quote runescape.com

02-Nov-2009 - Potential Downtime

As previously mentioned in Mod Tom S’s blog back in July, we have been migrating all of our core systems, such as the login and friend systems, to a new hosting facility. The new facility offers greater redundancy and performance. We have almost completed the migration and only a few systems are still to be transferred.

As discussed in the blog, the new hosting facility uses a Storage Area Network, or SAN, for data storage. The servers in the new facility use special fibre channel network cards (basically very fast network cards) to talk to the SAN. We have been alerted to a bug in the driver that runs the fibre channel network card.

After discussion within the Systems Administration team and with Mod MMG, we have decided this bug warrants an immediate driver update. Unfortunately, to update the driver we have to restart the servers. This will necessitate some downtime on nearly all our systems. We are going to perform the majority of the updates today. We apologise for any disruption this may cause and will attempt to keep downtime to a minimum.

quote Jagex

Finally, the hangover from winning the UK Games Developer of the Year award at the Golden Joysticks on Friday is lifting, albeit slowly.

It wouldn’t be right to celebrate this incredible, humbling achievement without expressing our sincerest thanks and appreciation to the entire Jagex community for helping make this landmark achievement a reality. We have never seen so many people simultaneously spit their champagne at each other as when Jagex was announced as the winner! It was truly a vision that will make me smile forever. =D

This award was indeed special as not only was there some really tough competition, but this is one of the only awards voted for by the players themselves rather than an industry “old boys' club”. This year, over 1.2 million votes were cast, ensuring a World Record in itself for the Golden Joystick Awards as the biggest ever player-voted competition, and I would like to believe that most of those votes came from you, our epically sized community, not to mention the small fact that you managed to crash their website four times with all your votes!

The Jagex development team have worked tirelessly over the last eight years, their only concern creating great content for our players and games that we wanted to play ourselves – all totally under the radar of the traditional games industry and press. So while it is nice to be recognised so publicly by the industry (no doubt they will all be thinking about developing online games of their own), I would like to give everyone the assurance that our focus will remain on building great games for our community, and that we’ll continue to work hard and do all we can to try to live up to this prestigious award.

So, once again, many thanks to you all! The credit goes to our much-loved players and we hope that our entire Jagex community will share in the success along with the team at Jagex. A big cheers to all the players!

Mod MMG & Andrew

quote Jagex

09-Nov-2009 - Champions’ Challenge Update and Hairstyles

A new challenge awaits worthy adventurers at the Champions’ Guild! It doesn’t matter if you have never seen a champion scroll in your life or have defeated all of them already, there will be something for you. The leprechaun champion is taking on all-comers – there’s no need to find a challenge scroll to fight this little pugilist. Just head on over to the Champions’ Guild and prepare yourself for some ‘no items’ fisticuffs.

Also, three new races have just joined the guild. If you prove yourself to be their enemy, one of them might just drop a scroll challenging you to a duel with their champion, so keep an eye out when battling monsters! Meanwhile, Glophren, the gnome champions of champions, is waiting for the worthiest of adventurers so he can finally issue his challenge. Will you be one of them?

What with the days getting shorter and colder, we thought we'd brighten things up with some new hairstyles! The much requested ‘mullet' haircut is now available, as well as a few variants on existing styles. The full list is as follows...

Male hairstyles: Dragon variant, Mohawk shaved, Mullet.

Female hairstyles: Asymmetric fringe, Half-up/half-down, Headband, Page boy.

Mod Maylea (Champions’ Challenge) and Mod Nancy (Hairstyles)
RuneScape Content Developers

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In other news...

Two worlds have been designated ‘Skill Total’ worlds - that's world 113 (free) and 114 (members). Only players who have a total level of at least 1,000 will be able to log into these worlds. If this proves to be popular, we can always add more worlds.

We've created a handful of item packs for some shops, similar to the box of spirit shards. In certain shops, you can now buy the whole stock of eyes of newt, empty or water-filled vials, raw bird meat, and empty baskets or sacks in one go.

A click-delay issue has been fixed in Castle Wars. The game engine has been modified to adjust the behaviour of these clicks back to their previous speed.

An animation has been added for when players are viewing the world map. Other players will see them in-game looking at a map.

A large number of items with parentheses after their names have had spaces added for consistency and easier searching on the Grand Exchange (e.g. “Agility potion(4)” is now “Agility potion (4)”).

An altar has been added to an upper floor in Falador Castle for players to recharge their Prayer points at.

We've added a confirmation when casting High Alchemy on items with a Grand Exchange value of 500,000gp or higher. This should prevent the accidental alching of those expensive items.

We’ve also converted the Superheat, Enchant lvlx and Plank Make spells to work in a similar fashion to High and Low Level Alchemy spells (i.e. you can now queue up your next cast).

Slayer Masters have now been given a right-click ‘Get-task’ option to speed things up a bit. You can also find out how many more kills you need with a right-click option on enchanted gems, which will even work if you are currently in combat. Finally, gargoyles have a new ‘Smash’ option when they're near death to allow you to more easily finish them off with a rock hammer.

Drop tables for the TzHaar have been significantly reworked and now drop more TokKul than before. This is to make up for the changes in the ThZaar shop prices earlier this year. The TokKul awarded for defeating TzTok-Jad in the Fight Caves has also been doubled.

The fairy ring network has been given an auto-dial feature. You’ll still need to discover each fairy ring destination to put in your log, but once there they can be simply clicked on to input the code for you.

Yanille has had more points of entry added to it in the form of a new ladder and doorway.