RuneFest 2011

This page contains information on the real world event of RuneFest 2011, the second RuneFest event. Held in London over two days it featured a wide range of activities including a significant number of developer panels.

Panels

A Decade in Gielinor

• Developers are allowed to incorporate own ideas which explains Russian mythos in the Lunar quest series (Baba Yaga)
• Silly fences – they were there to make the game feel bigger and lengthen quests
• Andrew once used a quest guide (most likely Tip.It) so he could play the sequel to a quest – they used to dislike them because they had a limited amount of content and wanted people to read the lore, but now are fine with them and have better methods of communication (like cutscenes and items) rather than just chat text
• The Grand Exchange ‘puts shops out of business’ and ‘spoilt’ quests – eg Imp Catcher (which you can just buy the beads for)
• Gnomeball was originally designed to absorb player time while RS2 developed.
• Castle Wars was another ‘time absorber’ which was unexpectedly popular and was once the thing they used to show case RS (as being a great bit of content, but also ‘just a minigame’)
• Multi-looks – enabling different people to see different views was originally designed for POH’s but Farming was the first to use it and is now a highly used feature (although it confused people on release)

Breaking the Bots

• Bots destroy core social aspect of the game’
• MMG says: ‘We don’t want your computer to play with ours, we want you to play with our community’.
• Jagex consider gold-farmers to be parasites
• 1.2/1.5 million accounts were banned on Tuesday
• 7.7 million by the weekend
• Peaking at 9K bans a minute
• 60% drop in user count
• 90% of the accounts botting were F2P – due, partially to ‘mule accounts'

QA

• Content vary considerably in size and scope
  • Ritual of the Mahjarrat took 7 weeks for 6 testers (that’s a lot of dodging fireballs, fighting ice monsters and sneaking round grabbing Arrav’s heart )
  • Clan Citadels, 13 weeks, 13 testers and many many hours of over time
  • New Trees – 3 weeks, 2 testers
• Waterfall development model
• QA stages: Feedback, WIP QA, RC QA, Live Monitoring

Combat

• The truth: Melee IS massively overpowering compared to Range & Magic. It can easily kill a magician (which it should be weak against) - 80 DPS Range, 77 Magic
• It’s hard to balance partially due to legacy – Melee has two skills.
• Future New Potential Feature: Action bars
• Future New Potential Feature: Unlock Abilities – seperate from specs
• Future Change: Restat all items
• Future Change: Magic should not be fixed damage
• Future Change: Absorption is far too complex. Will probably come onto every item
• Future Change: Increased lifepoints – upto 2-3K perhaps?

Question Time

• The POH’s need more than new textures – they will get an overhaul from Graphics in the (not too far) future
• Rune needs considerable adjustment – Combat Rework will need to include new high level skill content suchas new rocks/logs
• There is no new skill in planning due to the above
• Dragon Kite – could release it but it’s only cosmetic now – low priority due to better gear – purely gap filling exercise
• The Friends list – size is not the only problem – they are looking at groups, sorting, tagging and searching (without which a list of 400+ people is unusable)
• They are working on a better Knowledge Base – less reason to use fan-sites for some things, more relevant and user friendly.
• The tutorial rework is part of a larger look at the early game system which aims to get people playing, allow people to see the community * and introduce the game mechanics.
• They are using more 3DS Max and similar tools – less focus on in-house due to an evolving engine
• There is far too much legacy code for WASD to be possible
• Strings as bank names are too data-storage expensive to be used
• Bank space is limited for the same reason
• Combat level for highest creature is kind of irrelevant now – mechanics are the main system
• Unofficial ‘too-hard’ is ‘can beat all of QA for 3 days straight’
• Pures are unlikely to be allowed to remove experience – would ruin the ‘kudos’ of achievements for pures and be an issue for hacked accounts
• They “don’t have” the 2006 RS and so can’t reopen it.
• The Eastern Lands are not on the cards any time soon – they want to ‘finish the current continent and improve existing areas’ rather than add it – it’s only a few lines of dialogue!
• Transport network on the map would be very nice – but a big ask for content
• No plans to increase distance between places – teleports are rewards to prevent boredom from forcing people to re-run areas. Also affects balancing and competitive game play.
• Tutorial Island – if it came back would be confusing to those who never did it – return is unlikely
• Dicing – no plans to remove it and may be legally difficult to regulate it as a form of gambling
• Elven storyline is very tough graphically – Mod Mark really wants to get it ‘tied off’ – series going nowhere is not particularly fulfilling. Designs and approval required.
• Mêlée is apparently only first due to design choices…

Secrets of the Mahjarrat

• The number we used to store the Stone of Jas is definitely recorded for future use
• Definitely to meet Dragonkin in the future – bane ore and notes
• The ‘Nightmare’ cut-scene was designed to confuse and use an OTT destruction of Draynor - ToG, and Essence Mines are after effects of SoJ
• The Saradomin cutscene was the first to use the new Cutscene editor – designed to do stuff more like the trailer and allow the Content team to do it

Graphics Tools

• Directly pulling content from 3DS Max into the engine
• More water animation in the pipeline

Blocking out maps in MapEd - an in-house tool	Building repeatable wall designs in JagEd	2D and 3D Level Previewing & Modelling	Base character model designs
Character head modelling - Beauty	Labelling vertices in JagEd

Future of RuneScape

• Major armour kit (bronze -> rune, dragon and barrows, maybe more) graphical upgrade
• Kalphite King
• Queen Black Dragon
• RuneScape Olympics
• ‘King of the Hill’ style combat mini-game with weapons from the gods
• Player-owned Ports (working similar to Manage Thy Kingdom)
• Sequel to the Fight Caves mini-game, possibly with a Fire cape as the entry fee.

The concept art for the new Dragon armour	The concept art for the Kalphite King	The concept art for the Queen Black Dragon
The concept art for the combat mini-game announced. The monolith is present at the Wilderness Volcano.	The concept art for the player-owned/run ports announced.

In-game Commemorative Item

The item this year was a Runefest 2011 hood. You got this item by attending Runefest. When you entered the venue they gave you a cool red bag with a load of goodies in it. Inside it was a card that had a code on it. You had to go to Draynor and speak to Diango where you can redeem the item by entering the code.

25 lucky players also managed to obtain the code for a Golden scythe.