Runescape Blog

With the recent disabling of Protect Item prayers on PvP Worlds, a lot of players feel that we had rendered their high-value weapons (godswords and dragon claws, in particular) worthless. While no changes had been made to the weapons themselves, the amount of wealth you had to risk in order to use those weapons was considered prohibitively high.

We obviously don’t want you to feel like your investment is wasted; we appreciate how much work some of you have put into getting those items! But, we also don’t want to undo changes that we feel are good for PKing as whole.

So, we’ve come up with a way of hopefully achieving both goals. Today we are introducing a new type of Bounty World. These ‘+1 item’ worlds still won’t allow you to use the Protect Item prayer, but, instead, everyone will always keep their most valuable item protected.

On these worlds, to gain drop potential you (as usual) have to be risking 75k (or 25k on a free world). Because you always keep your most valuable item on these worlds, this means you have to risk 75k of items in ADDITION to your always-protected item.

This has the following advantages:

a) It still achieves our original intentions of making it harder to gain drop potential and participate in rewarding combat without actually really risking something;

b) It stops high-value weapons being made worthless and still maintains that type of gameplay for people who enjoy it;

c) Conversely, people who feel the new, more powerful weapons unbalanced PKing, without any risk to the wielder, have a different type of world that they can enjoy too.

NOTE - Our ISP issues have meant that world 32, the planned +1 item Bounty World for free players, is not currently available. We sincerely apologise and hope to get this world back online as soon as possible.

Mobilising Armies is a new multiplayer combat minigame, but instead of controlling your avatar you’ll be controlling a whole battalion, deploying your squads with tactical precision and trying to second-guess the intentions of your opponents. There are four different scenarios to play in: Conflict, Siege, Hoard and Rescue. Each presents its own set of challenges, such as building catapults, collecting resources and stealing from your opponents, to name just a few. Don’t worry about finding three other players, though: when you turn up at the command centre the officers will arrange your match for you.

As we all know, war isn’t cheap, so with Mobilising Armies we are introducing a commodity-exchange system. If, after training a skill, you’re left with a lot of commodities that you don’t need yourself (e.g. a surplus of jewellery after training Crafting), you’ll be able to trade them in at the command centre for investment credits, which can then be exchanged for squads and special units, such as cannons, barricades or exploding chinchompas. You can also choose to stake investment credits in an impending battle for a larger payout of reward credits, which can in turn be spent on additional items.

There are a variety of rewards for victorious commanders, including quest kits that let you hold much-needed questing tools in one inventory slot, resource locators that’ll teleport you directly to resources such as mining spots and trees, and “spoils of war”, which are a selection of resources, gold and items that will allow you to train your skills further

Good luck, and enjoy!

Mod Tim, Lead Content Developer, and Mod Maz, Content Developer and Queen of the Squirrels

In other news...

We’ve added the ability for you to make notes. To access this new feature, click on the Notes icon at the bottom-right of the screen. This remarkably simple system enables you to leave up to 30 notes for yourself, each of which can be up to 50 characters long.

On a related note, any invalid player names saved in your Friends/Ignore lists have been marked with a *.

We’ve also moved the Summoning interface’s functionality to the Summoning icon next to the minimap – simply right-click on this icon for all your pet/familiar needs. We’re aware this leaves a blank ‘stone’ on the interface; there is another new feature planned to go in that space.

We've added an alternative sitting position when you rest. You can toggle how you sit by clicking rest again to choose your preferred pose.

Zanik's crossbow can now be used with many more varieties of bolts. It seems that it only used a small selection beforehand.

The filter for the quest list will no longer remove quests you've already started.

Summoning scrolls should no longer interfere with special attack energy replenishing.

You can no longer use fairy rings while you are tele-blocked. This seemed a bit inconsistent with other areas of the game.

You can now take familiars over the bridge towards Zamorak in the God Wars Dungeon, so you don't have to dismiss them and then summon them again after crossing.