I have never played runescape. I was an oldschool UO player and I love the idea of being able to play a quality sandbox but none exist (except eve but I dont like being a spaceship).

Is runescape a quality sandbox? I know it has years of development and still has a big pop.

What are these changes? Why are people excited? Does it make it more of a sandbox?

Thanks!

What do you mean by sandbox?

Runescape has alot of restrictions and sure lots of skills and trades to do but when you say sandbox your talking about creation/destruction , options to influence the world.

Originally posted by EndDream

I have never played runescape. I was an oldschool UO player and I love the idea of being able to play a quality sandbox but none exist (except eve but I dont like being a spaceship).

Is runescape a quality sandbox? I know it has years of development and still has a big pop.

What are these changes? Why are people excited? Does it make it more of a sandbox?

Thanks!

Yeah, its a good sandbox as in you can do whatever you want and there are loads of options (though people will disagree)

Basically in late 2007 Jagex removed PvP from the wilderness (one of the best/popular parts of the game) and removed free trading so that you basically had to trade an item to someone exactly for what its worth, all to stop RMT, botting/macroing and scamming. Loads of people didn't like this and so quite a few people stopped playing, but still a small amount compared to the total amount of players. People have been complaining about this update for 3 years now and I think Jagex finally have the technology to combat RMT/bots (so they say) so they are now bringing it back by the looks of it.

Some videos of the old wilderness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHRikbRgS3g  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igOqPvkWv5c

The old wilderness had single and multi zones, and it wasn't always as filled up as those videos suggest, I just chose those as they show how popular it was at times.

Those updates aside though, its still a great sandbox which you should at least try. It gets positive reviews from most reviewers.

RuneScape is "sandbox" in the sense that advancement and gameplay is not driven by quests, but you advance by training individual skills (there are 25 skills: 8 combat skills, 17 crafting and/or non-combat skills) how you want and when you want. Or you can play minigames to get gear, advance your skills, or pursue various PvP pursuits.

Now, there are quests, but there are less than 200 of them, and they are all unique and actual "quests", solving a problem for certain NPCs, and the rewards often open up new areas of the world, or grant the player a new item, or bestow upon him a new ability. Or sometimes just give experience in some of the skills.

But RS is not sandbox in the sense that you can influence/modify the world in which you play in. In the old style "wilderness" PvP, certain clans could control parts of the PvP area (wilderness) on certain worlds (servers/realms), but that was as much as players could influence the world.

So when you log into RS, you're not really pursuing "max level". You log in and say "what the hell am I going to do today", and you really have hundreds of options, between what you choose to do and how you choose to do it.

The recently announced upcoming changes are essentially reverting Runescape's trade and PvP system back to what it was in the beginning, before Jagex had implemented a series of drastic changes in order to combat Real World Trading.

In the old days, PvP in RS was full loot (i.e., you killed a guy with X, Y an Z equipped and/or in his inventory, he dropped/lost X, Y and Z on death, and you picked up X, Y and Z as the reward). RWT companies could give you money that way by meeting you in the PvP area with millions of coins in their backpack, let you kill them, and then you'd loot the dropped coins. There were variations on this little scheme, all of which Jagex has thrwarted.

Similarly, they restricted player-to-player trades to make sure that items were traded for their true market value (established by trades recorded in the game's cross-server "Grand Exchange" auction house). That is, if something costs 1,000 coins, you basically could only trade it for a combination of goods/coins that also = 1,000 coins (give or take).

All of the changes did a great job reducing RWT and botting (since the demand for RS gold was gone, the chinese gold-seller bots went too). However, much of the gameplay that made RS fun and unique was gone as well. High adrenaline full loot PvP was basically gone, and so was just being able to give you friends gold or items to help them out in their thousands of hours of training.

So what Jagex is saying is: we're bringing back the old fun and flexibility, but we're also willing to accept bots and RWT if that's what it going to take to grow our subscriber base again.

I'm okay with the bots and the RWT myself. It sucks, but the game was a lot better with the "free trade" and old "wilderness" PvP. There will be downsides to this move, but I think the community largely believes the upsides will far outweigh the downs.