-combat activities, not specific to any skill. The most used familiar of this type is the pack yak, which can hold 38 items. An example of its use for skilling could be linked to the Prayer skill because it allows people to take many more bones with them on one single trip of using the gilded altar Prayer method.

The first non-combat skill in the alphabetical list is Agility. The skill was released on 12th December 2002, which means that it already existed in RS1. It is important to know that the fatigue system had been released one month earlier. This system also affected Agility and thus every player would have to rest every now and then to reduce the fatigue. Needless to say that this was bad for the xp rate, but you should also keep the mind for the other skills that follow. The only Agility courses that were available after the release of the skill were the one in the Gnome Stronghold and the lower-level one at the Barbarian Outpost. However, this one was located at a different place, east of Ardougne at first. It is possible that the Barbarian Outpost was moved to its current location on the same day as the release of the skill. The maximum xp per hour was around 10k xp per hour on the first course and about 15k xp per hour on the second one. Most animations took longer, but a relatively big amount of skilling methods offered more xp per hour in RS1 than they do now. This also counted for Agility. Today there are many shortcuts in RuneScape and most of them have become redundant as the years went by, but in RS1 there were only five shortcuts. This might not sound important, but when you cannot run and with limited teleportation possibilities, a shortcut here and there does help a lot (the lodestone teleportation network did not exist yet). The third and last Agility course that was released in RS1 is the Wilderness Agility course. It was added to the game on 28th January 2003 and this was a huge update for the skill. Not only did it provide xp rates of up to 40k-45k xp per hour (assuming that the player had a high Agility level), it was also located deep in the Wilderness. This turned the update into an important one for the entire community. PvP was the main activity in RS1. Players who did not have a high combat level usually were not able to get high xp rates on that course. The 40k-45k xp rate is including frequent attacks by the skeletons, forcing the player into using the three-round combat system. Furthermore, this is the xp rate that applies for the updated fatigue system with sleeping bags. The xp rate with the bed system is unknown. The release of RS2 on 29th March 2004 had little effect on the xp rate of the Wilderness Agility course because of decent rebalancing, which was necessary because each player would no longer need to rest as the fatigue system had been removed. Rebalancing Agility during the RS2 was slightly more difficult than the other skills because of the run-option that would be available in RS2. This would have enabled players to attain a higher Agility xp rate, so Jagex had to take into 176

account the run-option determining the xp for completing a lap. One of the advantages of having a high Agility level is that your run energy recharges faster. This energy system was released on the same day as RS2. However, the energy restoration speed used to be a lot slower than it is today. In June 2004 Jagex already improved it a little by making it restore 50% faster, but it the process was still extremely slow in comparison with today.

The Brimhaven Agility course was released on 27th July 2004 and it was the first course released in RS2. Unlike all of the other Agility courses, this one does not require you to follow one specific path. In fact, it does right the opposite. People are supposed to tag flashing pillars which can be reached by crossing several obstacles, and all of that within a certain time limit. It was first perceived as a 'game within a game' instead of an actual skilling method, but the people did not mind that at all. In fact, it was a nice alternative for those who did not always want to follow the same routine. Furthermore, sometimes a player can be lucky with the location of the flashing pillar, creating some time to chat without wasting any xp. Even at that time the course itself was not a fast way to train Agility, though. The exact rate is hard to determine because there is no specific path that the players are required to follow and many obstacles give a different amount of xp, depending on their difficulty. As reward for tagging the pillar the player receives tickets that can be exchanged for xp, herbs or a pirate's hook. The Agility xp rate, including the exchange of tickets for xp, was initially estimated at about 15k xp per hour. However, this could be increased by repeating the obstacles over and over again instead of waiting for the next pillar to start flashing. Today quite some low-level players still use the course just because it is considered less boring. However, since there are many better alternatives now and since you fail quite often in the Brimhaven Agility Arena, the only people who still use that course generally do not care about the xp rate and are just there to have a good time, although every now and then you also see a player there who just wants to collect tickets in order to be able to do a lot of xp in one day by exchanging many the tickets.

On 1st September 2004 the Herblore skill received an update and that update would have a big impact on Agility. The actual rest-option that recharges your energy very fast when being seated did not exist until 2009 (which is what I referred to by saying that recharging your energy today is a lot faster than it was for many years in RS2). This means that your in-game energy would frequently drop to zero whilst training Agility, and recharging your energy would take a while. The Herblore update that happened on that day would forever change this (for those had a few coins to spare). Energy potions were released and drinking from it increases your energy. This was a revolution for Agility. People started purchasing or making these potions and they would bring many of them to the Agility courses. Today these energy potions are not necessary anymore, but for a long time in RS2 these would be a conditio sine qua non for anyone who was serious about training Agility. Players would no longer run out of energy while training the skill, which resulted in a significant increase in the xp rates. Empty vials were either dropped or kept in the inventory and when there were no more potions left, people would pay a quick visit to a bank to withdraw or purchase new potions. That system or routine, whatever you prefer to call it, was used by the majority of the community to train Agility on the next course. 177

The fifth Agility course was released on 6th December 2004 and it was part of the Monkey Madness quest release. A new island for this quest was added to game where you can find what would for a long time be considered the king of all Agility courses: the Ape Atoll Agility course, which became the new fastest way to level Agility. After you stopped failing at level 75, the xp gains could go up to 54k xp per hour. This course became one of the most popular courses of all time, especially when the Ape Atoll Agility team was founded in April 2007. This team consisted of a group of players that trained Agility in world 46 and everyone was welcome to run along. More about this Agility community will follow later in this chapter, but many players used this team to reach level 99 in Agility. Also the mere thought of being able to train in ape-form was sensational to some players. Failing to jump across the waterfall is a particularly annoying element on the course, though. Because if you fail to reach the other side, you end up being taken to the prison on Ape Atoll. Not only is it annoying to escape, you will also be poisoned. The platform on this course has undergone quite some changes in the recent years, though. Tweaks to course, supposedly due to game engine updates, have caused it to become a little bit slower than when it was first released. The xp per hour since 2011 has been around 50k xp per hour, which is 4k xp lower than in 2004. The course lost a lot of popularity when the Advanced Agility courses were released in 2009. The Ape Atoll course is mainly used by people who are training at a level of 65-85 today.

On 31st January 2005 Jagex released the sixth Agility course: the Werewolf Agility course. Agility was already quite fast at that time - many readers will disagree now – and thus it was rather logical that this new course would not be as fast. The consequence of that is that it would never be used much. However, this Agility course still offered a nice xp rate for those who could not or did not want to train on Ape Atoll. At higher levels around 45k xp per hour can be gained by using the Werewolf Agility course. On 6th September 2005 Jagex added thirty new shortcuts to the game to reward the players with a high Agility level. Though less useful because of the many teleport options that already existed by then, some of them were still used frequently due to being located at convenient places. If you thought that the concept of the Brimhaven Agility Arena was weird, then you clearly have not seen everything yet. On 16th January of 2006 a new Agility course was added to the game. This course in the shape of a pyramid can be found in the Kharidian Desert south of Nardah and it is a good alternative for the Barbarian course. The unique concept of the Agility Pyramid caused it be quite an enjoyable course (in my opinion). A player starts at the base of the pyramid and then needs to find their way to the top on a path that spirals around the pyramid, starting from the base and ending at the top. A challenge at that time was that the use of waterskins was the only way of staying protected from the desert's heat. However, since January 2008 it is possible to protect yourself from the desert heat by wearing an enchanted water tiara. I advise you to try out this course if you have never been to it. It is located in the southeastern corner of the Kharidian Desert and it offers an xp rate of approximately 15k xp per hour, plus a good time. The Ape Atoll course was still the fastest course upon the pyramid’s release, though (with an xp rate of over 50k xp per hour). The quest Cold Wars was released two weeks later and completion of it grants a player access to the Penguin Agility course. It is located on the Iceberg, so it is not easy to reach. Furthermore, its xp rates are bad and those two reasons are why virtually no one would ever use that course to train the skill.

We have to jump forward in time to March 2007 to find a new big Agility update and it this time it is one that did make Agility faster. The high-level Agility course of Dorgesh-Kaan was released as the biggest Agility course of the game. At the Dorgesh-Kaan Agility course you are supposed to collect an item at the other side of the course and to bring it back to Turgall, at the beginning of the course, in return for a nice chunk of Agility xp, a reward which constitutes the majority of the Agility xp that the course has to offer for one completed lap. The course is built below the roof of a cave, so the only way to reach any obstacle is by completing all the other obstacles that precede it. Falling means that you have to run back to the start of the Agility course, causing you to lose a lot 178 of time. Furthermore, if you are already on the way back, the collected item will be broken, so Turgall will not accept it. Despite this annoyance xp gains initially used to be as high as 65k xp per hour. For those of you who are wondering, Dorgesh-Kaan is the capital of a large underground city. The Dorgesh-Kaan Agility course and the Ape Atoll one became the two most popular locations to train Agility at to 99. People generally decided to choose for either of them based on their personal preference. However, the Dorgesh-Kaan Agility course was nerfed in June 2009, on the same day that Jagex released the Advanced courses. It was probably nerfed because Jagex may have wanted the two new Advanced courses to become the main focus instead. The xp rate on the Dorgesh-Kaan course decreased from about 65k xp per hour to around 55k xp per hour due to the update.

However, the story does not end here for the ancient underground city, because we can stay in the same region for another Agility course that was released two years after the Dorgesh-Kaan course had made its entrance (both of these events took place before the release of the two aforementioned Advanced courses). The quest the Chosen Commander, which mainly takes place in the region of Dorgesh-Kaan, led to the discovery of a new Agility course in March of 2009: the Bandos Throne Room, also referred to as the Bandos Agility course. Not many people know about the existence of this course, so it is redundant to say that people really only used it during the quest. However, the course does offer an xp rate of about 40k xp per hour. But then again, most people who could do the quest usually already had a high enough Agility level to opt for better alternatives (Ape Atoll and Dorgesh-Kaan). In June 2009, the run energy system received a big update that directly affected Agility. The amount of time needed to restore your energy was significantly reduced and the energy drain rate while running was decreased. Secondly, the rest-option was added to the game, which made it possible to restore energy even faster. For Agility this meant that energy potions were no longer needed to maximize xp rates on most courses. A disadvantage of this update is that it would give an unfair advantage in free worlds because Agility is members-only skill. Jagex therefore decided that the Agility level should not have an influence if a member decides to play on a free server.

On 22nd June 2009 the Dorgesh- Kaan Agility course was nerfed and two new Agility courses were built on top of two other already existing Agility courses. These two courses can be found above the Gnome course and above the Barbarian course. Both of these new courses were aimed at players with a high Agility level. The requirements were set quite high at respectively level 85 and level 90. These new courses have the same name as the lower level ones, but the word Advanced was added to each of these courses in order to make a distinction between the different versions. Both Advanced courses offer more xp per hour than the Dorgesh-Kaan course. The Gnome Advanced course's maximum xp per hour used to be around 68k xp per hour and the Barbarian Advanced course used to do even better with 72k xp per hour. However, those xp rates were lowered by a few k xp due to minor tweaks. The Advanced courses made Agility easier, not only xp-wise, but also because the level of difficulty is a lot lower than that of the other Agility courses. Suddenly the first page of the Agility hiscores started filling up with new names. These two new courses in combination with the fact that energy potions were no longer needed, could be considered another Agility revolution. 179

In January 2010 players with a high Agility level were given some advantages. These advantages consisted of the ability to catch two tuna, swordfish, sharks in one go and the ability to pickpocket twice the normal amount of value/money. The biggest update of that day, however, was that Jagex made it possible to catch butterflies barehanded. The Black Warlock Hunter method would eventually offer a nice Agility xp rate (for what it is, because it is a Hunter training method, not an Agility one). The Barbarian Advanced course remained the fastest Agility course and the Black Warlock method did not even get close to the xp rate of the Ape Atoll course. The Flash Powder Factory replaced the Rogues' Den at the end of 2011 and part of this new factory was an Agility course. Initially the xp rates went up to 80k xp per hour, but Jagex nerfed that a month later. 50k- 60k xp per hour became the new average xp rate, although experienced players of the minigame could easily obtain a higher xp rate. An update in October of 2014 made is possible for extremely skilled Flash Powder Factory players to achieve around 120k Agility xp per hour without any form of xp boosting, as result of Jagex removing the penalty for leaving a game early.

As part of a major new RuneScape tutorial which gave Burthorpe a completely new look, a low- level Agility course was added to the northeastern corner of the town. That update happened on 31st January 2012 together with graphically improving and restructuring the city of Taverley. The new Agility course itself has as only purpose to teach new people to basics of Agility, which is why the xp rate does not even reach 10k xp per hour. On 4th March 2013 both Taverley and Burthorpe were added to the F2P area. These areas contain quite some P2P facilities with Herblore, Agility and several combat minigames. Jagex also made it possible for free players to train member skills up to level five, so the addition of the two aforementioned locations was a strategic move in an attempt to seduce free players, who were now given a chance to train at the new Burthorpe Agility course that had been released in 2012. However, that 4th March was a great day for Agility for other reasons because the rune energy drain rate had been reduced for a second time in various ways (the first reduction occurred in June 2009): First of all, the drain rate of run energy was increased at every Agility level. Secondly, the penalty caused by weight was also reduced. In additional to that, Jagex increased the run energy restoration rate at every level. In the announcement post for those updates Jagex also mentioned that they were going to try to come up with more benefits (on top of run energy restore rate and use of shortcuts) for having a higher Agility level. This is one of the rare occasions where Jagex explicitly seemed to have made an indirect promise in a regular update announcement. You will find out below if they ever followed through.

Every Agility fan, which includes myself, will consider the update that occurred on 14th March 2014 to be one of the most controversial content-related updates of the last decade. It was on that 14th March when a new promotion on Treasure Hunter introduced the silverhawk boots. Along with the boots came another tradeable item that would forever drastically change the click-intensive and effort-demanding skill that Agility was, that one item being the silverhawk feather. Charging the boots by using the feathers grants Agility xp while doing any activity in RuneScape. This means that you can engage in combat or train any skill of choice and the boots will systematically generate Agility xp. This update had huge implications for the skill: Agility was converted into a buyable skill and Agility xp could now be gained without actually training Agility. With the skill generally being considered one of the most disliked skills that the game has to offer, the demand for these tradeable silverhawk feathers was off the charts. The price skyrocketed and continued to do so until September 2014, when the price peaked at around 50k gp per feather. A feather grants less than 1k xp, so the price that you pay for not having to visit an Agility course is high. However, this did not stop the extremely rich players of the community, who own several billions of gp. The consequence of that is that a fair amount of players would 200m xp in Agility have done fewer than 20m of that xp by doing traditional Agility on the Agility courses.

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As Agility xp was being devoured by training bank skills (= skills that can be trained at a bank) or other non-Agility activities, the opposition of the update voiced their disappointed opinion all over the RuneScape forums. Several factors contributed to these highly negative opinions: not only did many players wonder how it could be possible to gain xp in a skill without actually training that skill, the most fierce criticism was aimed at the xp rate that it provided. At this point you have to keep in mind that the best Agility courses could produce a bit lower than 70k xp per hour at maximum at that time, with the Flash Powder Factory slightly exceeding that rate for experienced players at that time. The silverhawk boots would offer xp rates of up to 160-170k Agility xp per hour. However, this was while training Agility at an Agility course. The main problem was that many players disagreed with traditional Agility training suddenly offering a lower xp rate than wearing the boots + doing a non-Agility activity because the latter would still provide up to 100k Agility xp per hour. It should not come as a surprise that many of the high-ranked Agility players had strong opinions about the update, condemning it as a complete devaluation of the entire skill. This was reflected in the ever-growing criticism that overwhelmed the RuneScape forums in the first weeks.

An official reaction by Jagex followed remarkably fast. On 26th March, only twelve days after the release of the boots, a public mea culpa by former CEO Mark Gerhard confirmed that mistakes had been made in an attempt to make the Agility skill more appealing. The following quote is taken directly from the announcement that was posted on the front page of RuneScape on that day:

The announcement was quickly followed by Jagex nerfing the silverhawk boots, but the damage had already been done and the nerf was not considered to be sufficient because xp rates of slightly over 100k Agility xp could still be achieved while training Agility. This corresponds with around 40k Agility xp during non-Agility activities, which was still considered too high by many. However, as the price of the silverhawk feathers kept rising, the community generally became more accepting of the update. At the price of today (end of October 2014), going from level 98 to 99 in the skill, without setting foot on an Agility course or Agility minigame, would cost slightly over 50 million gp. This is obviously too expensive for the average RuneScape player. The most recent Agility update was part of the much-anticipated Elf City, and its release had a big impact on the skill. The new Hefin Agility course was tied to a significant improvement in the xp rate, with a unique reward system that had never been used before on another Agility course. There is no fixed average xp rate because the xp that a player receives depends on their level in the Agility. Also unlike any other Agility course is that shortcuts can sometimes be used to shorten a lap. A player with level 99 in the skill is able to achieve 120k xp per hour at the new Agility course. This is a significant increase in comparison with the fastest Agility course prior to the release of the Elf City, which was the Barbarian Advanced course, offering around 70k xp per hour. While completing laps on the new course, a player also receives a fair amount of Prayer xp, turning the Agility course into a decent but slow method of training Prayer. The combination of multiple skills on an Agility course had also never existed before. It is clear that the release of the Elf City should be considered an important event if we look at the evolution of Agility, but the new course was not the only part of the update that affected the skill. Another new game feature included the serenity 181 posts, also in the Hefin clan. These serenity posts are essentially a D&D from which a daily 20k Agility xp can be gained by imitating Lady Hefin in the central area.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Agility skill 12th December 2002 Gnome Agility course 12th December 2002 Barbarian Outpost course 12th December 2002 Wilderness Agility course 28th January 2003 Brimhaven Agility Arena 27th July 2004 Energy potions 1st September 2004 Ape Atoll Agility course 6th December 2004 Werewolf Agility course 31st January 2005 Agility Pyramid 16th January 2006 Penguin Agility course 29th January 2007 Dorgesh-Kaan Agility course 20th March 2007 Bandos Agility course 17th March 2009 Gnome Advanced Agility course 22nd June 2009 Barbarian Outpost Advanced Agility course 22nd June 2009 Burthorpe Agility course 31st January 2012 Silverhawk boots 14th March 2014 Hefin Agility course 10th November 2014

The Construction skill was released on 31st May 2006. This update immediately was the most delayed update ever. (Mod) Paul mentioned that he had initially planned to release it in the summer of 2001. The first plan was to let every member buy their own house in RuneScape on the main world map by letting the community make use of the houses in Varrock and Falador. Jagex soon realized that it would never work because there were too many players and the world map was limited in space. They could not find any solution for this because of the limited technology at that time and that is why the Jagex moderators had to postpone the update. As soon as technology had caught up with Andrew's and Paul's needs, they could start working on the development of the Construction skill. Construction was initially present as Carpentry in RS1, but you could not gain xp in it. That name already did appear in the stats interface, but it was later replaced by Agility. The release of Construction had therefore been anticipated by a lot of players. The concept of Construction was quite simple: buy your own Player Owned House (POH) and start building. These houses can be built on only a few locations, though: Rimmington, Taverley, Pollnivneach, Rellekka, Brimhaven and Yanille. To make Construction quite a bit easier, servants are at your service and they are willing to bank planks and other POH-related items for a small fee every now and then. The entire update included twenty rooms, new items, new armour, 330 pieces of furniture, games, dungeons, NPCs and much more. The portal chamber and the chapel became the most popular rooms. The Chapel became the most useful room after players had discovered that a gilded altar can be built in it. Using such an altar significantly increased the Prayer xp that is received from using bones on it. Almost every player who achieved 99 Prayer after this update did so by using that chapel. The teleport chamber is for many another reason to visit the POH because upgrading it allows a player to teleport to Ardougne, Camelot, Canifis, Falador, Lumbridge, Varrock and Yanille.

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Jagex added a costume room to Construction in October of 2006 due to the increasing amount of new clothes and items in the game. Players could store all clothes tidily in that costume room and also prevent their bank from getting full. Clothes that could be stored in the new chests, wardrobes and cape racks included Castle Wars rewards, quest clothes/rewards, skillcapes, random event costumes, Treasure Trail costumes and holiday event rewards. A while later Jagex later also added a pin code (same as bank pin) to the POH because the previous update had allowed valuable items to be stored in the POH. In July 2007 Jagex increased the amount of rooms that can be built from twenty to thirty. The next Construction update happened more than two years later, in August of 2009. This update introduced a menagerie to the Construction skill. In this menagerie you can let your pets or other creatures have fun for the rest of their life so that you do not need to look after them whilst skilling or fighting. You can place these critters in any of the habitats that were included in the update. Many people were fan of the POH because of its teleport option to it. It was not uncommon that people chose to have their POH located in Brimhaven because they had been training Slayer or Farming. However, sometimes people wished that there was more than one location where they could have their POH and the release of the Love Story quest on 5th July 2010 made that possible. This is one of the few quests in which Construction plays an important role and that is also clearly reflected in the rewards. Completion of the quest allows player to craft teleport tabs, which can be used to teleport to any of the POH portals, even if your POH is not located there. Furthermore, the ability to build a dungeon pit and the use of the dark stone decoration style are two other rewards, as well as reduction of the servants’ fee by 25%.

Several Construction methods that are commonly used today include building oak dungeon doors, teak wardrobes (both around 250k xp per hour) and mahogany tables (over 600k xp per hour). A method that gives more xp per hour is most likely to cost more. Construction is important to the game because is considered to be a money sink, much more in the past than it is today, though. A money sink implies that money leaves the game by making use of game content. The money sink in Construction is the use of servants, which have to be paid every now and then. Construction is in theory the fastest skill in RuneScape because of the demonic throne offering an xp rate of over 12m xp per hour, at the cost of several billions of gp… But who would pay that? Construction is one of the most click-intensive skills in RuneScape and therefore it is logical that not many people like training it. The last significant Construction update happened in 2009 and for years players have been requesting a new meaningful update, preferably one that offers an alternative way of gaining Construction xp without it being too click-intensive.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Construction skill 31st May 2006 Costume room 18th October 2006 Menagerie 18th August 2009 POH teleport tabs 5th July 2010

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Cooking is one of those skills that was there from the start of RuneScape. You would say that nothing much can be told about Cooking. That is more or less correct since not many changes were made to the skill, but do not forget how important this skill has been for the history of the game. These days it is easy to obtain cooked food with the presence of the Grand Exchange and the large size of the community. In the first six years, however, and especially in RS1, Cooking was an extremely important skill. RS1 was all about PvP, so food was like money, so to speak. Unfortunately, cooked food was not easy to obtain and there were several reasons for that. First of all, it has to be said that Cooking was generally slower back in RS1. The main reason for this is that an x-option did not exist yet. In addition to that, animations took longer, there were not as many Cooking ranges as there are now and Cooking gauntlets did not exist yet (so the burn rates were higher). As stated above, there was no Grand Exchange, so players had to buy cooked food from other players. That was not easy because there were no forums for several years and the community was not big yet. This means that only a small amount of people could cook high-level food while there was a significant demand for it. The food that I am referring to are cooked lobster, swordfish and shark. Swordfish was the best food until shark was released on 27th February 2002. So what you need to remember is that obtaining cooked food was not nearly as convenient as it is today. Therefore, Cooking was an extremely important skill and it was essential that your own Cooking level was high enough. And to make it even worse, Cooking was a very click-intensive skill. I mentioned above that there was no x-option to cook yet, so all cooking had to be done manually, and then I mean one by one. That is why the actual activity of cooking was not that popular, so people preferred to buy cooked food instead. Here is a small example of how this manual cooking system affected the speed of the skill: cooking lobsters in RS1 would give you around 90k xp per hour, or 110k if you tried really hard. Today that the xp rate is at 130k xp, so there is a difference of 20k-40k xp per hour. However, it is likely that Cooking xp rates were altered during the transition from RS1 to RS2. In April 2002 Cooking gauntlets were released, which made it possible not to burn high-level food once you had reached a specific level.

The first step to Cooking becoming one of the easiest skills was the introduction of the cook x-option in September 2005. The best place to train Cooking at that time was at the Rogues' Den. The reason for that is that there were two permanent fires near the bank so that you did not need to light logs yourself. Players that could not access the den usually decided to make their own fires near a bank. This is the tradition of what Cooking was like. Cooking obtained the reputation of being easy and the Rogues' Den became a nice place to chat, even the higher-levelled players would often to cook there. This changed in September 2007 when Jagex released the Varrock Achievement Diary. A reward for completing the diary is free access to the cooking range in the Cooking Guild. Most high-level players started to train there in order to avoid the low-level players and because of the bank booth that is located just a square away. All cooking ranges in RuneScape have a lower burn 184 rate than regular fires, but this was probably not a reason for using the Cooking Guild because most players usually already possessed or wore the correct items to reduce the chance of burning the food to 0%. I quickly skipped an update in 2006 so that I would not have to leave and go back to the topic of the Rogues' Den. The release of the Lunar spellbook on 24th July 2006 added a new cooking method to the game. One of the new spells was the bake pie spell. After a while, and mainly after the Grand Exchange had been released in November 2007, people discovered that baking summer pies by using that spell would generate high xp rates. Not only would players be able to reach Cooking xp rates of up to 450k xp per hour, this method also trained Magic at a rate of about 100k xp per hour. This method has always been quite expensive, though.

Making food easier to obtain was not the only thing that the Grand Exchange did. A side-effect was that new methods became a lot faster. Summer pies are one example of that, but there is also another example, one that is much better. As soon as people had discovered the power of the Grand Exchange, some players started to test all methods which were rarely used because the required items were too difficult to obtain in the absence of the Grand Exchange. A jug of water was one of those items, but the Grand Exchange made it much easier to obtain these. Jugs of water and grapes are used to make unfermented wine. Both items have been in the game since 4th January 2001, when RuneScape was released, but they were just extremely difficult to obtain at a sufficiently fast rate. Some players tested the method again and they discovered that an xp rate of up to 450k xp per hour was possible, making it as fast as cooking summer pies. Unfortunately, I do not know how cheap or expensive both methods used to be. On 15th February 2011, urns for skilling were released and Cooking is one of the skills for which those urns can be used. It turned out that you would be able to gain more xp per hour by using those urns. For Cooking shark this meant around 50k xp per hour more than you would normally gain without urns. Meanwhile, rocktail had already been released (September 2009) and many players had begun to use that type of fish instead of shark. However, rocktail ended up becoming much more expensive than shark while the xp difference of cooking them is only 15 xp, so sharks remained popular, nonetheless.

Mousekeys are allowed to be used in RuneScape and since the bank in the Cooking Guild was a bank that would not move around (as opposed to the one in Rogues’ Den), some players discovered a method to gain a lot more xp than you would normally be able to gain without mousekeys. This made Cooking click-intensive again, but leading to xp gains of over 1m Cooking xp per hour by using rocktail. However, not many players made use of this method because it is just not physically possible do it for an hour or longer. Today this method is no longer possible because of the updated (slower) automated cooking process that can no longer be bypassed.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Cooking skill 4th January 2001 Shark 27th February 2002 Cooking gauntlets 9th April 2002 X-option 12th September 2005 Bake Pie Lunar spell 24th July 2006 Cook’s Guild range 10th September 2007 Rocktail 17th September 2009 Cooking urns 15th February 2011

Crafting was added to RuneScape on 8th May 2001. After its release pottery and making jewelry were the only available Crafting methods. It was one of the first buyable skills, which was a problem because banks could initially only hold coins and not items. Furthermore, everything you 185 needed for the pottery method (clay, water, potter's wheel) was located relatively far away from each other. This means that Crafting was initially not only slow, but also frustrating. I do not have much information about these methods, so unfortunately, I cannot provide xp rates. On 18th March 2002, the makers of RuneScape released various Crafting methods because the skill was just too hard and too slow to train. These new methods consisted of leather-item crafting, cutting gems, making staves, crafting gold and silver items, and crafting objects made of glass. Making staves became a popular way to train the skill later on. As a buyable skill Crafting has always been expensive, and that was no different in the early days of RS1. The most used way to get Crafting up in RS1 was by crafting silver or leather items. Alternatively, to save some money, crafting jewelry or gems was used a lot as well. A player needed a gold bar, a mould, some gems and a furnace to do this, after which the gold bar should be used on the furnace to select the item that the player wanted to craft. Depending on how rich they were, some players also preferred to mine their own gems in Shilo Village. However, this was not possible before January 2003 because that village did not exist until then. To ease the pain a bit the Crafting Guild was released on the same day as the membership option in February 2002. This update helped quite some players because the guild contained several collectable resources that were used a lot at that time, such as different types of rock that could be mined to obtain ores.

After the release of RS2 in March 2004, Jagex released dragonhide (green, blue, red and black) to replace hard leather as the best resource to craft Ranged armour. These new types of dragonhide allowed higher xp rates, making Crafting one of the fastest skills at that time. Well, that is if you were rich enough to buy all the materials that you needed for it. Crafting leather and cutting gems were the faster Crafting methods at that time. The addition of Runecrafting and cosmic runes to the game (also part of the RS2 release) made it easier to create orbs for battlestaves because the required runes for it could now be bought or made. Prior to that update, a player would be able to obtain runes only from monster drops, in Varrock’s runes shop or at certain locations where the runes spawned. As making battlestaves provided a good xp rate and because it was fairly cheap, the Crafting method ended up becoming popular. Furthermore, the staves had a nice alchemy value. In order to make it easier to obtain those staves as well as the buckets of sand that are needed to make the orb, Jagex released several helpful features in the years after that. In January 2006, the quest The Hand in the Sand was released and a part of the reward is the ability to collect a certain amount of buckets of sand every day. The same (more or less) happened to battlestaves. Completion of the Varrock Diary, which was released in September 2007, allows you to collect a certain amount of staves every day. The release of the Grand Exchange stimulated every buyable skill and that also counted for Crafting. Dragonhide crafting became extremely popular and the rich players sometimes even opted for cutting gems. Cutting diamond and dragonstone would give 500k xp and 640k xp per hour, respectively. Of course you would lose a lot of money by using this method.

Remarkable about the Crafting skill is how it lacked major content updates for a decade. The next noteworthy update did not take place until November 2014, when the Elf City was added to RuneScape. This update included a new Crafting activity, called crystal singing, which consists of crafting elven crystal, a new type of resource that can be turned into weapons and other items by singing in the Ithell clan. Also in the Ithell clan are the harmonium harps, another new method of 186 training the skill. A player can get Crafting xp from playing the harps, although the xp rate of just over 50k xp per hour is relatively low in comparison to other Crafting methods. However, it is free and harmonic dust, another new type of resource, is obtained while making use of the harps. The harmonic dust is a necessary resource for engaging in the crystal singing activity, so both of the new Crafting features are somewhat linked to one another. All in all, we can say that the Crafting methods that are most commonly used today are not recent additions to the game at all, but are some of the oldest still-popular skilling methods that exist in RuneScape, such as crafting dragonhide armour.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Crafting skill 8th May 2001 Crafting Guild 27th February 2002 Leather crafting 18th March 2002 Gem crafting 18th March 2002 Silver and gold crafting 18th March 2002 Battlestaff crafting 18th March 2002 Dragonhide crafting 29th March 2004 Crafting urns 15th February 2011 Crystal singing 10th November 2014 Harmonium harp 10th November 2014

Divination is the youngest skill of the game. It was released on 20th August 2013 and it was supposed to be part one of a set of two skills, with the other skill being Invention. Divination and Invention would work like Mining and Smithing, with the former providing the resources for the latter. However, on RuneFest in October of 2014 Mod Mark announced that Jagex had been considering to cancel Invention. The point of Invention was to introduce new weaponry and other items to the game, but Jagex realized that the same could be achieved by expanding Crafting, Fletching and Smithing. Although Mod Mark said that a poll and other player feedback will decide about whether or not Invention will be cancelled, it was clear at RuneFest that only player feedback can prevent cessation of Invention, as it appeared that Jagex had already made up their mind about it. When reading the segments about Crafting, Fletching and Smithing in this chapter, you will see why it is actually a good idea to use these three skills instead of a new skill to introduce the items that were at first supposed to be released with the Invention skill. Nevertheless, in June 2015 Jagex announced that Invention was going to become a skill after all, but as a new type of skill, referred to by Jagex as elite skills.

At the start of August in 2013, Divination was officially introduced by Mod Mark at the same location where RuneFest 2013 would later take place. The concept of Divination is that every player has to collect the energy and memories of Guthix, which have been scattered all over Gielinor. This is necessary to fix and enrich the word. Surprisingly different in comparison with the previous skills, Summoning and Dungeoneering, is that Divination is an extremely simplistic and straightforward skill. Harvesting energy and memories from wisps to convert them at energy rifts all over RuneScape is all there is to it. However, the danger with simplistic skills is that they are often perceived as being relatively boring.

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Perhaps Jagex anticipated this by adding a couple of perks. One of these is the enriched wisp that spawns every twenty minutes and offers an opportunity to gain more xp in a shorter period of time. Then there also are the chronicle fragments that spawn randomly and offer a generous amount of Hunter and Divination xp. This was actually a great move by Jagex because it encouraged the players to pay attention to what they were doing or to what was going on around them. Not just the chronicle fragments, but also the enriched wisp served as an excellent way to make people focus their attention on the RuneScape window.

Above I mentioned how Divination was different from the previous two skills. However, in line with Summoning and Dungeoneering, also Divination affects other skills or activities. The rewards from Divination are versatile, with several of the most popular activities directly benefiting from it. For example, portents of restoration are useful in combat, whereas signs of the porter are useful for resource-gathering skills. Both the portents and signs are made with the Divination skill. This is a clear example of how a new skill is used as an opportunity to enrich other skills, and this is actually a trend that has been going on since RS1. For example, Divination, Dungeoneering, Summoning greatly affect other activities, especially combat; Hunter had a major effect on Ranged training with its carnivorous red chinchompas; Construction was used to introduce the highly popular gilded altar Prayer method; Farming created a new source of herbs; Slayer promoted combat; Runecrafting made it significantly easier and cheaper to train Magic. And there is a clear pattern in this. You may have noticed that these are all RS2 skills that affect RS1 skills. This is not a coincidence, it demonstrates very well that new skills are (also) built to be of use for the core skills in one way or another (with core skills meaning the skills that were already present in RS1).

I have mentioned little information about Divination itself so far, so it is time to change that. In June, so two months before the release of the skill, a poll had been made available to members in order to decide what the skillcape for Divination should look like. This means that the Divination skillcape would be the first cape to be (more or less) player-made. The second Behind The Scenes video elaborated on the rewards, with the most prominent one being the divine locations. When the Divination was released, the only skills for which there were divine locations were Farming Hunter, Mining and Woodcutting. The intention of these divine locations was to encourage a sociable style of gaming. Divine locations are extremely beneficial because they either provide a lot of xp or many resources in an extremely short period of time. The rewards are better when more people are harvesting at the same time, so the consequence of that is that Jagex eventually succeeded in creating content that would bring the community together. This intention is also reflected in how training Divination works because players can work together to ensure that there is always one wisp near the energy rift.

In the months after that several minor tweaks based on player feedback followed, but no big updates can be mentioned. We have to wait till 24th March 2014 for the next addition to the skill. At that moment there were divine locations for four skills, which I have already listed above. On 24th March Jagex released a new divine location for a fifth skill, called fishing bubbles. While divine locations were popular in general, the fishing bubble for rocktail ended up becoming extremely popular because they could provide around 20k Fishing xp in virtually no time. As a result, these bubbles were often placed at the high-level fishing locations in the Living Rock Cavern, usually attracting a swarm of people. A divine location for a sixth skill was added a bit later on 6th May, one for the skill Divination itself. However, that is just a small part of the Divination update that took place on that day. A batch of 188 high-level Divination content, Elder Divination, was introduced to RuneScape as an expansion to the Fate of the Gods quest, which is a grandmaster quest that strongly features the skill. On top of a new wisp colony from which elder energy can be generated, other important additions to the game included a set of powerful rewards that can be unlocked by completing Fate of the Gods. Other rewards included the new portent of degradation, portent of death and the sign of death. All of which were created for combat activities. The most significant part of the new content, however, was the release of the nightmare muspah familiar, for which the Summoning pouches would be sold for over 100k gp right after the release. Its popularity was caused by its main function of carrying memories and its ability to harvest wisps, causing a noticeable increase in the xp rates at every level. A last update to mention added the shadows cores to the Divination skill. These can be obtained from killing the shadow creatures that were part of the second Elf City update in November of 2014. The shadow cores, mainly obtained from killing the shadow creatures, can be converted into xp in the Amlodd clan. This method of training the skill could be considered a bonus for killing the creatures, especially because the shadow cores grant a fair amount of xp.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Divination skill 20th August 2013 Elder divination 6th May 2014 Nightmare muspah 6th May 2014 Shadow cores 10th November 2014

Dungeoneering was released on 12th April 2010 and it is, so far, the only teamwork skill that Jagex has released. Many players know how complex Dungeoneering is, and that is no surprise considering that it is the result of a long development, even longer than Summoning. Jagex had been hoping to release a skill like Dungeoneering since the release of RS2 (March 2004). Another remarkable fact is that the skill is the first skill to have a maximum level of 120 (which is around 104m xp, or eight times 99). These factors make Dungeoneering unique. Initially there was a lot of negative feedback because people did not like the teamwork aspect, and the randomness of the floors made the skill look like a minigame. After well-organised teams had found certain methods to complete their floors, a certain routine got into it and more people started to like it. It is not as repetitive as other skills, both combat and regular skilling are involved, and therefore Dungeoneering can be considered one of the more entertaining skills, if you know what you are doing. After Dungeoneering had been released, there were not as many floors as there are today and the ring of kinship also did not have as many options as it does today. The monsters and bosses inside Daemonheim also used to be a lot stronger. The deepest floor you could reach at first was floor 35. During each floor everyone is confronted with skilling and combat, which means that skillers are stimulated to learn combat methods and vice versa for players who have a general preference for combat. Dungeoneering is one of the few skill in which you get your experience at the end. The amount of xp that you receive depends on your performance as a team during the floors and on your prestige. This prestige was a new term to all players and everyone needed some time to figure out what exactly it was and how it worked.

The community realized rather fast that the skill can be trained efficiently only if everyone knows what they are doing. So the high-level players started skilling with other high-level players as they would generally provide better communication about what methods to use, etc. Of course another reason why high-level players avoided low-level players is because every skill level was important. So being a low-level player meant that it would be harder for you to find good partners. The top of RuneScape started to form their own permanent teams and the race to level 99 (and 200m xp) was characterized by groups that consisted of the same players most of the times. World 117 became the 189 first official Dungeoneering world and Daemonheim in that world became one of the most laggy areas in RuneScape. This caused some dungeoneers to start using their own world, where they would train with friends and that eventually led to the creation of the first Dungeoneering clans. 3bo, which stands for 3 binds only, became the biggest and most famous Dungeoneering clan. Almost everyone among the first players to reach 200m xp in the skill used to be part of that clan.

On 19th July 2010 many changes were made to the skill. The first of them was that you could now build a hotspot at the base of the Dungeoneering floor (e.g. prayer altar, farming patch). Jagex also added a lot of new titles that would show up in the xp screen after completing a floor. Furthermore, classes were given to the ring of kinship, which became extremely helpful because it would now contain different settings for keyers, killers and for those who wanted to the kill the boss as fast as possible. A factor that would speed up Dungeoneering ever since that day was the addition of the group gatestone. Today this is probably the most important item of the skill. Also hidden resource dungeons were released on that day. This part of the update was more important to slayers and other combat fans, though. Especially for those who had a high enough Dungeoneering level to fight the new frost dragons. The deepest floor remained floor 35. Exactly one month later, on 19th August 2010, Jagex released the occult floors (for members only). These twelve new floors would make Dungeoneering a bit harder due to containing nasty necromancers that have the ability to make monsters within Daemonheim aggressive when wearing the shadow silk hood (wearing this hood would normally prevent you from getting attacked by certain NPCs). The addition of twelve floors went hand in hand with higher prestige, causing an xp increase of possibly up to 40% more xp per hour. It is hard to compare xp rates because you gain more xp on deeper floors, but gaining more than 150k xp per hour became possible at this moment. In addition to that, Jagex also released nine new types of challenge rooms to Dungeoneering and five new rewards, mainly useful for non-combat skills (such as herbicide and new prayers).

On 2nd November 2010 Jagex added thirteen new members-only floors to Daemonheim, called warped floors. These floors are even harder than the occult ones because they contain reborn mages that can walk through doors. At prestige 60 it became possible to gain over 300k Dungeoneering xp per hour with a fast team. This update also added eight new challenge rooms, such as the notorious mercenary and ramokee rooms, which used to be a lot more difficult to than they are today. Until 15th March 2011 everyone in the Dungeoneering team had to have their floor unticked in the Dungeoneering interface in order to gain the full Dungeoneering xp. Otherwise the prestige would not work. On that day, however, Jagex made it possible to combine floors, well, almost. For example, if three persons had a party set up for floor 38 and the other two persons that joined later on could do only floor 39, they would still gain the full Dungeoneering experience. This works for all floors within the same theme (occult, warped, etc.). The reason for this change was to make it easier and faster to make teams. Several challenge rooms were made easier as well and a timer was added to the floor so that you would know for how long you had been stuck with other people. Top dungeoneers started to use that timer as an official instrument to determine speed-related records

On 11th April 2012 an update that would make Dungeoneering a lot more convenient took place. A topic that I have not discussed yet is that of keyers. Top Dungeoneering teams have always consisted of one keyer and four non-keyers. At first keying used to be the act of collecting keys and opening key doors. This meant that the keyer usually had the biggest responsibility, took the biggest risks and was the essential factor that determined how fast or how slow the floor would be. That is 190 quite some pressure for just one player, do you not think so? Luckily for the keyers, Jagex came with a solution on 11th April. They released the Dungeoneering toolbelt, an interface that would carry all keys that are picked up by any person in the team, and accessible to all players in the team. This means that all players would be able to access the keys at all times, instead of only one person prior to this update. Prior to this update, keys had to be dropped in order to give them to another team member. Keying somewhat died on that day and people had to alter their strategies accordingly.

Arguably the most interesting part about the skill is the rewards. Some of these rewards include the chaotic weapons, which can be bought by handing in the tokens that you receive from your Dungeoneering floors. The chaotic weapons caused a revolution in weaponry because they were a lot stronger than many other popular weapons. As a consequence the chaotic weapons sped up combat a lot. Keep in mind that the current combat system, Evolution of Combat, had not been released yet, so there was no dual wielding or combat ability system yet. Also the Bonecrusher was a valuable addition to combat, especially for those players with a low Prayer level. The main reason for adding rewards that affect non-combat skills was probably to reduce their cost a bit. The scroll of cleansing, for example, and several other scrolls would give the community a chance of saving resources while training the skills.

At that time Dungeoneering was considered to be a group activity because the xp rates for solo Dungeoneering (or in small groups) were extremely low. This had become problematic by the end of the 2012 because the popularity of the skill had decreased and forming parties of efficient dungeoneers was not an easy task anymore. The official worlds for the skill (77 and 117) were no longer sufficient to form parties that are able to generate high xp rates. As a consequence there was a high demand for alternative ways to train the skill. In November of 2012 Jagex responded to this demand by increasing the xp rates for solo Dungeoneering as well of for training the skill in smaller parties. The idea behind all of this was to make the skill more accessible, but parties consisting of five players were still supposed to yield to the highest xp rates. It is hard to mention xp rates because of how prestige works, but the update made it possible for high-level solo dungeoneers to gain several 100k Dungeoneering xp per hour. To put that into some sort of perspective, prior to the update it was not possible for solo dungeoneers to attain an xp rate of 100k xp per hour. At that time EoC has just been released, resulting in the need of more items in Daemonheim floors, so a change to the skill had to be made. The number of items that can be bound within Daemonheim was increased to ten for all players, regardless of Dungeoneering level. However, the number of bound items that a player could carry at any given was still restricted by level. The reason for this change was to allow players to create pre-sets for each combat type so that everyone could efficiently switch their armour in order to adapt to the monsters in Daemonheim.

A few months later, in February of 2013, a new D&D, called Sinkholes, was added to the game. This D&D can be played twice per day for around 30-40 minutes in total. That seems like a lot of time for a D&D, but the rewards are enormous. At a high level you are able to gain up to around 200k Dungeoneering xp per game if you come out on top, which means that the virtual xp rate would be higher than 600k xp per hour. Even if you are unlucky, the reward at the end is usually still worth the effort, so logically Sinkholes has been an extremely popular D&D since its release. Some players added this D&D to their daily routine, while others used it as a complete substitution for traditional Dungeoneering, meaning that these players would only play sinkholes for their Dungeoneering xp instead of completing floors in Daemonheim. 191

On 27th May 2014 the skill underwent several relatively big updates. The least important one for this chapter is the release of a new resource dungeon at level 90, but this had no effect on the skill itself. The addition of the floor skipping mechanism, however, did affect the skill tremendously. For years people had been complaining about the hassle of having to rush their low-level floors because completing those floors in the highest complexity mode was not worth the effort. The new floor skipping mechanism allowed players to skip floors. By paying an amount of Dungeoneering tokens, floors can be ticked off in the list of floors without having to complete the floor in Daemonheim. However, it is safe to assume that skipping floors never became a habit simply because the cost of skipping a floor can exceed 40k Dungeoneering tokens.

Another important segment of that update was the introduction of new gear to the rewards shop in Daemonheim. Most remarkable was the release of a chaotic spear, which can be made by using the powerful Zamorakian spear. The latter used to be a decent weapon in 2010 and earlier because of its stab bonus. It was particularly useful for fighting metal dragons at that time, so the addition of a chaotic variant was not meaningless at all, although there already were better alternatives with the higher-tier weaponry. Additionally, a few necklaces for Melee and Ranged were added to the shop. Also important to mention is that the hexhunter bow was made stronger in accordance with the dual wielding in EoC. Other additions to the shop include in-floor benefits, such as scrolls that unlock certain permanent passive perks while training Dungeoneering. Not important for the skill itself, but highly popular for reasons I still cannot understand, is that also several extremely expensive pets were added to the rewards shop, costing up to one million Dungeoneering tokens. For some reason quite some players were actually willing to pay for those new pets. Furthermore, a whole series of so-called quality-of-life updates were made on that day, such as an update to make the spike trap room less frustrating, the ability to use bonfires and the addition of an in-floor timer.

The release of Elf City’s second batch at the end of 2014 also added more content to the Dungeoneering skill. First of all, I should mention the two new resource dungeons in the Meilyr clan, requiring 95 and 115 Dungeoneering. Of course these dungeons are not updates with regard to the actual training of the skill, but they do offer access to new rewards linked to the skill. For instance, the lower-levelled dungeon contains the Gorajo hoardstalker, a NPC who gives each player a card every day that grants effects or bonuses while training Dungeoneering. These cards are the same as the Sinkholes ones, but with different effects, more appropriate for training the skill.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Dungeoneering skill 12th April 2010 Gatestones 19th July 2010 Hidden resource dungeons 19th July 2010 Occult floors 19th August 2010 Warped floors 2nd November 2010 Dungeoneering toolbelt 11th April 2012 Solo Dungeoneering boosted 13th November 2012 Sinkholes D&D 5th February 2013 192

Farming was released on 11th July 2005, but everyone could already buy seeds earlier in order to prepare for the skill's release. On 6th June (more than one month before the release) Jagex had already added a Farming market to Draynor Village where people could buy their seeds or where they could pickpocket the local Master Farmer in order to obtain the seeds in advance. Another way to obtain seeds was by collecting nests that had fallen from trees. Farming is the only skill that trained somewhat passively. You need to plant your seeds and wait for them to grow. At first some players did not really understand this part and they literally stood next to their farming patch, waiting for their seed to grow. Depending on the type of seeds that you had planted, the resources could be used for Cooking, Crafting or Herblore. A short while later many people voted in a poll that they did not like the skill at all. In fact, the results were so disappointing that Jagex decided to remove that poll. Like all skills, Farming was fairly limited after its release. There initially were four main areas where the skill could be trained. These areas were Ardougne, Catherby, Falador and Port Phasmatys. Most farming methods were already available, though. A player could plant seeds for trees, herbs, food etc. The release of Farming also had a huge effect on the Herblore skill because new herbs would be pumped into the game as a consequence of the herb patches. To make farming a bit more convenient, Jagex added leprechauns to each farming patch in December of 2005. These leprechauns would look after your farming tools so that you did not have to carry so many items during your farming trip.

Farming is a skill that was pretty much complete at its release. However, some updates that are worth mentioning include the release of the magic secateurs in February 2006, adding a new farming patch to the Gnome Stronghold in November of 2006 and adding a right-click option to the gardeners in October 2007 in order to save some time whilst paying them. In January 2008 Jagex also added a new fruit tree patch to Lletya. On 19th February 2008 the Vinesweeper minigame was released. This minigame became a good way to train Farming for those who did not like the concept of the skill. Vinesweeper is based on the minesweeper game and the points that are gained from it can be used to purchase seeds or Farming xp. On the same day the farming amulet was updated as well so that you could contact the gardeners who were looking after your patches. This made Farming a little bit more convenient because returning to a farming patch before the seed has fully grown is one of the most annoying things in RuneScape. Leprechauns were updated in May 2006 so that they could note and store some of your farming items. By that moment the leprechauns had become an invaluable feature to many players.

On 24th November 2010 Jagex released the Herblore Habitat area. This update brought a whole lot of seeds into the game that could be used for new potions. Even though Herblore Habitat mainly focuses on Herblore and Hunter, Juju potions were an important update for all farmers because tons of new seeds and herbs were released on that day. The farming part is also a requirement if you want to catch high-level jadinkos. The most important new seeds that were released are the erzille, samaden and ugune seeds because those would be used for skill potions. More about the actual 193 potions can be found in the description of the Herblore skill. Note that the Jadinko Lair beneath the surface of Herblore Habitat was not released on that day yet. Next, a quick mention should be given to a small update that was important to high-level farmers: a reward for completion of the new Prisoner of Glouphrie quest in February was the ability to plant up to two spirit trees at the same in Gielinor. The Livid Farm update in April of 2011 brought an extra farming method into the game. This method is slow for training Farming itself, but you gain quite some Overall xp per hour, including around 30k Farming xp. And that could make the activity worthwhile.

A frequent complaint by farmers for a long time used to address the inconvenience of manually having to fill plant pots with seeds as well as manually having to water them, one by one. A small quality-of-life update in May of 2011 automated this process to satisfy the farming community. Exactly two years later in the same month, the Farming skill was given a relatively big update as ten high-level plants were released. Unique about these plants is that some of them also give xp in other skills when harvested, in addition to a bit of Farming xp. A remarkable new type of 'plant' was the wishing well bush because it introduced another money sink to the game. By paying a few coins the yielded fruits of this bush will give you several items that can be worth up to three times the amount of coins that was paid. Of course, ending up worse is also a possibility, so in a way it could be considered a game of chance, hosted by the game's mechanisms. Jagex's intention behind releasing this type of tree is probably economy-related as the game was in a period of inflation at that time. Making money disappear from/leave the game is one way to combat the effects of inflation.

Now it has been a decade since Jagex released Farming, but the most severe inconvenience still has not been dealt with. If you have already extensively trained Farming, you will probably know that your trees, herbs, bushes etc. sometimes take a lot longer to grow than they are supposed to. This is not a glitch. The problem is related to the underlying mechanism of Farming, to which we could most easily refer by calling that mechanism the growth time cycle. This cycle is divided into several phases, which are visible in-game. For example, when your tree seems to have grown a tiny bit, but not completely, it has actually progressed to the next growth phase in the cycle. However, this cycle can be interrupted by logging out and logging in, which resets the current phase of the growth time cycle. The consequence of this is that the tree will take longer to grow because it was forced to restart at one of the growth phases. Despite Jagex being aware of the many complaints, because the skill was designed like that, still no change has been made to how this system works. That may baffle you, but the reason for that is probably because the growth time cycle is the core or the backbone of the entire skill, which would make it extremely difficult to make changes to it. It is generally advised to let your flora grow overnight to reduce or nullify this unpleasant effect. However, in January 2014 Jagex added the ultra-growth potion to the drop table of the Giant Mole. That untradeable potions allows the player to skip two growth phases, but only once per tree. The release of the Elf City in September of 2014 added a new elder tree patch, spirit tree patch and crystal tree patch to the game. Especially the crystal tree one is interesting because a player can receive a daily 15k Farming xp from harvesting it without having to replant a seed. That does not seem like much, but it does it add up over time, and that for just a few seconds of work every day. 194

In conclusion, many people think of Farming as being a slow skill, but that is not really correct. If you consider only the time spent on planting the seeds, then Farming is actually a fast skill. It may take some months to get 99 Farming, but you will only have spent little time on it. To give you a small example: my usual Farming trip back in 2009 took ten minutes. After planting the seeds, I would get back to skilling and wait for my seeds to grow. The next day I would go check my farming patches and plant my new seeds. After ten minutes, the duration of my farming trips, I would have planted all the new seeds and I would also have received 85k Farming xp. If you do a quick calculation, that equals 510k Farming xp per hour. And that is fast. Of course it is a buyable skill, so it also costs a bit. This example is just to show that Faming does not necessarily have to be slow. It was also a tradition among high-level players to start every bonus xp weekend with doing a Farming run to gain 2.7x the amount of the normal Farming xp. This was when the multiplier still decreased over time, which has not been the case for the most recent bonus xp weekends.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Draynor Farming market 6th June 2005 Farming skill 11th July 2005 Leprechauns 5th December 2005 Magic secateurs 27th February 2006 Vinesweeper minigame 19th February 2008 Herblore Habitat 24th November 2010 Livid Farm minigame 4th April 2011 Skill plants 20th May 2013 Elf City Farming patches 22nd September 2014

Firemaking is one of the skills that was released on the same day as RuneScape itself. The skill has the reputation of being basic and simple. This was also the case in RS1, but the skill was just much harder to train. Today you just have to burn some logs to make a fire, add a log to the fire and then the game will take over until your inventory is empty. That is heaven compared with how it used to work. In order to train the skill in RS1, you had to drop your logs manually and use your tinderbox on the dropped logs, after which you had to keep repeating the process until the inventory was empty. Each log had to be dropped and lit one by one. After lighting a fire, your character automatically walks to the west (if there is space for it). A nice line of fires would be the consequence of that, and the consequence of doing that multiple times is a painful hand. In RS1 making lines of fires used to be slower than in RS2 because the animation took longer to complete and because you did not have to manually drop your logs in RS2. In addition to that, it was possible in RS1 to fail at lighting a fire. At the very beginning of RuneScape, the only logs and trees that were available for Firemaking were normal logs. There were many different types of trees in RS1, but some of them did not exist until the release of Fletching in March 2002.

If we purely focus on RS1 Firemaking for now, we can say that making a fire would often fail between the levels 1-15. The skill was a time-consuming activity that did not get much better until level 30-35, or when you started to fail less and less. The best place to train the skill was near Draynor Village because of the many trees that have always been located there. Firemaking and Woodcutting were mostly trained together because that was the more convenient thing to do. The inventory set-up of most woodcutters and firemakers consisted of a hatchet (called axe at that time), a tinderbox, a sleeping bag and 27 logs (there were thirty inventory slots in RS1). The sleeping bag was needed to reduce the fatigue once it had reached 100%. The amount of xp that you would get

195 depended on your Firemaking level. The formula for normal logs was 25 + 1.75 * your level (but until the release of Fletching it was 12.5 instead of 25). This means that Firemaking offered better xp rates the more you trained it, or the higher your level in the skill was. At 90 Firemaking this would be 25 + 1.75 * 90 = 182.5 xp per normal log. So xp rates varied a lot because it depended on your level, but also because some players preferred to follow certain routes so that they would end up at trees right after they had lit the last fire. That method would result in getting about 10k Woodcutting and 75k Firemaking xp per hour at level 99. Later on people discovered a little trick: having a full inventory whilst woodcutting (this was possible in RS1) would result in your cut logs being dropped on the ground, automatically. People made use of that game mechanic so that Firemaking would be less intensive to train.

The release of RS2 changed all of that. Logs were assigned a fixed amount of xp and it became possible to train Firemaking by just selecting the tinderbox and using it on the logs in the inventory (instead of manually dropping the logs). Firemaking had become easier at this point, but it also means that the advantage of having a high Firemaking level had disappeared due to the removal of the formula. Just to clarify, even though logs could now be dropped by using the tinderbox on them, each of those logs still had to be lit manually, so even after the release of RS2, the skill was still a high-intensity activity. The Firemaking system stayed the same for many years, so not much can be said about the early RS2 years. However, several types of trees were added to the game during those years. The most popular logs used by relatively poor people have always been willows and maples, but the richer people began to use yew and magic logs more frequently after the release of RS2. As more content and more areas were being added to the game, people began to realize that some of these updates could be used to increase the Firemaking xp rate. Several game engine updates eventually made backwards firemaking possible, which is as simple as it sounds: first you walk west and make fires; when you have lit ½ of your logs, you move one step north or south and go back to the east while lighting fires. Walking to the west is the easy part because you automatically walk west after lighting a fire, so going east for the second part of your line means that you have to counteract the game mechanics and that requires some concentration. Another method discovered by clever firemakers was using a teleport location. For example: you always light fires to the west, so some players would bank at Varrock west bank and then teleport to Varrock Square. Once there, they would start lighting fires and when their inventory was empty, they would be near the entrance of the Varrock west bank again.

Gnome firelighters were added to the list of possible Treasure Trail rewards in February 2006. These can be used to the turn the fires into the same colour as the firelighter's colour when lighting a fire. However, this gnome firelighters were purely cosmetic and did not offer any advantages. A big addition to the Firemaking skill was the release of the All Fired Up quest and its minigame on 26th August 2008. The rewards from the minigame includes several Firemaking-related rewards that increase the xp for each log. Two of the three rewards are the ring of fire and the flame gloves. Both of these give 2% extra xp when worn individually, but 5% in total when worn together. The third reward is the inferno adze. Using this adze gives you a 30% chance of automatically 196 incinerating logs while woodcutting and the adze itself is as good as the dragon hatchet. Jagex released the Jadinko Lair on 12th July 2011. Fletching and Slayer are two of the activities that can be done in that lair, but Firemaking became the most popular activity down there. The dungeon consists of four rooms and in three of them you can cut curly roots from the many jade vines that are hanging from the roof. These curly roots can be used inside the lair to train Firemaking. Altogether this means that Firemaking was no longer a strictly buyable skill and of course many people were happy with that. Especially because the buyable skills had been becoming more and more expensive. Regular Firemaking, so the activity of making lines of fires, would become less popular because the xp rates in this lair are extremely high. Not only is it possible to obtain more than 250k Firemaking xp per hour at a high level, you will also got about a tenth of that in Woodcutting xp. Needless to say that this update was a revolution for the Firemaking skill. But not the only revolution.

A second revolution happened not even a year later, in May 2012. Jagex released the bonfire Firemaking method on day ten of that month and it completely changed how Firemaking would be trained in the next years. Making lines of fires and backward firemaking were no longer necessary if you wanted to train as efficiently as possible. On that day Jagex change the Firemaking system so that you just have to add a log to the fire and then the game will take over until your inventory is empty. Firemaking the old-fashioned way remained possible, but there was no longer a good reason to actually use that way. Xp rates of the bonfire method are not as fast as in the Jadinko Lair, though. An hour of Firemaking with maple logs is about 150k xp per hour and with magic logs about 300k xp. Of course, using Magic logs is expensive and it is really not worth it considering the presence of a free alternative that also offers more than 250k xp per hour (Jadinko Lair). The bonfires update is the last big Firemaking update that has taken place since 2012, but the way it transformed the skill eliminated the need for any more big updates. Also, other skills have been much less lucky. For example, just look at how Crafting remained the same for over a decade. As you can see, I was still able to tell quite a bit about the simple skill that Firemaking appears to be today. Keep in mind that the skill has undergone several big changes and whenever you feel the need to complain about Firemaking for any reason, think about what those RS1 players have gone through to train the skill.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Firemaking skill 4th January 2001 Fixed xp per tree type 29th March 2004 Inferno Adze 26th August 2008 Jadinko Lair 12th July 2011 Bonfire firemaking 10th May 2012

Fishing was released on 11th June 2001 and it already contained most fish up to manta rays in RS1. Shark was released alongside the membership option on 27th February 2002 and manta ray followed a year later in July 2003. Just some quest-bound and area-bound types of fish that exist now did not exist yet in RS1. The skill also worked almost exactly the same as it does today, so no Firemaking- like stories here. The only two differences were that fishing spots never moved, so you did not have to move whilst Fishing (unless when banking). However, it was not really AFK because you had to reclick your fishing spot after catching a fish. Players who preferred to gain fast Fishing xp would opt for the fly fish method, which provided up to 50k xp per hour at a high Fishing level. Other players who preferred money would opt for shark or lobster, which was much slower of course. I have not found xp rates for sharks, but lobsters were around 20k-25k xp per hour in RS1. Mind you, lobsters were the favourite food for Pk'ers for a long while, so the xp rate was not really important because many players caught fish to make money. 197

Initially the release of the fatigue system on 15th November 2002 affected Fishing a lot, too much according to the community, so Jagex reduced the fatigue rate for Fishing on 25th November. On that day the respawn rate of fish was also restored to close to the original rate of two weeks prior to the release of the fatigue system. Jagex had initially reduced the spawn rate because they had been working on a plan to launch a Fishing system consisting of deep fish and shallow fish, but this plan was eventually canceled because it did not work too well when Jagex tested it. The xp rates mentioned above are the rates that were recorded after the fatigue reduction. Fishing is one of the few skill that was not really get affected much during the transition from RS1 to RS2. The only few things that changed were the removal of the fatigue system and the skill became more AFK as a result of no longer having to reclick the fishing spot after catching a fish. A small comparison: every time you tried to catch a fish in RS1, you had to click on the fishing spot and four ticks (2.4 seconds) later you would get a message of whether you had caught a fish or not. In RS2 this changed to one single click and a chance of catching a fish every four game ticks, but without having to reclick. Fishing spots would now move around. We can immediately make a big jump to 2nd May 2006 for the next update. A new type of fish, called monkfish, was added to the game on that day. That was not really important for fishermen who were more interested in xp than in money, though. In March 2007, a new game engine made Fishing more convenient: dragging items in your inventory would no longer interrupt the skill.

On 3rd July 2007 Jagex added a new fishing method to the game: Barbarian heavy rod fishing immediately became the new fastest fishing method of RuneScape. Not only do you gain Fishing xp, but also some xp in Agility and Strength because heavy rods are... heavy. Even though there are better alternatives today, at that time the method was good for those who purely wanted xp and not money. Barbarian heavy rod fishing initially offered xp rates of up to 65k xp per hour, or the highest possible Fishing xp at that time. Later on in 2009, some clever people discovered that casting the high-level alchemy spell would not interrupt fishing, so they decided to alch the caught fish in order to save some time (instead of dropping them). This increased the xp per hour to around 67k xp per hour. Meanwhile Summoning had been released in January in 2008. This had introduced several Fishing-focused familiars to the game that give the player an invisible Fishing level boost. The granite lobster, the familiar that provides a high Fishing boost (of four levels), would eventually be used by many players who intended the train the skill. On 17th September 2009, the Living Rock Cavern was added to RuneScape. This update introduced two new types of fish to the game: cave fish and rocktail. These high-level fish need to be caught with a unique type of bait, called living minerals. If you look up the price of these minerals, you will see that they are not exactly, what you would call, cheap. No panic, though, because the cave fish and rocktail are not cheap either. Rocktail became an extremely popular moneymaking and training method and there are various reasons for that. First of all, rocktail fishing offers an xp rate of over 50k xp per hour and, secondly, the method is AFK because the rocktail are caught at an extremely slow pace in comparison with other fishing methods. So fishing in the Living Rock Cavern is AFK, but you can still make about 198

200k-300k gp profit per hour. This combination is what ultimately led to the popularity of the fishing method.

The release of Dungeoneering in April 2010 also added several new types of fish to the game. These fish can be caught only in Daemonheim, but they offer remarkably good xp rates. So sometimes it is always a good idea to go catch a few salve eels, blue crabs or cave morays when you have nothing to do. On 15th March 2011 several changes were made to Dungeoneering, one of which made fishing in Daemonheim the fastest fishing method of the game. Doing floors in complexity 2 and then finding and clearing all cave moray and blue crab fishing spots would give over 150k Fishing xp per hour at level 99 (you cannot fish in complexity 1). Jagex later noticed this and nerfed the xp rate. They halved the amount of xp, but fishing in Daemonheim still remained the fastest fishing method in RuneScape, offering around 80k xp per hour. Dungeoneering is a teamwork skill and clans obviously knew this as well. So during the Jagex Clan Cup of 2010 and 2011, the top skilling clans would form Dungeoneering parties and focus on one clan member. After a large floor had been cleared and after the fishing spots had been located, that one member would start their fishing session and the others would help that member get to the fishing spots very fast. This led to xp gains of over 150k xp per hour during the Jagex Cup of 2011. However, keep in mind that that xp rate excludes the preparation time and it would not be worth doing this if you included that time as well. Dungeoneering received a huge update in April 2012 and one of the changes was that raw fish would now stack. This means that training Fishing in a floor of complexity 2 would no longer fill up your inventory with caught fish. This indirectly increased the xp rate because people often lost time by dropping the fish. Including several others changes made to Dungeoneering on that day, the xp per hour increased from 80k to about 110k for the solo method, with experienced players consistently averaging at around 110k xp per hour.

Fishing is one of the skill for which skilling urns were released in February 2011. Fishing urns boost the xp rate of any training method that you wish to use (except in Dungeoneering because the urns cannot be taken into a floor). The downside is that these urns require inventory space, but there is one particular fishing method that does not suffer major negative consequences of this. Rocktail fishing offers good xp rates, but it takes a while to fill up an inventory with them because of the relatively high amount of xp that each caught rocktail gives. This was an ideal situation for fishing urns because it means that someone could easily carry a few urns without a noticeable negative effect. However, there is a conflict of interest: many fishermen in the Living Rock Cavern are there because they want their training to be relaxing, without the hassle of having to click often or even of having to go to a bank. Using fishing urns implies that you will have to bank every now and then, so while the use of fishing urns in the Living Rock Cavern was not uncommon, many others still preferred to catch the fish without urns at that time so that they could stay there for many hours.

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The release of the Divination skill in August 2013 had an impact on several skills because of the portents and signs that can be made by using the resources from the new skill. Signs of the porter, as they are called, automatically teleport collected resources to a bank. These signs ended up becoming more popular than fishing urns because only one free inventory slot is required for the former. The high-level signs last between 10-20 minutes each for rocktail fishing, so filling your inventory with just signs means that you could stay at the same location for many hours. Although signs of the porter became incredibly popular for fishing in the Living Rock Cavern (at the expense of Fishing urns' popularity), using the signs down there is actually not efficient. The difference in xp rate is negligible (barely 2k xp), while the signs have to be made by yourself from scratch. The use of signs for training the Fishing skill in the Living Rock Cavern is ideal for players who prefer to make their RuneScape sessions as AFK as possible, but in other situations the players are better off without the signs. In June of 2014 skillchompas were released. This is more relevant for the Hunter skill, but for now it is important to know that these skillchompas provide additional xp whilst skilling. The extra xp is a fixed relative amount of 10%, meaning that every fishing method provides 10% more xp while wielding these skillchompas.

In 2009 the skill become considerably less intensive because of the Living Rock Cavern, but the better methods in terms of xp per hour remained those that required physical effort. First with the presence of the Barbarian heavy rod fishing method and since 2011 with the Dungeoneering methods offering the highest xp rate. I am convinced that the game would be better if the most xp- rewarding training methods for each skills were the methods that require the most effort, if we want to avoid that too much content becomes unused in the long run.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Fishing skill 11th June 2001 Shark 27th February 2002 Manta ray 28th July 2003 Moving Fishing spots 29th March 2004 Monkfish 2nd May 2006 Barbarian heavy rod fishing 3rd July 2007 Cavefish and rocktail 17th September 2009 Fishing urns 15th February 2011 Dungeoneering fishing boosted 15th March 2011 Signs of the porter 20th August 2013 Skillchompas 23rd June 2014

Fletching was added to the game on 25th March 2002, a month after the release of membership, and the skill was extremely limited in RS1. There were only three fletching methods that could be used and all of them were highly click-intensive because the fletch x-option would not be introduced until 2006. These methods consisted of making bows (up to magic longbow), making arrows (up to rune arrows) and making darts (up to rune throwing darts). All these methods worked the same as they do today: to make a bow, you needed flax or bowstring, a knife and logs. Unlike Firemaking, you were able to fletch all types of bows, but the rarer high-level trees could be found only in Camelot. The most popular fletching method consisted of making bows and it remained like that for many years. Low-level players often also collected the flax (in Seers' Village) that they needed for it themselves instead of buying it from other players, which would then be crafted into bowstring.

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The next large Fletching-related update happened on 31st July 2006. Seven new types of bolts were released on that day. Fletching mithril, adamant or even runite bolts would become a popular method among the wealthy people in the community. Adamant bolts fletched by players who were experienced at using mousekeys could offer up to 800k xp per hour. This immediately made the skill seven to eight times faster. Of course it is highly doubtful that someone would be able to keep up fletching at such a speed for a long time. Not many updates have happened that affected Fletching, but in order to make the skill more interesting, Jagex (finally) added a fletching animation to it in 2007. This indeed means that there used to be no animations for this skill for a long while. The update that changed this happened on 18th June 2007. Before that day people would just see a character ‘training the bankstanding skill’ while they were actually training Fletching.

Until 2011 a popular method in the high-level community consisted of fletching broad bolts and broad arrows. The arrows had been around since the release of the Slayer skill, but the bolts were released on 5th June 2008 as part of a big Slayer update. Xp rates of 500k xp per hour were easily attainable by using the broad arrows method. However, this changed on 12th May 2011 when the bolt-fletching method was given an x-option. This immediately made the method a whole lot less intensive, but it can be seen as an update that nerfed the skill because it significantly reduced the xp per hour rate. The problem to most high level players is that it directly affected multitasking in a negative way. Some players used to fletch bolts whilst training combat, Fishing, Woodcutting, etc. and the update made all of that impossible because the activity of fletching would now interrupt the other skill. The next Fletching update happened on 20th March 2012. Bakriminel bolts were added to the game. These are high-level bolts and require a high Fletching level, so logically you would assume that these bolts provide a generous amount of Fletching xp. However, only the bolts are tradeable, but the items that you need for them are not. Furthermore, you can only fletch a certain amount of them each day because collecting the required resources carries a limit. That is all that I can say about Fletching. Nothing has really changed dramatically because only a few updates have happened to the skill. Nowadays the richer players either fletch bolts or arrows while the poorer part of the community still sticks to the old-fashioned method of bow-fletching.

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SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Fletching skill 25th March 2002 Bolt fletching 31st July 2006 Fletching animation 18th June 2007 Broad bolts and arrows 5th June 2008 X-option for bolt fletching 12th May 2011 Bakriminel bolts 20th March 2012

The Herblore skill was released on 27th February 2002 under the name of Herblaw. This skill is one of the three skills that used to have a quest requirement for access to the skill. For Herblaw, this was the Druidic Ritual quest, in which you learn the basics of Herblore. Herblore is a skill that has undergone many changes over the course of the years. Upon its release there were only a few types of herbs and the system with clean and grimy herbs did not exist yet. Initially once you had found a herb, it would appear as an unidentified herb. In order to find out what type of herb it was, you had to select the identify-option of the herb. However, that was not always possible because identifying could be done only if you had the required level to use the herb. If your Herblore level was not high enough to identify it, a message would appear saying... that your Herblore level was not high enough, and then you had to find another way to determine the type of the herb. You could either just get your Herblore level up until you had reached the required level or you could guess which herb of the eleven existing herbs (up to torstol) in RS1 it was. The highest-level potion that could be made in RS1 was the Zamorak potion, which required level 78 Herblore. Obtaining herbs was not the easiest part of the skill because Farming had not been released yet. You could buy them from others if you were lucky, but most players had to get them as a monster drop. The best monsters for this were chaos druids as they would frequently drop herbs. Same story for second ingredients, but you could buy them in several stores, though, and the vials could be bought from the stores in Ardougne and Taverley. The type of potion that a player would make for regular training depended on the price or the cost of the skill. Potions were mostly used for combat because RS1 was strongly combat-oriented. If you decided that your potions were useless and you could not sell them to anyone else, you either had to drop or drink them because an empty-option was not available yet.

The herbs that existed in RS1 were guam, marrentill, tarromin, harralander, ranarr, irit, avantoe, kwuarm, cadantine, dwarf weed and torstol. The first herb that was added to it was lantadyme in March 2004, which could be used to brew the new antifire potion. Using this potion was the first step to becoming a courageous dragon slayer. Jagex also decreased the respawn time of secondary items because gathering the secondary ingredients all by yourself had always been the most used way to obtain them. That happened in May 2004, probably to adapt to the growing player base. The addition of the Brimhaven Agility Arena two months later added two new herbs and potions to the game. These new herbs were the toadflax and snapdragon herbs. Both could be obtained as a reward at the Brimhaven Agility course, a nice alternative for those who did not like combat. The two new potions that accompanied these two herbs are the agility potion and the super restore potion. On 1st September 2004 two new potions were added to the game and those potions would have a great effect on the gameplay. The two new potions are the energy potion and the super energy potion. There was no rest-option yet at that time, so everyone needed to wait a long time for all energy to be restored, especially at a low Agility level. The use of energy potions sped up quite some activities, such as training Agility, Runecrafting and other activities or skills in which you needed to run a lot. The energy potion restores 10% of your energy (per dose) and the super energy 20% of your energy (per dose). Six days later Jagex also released a magic potion, followed by the empty-potion option that would make the skill more convenient to train.

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The release of Farming on 11th July 2005 had a big impact on Herblore. First of all, the Farming skill would become a new way of obtaining herbs by planting/growing them all by yourself. The community no longer depended on monster drops and the freshly grown herbs could of course also be sold, turning the growing of herbs into a moneymaking method. Herb supplies rapidly increased and that was necessary in order to meet the high demand for them. Herblore fans were also given an option to make super strong potions and weapon poisons. In October of 2005 Jagex released the Saradomin brew. These brews would become highly popular among combat fans. On 10th September 2007, several major changes happened to the Herblore skill. First of all, Jagex got rid of the identifying herbs system and it was replaced by a system of clean and grimy herbs. As for the grimy herbs, you would be able to see which herb it actually was because they had added the exact name to all grimy and clean herbs. This made it possible to see the name of the herb, even when you did not have the required level yet (which was not possible with the old system). Everything else remained the same, though. If you previously needed level 70 Herblore to identify a herb, then you still needed 70 Herblore to clean the herb after the update. The main reason for this system change was to make it more difficult for scammers their thing. Another part of the update is that it became clearer to see whether or not a potion already contained a second ingredient. If it did not contain a second ingredient, the word unfinished would be added to the name of the potion. Exactly a year later Jagex added Bob Barter to the Grand Exchange area. This person accepts your potions of (1), (2) or (3) doses and turns them into potions of (4) doses. This was supposed to save many players some time and effort. On 7th October 2009 Jagex added a whole set of extreme potions to the game. These potions greatly affected combat as it made facing high-level monsters significantly easier. The new extreme potions would boost your Melee stats to 125 and Ranged to 123 (if your level in those skills was 99). For Magic this was less (107). But still, those extreme potions were not the most powerful ones. That honour went to the overload potion, which was released on the same day. The potion combines the effects of the extreme Attack, Defence and Strength potions. The difference between fighting with or without using extreme potions is clearly noticeable, so the release of these potions did affect high-level combat.

The Herblore Habitat update on 24th November 2010 introduced a whole series of new herbs and potions to the game. The name of the minigame is a bit misleading, though, because the minigame revolves around Hunter and not Herblore. However, the new seeds/herbs of the activity could initially be used to make untradeable juju potions that are useful for other skills. The five new herbs were the argway, erzille, samaden, shengo and ugune herbs. The six new potions were the juju cooking, juju farming, juju fishing, juju hunter, juju mining and juju woodcutting potions. Other new potions included the scentless potion, Saradomin's blessing, Guthix's gift and Zamorak favour. These non-juju ones can only be used within the Herblore Habitat minigame, but the others can be used everywhere in Gielinor. Several of these potions ended up becoming useful. The juju farming potion, for instance, gives you extra herbs on your farming trip and for a while the juju mining potion would bank some of your ores for you every now and then, but this effect was removed and changed into something else at the release of Divination in 2013. In November of 2014 the juju potions were made tradeable as part of the big Elf City release.

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Do you remember that I said that the Druidic Ritual quest was a requirement for the Herblore skill? Well, the makers of RuneScape got rid of that requirement at the start of 2012. A month later, in February, they released a new type of potion and they called it potion flasks. These can be made only by skilled players and can hold up to six doses. That is two more than the regular potions. Even though high levels are required to make these, full potions flasks are tradeable and thus non- skillers did not need to get their non-combat skills up to make use of the flasks. Furthermore and unlike regular potions, potion flasks automatically disappear once they are empty. There is one more Herblore method about which I have not talked yet and the reason for that is because I have absolutely no clue when it was first used. The method to which I am referring is nothing special, though. In fact, it simply consists of... cleaning herbs. Of course this method has been around ever since the skill was released, but I am not sure when people started to use it with as goal to actually train the skill. Personally, I did a good million xp by cleaning herbs. You might think so what?, but I should point out that the x-option for cleaning herbs is a relatively a new addition. Back in my day cleaning herbs was quite a horrible experience because you needed to click on every single herb in order to clean them. Needless to say that you could not do this method for hours and hours. Do not underestimate that method, though. Mousekeys were a perfect medium that could be used clean the herbs in a less wrist-straining way and it was possible to clean up to 12,000 herbs per hour with them. If you do a quick calculation, that is more than three herbs per second on average. However that rate is difficult to maintain and 9,000 herbs per hour was usually more feasible. After the addition of the x-option for herb cleaning in 2012, this number dropped significantly because the automated process is much slower than the old manual method. Also worth noting is that cleaning herbs could be a good moneymaking method because of the constantly changing price difference between grimy and clean herbs.

In March 2013 the cities of Burthorpe and Taverley became part of the F2P area. With Taverley being the epicentre of Herblore, it is unthinkable that the skill would not be affected by it in one way or another. On that same day all free players were given the permanent ability to train the P2P stats up to level 5. In order to make sure that free players could experience the thrill of training Herblore better, Jagex released a few new low-level potions. The problem with these potions, however, is these potions would carry the name of already existing potions, so Jagex had to play around with the names in the higher-tier potions. The new potions in the level range of 1-5 were the ranging potion and the magic potion. The names of the already existing potions were adapted to be named super ranging potion and super magic potion.

The release of Elf City’s second batch on 10th November 2014 had a quite a few updates in store for the Herblore skill. I have already mentioned that the juju potions became tradeable on that day, but there was much more. The biggest Herblore-related update of that day was the release of the combination potions, which, as the name implies, contained combined effects from multiple types of potion. This allows the creation of relative strong potions, so Jagex added a monetary cost to unlocking the recipes for them, up to one million gp for the two best potions, which require level 99 to make. One of them, the supreme overload salve, combines the effects of six potions. This example is to demonstrate how powerful these combinations potions actually are. Some of the resources that are necessary to make the potions can be obtained from the harmony pillars that were released on the same day. These can be attuned to a skill and are essentially Farming patches, but I have added this game feature to the Herblore section because it was listed under Herblore in the official news 204 post about the update. Unlike any other farmable plant or tree, the harmony pillars’ growth stages advances as the player gains xp in the skill to which the pillar is attuned. A total of 200k xp needs to be done for the pillar to complete all growth stages. The concept behind this is pretty interesting because Farming had formerly been characterized as being an interval skill, in which a player does not need to do anything at all between planting the seed and checking if the herb, plant or tree has grown.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Herblore skill 27th February 2002 Lantadyme 29th March 2004 Antifire potion 29th March 2004 Toadflax 18th May 2004 Snapdragon 18th May 2004 Energy potion 1st September 2004 Empty-option for vials 7th September 2004 Herblore farming patches 11th July 2005 Saradomin brew 24th October 2005 Grimy herbs system 10th September 2007 Extreme potions 7th October 2009 Overload potion 7th October 2009 Juju potions 24th November 2010 Potion flask 7th February 2012 Combination potions 10th November 2014

Hunter is one of the newer skills and it was released on 21st November 2006. Several of the Hunter areas were already present from the beginning. The most important ones could be found south of Piscatoris, for grey chinchompas and falconry; in the Feldip Hills area for red chinchompas, several types of birds and larupia; and the Rellekka Hunter area. A few days later Jagex added ferret hunting and a new transportation method with eagles that allows you to fly to the Rellekka Hunter area and back to Eagles' Peak. Hunting red chinchompas would offer xp rates of up to 130k xp per hour at level 99, which made the method extremely popular. This popularity led to quite some frustration at the busiest moment of the day when the red chinchompa spots would be taken or crowded in almost all worlds. You did not want to hunt in a world where the hunter spots were already occupied because it would slow you down. At the same time people wanted to pick a world that was as full as possible because the respawn time would be faster then. Sometimes it happened that players could not stand it anymore and they decided to hunt other players away by making fires or by trying to steal their spot. Unfortunately, this is something that would never stop happening and even today it still tends to happen.

The lizard and salamander Hunter methods were released on the same day as the skill. There is one type of lizard that can be hunted near Canafis, but there are three types of salamanders that can be found at various locations. The three types are orange, red and black salamander, with the last one being the salamander that carries the highest Hunter requirement. The swamp lizard method is a fast way to level up when you do not have a high Hunter level yet, so it became quite popular at first. I do not know any xp rates, though. The black salamanders are located in the Wilderness, so it is logical that they have never been used to train Hunter. The second best salamanders, the orange ones, are located in the Kharidian Desert. The red salamanders can be found around the Ourania altar (that is near the Gnome Battlefield) and they became a popular method because of its xp rates.

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In fact, hunting red salamanders offers more xp per hour than hunting red chinchompas, but the difference is that you do not make any money when you decide to hunt salamanders. That is why red chinchompas were always the number one method until Jagex released better alternatives. A high Hunter level has always been advised if you want to hunt red chinchompas, so many players just used the salamander method until they had reached level 80 or 85. The xp rate at those levels is 80k xp per hour, a lot better than the xp rate of other methods at the same level. The xp rate of the salamander method probably exceeds 130k xp per hour at level 99.

2008 was the year when Summoning was released. This is also had an effect on Hunter because several of the familiars have level-boosting effects for the Hunter skill. The best one, the arctic bear, provides an invisible boost of seven levels, making it an indispensable familiar for many Hunters. The arctic bear familiar ended up becoming an extremely popular. On 22nd January 2008 Jagex added a Hunter method to the game that seemed relatively difficult to train at first sight. The new pawya and grenwall Hunter method is in fact is a combination of two methods. You receive pawya meat from catching a pawya, which is the bait that you need for catching grenwall. These grenwall give grenwall spikes that initially were cheap in price, so there was no good reason to make use of the method yet at that time. After the release of the extreme potions in 2009, hwoever, grenwall spikes became high in demand because they are a second ingredient of one of the potions. This caused grenwall spikes to go up in price, leading to the birth of pawya and grenwall hunting. Level 99 hunters reported xp gains of up to 130k xp per hour. However, 110k xp per hour was more common as an average among the experienced hunters. The profit rates were remarkable good after the release of the extreme potions, varying between 1.75m gp and 3 gp profit per hour (at a high Hunter level). The price of grenwall spikes have fluctuated a lot over the course of the years, though. It is important to know that the release of these methods signified a revolution for the Kingdom of Tirannwn. Prior to this update, Isafdar functioned only as quest area and there was really no other reason to visit it. These two new Hunter methods gave the community an incentive to start visiting Tirannwn more often, which eventually worked. However, hunting grenwall is one of the most click-intensive activities in RuneScape, it was never very popular.

On 19th January 2010 Jagex added a new Hunter method to the game: catching warlock butterflies barehanded. This method gives Agility and Hunter xp, and provides a higher Hunter xp rate than red chinchompa hunting. This new method offers a Hunter xp rate of around 150k xp per hour at 99 plus around 35k Agility xp. It is mainly the second xp rate that caused this method to become popular. Nevertheless, red chinchompa remained crowded, probably due to a combination of bots and legitimate players who wanted to make some money. Near the end of that year, on 12th October 2010, another Hunter method was introduced to the world of RuneScape. Charm sprite hunting, the name of the new method, did not become a competitor of the popular red chinchompas or grenwall, 206 but that was not a problem because charm sprite hunting was actually a Summoning update to help low-level players with collecting Summoning charms. The new Hunter training method made it possible for people to bypass combat to be able to train Summoning, which was previously not possible. This is why the Hunter xp rate did not really matter. People who did not like combat or did not have a sufficiently high combat level to efficiently collect charms from combat activities, were now given an alternative that provides Hunter xp as a nice extra. In April 2013 Jagex increased the Hunter xp rate of that Hunter method to make it more competitive with other training methods of that level (72). The new xp rate of charm sprite hunting ended up at around 100k Hunter xp per hour, which was indeed good at that level, but no longer great because new and much faster training methods had already been released by that time, as you will read below.

Also for this skill I will have to mention the Herblore Habitat update that took place on 24th November 2010. Hunter is the skill that was affected the most by it. Not only did the update include the release of a new Hunter method, but that method also provides extremely high xp rates. The method itself looks similar to the grenwall and chinchompa methods. However, hunting the new jadinkos requires some preparation and you will also be forced into doing some farming if you want to hunt the draconic jadinkos. These are the highest-levelled ones and they provide the most xp per hour. The highest xp rate used to be about 150k xp per hour prior to that day. The release of the draconic jadinko Hunter method doubled that, allowing players to gain 250k-300k xp per hour. The skill became more popular because of this update, but the red chinchompa spots would still remain crowded because the jadinko methods are no moneymakers.

On 28th August 2012 the Big Chinchompa D&D became a new popular daily activity. Twice per day catching butterflies for twenty minutes will give you a nice chunk of xp. Some people might claim that its virtual xp rate (of around 160k xp per hour) does not exceed that of draconic jadinkos and those people would be correct. However, it is actually the additional rewards (on top of the xp) that make the D&D a worthwhile activity. The points from playing the D&D can be exchanged for tickets that give you access to a private Hunter area where you can catch a limited number of a specific Hunter creatures. For a while a good strategy was to save your points or tickets until you had enough for an hour of catching grenwall in the private area. Not only could you indirectly make a bit money then from playing the D&D, catching the grenwall in the private area is much faster than elsewhere in RuneScape. Altogether this translated to a virtual profit rate of several millions of gp per hour, making the D&D a somewhat efficient Hunter activity. However, the price of grenwall spikes has been too low since late 2014.

In June 2014 Jagex released skillchompas. I have already mentioned them for the Fishing skill, but I have not properly explained yet what they are. First of all, skillchompas were released as a new box trap Hunter method, similarly to how catching grey and carnivorous red chinchompas work. Four types of skillchompas were released, but it is only the high-level one (the crimson chinchompa) that I will use to demonstrate what these new Hunter creatures do. Nice to know is that Jagex opted for using already existing space instead of releasing new areas. This resulted in several of the most remote places being put to use, such as the area south of the Quarry in the Kharidian Desert, and the area between Darkmeyer and Port Phasmatys. After catching many of the stackable skillchompas they can be used to generate additional xp while training Divination, Fishing, Mining or Woodcutting. The additional xp is always 10% of the xp that you normally receive from successfully completing the action. This essentially means that the maximum xp rate for all non- Dungeoneering methods for these four skills is increased by 10%. Of course, this is the Hunter section so we are not interested in the xp rates of other skills at this moment. At a high level, catching the crimson skillchompas gives around 200k Hunter xp per hour, which is significantly slower than the draconic jadinko method, but still good considering that the skillchompas can also be sold. Doing 1M Hunter xp by using this method, you would currently (October 2014) make around 4m gp, which makes it an okay moneymaker in combination with the xp rate. 207

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Hunter skill 21st November 2006 Pawya and grenwall hunting 22nd January 2008 Warlock butterfly hunting 19th January 2010 Charm sprite hunting 12th October 2010 Jadinko hunting 24th November 2010 Big Chinchompa D&D 28th August 2012 Skillchompas 23rd June 2014

Mining was one of the most primitive skills in RS1 and it is one of the skills that was already there at the start of RuneScape. The best pickaxe available in the early stages of RS1 was the bronze pickaxe and the type of rock that had the highest requirement was the runite rock. However, this rock initially did not exist. The problem with Mining in RS1 is that there was no visual way of determining whether a rock contained an ore or not. The only way to find out was by prospecting it or by trying to mine it. Unlike in RS2, your character would stop Mining if you had failed to mine an ore. This made Mining a lot more annoying and click-intensive. It was also one of those skills that was affected by the fatigue system. An alternative to mining regular rocks was mining gems at the gem mine in Shilo Village, although this city did not exist for two years. When it comes to actual Mining training methods, we can say that there were quite a lot of possibilities. If you preferred to bank the ore, then the best rocks to mine were gold, coal and mithril in the Mining Guild. You chose which rock you wanted to mine based on how rich you wanted to become or based on how much money you already had. The powerminers usually mined iron ore southwest of Varrock, which gave around 15k xp per hour. Whether it surprises you or not is irrelevant for what I am going to say, but even the miners in RS1 knew that you could superheat without interrupting Mining, which was used a lot for mining gold ores at the Crafting Guild. Also the goldsmith gauntlets already existed in RS1.

Two weeks after the release of the fatigue system, in November 2002, the Mining system was updated based on feedback from the players. First of all, the skill became less affected by fatigue. That means that you could skill for a longer time before your character would have to rest. Secondly, the new Mining system consisted of soft rocks and hard rocks. There is actually a story behind these two types of rock. After the release of the fatigue system, people complained about the skill being boring, it looked slower because the skill had been made more AFK and because the failure rates had been reduced. Jagex was surprised by this feedback because the old system was extremely repetitive and click-intensive, and you would tire much faster (tiring means reaching 100% fatigue). The solution that Jagex found to this problem was simply combining those two systems and that is how they came up with the idea for soft rocks and hard rocks. Soft rocks were rocks that respawned at a slow rate. These took a while to mine and you would need a long time before reaching the fatigue limit. Hard rocks, on the other hand, were rocks that you could mine relatively quickly and these would respawn at a faster rate, but you would also reach your fatigue limit much faster. The failure rates for both types of rock were reduced during the update, but an important difference was that you could not see when a soft rock had respawned. This was done to make it clear that soft rocks represented the old Mining system and that hard rocks represented the new Mining system. This also means that hard rocks would look different when they contained ore and when they did not, so only for hard rocks there was a visual way to determine whether you could mine it or not. An update on 27th May 2003 made Mining more convenient. A sleeping bag had been released and since that moment the players needed only a couple of seconds to recover from the Fatigue system. This caused Jagex to think that Mining system with hard and soft rocks had become pretty useless, so they reverted it to the way it used to be. Different types of pickaxes were added as well, with the rune pickaxe being the strongest one, replacing the bronze pickaxe. 208

Better pickaxes would automatically let your character do more attempts at mining an ore. With rune pickaxes you would stop mining after twelve swings. Since the update of 25th November 2002 had been undone now, it actually meant that Mining would return to the state in which you could not see whether a rock contained an ore or not. However, Jagex decided to keep it visible, so that is the only part of the previous Mining update that was not undone.

The next update that affected Mining was the transition from RS1 to RS2. The fatigue system was removed and that increased Mining xp rates. Furthermore, the release of Runecrafting also made it possible to mine rune essence (later pure essence as well). In March 2005 Jagex released a strange type of mine in Keldagrim, to be more precise, in a rock in Keldagrim. After completing the required quest, you are granted access to a special gold mine with a lot of mining rocks, called the Arzinian gold mine. You can access this mine only while wearing a gold helmet. If your inventory is full, you have to take that helm off in order to get teleported out of the mine. Afterwards you need to give the ores to someone who is standing around twenty seconds away from the mine and that person will then send the ores to a bank for you. This was not an update that made Mining faster, but some people would make use of it to make money. Jagex added another new mining method to RuneScape at the start of 2006. This mining method consists of mining granite and sandstone at the Quarry (the most southwestern part of the Kharidian Desert), and it became the fastest mining method of the game. Initially there used to be two granite rocks and two sandstone rocks located closely to each other, with two of them being placed opposite the other two and it was possible to walk between them. In other words, and yes this is important, the situation can be mentally visualized by imagining three rows: one the outer rows would contain two granite rocks, the other outer row would contain two sandstone rocks and the middle row would be the space where you could walk. People who trained Mining at that spot and became good at it were quite lucky. Those players would be able to gain 50k-70k Mining xp per hour there with a rune pickaxe.

On 20th April 2006, Jagex added a new type of essence to the game as a result of excessive botting in the rune essence mine. People who had level 30 Mining or higher would now automatically mine pure essence in the essence mine. In January of 2008, Jagex released the Dealing with Scabaras quest. This quest has a reward that was very useful for Mining for a long time: the enchanted water tiara. This tiara protects you from the desert heat so that you no longer need to bring waterskins to survive while mining at the Quarry, which was still the fastest mining method at that time. Also Summoning was released in the same month. As with several other skills that we have already discussed, also Mining was affected by the release of this combat skill. The lava titan is a Summoning familiar that provides an invisible Mining boost of ten levels. This is significant because ten levels make a huge difference. Lava titans would become an indispensable familiar for high-level miners and today the familiar has still not lost its popularity. It is important that you keep this mind because the xp rates that follow later in this section will count for training the skill under the best possible circumstances (unless mentioned otherwise), which includes the use of the lava titan familiar. Another important update for the skill was the release of the inferno adze in August 2008, a tool that can be used for both Mining and Woodcutting. Even though it was no stronger than 209 the rune pickaxe, it was special and better because of its unique log incineration effect. The adze will randomly incinerate about a third of the logs, granting Firemaking xp in the process. The dragon pickaxe did not exist yet and the consensus was that the inferno adze looked much cooler than a rune pickaxe, so at that time the inferno adze became the new preferred Mining tool. And that for a year because just over a later, Jagex added the dragon pickaxe to the game, better than both the rune pickaxe and inferno adze. Anyone who has ever wanted to purchase this dragon pickaxe will know that the price has always been notoriously high in comparison with its counterpart for Woodcutting, usually fluctuating between 12m and 18m gp.

In September of 2009 Jagex released the Living Rock Cavern. This update was a great one for both low- and high-level miners. Low-level miners could make use of the new coal deposits and high- level miners could make use of the new gold deposits. Both of these new types of rock enable the player to obtain more ore from just one rock, so these rocks do not collapse after successfully extracting ore from them. In fact, sometimes these rocks can last an hour, although that is extremely rare. Initially people in the unofficial mining world (created after the release of the Living Rock Caverns) tried to mine one rock only and they tried to stay off the other three gold rocks. The logical reason for this was that when one rock collapsed, they could switch to another rock. However, after a while the community noticed that there was something strange about this, a Jagex Moderator confirmed that all rocks were put on a random timer and that they could collapse even when no one has been mining. The concentrated gold ores method would be the fastest mining method until the release of the Elf City in September 2014. Together with the Varrock armour and the Lava Titan that gives an invisible Mining boost of 10 levels, people can gain up to 70k Mining xp per hour if doing regular mining. People who tested the maximum xp rate (no banking, but doing high-level alchemy instead) reported xp gains over 90k Mining xp per hour, making it officially the fastest method in RuneScape. These tests were done at level 99, with the dragon pickaxe that had been released one week before the Living Rock Cavern. The release of Mining urns in 2011 increased this rate to just over 100k xp. Sometimes people chose to bank their gold ores as gold bars. In other words, they preferred to superheat the gold ores while they were mining because the action of superheating would not interrupt the action of mining at all. This way of training became popular because it was the most efficient Mining method at that time. Not only could you gain up to 70k Mining xp per hour, you could also get about 50k Magic and Smithing xp per hour.

On 4th January 2011, exactly ten years after RuneScape's launch, the Lava Flow Mine was added to the game. It features prominently in the new King of the Dwarves quest, but it was not until a few months later that players could access the Lava Flow Mine to train the Mining skill. This option was added to the game on 16th May and requires completion of King of the Dwarves. The Lava Flow Mine is quite unique in the sense that mining there does not produce any ore. In the announcement post of that day Jagex spoke of' liquid rocks, but is it still a rock if it is liquid? And how would you mine something that is made of liquid? Anyway, training in Keldagrim's new mine is compulsory for obtaining the full golden mining suit, of which the pieces are given randomly to you by a NPC that appears as you are training. The full suit gives a Mining bonus of 2.5%, which was an incentive for many to pay a visit to the Lava Flow Mine. The xp rates, however, are not impressive. With a maximum of around 45k-50k xp per hour, it is much worse than training in the Living Rock Cavern. Also because Mining urns cannot be used in the Lava Flow Mine. 210

The release of Divination in August 2013 introduced signs of the porter to RuneScape. I have already explained what these are in the Fishing section, so I can be brief here. Some players preferred take these signs into Living Rock Mine to have the concentrated gold ores automatically banked. This is not an efficient method, though. Mainly because ores are obtained at a relatively fast rate, so your signs would run out of charges very quickly. In addition to that, using signs to bank the ores means that you abandon the option of superheating the obtained ore, which is by far the most efficient way to train Mining. The release of skillchompas in June 2014 also had an impact on Mining because it is one of the skill for which the beneficial effects counts. Training Mining while wielding the skillchompas generates 10% extra xp. This means that training Mining by using the concentrated gold ores in the Living Rock Cavern can now easily produce more than 100k Mining xp per hour. For this, however, you would have to be doing high-level alchemy instead of the more efficient superheating method. By now many xp boosting items (in any way) for Mining have been released. So far there is Varrock armour, the golden mining suit, skillchompas, Mining urns and the lava titan familiar. Altogether these significantly increase the xp rates of training the skill. In October of 2013 Jagex released the imcando pickaxe, which is has the same effect as the inferno adze’s incineration ability, but then for mining ore and Smithing xp is gained instead of Firemaking xp. The imcando pickaxe has a faster mining speed than the dragon pickaxe in the Lava Flaw Mine, but the same speed elsewhere in RuneScape. The smithing effect has a one of four chance of being triggered, but only at rocks that can be smelted.

Mining is a skill that was significantly affected by the release of Elf City at the end of 2014. The first batch added Seren stone to the skill and the second batch added the crystal pickaxe to the game. Mining Seren stone is a high-level training method, as is anything in Prifddinas, available in the Trahaearn clan and it gives the players corrupted ore in addition to a nice chunk of xp. Prior to this update, the fastest mining training method in RuneScape was located in the Living Rock Cavern and consisted of mining concentrated gold ore, offering xp rates of around 70k xp per hour, or higher by using alternative strategies, such as using alchemy spells instead of banking the ore. However, the new Seren stone dwarfs those xp rates as it allows the players to obtain between 140k and 175k Mining xp per hour. This is more than twice the xp rate obtained from concentrated gold ore. Needless to say that the Seren stone Mining method instantly became the new favourite choice for those who had the required level of 89 in the skill. The second batch of the Elf City updates contained the crystal pickaxe, which is a better pickaxe than the dragon one, with a mining speed that is 15% faster.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Mining skill 4th January 2001 Soft and hard rock system 25th November 2002 Rune essence mine 29th March 2004 Arzinian gold mine 21st March 2005 Quarry mine 23rd January 2006 Enchanted water tiara 2nd January 2008 Inferno adze 26th August 2008 Dragon pickaxe 9th September 2009 Living Rock Cavern 17th September 2009 Lava flow mine 4th January 2011 Mining urns 15th February 2011 Imcando pickaxe 2nd October 2013 Seren stone mining 22nd September 2014 Crystal pickaxe 10th November 2014

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Runecrafting was released on 29th March 2004, but people were already able to train the skill in the RS2 beta because Runecrafting belonged to one of the first updates of RS2. This beta ran from December 2003 till March 2004. However, any experience gained during the beta would be undone at the release of RS2. So regardless of your progress in the beta, everyone started with one in Runecrafting on 29th March 2004. The only ways to obtain runes in RS1 was by buying them in the shops or by killing monsters and getting them as a drop. Many players thought that this made Magic annoying to train. That is probably why Jagex decided to add a Runecrafting skill to the game. If you wanted to do high alchemy in RS1, you had to be lucky because nature runes could be obtained only from random chests, by telegrabbing the runes in the Wilderness or by repeatedly picking up the nature rune that spawned in the mine of Al-Kharid (or by buying them from other players of course, but there was little supply). When Runecrafting was released in RS2, only one type of essence existed: rune essence. All runes had to be crafted with this type of essence. The only runes that could initially be crafted were all of the elemental runes + cosmic, chaos and nature runes. Other runes already existed, but could not be crafted yet, a bit like the soul rune today if we disregard the ZMI altar. The law altar could not be accessed until the end of August 2004, when Jagex released the Troll Stronghold quest. Completion of it used to be a requirement to access the altar because one of the quest's reward was the law talisman, which was untradeable at that time. The Abyss did not exist at first and Summoning would be released four years later, so Runecrafting was a hard and slow skill to train at that time. Especially if you were a free player because free players could craft only the elemental runes. The main method to train Runecrafting (after level 44) in P2P used to consist of making nature runes at Karamja. This was slow, but still profitable because nature runes were still high in demand.

On 13th June 2005 Runecrafting received a big update. First of all, the ability to craft tiaras was added to the game and, secondly, the ability the craft members-only combination runes was introduced to RuneScape (for example: lava runes and mud runes are combination runes). A unique characteristic of combination runes is that you can fail to craft the runes. Jagex also added a binding necklace to the Runecrafting skill, which increases the success rate of making these combination runes. The biggest part of the update, however, was the addition of the Abyss. Via this place, which can be accessed in Wilderness level six, runecrafters are able to access almost all runecrafting altars. This was quite helpful for remote altars, such as the nature altar and the chaos altar. Although, keep in mind that using the Abyss meant that you had to run through six levels, so it was dangerous. Runecrafting pouches were also released on that day and they could initially be obtained only by killing monsters in the Abyss because the Runecrafting Guild had not been released yet. The pouches would eventually make Runecrafting a lot faster, although the massive pouch did not exist yet. Nature and law rune running became highly popular methods of training the skill. Rune running worked like this: people would take rune essence to altar. High- level runecrafters would be waiting there to accept the rune essence and they would 212 give the correct amount of runes to the other player in return for it. So rune running was a moneymaking method for the runner, but that player would not get any xp whatsoever (while the runecrafter would only get xp and no profit). However, you could also choose the craft the runes yourself and then you would earn a bit of money too. This was, of course, much better than just running without the xp, so rune runners who traded at the altar were always players who either did not have the level to craft the rune yet, or who did not have a sufficiently high level for the multiplier (at higher levels you receive more runes for each used essence). Crafting nature or death runes via the Abyss provided around 20k Runecrafting xp per hour. That seems slow, but they were the fastest Runecrafting methods in RuneScape at that time. In April 2006 Jagex added a new type of craftable essence to the game, called pure essence. The main reason for this was that bots had been taking over the essence mines. Mining rune essence was an extremely popular way of making money for low-level players. People who had level 30 Mining or Runecrafting and were in the possession of rune essence would see that their rune essence had been changed into pure essence as a result of the update. Furthermore, people with 30+ Mining would henceforth automatically mine pure essence instead of rune essence. The idea behind this update was that the normal rune essence would be cheaper than pure essence and then people who got banned for botting would receive less profit when mining essence on a new account. This also meant that runes had to be connected to a certain type of essence. Jagex chose to make all elemental runes craftable with both rune and pure essence, and all other runes would craftable only by using pure essence. On 14th July 2006 Jagex released the Lunar Diplomacy quest. The main reward from this quest is access to the Lunar spellbook. Another reward is the ability to craft astral runes. In 2010 when the price of nature runes had dropped to an all-time low, astral runecrafting became a good alternative. The astral altar is the only altar with a second function. Not only is it used to craft astral runes, but it is also used to switch your spellbook to the Lunar one.

On 18th September 2007 the Runecrafting ZMI altar was released. This unique altar crafts all types of runes at the same time. You receive a random amount of high- or low-level runes, depending on your Runecrafting level. People with a higher Runecrafting level receive more xp per hour than people with a lower level. A decent Defence level for this altar is necessary because the altar is protected by followers of Zamorak. The ZMI altar at that time was easily accessible because the Lunar spellbook had already been released, which contains a spell that teleports you to just outside the altar. ZMI runecrafting became the fastest runecrafting method in RuneScape; it initially gave around 45k xp per hour at a high level. The release of Summoning in January 2008 and the release of its second batch a few months later, introduced several familiars to the game that are helpful for Runecrafting. These familiars are the abyssal parasite and abyssal lurker. Both familiars are able to carry a certain amount of essence. This made almost all runecrafting methods slightly faster at that time. For ZMI runecrafting this meant that you could gain 45k-50k xp per hour starting from that moment and onwards. Later on this increased to over 60k xp per hour due to several game engine updates and other technical tweaks. ZMI stands for Zamorak Magical Institute. The spirit graahk was another useful Summoning familiar for Runecrafting that was released on the same day as the other two familiars. This graahk can teleport you to a place that is relatively close to the nature altar. As soon as the community had found out about this, a new runecrafting method was born. Crafting nature runes became almost two times faster, offering xp rates of up to around 30k xp per hour. However, Runecrafting in free-to-play remained slow (at around 8k xp per hour for crafting fire runes).

In April 2008 a new Runecrafting method was added the game. The release of the Legacy of Seergaze quest had as reward the ability to craft blood runes. Also the blood altar was made accessible through the Abyss and people started to use it as an alternative for crafting nature runes. In May 2008 the law talisman became tradeable. Initially you could obtain a law talisman only as a reward from the Troll Stronghold quest. The reason for this change was probably because the quest requires combat, which might have been perceived as being unfair to low-level skillers who do not 213 have the intention to train combat, let alone get a good level in it. Those players had been unable to craft law runes. Players who had already completed the Troll Stronghold quest received two experience lamps as compensation. Each of these lamps would offer 10k xp in a skill of choice. On 12th August 2008 Runecrafting got its own Runecrafting Guild. The most important news about this was that Runecrafting pouches can be bought there. This means that you no longer had to kill monsters in the Abyss if you had lost your pouches. Strangely enough, the Runecrafting skillcape seller remained Aubury in the runes shop of Varrock. In 2011 Jagex added a new NPC to the Runecrafting guild, called Larriar. She also sells Runecrafting skillcapes and she was named after the famous runecrafter Larryr. The Great Orb Project was a new minigame that can be accessed in the Runecrafting guild as well.

In September 2009 Jagex moved the air altar from Falador to Varrock, but this would not negatively affect Runecrafting because Jagex had ensured that the distance from the altar to the bank was exactly the same. A reason for this change was not mentioned, but it seems like that it was done to make the altar more easily accessible, considering that the Grand Exchange is located near it now. The old location used to be where you can now find the Clan Camp. On 17th November 2009 a big update was made to the Runecrafting skill. Runecrafters received a chance of crafting more runes than they could normally make at their Runecrafting level. This update affected all runes up to and including nature runes. Nature rune runecrafting therefore became more profitable because you would now have a chance of crafting two nature runes between the levels 44-91. On 1st February 2010 Jagex extended this and incorporated the blood, death and law runes. The main reason for these updates was to make the skill more popular and more attractive to train. But that apparently did not suffice. A Runecrafting revolution took place on 30th April 2012. Jagex changed the entire concept of Runecrafting by releasing a method that would turn out to be more or less AFK and up to 2.5 times faster than ZMI runecrafting. Runespan was released on that 30th April and that was a clear indication that Jagex wanted to get rid of grinding in RuneScape. Runespan itself functions like a minigame in which you can earn points. You will also get Runecrafting xp in the process of it and xp rates depend on the method that you use. Provided that you possessed the knowledge to obtain the highest xp rates, you could initially gain up to 130k xp per hour. The problem was that this xp rate was achievable even when you were more or less AFK. That is why Jagex nerfed the method in August of the same year so that you would get high xp rates only if you were active. The maximum xp rate was reduced to around 80-90k xp per hour because of this change.

By late 2014 Jagex noticed that runes had lost a lot of their value. Runecrafting was still a profitable method and actually content-wise also the main moneymaker for players who did only the non- combat activities, but the difference between combat and non-combat in terms of money acquisition speed had become enormous. Whereas several combat methods could offer up to 5m gp profit per hour on average, skillers were left behind with traditional runecrafting offering around 1m gp profit per hour. In September of 2014 Jagex tried to make runes more valuable. They did not specifically mention why, but it seems logical that the factor mentioned above played a significant role in this. Another possible reason is that Jagex knew that too many runes had been entering the game while 214 too few had been leaving. This might explain why their goal was to have runes being slowly taken away from the game every single week, as mentioned in the Podcast for this update. Jagex applied two specific strategies in their attempt to make runes more valuable: the first strategy was to release a D&D for which the players needed to use runes, which would then be removed from the game by the D&D. The second strategy was to remove various types of runes from the drop tables of many monsters in RuneScape. A total of 72 monsters either had their drop rates of runes significantly reduced or completely removed as part of that update.

The release of the D&D and the drop table changes were not the only Runecrafting-related updates of that day. Presumably to make traditional runecrafting (= altar running) more attractive, Jagex also increased the amount of essence that a runecrafting Beast of Burden can carry and they life span was increased. Additionally, manually emptying Beasts of Burden or pouches for Runecrafting became a thing of the past on that day because clicking on the altar would now automatically turn all essence into runes, including the essence stored in your pouches and/or familiar. Altogether this reduced the duration of a runecrafting lap, and therefore slightly increased the xp rates. I did not test or check for new xp rates, but I would assume that the additional xp is not higher than 2k xp per hour, depending on the method. Runecrafting is one of the skills that has undergone some major changes since its release. Initially it used to be slower than 8k xp per hour. The odd thing is that almost all updates concerning Runecrafting were for members only. This caused Runecrafting to become ten times faster than it initially was, with xp gains of over 130k xp per hour in the P2P world in 2012. In free-to-play, on the other hand, the maximum xp per hour was never improved.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Runecrafting skill 29th March 2004 Law altar 24th August 2004 Abyss 13th June 2005 Runecrafting pouches 13th June 2005 Runecrafting tiaras 13th June 2005 Combination runes 13th June 2005 Pure essence 20th April 2006 Astral altar 14th July 2006 ZMI altar 18th September 2007 Spirit graahk runecrafting 31st March 2008 Blood altar 22nd April 2008 Runecrafting Guild 12th August 2008 Runespan 30th April 2012 Rune Goldberg Machine D&D 15th September 2014

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Smithing is one of the skills in RuneScape that were already present from the very start of the game. To train Smithing you need ores or bars. These items were extremely difficult to obtain in RS1 and it was advised that you either mined all the rocks yourself or that you collaborated with a miner who would sell ores to you. Initially there were only three furnaces in RuneScape: they could be found in Al-Kharid, Lumbridge and Falador (and they are still at the same location). Iron ore is the only type of ore that has a failure rate of 50% for Smithing, and we have beta tester Rab to thank for that. Anvils used to be located a bit farther away from banks than they are now. There were four anvils in RuneScape. These could be found at Doric’s place north Falador, at Thurgo’s hut at Mudskipper Point, in West-Varrock and in the Wilderness. Goldsmith gauntlets were released in April 2002, but they gave only 33.5 xp when worn and when smelting gold bars. Popular smithing methods in RS1 included making steel platebodies or, if you were lucky enough to obtain runite ores, making runite bars which you could afterwards give or sell to top smiths to help them.

Just like today, Smithing was a buyable skill that was expensive if you wanted fast xp, but there were players who used certain tricks to buy their items cheaper or to sell them at a higher price. Some people discovered that shops would sell their items for a higher price if those items were low in stock and vice versa. The same counts for when you wanted to sell your items there. Selling items to the shop increased the shop’s stock, which means that the shopkeeper would automatically start buying them at a price that gradually became lower and lower (without warning you). Those players also discovered that the general store would always ask 25% more than actual price in smithing shops. Many smiths used to sell their end product in small amounts so that they would get more money in return than if they sold all at once. Not many smithing updates were mentioned on the RuneScape pages and that makes it difficult to go into detail about the development. The release of cannonballs in 2003 introduced a new smithing method to the game for a lot of players. Later on this method became profitable, but it was quite slow. In 2005 these cannonballs were given an x- option to speed up the smithing process. Later in the same year, Jagex released the Blast Furnace minigame. Especially players who did not have money for regular smithing tended to give this minigame a try.

On 10th September 2007 Jagex released the Varrock Achievement diary. One of the rewards from this diary is the ability to make use of the furnace in Edgeville. That furnace was placed close to a bank, causing the Smithing skill to become faster. Smithing gold ore with the goldsmith gauntlets would now give around 60k Smithing xp per hour. The release of Living Rock Cavern in September 2009 had quite an impact on the Smithing skill as well. As soon as people discovered that activities like alchemy and superheating did not interrupt Mining, a lot of efficient players started to superheat while mining there. This method gives a nice amount of xp in both Mining and Smithing xp at the same time and for many that was a great replacement for smithing in Edgeville. Clever people later discovered that superheating was also possible while doing other activities than just mining, such as superheating while smelting gold at the furnace in Edgeville. This would make regular gold smithing around 1.5 times faster. On 8th March 2011 the Artisan's Workshop was added to RuneScape. This update provided a new Smithing method that would eventually turn out 216 to be quite useless for high-level smiths. Low-level smiths, on the other hand, were given a new alternative to making cannonballs or smithing expensive gear. Speaking of expensive gear, throughout the history of RuneScape, smithing adamant platebodies has always been popular way for rich players to get their levels up. This method offers xp rates of 240k xp per hour.

The corrupted ore released as part of the Elf City update in September of 2014 can be obtained from the Seren stone, as already discussed in the Mining section. This is new type of ore that can be converted into xp if a player meets the requirement of level 89 in the Smithing skill. However, and this is unique about the corrupted ore, no items are obtained from doing so, despite Smithing being one of the item-production skills. On the other hand, corrupted ore is not a tradeable and is obtained from mining, which means that this method is a free training method, and a good one because it offers xp rates of around 250k xp per hour.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Smithing skill 4th January 2001 Goldsmith gauntlets 9th April 2002 Cannonball smithing 27th May 2003 Edgeville furnace 10th September 2007 Artisan’s workshop 8th March 2011 Corrupted ore 22nd September 2014

The Thieving skill was released on 30th April 2002 and it was extremely primitive in RS1. Thieving methods like Blackjacking or Pyramid Plunder did not exist yet. The positive sides of the skill were that you did not have to spend money on it and that it was profitable, but other than that... the skill was extremely click-intensive. The only Thieving methods available in RS1 were pickpocketing, picking locks, disarming traps, and stealing from market stalls. The most popular ways of training the skill consisted of pickpocketing warriors (till level 40), pickpocketing guards (till level 70) and pickpocketing paladins (till level 99). Xp rates were at around 60k xp per hour for pickpocketing guards at a high Thieving level. Of course it was also possible that your pickpocket attempt failed and then a guard, hero (NPC), or paladin would start attacking you. The success rate of pickpocketing a warrior at Thieving level 60 was around 50%. Please also keep in mind that once you were under attack, you needed to attack three times before you could escape because RS1's combat had at its core a three-round system which obligated you to attack three times before you could run away. The only change that happened to Thieving during the transition from RS1 to RS2 was that a new Thieving failure system was added to the skill. As the three-round combat system had been removed from the game, it would become too easy to run away from your victim if you had been caught pickpocketing. To replace this three-round method, players would get stunned and take a small amount of damage instead of being forced into using combat. 217

It has never been mentioned in any of the RuneScape updates, but it is probable that a new Thieving method, called blackjacking, was released on the same day as Pollnivneach. This happened on 4th April 2005. Initially no one used this method because it is extremely click-intensive and also because only a few players had tested it. It took a long time before someone started to seriously test this method and to their own surprise, those players were able to attain high Thieving xp rates (after a lot of practicing that was, because that method is difficult to master). The first xp rates indicated that you could gain around 200k Thieving xp per hour at a high Thieving level. Later on this xp rate increased to 280k xp per hour with the help of mousekeys and several other technical updates. Thieving had been slow for almost three years, until the release of that revolutionary method. On 17th July 2006 Jagex added the Pyramid Plunder minigame to RuneScape. This minigame would eventually become the most popular Thieving method in RuneScape. It is similar to stealing from stalls, but in the minigame you have to steal from urns in the Pyramid of Sophanem instead. Players knew that they had a chance of looting the expensive Pharaoh Sceptre with a bit of luck, which made this thieving method even more popular. Provided that you are able to loot every urn in the last two rooms of the pyramid (which was possible at a high level), you can gain around 260k Thieving xp per hour. A player is more likely to achieve this xp rate, or even slightly higher, when teaming up with one or more other players. Nevertheless, blackjacking remained the fastest Thieving method, but it was a lot harder to maintain high xp rates by using the blackjacking method. Often people would think that Pyramid Plunder was the fastest methods, even after testing both methods, while in reality they had just not properly mastered the blackjacking method.

The Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf quest introduced a new high-level thieving method on 9th September 2009. People with a Thieving level of at least 90 can travel to Keldagrim to pickpocket the dwarf traders. This works similarly to how pickpocketing elsewhere outside of Prifddinas works, although the failure rate is extremely high without the use of items that either boost your Thieving level or reduce the failure rate. In order to achieve an xp rate of over 250k xp per hour, a player usually needs an active five-finger discount aura, gloves of silence and the Ardougne cloak. This xp rate is slightly lower in comparison with some of the other Thieving methods that already existed at that time (Pyramid Plunder minigame and blackjacking Menaphite thugs), but an update in August 2014 changed that when the new Plague's End quest was released. One of its rewards is the Trahaearn exoskeleton set, which reduces the chances of getting stunned and taking damage by 25% while pickpocketing. A similar effect also applies to the Pyramid Plunder minigame, which means that both of the methods allow higher xp rates (than the ones mentioned so far) while wearing the exoskeleton set. And not just a little bit higher. Several players have reported xp gains of over 400k Thieving xp per hour in Keldagrim while wearing the exoskeleton set. However, this xp rate likely includes the use of several items or boosts that are not included in the xp rates that I have mentioned above.

On 28th April 2010 Jagex released the Thieving guild. At first people found out that you could gain over 400k Thieving xp per hour there. Jagex had clearly not intended to bring such a high xp rate into the game, so later on they nerfed it to under 200k xp per hour. On 1st December 2010 the release of the Do No Evil quest brought a new blackjacking-like Thieving method into RuneScape. At Ape Atoll to be more precise. In a building west of the temple at Ape Atoll, you can steal from ninja monkeys and doing so is actually identical to how blackjacking works. The xp rate is around 280k-300k xp per hour, but it is hard to keep up a high speed for a long time. The Black Ibis outfit was released on 23rd August 2011. This outfit, which consists of four pieces, can be obtained during the Pyramid Plunder minigame while stealing from the urns, and the full set provides a Thieving xp boost of +5%. However, that boost does not work within the pyramid itself. The sceptre of the gods was released on the same day as part of the update as well. This sceptre can be looted from a new sarcophagus in the last room. It functions like a pharaoh's sceptre, but it has ten teleport charges instead of three. Furthermore, wielding that sceptre whilst plundering the pyramid will increase 218 your chances of looting a piece of the Black Ibis outfit from the urns and a total of four new urns will be added to the last two rooms. This slightly increases the xp rate. The Flash Powder Factory was released on 11th December 2011 and it replaced the old Rogues' Den. The new minigame itself rewards you with tokens which can be exchanged for Thieving xp. However, playing the minigame is really not worthwhile if you are just doing it for the Thieving xp, even with the increase in xp rate of 43% that happened in October 2014.

Just when we thought that the Pyramid Plunder method was going to stay the most popular training method, no matter what other content would added to the game, Jagex released the Elf City with a new high-level thieving method that would outclass Pyramid Plunder on every level. First of all, the new method was unique because it consisted of a revolutionized pickpocketing system. No longer would a player have to click after each successful attempt at pickpocketing, but a player’s character would automatically keep on pickpocketing. Meanwhile, the other NPCs in Gielinor whom can be pickpocketed were left behind with the old click-intensive version of the activity. Perhaps Jagex will update this one day. Initially pickpocketing in Prifddinas generated more than 450k Thieving xp per hour (without using boosts), but that was nerfed after a few months so that the eventual xp rate would be around 300k xp per hour, without boosts.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Thieving skill 30th April 2002 Menaphite thugs blackjacking thieving 4th April 2005 Pyramid Plunder minigame 17th July 2006 Dwarf traders 9th September 2009 Thieving Guild 28th April 2010 Monkey knife fighters thieving 1st December 2010 Black Ibis outfit 23rd August 2011 Flash Powder Factory 11th December 2011 Trahaearn Exoskeleton outfit 11th August 2014 Elf City thieving 22nd September 2014

Woodcutting was released on the same day as RuneScape, so that is on 4th January 2001. You could only chop normal trees until the release of Fletching on 25th March 2002. A quite remarkable thing is that there were no level requirements for wielding hatchets, which used to be called axes at first until mid-RS2. The reason for the name change from axes to hatchets was probably to create a clear(er) distinction between the Mining and Woodcutting axes. Unlike in the RuneScape version of today, in RS1 you could also fail to cut a tree. If that happened a message appeared and you would have to click on the tree again. Just like Firemaking, there was a formula to calculate the xp that you would gain from cutting trees and it also depended on your Woodcutting level. This formula was 28.25 + your level * 1.75. At level 90, this would give 28.25 + 90 * 1.75 = 185.75 xp for cutting a normal tree. That may seem a lot, but keep in mind that the Woodcutting system was much slower than it is now. Later on in RS1, after the release of Fletching, all of this was changed. The formula was removed, more types of trees were added to RuneScape’s landscape and every tree was assigned a unique fixed amount of xp so that Woodcutting would become like it is today. Rune hatchets were the best hatchets at that time and they already had the same stats as they do today.. The most popular training method in RS1 was cutting willows in Draynor Village. On 6th June 2005, a new feature was added to the Woodcutting skill as people were given a chance of receiving a bird's nest whilst cutting a tree. This nest would always contain a seed and the update was meant as preparation for the release of the Farming skill. Later Jagex also added rings to bird's nests.

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Quick flash-forward to 2008: god eggs were added to this list of possible nest loot as a result of the release of Summoning. In August 2005 a big Woodcutting update took place. The addition of the Tai Bwo Wannai Clean-up minigame added a small fenced-off area with teaks and other trees to the game. This place became a popular place to train Woodcutting at because these teak trees would provide a higher xp per hour rate than other trees did. The new teak trees would offer xp rates of over 75k xp per hour. Rune hatchets were still the best hatchets of the game at that time.

On 7th November 2005, Jagex released a new type of hatchet. This new type of hatchet is called the dragon hatchet and it became the new best hatchet in game, 5% to 10% faster than rune hatchets. On 31st May 2006 Jagex added teak and mahogany trees to Ape Atoll, the Khazari Jungle, Uzer and to the area south of Castle Wars. As the dragon hatchet had already been released, new xp rates at teaks were around 80k xp per hour, but that could be increased to over 90k xp per hour by combining it with multitasking methods, such as alchemy.

On 15th August 2006 the release of the quest The Eyes of Glouphrie indirectly added a new woodcutting method to the game. One of the rewards is the crystal saw, which doubles all xp gained from completing a task at the sawmill (Lumber Yard northeast of Varrock). Note that the sawmill had been added to Gielinor in the summer of 2003, but completing tasks for Woodcutting xp was never really worth it without the doubled xp rate. At the Sawmill you have to make planks for which you receive Woodcutting xp. For high-level woodcutters this meant that a new fast woodcutting method was born. Various tests showed that the method would give around 95k-100k Woodcutting xp per hour at level 99. In March 2007 Jagex's new game engine made it possible to drag items in your inventory without interrupting Woodcutting. This did not have a great affect, but it made the Woodcutting experience more convenient. We have to wait more than two years for our next woodcutting update, but it is definitely worth the wait. The skill was rebalanced on 23rd September 2009. The less popular trees were given more xp to change the xp rates. On the same day a new type of plant was released as well. The new ivy could be found all over RuneScape on many walls. At that time it was the only type woodcutting flora that did not fill up your inventory, which means that Woodcutting was turned into an AFK'able skill on that day. The skill has been extremely popular ever since, yet some people found it unfortunate that Jagex had made it completely AFK. Xp rates at 99 could exceed 85k xp per hour.

The release of Dungeoneering in April 2010 was initially not that special for Woodcutting. High- level trees, such as gravecreeper and entgallow trees, could already be found in the dungeons, but those were not worth spending your time on. On 15th March 2011, however, an update made Woodcutting in Daemonheim much faster and that is the moment when things started to become interesting. This is also when fishing in Daemonheim became the fastest fishing method in-game, but that did not count for Woodcutting, though. The xp rates for chopping gravecreeper and entgallow trees remained slower than using the sawmill or than using teak and arctic pine to level up. I am not quite sure how good it was, but I would estimate that training Woodcutting in Daemonheim floors must have been around 65k-75k xp per hour back then. The Jadinko Lair underneath the Herblore Habitat area was released on 12th July 2011. This update was of great importance to Farming and Firemaking, and also to Slayer to a certain extent. Lighting curly roots became one of the fastest firemaking methods of the game and the only way to obtain them was by 220 cutting the jade vines hanging from the roof of the lair. On top of the 300k Firemaking xp, this was good for another 30k Woodcutting xp per hour. Now back to Dungeoneering, on 11th April 2012 the skill was tweaked and the entire skill generally became easier and more convenient to train. That also counted for anything else that you could train while completing floors, resulting in both Fishing and Woodcutting becoming faster. This is the day when woodcutting in Daemonheim floors became one of the fastest Woodcutting methods of the game. Xp rates increased to 110k xp per hour on average. There was only one method that did better, but that one was an extremely click- intensive one that was difficult to master: splitting arctic pine logs while using Woodcutting urns. First of all, these urns had been released in February 2011 and they give bonus xp while training the skill. Splitting arctic pines consists of chopping arctic pines on Neitiznot and immediately splitting them by using the tree chunks next to the arctic pines. Xp rates of this method could go up to 130k xp per hour, bit it is so intensive that expecting that you can do this for hours is surreal. That is why the Dungeoneering woodcutting method was generally accepted as the fastest woodcutting method of the game. It is definitely more efficient because you also gain combat xp in the process for virtually no effort and it can be combined with training Fishing in complexity 2.

Also early in 2012, the high-level bloodwood tree was added to the Wilderness in RuneScape. This tree has a Woodcutting requirement of level 85 and produces logs that cannot be taken away too far from the tree (or the logs will be destroyed by game mechanics). This type of tree was actually part of a combination update consisting of Fletching and Woodcutting content, and as a player you are supposed to immediately fletch the logs as you obtain them at the tree. These logs could be fletched to create the new bakriminel bolts that we have already discussed in the Fletching section. Bloodwood trees are not suitable for training Woodcutting, though. This is because the trees take around six hours to regrow. Luckily Jagex released two other high-level trees in October of 2013 and these two do offer great rewards. Requiring level 90 Woodcutting, the new elder tree can be cut at ten locations in the game, but it does not offer high xp rates. With an xp rate of only 30k-40k xp per hour, there are much better alternatives, as discussed above. However, the elder logs are relatively expensive, which makes training Woodcutting at elder trees a good moneymaker for players who do not have the skill levels for other high-level moneymaking methods.

The second new type of tree that was released is the crystal tree. It requires a Woodcutting level of 94, but unlike the elder tree, it does offer a good xp rate. At around 100k xp per hour, cutting crystal trees is better than most other popular Woodcutting methods. Whereas elder trees are good for money and bad for xp, the reverse is true for crystal trees because no logs whatsoever are given to the player. In other words, crystal trees are similar to ivy, but there are two important differences: first of all, the crystal tree offers a much higher xp rate. Secondly, whereas ivy regularly produces bird nests, crystal trees produce crystal geodes. It is important that I mentioned this because meanwhile a so-called tree-shaking scrimshaw had been added to the rewards in Player- Owned Ports (a high-level D&D). These scrimshaws, when activated, increase the drop rate of bird nests and crystal geodes by up to 400%. For crystal trees this means that a player would receive around 25 crystal geodes per hour. In addition to that, an activated scrimshaw also produces around 30 implings per hour, including the high-level dragon impling and kingly impling (although these two are rare). Crystal geodes, on the other hand, contain uncut gems, but might occasionally also 221 reward the player with one of the tree triskelion fragments, which can be used to unlock a greater and valuable reward in a rock southeast of Rellekka. In other words, crystal trees can be a moneymaker if you use tree-shaking scrimshaws that you made yourself in the Player-Owned Ports D&D (it also possible to buy the scrimshaw in the Grand Exchange, but then the cost and profits might result in a break-even or in low profit rates). Crystal trees are therefore an excellent way of training Woodcutting and would probably rank second in terms of efficiency, behind the Dungeoneering methods of using entgallow and gravecreeper trees. Just like Elf City added the crystal pickaxe to the Mining skill, so did it add the crystal hatchet to the Woodcutting skill. Also this time the crystal type is 15% faster than dragon type, adding about 10k xp to most of the training methods that I have mentioned in the Woodcutting section.

SKILL SUMMARY New content Release date Woodcutting skill 4th January 2001 Fixed xp per tree type 25 March 2002 Oak tree 25 March 2002 Maple tree 25 March 2002 Yew tree 25 March 2002 Magic tree 25 March 2002 Sawmill 28th July 2003 Bird’s nests 6th June 2005 Mahogany tree 9th August 2005 Teak tree 9th August 2005 Dragon hatchet 7th November 2005 Crystal saw 15th August 2006 Arctic pine tree 6th February 2007 Ivy 23rd September 2009 Dungeoneering woodcutting boosted 15th March 2011 Jadinko Lair 12th July 2011 Bloodwood tree 20th March 2012 Elder tree 8th October 2013 Crystal tree and geodes 8th October 2013 Crystal hatchet 10th November 2014

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7

Quests

200 quests have been released since 2001 and some of them introduced faster and easier skilling methods, new areas, new equipment and much more. Quests already existed in RS1 and over the course of the years many of them have had an impact on the game or on the gameplay experience. In this chapter I will attempt to describe in chronological order how a quest influenced the game or the community, or led to changes in gameplay preferences. This way we can find out in a structured manner how some quests have contributed to the development of the skills and the game itself. For each quest I have looked up if or how it could have made the game easier, and if or how it contributed to the development and popularization of new skilling methods and areas in Gielinor. We currently know the quest system as one that gives a player quest points and other rewards after completing a quest. In the early stages of RS1, however, this system was different. It did not consist of quest points, but of influence. Completing quests would cause the NPCs in Gielinor to respect and trust a player more easily. It is essentially the same as it is today, but today it is just not called influence anymore. For example, when a player completes the quest Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf, he or she will be granted access to the Chaos Dwarves' Battlefield. Without completing this quest, that player would never be allowed to access this area. In other words, completing the quest increases the influence that a player has on the NPC that is responsible for the area or other content that is unlocked upon completion of the quests. RuneScape counted six quests when the game was released on 4th January 2001. These quests were Cook's Assistant, Demon Slayer, Romeo and Juliet, Shield of Arrav, Sheep Shearer and The Restless Ghost. In the Behind The Scenes article of March 2006 it is written that their first ever quest was Cook's Assistant.

We might be able to discover how large the world of RuneScape initially was and how it gradually expanded if we purely look at which locations are visited in the quest. Cook's Assistant is about discovering the local products of Lumbridge. Our next quest, Demon Slayer, takes place in quite some more areas. Varrock, Draynor Village, Wizards’ Tower are the locations that are visited during the quest. The main setting of the Romeo and Juliet quest was Varrock as well. Sheep Shearer brings a player back to Lumbridge and the Restless Ghost leads to community to a new area, called the Lumbridge Swamps. The Shield of Arrav quest uses the same locations. Those are the locations that are linked to the first six quests. Now open your world map and situate those areas on the map. Then take a closer look at everything to the west of the areas mentioned above. As you should notice, you can draw one vertical line from Draynor Village (a bit west of that) to Edgeville to make a perfect separation on the world map. So does that mean that we can assume that the areas Falador,

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Rimmington, Port Sarim, Goblin Village, Ice Mountain and Al-Kharid did not exist yet when the game was released (I am looking only at the F2P areas now)? And that therefore every area at the other side of those locations did not exist either? Jagex generally links each (new) area to at least one quest when it is released, so that players have an incentive to visit that area. This is why it would be okay if you were inclined to answer those two questions above in the affirmative. It is possible that you knew the answer just because you have already read the chapter about the development of Gielinor, but without taking that knowledge into account for a moment, it still leads to some questions. For instance, what about Al-Kharid? Because there is a clear seperation between Al-Kharid and Lumbridge. I will just give this one away: no, it did not exist yet. And that also counts for the aforementioned locations. So our assumption that any other area did not exist yet was correct. In other words, we could look at the content of quests to determine which areas were there yet and which ones were not, at least, to a certain extent. However, that is definitely not a foolproof methodology because we cannot know if an area in between of two cities, for example, was added to the game when the first city or when the second city was released. So we have to be careful with this. Nevertheless, using this method still gives us a general idea of where the world map ended. That makes it possible for us to find out if new quests expanded the world map or not. Now the only point that I am trying to make here is that quests contain many clues about the game itself, not only can they help us to find out when certain locations were added to the game, the absence or presence of certain quests can contain indications about game content that may or may not have existed at any point in the past. In this chapter I will try to deduce from quest release dates what the world map looked like at any moment and how these quests affected the community’s preferences of training. This is essentially a brief combination of the chapters about the development of the Gielinor and about the evolution of the skills, but with a more fun or entertaining approach. I will make mention only of the quests that had noteworthy contributions to the gameplay experience. The others will be skipped because otherwise the text would be probably be too long-winded. However, for the first few years you will notice that I also list several insignificant quests, this is purely for the sake of nostalgia. I have already had a look at the first six quests, so below I will proceed with the seventh.

Ernest the Chicken was released on 21st January 2001. This quest's setting is Draynor Manor. Prior to the release of this quest, Draynor Village did not exist yet, so both locations were added to the map on that day. This, of course, is logical because the manor cannot exist without the presence of the village. Based on this information we can assume that willow trees in Draynor Village, a popular place for training Woodcutting, did not exist in the first weeks. However, that does not really matter because the only type of tree that a player could chop was normal trees until early 2002.

Prince Ali Rescue was released on 28th February 2001 and it introduced the community to a new desert region, called Al-Kharid. If you are someone who started playing the game in the last few years, you might not recognize the name of this quest. Prince Ali Rescue was removed on 26th September 2012 when the city of Al-Kharid received a big update. Until that day every player had to complete the Prince Ali Rescue quest if they wanted to enter Al-Kharid without paying a fee of 224

10gp. This was a problem for new players, who were not keen on spending their money. This is probably the reason why the payment requirement was removed during the Al-Kharid update of 2012. In the early days of the game the economy was slow and every player assigned a higher psychological value to coins than they do today. 10gp may not seem much, but when the game is severely limited in its features and moneymaking methods (I am referring to RS1 now), the last thing a player wants is to spend money on something that they may not really need, especially given that each player starts the game with 0gp.

On 6th April 2001 four new quests were released. In other words, that 6th of April seemed like a big day in the history of the game. Perhaps a couple of new areas were released? The first quest is Black Knight's Fortress, open your world map and look up where it is. As you can see, this is to the west of Edgeville. The quest also takes us to Falador. Earlier I confirmed that Falador did not exist yet, so the release of this quest can be used as a strong indication that the city of Falador was released on 6th April, which is indeed when it was added to the game. Our next of the four quests is Doric's quest. Doric is situated to the north of Falador. In Doric's quest, the players are supposed to visit the Dwarven Mines, another area that must have been added on that day, considering that those mines are situated beneath the Ice Mountain, an area which had not been covered yet on the world map. As for training methods, after the completion of the quest, the players were allowed to use Doric's Anvil. Ideal for Smithing. The only other anvil close to a bank at that time was the West Varrock one. The new Dwarven Mines dungeon ended up becoming a popular place to train Mining, especially for coal and iron ore. Also Doric’s quest does not exist anymore. It was replaced in October 2012 by the quest What’s Mine is Yours. This replacement happened because Doric’s quest was initially meant to be an introduction to the Mining and Smithing skills, but by 2012 its content had become out of date. The third quest released on 6th April was The Knight's Sword, which takes the players to a more exotic area on the map: Port Sarim and Mudskipper point, where they have to enter the Mudskipper dungeon. This location became a high-level combat training area. That might make you frown because today we know that its ice warriors are not strong at all, but at that time adamant armour was the best type of armour that existed and many players had a low combat level. That is not only because the game had just been released, but also because all of the skills were much slower to train than they are now. The last of the four quests is Witch's Potion. This quests took place in Rimmington and Port Sarim, but had no influence on the gameplay. Also that quest no longer exists today, though. It was removed in 2010 because it no longer lived up to the standards of other quests, according to the official update announcement.

Goblin Diplomacy was released on 8th May 2001 and this quest takes us to an area to which we have not been before. This new area is the Goblin Village, north of Doric's house. Whether the Goblin Village was already there or not is not known. The same counts for the many goblins that suddenly appeared in RuneScape, were they already there or not? They most likely were not, but their existence at that time created a nice combat training spot for low-level players. A fighting spot that would often be used by new players, even to this day.

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Pirate's Treasure was released on 11th June 2001 and it introduced the community to the first island of RuneScape: Musa Point. Looking at the clear separation between Karamja and Brimhaven, we can say that Brimhaven most likely did not exist yet, and that indeed was the case, so what we call Karamja today was relatively small at first. Musa Point was part of a bigger update to promote the Fishing skill, which had been released on the same day. Musa Point’s northern pier eventually became an extremely popular location for training Fishing, more specifically for catching lobster. There has never been a bank on Musa Point, so taking the items to a bank was not a pleasant task because of how long it usually took, keep in mind that players could not run yet. Amulets of glory did not exist at that time, so there was no teleport option to the banana plantation. This is why Cooking was most often trained at the same time as well, after the players had filled their inventory. However, this required that at least one person there had brought a Woodcutting axe and a tinderbox, which led to hilarious moments when eventually some players would start shouting for an axe and tinderbox because no one there had brought one. This predicament could have been easily avoided simply by bringing the required items, but for some reason this weird tradition continued to exist for as long as Musa Point was a popular location for training Fishing.

Dragon Slayer was released on 23rd September 2001, which was considered to be a very hard quest at that time because of the limitations in combat equipment. At that moment the quest forced the player to visit most of the existing locations on the non-wilderness world map. This quest can be started by going to the Champions’ Guild, which had been released in February. As part of the quest, a player is asked to visit Melzar's maze. This maze, located northwest of Rimmington, is a quest-only area, which means that it was added on the same day as the Dragon Slayer quest. At a later stage in the quest, the player is also taken to a new island, called Crandor, which became the second island of RuneScape. As the new rune armour was released on the same day and required completion of the quest in order to wear it, it meant that each player had to fight Elvarg in adamant armour. The new dungeon from Crandor to Karamja had clearly been added on this day as well because its structure was in function of the Dragon Slayer quest. Ever since that day high-level fighters could risk their lives in this very dangerous dungeon. This quest immediately was the last non-members quest to ever be released until 2008.

The option to become a (paying) member was released on 27th February 2002. Five new quests were added on that day. Our first of these five quests is Druidic Ritual. This former members-only quest can today also be played by free players after an update of January 2012. Completion of this quest has always been the requirement for access to the Herblore skill, a quest which takes place in one of the first members-only areas, Taverley. Our next of the five quests is Heroes' Quest, which can be started by talking to Achiettes next to the Heroes' Guild. During the quest the players are asked to kill the Ice Queen in the dungeons that can be accessed only via the White Wolf Mountain, meaning that these areas were added on the same day as well, just like the new island of Entrana, RuneScape’s third island. The main reward for completing the Heroes’ Quest is access to the Heroes' Guild, where the dragon battleaxe can be bought, a weapon which initially did not exist. At that time the rune 2h sword was the strongest and most popular weapon available. The power bonus of the dragon battleaxe caused the weapon to become a worthy competitor for the rune 2h sword. One of the tasks in the quest is to catch lava eel, a type of fish that the players were supposed to catch in the new Taverley dungeon. This colossal dungeon was a big addition to the game because of its content. Containing blue dragons, black demons and the highly popular hill giants, it is easy to imagine that many new members immediately ventured into this new dungeon. Also present in the dungeon are the druids. These low-level NPCs became a hot spot because of the frequent rate at which herbs are dropped and the lack of better alternatives (Farming had not been released yet). Today there are much more efficient ways to obtain herbs, but for a few years the low-level players, 226 or those who did not possess much money in general, would often kill the druids to obtain herbs.

The third of five quests is Lost City, in which the players are asked to visit Zanaris. This is a members-only area, so it means that Zanaris was added on 27th February as well. The quest’s main reward at that time was the ability to wield new dragon sword (called dragon longsword today). The dragon dagger did not exist in RS1. The only dragon weapons to exist in RS1 were the sword and the (battle)axe. The longsword was given to exact same stats as the rune 2h sword, so eventually this 2-hander, the dragon longsword and the dragon battleaxe would become the strongest weapons to exist in RS1. This means that the Heroes’ Quest and Lost City initially played a pivotal role in the gameplay experience. Our next of five quests is Merlin's Crystal, which can started in the city of Camelot. Considering that also this one is a members-only quest, Camelot as well as the area between Camelot and White Wolf Mountain must have been added to the game on the same day, with the area between those places being Catherby. In Merlin’s Crystal the players are taken to the Keep Le Faye Stronghold, which is located to the south west of Catherby. As you might know from memory, there are many open spaces south west of Catherby and south of Camelot. These spaces did not exist yet, but were added a couple of weeks later. In Merlin’s Crystal, one of my favourite quests, the players are asked to visit the Lady of the Lake. This proves the existence of the small peninsula south east of Taverley, but much more interesting is the reward from the quest, which is the excalibur sword, a popular RS2 item because of its healing special attack. However, these special attacks did not exist yet until June of 2004, so the weapon was quite useless in RS1. Our last of five quests is Witch's House, but nothing significant happens in that quest. A point that I would like to bring up is that the new members-only regions were accessible only by players with a good Defence level. This is because the only way to get to the other side of the White Wolf Mountain was by traversing it. This did create a separation in the community because the lower- level players were essentially stuck in the free- to-play areas of the game. Quite a lot happened on 27th February 2002. Here is a quick list of the areas that were added to the game, as a summary: Taverley and its dungeon, the White Wolf Mountain, Catherby and Camelot. The locations in that general region that did not exist yet at that moment are Burthorpe, McGrubor's Wood and any place to the north and south of there.

Scorpion Catcher was added to the game on 25th March 2002. In the quest the players are sent to someone in the Sorcerer's Tower. This means that this location and the open space between it and Catherby certainly existed at this stage. This quest requires the completion of the Bar Crawl, which is a miniquest in which the players have to visit a variety of bars or pubs in RuneScape, including some at several locations not previously discussed. These areas are The Grand Tree, Ardougne, Yanille and Seers' Village. Therefore, we might be inclined to assume that the Gnome Stronghold and the Tree Gnome Village already existed as well. However, that is not true because Ardougne was released at the end of April. That means that its pub must have been added to the Bar Crawl miniquest afterwards. This miniquest can be started at the Barbarian Outpost. However, the outpost used to be located east of Ardougne at that time, and not north of the Baxtorian Falls, which is where it is located right now. I have not been able to find out why Jagex eventually moved the 227 outpost to a more northern region, but a possible explanation can be as simple as Ardougne having become too overcrowded to be able to support the addition of the Barbarian Agility course upon its release in December of 2002. So far none of the quests has given a good indication of the presence of McGrubor's Wood, the Ranging Guild, the Fishing Guild, the Combat Training Camp, Witchaven and Port Khazard. At the end of the Scorpion Catcher quest, the players are sent to Seers' Village, which had also been released on 25th March. Even though I have mentioned the Barbarian Outpost here, which today hosts two Agility courses, it important to keep in mind that the Agility skill did not exist yet. The reward from the quest is a new powerful type of staff: the Mystic Staff. Battlestaves had been added to the game just a little earlier. Both types of staves became the new strongest Magic weapons at that time.

Family Crest was released on 9th April 2002. This is the first time that we have to go to Witchaven and its dungeon there. Later in this quest, the players are also asked to visit the Edgeville dungeon. We have not visited this dungeon before yet, so it is possible that it was added on this day. The reward from the quest is family gauntlets, which can be turned into Cooking or Smithing gauntlets for easier skilling. These gauntlets were popular skilling items for more than a decade, especially the Smithing one, which some high-level players would use in the Living Rock Cavern after September 2009 to combine Mining with superheating. Tribal Totem was released on 30th April 2002. This quest can be started in Brimhaven, a place that we have not visited before. We might therefore think that Brimhaven was added on that day, but that turns out to be wrong. Brimhaven was added on the same day as the release of the membership option, but none of the first member quests take place on Brimhaven. So even though quests serve as great indicators, they are not perfect to find out whether or not a place or an item already existed. Tribal Totem is also the first quest that required a Thieving level.

Fishing Contest was released on 28th May 2002. In this quest we are sent to McGrubor's Wood, an enclosed area that that was released on the same day. The quest-bound area Hemenster (south of McGrubor's Wood) plays a prominent role in Fishing Content, so it is more than just probable that the fenced-off Hemenster area was added to the game on 28th May too. The main reward from this quest is access to a safe tunnel below the White Wolf Mountain. That might sound great for the low- level players, but it was not possible to reach the Kingdom of Kandarin by boat yet. This means that the players with a low combat level still had to cross the White Wolf Mountain to start the quest. The Monk's Friend quest was added on the same day as Fishing Contest. This is the first time we are sent to the Monastery south of Ardougne, but it could have existed before that day already.

Temple of Ikov was released on 17th June 2002. The players are also asked to visit Lucien's house to the east of Edgeville (east of the river Lum), someone who would later play in important role in the first grandmaster quest of the game. Please keep in mind that the Grand Exchange did not exist yet and that the area to the east of Edgeville was an open area where outlaw members could be found. The quest reward is the boots of lightness which lower a player’s. These boots would become important after the release of Agility. On 23rd July 2002 three new quests were released. The first one of these is Fight Arena. In this quest a player had to enter the Fight Arena (south of Ardougne). It is possible that this arena was already there before the quest, but that it just did not have a function yet. There could also just have been an open field. However, that is an unlikely scenario. 228

The next of three quests is Holy Grail. In this quest the player are taken to the land of the Fisher King, but that area does not appear on the world map and it is not possible to revisit it after completion of the quest. The last of three quests is Tree Gnome Village. By releasing a quest with that name, it is safe to assume that the Tree Gnome Village (area) did not exist before 23rd July and that there was just an open space. Although the actual maze could already have been there, but just without a function. It is also the first time that a player is sent to the Gnome Battlefield with the Khazard buildings. Of course, more important for this quest is the reward: access to the spirit tree teleportation system. The release of this quest had a noticeable impact on the game because the lodestone teleportation network did not exist yet. Players who did not have a sufficiently high Magic level could now just complete the Tree Gnome Village quest in order to unlock a convenient method of teleportation to the member areas.

Plague city was released on 27th August 2002. In this quest we are sent to West Ardougne for the first time. The Ardougne teleportation spell is unlocked upon completion of this quest. Needless to say that completing this quest became a priority for those who had the required Magic level for the new spell. Waterfall Quest was released on 24th September 2002. This is when the Baxtorian Falls might have been released, although I was never able to find a release date. Entry to the Waterfall dungeon is obtained during the quest. Its many fire giants, zombies and spiders became ideal combat training.

Biohazard was released on 23rd October 2002. Completion of this quest grants the payer access to the Combat Training Camp north of West Ardougne. Jungle Potion was released on the same day as Biohazard and takes us for the first time to Tai Bwo Wannai, south of Brimhaven. Tai Bwo Wannai is the first location on what it now recognizable as the actual main land of Karamja. During this quest we explore a very large part of Karamja, but always while staying north of what is now called Shilo Village (it did not exist at that moment). It is likely that the main land of Karamja was released on this 23rd October, although I should also mention that the players stayed on the western part of Karamja and never access the eastern part.

The Grand Tree was added to RuneScape on 12th December 2002. This is the same day that Agility was released, so the quest is probably in function of the new skill. A new way of travelling is unlocked from completing the quest: Gnome Gliders. In the quest we have to fly to an area about which we were only just in doubt, namely the eastern region of Karamja. A remarkable fact about this quest is that level 25 in Agility is required to start this quest, while Agility was released on the same day. So none of the players at that time could start the quest immediately after its release. It is also possible that the Barbarian Outpost was moved to its current location on that day.

Shilo Village was released on 23rd January 2003. This quest added the large Shilo Village area to the map, which can be accessed only after completion of the quest, in which we travel to all corners of Karamja, but always staying north of the Khazari Jungle, so it did most likely not exist yet. The reward from this quest is access Shilo Village, where gems can be mined and fly fish be caught. Shilo Village became a somewhat popular place for these activities. The Slayer master Duradel was not part of the Shilo Village yet because Slayer did not exist until 2005.

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The Underground Pass was released on 3rd March 2003. In this quest we are taken into a huge underground area that can be accessed via a dungeon in West Ardougne. This dangerous area is full of Agility and Thieving traps and sometimes it looks more like a maze than anything else. The rewards are worth the hassle, though. There is the Iban staff as the reward as well as Klank’s gauntlets. The staff would become one of the most powerful staves to exist in RS1 because of its special attack, which other staves did not have. Also Klank’s gauntlets were very strong at that time.

Observatory Quest was released on 17th March 2003. At that time the quest had no significant contribution to the game yet, but that changed in 2004 when the close scrolls were released. Tourist Trap was released on 14th April 2003. In this quest we discover a whole new area, south of Al- Kharid: the Kharidian Desert. In this quest we visit Bedabin Camp, Desert Mining Camp and the underground mines that are part of the latter camp. The ability to make darts is among the rewards for completing this quest. Any desert location south of the mining camp did not exist yet.

Watchtower was added to the game on 7th May 2003. In this quest we get access to Watchtower and we have to visit Gu'Tanoth for the first time. The Watchtower teleport spell is a reward from this quest. A useful spell at that time because the lodestone teleportation did not exist yet and neither did the Construction Player-Owned Houses, so casting the magic spell was the only fast way of reaching Yanille. If a player had completed all quests before completing Watchtower, they would end up having more than hundred quest points after completing it.

Dwarf Cannon was added on 27th May 2003. As reward from this quest we can buy the powerful dwarf cannon from Nulodion. This cannon would later become extremely useful for rich players to train Ranged. After the release of Slayer in 2005 this cannon became a must-have weapon for rich players, a weapon that is still popular today. I would like to stress that the release of the quest had a major impact on the gameplay experience. Until that moment it was the traditional bow and arrow training method that had to be used to train Ranged. As we all know today, that is not the quickest way of training the skill. It would not be an exaggeration to say that training Ranged with bow and arrow died as a result of this quest being released. At least, in the high-level community. Of course cannonballs were extremely expensive at first, so it is likely that it took until the release of the Slayer skill in 2005 for the dwarf cannon training method to become noticeably popular.

The Dig Site was released on 23rd June 2003. This quest expanded the map with a large area, containing the digsite and the Exam Centre, as well as the underground areas beneath the digsite. The prayer altar underneath the digsite did not exist yet, though. Gertrude's Cat was released on 28th July 2003. This is the first time that we have to visit the Lumber Yard, which indicates that the sawmill Woodcutting method was probably released on that day too. In RS2 after the introduction of the crystal saw to the game, the sawmill Woodcutting method became one of the fastest ways to train the skill. As reward we get a cat that follows us around during our RuneScape journey. Optionally, luckily. Was this the first inspiration for a Summoning skill? We will never know. The 50th quest of RuneScape was released on 20th August 2003. This quest, Legends' Quest, became one of the hardest quests in RS1. It immediately also was the last quest released in RS1. In Legends’ Quest we get access to the Khazari Jungle and its dangerous dungeons, about which we talked earlier. The Legends' Guild was added to the game on that day too. After the addition of the Legends’ Quest, Jagex started to focus on RS2 and decided not to release any more quests in 2003. 230

The first quest released in RS2 was Rune Mysteries on 29th March 2004 as a result of the new Runecrafting skill. Rune Mysteries is a requirement to gain access to the Runecrafting skill. The reward that we receive is an air talisman. We also gain access to the essence mines that were added to the game on that day. However, only rune essence could initially be obtained from the essence mines. This changed in 2006 in attempt to combat the many essence bots that had been entering the game on a daily basis. Big Chompy Bird Hunting was released on 28th May 2004. This is the first time that we are asked to explore the area to the south of Feldip Hills. It is uncertain whether this area already existed or not. The quest-bound area that we access during this quest is the cave of Rantz and as reward for completing this quest, we are granted access to the Big Chompy Bird Hunting activity.

Elemental Workshop I was released on 2nd June 2004, a quest in which gain access to a new dungeon in Seers' Village with various elemental monsters. A potential way to train combat for players who did not have a high combat level. Priest in Peril was released on 29th June 2004. This quest’s release went hand in hand with the addition of a large area to the world of Gielinor. During the quest we discover a secret underground passage to Canifis. However, it uncertain how far this expansion went, probably not farther than Canifis. The Slayer Tower did not exist yet and the only city originally mentioned in the quest journal was Canifis. Completion of this quest used to a requirement to access the Kingdom of Morytania for almost a decade. Nature Spirit was released on 13th July 2004 and it introduced the community to the new Mort Myre Swamp, often remembered a huge pain because of the attacking ghasts that rot a player’s food. In the quest we also gain access to the Grotto of Filliman Tarlock, in which a new Prayer altar is unlocked. Any area south of the Mort Myre Swamp did not exist yet, though, so there initially was no reason yet to visit the Mort Myre Swamp if a player was not doing the quest.

Death Plateau was released on 9th August 2004. This is the first time that we have to visit Burthorpe, a village which did not exist yet prior to that day. The same counts for the actual Death Plateau around which the quest revolves. Troll Stronghold was released on 24th August 2004 and it is the sequel to Death Plateau. In this quest we dig further into the mysteries of the trolls and we also visit several new areas, such as the Troll Maze and the actual Troll Stronghold. The quest Regicide was added to the game on 20th September 2004. During this quest we revisit the Underground Pass in order to reach a new region: the isolated elven region Tirannwn, which initially consisted of Arandar, Isafdar, Tyras Camp and Prifddinas. Lletya was not included in that update yet and Prifddinas could not be accessed until September 2014. Today Tirannwn is seen as an area in which Hunter can be trained by using the pawya and grenwall method. However, keep in mind that Hunter did not exist until November of 2006, so until then it was a quest-bound area without any useful post-quest content. The reward from this quest is dragon halberd, the first Melee weapon that could be used for long-distance combat, sort of, and enabled safe-spotting. Eadgar's Ruse was released on 5th October 2004. This quest takes place in the Troll area and its stronghold, but does not lead us to any new areas. The Trollheim teleport spell is a quest reward from this quest, which would have been more useful as reward for completing the Troll Stronghold quest. Shades of Mort'ton was released on 18th October 2004 and it takes us to a new area we to which we have not been before: Mort'ton. This is an area to the south of the Mort Myre Swamp and could for many years be reached only by traversing the Mort Myre Swamp.

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The Fremennik Trials quest was released on 2nd November 2004 and in this quest we are directed to a large new area, called Rellekka. The presence of this city indicates that there also must have been a new area between Rellekka and the Troll Stronghold. This assumption is correct because in the quest we are asked to go there. One of the quest rewards is the teleport Lyre, which can teleport a player to Rellekka. This was a useful item at that time due to lack of better teleportation options. We also gain access to the Waterbirth Island after this quest, although the rock lobster, popular for Magic training until the later years of RS2, did not exist yet. Horror from the Deep was released on 17th November 2004. In this quest we are granted access to the Lighthouse and its dungeon. Permanent access to the dungeon is unlocked after the quest, with the dungeon being filled with Dagannoth monsters. The dungeon would become a very popular location after the release of Slayer in 2005 because the area was considered to be ideal for the use the dwarf multicannon, allowing fast killing and high xp rates in the Slayer skill. Throne of Miscellania was released on 29th November 2004. In this quest we discover a large wealthy island. After completion of the quest we are given the ability to manage the kingdom of Miscellania, a nice way to make some money for the mid- level players of the community, which appeared to be relatively popular for at least the first five years. Of any of the other islands is not spoken in this quest.

Monkey Madness was released on 6th December 2004. This quest introduced a large atoll and a few other places to the game, such as Crash Island and the place where the Gnome Gliders are prepared for their long journey. During the quest we are forced to endure the mind-bogglingly long and dangerous dungeon below Ape Atoll. It is also the first time that we are sent to the zoo of Ardougne. This quest and its rewards had a big impact on the game. First of all, there was the Ape Atoll Agility course, which immediately became the best and most efficient place to train Agility, and would remain popular until the release of the advanced Agility courses in June 2009. Upon release of the quest, the only other good Agility course for fast training was the one in the Wilderness. Another important reward is the Ape Atoll teleportation spell. Not only did it provide fast and easy access to Ape Atoll, but also to a new high-level Melee training method in the temple, which became incredibly popular after the release of the Dharok armour set in 2005. The temple is filled with monkey guards and contains a Prayer altar. For about five more years after the release of the quest, protection prayers would block 100% of the damage. This allowed players to train Melee inside the temple while keeping their life points very low in order to maximize the effect of the Dharok armour set (the lower the life points, the higher the damage). A third important reward is the ability to wield the new dragon scimitar. This scimitar eventually became one of the most popular dragon weapons, alongside the dragon longsword.

In Search of the Myreque was released on 10th January 2005. During this quest we discover the secret tunnel that leads from Canifis's pub to the Mort Myre Swamp and we also learn about the boat that can be used as a shortcut to Mort'ton. Creature of Fenkenstrain was released on 31st January 2005. In this quest we visit a few new areas. The first one is the actual castle in which Fenkenstrain resides. The second area is the Haunted Woods in which we have to collect a quest item and the third new location are is the memorial/tomb that leads to a dungeon with Experiments 232

(monsters). Training combat in that dungeon became a popular mid-level activity for a good five years. One of the rewards for completing the quest is the ring of charos, which would eventually be re-used in several more quests.

Roving Elves was added to the game on 7th February 2005. The main setting is the area of Tirannwn. One of the quest rewards is the option to choose between whether we want a crystal shield or crystal bow. This bow was unique at that time because it was the only bow that did not require ammunition. This helped to make the bow popular, although its mere strength was also enough to achieve that. The crystal bow would remain a popular bow for many years to follow. Even today I actually still like to use it. Ghosts Ahoy was added to the game on 15th February 2005. This is the first time that we have to go to Port Phasmatys, an area released on the same day. The release of that spooky place gave birth to the Ectofuntus Prayer method, a slow method of training the skill. However, it was popular at that time just because there was nothing better. The gilded altar has not been released yet, so the only other option was manually burying bones. The Dragontooth Island is visited for the first time during the quest and free access to Port Phasmatys is the reward. Between a Rock... was released on 21st March 2005. This quest takes us to a very large new area, called Keldagrim. This city can be accessed by using a dungeon to the east of Rellekka and in this quest we discover the big and eccentric Arzinian Gold Mines. After this quest we are allowed to these mines and make use of any of the many gold rocks. This ended up becoming a relatively unknown, but good way of training Mining while making some money for a couple of years. At that moment the game still lacked any fast mining method, so the Arzinian Gold Mines were worth a shot.

April 2005 is called the Desert month and the reason for that is quite obvious: the Kharidian Desert received several updates that caused the area to become more than twice as big. It started when The Feud was released on 4th April 2005. In this quest we visit Pollnivneach for the first time, a city that was added to the game on the same day. This went hand in hand with the introduction of the blackjacking Thieving method. People soon discovered that it allowed high xp rates, although a considerable difficulty was the high click-intensity. While theoretically 280k xp could be gained per hour, in reality reaching 250k was already difficult. The only alternatives at that moment, however, were the pickpocketing methods, all of which did not even reach an xp rate consisting of three digits. The Golem quest was released on 11th April 2005. This quest has to be started in Uzer, which is an area to which we have not been before (east of Pollnivneach). This is also when we discover the desert phoenix that will play a more important role after the release of extreme potions in 2009. As Uzer is quite far away from Al-Kharid, the carpet transportation system started to play an important role at this stage, which had been added to the desert on the same day as The Feud quest.

The famous Desert Treasure was released on 18th April 2005. This is the first time that we are asked to visit the large southern part of the Kharidian Desert (south of Pollnivneach), where we discover a new mining site, called the Quarry. This quarry would eventually offer the highest Mining xp rates for over five years, offering xp rates between 30k-80k xp per hour, depending on the method for which the players opted, as there were several variations. During the quest we also have to visit the very dangerous Ice Path, north of the Troll Stronghold, and we are forced quite far into that snowy area. The dangerous Smoky Well Dungeon in the desert is also a new area that was 233 released on that day too. One of the more important new places that we have to visit is the Pyramid in the Kharidian Desert, which is where the rewards are unlocked for completing the quest. One of these rewards is access to a new combat-based Magic spellbook: Ancient Magicks with very powerful multi-combat spells. The release of this spellbook had a major impact on the game, affecting not only the Magic skill, but also the PvP and PvM communities. The Ice Barrage spell eventually became one of the most iconic and historically significant Magic spells of the game due its devastating power in multi-combat areas. Fighting monsters by using that Magic spell, which is also commonly referred to as barraging, could at time result in xp rates of 200k xp per hour. This xp rate increased over the course of the years as new armour and Magic staves were added to the game. The last desert month quest, Icthlarin's Little Helper, was released on 26th April 2005. The quest can be started near Sophanem, a big new area at the east side of the river Elid. During the quest we explore the most southern regions of the Kharidian Desert and we take a look at the dangerous traps in the new dungeons there.

Tears of Guthix was released on 4th May 2005. In this quest we gain access to the Tears of Guthix cave beneath the swamps of Lumbridge. Completion of this quest grant us access to the Tears of Guthix minigame, which can be trained every week. At that time the xp reward was not as good yet as it is today, but the minigame was still popular because it was a good way of training the low and slow skills. Zogre Flesh Eaters was released on 17th May 2005. This is the first time that we are asked to visit the Magic guild, which was also released on that day. The Lost Tribe quest was added to the game on 31st May 2005. During this quest we discover a faster way enter the dungeon beneath the swamps of Lumbridge by using a hole in the wall of Lumbridge’s cellar. We also gain access to the Dorgeshuun mines, although this was mainly important for other quests that would be released in the next years. The Giant Dwarf quest was released on the same day as the Lost Tribe. The most interesting part of the quest is the rewards. These include access to the Mining Carts transport system and new gravestones that last longer. Prior to that update the only way of entering Keldagrim was by using the dungeon to the east of Rellekka. Keep in mind that the lodestone network and Rellekka teleportation tablets did not exist yet at that moment.

Mourning's Ends Part I was released on 19th July 2005 and the city of Lletya is unlocked upon completing of this quest. Mourning's Ends Part II was released on 17th October 2005. In this highly entertaining quest do we not only discover the devastating power of frustration, but also the dangerous Temple of Light, that can be accessed via the Mourners' headquarter. We also discover another route to the Death Altar, with the ability to craft death runes being the quest’s main reward. We also receive a crystal trinket that can be used to teleport to the Temple of Light. Two years after the release of this quest, Jagex added the dark beast Slayer monsters to that area, the only location where dark beasts could initially be slain. However, the dark beasts did not drop dark bows yet at that moment. Rum Deal was released on 31st October 2005. This quest takes us to a new island, called Braindeath Island. The holy wrench is the reward, an item that would commonly be used while training Slayer as it slightly slows down the rate at which the Prayer points decrease. Shadow of the Storm was released on 14th November 2005. The reward from this quest is a darklight sword, which would become an extremely useful weapon four years later, when tormented demons were added to the game.

Spirits of the Elid was released on 5th December 2005. Not coincidentally, this is the first time we are sent to Nardah for a quest. The release of Nardah was one of the last big additions to the Kharidian Desert. The quest Cabin Fever was released on 7th February 2006. The main setting of this quest is nothing more than a boat, to which we are 234 denied access after the quest. However, in return we are allowed to visit the new island of Mos Le'Harmless. A Fairy Tale Part I – Growing Pains was released on 27th February 2006. This is the first time that we are taken to the Dark Wizard's Tower, west of Falador. Later in the quest we discover a secret tunnel in Zanaris that can be used only during the quest. This tunnel leads to Tanglefoot. Recipe for Disaster was released on 15th March 2006 and it was the 100th quest of RuneScape. To celebrate this event, Recipe for Disaster was designed as a serious of subquests, which must all be completed to unlock all and the best rewards. These include access to the Culinaromancer's Chest, from which powerful gloves, at that time, and other useful items can be bought.

In Aid of the Myreque was released on 22nd March 2006. This time we return to Mort'ton to gain access the new area of Burgh de Rott. We also have to go to the hideout of Veliaf Hurtz beneath the Mort Myre Swamps. A week after the release of this quest Jagex added the Temple Trekking minigame to the game, which can be played after completing In Aid of the Myreque. This minigame would become somewhat popular due to the lumberjack outfit that can be unlocked by playing the minigame. The lumberjack outfit provides a small xp boost when training Woodcutting. Rag and Bone Man was released on 10th April 2006. After this quest we have the option of collecting the bones for his wish list, which must be completed in order to be able to purchase the quest cape. Swan Song was released on 2nd May 2006 and it introduced the area of Piscatoris to the game. The main reward is access to the Piscatoris Fishing Colony where a new type of fish can be caught, called monkfish. It is important to note that Hunter did still not exist at that time, so logically there was no Piscatoris Hunter area yet.

A Fairy Tale Part II – Cure a Queen was released on 11th July 2006 and it is one of those quests that had a noticeable impact on the game. During the quest we unlock a dungeon with Gorak monsters, mainly useful for the Slayer tasks, but not as important as the quest’s reward, which is the ability to use fairy rings. This fairy rings facilitated a fair amount activities in RuneScape, mainly isolated activities or activities that require a lot of travelling, such as training Slayer. Lunar Diplomacy was added to the game on 24th July 2006 and it introduced the Lunar Isle to the game. The rewards are particularly interesting as we are granted access to the new Lunar spellbook, with Magic spells that focus primarily on training skills and on teleportation. Some of the spells are mainly useful for Farming, while others have played a role in other activities. For instance, there is one Magic spell allows enables us to contact NPCs from a distance. This became very useful for Runecrafting, at least before Runespan was released in 2012, because the players could make use of the spell to avoid having to go through to Abyss to have their Runecrafting pouches repaired. A second batch of spells was added to the book in May 2007 after the release of the Dream Mentor quest. As of that moment and until 2009, the Humidify spell became a commonly used Magic spell that was needed to 235 train Mining in the desert’s Quarry without needing to carry waterskins. Another quest reward is access to the astral rune Runecrafting method that was also released on that day. The Eyes of Glouphrie was released on 15th August 2006. One of its rewards is the crystal seed, which can be turned into a crystal saw. This saw boosts a player’s Construction level and doubles the amount of Woodcutting xp that is gained at the sawmill in Varrock’s Lumber Yard. The consequence of that was that the sawmill Woodcutting method became the fastest way to train the skill, offering xp rates of over 90k xp per hour at a high level.

Darkness of Hallowvale was released on 4th September 2006. This quest introduced the notorious Meiyerditch labyrinth area to the game, east of Burgh de Rott. We are also asked to visit the Drakan Castle for the first time, as well as the Meiyerditch Mine. Slug Menace was released on 20th September 2006. Proselyte armour is the reward from this quest, which became an extremely popular type of armour because of its high Prayer bonus and other decent stats. If a player could not afford the best armour that was available, then proselyte was another option. My Arm's Big Adventure was released on 23rd October 2006. In this quest we gain access to a disease-free Herb patch, which is also immediately the quest’s reward. Enlightened Journey was released on 6th November 2006. They say that the sky is the limit and in this quest we get just a little bit closer to that limit by using the new balloon transportation system. Eagles' Peak was released on 28th November 2006. This quest was released in function of the new Hunter skill that had just been added to the game. It is therefore only logical that its reward is related to the skill. More specifically, the ability to hunt for ferrets and access to the Eagle transportation system is unlocked upon completion of the quest. Animal Magnetism was released on 12th December 2006. The reward from this quest is Ava's attractor/accumulator, which become popular among the low- and mid-level players in the community because of its ability to automatically pick up certain types of arrow.

Contact! was released on 10th January 2007. In this quest we are forced into the very dangerous area below Sophanem, where tricky maze with lots of traps awaits us and where we also encounter a large catacomb with dangerous scarabs. The quest reward is access to the bank of Sophanem, which would commonly be used to play the Pyramid Plunder Thieving minigame that had already been released by then. Cold War was released on 29th January 2007. In this quest we are taken to a place with a polar environment: Iceberg. The penguin's headquarter is no longer a secret to our in- game characters and we also find out that an Agility course on ice can be entertaining. Access to that Agility course is one of the rewards for completing the quest. The Fremennik Isles quest was released on 6th February 2007. The quest rewards include access to the new islands of Jatiszo and Neitiznot, the ability to craft yak hide and to fight yaks. These yaks ended up becoming a popular combat training method. After the release of Summoning in 2008 the yak hides began to play a more important role because it is one of the ingredients required for one of the Summoning familiars. Completion of the quest also rewards the players with a helm of Neitiznot, which became the strongest helm of the game at that moment and would be used by many players for several years.

The Great Brain Robbery was released on 6th March 2007. This quest can be started at Mos Le'Harmless. While doing this quest we access an underwater area and the new Harmony island, south of Mos Le'Harmless. The reward from this quest is a barrelchest anchor that can be used as weapon and a blessed Prayer book. What Lies Below was released on 27th March 2007. In this quest we visit the Outlaw Camp to the east of Edgeville. That camp initially used to be located 236 where the Grand Exchange can be found today. We also discover a shortcut to the Chaos Altar, which turns out to be very long… The Path of Glouphrie was released on 3rd September 2007. In this quest we are taken into the dangerous Poison Waste Dungeon, to which we are given permanent access upon completing the quest and which contains the warped tortoise Slayer creature. The quest Dealing with Scabaras was released on 2nd January 2008. It takes us to an extremely dangerous part of the desert underworld, starting in the new Archaeologists' Camp, east of Sophanem. The Pyramid Plunder area and the Agility Pyramid area are also visited for the first time. One of the quest’s rewards is the ability to make the enchanted water tiara, which protects a player from the desert heat so that waterskins are no longer needed. This eventually became extremely useful for Mining because mining in the Quarry still was the fastest method to train the skill at that time. Wearing an enchanted water tiara eliminated the need of having to use waterskins or the Humidify spell.

Wolf Whistle was released on 15th January 2008. Completion of this quest is a requirement to train Summoning, which was released on the same day. As a First Resort... was released on 29th January 2008. This quest added the Oo'Glog area to the south of Feldip Hills and the main reward for completing the quest is the ability to use the many pools in which players can submerge themselves to be affected by specific boosts. For example, the salt water spring restores a player’s run energy to 100% every game tick. This was a useful effect when training Agility because the normal energy restoration rate was much slower at that time, to the point at which players were advised to use energy potions while training the skill. Another pool causes the Bandos monsters in the God Wars Dungeon to become unaggressive for a certain amount of time. Legacy of Seergaze was added to the game on 22nd April 2008. This quest's main setting is the Sanguinesti region (Meiyerditch etc.), but we also visit a new tunnel that leads to the blood altar and bloodvelds. The biggest reward from this quest is the ability to craft blood runes. However, there is a reward for slayers as well: access the tunnel with mutated bloodvelds. These ended up becoming one of the fastest Slayer tasks because of their relatively high amount life points and because a dwarf cannon can be set up there.

Smoking Kills was released on 5th June 2008. In this quest we visit several dangerous areas and dungeons in the Kharidian Desert, such as the Tomb of Catolax. The biggest reward is a whole new Slayer system based on points, which is one of the biggest updates to happen to the skill. Other rewards include a new Slayer master, Sumona; the ability to make a Slayer helmet and access to the Desert Slayer Dungeon in Pollnivneach. More about this update can be found in the chapter about the skills. Learning the Ropes was released on 14th July 2008. This quest was meant to be a replacement for the Tutorial Island that had excluded from the account creation process, but it was in September of 2009 replaced with a new quest, called Unstable Foundations. Ironically, also that quest was removed in May if 2011. The logical reward for completing these quests was access to the main land of Gielinor.

Spirit of Summer was released on 29th July 2008 and is the first quest that forces a player into the Wilderness. PvP in the Wilderness had been impossible for seven months at that moment. The main setting for this quest is the Ruins, east of the Wilderness Volcano, and a new spirit world that other players cannot access. We are also introduced to the new strongest monster of game at that time: the Corporeal Beast. All Fired up was added to the game on 26th August 2008. This quest takes place between the Lumber Yard and the temple that leads to Morytania. The quest’s reward are useful items for Firemaking and Woodcutting. The new ring and pair of gloves provide an xp boost when training Firemaking, while the new inferno adze became a popular Woodcutting item because of its ability to incinerate logs for Firemaking xp. Summer's End was released on 15th September 2008 and is the second quest to take place in the Wilderness. We are taken into a new extremely dangerous dungeon in which the mighty Corporeal Beast resides. The quest rewards are the ability to wield Spirit shield and the ability to fight this new Corporeal Beast. The activity of killing this boss became extremely popular because of the enormously high prices that the various new shields ended up reaching. For example, the divine spirit shield peaked at around one billion gp. Never 237 before had a non-holiday event item reached such a high price, not even close. It goes without saying that the hype was noticeable, even when you were not part of the PvM community. Defender of Varrock was added on 29th September 2008, also as a dangerous Wilderness quest, in which we gain access to the Chaos Altar Dungeon that contains armoured zombies. These would later become a semi-popular method of training combat.

While Guthix Sleeps was released on 26th November 2008. It was the very first Grandmaster quest of RuneScape, so the community could expect a difficult, more complex and longer quest than ever before. As we might expect from a grandmaster quest, we have to visit several new areas. These include the Warriors' Guild (we have never been there before as part of a quest), the long and very dangerous Black Knights Dungeon beneath the Black Knights Fortress, Surok Magis' Hideout, a strange snowy place leading to a dark and scary-looking environment that does not appear on the map, the Chasm in the Lumbridge Swamp Dungeon and the deeper areas to where it leads, such as the Ancient Guthix Temple with the new tormented demons. Apart from the permission to access the tormented demons area of this temple, this quest had several other big rewards of a never- before-seen magnitude. These include four lamps that grant 100k xp in a skill of choice and a lump of dragon metal, a necessary item to make the dragon platebodies that were also added to the game on that day. Killing tormented demons ended up becoming a popular moneymaking method because of the new and expensive dragon claws that are dropped by the demons. The weapon became high in demand because of its extremely powerful special attack, which was essentially a stronger version of the dragon dagger’s special attack. Combat abilities did not exist yet, which is why the dragon claws’ special attack stood out in combat.

The first few quests after the release of While Guthix Sleeps had little to no benefits for the gameplay experience. Hunt for Red Raktuber was released on 2nd June 2009. Its reward is an expansion of the penguin hunting D&D. Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf was released on 9th September 2009. In this quest we are granted access to an expansion of the western Keldagrim mines and to the Chaos Dwarf Battlefield. The Chaos Dwarves on the battlefield can drop the dragon pickaxe and hand cannons that were released on the same day. The dragon pickaxe was significant improvement to the rune pickaxe, which is probably why its price eventually settled at no less than 15m gp. The hand cannon became a good alternative to fight high-level monsters with Ranged. Some players would use that weapon to fight the tormented demons, which were still popular at that time. The Temple at Senntisten was released on 3rd December 2009. This quest leads us to several areas to which we have never been before, such as the Frozen Waste Plateau and its dungeon, called the Ghorrock Fortress. We are also asked to play a round of the Barrows minigame during this quest. The new Senntisten area below the digsite contains an evil temple, to which we obtain permanent access after completing the quest. This temple contain a Zaros Prayer altar where a new Prayer book, called Ancient Curses, can be unlocked. This powerful Prayer book would become extremely useful for Slayer and combat in general, superseding the regular Prayer book because of its ability to deflect damage back onto the opponent when using the protection prayers.

Nomad's Requiem was added to the game on 11th January 2010 as the second Grandmaster quest of RuneScape. One of the rewards obtained from defeating Nomad is the ability to wear the Soul Wars cape, which was relatively strong at that time and became a good alternative if a player could not wear the fire cape. Gunnar's Ground was released on 21st September 2010 and is a quest for both 238 members and free players. This quest was the replacement for the Romeo and Juliet quest, which Jagex had decided to remove from the game. The Void Stares Back was released on 6th October 2010. A portal in this quest leads us to the place where we have to fight the Pest Queen. After succeeding in slaying her, the main reward is the Korasi’s sword, which had a relatively strong special attack at that time.

Do Not Evil was released on 1st December 2010. This quest takes place mainly in the Kharidian Desert and on Ape Atoll. The monkey knife fighters Thieving method is unlocked upon completion of this quest. These fighters are located on Ape Atoll and need to be pickpocketed for Thieving xp. If a player is able to keep up for a while without misclicking, xp rates of close to 300k xp per hour can be reached, which is slightly better than the blackjacking Thieving method and considerably faster than Pyramid Plunder, which was by far the most popular way of training Thieving at that time. King of the Dwarves was released on 4th January 2011 and it takes us to the new Lava-flow mine in Keldagrim, although the actual Mining training method did not exist until May of 2011, which is when training the skill in the Living Rock Cavern was significantly faster than anywhere else in RuneScape. The Prisoner of Glouphrie was released on 9th February 2011. The reward for completing this quest is the ability to plant two spirit trees at the same time. A Clockwork Syringe was released on 28th March 2011. This is the first quest that gave Dungeoneering xp as reward. This also is the first quest that can and has to be started in the player’s own Player-Owned House. During the quest we discover a dungeon that leads to an underwater area on Braindeath Island and after this quest we gain access to the Braindeath Island 'Rum'geon. We also receive a spell sheet that can teleport us from Mos Le'Harmless to Braindeath Island and vice versa, although this spell does not work if the player is at another place in Gielinor. Salt in the Wound was released on 5th July 2011 as the first quest that starts in Daemonheim and makes use of actual Dungeoneering floors.

The Branches of Darkmeyer was added to RuneScape on 31st August 2011. In this quest we unlock access to a new area, called Darkmeyer, which is part of the Kingdom of Morytania. The quest has quite a few interesting rewards. First of all, there is Drakan’s medallion that allows us to teleport to five different locations in the southern part of Morytania, including the popular minigame of Barrows. Until then the only other way of reaching the southern region was by travelling through the Mort Myre Swamp. A second reward is access to the new vyrewatch Slayer task. Ritual of the Mahjarrat was released on 14th September 2011 as a Grandmaster quest and it impact on the game was quite significant. Completion of this quest rewards with access to Akrisae, a new Barrow brother; the ability to craft the new Armadyl runes; and a dungeon filled with glacors, which ended up becoming a popular place for players to train their Magic level. Not only can xp rates of more than 500k Magic xp per hour be achieved there, the glacors also drop the expensive steadfast, ragefire and glaiven boots. The last quest to be released in 2011, One Piercing Note, was released on 7th November and introduced a new area to the game, added to the east of Al-Kharid. The new Citharede Abbey is mainly quest area, though.

The Firemaker’s Curse was released on 11th January 2012 and in this quest we spend most of our time inside a cave near Eagles’ Peak. One of the rewards is the book of Char, which can be used once per day to teleport to the entrance of the quest’s cave. At that time the lodestone teleportation network did not exist yet, so this book was useful for in case a player needed to 239 visit that area or Piscatoris. The Elder Kiln quest was added to RuneScape on 14th February 2012 and it reintroduces us to the TzHaar city. Its main reward is access to the new Fight Kiln minigame, popular among those who like combat because of the TokHaar capes, one for each combat type, that can be unlocked by playing the minigame. These capes are stronger than the fire cape, which until then had been the strongest cape of RuneScape. Another reward is the Tokkul-Zo ring, which can be used to teleport to the TzHaar city. The quest Song from the Depth was released on 22nd May 2012. Special about this quest is that it was added to a game to serve as an introduction to the new Queen Black Dragon boss, who would be released a week later. The 7th August of 2012 saw the addition of the Some Like it Cold quest. At that moment the penguin hide-and-seek D&D was a relatively popular activity in RuneScape. The rewards from the D&D include access to the ghost penguin, which gives more points and can be spotted only while wearing a ring of visibility. This is the same ring that was needed in the Desert Treasure quest.

Stolen Hearts and Diamond in the Rough are two quests that were released on 26th September 2012 as part of an update to graphically improve the entire city of Al-Kharid. The Prince Ali Rescue quest, from 2001, needed to be removed for this. Stolen Hearts is a free-to-play quest, which might indicate that this was the actual replacement for Prince Ali Rescue. The next quest on the list is What’s Mine is Yours, released on 17th October. Also this quest was added to the game to replace the Doric’s Quest that had existed since 2001. The reason for replacing it was because Doric’s Quest no longer offered a good introduction to the Smithing and Mining skills because a lot more content had been released in the previous eleven years. The quests Rune Mysteries and Rune Memories were released on 28th November 2012 as part of a big update to Wizards’ Tower, which ended up transforming the entire area and led to the Tutorial Island’s removal from the game. Rune Mysteries is a free-to-play quest and Rune Memories serves as a members-only sequel. Both quests were designed to introduce the community to the graphically improved Wizards’ Tower area.

The Brink of Extinction was the first combat quest to be released after the addition of the Evolution of Combat to the game. The only function of this quest was introducing the players to the new system of using combat abilities, so logically the entire quest revolved around combat. The release of this quest went along with quite a hype because the people who were mainly interested in combat had been looking forward to a quest like this. Being a skiller myself, I remember thinking that I would never re-obtain the quest cape. That assumption appeared to be correct for a while because it took me many, many deaths to complete the quest, possibly over thirty. The main reward from the quest is access to the TokHaar Fight Cauldron. The quest Demon Slayer was re-released on 28th January 2013 as part of the Demon Flash Mob D&D’s addition to the game. If a player had already completed Demon Slayer, he or she would still need to do the new rework in order for all quests in the quest journal to appear as green (or completed). However, redoing this quest was no requirement for the quest cape or the completionist cape. The reason for a quest rework was because the original Demon Slayer quest included too much travelling and too little questing.

The World Wakes, released on 4th March 2013, was advertised as the biggest quest in the history of the game. Not only because of its magnitude, but also because of its lore-related implications, such as the death of Guthix. The rewards were of the same proportion as more than 900k xp is received from the quest, including the post-quest rewards. High xp rewards upon completion of quests had 240 been the trend for a year or two, but never before had it been this much. Other rewards from this quest include access to a new combat area where automations and cresbots can be fought. The quest Birthright of the Dwarves was added to the game on 2nd October 2014. Also this quest is very generous with its reward as 650k xp can be obtained here. However, the xp is not the only interesting rewards. The dragon warhammer and the dragon battlestaff were released on the same day. Completion of this quest grants access to these weapons, although I should mention that they were not as strong as other existing weapons at that time. Another reward is the ability to wield the new imcando pickaxe, which is the gilded version of the dragon pickaxe. Both pickaxes have the same mining speed, except in the Keldagrim’s lava flow mine, where the imcando version is faster. This imcando pickaxe also incinerates ores every now and then, which gives xp in Smithing, so it essentially the Mining equivalent of the inferno adze, even though the adze can be used to train Mining too.

One of a Kind was added to the game on 10th March 2014, a quest in which the Dragontooth Island dungeon is unlocked. Inside of it are the new celestial dragons that drop the new dragon rider items. The next big quest to be released was Fate of the Gods on 24th March of the same year. In this quest we gain access to a large dungeon of which the entrance is located south of Eagles’ Peak. The most significant reward, other than the high amount of xp again, is the shard of Zaros, which makes all monsters in the God Wars Dungeon unaggressive. A remarkable quest was released on 2nd June of 2014. The Mighty Falls features Yelps, a character which had formerly been featured in the Squeal of Fortune interface, the precursor of Treasure Hunter. In an earlier poll it had been decided that Yelps should be killed, this decision may have stemmed from the general dislike towards the Squeal of Fortune that still existed even several years after being introduced to the game.

The quest Plague’s End was added to RuneScape on 11th August 2014 in anticipation of Prifddinas’s grand opening that would take place in September. The new city of the elves was supposed to host content aimed at high-level players, so releasing a quest with relatively high requirements was the easiest way of making sure that only the high-level players would be able to access the new city. Although the quest’s main reward is access to Prifddinas, the community still had to wait till 2nd September to enter the city. The release of this city had major consequences for the gameplay experience. The most important additions included the Seren stone Mining method, offering around 150k xp per hour; the Hefin Agility course, good for a new highest Agility xp rate in RuneScape with its 120k xp per hour; and the new, automated Pickpocketing Thieving method that would eventually become the fast way of training the skill, with xp rates of around 300k xp per hour.

For those who found it hard to follow because of the amount of text, here's a simple list of all release dates of all quests until 1st July 2012 (in chronological order).

Cook's Assistant: 4th January 2001 Demon Slayer: 4th January 2001 Romeo and Juliet: 4th January 2001 Shield of Arrav: 4th January 2001 Sheep Shearer: 4th January 2001 The Restless ghost: 4th January 2001 Ernest the Chicken: 21st January 2001 Vampire Slayer: 28th January 2001 241

Imp Catcher: 16th February 2001 Prince Ali Rescue: 28th February 2001 Black Knight's Fortress: 6th April 2001 Doric's Quest: 6th April 2001 The Knight's Sword: 6th April 2001 Witch's Potion: 6th April 2001 Goblin Diplomacy: 8th May 2001 Pirate's Treasure: 11th June 2001 Dragon Slayer: 23rd September 2001

Druidic Ritual: 27th February 2002 Heroes' Quest: 27th February 2002 Lost City: 27th February 2002 Merlin's Crystal: 27th February 2002 Witch's House: 27th February 2002 Scorpion Catcher: 25th March 2002 Family Crest: 9th April 2002 Tribal Totem: 30th April 2002 Fishing Contest: 28th May 2002 Monk's Friend: 28th May 2002 Clock Tower: 17th June 2002 Temple of Ikov: 17th June 2002 Fight Arena: 23rd July 2002 Holy Grail: 23rd July 2002 Tree Gnome Village: 23rd July 2002 Hazeel Cult: 15th August 2002 Sheep Herder: 15th August 2002 Plague City: 27th August 2002 Sea Slug: 9th September 2002 Waterfall Quest: 24th September 2002 Biohazard: 23rd October 2002 Jungle Potion: 23rd October 2002 Grand Tree Quest: 12th December 2002

Shilo Village: 27th January 2003 Underground Pass: 3rd March 2003 Observatory Quest: 17th March 2003 Tourist Trap: 14th April 2003 Watchtower: 7th May 2003 Dwarf Cannon: 27th May 2003 Murder Mystery: 9th June 2003 The Dig Site: 9th July 2003 Gertrude's Cat: 28th July 2003 Legend's Quest: 20th August 2003

Rune Mysteries: 29th March 2004 Big Chompy Bird Hunting: 28th May 2004 Elemental Workshop I: 2nd June 2004 Priest in Peril: 29th June 2004 Nature Spirit: 13th July 2004 Death Plateau: 9th August 2004 242

Troll Stronghold: 24th August 2004 Tai Bwo Wannai Trio: 14th September 2004 Regicide: 20th September 2004 Eadgar's Ruse: 5th October 2004 Shades of Mort'ton: 18th October 2004 The Fremennik Trials: 2nd November 2004 Horror from the Deep: 17th November 2004 Throne of Miscellania: 29th November 2004 Monkey Madness: 6th December 2004 Haunted Mine: 21st December 2004

Troll Romance: 5th January 2005 In Search of the Myreque: 10th January 2005 Creature of Fenkenstrain: 31st January 2005 Roving Elves: 7th February 2005 Ghosts Ahoy: 15th February 2005 One Small Favour: 28th February 2005 Mountain Daughter: 7th March 2005 Between a Rock...: 21st March 2005 The Feud: 4th April 2005 The Golem: 11th April 2005 Desert Treasure: 18th April 2005 Icthlarin's Little Helper: 26th April 2005 Tears of Guthix: 4th May 2005 Zogre Flesh Eaters: 17th May 2005 The Giant Dwarf: 31st May 2005 The Lost Tribe: 31st May 2005 Recruitment Drive: 27th June 2005 Mourning's Ends Part I: 19th July 2005 Forgettable Tale of a Drunken Dwarf: 26th July 2005 Garden of Tranquility: 30th August 2005 A Tail of Two Cats: 26th September 2005 Mourning's Ends Part II: 17th October 2005 Wanted!: 17th October 2005 Rum Deal: 31st October 2005 Shadow of the Storm: 14th November 2005 Making History: 22nd November 2005 Ratcatchers: 28th November 2005 Spirits of the Elid: 5th December 2005 Devious Minds: 19th December 2005

The Hand in the Sand 10th January 2006 Enakhra's Lament: 23rd January 2006 Cabin Fever: 7th February 2006 Fairy Tale Part I – Growing Pains: 27th February 2006 Recipe for Disaster: 15th March 2006 In Aid of the Myreque: 26th March 2006 A Soul's Bane: 3rd April 2006 Rag and Bone Man: 10th April 2006 Swan Song: 2nd May 2006 Royal Trouble: 22nd May 2006 243

Death to the Dorgeshuun: 21st June 2006 Fairy Tale Part II – Cure a Queen: 11th July 2006 Lunar Diplomacy: 24th July 2006 The Eyes of Glouphrie: 15th August 2006 Darkness of Hallowvale: 4th September 2006 Slug Menace: 20th September 2006 Elemental Workshop II: 2nd October 2006 My Arm's big Adventure: 23rd October 2006 Enlightened Journey: 6th November 2006 Eagles' Peak: 28th November 2006 Animal Magnetism: 12th December 2006

Contact!: 10th January 2007 Cold War: 29th January 2007 The Fremennik Isles: 6th February 2007 Tower of Life: 19th February 2007 The Great Brain Robbery: 6th March 2007 What Lies Below: 27th March 2007 Olaf's Quest: 10th April 2007 Another slice of H.A.M.: 24th April 2007 Dream Mentor: 15th May 2007 Grim Tales: 4th June 2007 King's Ransom: 24th July 2007 The Path of Glouphrie: 3rd September 2007 Back to my Roots: 9th October 2007 Land of the Goblins: 12th November 2007

Dealing with Scabaras: 2nd January 2008 Wolf Whistle: 15th January 2008 As a First Resort: 29th January 2008 Catapult Construction: 13th February 2008 Kennith's Concerns: 11th March 2008 Legacy of Seergaze: 22nd April 2008 Perils of Ice Mountain: 7th May 2008 TokTz-Ket-Dill: 13th May 2008 Smoking Kills: 5th June 2008 Rocking Out: 11th June 2008 Learning the Ropes: 14th July 2008 Spirit of Summer: 29th July 2008 Meeting History: 5th August 2008 All Fired Up: 26th August 2008 Summer's End: 15th September 2008 Defender of Varrock: 29th September 2008 Swept Away: 28th October 2008 While Guthix Sleeps: 26th November 2008 Myths of the White lands: 16th December 2008

In Pyre Need: 6th January 2009 The Chosen Commander: 17th March 2009 Glorious Memories: 1st April 2009 The Tale of the Muspah: 21st April 2009 244

Missing my Mummy: 19th May 2009 Hunt for Red Raktuber: 2nd June 2009 The Curse of Arrav: 21st July 2009 Fur 'n' Seek: 10th August 2009 Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf: 9th September 2009 Unstable Foundations: 17th September 2009 Within the Light: 13th October 2009 The Temple at Senntisten: 3rd December 2009 Blood Runs Deep: 15th December 2009

Nomad's Requiem: 11th January 2010 Rune Mechanics: 1st February 2010 The Blood Pact: 15th March 2010 Buyers and Cellars: 28th April 2010 Fairy Tale Part III – Orks Rift: 13th May 2010 Elemental Workshop III: 25th May 2010 Quiet before the Swarm: 24th June 2010 Love Story: 5th July 2010 A Void Dance: 10th August 2010 Gunnar's Ground: 21st September 2010 The Void Stares Back: 6th October 2010 Do No Evil: 1st December 2010

King of the Dwarves: 4th January 2011 The Prisoner of Glouphrie: 9th February 2011 Elemental Workshop IV: 1st March 2011 A Clockwork Syringe: 28th March 2011 Deadliest Catch: 7th June 2011 Salt in the Wound: 5th July 2011 The Branches of Darkmeyer: 31st August 2011 Ritual of the Mahjarrat: 14th September 2011 One Piercing Note: 7th November 2011

The Firemaker's Curse: 11th January 2012 The Elder Kiln: 14th February 2012 Song from the Depths: 22nd May 2012 Carnillean Rising: 3rd July 2012 Some Like it Cold: 7th August 2012 Stolen Hearts: 26th September 2012 Diamond in the Rough: 26th September 2012 What’s Mine is Yours: 17th October 2012 Rune Mysteries: 28th November 2012 Rune Memories: 28th November 2012 The Brink of Extinction: 4th December 2012

Demon Slayer (updated): 28th January 2013 The World Wakes: 4th March 2013 Bringing Home the Bacon: 9th July 2013 The Death of Chivalry: 13th August 2013 Birthright of the Dwarves: 2nd October 2013 Missing, Presumed Death: 15th October 2013

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One of a Kind: 10th March 2014 Fate of the Gods: 24th March 2014 A Shadow over Ashdale: 22nd April 2014 The Mighty Fall: 2nd June 2014 Plague’s End: 11th August 2014 Broken Home: 27th October 2014 Heart of Stone: 24th November 2014

Now that we have had this long list of quests, it seems interesting to have a look at several quest statistics. The image below displays how many quests were released in each year since 2001. You might notice that the numbers add up to more than 200. This is because I have also included the quests that were removed from the game, such as Sheep Shearer and Wizard’s Potions. In 2003 only ten quests were released, but this is because Jagex spent the second half focusing entirely on RS2, which is why no quests were released in the last four months of that year. You will also notice that the amount of quest releases has decreased over the course of the years, but it is important to keep in mind here that the vast majority of the recent quests were large-scale projects. The quests released in the first five to six years, on the other hand, were relatively small and required much less time to develop.

Another aspect at which I would like to have a loo, is the highest level that is required in each skill and how much xp is gained in each skill upon completion of all quests. The numbers below should be accurate, but I should mention that the column with the amounts of xp also includes the xp rewards from quests that have been removed from the game by now. Furthermore, additional optional quests rewards have been included too. For example, after completing the quest Birthright of the Dwarves, an additional Mining xp reward can be unlocked in Keldagrim. This reward is also included in the list below, despite not being an automatic reward. The cut-off date for the list below 246 is 1st January 2015.

Skill Highest requirement Xp gained from all quests Agility 77 (Ritual of the Mahjarrat) 609,962 Attack 79 (The Mighty Fall) 181,237 Constitution 78 (The Mighty Fall) 223,812 Construction 75 (Plague’s End) 290,850 Cooking 70 (Recipe for Disaster) 48,220 Crafting 76 (Ritual of the Mahjarrat) 428,949 Defence 80 (The Brink of Extinction) 190,587 Divination 75 (Fate of the Gods) 305,000 Dungeoneering 75 (Plague’s End) 105,000 Farming 65 (While Guthix Sleeps) 113,850 Firemaking 74 (The Firemaker’s Curse) 254,975 Fishing 70 (Deadliest Catch) 151,149 Fletching 70 (The Branches of Darkmeyer) 96,574 Herblore 75 (Plague’s End) 124,850 Hunter 67 (Deadliest Catch) 105,500 Magic 81 (One of a Kind) 561,863 Mining 80 (Birthright of the Dwarves) 720,900 Prayer 75 (Plague’s End) 582,931 Ranged 75 (Within the Light) 102,573 Runecrafting 61 (The Prisoner of Glouphrie) 83,600 Slayer 76 (Fate of the Gods) 311,000 Smithing 82 (Birthright of the Dwarves) 377,133 Strength 85 (Birthright of the Dwarves) 426,275 Summoning 75 (Plague’s End) 252,626 Thieving 74 (A Clockwork Syringe) 428,012 Woodcutting 76 (The Branches of Darkmeyer) 247,587 Total 1946 7,325,015 xp

The table above includes only the xp rewards for a specific skill, but plenty of quests also give xp lamps (or other items) that allows player to choose a skill for the xp. The total amount of quest xp rewards for which the player can choose the skill is 3,314,000 xp. When we add this to the 7.3m xp mentioned above, we see that a total of 10,639,015 xp can be obtained from completing all quests. The free-to-choose xp accounts for 31% of the total quest xp.

Perhaps we should have a look at how this xp has been distributed across all of the years. The chart below displays the amount of quests released per year (left y-axis) and the total amount of xp gained from all quests per year (right y-axis).

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It is clear that most of the xp has been assigned to the more recent quests. Since 2011 a little bit more than 6.3m xp has been added to the quest rewards. That leaves only 4.3m xp for the first ten years, of which only 868k xp was initially assigned to the quests from 2001 until and including 2005. This significant difference can for the most part be ascribed to the evolution of skilling. In the early days of the game the best xp rates were those that are now considered to be extremely low for the current standards. In 2001 a quest reward of 15k xp was considered to be a generous reward, today we need a three-digit amount of xp to consider the reward as being generous.

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8

Influential people

Since the dawn of RuneScape many players have come and gone. Many among those who quit have been forgotten, but there are some who have left their footprint on the game. Those are the players that were admired by many, either for their achievements or for their contributions to the RuneScape community. The majority of them impressed their fellow adventurers by conquering the top of the hiscores or by devouring xp gains at a never-before-seen pace. A minority became well- known for being exceptional community people. All of them have left a legacy behind. They were not just players; to some they were idols, role models and a source of inspiration. But before having a look at those players, I am first going to put the spotlights on the Gower brothers; the creators of RuneScape.

Andrew Gower: He is often credited as the main developer of RuneScape in the early days due to the fact that he appeared to lead the project that RuneScape was back in 2000. He also wrote most of the initial game announcements and news posts. The RS1 game engine contained a much less powerful version of Runescript than it does today, which meant that most of the content had to be hardcoded into the game. Hardcoding is the act of directly inserting data into the program code instead of using an external configuration file on which all of the programme code is already stored. Only Andrew possessed the required skills for that, so he ended up creating the entire game engine. This includes combat, some skills and everything that contained a user interface, such as shops, banks, trading, the inventory, the equipment interface, etc. Andrew also created the map editor, the 3D modeler, the 3D animation software, the in-house tools, the website and the webserver. Furthermore, he took care of the account creation system, the login system, the chat system, and other supporting systems. After the release of membership at the beginning of 2002, more staff people were being hired, which allowed Andrew to delegate the different tasks and to focus on improving the game engine, among several other smaller tasks. He also created the original RS2 engine and developed his own set of tools. For a while Andrew was the only engine developer until Jagex began to hire more people to assist him. Even though he was not really involved in the creation of new content, he still he helped with the high-level design of bigger updates and he had the ultimate sign-off on what updates were produced until December 2010. Every now and then he would use his veto power when he did not like certain ideas. The Dungeoneering skill was originally Andrew’s idea and design, although it was other Jagex moderators who developed the skill and brought Andrew’s ideas to life. Dungeoneering is also the last update for which Andrew 249 had a significant input. Together with Jagex, Andrew achieved many great things. His favourite achievements include the successful transitioning to RS2 at the beginning of 2004; being able to keep up with the growth of the game and building all of the infrastructure to support it; building the team, processes and technology to develop significant updates on a weekly basis; creating RuneScape HD in 2008; and winning the 100 best companies to work for award in 2007 and 2008. As of December 2010 he is no longer a director, but he kept giving advice for a short period afterwards. Andrew left the studio because he wanted to face new challenges, and he had an idea for a new games language that he wanted to pursue. He called his new company Fen Research and aims to create a sort of mixture between a game engine and new programming language to make the development of online multiplayer games quicker, easier, and less error-prone. The engine itself is called Fenforge and will be made available to the public when it is completely finished, which will take another few years as of 2015, although their first game, Solstrike, is expected to be released at the end of 2015. They have also been working on a top secret game that will be released much later. Evidently, Andrew could not reveal too much information about the game yet, but he was willing to share that it will be 3D and that it will take place in a fantasy setting. The project can be followed at www.fenresearch.com and Andrew Gower is also on Twitter, with the username of @AndrewCGower.

Ian Gower: He was the least involved of the three brothers because he is the youngest and he initially still needed to finish his studies at a university that did not allow Ian to have a job on top of his studies. Ian mostly helped with the graphics and made a lot of player graphics, NPC graphics, inventory graphics and 3D models. He also designed the original RuneScape and Jagex logos, although many of the monster graphics were designed by a freelance graphics artist whom they had hired online. These monsters include the first skeleton, zombie, dragon and goblin designs. They were drawn on paper and then scanned, and were initially recognizable in-game as being slightly different due to having a slightly more cartooney style. Ian also helped with the development of content in RS1 and RS2. The Hunter skill, for example, was created by Ian. He joined Jagex as a full-time content developer after graduating from university. After the release of Old School RuneScape he switched from the main game to Old School to do the game engine development.

Paul Gower: He had a lot more time than Ian to help out and he was also important for the success of RuneScape. In RS1 Paul did most of the map design, most of the lore for the game, most of the quests, and most of the NPC configuration and NPC dialog. He also created the majority of the skills and had a hand in the inventory configuration. A former beta tester of the game, Rab, designed some of the quests. Paul tested them and integrated them into the game engine because Rab did not have access to that. Eventually Paul became content team leader for several years until Mod Mark took over from him, but Paul continued to have a big influence on the development of new content and ended up creating the Mahjarrat quest series, among several other big updates.

Aasiwat/Allar: Today known as Allar, he became well-known in 2008 under the name Aasiwat. At that time Gertjaars started his dominance at the top of the hiscores, but Aasiwat soon followed and comfortably maintained rank two in the hiscores, a rank which he held from March 2009 until the release of Dungeoneering in April 2010. He was one of the many top players who did not attempt to defend their rank after the release of that skill, although after the release of Divination in August 2013 he briefly entered the top 21 again. Despite never having been rank one in the hiscores, for a year after the release of Dungeoneering he was the player with the highest total xp. Gertjaars, rank one prior to the release of the skill, quit almost immediately after the skill had been added to the game. This allowed Aasiwat to pass his total xp. However, he did not go for 99 or 120 Dungeoneering because he did not like the team aspect of the skill and he could not imagine himself getting level 120 in it, otherwise he would surely have taken that precious rank one. Aasiwat started playing RuneScape in 2001, but quit in 2002 after reaching a total level of 1,100. He also managed to take rank seven in Firemaking, at level 94, before he quit. Aasiwat then stayed away for four 250 years and returned in 2006. He joined the clan Supreme Skillers in September 2006 and became one of its leader early in 2008, a position that he held until the clan became inactive in the recent years. His biggest achievements, apart from the ones that have already been mentioned, include being the fifteenth person to reach total level 2376 after the release of Summoning in 2008, being the second person to obtain 20m xp in all skills and holding rank one in Summoning for several months. In addition to that, he has also held a top five rank in the skills Construction, Crafting and Strength after reaching 200m xp in each of those skills between 2009 and 2011. Aasiwat currently (early 2015) has more than three billion total xp, with nine skills at 200m xp.

Bluerose13x: She was the first person to achieve level 99 in Smithing and Magic. She also had the highest total xp of the game for almost two years without interruption. Bluerose13x had a significant influence on the Smithing market because she was one of the few players who could smith high-level armour and weaponry early in RS1. After she had used her high level to enrich herself, she began to offer her services for free, which led other players to impersonate her in an attempt to scam innocent players by pretending to offer assistance with Smithing for free. Bluerose13x suffered heavily from this because the victims truly believed that they had been scammed by the real Bluerose13x, which caused many people to distrust her. Bluerose13x was known as a relatively withdrawn player who, despite helping other people obtain adamant and rune weapons or armour, was not very sociable and often had a sense of sarcasm hidden in her demeanor. Nevertheless, she is considered to be one of the first RuneScape ‘celebrities’ and introduced many of the high-level weapons to the game at that time, such as rune 2h swords. These swords could not be obtained anywhere else yet, so she had the liberty of charging millions of gp for the rarer weapons. The release of dragon weapons in 2002 reduced the street price of rune weapons, but by then she had already become one of the richest players of the game, so she could afford to offer her services for free. Bluerose13x’s fame was limited to RS1. She did shortly play RS2 in 2004, but was not convinced by it and decided to quit the game. In 2005 she briefly returned to try the new Slayer skill. Over the course of the next year, until today, she would be inactive for the most part, but still return every now and then. In 2015 she returned to RuneScape and changed her name several times. She lost her original name, Bluerose13x, to someone else. It is unknown whether this was a deliberate choice or if she was unware of the consequences of changing her name. Either way, the name Bluerose13x is no longer on the original account.

Bonebreaker6: The last player to own Overall rank one in RS1 is Bonebreaker6. He obtained this rank in October 2003, after Tks (the rank one at that time) had requested her account to be locked. In August of 2003 Bonebreaker6 had passed L6vi in the hiscores, another top player in RS1. Bonebreaker6 was the first person to reach Overall level 1,600 and he stayed rank one until March 2004, losing his rank to Zezima. Bonebreaker6 does no longer appear in the hiscores and any further information about him has not survived the test of time. What is certain about him, however, is that he quit the game in the early years of RS2 and never returned.

Deja Vu Xiii: He is one those persons who never really became famous, but whose achievements were still noticed by many. From 2007 until early in 2009 Deja Vu Xiii focused single-mindedly on training his Melee combat skills to 200m xp. In the process of this he became the first person to reach 200m xp in Constitution in 2009, after which he immediately quit RuneScape. By then he had already achieved 200m xp in Attack, Defence and Strength; although never as the first person to do so: he was the second person for Attack, the third person for Defence and the eight person for Strength. Deja Vu Xiii was interested only in Melee and did not combine this with training Slayer, which he left behind at level 85. Altogether Deja Vu Xiii was the first person to reach the maximum xp in all Melee skills. The next person in the list, Drumgun, would do one step better and expand this to include the other combat skills too. Only 87m of Deja Vu Xiii’s 887m total xp has been gained in non-Melee skills. On Zybez he explained that he had done Attack at dust devils, receiving thirteen dragon chainbodies from them; 80m Defence xp at abyssal demons, receiving around two 251 hundred abyssal whips from them; the next 50m Defence xp at dust devils, giving him another seven dragon chainbodies; the final 50m Defence xp at armoured zombies, where he also gained 110m Strength xp; and the remaining 70m Strength xp at the Ape Atoll skeletons.

Drumgun: Today known as the first person to reach 5.2 billion xp, or the highest amount xp possible in the game, his fame started much earlier, even before he made his first appearance on the front page of the hiscores. Drumgun started playing RuneScape in 2005. Between 2006 and 2010 he was considered to be one of the best non-front page skillers of the game due to his exceptionally fast xp gains in the Hunter skill. He achieved 200m xp in that skill in April 2009, as the seventh person to do so, and had by then already succeeded in impressing the world of skillers, despite not having a high rank in the Overall hiscores. His most mind-boggling achievement at that moment was doing more than 70m Hunter xp in a month by using the red chinchompas Hunter method, providing around 120k-130k xp per hour without the existence of bonus xp. From 2009 until early in 2011 he focused on reaching 200m xp in the combat skills. By then he had accumulated more than two billion Overall xp, which would have put him high on the front page of the hiscores if he had not decided to keep at least one of his skill levels at below 99. In July of 2010 Drumgun achieved 200m xp in Summoning as the first person to do so, which was also the last combat skill in which he still needed to reach the highest amount of xp. In December of 2012 he reached level 120 in Dungeoneering and maxed for the first time. This immediately placed him at rank three in the Overall hiscores, below Jake (on two) and Suomi (on one). Jagex added the Divination skill to the game in August of 2013. Drumgun managed to obtain 200m xp in that skill, as the first person, in just five months. He took rank two from Jake early in 2014 and accepted that he would be the second person to reach maximum Overall xp of 5.2 billion. Suomi was too far ahead of him, passing him would not be possible. However, that changed when Suomi surprisingly quit at around 5 billion xp, which allowed Drumgun to pass him in May of 2014. Drumgun reached 5.2 billion xp on 3rd July 2014, an achievement that everyone would have considered impossible just five years earlier. In 2014 Mod MMG revealed in a news post that Drumgun has played at an average of just over thirteen hours per days since the creation of his account. His biggest achievements include setting dazzling Hunter xp records, being the first person to reach 200m xp in Summoning and Divination, and being the first person to reach 200m xp in all skills, effectively securing his spot at the top of the hiscores until a new skill is released.

El Popo1: El Popo1 is a former rank 1 in F2P. He started playing this game in RS1, but his stats were still low during that period. Only since 2007 did he start to appear near the top of F2P hiscores. Eventually he became a direct competitor of Syzygy and S Diamant Y, the other top F2P players of that time. El Popo1 managed to obtain and maintain rank two in F2P for a couple of years, below S Diamant Y in the hiscores. El Popo1's xp gains gradually started to increase in 2009 and he began to average at around 300M xp/year, in an attempt to close the xp gap between him and S Diamant Y. After the release of Dungeoneering in April of 2010, he decided to go for level 120 because he knew that S Diamant Y could be passed by doing so. However, she suddenly quit in 2010, allowing El Popo1 to seize rank one right away in F2P. He held that tank until Jagex removed the F2P hiscores in November of 2011, after which he decided to become a paying RuneScape player for the first time in his RuneScape career, and that because there was little point in continuing to play in F2P without any hiscores. Apart from holding rank one in F2P for a year and a half, he was also the first free player to reach one billion total xp, which he achieved in February of 2011.

Elias: After previously trying and immediately quitting RuneScape in 2001, Elias returned five years later in 2006 to catch up on the things that he had missed. He became known for being a regular in the top five of the hiscores from November 2010 till the release of Divination in August of 2013. His most prominent achievement is becoming rank one of the game from late in June of 2011 till September of the same year, a period in which Elias was the first person to reach three 252 billion total xp. Over the course of the years he succeeded in obtaining 200m xp in fourteen skill, most of them being the buyable skills. He acquired all of his money through Grand Exchange merchanting, claiming to make an average profit of 25m gp per day at his peak. Elias started to uphold a negative opinion about the future of RuneScape during his time at the top of the hiscores. This was not unusual for the top players of that era because all of them had grown up in RuneScape and accomplished their achievements when bonus xp was absent and when the only way of gaining xp in a skill was by actually training it. They considered the introduction of xp-boosting content to be a devaluation of their achievements. Nevertheless, Elias’s favourite activity was Dungeoneering, a relatively late addition to the game. Before ascending to the top of the hiscores, Elias had been inspired by several other former front page players. These include Aasiwat, Lucipher6 and Yogosun. Elias quit playing RuneScape shortly before the release of Divination.

Elvis: Formerly known as Nintendo Swe, his unusual initial name was enough to be recognized in- game. He regularly appeared in the top ten of the hiscores in the same period as Elias, which was enough to confuse people every now and then. Both players initially had completely different names. After a while it happened that people began to mix both names up, thinking it was the other player. The fact that both players were from the same country only added to that confusion. At the time that Elias reached three billion xp as rank one in 2011, Elvis was ranked fifth with 2.6 billion xp. Elvis remained on the front page of the hiscores until August of 2014 and ended up reaching 200m xp in seventeen skills, with his most notable one being the fourth person to reach 200m xp in the Prayer skill.

Fat Wrecked: He was high-ranked in Attack during the period 2006-2008 and became a relatively well-known RuneScape video maker in 2008. Everything was going just fine for him until 12th May 2008, when tragedy struck like a lightning bolt in a clear sky. Fat Wrecked had passed away as a result of heart failure caused by a congenital form of myopathy. At that time he held rank three in the Attack hiscores, which is why many people recognized his name when the news of his decease was made public in RuneScape. Some of the players who had watched Fat Wrecked’s videos uploaded tribute videos to YouTube to honour him.

Gearshifter: He was the first person to reach combat level 123 in RS1. Level 123 was the highest level due to a different combat formula. Only four players were able to reach this level before RS2’s release in March of 2004. The other three players were Arc Druid, Lilyuffie88 and S A X, not in that order.

Gertjaars: A RuneScape player who began his Gielinor adventures in January 2005. His main achievement is obtaining rank one in the Overall hiscores and holding it for eighteen consecutive months, from November 2008 till April 2010. Gertjaars’s rise to the top began in 2008 and was facilitated by the Grand Exchange. He successfully turned this new trading mechanism into an efficient moneymaking method, as did many other high-ranked players, and was regularly involved in merchanting clans who informed him about the next merchanting item before sharing that information with other clan members. This allowed him to accumulate billions of gp in a matter of months, money that he spent on training buyable skills to 200m xp. These skills include Cooking, Crafting, Fletching and two other skills. If the skill could be trained at a bank, he could usually be found at the Grand Exchange combining his skilling with merchanting. Other players on the front page were doing exactly the same, but Gertjaars did it faster, devouring rank after rank as he headed for the number one spot, which was taken by Kingduffy at that moment, who eventually lost his rank in November of 2008. Gertjaars had joined Supreme Skillers earlier that year, a clan led by Aasiwat at that moment, the latter of which would be the rank two of RuneScape for as long as Gertjaars was rank one. Gertjaars’s training speed was at a different level than that of any of his direct competitors. At one point Gertjaars was more than 300m xp ahead of Aasiwat and lower ranks were even farther behind. In March of 2010 Gertjaars reached two billion total xp as the first 253 person to do so, still with xp rates that were of a different nature. At one point he was on the verge of doing something in one year that had taken Zezima almost six years. Gertjaars had succeeded in gaining 970m xp in just twelve months and it looked like he could break the one billion xp mark. However, at 970m he switched his focus from buyable skills to Slayer, a skill which yielded much less total xp at that time and prevented him from reaching the magical figure of one billion. His reign at the top of the hiscores was abruptly ended after eighteen months when Jagex added the Dungeoneering skill to the game in April of 2010. He did not want to train the new skill because of the teamwork aspect behind it. However, Gertjaars had already been losing his motivation for several months, this was visible by the fact that Aasiwat had been able to close most of the xp gap. If Dungeoneering had not been released, Aasiwat would probably have overtaken Gertjaars within a month. Eventually the release of Dungeoneering and the fact that is was teamwork skill was too much for Gertjaars. Without much hesitation he took the decision to permanently quit RuneScape, which he did in May of 2010.

Inuyasha8750: As someone who was familiar with the inner working of game engines, Inuyasha8750 used his knowledge to perfect training methods and to maximize xp gain. He avoiding time-wasting like the plague, which is what probably lies at the basis of his achievements. Inuyasha8750 started playing RuneScape in 2001, but did not become famous until the early years of RS2. In July of 2005 he took rank one in Agility at around 25m xp and would remain the rank for two years, until July 2007. What is so remarkable about this achievement is that Agility was not the only skill in which he managed to obtain a high rank. At the end of 2005, Inuyasha8750 entered the top ten in Farming and successfully defended his rank for almost two years, with rank three being the highest rank he ever achieved in the skill. However, two skills were not enough… The Hunter skill was released in November of 2006. Inuyasha8750 almost immediately shifted his attention from Agility to Hunter in a successful attempt to attain a high rank. Although he was not the first person to reach level 99 in the skill, he did manage to become rank one in the skill in December. At the beginning of 2007 Inuyasha8750 held three in Farming, rank one in Agility and rank one in Hunter. And if that is not impressive enough, he managed to gain 60m Hunter xp in just two months by using the red chinchompa method, and that while defending his Agility rank as well. It is safe to assume that skillers looked up to him. Even though his achievements seemed unrealistic, the reason why he managed to generate sufficiently high xp rates to defend his rank in all three skills is because he strived to be efficient and avoided standing about without doing anything at all. However, in July 2007, when he had just reached 70m xp in Agility, he received a permanent ban. Many rumours exist regarding the reason, but none of those have been ever been proven, although it has been confirmed that he was not banned for botting. This is where the public knowledge about him ends. No one would ever hear from Inuyaha8750 again and it was generally assumed that he had either completely quit or decided to continue playing in obscurity on a new account. The latter is how it turned out to be and how I met him in the friends chat of a former rank one player. He has asked me to keep his account hidden because he has chosen to leave his past as Inuyasha8750 behind. On his new account he decided not to play competitively, but he did take a keen interest in Grand Exchange merchanting. He enjoyed merchanting on his own, but also operated behind the scenes in a merchanting clan and eventually became a successful merchant. Nevertheless, Inuyasha8750 was still a skiller, so going for 99 in multiple skills was inevitable. Of course, with Agility and Hunter being two of them… Inuyasha8750 permanently quit in 2014 after being disappointed in the evolution of both the main game and Old School RuneScape. He has indicated that he has no plans to return.

Jake: Jake began playing RuneScape in 2005 and reached level 99 in all skills in May of 2009. A month later he would enter the top hundred for the first time. Jake regularly visited Gertjaars’s friend chat when he reigned at the top of the hiscores in 2008 and 2009. He was given the general rank and began to spend most of his time in Gertjaars’s friend chat, despite having his own (but much smaller) friend chat. As Jake slowly gained more ranks in the top hundred, Gertjaars’s fans 254 began to support Jake as well. An important event because after the release of Dungeoneering in 2010, Gertjaars quit and many of his fans decided to migrate to Jake’s friend chat instead, turning it into a big and very active place. Jake became a regular top five player after the release of Dungeoneering, joining others whom we have already discussed, such as Elias and Elvis. In October of 2011 Jake managed to grab rank two in the hiscores, a rank which he considered to be the highest possible because at that time Suomi, the rank one, had a comfortable lead of almost 300m xp, a gap that would only grow over the course of the months. Surprisingly, Suomi did not train Divination after its release in August of 2013. This caused Jake to automatically become the new rank one of the game, a rank which he held for two months, after which he lost it again to Suomi. In January of 2014 Jake decided to quit RuneScape at a total xp of just over 4.9 billion. At that moment he needed to reach 200m xp in just two more skills, Agility and Runecrafting. It is possible that he was not ready for that challenge because Agility was arguably the most tedious skill of the game at moment and both skills yielded relatively low xp gains.

Jdelacroix: Jdelacroix started playing RuneScape either in 2005 or 2006 and is known for having been a regular on the front page of the hiscores since the summer of 2009, only rarely dropping out of it. Jdelacroix is often compared to Zarfot, another top skiller, due to having a similar playing style that revolves largely around efficiency and having the same style of communication with a fine sense of sarcasm. Furthermore, Jdelacroix is a former rank one player, a rank that he achieved in December of 2010 and held until April of 2011. After taking his spot at the top of the hiscores table, he changed his display name to ‘FinallyOnTop’ as a reference to having been in the top ten since September of 2009, although with a break of several months due to the release of Dungeoneering in 2010. After losing his rank one early in 2011, he remained a top five player until September of 2014, when he was about to reach five billion total xp. Eventually he ended up becoming the sixth person to reach the maximum total xp of 5.2 billion, which he achieved in December of the same year. The reason why this achievement is more remarkable than that of the other people is because Jdelacroix gained a large portion of his total xp before bonus xp and microtransactions started to become commonplace, nor did he ever participate in the highly lucrative but heavily frowned upon activity of dicing. Jdelacroix accumulated the necessary financial resources for 200m xp in all buyable skills between 2008 and 2011 through Grand Exchange merchanting. He is regarded as one of the few old school top players on the front of page of the hiscores, stemming from a different era than most other front page players who heavily relied on bonus xp and other methods of boosting xp in the presence of training methods with a relatively low click-intensity, which is unlike the era Jdelacroix spent most of his time in. Other front page players to whom applies the same include Drumgun, Paperbag and Suomi.

Jebrim: In 2002 Jebrim signed up to RuneScape with another account and that is when his journey began. The account on which he became famous, The1general/Jebrim, was made in 2005. As he started training Agility, it soon became his favourite skill and he reached 99 in it in April of 2008. He slowly became obsessed – in his own words – with his Agility ranks and decided to train it to 200m xp, a goal that he achieved in just twenty months while breaking several xp records, such as 7m Agility xp in a week and almost 25m xp in a month by using the Dorgesh-Kaan course, which granted about 60k xp per hour at that time before being nerfed in June of 2009. In November of 2009 he became the third person to achieve 200m xp in Agility. At that moment he decided to set a most unusual goal: he wanted to do one billion Agility xp, spread across five accounts, because he loved the skill so much. The world of top skillers responded harshly to the announcement of that goal, considering Jebrim to be deluded for thinking that he could ever achieve something like that. Many people refused to take him seriously, so he became the subject of regular mockery in the next years. This might partly have been caused by his over-the-top self-confidence, bordering to arrogance according to the public opinion. Nevertheless, all the criticism did not discourage Jebrim and he eagerly began his personal Sisyphean task. Almost exactly two years after reaching 200m xp on his first account, he achieved the same on his second account. Just eleven months later, in 255

October 2012, he achieved 200m Agility xp on a third account by using the Advanced Barbarian course and the Flash Powder Factory. In just four and half years he had succeeded in doing 600m Agility xp. It started to look more and more like he was going to prove his haters wrong, and he had many. The release of Old School RuneScape early in 2013 was an incentive to change his focus for a while, pausing his goal of one billion Agility. In Old School RuneScape he became the first person to achieve 99 Agility and the first person to reach level 99 in all skills, the latter of which took him only eight months. He then decided to resume his initial Agility goal and to spread it across both versions of the game. At the moment of writing, early 2015, Jebrim was just 10m xp away from reaching 200m xp on his fourth account. He will do the remainder by using the Flash Powder Factory, which gives around 80k Agility xp per hour. He does not have the requirements to enter Elf City, so he cannot make use of the Agility course of Prifddinas that provides much higher xp rates. He also estimated that he has spent over 12k hours on training the skill. In addition to his one billion xp goal, but not included in it, Jebrim also began training Agility on a RSC account in 2011. Even though there are no official hiscores for that game, he claims to have accumulated 105m Agility xp in RS1 over the course of the years. Today he is still working on his goal of one billion Agility xp, although he has much less time than he used to have. Several players who inspired him are Inuyasha8750, Suomi and Zarfot.

Kingduffy: After the release of Summoning in January of 2008, Kingduffy needed only a couple of weeks to become the new rank one of RuneScape. At that moment his total xp was at just below 700m. Over the course of the next ten months Kingduffy would regularly but only briefly lose his rank one to previously maxed people who finally reached level 99 in Summoning, such as Green098 in April 2008 and Yogosun during the summer of the same year. In September Kingduffy re-obtained rank one for the last time. Meanwhile Gertjaars had started to pass rank after rank until he eventually took rank one from Kingduffy in November. Kingduffy had just achieved one billion total xp at that moment. In 2009 he gradually lost more ranks, eventually disappearing from the front page. At his peak, another of his achievements was being one of the very few people who were ranked in the top hundred in all skills at the same time. This had previously only been accomplished by Zezima. After the release of Dungeoneering in 2010, he did not compete at all and decided to take things slowly, eventually reaching level 120 in it in May of 2011. This accomplishment brought him back into the top ten at just over two billion total xp. In the next years he successfully defended his top ten position, regularly dropping out of it, until late in 2013. Halfway in 2014 Kingduffy disappeared from the front page of the hiscores for the first time in over three years and would never return to it. Remarkable is that, despite having just over four billion total xp early in 2015, Kingduffy has 200m xp in only three skills: Cooking, Dungeoneering and Fletching. All of his other skills, with the exception of Divination, are at over 100m xp.

L6vi: A RS1 player who inspired many people. Late in December of 2001 L6vi took rank one in the RuneScape hiscores from Tiwi. In March 2002 he was the first player to reach Overall level 1,100. Later on he also passed the Overall levels 1,200 and 1,300 mark as the first person to do so. This means that he was rank one of the game for at least several months, possibly with several interruptions. L6vi was one of the first players to successfully defend his rank for a relatively long period. The early days of RuneScape were characterized by a fast-changing hierarchy in the hiscores. Although when exactly is not known, he probably permanently lost his rank before the summer of 2002. He continued playing the game after the release of RS2, but as an average non- competitive player. By early 2008 he had dropped out of the top 20,000, at a total xp of just 145m. His heyday was in RS1, when he defended his rank one and was the second person to reach level 99 in Cooking. L6vi still appears in the hiscores. He initially lost his display name during the name clean-up of 2014, but it was later given back after a successful campaign on the forum led by myself. I had been able to snipe the name and to store it on another account, before someone else would be able to. A Jagex moderator later removed the name from my secondary account and gave it back to the real L6vi after reading my thread. – Thank you for that. L6vi was last seen playing 256 early in 2011, but has stayed away from the game ever since.

Larryr: By far the most famous runecrafter in the history of RuneScape. From 2004 till late in 2006 she was the owner of a nature rune-making company that revolved around supplying essence to her in return for a fee. I have already described her Runecrafting business in great detail in the chapter about skilling, but I will quickly repeat the most important information. Her business was supported by a professional internal structure. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the runners (= the helpers). They were supposed to bring unnoted essence to nature rune altar, which is located on Karamja, where collectors would accept the essence in a trade and give the runners 25 noted essence and 10,525 gp. The runners’ job was essentially to turn noted essence into unnoted essence and to bring it the nature rune altar, where Larryr would be waiting to receive the unnoted essence from the collectors. The Grand Exchange did not exist yet, so the CEO had to sell runes and buy essence by using the forums or by visiting the popular trading locations in world 2. Larryr paid a fixed sum of money to all the non-runners in the business. Larryr’s business would continue to exist until 2006, when she quit RuneScape. Any attempt to keep the business alive failed. However, during its existence the Runecrafting company was an ideal environment for players who wanted a good moneymaking method, but did not have the required level to craft double natures, which was the most profitable activity of RuneScape at that time. Larryr was the only crafter of the company and was bombarded with trade requests. The fact that she did not need to travel between the bank and the nature rune altar enabled her to gain a lot of xp at a fast pace. She achieved level 99, or 13m xp, in September of 2004 and became rank one in the skill within a couple of weeks afterwards. Just four months later she already reached 30m xp in the skill. Larryr passed the 100m xp mark in October of 2005. Meanwhile the rank two in the skill had only 22m xp, which suggests that Larryr’s actual xp rate must have around five times as high as the regular xp rate without runners, or around 80-90k xp per hour for Larryr as opposed to the normal xp rate of a little below 20k xp per hour for everyone else. She quit RuneScape in 2006 at 157m Runecrafting xp. It would eventually take another three years for someone to pass her in the hiscores, which was done in 2009 by Phoenix Odin. Larryr managed to hold rank one in Runecrafting for five consecutive years, without a single interruption, thanks to her efficient runecrafing company. In 2011 Mod Ash created a new wizard inside the Runecrafting Guild named Larriar, named after Larryr.

Lightning: Together with Gugge, Merlin and Rab she was one of the four beta testers of the game who were given the privilege of testing RuneScape before it went live on 4th January 2001. Right after the release of the game, she founded a clan, called The Wanderers, that would be relatively strong until the introduction of the Wilderness in August of 2001. Early in 2001, possibly in January already, she became rank one of the game and kept it for several months until April, when she lost it to Tiwi. Her reign of three around months (it might have been shorter or longer) is why Lightning is generally considered to be the first ‘real’ rank one of the game. During her time at the top of the hiscores she was the first person to achieve total levels 500, 600, 700 and 800. The first year of the game was the important year for her. In 2002 and later she never succeeded in becoming the best player of the game again. Lightning continued to play in RS2, although with many long-lasting breaks. At the end of 2007 she had around 187m total xp and was ranked in the top 3,000. Her last in-game activity can be traced back to February of 2014. She was one of the many female top players in RS1, initially most famous for her period as being rank, but today most frequently recognized because of her former status as beta tester of the game.

Lilyuffie88: Another famous female RS1 player, but her fame continued in RS2 for another three years. Lilyuffie88 was the first person to achieve level 99 Prayer and level 126 combat in RS2, the highest combat level at that time. She also managed to achieve the highest combat level in RS1 (123), but not as the first person to do so. Her direct competitors for Prayer in RS1 were Gearshifter and S A X, but she was a threat in the overall hiscores as well. Lilyuffie88 was a top skiller and top fighter who could easily have aimed for total rank one, but she did not. In retrospect people referred 257 to Lilyuffie88 as the female Zezima, which is a huge compliment, considering that Zezima dominated at the top of hiscores for many years in RS2. Lilyuffie88 at one point had the highest total xp in-game, but was later overtaken by Zezima. As of 2004 her Prayer battle continued with Hasla Ragga as most prominent competitor. She nearly always stayed ahead by a few 100k xp, but frequently did lose her rank one, though. She also became rank one in Constitution and rank one in Ranged at some point, but went inactive after the release of the Construction skill in May of 2006, causing her to permanently lose rank one in Constitution, Prayer and Ranged. She was rank one in all of those three skills at the same time. At the release of the skill she had around 550m total xp, which would have put her at rank four in the Overall hiscores if she had trained Construction. Lilyuffie88 did not return to RuneScape until early 2008, all of her ranks gone and no longer in range. In 2011 I talked to her for my initial thread about the history of the game and she was so kind to provide a list containing all the dates on which she achieved her last Prayer levels. I have chosen to include it in this PDF:

22nd November 2003: 93 Prayer, rank 1 Prayer in RS1 18th December 2003: 94 Prayer 21st January 2004: 95 Prayer 8th February 2004: 96 Prayer 5th March 2004: 97 Prayer 4th April 2004: 98 Prayer + 126 Combat 12th May 2004: 99 Prayer

Lover Romeo: As romantic as his name might be, his achievements have made people wonder if he is actually human. He reached 200m Agility xp and 200m Mining xp on Valentine’s day of 2009 as rank one in both skills. Of course, what other date would you pick with such a name? Many found it hard to believe that someone could truly, in a fair way, have pulled off such an achievement. Lover Romeo gained all of his Mining xp in the Quarry, the southwestern corner of the Kharidian Desert, because the Living Rock Cavern had not been released yet. He did all of his Agility xp at Ape Atoll or Dorgesh-Kaan because any better course had not been added to the game yet. This means that he trained Mining at around 40k-50k xp per hour and Agility at around 50k, considering that he was also a player moderator and regularly chatted with other players. Based on those xp rates achieving 200m in both skills must have taken around 8k hours. How could someone have trained both Agility and Mining while defending rank one in both skills? People regularly accused him of botting because of how surreal his achievements were. However, it was easy for people to forget that Lover Romeo had dedicated many years this his achievement. People had been following his progress for two years and those who managed to talk to him described Lover Romeo as an extremely friendly and optimistic person. That would explain his status as player moderator. Reaching 200m xp in two of the hardest skills of the game at that time did not earn him any more respect because he already been given that by the skilling community long before accomplishing his goal.

LtAngel: Another female RS1 player. One would be inclined to think that female players dominated the early years of the game. LtAngel joined RuneScape in May 2001 and she was the first person to reach level 99 in the Crafting skill, which she achieved on 30th March 2003. She then successfully defended her rank one in the skill for four years until March of 2007, when Paulrat3 passed her. Together with Bwareofmef, LtAngel founded a small Crafting service in RS1, called LtAngel’s Crafting and Enchantment Services, in which they would craft dragonstone amulets for other people. First for free, later they charged hundred silver ores/bars whenever they were in need of money. Quite soon she expanded her services to include any type of Crafting-related item. The only requirement was that the other players had to provide the required resources. She might have charged for specific items, but not for others. She continued to offer her services in RS2 for several years and became a member of the clan Crafters99, in which people could ask for Crafting assistance in general. LtAngel discontinued her service when Jagex added the assist system to the 258 game at the end of 2007. The Lt in her name stands for Lady Texas.

Lucipher6: Lucipher6 is player who stems from the Gertjaars era and began his RuneScape adventure in January 2005, just like Gertjaars. Lucipher6 started to become a regular front page player as of April 2008 and was consistently part of the top ten between November 2008 and April 2010, with rank three being the highest rank that he ever obtained. Just like Allar and Gertjaars, he was a member of the former top skilling clan Supreme Skillers. In 2009 when holding rank three, he was mistakenly banned for macroing (the use of bots). The game’s bot-detection system had recognized his mousekeys as a bot. There had already been a lot of controversy about mousekeys prior to this event, but Jagex moderators had always stated that the use of mousekeys is allowed. The mousekeys feature is a standard function present in all computers that allows people to use the numeric keyboard as a mouse. Many of the top skillers at that time made use of that feature because it is a lot less straining for the wrists and generally more efficient because the fixed space intervals at which a mousekeys-driven cursor moves can eliminate most of the misclicks that regularly occur when using a normal mouse. Within a few days Jagex realized that there had been a mistake and they rectified it by lifting the ban. Lucipher6 himself just continued skilling for another year until his activity decreased significantly. It turned out that he had applied for a job at Jagex and they had accepted his application. He started in customer support and over the course of the year he has fulfilled several roles within the company: Quality Assurance (QA) team member, content developer and technical developer. He is currently (summer 2015) a senior technical developer and part of the ninja team. His moderator name is Mod Hunter.

Mendark 9: This RS1 player became an idol to many of the later top players. As a true F2P legend, he used to be rank one (in F2P) for a long while in RS1 and RS2. He was considered to be a relatively efficient player who used to train with Suomi every now and then. It is said that it took him only 28 days to achieve level 99 Firemaking, which was very fast at that time. Soon after the release of RS2 Mendark 9 obtained combat level 123. He was primarily known for being extremely far ahead of his competitors, although there are no data about xp or level differences. He quit halfway in 2006, making way for Syzygy to pass him. Surprisingly, in his later years he primarily occupied himself with crafting air runes and that is how he trained to at least level 97 in Runecrafting. Other F2P legends, such as Syzygy, S Diamant Y used to be a fan of Mendark 9. Also Suomi admired him for his achievements. His latest RuneScape activity dates back to November 2011, although the account was likely recovered by someone else.

N0valyfe: Zezima’s most significant competitor started playing RuneScape in July of 2004. Zezima and N0valyfe were clearly the two best players of 2005 and 2006. They took rank one from each other several times, some people describe that period as the great fight for rank one, although Zezima was on top for the vast majority of the time. Unlike one would expect, they did not treat each other like enemies. Zezima and N0valyfe respected each other and later on Zezima stated in an interview that players like N0valyfe and Lilyuffie88 deserve as much fame as he does. In the second half of 2004 N0valyfe joined the highly successful PvP clan The Gladiatorz. He had a preference for skilling from day one of his RuneScape adventure, but it was not until in 2005 after becoming rich from Slayer that he realized that he could achieve level 99 in all skills if he really tried. Despite being a top player, he did not describe himself as being competition-minded and he disliked the thought of having to race against someone else. He believed that everyone had their own way of playing and that is all. He was never driven be a desire for fame, but wanted to prove to himself that he could master all skills in an efficient, intelligent and elegant manner. N0valyfe was the first person to attain the highest total level after the release of Construction in 2006. He also maintained a top five rank in the skills Construction, Cooking, Farming and Fletching. A little later he decided to go for 200m xp in Cooking and Fletching, both of which he also achieved in 2006. In November of 2006 N0valyfe announced that he had retired from RuneScape. He had achieved all of his goals and there was no longer a reason for him to stick around. On the day that his membership 259 expired, he had around 730m total xp, all of which he had accumulated in fewer than two and half years of playing the game. Even though Zezima was his only real competitor, N0valyfe began playing the game several years after Zezima, giving the latter a comfortable lead to begin with. N0valyfe briefly returned in April of 2010 to try the new Dungeoneering skill, but he soon lost his motivation and quit again.

Rab: In 1999 Rab and Andrew Gower met each other on Games Domain, a site which used to host other games and which no longer exists. Andrew was a moderator at Games Domain and contributed to some of the games that had been released on the website. In early 2000 Andrew invited Rab to test a new game which he had been developing. Rab would become one of the four beta testers for the game, together with Gugge, Lightning and Merlin. After the public release of the game, Rab became more than just a normal player, though. He started helping Andrew with the game and ended up writing the quest Romeo and Juliet. He also suggested several important changes that now still have an effect on our gameplay. Some of these changes were placing furnaces far away from anvils, the possibility of failing to smith iron bars and several other things. Rab also wrote the first in-game guides that could be read in Lumbridge. Andrew and Paul later also appointed him as a Moderator with ban and mute powers. People who had broken rules would sometimes be teleported by Rab to his otherwise inaccessible secret office in a building in Al- Kharid, where he would chat with them about the ‘recent events’. Paul used this location for the same reason. In December of 2001 Rab eventually resigned as moderator because it had become too much work for just one person to handle. Rab is generally considered to be the first player to have signed up to RuneScape. This is true, but no one knows exactly why or how that could be proved, so I will share that information. At around September of 2001 Andrew added the hiscore tables to the game (the initial hiscores had initially been included in the news letters). At that moment the developers had already announced that several new skills were soon going to be released. Of course these skills were not visible in the hiscores yet. However, the players knew that the hiscore pages for each skill carried a value. It is not known how this was denoted, but the hiscore page for Attack, for instance, could have been denoted in the hiscores as ‘Highscore01’, or anything similar to that. The eighth skill would then be ‘Highscore08’ etc. until reaching the last skill of the game. However, some players discovered that they could continue to use that method for skills that had not been released yet, but were already added to the hiscores (but were still invisible). One of those skills was Herblaw (the original name for Herblore). Of course everyone had level one in it without any xp because the skill had not yet been added to the game, but the order in which the names were displayed followed the same order in which accounts were created. Rab’s name was at the top of the Herblaw hiscore page, which means that his account was the oldest player account. The existence of this normally invisible page allowed the players to find out how many players had created an account before them. Obviously, all of the beta testers were mentioned at the top of the page. Rab quit playing RuneScape at the beginning of 2003, but returned every now and then to chat with other players. His reason for quitting is quite peculiar. One day he was just walking around and wound up on the grassy area north of Draynor Manor and south of the Barbarian Village. He found the shade of the grass to be too bright and too invasive, he just could not stand it. That might sound very weird, but I actually have a similar personal experience with training Mining in the Kharidian Desert, which I could not do for a full hour just because the yellow shade of the sand was too bright for me. Over the course of the years Rab has regularly logged in to catch up on everything, usually leaving several months between his visits. If you are lucky, you might be able to catch him online next time. That is how I got all of the information that I mentioned above!

S Diamant Y: She was the second person to max overall in F2P without becoming a member. S Diamant Y started playing the game at the end of 2004 after her cousin had told her about it. Just like Syzygy, Mendark 9 was her idol and it was he who inspired S Diamant Y to max in F2P. She eventually became well-known because of her high xp gains in F2P. She used to be rank one in F2P for many years, until the release of the Dungeoneering skill in 2010. One of her competitors, El 260

Popo1, progressed faster than she did in the Dungeoneering skill and was able to take her rank. S Diamant Y was the first free player to reach 500m total xp and 200m xp in the Cooking skill in F2P. She quit RuneScape in 2010, but returned a while later and noticed that El Popo1 had become P2P.

S U O M I/Suomi: There are many reasons why this person could be recognized by a random person in RuneScape. If you were a RS1 player, you might recognize him because he used to be a high-ranked free player at that moment; if your personal heyday was in 2008 and 2009, you might recognize him as that skiller with, arguably, insane xp gains who refused to max his total level; if you started playing this game in 2011 or later, you will probably know as being the former rank one of RuneScape. Whatever the reason, there is a lot that can be said about Suomi. So what most people who know Suomi do not know is that he used to be a top F2P player from 2002 until 2005. He regularly trained with Mendark 9, a living legend at that time, and was able to obtain rank three in F2P at a total level of 1,300. Evidently, he also managed to attain a high rank in several skills, despite being a free player. Other players whom he admired were Whitemagem and Zezima. The latter inspired him to become P2P and to go for 200m xp in all skills. A goal which he attempted to achieve in manner that no other person would ever copy. It started with his aversion to fame. He never wanted to became famous, so he decided that he should always keep at least one skill at below level 99, so that he would not appear on the first pages of the hiscores. By 2008 a no xp waste mentality started to become more prevalent in the RuneScape community. Suomi took that one step further and decided that only the maximum xp rates for each skills were acceptable. This mindset in combination with his determination and the many hours that he played every day, resulted in incredible xp rates that had never been seen before. For example, in 2008 Suomi did 180m Fishing xp in eight months by using the Barbarian heavy rod fishing method, which yielded around 65k xp per hour. In the second half of 2009 he gained 180m Agility xp in just six months by the Advanced Barbarian Agility course at xp rates of around 72k xp per hour. In 2010 he managed to do 28m Mining xp in a month of training the skill inside the Loving Rock Cavern. The newer players should keep in mind that the present-day concept of bonus xp did not exist yet at that time. Although many players of the skilling community admired him, he was also disliked by some because he constantly asked for donations. And when a person decided to donate to him, the trade had to happen as fast as possible, preferably in under ten seconds, so that he would not waste too much time. Suomi did not care about the criticism, and rightfully so, because by September of 2010 he had received around 800m gp in total from all donations over the course of the years. This significantly increased after the trade limit had been removed in 2011, allowing him to buy the required resources for the buyable skills. That is when he decided to max his total level, automatically becoming rank five in the hiscores with a total xp of just over two billion. In September of 2011 he took rank one in the hiscores and would hold onto it until the release of Divination in August of 2013. By the time that he achieved five billion xp early in 2013, he was more than 650m xp ahead of rank two, Jake. Considering that Divination had not been released yet, five billion xp was the highest possible xp. In other words, not Drumgun but Suomi was the first person to reach 200m xp in all skills. Suomi managed to gain 1.9 billion xp in a year’s time at his peak, or a daily average of more than 5.2m xp per day for an entire year, something no one had ever done before. There were more than six months between maxing his xp and the release of Divination, a period that was not enough for Jake to catch up. At the release of Divination Jake was still 480m xp behind, but surprisingly, Suomi allowed Jake to take rank one for a couple of months and waited till the end of October with getting level 99 in the skill. It looked like Suomi was easily going to be the first person to reach the new highest total xp of 5.2 billion, but he quit at exactly 5,020,000,000 xp because he had accidentally gotten level 99 in Divination while his initial intention was to have Jake let rank one for a long time. Perhaps, after all, he really did not like the fame. Another indication of that is the fact that, after he had returned again, he quit at 5,199,999,999 and refused to gain that last one xp. The reason being that he has been waiting for Zezima to catch up with him, so that both of them can max their xp together. The name Suomi refers to the Finnish word Suomi, which means Finland and Finnish. This also immediately reveals in which country he 261 lives.

Skiller 703: As the name suggests, this player became known for his non-combat achievements. His career can be divided into two ears: before the release of Dungeoneering and after it. In the first era he initially became known between 2006 and 2009 for his high levels as a pure skiller. His breakthrough was set in motion once he began to focus on Hunter, in which he wanted 200m xp. He impressed the world of skillers by doing 190m Hunter xp in just twelve months and becoming rank four in the skill. This is also when Drumgun had started to train Hunter and both ended up in a ‘friendly rivalry’, trying to one-up each other with xp gains, although Drumgun eventually took the upper hand. To give a small comparison. According to Runetracker, Skiller 703’s daily xp record at red chinchompas was 2,948k xp, achieved in November of 2008. Drumgun’s was 2,942k xp, achieved in March of 2009. In the end the monthly xp rates revealed that Drumgun was the faster of the two. Later in 2009 Skiller 703 tried his luck with the Thieving skill and achieved 200m xp in it by setting a new monthly record: he became the first person to do 100m Thieving xp in a month, and that was accomplished by using the Pyramid Plunder minigame. By that moment he had also become a part of the highly successful skilling clan Divination that ended up winning three Jagex skilling cups. His second era, if we could call it that, began in April 2010 when Jagex released the Dungeoneering skill. Skiller 703 was known as a person who was driven by achievements. He considered the release of the skill as an opportunity to show himself to the world, so he set a new goal of becoming the first person to reach level 99 in the skill. A goal that he convincingly achieved. In May of 2010 he became the first person to achieve level 99 and he even had a lead of two million xp. In the first two years after that, Skiller 703 tried to compete on the front page of the Overall hiscores. The highest rank he achieved was rank four, which he held for two weeks in October of 2010. He disappeared from the front page in July of 2012 and never returned to it. At this moment, early 2015, Skiller 703 is no longer active in RuneScape.

Syzygy: Syzygy was the first person to reach max overall in F2P without becoming a member. He achieved this on 28th January 2008. Syzygy started playing in 2002, but when Jagex released P2P he decided to stay a free player. His goal was to become a very good free player, without any specific goal at first. Later he decided to go for highest possible overall level in F2P, which he achieved in 2008. A while later he lost his rank one in F2P to S Diamant Y and he would never be able to reacquire that rank. The release of Dungeoneering in 2010 introduced a new difficult challenge for every free player, but Syzygy decided to face it and to get level 99 in the skill. In 2012 he became the first free player to achieve 200m xp in Woodcutting, and 200m Runecrafting xp in 2013. Syzygy is a word from astronomy that is used to refer to the alignment of three or more objects in a gravitational system. It is also a cool tongue-twister if you try to pronounce it very fast ten times in a row. Try it, or first look up how the pronounce it if you are not sure.

Telmomarques: A skiller of the successful Supreme Skillers clan who was a work-in-progress at the time when Gertjaars was comfortably at the top of the hiscores. Telmomarques was part of the first generation of top skillers who succeeded in doing more than 150m xp in a month. This gradually became a more frequent occurrence as of 2009. Telmomarques was the first person to gain more than one billion xp in a year, which he achieved during the period June 2009 – June 2010. Gertjaars had much earlier peaked at around 970m xp in a year when he suddenly decided to train slower skills. Telmomarques entered the front page of the hiscores for the first time in January 2010, at slightly below 1.2 billion xp, and managed to climb up to rank eleven by the time Jagex added Dungeoneering to the game. Little did he know that the release of this skill would forever change his RuneScape career. Many of the former top players either quit or decided not to train Dungeoneering for a while. This allowed Telmomarques to jump to the top of the hiscores. Meanwhile he was also the first person to reach level 120 in Dungeoneering. He obtained Overall 262 rank one in July of 2010 and did not lose it until November of the same year. In 2011 he managed to re-obtain rank one for two months until he quit in July for unknown reason. Much later he changed his name to ‘RIP Bector’ in honor of a real-life friend who had passed away.

The Old Nite: The Old Nite was a well-known and highly respected player in RS1 and the early years of RS2. Not only did he receive attention for his skills, but also for being a community person who was regarded as one of the nicest high-ranked players of his time. Shortly after he achieved 2079 Overall (level 99 in all skills at that time) as the second person to do so (after Zezima), saddening news was spread across the lands of Gielinor: The Old Nite had passed away. The RuneScape world was in shock after hearing this news. He passed away in April of 2006 after losing a long battle to colon cancer.

Thehate: A player who is primarily known for his achievements in RS1. He started playing in 2001 and was the first person to reach level 99 Agility. At that moment he was 8m xp ahead of Agility rank two and it would take five more months for the next person to reach 99. Thehate was also the first person to reach level 99 in five skills, six skills, and much later in 2006 also in 23 skills. In RS1 Thehate was almost consistently ranked on the front page of the hiscores, with rank two being the highest he achieved. Zezima considered Thehate to be one of his skilling rivals, but Thehate was not into the whole concept of needing to compete. He just played the game. Thehate at one point had the highest total xp in-game, but was later overtaken by Lilyuffie88. He continued to be on the front page in RS2 until the summer of 2008. At the end of 2006 he was briefly rank one of the game due to being the first person to max after the release of Hunter. Altogether his long-term achievement of being a front page player for around six years might even stand out the most. In 2009 or later he would no longer be able to compete in the top twenty. After the release of Dungeoneering in 2010, Thehate became a staff member of the extremely popular high-level Dungeoneering clan 3 Binds Only. In the recent years he has started to focus less on skilling and more on meeting the requirements for the Completionist’s cape.

Tks: This RS1 player was the fourth female to hold rank one for a considerable amount of time, after Lightning, Mysticsmagic and Ashley. Tks is also known for being the first person to reach level 99 in the skills Cooking and Fishing, which she accomplished early in 2002 before she ascended to the top of the hiscores. She was rank one of the game for the most part of 2002 and her reign continued into 2003. During her time at the top of the hiscores table she became the first person to reach total levels 1,400 and 1,500. In October of 2003 Tks was passed by Bonebreaker6 after having been rank one for over a year. She was an also known as a very friendly person, but she reportedly refused to play RS2 and requested Jagex to lock her account, although this has never been confirmed. Nothing would be heard of her for a long time until activity on her account was noticed a few years later in RS2. It turned out that her account had been hacked, which she confirmed in 2011 after recovering the account. She had lost several partyhat sets and Christmas crackers, causing her to quit again. Eventually she returned in January of 2015 and was devastated when she saw that she had lost her display name as a result of the name clean-up held in the summer of 2014. Luckily, Tks was another name that I had been able to snipe before someone, possibly with bad intentions, could. My forum campaign for L6vi’s display name had been successful, so I decided to change it into a campaign for Tks and I asked her to post in the thread, which would almost certainly have been sufficient to have Jagex restore the name. Unfortunately, they did not fulfil that request. Tks decided to quit RuneScape because she could not see herself play the game with a different name. It was not until after she had quit that someone made us aware of the fact that we could have swapped our names by using bonds. I am human, I make mistakes too! To this day the name Tks is still not on the original account and it is not likely that the real Tks will return anytime soon. The letters of the name stand for the initials of her real life name.

Villandra: She started her career in January of 2004 and was initially known for having a high 263

Overall level. Early in RS2 she joined the top skilling clan Serenity. Her earlier achievements include being in the top fifteen to achieve 99 Slayer, the maximum total level of 2277 in 2007 and being the third person to reach the highest total level of 2376 after the release of Summoning in 2008. The highest rank that she ever attained was rank three after reaching level 2376, after which she gradually stopped playing on her main account. During the early years of RS2 she had created several other accounts, which is what eventually led to most of the fame she ever acquired. It started with an experiment in 2005. Villandra wondered what the lowest possible combat level is that a Slayer pure could have at level 85 in Slayer, so she created an account for that, called Villaninja, and decided to test it. She ended up reaching combat level 76 at a Slayer level of 85, with average Slayer xp rates that were not much higher than 5k xp per hour. A year later she took it one step further and she wanted to test if she could reach level 99 in Slayer without having a 99 in any of the other skills. This required planning because normally a player would reach level 99 in at least one other combat skill before obtaining 99 in Slayer. She created an account with the name of Slayerbelle for it and gave it a try. In December of 2007 she became the first player to obtain the untrimmed Slayer skillcape. The release of Summoning at the beginning of 2008 gave her a new idea. She now wondered if she could obtain the untrimmed Summoning skillcape, so she created a new account for that, called Lorica. Unsurprisingly, she was the first person who succeeded in that goal, but she was still thirsty for more. She created a new account, Ellebreyals (Slayerbelle reversed) and set an incredibly difficult goal for herself. Without using Soul Wars, she wanted to reach level 99 in Slayer and Summoning at a Constitution level of just 10. This could be achieved by using the dwarf multicannon, although that would be extremely expensive. Nevertheless, she went ahead, spent hundreds of millions on cannonballs and completed her goal in the second part of 2009. By then she had achieved level 99 in Slayer three times, of which twice in an unconventional and more difficult manner, at a time when Slayer xp rates of around 40k xp per hour were considered to be good to very good. The release of Dungeoneering in 2010 made her consider to quit the game, but eventually she set a new goal of wanting to reach 99 Slayer by using only Melee. She created the account Stinkerbell for it, but never finished her goal.

Whitemagem: In RuneScape 1 this player was popular for being one of the few high-level smiths who offered his Smithing services either for free or for a cheap price. He created his account in 2001 and competed with several other famous people for a high rank in the Smithing skill, such as Bluerose13x and Musashi22. Whitemagem could usually be found smithing for free at the Varrock west bank in world four if the other player provided the resources. Rune 2h swords, the best weapon at that moment, were high in demand for PvP, so initially he was able to sell those weapons for around 1.2m gp, although he would also do it in exchange for three rune bars. Meanwhile other high-level smiths were still selling Rune 2h swords for a much higher price, so a lot of players ended up making use of Whitemagem’s services. He managed to attain rank two in the Smithing hiscores as a result of being one of the most popular freesmiths.

Woox16: Most of the players above can all be linked the skill-related achievements because the hiscores were for a very long time the only objective way of determining some sort of hierarchy. However, Woox16 managed to make himself known to the other members of the community by mastering PvM. Not much is known about the earlier years of his career, but he first caught people’s attention late in 2009 when he recorded himself solokilling the Corporeal Beast, something no one had ever been able to do before. His most notable achievement followed in 2010 when he made another video in which he succeeded in defeating the TzTok-Jad in under seven seconds by using dragon claws and the vengeance spell. Woox16 solokilled anything he wanted, including the four original bosses in the God Wars Dungeon. By the end of 2010 he had acquired the status of being the best PvM player of the game, fearing no challenge and often handicapping himself before attempting another solo kill. In January of 2011 Jagex added Nex to the God Wars Dungeon and claimed that it was the first boss that could not be killed in a solo fight. Woox16 smiled and happily accepted the challenge. Initially he attempted to kill Nex in teams of three and two players, 264 eventually succeeding in a duo kill together with Stokenut just three months later. Not much later Woox16 also managed to defeat Nex in a solo attempt. In 2013 he became the first person to slay the Kalphite King after a solo fight. A new challenge emerged a little later in 2013 when Jagex added Vorago to the game. For many people hard to kill in a five-man team, but Woox16 thought differently about that. Although he did not succeed in defeating Vorago on his own, he did manage to kill Vorago in a duo fight.

Yogosun: In 2001 several real-life friends told Yogosun to check out a game, called Run and Scape. He could not find it, but after a few days he discovered that his friends had been pronouncing it incorrectly and that the actual name was RuneScape. He decided not to play RuneScape at that moment for reasons he did not specify. A year went by and suddenly he saw the game RuneScape appear again on his computer screen, so he decided to give it a try. Yogosun had no clue that he would eventually become a great RuneScape player. He became well-known for his high overall rank, which he owned for years (until 2009) and for being rank one of the game for several months in the first half of 2008, after the release of Summoning. Later he lost his rank to Kingduffy. Yogosun was also the first person who achieved 200m xp in three skills. He initially earned his money by training Runecrafting and by killing the bosses in the God Wars Dungeon. Yogosun continued playing the game until he had accumulated a bit more than one billion xp. He quit in February of 2009 and was rank four at that time, but returned in May of 2010 after the release of Dungeoneering. Despite his absence of more than a year, he automatically became a top fifty player again after getting level 120 in Dungeoneering. Yogosun has been active ever since his return. At the end of 2014 he had just over 1.8 billion total xp. Yogosun was primarily known for his short period as rank one, but also gained a lot of respect for being a top player for many consecutive years.

Zarfot: A name that is likely to be mentioned in any discussion about the most efficient player in the history of RuneScape, is Zarfot. Some even consider him to be the best player since the beginning of RuneScape. Zarfot started playing in 2005 and maxed for the first time in 2008. At first he was known as an efficient player who would always look for the best training methods for various skills, although in the early days of his RuneScape career he spent a lot of his time on training Runecrafting by using the Abyss, with Runecrafting eventually becoming his second 99 skill. He often resorted to multitasking if the second activity did not interrupt the main activity too much. An example of this would be fletching bolts while training Woodcutting, which was possible without interruption before 2011 or 2012, when Jagex automated the process; or casting the high- level alchemy spell while training Fishing, Mining or Woodcutting. His fans and friends began to copy his training methods, which caused the skilling community to believe that Zarfot had invented or discovered them. This was not true, however. Zarfot had seen other people use those methods before and he knew that the skills could be trained by combining them. He was a highly respected skiller and it was his popularity that caused those efficient training methods to be popularized in the community. The most prevalent use of combining skills sprang into existence when Jagex added the Living Rock Cavern to the game in September of 2009. High-level players began to combine Magic, Mining and Smithing by using the superheat spell. Zarfot also became well-known for his Mega Skilling Guides in 2008 and 2009. He had written those guides for the skills Thieving, Slayer and Runecrafting. Each of them contained an in-depth description about the particular skill, spanning multiple pages on the forums and containing thorough analyses related to efficiency, strategy and xp rates. Zarfot regularly updated those guides and posted new versions. His fifth version of the Slayer guide was posted in 2010. It still exists today and it counts twenty pages (Mega Slayer Guide 5 on the forums if you are interested in having a look). In 2010 Zarfot posted a detailed merchanting guide on the forums. Even though his guide was impressive and contained a well-structured step-by-step manual about merchanting and the Grand Exchange, a lot of criticism 265 by the other top players followed, who claimed that their margins (profit rate) had decreased as a result of the guide’s existence. Some even went as far as accusing Zarfot of releasing the guide as a ploy to hinder his competition. As a result of the unexpected criticism, and its nature, Zarfot removed the guide from the forums not much later. His excellent merchanting skills had enabled him to conquer the front page of the hiscores. In March 2009 he became the first person to reach 200m Prayer xp. He entered the top twenty in April of 2009 and continued to be listed on the front page until the release of Dungeoneering exactly a year later. At that moment Zarfot was rank three with a total xp count of around 1.8 billion. A forum post in 2011 revealed that Zarfot was ranked first for ‘highest base xp’, meaning that no one’s lowest skill had more xp than Zarfot’s lowest skill. At that time Zarfot’s lowest skill was Fishing, in which he had accumulated 36.5m xp. Kingduffy held rank two in that unofficial, player-organized hiscore, with Construction, at 32.9m xp, being his lowest skill. Zarfot continued playing RuneScape after the release of Dungeoneering, but never got level 120 in it and he eventually permanently quit the game in November of 2010. He stated that the game had become too easy and that ancient effigies, released earlier that year, had ruined the fun of skilling and devalued real achievements. However, that was not his only reason. He also wanted to focus more on real life and RuneScape would just be a distraction.

Zezima: By many considered to be the best and most legendary player of RuneScape. He started playing RuneScape in July 2001 and is, without any doubt, the most famous RuneScape player of the previous decade. His era began after Bonebreaker6 had quit the game at the end of 2003. His achievements include being the first person to reach level 99 in Slayer, total level 1980 after the release of Farming and total level 2079 after the release of Farming. All of which he achieved in 2005. Zezima was also the first person to have all skills ranked in the top hundred at the same time. His most remarkable achievements, however, are becoming the first person to reach one billion Overall xp, which he achieved on 14th June 2007, and being rank one of the game from the beginning of RS2 in 2004 until the release of Summoning in January of 2008, for a total of four years. He regularly lost his rank one when new skills were released, but always managed to re- obtain it after a short period. In 2005 and 2006 his most significant competitor was N0valyfe, who regularly managed to dethrone Zezima because both players often had a similar amount of Overall xp. Nevertheless, Zezima was at the top of the hiscores table for the most part. Furthermore, he had a lot of respect for N0valyfe and he did not consider him to be a rival. When N0valyfe quit in November 2006, Zezima no longer had any competition and spent the year of 2007 comfortably reigning at the top of the hiscores. Even though he could easily have continued in 2008, he chose not to get level 99 in Summoning, which allowed Green098, Yogosun, Kingduffy and Gertjaars to become rank one in 2008. Zezima explained that he had stepped aside because he found that RuneScape had become too easy and that all the time he had spent on achieving 99 in a skill could at that moment (2008-2009) be done much faster. In 2009 he explained in the clan chat of Mod Mmg why he had no intention of returning to the top of hiscores table. He had seen people achieve things in a very short time and he added that he would never be able to achieve things like that. At the end of 2010, Zezima returned to RuneScape and obtained level 99 Summoning and Dungeoneering. He waited with getting level 120 in Dungeoneering until enough players had passed his total xp, so that he would not end up on the front page of the hiscores after maxing. Zezima remained active after these achievements. With the exception of a brief period after the release of Divination in 2013, Zezima would never re-appear on the front page of the hiscores. At RuneFest 2013 Zezima was awarded a Golden Gnome for Lifetime Achievement. In 2014 Zezima began to focus on the new seasonal hiscores system, which consists of several minicompetitions, such as doing the most clue scrolls or the most red imp kills in a week’s time.

Zonghui: This RS1 player was the first person to reach level 99 in Attack, Defence and Constitution, so in three skills. A unique achievement that no one would ever repeat. Zonghui was a 266 hero and an inspiration to any of the first generation players who enjoyed training combat. Despite the fact that he maxed Melee at an exceptionally fast speed, he never reached combat level 123 because he had a Prayer level that was lower than 90. Little is known about Zonghui because he quit early in RS1, probably in the first half of 2002 already.

As a little bonus added to this chapter, I have decided to collect a few fun facts about hiscore-related achievements. Obtaining Overall rank one has been a goal that many have set for themselves with most of them failing and only a few of them succeeding. I have tried to create some sort of timeline that displays the long-term rank one players that RuneScape has had. Long-term can be defined as anything, but I have taken as definition anyone who has uninterruptedly held rank one for at least two weeks. While that might not sound like a long period, it does eliminate the majority of the players who held rank one as a result of a new skills being released, as well as those who became rank one at another time, but were just not good enough to defend it. Notable people who belong to the second category include Lilyuffie88 and N0valyfe. For the period 2008-2014 I have made use of the interactive charts on runetracker.org. Therefore, the list below for those years is highly accurate, as are the first four years of RS2 because that is when Zezima was busy with his long reign at the top of the hiscores, although regularly losing his rank to N0valyfe in 2006. The RS1 years, however, are accurate only to a certain extent due to limited available date, so it is more than likely that several names are missing. It is also possible for those earlier years that a player whom I have added to the list is incorrectly thought to have been rank one for at least two weeks. Nevertheless, the general timeline for those years will definitely be correct for the most part because like L6vi and Tks are known to have been rank one for a very long time.

2001: Lightning, Mysticsmagic, Ashley, Tiwi, l6vi 2002: L6vi, Tks 2003: Tks, Bonebreaker6, Zezima 2004: Choppermad, Zezima 2005: Zezima 2006: Zezima 2007: Zezima 2008: Zezima, Green098, Yogosun, Kingduffy 1, Gertjaars 2009: Gertjaars 2010: Gertjaars, Skiller 703, Telmomarques, Elvis, Jdelacroix 2011: Jdelacroix, Telmomarques, Elias, Suomi 2012: Suomi 2013: Suomi, Jake, Suomi 2014: Suomi, Drumgun

From January 2001 till March 2002 various players were rank one for a while. The most prominent ones, who meet the two weeks requirement, are Lightning, Mysticsmagic, Tiwi and L6vi. Lightning is considered to be the first player who managed to hold rank one for a longer period. By the beginning of 2002, L6vi had taken control at the top of the hiscores and he remained rank one for at least a couple of months. How long exactly, however, is unknown. Although it is known that Tks conquered rank one before the start of the summer and successfully defended it until October 2003, shortly after she had quit playing the game. That is when Bonebreaker6 became the new rank one of RuneScape until he decided to quit after the release of RS2. It is possible that Choppermad might have held rank one at the beginning of 2004, but I have not been able to confirm this. I have still added him to the list because my sources mentioned him a couple of times.

The release of RS2 marks the beginning of Zezima’s era. Initially Lilyuffie88 gave him a hard time, but she could never dethrone Zezima for a long time. 2006 was the year of the battle for rank one between Zezima and N0valyfe. Even though the latter did obtain rank one several times, it was 267

Zezima who almost consistently ranked at the top. N0valyfe quit in November of 2006. Considering that he had been playing for just over two and a half years, as opposed to the six and half of Zezima, it is probable that N0valyfe would eventually have been able to secure a long-term spot at the top of the hiscore table if he had not quit. Zezima had become a living legend by 2008, when Jagex released Summoning. This is also when he lost his rank one due to not wanting to get level 99 in the skill. Kingduffy was the first person to defend his rank one for a longer period. He had obtained that rank in fewer than two weeks after the release of Summoning. At the beginning of April he briefly lost it to Green098, but managed to reacquire after two weeks. Yogosun maxed at the end of April, which automatically placed him above Kingduffy in the hiscores, with a lead of around 180m xp. In the following months Kingduffy would gain xp at a much faster rate than Yogosun until he eventually passed Yogosun’s xp at the beginning of September and became the new rank one.

However, while all of that was happening, another player had at the same time been gaining xp at an even faster rate than that of Kingduffy. That particular was called Gertjaars and was racing towards Kingduffy’s spot in the hiscores. Gertjaars closed the 100m xp gap in just two months and would become the first player since Zezima to hold rank one for longer than a year, eighteen months to be precise. Gertjaars had lost most of his motivation by the release of Dungeoneering in April 2010, so he decided to quit. His decrease in motivation was noticeable because he had been gaining xp at a much slower pace. In fact, Aasiwat (called Allar now), who had been rank two for years during Gertjaars’s reign, had almost caught up with Gertjaars and would probably have passed Gertjaars in the same month if the skill had not been released. Aasiwat never ended up become rank one because also he did not like Dungeoneering, although he did continue playing the game. Skiller 703 was a maxed player (except Dungeoneering) with a relatively high amount of Overall xp who managed to stay ahead of everyone else during the race to 99 Dungeoneering. This allowed him to enjoy a position at the top of the hiscores for a while until someone with a higher amount of xp managed to pass him. This happened at the beginning of the summer, with Telmomarques as protagonist. He held his rank for three months until he lost it to Elias in November, who in turn lost it to Jdelacroix just a month later.

Jdelacroix managed to hold off Telmomarques until May of 2011, which is when Telmomarques finally succeeded in regaining the Overall rank one. Meanwhile Elias had been pulling off some amazing xp gains of over 200m xp per month. At the end of June he was rewarded with rank one in the hiscores and retained it for just under two months. During the summer months he became the first player to reach three billion xp and decided refrain from gaining any more xp for a while. This allowed Suomi to become rank one for the first time in his extremely long RuneScape career. And he would have absolutely no competition for two years because he was able to generate unparalleled xp gains, up to 400m xp in just one month and more than 1.9 billion xp in a year. That was absolutely incredible and no one else was able to copy his xp gains at that time. After the release of Divination in August of 2013, he decided to wait with maxing to allow Jake, who had been rank two since forever, a month as the new rank one of the game. This lasted until November. Even though Suomi had taken rank one again, he decided not to go for 200m xp in Divination. In fact, he just stopped gaining xp. Even without any xp gains, it took seven more months, until May of 2014, for someone to pass him. That person was Drumgun, and we know how that story continued.

What I also considered to be a potentially interesting idea was keeping track of the highest amount of total xp in-game across the many years. What was the highest amount of total xp, owned by a single player, in April of 2004? Or May of 2005? Or June of 2006? Etc. I decided to do the research. After many hours of analyzing Runetracker’s interactive charts and watching YouTube videos about the RuneScape hiscores, I eventually managed to construct the following chart, which should be extremely accurate for any moment after July of 2005. I kept the data points visible in the graph so that it is clear when xp was logged and when not. For RS1 I found just one single dated screenshot, 268 which was for April 2003. The first data point (2001 in the chart) is a personal guess based on old hiscore screenshots.

I am not going to discuss this chart in great detail, although it is worth nothing that the data points on this chart do not necessarily coincide with whoever held Overall rank one at that moment. Most of the time the person with rank one was also the person with the highest xp, but that was not always the case. For example, the Grand Exchange was released in December of 2007. This revolutionized skilling in several ways. The one most relevant for the chart is that rich players could suddenly buy a lot of resources in a limited amount of time. As a consequence you would expect that the average monthly xp gained by the players on the front page of the hiscores would increase. That is what happened in 2008 (in comparison with 2007), although the chart indicates the opposite. The reason for that is simple: Zezima lost rank one after the release of Summoning and started to play less. However, for almost a year thereafter he was still the person with the highest xp because it took the people who actually held rank one a long time to catch up with Zezima’s xp. He gained only 100m xp in the first nine months of 2008, a lot less than in 2007. However, even with such slow xp gains he was still the person with the highest xp because Kingduffy, Yogosun and Gertjaars needed almost a year to catch up, which they did at the pace that one would expect after the release of the Grand Exchange. For example, in 2008 Gertjaars gained almost 100m xp in just a month. That is higher than the xp gained by Zezima in 2007, but that is not visible in the chart because of Zezima’s higher total xp in combination with his remarkably slower xp gains in 2008. In the chart there is a clear kink between November 2008 and April 2009. That kink represents the moment at which Gertjaars passed Zezima’s total xp, and the pace displayed after this kink is similar to the pace at which Gertjaars had been gaining xp prior to passing Zezima.

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Another remarkable fact is that it took Zezima almost seven years to reach one billion as the first person to do so, while the next seven years would be enough for Suomi to reach five billion xp. Several factors have played a role in this. The first one is that skilling has naturally evolved to generate higher xp rates. An example of this is that Runecrafting maxed at around 20k xp per hour in 2006, which was more than tripled with the release of Runespan in 2012. Another factor is that skilling has become significantly easier in the sense that skilling today is a lot less click-intensive. For the first seven to eight years of the game’s existence, it was difficult to play efficiently for many hours per day without wasting xp. X-options did not exist for a very long time. For example, Cooking had to be done manually in RS1. As of late 2009 – I generally use the release of the Living Rock Cavern in September of 2009 as a turning point – skills have gradually become less click- intensive. The introduction of concentrated gold ore and rocktail fishing turned two skills into low- intensity skills in just one single day. In the same month the same had happened to Woodcutting with the release of ivy. The gradual release of low-intensity content enabled people to spend more time on RuneScape without feeling like they were torturing their wrists, which in turn led to higher average monthly xp gains. A third factor is the release of the Grand Exchange, which greatly sped up the purchasing and selling of the resources and products. No longer did players need to go on the forums or to one of the designated worlds for trading (world one and two) and lose a lot of time by trying to buy or sell whatever they needed. A few buttons in the Grand Exchange interface sufficed to set in motion an era in which the top players focused single-mindedly on training the buyable skills. These can usually be trained at a bank, so the top players could just train at the Grand Exchange and trade while skilling, not before or after skilling anymore, while. A great time-saver.

Furthermore, the Grand Exchange gave also rise to a much more efficient and faster way of merchanting. It was not uncommon for the top players to generate one billion gp profit in month in 2008 and later, as a direct consequence of the Grand Exchange’s existence. This noticeable increase in personal wealth enabled the top skillers to invest in faster training methods, which tended be extremely expensive. A fourth important factor is the emergence of bonus xp, which is a relatively new phenomenon. Bonus xp already did exist in several minigames, such as Barbarian Assault, but to a much lesser extent than today. The event with which it probably began was the introduction of the first bonus xp weekend in March 2010. There was a massive hype in anticipation of this event and what taught it us is that time really is valuable to many players. In the years after that, Jagex slowly began to add more bonus xp to the game in the form of improved minigame rewards and many new D&Ds. A few examples of this include the updated Barbarian Assault minigame, the Sinkholes D&D for Dungeoneering, the Big Chinchompa D&D for Hunter, and the Warbands D&D for the Farming, Herblore and Mining skills. These minigames and D&Ds essentially started to replace actual training methods to a certain extent. However, more important for this chart is that these minigames provided additional xp at a rate that is faster than when using traditional skilling methods. The release of Squeal of Fortune in 2012, and later Treasure Hunter, is perhaps the culmination of this trend. Jagex began to add bonus xp to the Squeal of Fortune in the form of xp lamps and, a little later, fallen stars. At first this enabled rich players (in real life) to buy bonus xp, as it is often referred to, simply by purchasing more Squeal of Fortune spins. The release of bonds at the end of 2013 added to the game the option to buy Squeal of Fortune spins (and later Treasure Hunter keys) by using bonds instead of real-life money. The new strategy was quite simple: spend most money on purchasing spins/keys through bonds, but keep just enough to be able to afford 200m xp in all the buyable skills. An important footnote here, however, would be that is unknown how much the top players effectively ended up spending on purchasing spins and keys. Nevertheless, it did give rise to faster skilling, but only for those who could afford to buy the spins or keys, which greatly coincided with those who were at the top of the hiscore tables due to fact that 200m xp in buyable skills had become a requirement for keeping up with the competition by 2010.

I have also looked up some information with regard to who the first players were to achieve certain levels. This short list below displays some of those levels that were first reached in RS1. You will 270 see that this greatly overlaps with out earlier list that displayed the people who held a rank one position in RS1.

First to 1000 Skill Total: Tiwi First to 1100 Skill Total: L6vi First to 1200 Skill Total: L6vi First to 1300 Skill Total: L6vi First to 1400 Skill Total: Tks First to 1500 Skill Total: Tks First to 1600 Skill Total: Bonebreaker6

It is important to note that no one was able to achieve the highest total level before the release of RS2 in 2004. And even then it still took more than a year for someone to max. The list below shows the players who were first to reach the highest total level after the release of a new skill.

1980 Overall: Zezima on 9th July 2005 2079 Overall: Zezima on 4th October 2005 2178 Overall: N0valyfe on 11th June 2006 2277 Overall: Thehate on 8th December 2006 2376 Overall: Kingduffy on 12th February 2008 2475 Overall: Skiller 703 on 7th May 2010 -2496 Overall: Telmomarques on 22nd August 2010 2595 Overall: Im Choice on 29th August 2013

Becoming the first player to reach level 99 or 200m xp in a skill is considered to be a great honour. The lists below offer a chronological overview of those players who earned their spot in the history books by doing just that.

First player to reach 99 Woodcutting: Everdred in August 2001 First player to reach 99 Magic: Bluerose13x in October 2001 First player to reach 99 Smithing: Bluerose13x in December 2001 First player to reach 99 Cooking: Tks in January 2002 First player to reach 99 Firemaking: Cowchicken in April 2002 First player to reach 99 Fishing: Tks in May 2002 First player to reach 99 Attack: Zonghui in May 2002 First player to reach 99 Strength: Ladykilljoy in June 2002 First player to reach 99 Constitution: Zonghui in June 2002 First player to reach 99 Defence: Zonghui in June 2002 First player to reach 99 Thieving: Swedemike in August 2002 First player to reach 99 Mining: Joe Bill64 in October 2002 First player to reach 99 Ranged: Snake Slava in November 2002 First player to reach 99 Crafting: LtAngel in March 2003 First player to reach 99 Agility: Thehate in April 2003 First player to reach 99 Fletching: Chilipeppers in April 2003 First player to reach 99 Herblore: Halw Gnun in June 2003 First player to reach 99 Prayer: Lilyuffie88 in May 2004 First player to reach 99 Runecrafting: Kale Stille in September 2004 First player to reach 99 Slayer: Zezima in July 2005 First player to reach 99 Farming: 0xpx0 in September 2005 First player to reach 99 Construction: Cursed You in June 2006 First player to reach 99 Hunter: Darkforest67 in December 2006 First player to reach 99 Summoning: Nercychlidae in February 2008 271

First player to reach 99 Dungeoneering: Skiller 703 in May 2010 First player to reach 99 Divination: Im Choice in August 2013 First player to reach 120 Dungeoneering: Telmomarques in August 2010

First player to reach 200M xp in Fletching: Xxx Neo Xxx7 in January 2006 First player to reach 200M xp in Cooking: Eve340 in January 2006 First player to reach 200M xp in Firemaking: Empror1 in May 2006 First player to reach 200M xp in Thieving: Herbaman in November 2006 First player to reach 200M xp in Attack: Aclaw in December 2006 First player to reach 200M xp in Defence: Miles15 in January 2007 First player to reach 200M xp in Ranged: Enrix E B in February 2007 First player to reach 200M xp in Woodcutting: The Power 7 in May 2007 First player to reach 200M xp in Hunter: Momeydragon in June 2007 First player to reach 200M xp in Herblore: Halw Gnun in December 2007 First player to reach 200M xp in Strength: Fir3g0d in February 2008 First player to reach 200M xp in Smithing: Priscilla44 in May 2008 First player to reach 200M xp in Fishing: 777Knight777 in July 2008 First player to reach 200M xp in Crafting: Paulrat3 in July 2008 First player to reach 200M xp in Construction: Simon in December 2008 First player to reach 200M xp in Agility: Lover Romeo in February 2009 First player to reach 200M xp in Mining: Lover Romeo in February 2009 First player to reach 200M xp in Prayer: Zarfot in March 2009 First player to reach 200M xp in Magic: 14 Loki 88 in April 2009 First player to reach 200M xp in Farming: Pow012000 in May 2009 First player to reach 200M xp in Constitution Deja Vu Xiii in May 2009 First player to reach 200M xp in Summoning: Drumgun in July 2010 First player to reach 200M xp in Dungeoneering Wisely Done in November 2010 First player to reach 200M xp in Slayer Toony in November 2010 First player to reach 200M xp in Runecrafting Phoenix Odin in December 2010 First player to reach 200M xp in Divination Drumgun in December 2013

Someone who goes for 200m xp in a skill usually has more plans. Competing at the top of the hiscores is possible only when 200m xp is obtained in multiple skills, so many top skillers decided to go for 200m xp in more than just a couple of skills. They wanted to become and stay the rank one of the game. Before around 2011-2012, the players on the front page of the hiscores just wanted to become rank one. Obtaining 200m xp in all skills seemed impossible even to them, which is why many of the top player tended to focus on the fast skills only. The majority of them assumed that they would never reach that xp milestone in the slower skills, like Agility and Runecrafting at that time. This is why almost everyone who aspired to be a rank one player started out by accumulating wealth and investing in buyable skills, such as Construction or Crafting. The list below contains an overview of the players who succeeded in reaching 200m xp in a certain amount of skills as the first person to do so. As a final addition I have also included the names of the players who broke the billion xp marks as the first person in the history of this game.

First player to reach 100M xp in a skill: Herbaman First player to reach 200M in a skill: Xxx Neo Xxx7 First player to reach 200M in 2 skills: Matt258 First player to reach 200M in 3 skills: Yogosun First player to reach 200M in 4 skills: Gertjaars First player to reach 200M in 5 skills: Gertjaars First player to reach 200M in 6 skills: Gertjaars First player to reach 200M in 7 skills: Drumgun 272

First player to reach 200M in 8 skills: Drumgun First player to reach 200M in 9 skills: Drumgun First player to reach 200M in 10 skills: Drumgun First player to reach 200M in 11 skills: Jake First player to reach 200M in 12 skills: Jake First player to reach 200M in 13 skills: Jake First player to reach 200M in 14 skills: Jake First player to reach 200M in 15 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 16 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 17 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 18 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 19 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 20 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 21 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 22 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 23 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 24 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 25 skills: Suomi First player to reach 200M in 26 skills: Drumgun

First player to reach 1B Overall xp: Zezima First player to reach 2B Overall xp: Gertjaars First player to reach 3B Overall xp: Elias First player to reach 4B Overall xp: Suomi First player to reach 5B Overall xp: Suomi

I would also like to give a little bit of attention to the F2P world. A lot of people underestimate F2P and some even call it a demo, which is wrong. F2P is a game on its own. In some way, it may even be considered harder than P2P because skills have slower xp rates and it is a lot more difficult to make money. The highest total level prior to the release of Dungeoneering in F2P was 1494. Only twelve free players managed to achieve that level before Dungeoneering was added to the game (without becoming member). These are, in chronological order:

Syzygy on 28th January 2008 S Diamant Y on 30th March 2008 El Popo1 on 12th September 2008 Deu Terium on 9th May 2009 Water Is Nat* on 9th May 2009 Aise6 on 23rd August 2009 Mauranius on 6th September 2009 Genworth5 on 6th September 2009 Missoverflow on 7th October 2009 Setelima on 22nd October 2009 Armeng90 on 31st December 2009 5743 on 16th January 2010

First free player to achieve 100M xp in any skill: Expert1212 in Firemaking First free player to achieve 200M xp in any skill: Expert1212 in Firemaking First free player to achieve 1B Overall xp: El Popo1

*Water Is Nat was able to change his display name to "Water" by getting membership on Funorb. 273

He became a paying player after the removal of free accounts from the hiscores.

In an update of November 2011 Jagex removed free players from the hiscores. Many of the top F2P players bought membership because there was no point in staying in F2P anymore if there was no way of competing against other players. Only a small minority of competitive free players continued to play in F2P. Several others decided to quit the game altogether, S Diamant Y was one of them. The removal of free players from the hiscores was undone in 2014.

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9

Miscellania Etceteria

Every largely celebrated holiday gives Jagex an opportunity to celebrate with the RuneScape community. These holidays include Christmas, Easter and Halloween and some people are constantly looking forward to those joyful days because they always bring along a nice holiday- related event with rewards. Even though people generally like these events, it cannot be denied that there also are plenty of people who are interested in the rewards more than in the event itself. The past has proven that these rewards can have a big impact on the game, especially for the distant future. Relatively new players might not know this, but several of the older holiday event items ended up becoming extremely valuable, even though that was not Jagex's intention. These older items could be obtained as rewards from holiday events during the first years of RuneScape. These items were tradeable and they quickly started to become more and more expensive. As a reaction to these price changes, in 2003 Jagex decided to make any new holiday items untradeable. They realized that every new tradeable discontinued item would undergo the same price evolution. As the community kept growing, it became more difficult to get your hands on any such tradeable holiday items. Additionally, each year the amount of them decreases because of players permanently losing them as a result of dying. Then there are also players who take those valuable holiday items out of the market, either by quitting RuneScape, ergo leaving any holiday item behind in their bank, or by holding on to them for an extremely long time without trading. These factors all contributed to the holiday items becoming more expensive. At first this happened gradually, but the growth of the RuneScape community contributed to increasing demand for those events, eventually resulting in 275 prices of several hundred million coins within half a decade since their release. Jagex may or may not have anticipated that this would happen, but that does not matter. It is clear from the current prices of the tradeable holiday event items that making any new items untradeable was the only correct decision. Although it would be extremely interesting to zoom in on each individual event, unfortunately that would be too much work. This is why I will not discuss any of the events, but only the rewards, especially because some of them have been an object of interest for many years. That is a reference to the tradeable rewards. I will focus on the first five years because the holiday rewards from that era are the most interesting from an historical point of view.

Easter 2001: / Easter 2002: Easter Egg Easter 2003: Bunny Ears Easter 2004: / Easter 2005: Rubber Chicken Easter 2006: Easter Ring

Halloween 2001: Pumpkin Halloween 2002: Halloween Masks Halloween 2003: Scythe Halloween 2004: / Halloween 2005: Zombie Head Halloween 2006: Skeleton Clothes + Jack Lantern Masks

Christmas 2001: Christmas Crackers + Partyhats Christmas 2002: Santa Hat Christmas 2003: / Christmas 2004: Yo-yo Christmas 2005: Scarves, Hats and Marionettes Christmas 2006: Reindeer Hats + Wintumber Tree

As you should have noticed, there were no events for Christmas 2003, Easter 2004 and Halloween 2004. The absence of the Christmas event can be explained by the fact that the developers of the game were focusing on the RS2 beta at that time. There also was no Easter 2001 event for the simple reason that Halloween 2001 is the first time that the makers of RuneScape got the idea of introducing holiday events. The unexpected popularity of that event is what led to the seasonally recurring tradition of organizing small events for the players, from which several interesting items could be obtained as a reward. The pumpkin is the first item at which I will have a look. This pumpkin could be obtained from the Halloween 2001 event, which is when they were dropped all over RuneScape and the players were supposed to pick them whenever the pumpkins appeared in sight. People who started to play RuneScape only a few years ago might associate this pumpkin with some sort of ornament, but it is actually food. This led to some people accidentally eating the pumpkins, although that was not really a problem at that time because the pumpkins were cheap right after their introduction to the game. Jagex probably never anticipated that these pumpkins would eventually become rare and expensive after several years. During the next ten to fifteen years of their existence, the pumpkins' value would change from being worthless to peaking at over 300m gp at the end of 2011.

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Christmas crackers and partyhats were added to the game as part of the 2001 Christmas event. Today we know these items as the most controversial holiday reward items of RuneScape. In the original event Christmas Crackers would be dropped all over RuneScape. People who were lucky enough to find one or more of them, would be able to get a reward that was hidden inside these crackers. In order to obtain this reward everyone had to use the cracker on another player and one of the two players would get the reward, which was a partyhat of a random colour. This means that each player had 50% to obtain such a partyhat from a cracker. If one player was lucky enough to get it, the second player would be left behind with another random item. Remarkably, after the Christmas event had been removed from the game, people kept trying to obtain partyhats. This led to partyhats (as well as Christmas crackers) increasing in price and that is a trend that would eventually never come to a halt. The most expensive one was the blue partyhat for a very long while. In June 2006 its price was around 260m gp and then it suddenly started to go up in price more quickly until it had reached 600m gp at the end of January of 2010. After the return of free trade and unrestricted Wilderness Pk'ing in February 2011, all partyhats started to skyrocket in price. Although that was just an illusion. During the existence of restricted trading (2008-2011), the street value of the partyhats was much higher than indicated in the Grand Exchange database. The blue partyhat was the first item to have a Grand Exchange price of over one billion gp, although its street price had been much higher for a long time. A similar story applies to the Christmas cracker, which is considered to be the rarest tradeable item of the game and has been worth several billions of gp for a couple of years now.

The Easter egg could obtained from the Easter event in 2002. Just like the previous items, they were dropped in RuneScape at random locations. Also the Easter eggs are edible, so it tended to happen every now and then that a player accidentally ate it. As soon as the event had been removed, people began to buy Easter eggs whilst most of the eggs disappeared from the game as a result of hungry people. At the start of 2009 the Easter eggs had a value of around 4m gp. Easter Eggs significantly rose in price after October 2009 and peaked at a price of around 130m gp in 2011. Halloween Masks were the reward from the Halloween 2002 event and they could be obtained in three colours. The masks were randomly dropped in RuneScape for a lucky finder to pick them up. There is an odd story about the red version of this mask, though. After the event some people would use them as a replacement for the dragon medium helmet, even though the masks had no stats at all. They were probably worn because they looked cooler. Coincidentally (or not?), the red mask has always been the most expensive one of the three. At the start of 2009 the red mask was worth around 20m gp and eventually peaked at over 250m gp in 2013. The Santa hat is a popular holiday event reward that could be obtained at Christmas in 2002. Just like the previous items, the Santa hats were dropped at various locations. Some players tried to trick others by dropping a ball of wool, a red bead and ashes on the same spot. This looked like a Santa hat in RS1, so players would try to pick it up, only to end up disappointed. At the start of 2005, these hats were worth around 200k gp. A year later this price had increased by a tenfold. Santa hats had their first peak at 25m gp, which they reached in December 2007, but after the removal of free trade and unrestricted Wilderness Pk'ing in the same month, they fell back in price to around 10m -12m gp. At the start of 2010, the Santa hat significantly rose in price again and by June 2010 it had reached the highest price in its history: around 180m gp in 2011 (and later again in 2013). The Santa hat is the last tradable holiday reward item that Jagex has released. 277

Bunny Ears were the first untradeable holiday rewards of RuneScape. They could be obtained at Easter 2003 and the fact they are untradeable allowed them to become the first holiday item that can be claimed back after losing it. Also the bunny ears could be obtained only by picking them up at the location where Jagex had dropped them. For a long time in RS1 and RS2, the bunny ears used to be a popular piece of clothing that would later be commonly used for forum profile pictures. The yo-yo is the first holiday item that was not dropped in RuneScape. At Christmas 2003 people could go to the big cities and talk to Santa to obtain one. This item is not tradable either and it can be claimed back when lost. The yo-yo is a pretty unknown holiday item today, but it carries a great sentimental value for a lot of players. The rubber chicken was the last holiday reward item that is considered well-known these days. The rubber chicken could be obtained at the event of Easter 2004, which was the first holiday event in which players had to complete a task before they could claim the item. The fact that this rubber chicken could be wielded as some sort of fun weapon caused it to become very popular. Especially the whack-option will probably have had an influence on the popularity.

Of course these are not the only holidays that have been celebrated in RuneScape, but these are the larger ones that are generally celebrated by a high percentage of players in the RuneScape community. We have now discussed all ‘famous’ holiday event rewards, but we should also create some space for other rare items that have played a role in the history of this game.

The first item at which I will have a look is the disk of returning. This item was released on 12th July 2001 and it probably is the item with the oddest function that has ever existed. The disk of returning could be obtained only by... getting banned. Not really, but the banning system led to the creation of this item. In 2001 temporarily banned players were teleported to a black hole. After their ban had expired, they would return to the game. Those players began to share their stories about this black hole, which caused other people to wonder what the black hole actually was. This resulted in players getting themselves banned... just to see what the black hole was like. As soon as Jagex had been made aware of this, they started to figure out a solution to this problem. Eventually they came up with the idea of creating a place that looked similar to the black hole. Everyone was allowed to visit that location, but the only way of getting out was by buying a disk of returning from Thordur, who could be found in the same black hole. This item became tradable when the black hole was replaced by a new banning system at the end of 2001. Disks of returning were discontinued in the process and we all know what this means for tradable items: More and more people wanted to buy this item that was gradually disappearing from the game. Therefore the price started to rise significantly and at the start of 2009 the disk of returning cost around 5m gp, after which it would peak at a price of over 300m gp at the end of 2011.

Jugs of wine were released in 2001. People who drank once from them, would see their jug of wine change into a half full wine jug because of a full jug consisted of two doses. Drinking once from it would also heal 700 life points. Still in RS1, an update changed the way these jugs of wine worked: people would drink them entirely, rather than in two doses. This means that it would no longer be possible to obtain a half full wine jug, causing it to become a rare item. Merchants wanted to buy as many of these half full wine jugs as possible because they knew that the jugs would go up in price. Just like most rare items, this one would only slightly go up in price until 2009. This is still a weird phenomenon: most rare items started to significantly go up in price in 2009, while before 2009 the increase in price was gradual or slow. Early in 2009 the price of half full wine jugs was around 30m gp. They settled at this price for around eight months before skyrocketing in price. By August 2010 these jugs had risen to a price of 60m gp. The return of free trade and unrestricted Wilderness Pk'ing 278 accelerated the price increase in the Grand Exchange, although its street value had probably been higher than indicated during the absence of free trade. The price of the half full win jug has never decreased and it is currently, at the moment of writing, at its peak of over 350m gp, which will likely only continue to increase. Owners of these half full wine jugs try to avoid having them in their inventory so that they will not accidentally drink from the jug, which is why it is advised to carry them in the inventory as noted items.

Quite a bit can be said about purple sweets as well. Initially the sweets that are the precursor of purple sweets played a role in the Halloween event of 2005. After the event these sweets changed into chocolate dust and the actual sweets were removed from the game. Later on Jagex added purple sweets to the Treasure Trail rewards option. Purple sweets can be used to increase your run energy with 20% and to heal 200 life points. Furthermore, they are stackable. Especially this last factor was initially important because it meant that a player could be carrying an infinite amount of run energy, and that at a time when there was no rest-option yet and when energy potions were still commonly used. Purple sweets have never been discontinued, so their price history has experienced a little bit more fluctuation than other rare items. Early in 2009 these purple sweets were worth almost 2.7k gp each, after which the price dropped and settled at around 1.6k gp each until November 2009. After the return of free trade and unrestricted Wilderness Pk'ing, the price increased to almost 20k gp, the highest price that they would ever reach as their current value is no higher than 1,100 gp.

A peculiar event involving Christmas crackers and partyhats took place on 7th November 2003. Someone accidentally found a way to duplicate items while trying to trade the scythe, the non- tradeable Halloween 2003 event reward, by using third party software. He told several friends about this bug, which eventually led to the duplication of many items, including partyhats. For some reason the bug abusers had chosen to duplicate mainly the purple partyhat, which was referred to as a pink partyhat at that time. The consequence of the mass-duplication of these partyhats is that the cheaters pumped tradeable rare items into the economy and artificially lowered their value. People began selling the purple partyhats for relatively cheap prices and before Jagex had any time to intervene, partyhats had switched owner several times. Some people were aware that the items had been duplicated by a player, others were not and assumed that they had been able to make a great deal. A couple of hours later the following messaged was posted on the front page of the website.

Eventually the makers of RuneScape were able to ban most players who had duplicated items, but it was not possible to remove the duplicated items from the game due to multiple reasons. First of all, all copies of an item carry the same ID. For example, an item might have number 536 as ID, but the problem is that the same ID is assigned to all copies of that item. This means that there was no way for Jagex to find out which items were created due to duplication and which items were original. Secondly, several players were unaware of the fact that they had bought duplicated items, so to remove those from the game would have been unfair towards those players. A system rollback was considered an overreaction, so eventually the duplicated items remained in the economy, although the accounts which had been used for the duplication, as well as all items on that account, were banned from the game.

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That was not the only memorable instance of bug abuse in the history of this game. Actually, bug abuse is not an extremely rare phenomenon in any game. It usually occurs after a system update when new content has been added to the game and most of the time the abuse causes no damage to the game and is minor in nature. However, in rare cases the bug abuse does have a dramatic impact on the game. The item duplication bug is one of those cases, but there are more examples. I am not going to list all of them, just a selection. Although it is fairly obvious, I will still mention it anyway: All bugs have been fixed and no longer work, do not try recreate any of the bugs described in this PDF. One of those bugs is called the knife bug and occurred early in 2002. In RS1 a player character would not drop an item until it had stopped running. This mechanism played an important role in the manifestation of the bug. A player needed to have a weapon and knives in the inventory if they wanted to abuse the bug. The only place where the knives spawned was upstairs in a building in Varrock, a place that usually no one visited. This immediately revealed who was aware of the bug and actively tried to abuse it, or at least considered the option. After a series of actions that had to be performed by making use of the aforementioned game mechanic, a player was able to wield the knives instead of an actual weapon. However, not just one knife, but they would end up wielding all knives that they had been carrying in the inventory at the same time. In RS1 these knives had weapon bonuses. The bonus was not high, but the bonus of each wielded knife stacked, enabling the bug abusers to boost their weapon bonuses to a high level. The result was that these players could hit over fourty, which was extremely high and not possible with the strongest weapon at that time. Jagex responded by banning the players who had gained too much advantage from abusing the bug. Other people, who had abused the bug only mildly and had the knives equipped, were given the punishment of dying instantly upon logging in the next time. Many players ended up losing some of their items because of that punishment. The lodestone teleportation system did not exist yet and the absence of the run-option and advanced gravestones made it almost impossible to return to the players where the played had died before the items would disappear.

Shortly after the release of the Construction skill in 2006, a group of players discovered another item-duplicating glitch that involved the Player-Owned Houses (POH). The bug could be triggered by having the building mode switched on while being outside of the POH. When visiting a friend’s house, the building mode would then be transferred into the friend’s house, meaning that the player would be able to build anything in someone else’s house. However, because the POH did not belong to the bug abuser, the items would not disappear from the wall after effectively removing the items in building mode. This bug enabled players to duplicate amulets of glory, Castle Wars armour and anything else that can be made inside a POH. Reportedly, a five-digit number of amulets of glory was created due to this bug, causing their price to halve in just a couple of weeks. It took Jagex three weeks to fix the bug because the group of bug abusers had decided not to leak the bug to the public. Evidently, the bug abusers were eventually banned. Another type of bug came into existence in 2008 when a few players discovered a way to access areas that are normally not accessible. This is called no-clipping and had been attempted multiple times. Succeeding in no-clipping means that a player is able to walk through walls, fences, other obstacles, on water and on the black areas that separate different regions both above and below the surface of RuneScape. 280

Although not harmful, the bug itself was quite fascinating because it allowed the bug abusers to visit the Tutorial Island, Prifddinas before it was made accessible at the end of 2014 and other locations which were remote and separated from the accessible world.

The Penguin Hide-and-Seek D&D allows players to gain a bunch of xp on a weekly basis by spotting ten penguins. Each week the same penguin can be spotted only once. However, in January of 2009 Jagex had accidentally caused the coding of that D&D to be altered so that there was no longer a limit on how often the penguins could be spied on and received points from. The news spread like a wildfire and suddenly hundreds of players were abusing to bug to gain millions of xp in just a couple of hours in any skill of their choice. Jagex permanently banned all players, around 160, who had exchanged more than 250 points that had been accumulated through abuse of the bug. Many other players received temporary bans. Another bug that enabled players to gain millions of xp in a short period happened shortly after the release of Dungeoneering, in Daemonheim. Runecrafting in Daemonheim was supposed to give much less xp than outside of Daemonheim. However, due to an error in the coding, Runecrafting in Daemonheim wound up providing xp rates high enough to reach 99 in the skill in half an hour. Due to the scale of the bug and the popularity of the skill, as it was only two days old, Jagex was forced to shut down all servers until the bug could be resolved. After four hours of downtime, Jagex decided to perform a system rollback, an extremely rare occurrence in the history of the game, during which the game is restored to a previous moment, erasing all progress made since that point of restoration.

Players who intend to make money by slaying monsters are often advised to wear a ring of wealth in order to increase the odds of getting a rare drop. A useful if the player is not a very rich, especially when the ring goes into overdrive, as happened in 2011 after the ring of wealth had just been updated to include teleportation options. Shortly after the update players in a friends chat with the LootShare system switched on noticed that the effect that increases the drop rate stacked for each player in the friends chat. That was definitely not intended to happen because it allowed players in a LootShare-enabled friends chat to consistently get rare drops from monsters. The Corporeal Beast was still a popular boss at that time because the prices of the shields and sigils were still high. As a consequence of the bug, some players received sigil drops from every single kill. Jagex was quick to fix the bug, though, and Mod Mark apologized for the inconvenience. It is not known how many players were banned for abusing the bug, but that is quite different for the next bug. Not only rings, but also bot-detection systems can go into overdrive. In September of 2012 Jagex released Botany Bay and updated their bot-detection system. Due to an error in the settings upon launch, the system began to systematically ban player who were not using third party software at all, after first giving those players in-game warnings. Within hours, over 40,000 players had been given an unappealable permanent ban. Although there is probably nothing scarier than getting banned while you are playing the game, the people who had been following the updates were probably aware of the banning being the result of a bug. After resolving the issue and removing the permanent ban from the affected accounts, Jagex apologized and gave each player who had been banned a result of the bug twenty free spins for the Squeal of Fortune, the precursor of Treasure Hunter. I was one of those players and I remember being teleported to a normally inaccessible room in Falador castle from which I could not escape, quite similar to how Rab used to teleport cheaters or rule breakers in RS1. However, just before release of this PDF, I went back to Falador to visit that room, but I could not find it…

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While the bot-detection bug is technically the biggest bug in the history of the game if we look at how many accounts were affected, it is the Falador Massacre Bug, in fancy capital letters, that is generally considered to be the most historically significant bug that has ever occurred in the almost fifteen years that the game exists. Eerily creepy about this bug is the combination of circumstances that ultimately led to the immense popularity of the Falador Massacre. The bug took place on 6th June 2006, or 06/06/06 and the event that led to the massacre was the achievement of, ironically, Cursed You, who became the first person to reach level 99 in Construction on that day. He allowed everyone to attend his party inside his POH. However, that turned out to a bad decision because the high amount of players present at the party caused severe lag. Eventually Cursed You had no other choice but to kick everyone out, and that is when the bug occurred. Due to an error in the coding of the Construction skill, everyone who was inside the combat ring in the POH when Cursed You removed everyone from the POH, was suddenly able to attack other players outside of the POH. This attack-option had been transferred directly from the combat ring, as all players are able to attack each inside the combat ring, but not anywhere else. Some of the players who noticed that there was an attack-option began to attack random players anywhere in Gielinor. Other players could not defend themselves because there was no attack-option for them. Even though several players abused this bug to kill other players and loot their stuff, there was one player who stood out and went on an hour-long killing spree in and around Falador, using the Ancient Magicks spellbook. What caused this event to be so dramatic is that everyone wanted to check out what was going on as soon as they heard the news of a massacre taking place and they did not hesitate to run straight into the path of the bug abusers. The player moderators who were there tried to warn everyone and instructed all players to bank their valuables and to teleport to another location. It is said that a total value of over two billion gp in items was lost during the massacre. Even though all bug abusers received a permanent ban, no items were restored to the accounts of the victims.

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Until 24th October 2012 many of us knew random events as the annoying in-game distraction that interrupted our everyday RuneScape adventure. Even though they did not exist before RS2, it should be noted that RS1 players were not much luckier. The fatigue system is the predecessor of random events and it was even more inconvenient than the random event system. Both systems had as goal to break bots and remove them from the game so that legitimate players could play under the best circumstances. I have already described what the fatigue system is, so I am not going to do that again here. The community reacted negatively towards this system and that is why it was removed during the transition from RS1 to RS2. The innovating random event system came instead of it. It had the same goal, but unlike the fatigue system, it tried to provide the players with a more enjoyable or more entertaining way of getting through that procedure of breaking the bots. Successfully completing the random event would also give the player a reward. This reward could be anything small, varying from xp lamps to noted gems, coins, or even a mystery box that would generate a random reward. Many random events were introduced to the game over the course of the years, but quite some of them had already been replaced prior to removal of the random event system October 2012. Some of the random events at that time had been revamped several times and the reward system had changed too. There also used to be dangerous random events which featured NPCs that would attack the players if they ignored that NPC, but some of those random events would also cause the NPC to attack the player right away, such as the dreaded evil chicken. All these dangerous random events were removed from the game on 25th February 2009 when Jagex revamped the entire system. Prior to this update the activity that a player had been doing determined what random event he or she would get, based on if there was any relation between the random event and the activity. Jagex changed this and completely randomized the system on that day as well, so that people would be given random events that they had never had before. Another change was that the players would no longer get random rewards for completing the events, but a random event gift instead, which was a box containing random rewards from which one could be chosen. The advantage of the new system was that there would always be something good in the box. High-level players usually picked the xp lamps because they were generally not in need of coins or any item that could be sold for a small amount of money. Summoning charms was also a possible reward that those players would regularly choose. Low-level players, on the other hand, usually did not need the xp lamps because the xp received from them was based on the player’s skill level and was scaled to it, so those players usually opted for the coins or any of the items. Jagex removed the random event system on 24th October 2012 because they believed that the system had become redundant after the release of Botany Bay and its improved bot-catching system on 26th September 2012.

More than fourty random event have existed in this game’s history, but it would really not be surprising if even veteran players have not encountered all of them. I was initially hesitant about adding a little something about random events, but eventually I was talked into it by some of my friends! Nevertheless, it would take up too much space to discuss all of the random events, so I have limited myself to a selection of them, but still enough to demonstrate what the events used to be like. 283

The Abyssal plane is place that immediately reminds old players of the Abyss, a dangerous location that was used a lot by runecrafters until the release of the runespan minigame in 2012. The release date of this random event was possibly 9th August 2005, the same day on which several others were released. The Abyssal plane random event has a rich history. First of all, it looked like it could have bordered the Runecrafting Abyss because the environment is identical. Initially it was not possible to interact in this event, other than clicking through chat box messages. Players who were teleported to the Abyssal plane would be asked to pull the odd appendage and they would automatically pull the correct one without having to click on it. In addition to that, there initially was no space between the spot where the player was standing and the four levers, preventing the player from moving. Furthermore, at first there were only two activities that could cause a player to get teleported to the Abyssal plane. These activities were the use of any teleportation spell or getting teleported to the essence mine. When Jagex changed the random event so that each player had to manually click the right appendage in order to escape, people noticed that pulling the wrong one would not result in any punishment whatsoever. However, pulling the wrong one multiple times would result in taking heavy damage. Regardless of how many attempts that were needed to pick the right one, the player would always get a reward, but that reward depended on the activity that the player had been doing when they got teleported to the Abyssal plane. The reward consisted of either noted rune essence or teleportation runes. After the random event system update in February 2009, it became possible to be teleported to the Abyssal plane while doing other activities as well and the plane itself was enlarged. The Abyssal plane random event was very rare until that update due to its limited chances of occurring without deliberately forcing one (e.g. by casting teleportation spells until it got triggered). From that moment until the event system removal in 2012, it was one of the favourite random events in game as it took only a few seconds to complete it while there were plenty of other random events that required more time and effort to complete. During the first two weeks of October 2012 there was a glitch which prevented many players from getting any other random event besides the Abyssal plane one. They would still get random events as frequently as other people, but it would always be the Abyssal plane random event. The players who were affected by this glitch of course did not complain because the event was easy and fast to complete for almost no effort. Some players initially believed that this glitch had been caused by the Botany Bay glitch that had taken place a week before the first appearance of this random event glitch. Botany Bay was part of an improved anti-bot system that Jagex had released at the end of September 2012, but only a day after its release there was a glitch that caused over 40,000 legitimate players to get banned by the new system. So what exactly does this glitch have to do with random event one? Well, it was mainly the people that had been falsely banned who reported that the only event that they had been getting was the Abyssal plane one. Many players immediately made the connection between the two glitches because of that. Jagex initially did not know what had caused the Abyssal plane glitch to occur, but they confirmed that it was not related to Botany Bay in any way. The Abyssal plane glitch was fixed a good ten days after that statement had been made. The reason why there appeared to be a connection between the two events was probably just because so many accounts had been affected by the Botany Bay glitch.

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The beekeeper random event was released on 4th July 2006 and there used to be only one way to obtain this event. Especially the veteran players might remember that there is a flax field a little bit south of Camelot and that there is a fenced-off area next to it that contains several beehives. That area used to be empty until the release of this random event, but the flax field next to it is related to it as picking flax was the only way to end up in the beekeeper random event. However, other players that were picking flax could not see that someone had been teleported into that area for the random event. Players were supposed to repair a beehive in this random event by dragging the four pieces into their correct position. A player would be teleported back to the flax field once they had repaired it correctly. Failing to assemble all the pieces correctly would cause the bees to escape and chase the player into the water, after which that player would end up being teleported to Seers' Village. That was not a disaster, though, because Seers’ Village is located closed to the flax field. Of course there were also flax fields at other locations in RuneScape, but the Seers' Village one was by far the most popular place to pick flax because it was close to a spinning wheel and a bank, so players could pick the flax, spin it into bow string by using the spinning wheel and bank the bow string before returning to the flax field. Picking flax was never a popular activity among high-level players, or just among players with decent skills in general, so there were many players who had never gotten this random event before the entire system was updated in February 2009, which made it possible to get the random event while doing other activities as well. The beekeeper event was slightly changed during that update too: failing to assemble the beehive correctly would still cause angry bees to chase the payer, but that player would no longer jump into water. Instead, the angry bees would sting the player and the beekeeper would then teleport that player to a random location in RuneScape. The stinging did not cause any damage, though. The four pieces of the beehive were always represented on the screen as four separate pieces. These pieces used to be white for a very long time, but since Christmas 2011, they carried random colours that changed every few seconds. It was updated that way to increase the chances of catching (colour) bots. Also this random event could be categorized as being enjoyable because of its fast completion speed.

Cap'n Arnav and his locked chest is our next random event. This event changed drastically ever since it was introduced to RuneScape. Initially it was possible to get this random event only while training Farming. That means that the random event used to be members-only content. The Cap'n Arnav random event did not exist yet when RS2 was released, with the logical reason for that being that the Farming skill was released on 11th July 2005, the same day as this random event, which could be triggered by planting seeds in the various farming patches that can be found in RuneScape. After digging up the chest in the farming patch, Cap'n Arnav would appear and ask the player to unlock his chest by solving the combination code. Everyone was given two attempts to match all three items on the lock. As punishment for failing twice, Cap'n Arnav would get angry and teleport that player to a random 285 location in RuneScape. The whole random event was revamped at the start of 2009. Free members were given access to it as well, which means that it would no longer be a Farming-only random event. The problem was that the Cap'n Arnav event was pretty much built around the Farming skill, so Jagex had to update the event. They did this by teleporting the players to a new island where Cap'n Arnav would be waiting for players to help him. The goal or task in this random event remained the same, but this time players received five attempts rather than the two that they had been given in the previous version. Some visual aspects of the random event included the presence of four sharks circling the island, waiting for anyone to enter the water. Just like before, failing the random event would result in getting teleported to a random location in RuneScape. The Cap’n Arnav random event was never well-liked because the compulsory conversation with the captain took a while and the actual lock could lag when trying to unlock it very fast, often causing playing to click once too much.

The certer event has a story worthy of knowing as well. Let me start by saying that the certer could be either Miles, Niles or Giles. These names should ring a bell for the players who have played RS1. The bank notes system did not exist in RS1 and the only way to obtain a form of notes was by going to any of the certers. They would change five of the same item into five stackable notes, saving four slots in the inventory. Miles, Niles and Giles were three of the available certers and it would be hard to imagine that some of the RS1 players never made use of their services back in the day. However, these certers became useless when the bank note system was added to the game during the RS2 beta in February 2004. That is also when the fatigue system was replaced with the random event system, but Miles, Niles and Giles were removed from the game until the certer random event re-introduced them on 9th August 2005. Initially either Miles, Niles or Giles would appear next to a player and would ask to identify an item. Whoever appeared next to that player was completely random and there would be three answers from which the player could choose. If a player ignored the certer, that player would be given four warnings, after which the certer would get angry, turn all of the player’s items in the inventory and in equipment slot into bank notes, and teleport that player to a random location in RuneScape. A problem that could arise was that it was sometimes just not possible to talk to the certer. This could happen when the particular player was engaged in combat and could not run away or hide from the attacking monster. Jagex solved this problem in 2009 by having the players teleported to the certer's office by either of the three certers. However, according to a quote taken from the Postbag of the Hedge, the random event should actually have been removed by then. An article of 2008 contains a quote by Giles, We are most hopeful that this little piece of bureaucracy will soon be a thing of the past, and we can all go on a well-deserved holiday, or possibly even retire. This suggests that Jagex had initially planned to remove the random event along with other random events at the start of 2009, but something must have changed their mind as it remained part of the game until late in 2012.

Left, right, left, right, left, right... the movement of a demon's leg when watching a player perform hard labour. That demon listened to the name Sergeant Damien and he was added to the game in October 2004 as part of the new drill demon event, in which a player was supposed to follow the orders of the drill demon and do several exercises as punishment for being lazy. There were four different exercises which had to be performed on four different mats, indicated by a symbol. Sergeant Damien would insult – nothing bad! – the player for doing the wrong exercise, but no other punishment would be given for that. The reward for following his orders was a piece of the 286

camouflage outfit or a random reward if the player already had the full set. The outfit was tradeable until February 2009. During that same update, Jagex tweaked the random event a little bit so that the exercise mats would change after performing an exercise. This meant that players would have to pay more attention, although the change was more aimed at bots and was undone in 2012. The place where the event took place is quite interesting. The fenced-off exercise area was surrounded by an obstacle course that looked like a small Agility course.

Evil Bob is without a doubt the most popular cat in Gielinor, but his random event was generally considered to be very annoying. All of his victims would find themselves stuck on an island with the cat and a servant. This was a little bit different than the random event's early stages after its release on 9th August 2005. First of all, there used to be two slave servants until August 2005, which is when they were replaced by one servant. Furthermore, no one was able to speak with the servants, unless when wearing a manspeak amulet, which could be obtained during the random event. Bob himself was wearing such an amulet as well so that he could talk to the players. There were several fishing spots on each side of the island and one of the slaves would tell the player on which side to catch the fish. Initially everyone was asked to catch four fish, but this was changed to one in 2012. Completing the event was a long-winded process because the player was also supposed to pick up one of the nets on the island. After catching a fish, which was already cooked, it had to be uncooked and fed to Bob. If the player had fished at the wrong spot, Bob would say that the fish was disgusting and force that player to catch two more fish as punishment. Not paying attention while any of the slaves was telling where to catch the fish resulted in the player having to guess because the information could not be re-obtained by talking to bob or the servants. Once a player had caught enough fish for Bob to fall asleep (four fish; later, one), that player could escape by entering the portal next to him, but not before performing the raspberry emote, aimed at Bob. Initially the reward for completing the event would be either Fishing or Magic xp, depending on what the player had been doing prior to being abducted by Bob. A few years after the release of the random event, the manspeak amulet was removed from the event and, probably on the same day, Jagex reduced the amount of fish that a player was supposed to catch from four to two, and that was a good decision considering the fact that catching and uncooking four fish was time- consuming. In February 2009 Jagex reduced the amount of fish that was required to escape from two to one. This made the random event a whole lot more enjoyable. Male players had the option to ask the (female) servant to escape with them once the cat has fallen asleep. She would always refuse the offer, though… A wasted opportunity for her! 287

Molly and her twin sister were the protagonists of another random event that the RuneScape community would have rather seen removed from the game. Moira – that was the name of her sister – had been misbehaving and Molly hoped that the player could put her behind bars. This random event was one of the very few that did not change at all ever since its release on 22nd May 2006. Not even the long non-optional conversation that everyone was forced to go through at the start of the event was ever removed. Molly's evil twin event was also one of the few events during which a player was required to memorize something. In this case it was the appearance of Molly herself because her twin sister in the room next door was wearing the exact same clothes. The only problem was that there were four other women who looked similar and the following extra difficultly was present as well: while in Molly's room, a player could not check Moira's appearance and while in Moira's room, that player could not check what Molly looked like. Furthermore, a player could not return to Molly's room until Moira had been caught. The stressful part of the random event was that the player needed to operate the control panel to move the crane that was supposed to be used to pick up the evil twin, who was walking around in the room with only brief intermissions of standing still. Quite frustrating because it was easy to be just too late if a player needed too much time moving the crane above the head of Moira. It could cause the random event to take quite some time to complete, although reportedly some people actually did like that part. Even though this random event generally took some time to complete, it did not necessarily have to be that way. In fact, there was a chance to catch the evil twin within three seconds after starting to use the control panel, or the time it took for Moira to make her first movement. It was all just a matter of getting used to the routine. There was also a mysterious door that could not be opened in the closed-off area where the women were walking around. I have always wondered to what place it led. Completing the event would give the player a random reward until early 2009, when the random event gifts were introduced and allowed the players to choose their reward. Twin sisters always have many things in common and that also counted for their behaviour in this case. Fail to pick the right twin twice (a player was given two chances) and Molly would become angry and send that player to a random location in Gielinor, without a reward.

The freaky forester was a guy in lederhosen who could not count. The random event was released on the first day of August 2005 and the freaky forester featuring in it needed help with catching the correct pheasant. Also this event never changed at all since its release until its removal in 2012. This event was one of the easier and faster random events and a new outfit could be unlocked upon completion of it. However, players reported that this was one of the rarer random events at first. During this event a player would find themselves trapped in the middle of an area surrounded by trees and apparently inhabited by pheasants... and a freaky forester. There were pheasants with one, two, three and four tails, and the freaky forester needed help with catching the right one. The players were supposed to offer that help by killing the pheasant that had the correct amount of tails. They would deal damage in the process, although no xp could be gained from the event. When most random events used to be related to certain activities (this was until February 2009), people thought that the freaky forester one was easier to obtain while training the Woodcutting skill. Although we can say with certainty that that was not the case after February 2009, it has never been confirmed nor denied that Woodcutting did increase a player’s chances of getting the freaky forester as event. The random event could also occur when doing other activities, unlike many other random events at that time that were bound to specific activities. A piece of the lederhosen outfit that the forester 288 wore during the random event was the reward that a player would obtain from successfully helping the forester. As of early 2009 a player could choose whether or not they wanted the outfit as reward by selecting any of the possible rewards that the random event gift offered. It was not possible to kill any more pheasants after handing over the dead pheasant. This was also the case when a player had killed the wrong bird as he or she would not be given another chance and would be teleported to another place in RuneScape.

Not only was there a famous cat, we have also had a famous frog and its name was Herald. Players who met Herald got teleported to the Land of the Frogs where Herald the frog would explain what the player needed to do. Female players were supposed to kiss a prince who had been turned into a frog. Male players were asked to kiss a princess who had been turned into that same green critter. The random event was released on the same day as the freaky forester one, which was on 1st August 2005. For the first few years of the event’s existence, multiple frogs would appear next to the player without getting teleported to the Land of the Frogs. Until early 2009 successfully completing this event would reward a frog token, which could be exchanged at Thessalia's clothing store in Varrock for any piece of the prince or princess outfit, depending on the player’s gender. The reason for giving frog tokens rather than immediately a piece of the set is probably because the reward was gender-related. Banking the frog tokens was possible, although they could not be noted and they did not stack in the inventory. As of February 2009 frog tokens could no longer be obtained and all of them were removed from the game. Players who happened to have any frog tokens sitting in their bank would get a random event gift for each frog token that was in their possession. Players who completed the event after the aforementioned date received a random event gift which contained a piece of the prince or princess outfit as one of the possible rewards. There was not really a way to fail this random event because there was only one frog that could be kissed. However, if a player ignored that frog for too long or talked too much to the other frogs, the prince or princess would start to feel offended, after which she would teleport that player to another area in the Land of the Frogs, so you would still be in the random event.

Whenever a player saw Leo the gravedigger pop up on the screen, they knew that they were up for a nice memory test. Leo needed to put five coffins into the five graves that were present in the random event. The coffins were already lying in the graves, but not in the correct ones and Leo himself was known to be a little bit lazy. So... someone else had to do that for him. The lucky victim first needed to find out which coffin belonged to which grave by clicking on the gravestones of each grave. Doing so made a rotating image show up that displayed one of the items that was supposed to be included in the coffin of that particular grave. Each coffin contained different items and the player was supposed to use the rotating images to determine the right grave for each coffin. This little memory test was released on 289

15th March 2006, but many players disliked this random event. The memory part definitely played a role in that, but also the fact that it took a while to complete the event. Initially this random event could be triggered only by burying bones. This changed in the February 2009 when the entire random event system was revamped. A unique feature of this event was that it offered the possibility to skip the event. Many players did know this, but just gave it a shot anyway. Skipping could be done by talking to Leo again like a player would normally do after having put all the coffins in their corresponding grave. Talking to him again right away was also advised because sometimes all five coffins were already lying in the correct grave, which means that the player would get the reward and be teleported back to their spot in RuneScape without actually needing to do anything in the random event. If any or more of the coffins were not in the correct grave, however, Leo would ask that player if they wanted to retry or give up. Doing the latter would be considered as failing the event, though, which meant that the player would be teleported to a random location in RuneScape, but that was not the only punishment. In addition to that, the random event frequency would also increase for that player for the next 24 hours, which is why it was not advised to skip the event. Completing the event prior to February 2009 would give each player a piece of the zombie outfit or any of the two zombie emotes as reward. The Kingdom of Morytania received a big graphical update in August 2011. An interesting fact is that the Leo's mausoleum was also graphically updated on that day. This confirmed the presumption that Leo's graveyard would probably be located in Morytania. But hey, where else would you find so much death outside of the Wilderness? As of Christmas 2011 the rotating items that showed up when clicking the gravestone changed colour every few seconds. This was done to increase the chances of catching colour bots. Leo the gravedigger is one of the random events that is not missed by many.

The maze random event was released on 2nd August 2004 and it featured the mysterious old man. He has quite a history in the world of random events. To start off, you were either a lover or a hater of the maze random event. Some found it extremely annoying to maneuver through the maze while others looked forward to the rewards. When confronted with this random event, players ended up in a maze in which they had to reach the most central point of it to unlock the rewards. The maze was full of gates that could be used. I still remember the first time I was teleported to the maze… I was completely lost. Luckily it was possible to look at the routes that other people were using, but getting lost or having no clue where to go was definitely part of it for a fair amount of players. The maze random event never underwent any major changes, but in 2012 there a few minor changes were made to the way in it worked, though. First of all, in the earlier years there was no mysterious old man that would follow the player through the maze. Everyone was left to their owner devices, but would still get a message when trying to go through a wrong gate. Secondly, the rewards that the random event initially gave were limited in comparison with years later. At first it was even possible to get nothing at all. After the changes to the random event system in February 2009, the maze random event remained the only event that would not reward a player with the new random event gift. The rewards itself were based on how fast the player had been able to navigate through the maze and rewards with a total value of over 100k gp were not rare. This is why many low-level players often referred to the maze 290 event as their favourite random event, while many of the rich players often disliked it. Furthermore, the rewards were always level-based, so experienced players would receive better rewards than new players. Still in February of 2009, the maze event system was changed so that a player would always have their energy at 100% in the maze, also while running. Keep in mind that the energy restoration rate was still slow at that time and that the rest-option had not been released yet, which could be a disaster if the player ran around too much in the maze without actually progressing through it towards the centre. There was never a way to fail this random event, so that means that the only option a player had was getting to the centre, even if it meant no reward because the percentage had dropped to 0% by then. However, a player would get kicked from the random event after 24 hours. It is no secret that some players did not like this random event. Not only because the gates had the same colour as the maze's walls, but also because all walls carried an open-wall option, exactly the same text that a player would see when hovering the mouse over the gates.

The mime random event was released on the same day as the maze event. Players who were sent to the theatre area where they had to imitate the mime would first encounter the mysterious old man. As we have seen with the maze event, the mime one was only one of the random events in which he featured. The event area never changed over the course of the years, but some differences in other aspects can be noted, though. First of all, initially a player did not receive a message after performing the right or wrong emote. Jagex used emotes instead of text to indicate that because the random event was entirely emote-based anyway. A player would automatically perform the cheer emote if the mime had been imitated correctly, but perform the cry emote if the wrong emote had been copied. The latter happened more than you would expect because there was no way to find out which emote the mime had performed in case the player had not been paying attention. A player was supposed to cope the mime correctly three times in order to escape, but the annoying part about this was that all those three correct emotes had to be performed consecutively. For example, if a player had performed two correct emotes, but messed up on the third one, he or she would have to restart and do three new emotes. After completing the event, the player would be rewarded with a piece of the mime outfit, which became very popular because of its fashionable combination possibilities with other clothes or armour at that time. When the random event system was updated early 2009, that outfit became a part of the new random event gift from which a player could choose a piece of the outfit or other random rewards. That day was also when the random event was given messages in the chatbox to indicate whether an emote had been imitated correctly or not.

The pillory random event was released on 24th October 2005 and a player used to be able to get this random event only while training the Thieving skill, so that means that the event used to be members-only content. The intriguing part of the pillory random event is that it served as a way to punish the players for stealing. Anyone who got caught in this event would find themselves inside a prison at a public location. This last element is important because it allowed other players to interact as well. The possible locations were 291

Seers’ Village, Varrock and Yanille. The player was supposed to unlock three locks by using the correct keys and meanwhile other players could throw rotten tomatoes. There was also always a NPC who would throw tomatoes, just in case that none of the players was interested in occupying themselves with activities like that. The only way to get out of the prison was by unlocking all locks, so there was not really a way to fail this random event. However, using the wrong key resulted in seeing an extra lock added that the player would need to unlock as well then. This random event became available to free players when the whole random event system was updated at the beginning of 2009. Another part of that update was that it became possible to get that event while doing non-Thieving activities as well. The pillory random event is one that was fast and easy to complete. Players who were teleported to this event by the pillory guard would find themselves trapped in one of the three prisons in any of the aforementioned cities, but these cages were not removed when Jagex decided to remove the random event system at the end of 2012. That means that it is still possible to visit those public prisons. In fact, you can still end up in one of them by trying to pickpocket the nearby pillory guard, just give it a try.

The pinball random event was another random event which featured the mysterious old man. This time he would teleport the player to the random event area and explain the rules of the game, after which he vanished into nothingness. It was released on 22nd May 2006, which is the same release date as the evil twin random event, and it was never altered after its release. In this random event the player was supposed to tag the flashing pillar ten times in a row without making a mistake. Mistakes could be made because there were five pillars while only one of them would flash. Tagging the wrong pillar meant that the score would reset and that the player would have to retry. This immediately also implies that there was no way to fail the event. After having tagged the correct pillar ten times, the player could leave through the exit, which was guarded by Flippa and Tilt, two trolls. Initially, when someone tried to leave before tagging all the required pillars, Flippa and Tilt would become very angry and smash that player back into the area. The player would also take some damage for that, but Jagex later changed that. The difficult part of this random event was that the camera angle constantly changed and that made it easy to accidentally tag the wrong pillar. Furthermore, it was not a random event that was fast to complete, and those two elements could be a reason why some people disliked it. Jagex also added a sort of window, or glassy effect, as an on- screen layer between the player and the game area to make it look similar to a real-life pinball machine. Sometimes upon leaving the random event, it could happen that a player would still see that window or layer for another second, even though they were already back at the location where they had been abducted by the mysterious old man. Flippa and Tilt were probably the most well-known trolls in Gielinor during their six years of existence.

Prison Pete and his prison definitely formed one of the stranger random events in Gielinor. It was released on 10th January 2006 and players who were lucky enough to meet Prison Pete would be teleported to a prison in the mirror world of RuneScape, called ScapeRune. The shape of the prison was an exact copy of the party room in Falador, and Prison Pete and Party Pete seemed to be twin brothers as well. The truly fascinating part about this random event is that the player needed to 292

escape by killing live balloon animals that dropped the keys that were needed to open the locks. There were several types of balloon animals and the one that the player was supposed kill for the correct key would be determined by a lever that they had to pull. Strangely, the keys were initially not used to unlock door locks for the simple reason that there was no door or gate with a lock yet. Instead there used to be a passage which was blocked by three magical barriers that disappeared only when giving the correct keys to Prison Pete. Handing over a wrong key would result in seeing a new barrier added. It was also possible to be a rebel and to refuse to pop the balloon animals. If that is what someone decided to do, they would eventually automatically be teleported back to the main game after 24 hours. Later this was changed to just fifteen minutes. An interesting remark to make here is that it initially was Evil Bob and not Prison Pete who would teleport the players to the random event area, but I could not find when this was changed. Quite some modifications to the Prison Pete event took place when the random event system was revamped in February 2009. First of all, the walls as well as the floor were given a lighter shade of grey as colour. Secondly, the barriers were replaced with just one door that contained three locks and then there also was the reduction from 24 hours to fifteen minutes. Jagex increased the size of all balloon animals in 2011, but I am not sure if that was done to make it more convenient to click on them or because two of the balloon animal types looked quite alike. So increasing their size would then have made them easier to recognize. This random event has a rich history, and it safe to say that some of us were a fan of it.

The quiz master random event was added to the game on a day that many random events were released: 1st August 2005. The purpose of this event was to answer several questions correctly so that the player could escape. The overly excited quiz master would show the lucky player three items form which he or she would then have to pick the odd one out. The random event was never updated because completing it was relatively straightforward. Until 2009 everyone was given the option to choose between a reward of 1,000 gp or a mystery box. The mystery box would contain a random item that could have a higher value than the 1,000 coins. However, it could also be the other way around, and that was how it mostly turned out to be. In February 2009 both rewards became part of the new reward system with the random event gifts. There was no way to fail this random event. Answering incorrectly would result in having to restart the event, but there was no actual punishment.

The sandwich lady was released on 10th January 2006 and her existence is quite a unique story. Mod Poppy, a former Jagex moderator, reported in 2011 on the RuneScape forums that a sandwich lady always used to come over at Jagex's headquarters to provide the employees with food at 293 lunchtime. Initially the sandwich lady would visit the players in-game and tell them to pick a specific type of food that she was carrying in her basket. The player would not be teleported to another location for this and was allowed to keep the food if the right type of food had been selected in her basket. On the other hand, the sandwich lady would show her angry side if the player had picked the wrong one. She would then hit that player with a baguette, inflicting a small amount of damage in the process, and teleport him or her to a random location in RuneScape. Several foreign players complained about the fact that they could not recognize some of the types of food because they did not know the English words, so shortly after the random event had been released, Jagex added a key-option to the event screen so that everyone would be able to see the names of each type of food. The changes of February 2009 had a big impact on the random event. The most significant change was that the lady would no longer offer her food at the player’s location itself, but that player would instead be teleported to sandwich lady’s personal food restaurant. A fun fact about this random event is that the sandwich lady also used to be able to teleport a player to the Wilderness if they had selected the wrong type of food, but Jagex changed that rather fast. The sandwich lady random event was perhaps the fastest event of them all, so many players generally did not mind giving her some attention for a few seconds. And a few seconds was really all it took.

Exams are usually not a welcome happening to many, but that was slightly different in RuneScape. At least, for one random event in which the teacher was a red dragon. The surprise exam random event, as it was often called, was one of the newer events, though, as it was released on 17th July 2007. The players were supposed to either link three relevant items to each other or to pick a fourth relevant item that could be linked to three previous ones. Each time there were multiple options, so of course it was possible to make mistakes. The type of task that a player would get was completely random, but adding the fourth item in a series was generally an easier and faster exercise. If a player needed to relate three different yet relevant items to each other in a grid containing fifteen options, the dragon teacher would give that player cryptic hint. There were four different doors in the classroom and once the player had answered three questions correctly, the red dragon would tell which door could be used to leave the room. Picking the wrong door would result in missing out on the reward and being teleported to a random location in RuneScape, even if all tasks has been completed correctly. The much-liked element of this random event was the reward as it was arguably the best random event reward that existed in the game, namely the book of knowledge. This book would offer the players xp in a skill of their own choice, but much more than the genie’s xp lamp that could be obtained from other random events.

The angry ent random event could occur only while training Woodcutting. It was one of the first random events to exist, released when the random even system replaced the fatigue system during the beta of RS2 in early 2004. A player could recognize that a tree had turned into an angry ent by the face that would appear on the tree, and the tree itself would start to wobble a bit too. Another visual sign could be noticed in the text box when hovering the mouse over the tree (this feature was removed upon the release of RS3 in August 2013). The name of the tree would be displayed in yellow and the tree would appear as a yellow dot on the minimap, to make it look like a NPC. If a 294 player continued to chop the true after the angry ent had appeared, it would break that player’s hatchet, which means that he or she would not be able to continue training Woodcutting. These broken axes, as they were called, could initially be repaired only in Lumbridge, but later also in the POH after the release of Construction in 2006. Keep in mind that there was no home teleport spell until September 2006, let alone a lodestone network, so the player was forced to get to Lumbridge by other means. The angry ent random event could be trigger by all players who were training the skill at the same tree and as soon as an ent appeared, all players would be affected by it. This means that the angry ent appeared more frequently when there were more players training Woodcutting. It also means that the ent could appear several times in a short period of time. However, some of the later-generation hatchets were not affected by the angry ent, such as the hatchet from the Stealing Creation minigame and the inferno adze. Both of them could not be broken by the ent, but the player would automatically stop chopping the tree instead. After a while the angry ent would transform back into the regular tree, after which the players could click on the tree again to continue the woodcutting. The angry ent random event was removed from the game in February 2009. As a side-note I would like to add that all Woodcutting hatchets were called axes until 1st April 2009 (adamant axe, bronze axe, rune axe etc.).

Also being one of the first random events in RuneScape, the big fish random event could be triggered by training Fishing. This fish would bug fishermen by quickly grabbing their fishing tool and spitting it out. This could not be avoided by the affected player. The spat out fishing tool could be lying on the ground up to ten squares away from where the player had been fishing. It also acted as a dropped item, meaning that it would disappear after a certain amount of time and that it could be picked up by other players. The big fish random event could occur only when using a tradeable fishing tool and thus is could technically be avoided by using fishing methods that require the use of an untradeable fishing tool. This random event remained in RuneScape for five years until it was removed on 25th February 2009, alongside removal of many other random events, such as the strange plant. This plant could randomly appear regardless of the activity that a player was doing. That player was then supposed to pick the strange fruit from the plant, after which the plant would disappear. However, if the player did not do that or was not paying attention, the plant would begin to attack and poison the player. The plant must have had a very strong defence because the maximum hit that a player could deal on the plant was, using the life points system, just thirty, while the plant itself had many life points. This plant was generally considered to be a nightmare to low-level players because of its poison and it is safe to assume that many players have died due to being attacked by the plant in the early days of their RuneScape career. The random event was removed in February 2009, but the strange plant still exists today and grows west of the crystal tree spot in Brimhaven.

The tree spirit random event was added to the game during the RS2 beta. Trying to chop any type of tree could result in a tree spirit emerging from the tree. She would always have a higher combat level than the player that she was going to attack. The tree spirit was known for being relatively 295 difficult to kill by using Melee because she had a strong defence, although this could be circumvented by using fire spells. Of course no woodcutter would ever train the skill with a magic staff and runes in the inventory. Alternatively, the player could run away, far enough. The tree spirit would disappear after a while then, so that the player could safely return. Instead of completely removing the random event in 2009, Jagex moved the tree spirit to the Enchanted Valley, which is a location that is unlocked during the quest Fairy Tale II – Cure a Queen. There also used to exist a Fishing and Mining equivalent of the tree spirit, released also during the RS2 beta. The river troll could randomly appear while fishing and would attack any of the players. For the Mining skill there was the rock golem trying to protect the ore. Together with the tree spirit, also the river troll and the rock golem were moved to the Enchanted Valley when Jagex removed all dangerous random events from the game in February of 2009. All three can be triggered by training the corresponding skills in the Enchanted Valley, although weaker versions will appear.

The last random event that I will discuss is the notorious evil chicken, which could appear anywhere in RuneScape regardless of the activity or skill. As soon as it spawned, the players’ first reaction was usually to run away as fast as possible as far as possible. The evil chicken would launch magic attacks in rapid succession at its target. Although the hits were never high, they were always accurate. This was primarily a problem for players whose life points were low. People usually preferred to run away and wait till the evil chicken had disappeared instead of trying to fight it. Also this random event was removed in 2009, but the chicken would later in the Easter event of 2012. Furthermore, the evil chicken appears in the quest Recipe for Disaster and still exists today as it can be fought in the Dominion Tower. The evil chicken sometimes also appears anywhere near a place with chickens to encourage them to start a revolt against humans.

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Appendix I

Revival of the Wilderness

In this book I have talked about many of the central elements that once were or still are part of the game. One of those central elements is the Wilderness and its important role many, many years ago. The revival of the Wilderness has since the removal of the trade limit in 2011 been a much- discussed topic. At RuneFest 2011 Mod Chihiro acknowledged and addressed the concerns raised by the PvP community, after it had started to become clear that Wilderness Pk’ing had suffered too much under the three-year presence of the trade limit and the alternative Pk’ing systems. In 2012 His Lordship and DG Keanu, in cooperation with the most prominent PvP clans, released a video in an attempt to draw Jagex’s attention. The proposed solution, to make the Wilderness more attractive, that followed shortly thereafter was taken into consideration by Jagex. In 2013 they seemed to respond by releasing the Warbands D&D, but to no avail. Months went by as the Wilderness’s situation became more hopeless with each passing second. Eventually, it was at RuneFest 2014 when Jagex revealed that a big Wilderness update could be expected in 2015. What should we expect?

I do not know, but in this exposition I will propose an alternative solution. In the past months I have had the opportunity to talk to several former representatives of the PvP community, such as King Sabre, who founded the very first clan in 2001 and was there to witness the birth of a game which would revolve around PvP for many of the next years; and His Lordship, founder of the Wilderness Guardians and a highly respected member of the RS2 and RS3 PvP community. I have listened to their stories and devised a careful solution that should sound like music to the ears of Pk’ers, skillers and even those warriors who are brave enough to challenge the toughest boss monsters.

Before I continue with my suggestion, I want you to know that I am not a Pk’er. In fact, I am one of those skillers who used to care about gaining xp and the mere thought of visiting the Wilderness seemed like a waste of time to me. But not only that, it also scared me, a lot. As a consequence, I

297 have never set foot in the Wilderness with the intention of trying to kill another player. Now you might wonder why I would be an advocate of reviving the Wilderness, so here is why: For many years the Wilderness was the driving force behind the game. The PvP tradition dates back to as early as the game’s release on 4th January 2001 and it was not until the release of RuneScape 2 on 29th March 2004 that a first shift towards a more non-combat-minded community became noticeable. But even then the PvP community remained on the foreground, pretty much until December 2007, when Jagex took a series of measures to combat real-world traders, and they sacrificed the PvP community in the process. Something had been unfairly taken away from a community whose mere existence in 2007 was the result of an extremely successful and rich PvP tradition.

Despite my personal aversion to Pk’ing, from a historical point of view there is no denying that the PvP community is worth reviving. Jagex has seemed willing to try to resolve this situation in the past, so I hope that also the solution proposed here will be taken into consideration. Different than previous suggestions made by the community is that the solution in this thread was written from the standpoint of a skiller, ergo, with great consideration for the non-Pk’ers.

CONTENTS

-Introduction -The right method

-The Wilderness area --PvM content --Skilling content --Other changes to the Wilderness

-Part 1 of the new game mechanism --A formula for Pk’ing and gaining xp --Restrictions

-Rewards --Part 2 of the new game mechanism ---Type 1 rewards ---Type 2 rewards ---About the Type 1 and Type 2 rewards

-Hiscores -Potential issues with the solution -Conclusion -Closing words

THE RIGHT METHOD

For many years Pk’ing was one of the most profitable activities in the game. Today, however, PvP (or what is left of it) is done for the love of the tradition. There is no longer a focus on money and it is not uncommon for a Pk’er to lose money, on average. Then also with the extremely rewarding content released in the recent years, it should be understood by everyone that attempting to revive the Wilderness in a way which turns PvP into an efficient method for moneymaking is something that will never work. The only viable solutions are those which primarily focus on the renaissance of the PvP tradition itself. A suggestion should not only have as goal to bring back PvP, but also to 298 create more diversity in the general community, to make a connection between the various major subcommunities (PvP, PvM, skilling) and to revive a large area in RuneScape which, for the most part, is now completely redundant. I strongly believe that my solution will be able to achieve all of this.

How I deem the revival of the PvP community and the Wilderness very possible is by rewarding the players for risking their items. This means that a player should be rewarded for spending time in the Wilderness, even when that player is bad at Pk’ing. So how should we go about this? In the current community many players are opposed to the idea of entering the Wilderness while carrying a certain amount of money if there is no guarantee that they will get something in return. Why should a player jump over the wall into the Land of Blood when nothing can be gained, but only lost? When we consider the idea of rewarding players simply for entering the Wilderness, then the first things that should jump to your mind are probably 76k’ing and adding more resources to the Wilderness. 76k’ing was good for what it was, but it just was not what PvP is supposed to be like. Adding more resources would definitely help, but also here you face the problem of no rewards being guaranteed (a player might get killed on their way back to the bank or while running towards the resources). Does that mean that a player should be rewarded even when he or she is just standing around in the Wilderness, doing nothing at all? Of course not, that could open the door for abuse of the system. However, there are ways to provide guaranteed rewards without allowing any kind of abuse. I believe that I have found such a solution by adding a new mechanism which comprises the entire area of the Wilderness.

THE WILDERNESS AREA

Let’s first talk about the Wilderness before telling more about that new game mechanism. First of all, the currently existing content would continue to exist and everyone would still have access to the original content (unless, of course, certain levels are currently already required). In the solution there should be more resources etc. for the Wilderness, but just new content will not do. Mentioned below is more information about the new content that should be released, but it is eventually the combination of new content and the new game mechanism that would coalesce to form the eventual solution.

PvM content

Currently the Wilderness is home to many different creatures. A few those are the Chaos Elemental and the WildyWyrms. A good idea to start off with would be to add new bosses to the Wilderness, with a new kind of drop table that is currently not used by any other monster yet. These new bosses, perhaps a Revenant King and a Revenant Queen, should have a drop table that contains almost all tradeable items in RuneScape (perhaps minus holiday items). For example, if there are 4000 tradeable items, all of them would be added to the drop table and the drop rate of each item would become 1/4000. In addition to that, all time spent on attacking/killing these monsters would be logged in the same way that some combat weapons degrade as a player uses them. The most expensive tradeable items would be grouped together into a tier. As time passes, each player would be more likely to receive a top tier item if none have been obtained yet. For instance, following the same example, after 25 hours the drop rate of the top tier items could be reduced to 1/2000. As soon as a player receives a top tier item, the drop rate of those items would be reset to 1/4000. The general idea is that the each player would eventually get a very expensive drop, although ignore the numbers that I have mentioned here as they are just used as examples. Jagex should eventually determine how to balance everything.

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Another way to make the Wilderness more attractive is by releasing a new Slayer master who grants access to a new Slayer dungeon in the Wilderness, a dungeon which contains already existing monsters and new Slayer creatures. All Slayer xp gained in these dungeons would be twice as high as elsewhere in RuneScape and a new valuable item could be added to the drop table of the monsters, a new item which would not be dropped by the same monsters outside of the Wilderness. An important detail to keep in mind for this suggestion as well as the one about the new bosses is that the players who engage in these activities will already be wearing good armour and subsequently be able to defend themselves. However, this Slayer dungeon should be a single- combat area for PvP combat.

Skilling content

In his own suggestion of 2012, His Lordship talked about mobile resources. These would be great for the Wilderness, although my version of these resources is slightly different as it based on my own vision. Mobile resources are resources that spawn randomly at random location in the Wilderness and exist for ten to fifteen minutes before collapsing. The resources obtained from these spots are stackable and collecting them gives the player a generous amount of bonus xp in the respective resource-gathering skill and in the corresponding item-production skill (when possible). For example, a mobile resource spot could provide rune essence and reward the player with bonus xp in Mining and Runecrafting. Or, another spot could provide big bones and give bonus xp only in Prayer. The new resources obtained in the process could then be used to train their respective item- production skills outside of the Wilderness. A great idea here would be to combine the ideas of the Invention skill and to make the mobile resource spots provide a new type of resource that could be used to create any of the items that are also going to be part of Invention. The collecting of these mobile resources cannot give raw (actual) xp for reasons I will explain later in this suggestion.

There should also be more content for skillers in general. For example, an advanced Agility course on top of the already existing Wilderness course would be great. However, the focus here should be on what is now referred to as the buyable skills. It would be good to add content for Construction, Crafting, Herblore etc. to the Wilderness that does not require the buying of any resources. This way the poorer players in the community will be stimulated to enter the Wilderness, since it is an opportunity for them to train the buyable skills without having to spend money on it. Keep in mind that this should not all be high-level content. Ideally there would be content for each level. New content should also be made available in the lower levels of the Wilderness and not only in the deep levels. Perhaps content in the lower level regions could be aimed more at the lower-levelled players than at the higher-levelled players. On a final note, this new content should also generate a new type of resource, perhaps stackable, that can be used to train the same buyable skill outside of the Wilderness. This is to ensure that skillers in the Wilderness will always carry a certain amount of wealth, so that they will probably feel the need to bank every once and while and thus be forced to run through the Wilderness until they can teleport.

Other changes to the Wilderness

The amount of Wilderness levels should be reduced to thirty for two reason: so that every player will be more motivated to explore the deeper areas of the Wilderness and because it is necessary for something that follows in the next paragraphs. I also believe that there should be more single combat areas than multi-combat areas because the majority of the current community will probably not be able to adapt immediately to groups of Pk’ers. Additionally, for skillers or other non-combat minded players, single-combat areas would be a lot more enjoyable. Some players would enter the Wilderness with the intention of staying away from the multi-combat areas. For that reason I 300 believe that there should be a visible border between single-combat and multi-combat. This border could be as simple as a line of grass.

A last change applies to player versus monster fights in the Wilderness. When a player dies as a result of battle with a monster, his or her unprotected items should no longer spawn at the place of death, but at random locations in the Wilderness, and that for five minutes. A location is defined as a game square here. For example, if I were to be defeated by a Chaos Elemental and six of my items are not protected, they would immediately spawn at six random locations (one item per location). Keep in mind, only for player versus monster battles, not player versus player. This should motivate more players to explore the Wilderness and the empty regions between Wilderness content. Furthermore, this would serve as an item sink for the game, if we assume that many items will not be found.

PART 1 OF THE NEW GAME MECHANISM

The general idea behind the new mechanism is to reward the players for spending time in the Wilderness AND for being active there. The changes above cannot achieve that in a sufficiently satisfying manner without the introduction of this new game mechanism. For example, a skiller who collects resources in the Wilderness can still lose the resources when he or she gets killed by someone else. So even with the resources being present, there is no guarantee that the skiller will leave the Wilderness with the resources. This is why assigning good (bonus) xp rates to the mobile resources (and other new content) is necessary, but that would not be enough. However, the risk of losing items can still be compensated for by the new mechanism which I will describe below.

A formula for Pk’ing and gaining xp

Skillers and Pk’ers alike will automatically gain points for doing anything in the Wilderness. The act of Pk’ing itself will give points to both the victor and the defeated of the duel. The players will also obtain points from gaining xp in the Wilderness. The rate at which these points are obtained should be the same for all skills to prevent that training one skill in the Wilderness would become much more popular than another. Regarding points gained from Pk’ing, the winner should receive more points than the loser. The Wilderness level in which the Pk’ing or skilling takes place also affects the amount of points. These points would eventually be used to unlock rewards, but more about the rewards will follow later in this suggestion. Below I will show a few examples of balanced formulas (just try different numbers) that could be used to determine how many points a player should receive.

Example of a formula for Pk’ing:

Wilderness level Opponent′s Cb level−Your Cb level Base value * (1 + + ( )) * x 10 20 x = 1 if you lose and 3 if you win.

The base value is the arbitrarily defined value from which everything else is scaled. In this case the base value is 10 (warning: if you change this base value, the formula will no longer be balanced). If we apply this to someone with a combat level of 105 who gets killed by someone with a combat level of 95 in Wilderness level 29:

29 95−105 10*(1 + + ( )) * 1 = 10*(3.9 + (-0.5))*1 = 34 points 10 20 301

If the level 105 player would have won, he or she would have received 34*3= 102 points. Now let’s do that again, but this time from the perspective of the level 95, who loses the duel.

29 105−95 10*(1 + + ( )) * 1 = 44 10 20

If he wins the duel, he would have received 490*3=132 points. As you can see, the player with the lower combat levels get more points in the same situation (44 vs 34 and 132 vs 102). This is how it should work so that lower-levelled players will be encouraged to fight equally strong or even stronger players as well, instead of picking out the lower-level ones. In the example above, if you substituted both combat levels with, for instance, 24 and 34 (also a ten level gap), you would get the exact same values (44 vs 34 and 132 vs 102). In other words, this is a fair formula that does not punish players for having a low combat level. The existence of this formula is another reason why the number of Wilderness levels should be reduced to 30, otherwise the difference in points might be too big between the early and the deep Wilderness levels. This formula also applies when a skiller gets killer, even when he or she does not retaliate.

Another formula would exist for when a player is gaining xp. However, this formula does not grant points right away, but only after a certain amount of xp has been done in the skill (this value will differ from skill to skill because the goal is to have all skills grant points at an equal rate). The formula is the same for each activity in the Wilderness, and for every skill. An example of a formula for gaining xp could be as follows below. The second example applies to someone with level 95 in Agility who is training at an Agility course that requires level 90 Agility, in Wilderness level 29. The base value is supposed to be same in both formulas for Pk’ing and skilling. Warning: if you change the base value, the formula will no longer be balanced.

LR: Level required (in the skill to use that piece of content)

Wilderness level Base value * [(LR + your level in the skill) + (LR*( )] 10

29 10 * [(90 + 95) + (90*( )] = 100 * (185+90*2.9) = 4,460 10

Now let’s try this at different levels to see how the outcomes varies. This time I will use values that should correspond to the levels of the average mid-level player. The Agility course requires level 55, is located in Wilderness level 14 and the player has Agility level 65.

14 10 * [(55 + 65) + (55*( )] = 100 * (120+55*1.4) = 1,970 10

As you can see, there is a clear difference in outcome for the skilling formula, and that is how it should be as I believe that the variables in the formula are important. The goal of the two formulas is to make one hour of skilling generate fewer, but still enough, points than one hour of Pk’ing (this includes the time between finding a new person to kill). I am not sure how many players could be killed on average, but the xp intervals could always be adjusted to fix any imbalance (without having to touch the formula). For example: it might be agreed that a player will receive points for every 50k xp of Agility xp done in the Wilderness. However, a skill that is on average twice as fast as Agility should reward the players with the same amount of points after every 100k xp gained. Every imbalance could be corrected simply by adjusting these xp intervals, so it would not be necessary to change the formulas. This way it might even be better to assign xp intervals to each unique piece of content in the Wilderness, instead of doing this per skill. This part of the mechanism is why the mobile resources cannot give raw xp, but only bonus xp. If they provided raw (or actual) 302 xp, it would be incredibly difficult to balance this entire system as xp rates of the mobile resources are supposed to be more generous. The balancing between the two formulas (for PvP and skilling) is something that will inevitably have to be improved after the release of all the content because it seems impossible to get it right without the entire community testing it first.

Once a player has gained enough xp to receive points (50k xp if we follow the Agility example), he or she has to go to one of the new totems in the Wilderness to claim those points. There would be seven to ten totems in the Wilderness. A player is not required to claim these points, but in that case the interval will be paused, meaning that gaining xp will not contribute to a new round of, for example, 50k xp in the case of Agility. The reason for having these totems is to create more traffic in the Wilderness. Information such as current amount of points and whether a person has already gained enough xp to unlock more points at one of the totems should be displayed as on-screen information, in the same way that the Wilderness level is always displayed.

As an additional note I would also like to mention that a Pk’er would be affected by both formulas because they are gaining xp when fighting the opponent. When this is the case, both formulas add up to each another.

Restrictions

The system described above opens the door to possible abuse, so there should be a few rules: -Clan members cannot kill each other. -A player can kill the same player for a maximum of only five times per day. -Beasts or Burdens are not allowed in the Wilderness. This is mainly to avoid abuse of the winter storage scroll. -The three Melee skills would count as one skill. In other words, xp gained simultaneously across these skills does not accumulate. -Xp gained in Constitution is excluded from the points system. -Teleportation in the Wilderness is not possible, except by using the teleportation obelisks.

REWARDS

Part 2 of the new game mechanism

The second part of the new mechanism concerns what a player can do with those points. There would be a new building in Edgeville where these points could be exchanged for special rights and a series of untradeable items. The special rights are Type 1 rewards and the untradeable items are Type 2 rewards. Before I explain what this implies, there a few rules that the rewards must follow:

-There should be rewards for Pk’er, skillers and slayers -The rewards must be good enough, but not overpowered -The rewards system must not directly pump money or tradeable items into the game

Type 1 rewards

-Are untradeable -Carry no requirements -Can be unlocked/claimed as soon as the points are gained 303

Below I will suggest a list of rewards. However, these merely serve as examples. Therefore, this list is not exhaustive. Much more can be suggested or the ones I mention can be removed, replaced or tweaked. There should be rewards for all kinds of players. Keep in mind that most of these are one- time special rewards, meaning that they work as consumables and have to be bought multiple times if a player wishes the use those rewards more than once. In the list below I will mark the examples to gives a clearer idea of at whom the reward is aimed (SK = Skiller; SL = Slayer; PK = Pk’er).

-SK: Buy camouflage potions [makes the player invisible on the minimap] -SK: Buy brawler gloves of a random type -SK: Buy brawler gloves of a specific type [more expensive] -SK: Buy voyage rerolls for Player-Owned Ports [limit: 5 rerolls/day] -SK: Buy an easy/medium/hard/elite clue scroll [with different costs; could have a limit] -SK: Receive a second daily challenge tomorrow -SK: Reset the cooldown time of any non-combat aura [limit: once per aura per day] -SK: Reset D&D limits [limit: once per day per D&D, or week/month] -SK: Reset the Thieving timer for clans in the Elf City [there would be tickets for each clan] -SK: Tick all Frozen floors in Dungeoneering [expensive reward; also for Abandoned and Furnished] -… -Etc.

-SL: Buy a new potion to recharge a weapon for 5%, 10%, 20% -SL: Buy teletabs to high-level Slayer and boss locations -SL: Halve the cost of your next death outside of the Wilderness [with new death system; expensive] -SL: Recharge a weapon without cost [very expensive] -SL: Reset the cooldown time of any combat aura [limit: once per aura per day] -SL: Receive double slayer points from the next Slayer task [limit: 5 tasks per day] -SL: Receive double loot from the current Slayer task [2x a new loot per kill, not 2x the same drop] -SL: Receive double loot from 5 boss kills [2x a new loot per kill, not 2x the same drop] -SL: Receive free access to K’ril Tsutsaroth/Kree’arra/Graardor/Zilyana God Wars Dungeon room [limit: 1x per boss per day] -… -Etc.

-PK: Buy a Pk “Slayer” task and receive Slayer xp [e.g. kill 20 people in the Wilderness] -PK: Buy explosive flasks [teleblocks opponent for 20 seconds when thrown at them; This is in case Jagex will allow teleportation in the Wilderness] -PK: Buy radar potions [bypasses the camouflage potion’s effect] -PK: Gain points from the next 15 PvP duels as if you had won [even when you lose; 1x per day] -PK: Receive Summoning charms from PvP kills for 1 hour. [limit: once per day] -... -Etc.

OTHER -Buy x frozen hearts on Treasure Hunter [limit: 1 per day] -Buy a teleportation potion that teleports you to a random location in the Wilderness. [limit: cannot be used for twenty seconds after teleporting; this overrules the no-teleportation rule] -Ticket to gain points from minigames as if you had won [even when you lose. The ticket is wasted if you do actually win] -Unlock new titles [expensive] 304

Type 2 rewards

-Are untradeable -Carry requirements -Degrade

The type 2 rewards comprise most items (about 90% perhaps) in RuneScape, but are untradeable versions that degrade over time and can be recharged by spending more points. The cost (in points) of each item is linked directly to the Grand Exchange price of its tradeable counterpart. The rewards must be untradeable because otherwise it would be detrimental for the RuneScape economy. The amount of points that is required to unlock the items must reflect the current price of its tradeable counterpart in the Grand Exchange. The only exception here is items that are already untradeable, thus have no real value. These can permanently have a fixed amount of points assigned to them. When the Grand Exchange price of an item drops, it should be logical that this change is also reflected in the amount of points that is necessary to purchase the reward. Therefore, there must be a link between the Grand Exchange and the reward shop. For example, when the price of an item in the Grand Exchange drops by 5%, which is often referred to as a crash, its untradeable equivalent in the reward shop loses 5% of the amount of points that is required to unlock that particular reward.

These untradeable equivalents are identical to their tradeable counterparts, with only two exceptions: they would degrade + the name needs to be different. Destroying or losing an item upon death would have the same effect as if the player destroyed or died with the tradeable version: if it is not protected and the player does not get back in time, he or she would permanently lose it. This part of the system might cause a problem for Pk'ing since the items are untradeable, but that is a problem that will be discussed later, at the end of this suggestion. Eventually all of these items would degrade until they can no longer be used. At that point the player can recharge the item by paying a fee (in points) of 5%-10% of the current cost. It is important to keep in mind that this system with untradeable items does not affect the supply side of the RuneScape economy and does not affect the amount of tradeable items in-game. Furthermore, resources or consumables could also be obtained as untradeable items. Of course, these do not degrade, but get consumed upon use and have to be bought again (so there should be a buy-x option for this).

At the beginning of this Type 2 rewards part I mentioned that all items would carry requirements. All items in the shop would be divided into tiers, with the most expensive items in RuneScape having their untradeable counterpart assigned to the highest tier. An example of how tiers could work is as follows (keep in mind that all items in the rewards shop are untradeable, but the tier they are in depends entirely on the Grand Exchange, which means that the tier could change for every item).

Tier 1: Items cheaper than 5k gp Tier 2: Items with a price of 5k gp – 24,999 gp Tier 3: Items with a price of 25k gp – 49,999 gp Tier 4: Items with a price of 50k gp – 99,999 gp Tier 5: Items with a price of 100k gp – 249,999 gp Tier 6: Items with a price of 250k gp – 999,999 gp Tier 7: Items with a price of 1m gp – 4,999,999 gp Tier 8: Items with a price of 5m – 9,999,999 gp Tier 9: Items with a price of 10m – 99,999,999 gp Tier 10: Items more expensive than 100m gp

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Even though all degraded items can be recharged by spending more points, there should be an alternative for tiers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. A problem about which many players have complained is that there are too many low- and medium-level items in RuneScape. There should be an item sink and I have found a way to combine one with this system. For tiers 1-5 it should be possible to recharge the degraded untradeable items by donating ten tradeable equivalents, which can be bought in the Grand Exchange. This effectively means that recharging by using that alternative is ten times more expensive than using points because the recharge cost (in points) is supposed to be scaled to the Grand Exchange price. To fully recharge an item by using the alternative method, the price would vary from 10 gp to 2,499,990 gp. All tradeable items that are donated to recharge the item would be removed from the game. However, while that seems like a good system, it should not be applied to tiers 6-10 because then the extremely rich players will no longer have a reason to enter the Wilderness.

Only tiers 1-3 can be freely accessed without any type of requirements. For the remaining seven tiers the player must gain a certain amount of xp in ALL of the Wilderness skills and the xp must have been gained in the Wilderness. For example, to access tier 4 a player must have accumulated 50k Wilderness-gained xp in all of the skills for which there is content in the Wilderness. Ideally, the Wilderness would contain content for all resource-gathering and item-production skills. I am not sure what to do with the combat skills, perhaps these can be left out or serve as substitutes for any of the non-combat skills that are present in the Wilderness. For the other tiers, below is a list containing the amount of xp that must be gained in each of the Wilderness skills (by using Wilderness content) before a player receives permanent access to the tier. Again, these numbers are just examples and may be altered.

Tier 4: 50k xp Tier 5: 100k xp Tier 6: 500k xp Tier 7: 1m xp Tier 8: 2m xp Tier 9: 5m xp Tier 10: 10m xp

The entire system behind the Type 2 rewards would ensure that the content suggested at the start of this solution (and already existing content) would be used by many players. Additionally, the idea of untradeable items allows players to acquire items which they would otherwise never have been able to afford, although an important remark to make here is that it should take longer to obtain the untradeable version in this shop than the tradeable version through the original content. This can be achieved by making sure that each item has a sufficiently high price in the rewards shop. At the same time, a player could purchase resources in the rewards shop and train the item-production skills without having to spend money. The consequence of this is that the poorer people in the community might prefer to skill in the Wilderness so that they can use the points to acquire resources. The items produced with the resources would also be untradeable. Additionally, all items obtained in the reward shop would have an alchemy value of 0 gp.

About the Type 1 and Type 2 rewards

The Type 1 rewards are suitable for everyday activities, while the Type 2 rewards are essentially a bonus in case the player is left with too many points. When this happens, the player would not be interested in entering the Wilderness anymore, so the Type 2 rewards are necessary, despite being a bonus. A simple analogy could be used to summarize the usefulness of the Type 1 and Type 2 rewards. Imagine a house. First you build the foundation, the walls, a roof and everything else that 306 is required to have a house worth living in. This is what the content in the Wilderness and the system that provides points for killing and skilling would be, they are the foundation of the Wilderness and they ensure that there will be activity in the Wilderness. You would not spend your time in a roofless house, right? Once you have built your house, you can decorate it. You can make it look better, but underneath the decoration hides the same house. That is what this reward system is; it's an extra bonus on top of the foundation; it is the decoration. There is all the new content with the mobile resources, skilling methods that provide xp in multiple skills, a new Slayer master and dungeon, a new high-level boss, etc. and on top of that, everyone gets points with which cool rewards can be unlocked to ensure that everyone continues to use the content in the Wilderness.

HISCORES

Another incentive for players to enter the Wilderness would jump into existence when new hiscores are created. I can know, because I used to be a fanatic skiller, and skillers love hiscores and being able to track their xp. There are a couple of new hiscores that could be added to the regular hiscores to make this entire solution even better:

-Total amount of points obtained (spending points does not affect this hiscore) -Total amount of players killed

On top of that, there should be a new type of hiscore page. Today there are hiscores types for regular players, ironman players and hardcore ironman players. There should also be a fourth type which logs xp gained in the Wilderness in all skills by using Wilderness content. Xp that is added to this hiscores page would also be added to the regular hiscores page of course. To clarify something important here, no matter the levels and xp that a persons has prior to the implementation of this solution, each player will start with 0 xp on the Wilderness hiscore page. This means that people who already have 200m xp in one or more skills could do another 200m xp in the Wilderness (of course the new xp cannot be added to the regular hiscores page). The consequence of this type of hiscores is that a new sort of competition will be born, where people try to “max’ again in the Wilderness (in other words, gain 13m xp in all skills in the Wilderness). In fact, I think that the existence of this hiscore page would serve as an incredible stimulus. Not only would skillers be happier with entering the Wilderness, by creating a new type of hiscores and subsequently a new type of competition, the future of this game would essentially be protected.

POTENTIAL ISSUES WITH THE SOLUTION (Q&A)

To address the possible problems with this solution I will make use of a Q&A format.

Q: If player purchases untradeable combat equipment in the reward shop and then enters the Wilderness, will this not be discouraging for Pk’ers? A: Yes, it will be. However, keep in mind that the PvP should be revived for the tradition because it will never become a good moneymaker again. So the fact that people will use the untradeable equipment in the Wilderness is actually not that much of a problem. However, even if it were, there are still solutions. For example, there could be mechanisms that prevent players from entering the Wilderness if they are wearing untradeable weapons, chest pieces or leg pieces. By extension of this rule, degradeable items that are tradeable only when charged for 100% or 0% would be considered tradeable at any charge, so these can still be taken into the Wilderness at any time. If such a player then dies with, for instance, a (tradeable) drygore rapier at 67% charged, the item would fully degrade upon dying and become tradeable so that the other player can still pick it up.

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Q: Wouldn’t multi-way combat areas interfere with the formula for Pk’ing? A: Yes, it would and that is an issue. I mentioned that there should be more single-combat areas than multi-way combat areas, but of course that is not a solution to this problem. A way to get around this could be by using a tag system and adjusting the xp multiplier. For example, if a player is attacked by someone else, the game will detect this as one tag. As soon as someone else joins in and attacks the first player, there will be two tags on that player. In the Pk formula there is an x1 multiplier for the defeated and an x3 multiplier for the winner. As soon as player has been tagged by two or more players in, the multiplier in the Pk formula for the loser will increase to x2, with x2 being the maximum, regardless of how many players are attacking. The tags would expire ten seconds after the last hit has been received from whomever was attacking. Increasing the multiplier to x2 for the loser of the fight will not create an opportunity for abuse due to two of the restrictions mentioned at the beginning of the proposal: members of the same clan cannot attack each other and the same player can be attacked only five times a day by the same person.

Q: Is preventing teleportation not a little too far-going? A: Not really, because the new teleportation potion could still be used, but it has to be bought in the rewards shop of course. Nevertheless, if blocking teleportation is really a problem, then a new system could be implemented instead: teleporting in the Wilderness has an 80% chance of failing, and failing blocks any teleportation option for five seconds. Additionally, the fact that the player who loses the duel still receives points is a mechanism of prevention by itself as it might encourage to battle anyway.

Q: Wouldn't untradeable items cause a problem with bank space? A: They could, although to me it seems like they would just replace tradeable items. I doubt that many people would have both the tradeable and untradeable items. If it does become a problem, a solution could be that those items are not stored in the bank, but in the rewards shop itself. Consequently, there should be multiple reward shops all over RuneScape then, potentially one in each of the bigger banks.

Q: What about urns, bonus xp and other game features which can be used to boost xp gains in the Wilderness? A: Both formulas would only take into account so-called unboosted xp. Therefore, any such feature will have no effect on the rate at which the points can be acquired through skilling.

Q: Why is it necessary that the items unlocked through this system degrade + how long should they last? A: There are various reasons. First of all, so that people would need to return to Wilderness every now and then to collect more points. Another reason is that the original tradeable item would have one significant advantage: it does not degrade (unless the original item also degrades of course). Jagex would need to decide how fast they degrade. It must not be too fast or too slow, though.

Q: Should holiday items, such as partyhats, be added to the tier 10 rewards? A: Tradeable discontinued items have always been a burden to the RuneScape economy. Not only were they not intended to become expensive in the first place, they also store money where money is not supposed to be invested (since partyhats have no contribution to the actual gameplay). When added to the rewards shop as untradeable items, the prices of tradeable discontinued items would fall, but the beauty in all this is that this new system would let that happen in a natural, as in non- manipulative, way. Additionally, it would be an opportunity for the poorer players in the community to obtain these massively overhyped items. In the end, the RuneScape economy, and the entire game itself, only benefits from seeing discontinued rare items included in this system.

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CONCLUSION

In the end there a couple of things that should be remembered. First of all, the Wilderness is definitely worth reviving and I believe that it can be done in a way which satisfies not only the Pk’ers, but also the skillers and the slayers. Nevertheless, simply adding new content to the Wilderness will probably not do the trick because the risk might still be perceived as too big by the inexperienced Pk’ers, which form the vast majority of the community today. The solution proposed above adds a sufficient amount of incentives to the game, so that many players will be excited about spending their time in the Wilderness. Aside from adding new content to the Wilderness, that area should also be subjected to a new game mechanism based on two formulas which generate points: one for Pk’ing and the other for gaining xp. In order for both formulas to work, however, the base value cannot be changed and the number of Wilderness levels must be reduced to 30. The points can be used to unlock Type 1 and Type 2 rewards. Type 1 rewards consist for the most part of consumable special rights, which must be rebought if a player wishes to hold those special rights for an extended period of time. The Type 2 rewards system contains items that cannot immediately be bought; they have to be unlocked by gaining a certain amount of xp across ALL the Wilderness skills, by using Wilderness content. This type of rewards is necessary to keep the players motivated, otherwise they will probably end up with an excess of points, which would discourage them from entering the Wilderness. Furthermore, the Type 2 rewards, which allow the acquisition of untradeable resources by spending points, would stimulate a big part of the community (those who are not rich) to train other skills in the Wilderness, so that they can accumulate points to buy those resources and to train the buyable skills without having to spend money on it.

At first sight it appears that potential problems, such as untradeable armour, teleporting, different forms of abuse etc. can easily be bypassed. All activity in the Wilderness in terms of kills and xp gained should also be logged in the hiscores. Not only should more hiscores be added to the regular hiscores page, but also a new, fourth type of hiscores page should be added on which a player can see how much xp they have gained in the Wilderness across all skills. This would be great for the entire game because such a hiscores page would give birth to a new type of competition. It would also create the possibility for players who already have 200m xp in a skill to do redo everything, but this time in the Wilderness. What it all comes down to in the end is that there should be enough incentives to visit the Wilderness. The list that follows below gives a quick overview of these incentives or, in other words, the reasons why the community should play in the Wilderness.

-A player receives points even when not being the winner of the fight. -A Wilderness Slayer master and a Slayer dungeon in which xp rates and drops are better. -Bosses with a new type of drop table. -Clear borders between single-combat and multi-combat areas. -Mobile resources that spawn at random locations and exist for around ten minutes, providing big chunks of bonus xp and different types of resources. -New content in general, with some providing xp in multiple skills. -Slightly more single-combat areas to comfort the non-Pk’ers -The new drop mechanism when a players dies against a monster would encourage the community to explore the empty regions in the Wilderness. -The poorer people in the community could prefer this system with points to train skills. -The Type 1 and Type 2 rewards would attract Pk’ers, skillers and slayers. -The Wilderness hiscores would allow for a new sub-community to flourish, to the point at which the mere presence of these hiscores could essentially be enough to revive the entire Wilderness.

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CLOSING WORDS

The solution proposed in this thread is written from a mixed perspective. While I am a skiller, I have also taken into consideration the suggestions made by His Lordship, a Pk’er, who wrote a well-thought out solution in 2012 in collaboration with the PvP community. For example, the mobile resources were initially proposed by His Lordship, as were several other smaller elements in this suggestion, such as the camouflage potion. The idea of working with a reward shop in which untradeable items can be purchased was first used in an old suggestion of mine that I wrote with the intention of trying to revive all dead content in RuneScape. I realized that a lot of elements could also be used in a suggestion to revive the Wilderness, so I decided to incorporate them in my proposed solution to bring back PvP to Gielinor.

After giving it a lot of thought and reconsideration, I genuinely believe that this solution could revive the Wilderness, but only on the condition that it is added in its entirety to RuneScape, and not just several elements of it. I have already done the effort of designing two balanced formulas that take all situations into account. Both low- and high-levelled players could benefit from this system, so I hope that this solution will be considered and evaluated by Jagex.

It is not too late to revive the Wilderness, it never is. We just need to find the right solution, and I am sure that this is the right solution, but it will require some goodwill on Jagex’s side because I am aware that the new mechanism and the new content would take a lot of time to develop. Nevertheless, I hope that Jagex can see past this obstacle because it would be so amazing to see the Land of Blood be put to good use again. Furthermore, the new type of hiscores would create a new type of competition and ultimately contribute to the continuation of this game’s many successes. In fact, these hiscores could already be released right now, in anticipation of the new content. His Lordship in his incredible Wilderness video once said, “The Wilderness poses the highest risk in the game; it is only logical that it should offer the highest return”. I think that the suggestion made in this thread is one great way to achieve that.

I thank you for reading this, and I hope that both the community and Jagex will be able to see the potential of this suggestion. I genuinely believe that the PvP tradition can be brought back to RuneScape in a way that pleases skillers, slayers and Pk’ers alike.

______

You have now reached the end of the history-related content. – What follows next is the image library and an overview of the sources. Feel free to discuss the contents of this book on www.rshistory.com – If you enjoyed reading this book, please share it with your friends.

Kind regards, July

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Image Library

Several players have submitted some of their authentic screenshots that I could use in this book. I am grateful that they have allowed me to use those screenshots because it definitely adds something to the book. My screenshots were not sufficient to cover all of the pages, so I really needed their help for this. Below you can find an overview of the RuneScape players whose screenshots I have used and where they can be found in this book. At the end I will also indicate which screenshots are mine. Anyone is allowed to use my screenshots without having to request permission, but do not forget that that does not count for the images that have been submitted by the other players.

Agent833: P106(2), P110(1)

Castle Wars: P50, P52, P53, P64, P65(1), P67, P70(1), P72, P74, P76, P81, P84, P85, P88, P91, P92, P98, P99, P103(2), P105(1), P117, P147, P155, P156, P170, P183, P184, P186, P193, P194, P209, P212, P214, P217, P282(2), P283, P295(1), P295(2), P296(2)

Gwynrwyn: P22, P27, P28, P38

Leta: P16, P17, P19(1), P20, P21(2), P24(1), P24(2), P26, P29, P30, P37, P62, P79, P80, P86, P87, P125, P127, P177

July (mine): P14, P15, P18, P19(2), P21(1), P23, P25, P34, P39, P42, P43, P44, P45, P46, P54(1), P54(2), P55, P56, P57, P63, P65(2), P66, P68, P69, P70(2), P71, P73, P75(1), P75(2), P77, P82, P83(1), P83(2), P89, P90, P93, P95, P96, P97, P100, P101, P103(1), P104, P105(2), P106(1), P107, P108(1), P108(2), P109, P110(2), P111(1), P111(2), P112, P113, P118, P119, P123(1), P123(2), P129, P133, P141, P148, P153, P154, P157, P158, P159, P164, P165, P166, P167, P168, P171(1), P171(2), P172, P174, P175, P179, P181, P187, P188, P190, P191, P192, P196, P198, P199(1), P199(2), P201, P203, P204, P206, P210, P215, P216, P220, P221, P224, P225, P226, P227, P228, P229, P230, P231, P232, P233, P234, P235(1), P235(2), P236, P238, P239, P240, P241, P247, P275, P277, P278, P279, P280, P281, P282(1), P284, P285(1), P285(2), P286, P287(1), P287(2), P288, P289(1), P289(2), P290, P291(1), P291(2), P292, P293(1), P293(2), P294, P296(1)

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Sources

Due to the enormous amount of articles, I have decided to categorize the sources. Consequently, it is possible that a source is featured more than once in this list. I will start with the sources from the RuneScape news archive, followed by other sources categorized per website.

Note: Due to a new anti-DDoS system that was implemented in 2014, I was unable to revisit all sources in RuneScape news archive. After loading a certain amount of articles in a specific time window, trying to load new articles will return a 404 error until the time window has passed. Please keep this mind if you intend to have a look at the sources. Furthermore, this limitation prevented me from checking all sources to verify whether or not I actually used them. It is therefore possible that some of the articles in the list were not used. However, the amount of unused articles will be very low, definitely below 10%. The articles are ordered alphabetically per category.

RuneScape new archive

Agility http://services.runescape.com/m=news/agility-benefits-for-fishing-hunter-and-thieving http://services.runescape.com/m=news/agility-improved-and-bug-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/agility-pyramid http://services.runescape.com/m=news/combat-updates-free-game-changes-and-more-mobility http://services.runescape.com/m=news/creature-of-fenkenstrain http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dangerous-agility http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dorgesh-kaan http://services.runescape.com/m=news/extended-agility-courses http://services.runescape.com/m=news/mod-mmg-on-runescape-micro-payments http://services.runescape.com/m=news/monkey-madness http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-shortcuts-and-prayers http://services.runescape.com/m=news/run-energy-upgrade http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skill-bonanza-urns-ashes-and-shortcuts http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-flash-powder-factory http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-pit http://services.runescape.com/m=news/treasure-hunter--silverhawk-boots http://services.runescape.com/m=news/troll-warzone

312

Combat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/a-sqirk-a-day http://services.runescape.com/m=news/araxxor-twitch-integration-and-lobby-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bakriminel-bolts http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bank-notes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/barrows http://services.runescape.com/m=news/barrows---rise-of-the-six http://services.runescape.com/m=news/barrows-changes--other-tweaks http://services.runescape.com/m=news/changes-to-autocasting-spells http://services.runescape.com/m=news/changes-to-the-hitpoints-skill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/choose-your-fate-for-sizzling-summer http://services.runescape.com/m=news/coinshare-and-grand-exchange-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/coinshare-world-map-and-tutorial http://services.runescape.com/m=news/combat-buffs-and-weaknesses http://services.runescape.com/m=news/cows-chickens-rabbits-and-the-fishing-trawler http://services.runescape.com/m=news/crossbows http://services.runescape.com/m=news/damage-soaking-and-new-hitsplats http://services.runescape.com/m=news/desert-tasks http://services.runescape.com/m=news/desert-treasure http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dream-mentor http://services.runescape.com/m=news/enchanting-rings http://services.runescape.com/m=news/game-improvements http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ghosts-ahoy-and-slayer-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/god-wars-dungeon http://services.runescape.com/m=news/instanced-god-wars--eoc-updates http://services.runescape.com/m=news/items-kept-on-death-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/legacy-mode-launch-global-combat-improvements-and- gear-guide- http://services.runescape.com/m=news/lootshare http://services.runescape.com/m=news/lunar-diplomacy http://services.runescape.com/m=news/magic-interface-features http://services.runescape.com/m=news/make-x-improvements-and-low-level-combat-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/mortton-shades-and-mage-armour http://services.runescape.com/m=news/multi-part-quest http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-dwarf-cannon-quest http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-f2p-prayers-port-to-port-transport-and-improved- dragon-axe http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-high-level-prayer-potion http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-shortcuts-and-prayers http://services.runescape.com/m=news/poll---legacy-combat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/polypore-dungeon http://services.runescape.com/m=news/potions-spells-and-runes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pvp-worlds http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-bugfixes---part-5 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-combat-system-explained http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-new-features--bug-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-tweaks-and-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/security-and-free-to-play-update---the-stronghold-of- security http://services.runescape.com/m=news/sirenic-armour http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skill-bonanza-urns-ashes-and-shortcuts 313 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/slayer-skill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/special-attacks http://services.runescape.com/m=news/stronghold-of-player-safety http://services.runescape.com/m=news/strykewyrms http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-dragonfire-shield http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-evolution-of-combat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-kalphite-king http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-nexus http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-temple-at-senntisten http://services.runescape.com/m=news/treasure-trails-spiders-and-sheep http://services.runescape.com/m=news/treevolution---high-level-trees http://services.runescape.com/m=news/upcoming-runescape-updates http://services.runescape.com/m=news/updates-galore http://services.runescape.com/m=news/vorago---high-level-boss-fight http://services.runescape.com/m=news/warriors-guild http://services.runescape.com/m=news/warriors-guild-and-dragon-defender http://services.runescape.com/m=news/weapons-update

Construction http://services.runescape.com/m=news/fremennik-isles http://services.runescape.com/m=news/menagerie-familiar-controls-and-butlers http://services.runescape.com/m=news/player-owned-house-costume-room http://services.runescape.com/m=news/player-owned-houses http://services.runescape.com/m=news/poh-room-increase-and-more

Cooking http://services.runescape.com/m=news/cook-x http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rogues-den--tweaks%20cook http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skill-bonanza-urns-ashes-and-shortcuts

Divination http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bts-video-64-divination-part-1 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bts-video-66-divination---part-2 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/divination-skill---now-live http://services.runescape.com/m=news/divination-skillcape-poll---results http://services.runescape.com/m=news/elder-divination http://services.runescape.com/m=news/fate-of-the-gods

Dungeoneering http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering---the-occult-floors http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering-and-shop-improvements http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering-skill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering-spotlight http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering-update 314 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering-xp--gravestones http://services.runescape.com/m=news/fremennik-sagas http://services.runescape.com/m=news/fremennik-sagas-ii http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ring-of-wealth-shanties-trolls-and-dungeoneering http://services.runescape.com/m=news/salt-in-the-wound http://services.runescape.com/m=news/sinkholes

Farming http://services.runescape.com/m=news/back-to-my-roots-quest http://services.runescape.com/m=news/death-hats-draynor-and-upgrades http://services.runescape.com/m=news/enlightened-journey http://services.runescape.com/m=news/farming http://services.runescape.com/m=news/harvest-heaven-high-level-farming http://services.runescape.com/m=news/herblore-habitat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/livid-farm http://services.runescape.com/m=news/nardah-tool-sheds--spirits-of-the-elid http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pawya-and-grenwall-hunter-creatures http://services.runescape.com/m=news/prisoner-of-glouphrie-and-gnome-graphical-rework http://services.runescape.com/m=news/seeds-bankspace-and-advisors http://services.runescape.com/m=news/vinesweeper-and-amulet-of-nature-update

Firemaking http://services.runescape.com/m=news/all-fired-up http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bonfires http://services.runescape.com/m=news/jadinko-lair http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-beta-updated-again

Fishing http://services.runescape.com/m=news/barbarian-training http://services.runescape.com/m=news/cows-chickens-rabbits-and-the-fishing-trawler http://services.runescape.com/m=news/living-rock-caverns http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skill-bonanza-urns-ashes-and-shortcuts

Fletching http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bakriminel-bolts http://services.runescape.com/m=news/crossbows http://services.runescape.com/m=news/game-improvements http://services.runescape.com/m=news/game-improvements-1 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/jadinko-lair

Heblore http://services.runescape.com/m=news/agility-potions-and-parties 315 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bigger-banks--treasure-trails http://services.runescape.com/m=news/clan-wars-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/farming http://services.runescape.com/m=news/herbal-remedies http://services.runescape.com/m=news/herblore-additions http://services.runescape.com/m=news/herblore-habitat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/high-level-herblore-potions http://services.runescape.com/m=news/mogres-lizards-pet-fish-potions-and-potatoes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-high-level-prayer-potion http://services.runescape.com/m=news/potion-flasks http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-tweaks-and-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/situation-in-the-sands http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-world-wakes- http://services.runescape.com/m=news/treasure-trails-and-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/troll-warzone

Hunter http://services.runescape.com/m=news/agility-benefits-for-fishing-hunter-and-thieving http://services.runescape.com/m=news/charm-sprite-hunting http://services.runescape.com/m=news/deposit-all-feature-and-more http://services.runescape.com/m=news/eagles-peak http://services.runescape.com/m=news/herblore-habitat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/hunter-skill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pawya-and-grenwall-hunter-creatures http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skillchompas-and-legacy-mode-poll http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-big-chinchompa

Mining http://services.runescape.com/m=news/birthright-of-the-dwarves http://services.runescape.com/m=news/champions-wyverns-and-granite http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dealing-with-scabaras http://services.runescape.com/m=news/fatigue-reduced http://services.runescape.com/m=news/keldagrim---the-dwarven-city http://services.runescape.com/m=news/king-of-the-dwarves http://services.runescape.com/m=news/lava-flow-mine http://services.runescape.com/m=news/living-rock-caverns http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rune-essence-adjustment http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skill-bonanza-urns-ashes-and-shortcuts http://services.runescape.com/m=news/sleeping-bags-and-pickaxes

Runecrafting http://services.runescape.com/m=news/chance-of-double-law-death-and-blood-runes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/law-talisman-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/more-rs2-quests--fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/podcast---rune-value http://services.runescape.com/m=news/potions-spells-and-runes 316 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pure-essence-now-craftable-on-free-servers http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rune-value-improvements http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runecraft-update--tweaks http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runecrafting-guild-and-game---for-all-players http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-big-chinchompa http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-runespan http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-zmi-altar

Slayer http://services.runescape.com/m=news/barbarian-training http://services.runescape.com/m=news/champions-wyverns-and-granite http://services.runescape.com/m=news/chaos-tunnels-interface-improvements-extra-bank-space- and-more http://services.runescape.com/m=news/creature-of-fenkenstrain http://services.runescape.com/m=news/fairy-tale-ii---cure-a-queen http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ghosts-ahoy-and-slayer-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/harbingers-of-tuska http://services.runescape.com/m=news/jadinko-lair http://services.runescape.com/m=news/kuradals-dungeon http://services.runescape.com/m=news/mogres-lizards-pet-fish-potions-and-potatoes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/order-of-ascension http://services.runescape.com/m=news/player-owned-house-costume-room http://services.runescape.com/m=news/polypore-dungeon http://services.runescape.com/m=news/shattered-heart http://services.runescape.com/m=news/slayer-challenges http://services.runescape.com/m=news/slayer-helmet-and-social-slayer-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/slayer-skill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/slayer-tower-revamped http://services.runescape.com/m=news/smoking-kills http://services.runescape.com/m=news/social-slayer--gielinor-games-preparation http://services.runescape.com/m=news/soul-reaper http://services.runescape.com/m=news/strykewyrms http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-dark-bow

Smithing http://services.runescape.com/m=news/artisans-workshop http://services.runescape.com/m=news/blast-furnace http://services.runescape.com/m=news/nardah-tool-sheds--spirits-of-the-elid http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rogues-den--tweaks

Summoning http://services.runescape.com/m=news/chaos-tunnels-interface-improvements-extra-bank-space- and-more http://services.runescape.com/m=news/charm-sprite-hunting http://services.runescape.com/m=news/charm-sprites-catch-them-if-you-can http://services.runescape.com/m=news/dungeoneering-dual-wielding-and-charming-imp 317 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/elder-divination http://services.runescape.com/m=news/harbingers-of-tuska http://services.runescape.com/m=news/menagerie-familiar-controls-and-butlers http://services.runescape.com/m=news/mobilising-armies http://services.runescape.com/m=news/perils-of-ice-mountain http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ring-of-wealth-shanties-trolls-and-dungeoneering http://services.runescape.com/m=news/summoning http://services.runescape.com/m=news/summoning-2 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/summoning-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/summoning-upgrade-and-hairstyles http://services.runescape.com/m=news/troll-warzone http://services.runescape.com/m=news/up-to-snow-good---christmas-2013

Thieving http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ali-morrisane-and-pollnivneach http://services.runescape.com/m=news/elemental-workshop-quest http://services.runescape.com/m=news/forgiveness-of-a-chaos-dwarf http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pyramid-plunder http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2---duelling-and-extras

Woodcutting http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bakriminel-bolts http://services.runescape.com/m=news/cows-chickens-rabbits-and-the-fishing-trawler http://services.runescape.com/m=news/jadinko-lair http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-f2p-prayers-port-to-port-transport-and-improved- dragon-axe http://services.runescape.com/m=news/readers-letters-bank-space-and-game-tweaks http://services.runescape.com/m=news/seeds-bankspace-and-advisors http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skill-bonanza-urns-ashes-and-shortcuts http://services.runescape.com/m=news/tai-bwo-wannai-clean-up http://services.runescape.com/m=news/treevolution---high-level-trees http://services.runescape.com/m=news/woodcutting-rebalance

PvM http://services.runescape.com/m=news/araxxor-twitch-integration-and-lobby-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/boss-timer-kill-counts-and-legacy-mode-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/canoeing-zygomites-and-a-mole http://services.runescape.com/m=news/desert-month-finale http://services.runescape.com/m=news/god-wars-dungeon http://services.runescape.com/m=news/god-wars-dungeon---the-ancient-prison http://services.runescape.com/m=news/god-wars-dungeon--the-nex-big-thing http://services.runescape.com/m=news/god-wars-remastered http://services.runescape.com/m=news/holy-moley---giant-mole-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/instanced-god-wars--eoc-updates http://services.runescape.com/m=news/karamja-dungeon http://services.runescape.com/m=news/king-black-dragon--dungeon-rework- 318 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/player-owned-ports---the-next-journey http://services.runescape.com/m=news/queen-black-dragon-diamond-jubilee-and-clue-fest http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-additions-and-improvements http://services.runescape.com/m=news/situation-in-the-sands http://services.runescape.com/m=news/skills-duels-and-the-kalphite http://services.runescape.com/m=news/song-from-the-depths http://services.runescape.com/m=news/summers-end http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-kalphite-king http://services.runescape.com/m=news/tzhaar-fight-caves http://services.runescape.com/m=news/updates-updates-and-more-updates http://services.runescape.com/m=news/vorago---high-level-boss-fight http://services.runescape.com/m=news/waterbirth-island---deeper-darker-deadlier http://services.runescape.com/m=news/while-guthix-sleeps

PvP & Wilderness http://services.runescape.com/m=news/anti-76king-measures http://services.runescape.com/m=news/banishing-the-revenants http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bounty-hunter-wilderness-only-pvp%20may%202009 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/bounty-worlds-1-item http://services.runescape.com/m=news/changes-to-pvp-and-bounty-worlds-and-gravestones http://services.runescape.com/m=news/death-hats-draynor-and-upgrades http://services.runescape.com/m=news/future-pvp-updates http://services.runescape.com/m=news/items-kept-on-death-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pvp-world-changes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pvp-worlds http://services.runescape.com/m=news/pvp-worlds-improvements http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-referendum-voting-closed http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-wilderness-and-free-trade-return http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-wilderness-and-free-trade-will-return http://services.runescape.com/m=news/wilderness-and-free-trade-referendum http://services.runescape.com/m=news/wilderness-and-free-trade-vote http://services.runescape.com/m=news/wilderness-changes-bounty-hunter-and-clan-wars http://services.runescape.com/m=news/wilderness-ditch http://services.runescape.com/m=news/wilderness-graphical-update

RS2 Beta http://services.runescape.com/m=news/last-chance-to-move-items http://services.runescape.com/m=news/more-rs2-updates http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-2-launch-plan-b http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2---duelling-and-extras http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-beta-update http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-beta-updated-again http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-launched http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-music-player-and-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-new-features--bug-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-progress-report http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-tweaks-and-fixes http://services.runescape.com/m=news/upcoming-runescape-updates 319

Other http://services.runescape.com/m=news/4-new-dallas-worlds-added http://services.runescape.com/m=news/4-new-atlanta-worlds-added http://services.runescape.com/m=news/4-new-worlds-now-online http://services.runescape.com/m=news/5-new-worlds-in-stockholm-sweden http://services.runescape.com/m=news/a-shadow-over-ashdale http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ariane-quest-double-bill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/behind-the-scenes---july-2015 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/clan-camp-support-and-web-pages http://services.runescape.com/m=news/clan-chat http://services.runescape.com/m=news/clan-citadels-are-here http://services.runescape.com/m=news/clan-cup-results http://services.runescape.com/m=news/coinshare-world-map-and-tutorial http://services.runescape.com/m=news/demon-flash-mobs http://services.runescape.com/m=news/introducing-clan-citadels http://services.runescape.com/m=news/free-to-play-hiscores-action-bar-sharing-and-clan-messaging http://services.runescape.com/m=news/in-low-hpand-in-health http://services.runescape.com/m=news/jagex-clan-cup-2012--winners http://services.runescape.com/m=news/jagex-cup-winners--2011 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/more-bandwidth http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new---legends-quest http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-london-servers http://services.runescape.com/m=news/new-rs1-game-worlds-online http://services.runescape.com/m=news/ozan-quest-double-bill http://services.runescape.com/m=news/rs2-launched http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runefest-videos-developer-insider-sessions http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-2014---power-to-the-players http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-classic-temporarily-re-opened http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-classic-temporarily-re-opened- http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-classic-temporarily-re-opening http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-races-towards-historic-milestone http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-revolution http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-romance-turns-real http://services.runescape.com/m=news/siw-midtrud http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-biggest-update-ever http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-jagex-clan-cup-2009 http://services.runescape.com/m=news/two-new-members-worlds-onlin http://services.runescape.com/m=news/whats-mine-is-yours

Rsplayers.wikia.com http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Drumgun http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Jebrim http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/L6vi http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Lightning http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Larryr http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Larryr%27s_Runecrafting_business http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Syzygy http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Woox http://rsplayers.wikia.com/wiki/Zezima 320

Runescapeclassic.wikia.com http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/Combat http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/Herblore http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/Influence http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/King_Black_Dragon http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/Ranged http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/Runite http://runescapeclassic.wikia.com/wiki/Weapon

Runescape.salmoneus.net http://runescape.salmoneus.net/forums/topic/285292-a-history-of-bug-abuse/

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