RuneScape Forum Archive

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Thieving

This also needs consideration as salvaging is essentially sea-based thievery, however there is much more leeway as thieving is already a very fast skill. Salvage, then, is not a super quick method of training in comparison to pyramid plunder, but is more along the lines of thieving chests, with the highest level salvaging being comparable to the rogue’s chests in the wilderness.

Combat

Resource islands with good combat training spots would not be overpowered as they would just be more of what we have already: rock crabs, experiments, yaks and the like. The attraction of the resource island spots is that they would be less crowded.

Boss monsters would require the usual drop table balancing that any other new bosses do. There will need to be good unique rewards to make them worthwhile of course; crowdsourcing ideas as is done currently would help this along.

Chance of finding a boat in wilderness sea

There are 100 squares, minus 4 for the ports/ other sea squares. Does that not make it rather unlikely that you may find another boat there?

I think not, as, much like the regular wilderness, players will eventually figure out where the best resource islands are located and that there will be a greater chance of finding another boat there.

However, given there can be plenty of resources there, it shouldn’t be prohibitively dangerous to the point that nobody uses the resources. It will all be risk vs reward. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:42:10 - Last edited on 24-Aug-2014 00:01:22 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Other resource skills

None of the resource islands are intended to replace current skilling methods, so they will not offer higher exp rates than there are currently.

Rather, they should reflect current training spots, with the incentive being that they will be less crowded. Thus, emphasis is placed on resources that are difficult to obtain, not for lack of spots, but because there are so many other players/ bots that it is difficult to compete.

Some preliminary thoughts on what this could be:
Hunter: a resource island with a few red chin spawns
Woodcutting: some magic trees
Mining: Some rune rocks, granite rocks, iron rocks in a good formation for power training

Of course, there is still potential for new resources. These ideas can be crowdsourced, polled, and implemented as necessary.

How fast is Sailing?

It might seem odd that I’ve gone into so much detail with everything else and haven’t yet even touched upon how fast this skill would be to train.

Being that this is an assistive skill, exp is gained as a by-product of doing other skills. I’m not sure if I want to go down the line of slayer, where slayer is the most efficient way to train combat skills. That would mean that efficiency wise sailing would be the best way to train all the resource skills.

Thus, I would say, in my opinion, that sailing ought to be at 99 after say 3 or so skills have been brought to 99 using the method. Especially considered exp rates are protected at all times, this should make sailing the more efficient method for some but not all skills.

That would make sailing (very generally speaking) around 20-30k/h when training passively. I imagine in methods that are more dedicated to training just sailing (navy defence against priates, for instance) it would maybe go up to about 40k/h. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:42:14 - Last edited on 24-Aug-2014 00:01:36 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Arguments Against & Rebuttals

As I’ve had a very rough draft of this concept as a forum thread for a few months now, in that time I have, naturally, come across people who do not support the idea for one reason or another. I’ll now take the time to address some of these concerns.

Sailing or Seafaring?

This is a genuinely tricky one. I cannot decide whether this skill should be called Sailing or Seafaring. Admittedly, the thread I’ve had up for the past few months is titled as sailing. However, after further consideration I asserted that “sailing” implies the boats have sails, which is not always the case with this design. I therefore concluded that “seafaring” is a more correct term for this skill. However, nobody ever refers to it as seafaring. It’s always sailing. So the choice has to be made between popular awareness and etymological correctness.

This would take too much development time

As far as I’m aware, this design shouldn't require too much engine work as I’ve tried to base it off of mechanics we already have in game.

This is a valid argument in terms of development time, certainly. I concede that if everything I outlined in this thread was to be added at the same time, and there were to be hundreds of resource islands, it would amount to quite a hefty amount of development. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:43:05 - Last edited on 24-Aug-2014 00:01:59 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

However, there are several reasons why I think it should not be so prohibitive:

1) Every skill I can remember had a staggered launch, with an initial release of the core mechanics, followed by (sometimes several) additional releases to flesh out the content. A staggered launch for sailing would be perfectly fine. If anything, sailing could cope with a staggered launch better than most other new skills: it can function with slightly less content but not feel as if the skill is incomplete. Even better, new resources/dangers can be added to a square without even telling the players and they wouldn’t know any different!

2) There aren’t actually all that many new graphics that would need to be created. Aside from the boats and navigation map, most other graphics can be recycled, such as for resource islands. New areas would of course require new graphics but that is dependent on if players want new areas.

3) I don’t think there would be a PDC for a new skill if such a large scale project were not possible. New skills seem to have a tendency to want to outdo the previous ones. This was particularly evident with summoning and dungeoneering, especially the latter which was an absolutely gargantuan piece of content. Perhaps a bit of a *Go Hard or Go Home” mentality is at work here! Given that sailing benefits skillers, PvMers and PvPers, I think it would definitely be worth the work needed to make happen, especially given there have been barely any updates that bring such universal benefit. The opportunity of having a new skill in old school is not going to happen very often if ever again, so it would be a shame to squander such an opportunity on anything but the most accessible, enduring, and crucially, fun update possible. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:43:17 - Last edited on 23-Aug-2014 02:46:48 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

This would be better suited to RS3

Yes, RS3’s graphics would make for a good and pretty skill. But this is oldschool, we had a PDC for a new skill, this is a skill, so here I am!

This would change the game too much

It wouldn’t really change the game, pedantically speaking, it would add to the game. But, if we ignore the semantics, the responses to the idea of a massive new continent showed quite a large number of players are not only fine with, but embrace the notion of change.

Sailing isn’t very original

I imagine there were a lot of PDC content submissions for some sea-based skill. That may come over to some as unoriginal, but to me at least it comes across as evidence that sailing has an enduring popularity. Hundreds of other skills have been suggested over the years, but none have been as persistent as sailing. I believe that’s because sailing has the most promise to work, and the community knows it.

This is a minigame, not a skill

The main reason why I think, if anything, sailing needs to be a skill rather than a minigame is that without being a skill many things don’t make sense. A sailing stat means that having a higher sailing level means:

-Players can unlock better boats
-Players can unlock better resource islands
-Players are better able to avoid dangers

Think of it in terms of another skill, for example strength. The strength stat means that a player who has spent more time training it can hit higher than somebody who hasn’t. That’s why sailing really needs to be a skill for this design to make sense. The sailing stats means that a player who has spent more time training can use better boats, go to better resource islands and be better able to avoid dangers. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:44:25 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2015 03:55:18 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

This punishes players who want to play solo

The best way to summarise is that I consider the high end sailing resource islands to be to skilling what high end bosses are to pvm. That is, stuff like corp or nex are among the strongest bosses going, and generally require a team to kill them. They're exceptionally dangerous, require great skill/ teamwork/ equipment, and in return, they have the best rewards.

The high end resource islands of sailing are also very dangerous. Or, at least, getting to them is. Getting to them requires great skill/ teamwork/ equipment. But in return they have the best rewards.

It's also important to look at exactly what having a team does to the mechanic of bossing, and from that it's easier to understand how it is analogous to sailing.

Having a team in PVM does a few things. It increases the total HP of the attacking party. It increases the longevity of the party. It increases the DPS of the party. It also, however, decreases the value for each participant of each drop.

In sailing, though, these attributes are transferred to the boat, rather than the players, however it's done in such a way that they can essentially be considered equivalent: since an increase in players increases the boat that can be used, which in turn increases those attributes.

So, having it such that only up to tier 3 boats can be used solo isn't really depriving solo players of content, it's just making it so that the team play mechanic can be implemented. A solo player with a tier 3 boat is still perfectly free to try to make it to the high level resources, and if they're skilled enough, they'll probably be able to do so. Also, since you mentioned it briefly: a high sailing level player isn't forced to use boats that require a team - they can still use the lower tier boats. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:44:30 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2015 03:55:53 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Add to that, there are the upgradeable hotspots which would allow the player(s) to further increase the ability of the boat to withstand dangers. That can be considered analogous to how a player in better armour is better able to kill a boss.

Furthermore, being in a team may actually be detrimental in some cases, since items placed into the cargo are shared between players. I'd say most of sailing is more effective as single player, really. Just the high end resource islands, bosses and PVP are a bit easier (and possibly, in some very high cases required, like nex was). A lot like mainland runescape is, I suppose.

Finally, to touch upon the subject of gauging how well others can play, I think it shouldn't be too much of an issue, for reasons I'll explain in a bit. I've played enough barbarian assault in my time to know how much of an annoyance uncooperative/uninformed players can be!

I think the main cause of that annoyance, especially at barbarian assault, is that there's no forced interactive introduction. There's that whole thing where you have to go through cutscenes or something, but do people really pay attention to those? I don't think so. I think a new player just skips through that and then is thrown in the deep end expected to be able to work as part of a team.

Sailing can help with that by making it such that only solo content is available at the start. So essentially, the first 15 levels before tier 2 (the first multiplayer) boats are unlocked serve as a kind of forced, interactive introduction to the mechanics of sailing. With that in place, completely clueless folk shouldn't be a problem like they are in BA. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:45:39 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2015 03:56:21 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Next, there is the fact that sailing exp is only really gained by interactive means. Since exploring a square is a kind of one off chunk of exp, the most consistent sailing exp comes from:
-Adding items to the cargo (requires input from the player)
-Hunting pirates (afk player will just end up dying)

If they're not afk, but are rather just leeching, they can be kicked by the captain. The captain can't be afking since they're the one controlling where the boat goes.

Therefore, that means that a high sailing level is indeed an indicator of how able the player is at operating boats, since they aren't able to just afk/ leech to train the skill.

That helps somewhat with mitigating the issue dungeoneering had with "selling" floors, since unlike dungeoneering, a buyer won't just receive the same exp at the end as if they had been participating. They will have to participate actively to get the sailing exp. That also means that a player must actively participate if they are to unlock new content: not participating means no sailing exp, which means not getting the levels required for the content. Whereas, of course, in dungoneering somebody could just buy all the floors, still get the exp, and continually unlock new content along with that.

Plus, even if they don't care about getting exp, there's not really any incentive to be selling a trip just for the rewards, unlike dungeoneering. It's somewhat pointless, since an extra player also reduces the cut to each player of what was in the cargo hold. So you might be getting money for selling the trip, but you lose out on resources. Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:45:44 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2015 03:56:37 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Conclusion

And so concludes the product of a good week of vehement procrastination.

Hopefully this document has served to outline my vision for the design of sailing, as well as provided adequate justification for why I believe this design to be the best method to implement the skill. Furthermore, I hope that the thought put into addressing the many potential problems will be able to show that the design is not simply a half-baked concept but a credible model that can truly function as part of the game. Finally, I hope the document serves as evidence that the core aims were not a just bunch of unsubstantiated business buzz-words, but verifiable targets that, if anything, still do not fully encapsulate what an overwhelming benefit this skill can bring.

Thank you for reading.
San Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:45:48 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2015 03:56:55 by San

Jul

2023

San

Posts: 4,259 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

r Sailing

23-Aug-2014 02:47:10

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