Botany Bay - Finally bots get nuked again!

The new bot killing that Jagex is in place and it seems to be working.  I have been able to get on to F2P and I can actually now gather resources without too many problems competing with the bots.  The animation on spam bots is nice and it happens within about two minutes of their going 'live'.  The court itself may be 'lame' for some players, but, it is a nice distraction and I like to be able to choose their final method of being removed permanently from Runescape.  The only thing I can see is that if you are F2P I would recommend that you log on to a F2P world as the cases happens much faster there.  When I was on P2P I would get maybe one bot tried an hour, but, F2P I watched seven within thirty minutes.

It will be interesting to see how long it will take before bots make another comeback, but, I truly hope that they never will.

One of the players watching was commenting that bots are not bad in that they help make materials ready.  I wonder if that was a bot master or user.  I find that bots are extremly annoying in that the spam-bots make reading chat almost impossible or they send you 'private message' without permission.  They also hog resources so that you cannot gather materials and artificially distort prices of raw materials which further discourages players from even try to gather materials to sell so that they can buy other items for progression within the game.  If anyone disagrees with me on this please think of the blue dragons and the bots there.  I had blue dragons as a slayer task and had to cancel as there were at least four bots for every dragon and it would have taken me weeks to finish that slayer task.

Fish Flingers

It is a new mini-game for pay-to-play players and you don't have to worry about tools, requirements or inventory space. There are fishing spots on the beach, lake, docks, ponds and rivers. The game starts every 90 minutes and goes on for about 15 minutes. You can get tackle boxes to hold some of your supplies, the bigger tackle box the more supplies you can store.

So far I like the mini-game (activity) as-is. The last time I played the game I received about 7k of Xp in 15 minutes.

TomT Levels

It has been a bit since I last updated the blog. I have been working on a number of my levels and trying to help out Zelda online with her quests. One of my current goals is to get all of my levels up to 80 for all skills and that is taking a lot of effort. The biggest one is runecrafting as the best XP I get is 10 per essence when I do death runes. I have been playing the Great Orb Project for the XP and teletabs to the Law alter which helps along with playing penguin hide & seek each week and putting the XP to runecrafting.

You can see all of my levels to the right as of June 20th. It is slow, but, they are the result of me doing the work and not Bots. I see that Jagex has updated their bot detection and have been removing high level accounts that use bots. I think that is great as it is not fair to all of us who spend our time and energy to get our levels up in a legit way.

Zelda and I have also been playing the evil tree event at least once a day as it gives us great farming, woodcutting and firemaking XP. The rewards when the tree is a maple or higher is nice, but, we are mosting playing it to pump up our XP.

Zelda wants to get to 99 FM as the first skill, but, I know that is going to be a long and hard process as she gets bored after about 15-20 loads of logs burned. I make a game of it in that she needs to work on FM while we wait for the evil tree event. Doing that today she got almost 100k of XP without being too bored.

Soul Wars freeloader fix + Penguin Hide&Seek

Jagex finally made a small fix to Soul Wars. Before people would just stand there and get a reward for doing nothing. I found it very annoying that they would get a reward for doing nothing and I was trying to get in to play and could not. Now that they made the fix people must play or get kicked out without getting rewards. I have not tried it yet, but, when I am doing working on my other skills I will play it again with my dad.

My dad has been playing Penguin hide and seek with me for the last several weeks helping me find all of the penguins across Runescape. There are a few places I cannot go to as I have not done the quest or I just won't go there (high wilderness). I have been putting the rewards to runecrafting so I can get to level 50 and then I can play the 'Great Orb Project' with my dad and really get cool rewards there. I can then buy the teletabs to the various altars so I can get 55 runecrafing, then I can start to make law runes and make lots of GP for the things I want to buy in the game.

Soul wars mini-game

For the last few weeks Zelda and myself have been playing the new mini game Soul Wars. The concept itself is nice and the rewards are nice, but, there are a few problems with the game as it stands right now.

The first problem is that people can enter the game and for twenty minutes just stand around doing nothing, but, at the end of the game they get at least one point if they were on the losing side, three for being on the winning side. There have been games where I counted over twenty people standing around the avatar doing absolutely nothing, but, they get free XP at a rate they can't get anywhere else. It should be changed so that if you don't participate you get zero points.

The second problem is somtimes it takes several games before you are allowed to join in. You stand in the waiting areas for twenty-three minutes to the next game and then don't get into that one. Combined with the problem above it is a frustrating experience as those who want to play have to wait while the ones who just stand around get in. As there are only three official servers it can be a highly frustrating experience trying to get in to play.

If you do play the game it is a great way to quickly get XP in a number of areas.

Zelda did another piece of artwork. The insiration for this was we were on opposite sides for a game and I attacked her there and beat her. This is her switching things around showing what she would do the next time.