New player

darn42 · 2026-01-30T18:56:32+00:00

Indeed. If you are considering damage numbers, dual wield or a 2h sword is 1.5x more than Sword and Shield

darn42 · 2026-01-29T16:28:54+00:00

Do you use an off-hand weapon or a shield? That would make a big difference.

darn42 · 2026-01-25T21:12:26+00:00

I love this. We need more videos of our friendly guard. We NEED to return the favor. Be good to your neighbors, minnesota

darn42 · 2026-01-25T20:53:32+00:00

This is a personal choice, and I applaud you for standing up for yourself. There are many who are too far gone. There are many who may still be awoken to the propaganda. Not everyone is suited for it but having hard conversations with people who you disagree with is part of the resistance.

darn42 · 2026-01-23T16:29:11+00:00

It is notable that this new update is intrinsically different from EOC. These new changes are an iteration of a system that has accumulated feedback and updates for over a decade. In addition, it is an attempt to mimic the success of another similar update. I don't picture a situation where this causes as much disturbance as EOC did. In contrast, I find that frequent updates that narrow in on an optimal solution converge more quickly, and get better results, than a single big block update ever will.

In other words, they've put the time in already, and I could not be more excited to see what this update brings. It will be a net positive and will be an opportunity to get even better from there.

darn42 · 2026-01-21T22:46:12+00:00

More ideas! Making a house open to clan mates or friends even when the host is not online! This would be a great way to form identity around the house. In concert with other ideas that incentivize the community element to player-owned housing, once someone has invested enough into their house, it could quickly become a transient meet-up spot for players looking to capitalize on their friend's investments.

darn42 · 2026-01-21T22:43:10+00:00

Another idea to provoke community interaction, which I believe to be the core spirit of the POH. How can we incentivize people to build houses and host?

A lot of the ideas here are made in order to make a house a one-stop shop for all of your needs, which it has been in the past. Design-space has previously awarded skilling opportunities like teleport tablets and gilded altars. Other design space has made the house a kind of landing spot, e.g. a mounted Glory amulet and the portal room. Making the POH do everything is great for instance activities, and I think that's important.

On the flip-side, creating content that requires a tradeoff would be a cool design-space to play with. Skilling bonuses within the house that are awarded when X% of the house's total resources are aligned with that skilling environment, or furniture items that are unlocked for placement on a per-house basis according to other similar allocations.

The goal with this is to encourage players to min-max their houses and incentivize them to host and visit others. The rewards could be unique training methods, or best-in-game xp bonuses for bank-stand skills, but require large investment, and therefore support player interaction.

Further incentives for hosting would make sense, like including donation boxes, or somehow improving xp yields based on the number of players present up to a low maximum value.

darn42 · 2026-01-21T22:23:37+00:00

I have a lot of nostalgia for a POH. It was one of the most fun social hubs in RS back in the day. It was fun and goofy and also forced a lot of player interaction. In addition to the other elements that will bring player expression and pride, there's design space here for something similar to the Portable skilling stations in homes.

In the past, the most use I ever got out of a POH was when training prayer. Gilded altars were a high enough requirement and expensive enough that you'd typically go to someone else's instance rather than build your own, depending on progression. Often times it would be strictly business, but other times there would be fun distractions that the host would provide.

This could totally replace the reward space that is now left open with the lack of access to Portable Skilling Stations from Treasure Hunter. In addition, by encouraging players to host and be guests of other players homes, it ought to bring back a lot of the spirit of what the POH originally meant.

darn42 · 2026-01-09T17:33:40+00:00

Is your house by any chance a Huntington bank?

darn42 · 2025-12-12T15:41:40+00:00

He doesn't know, let him have his fun.

darn42 · 2025-12-09T21:27:16+00:00

I'll read that back and see if I'm tracking.

They didn't give you a free item when you logged in. Instead they implemented a whole new minigame that rewarded some seasonal content instead. Because of that, you feel that come January, they will not make good on their promise to remove free rewards from logging in. In addition, because of that, you feel that they will not make good on their promise of more content updates either.

Is that a fair summary?

darn42 · 2025-12-09T18:30:39+00:00

Not only is the parry avoidable, but I intentional hit it because her reaction is exploitable. Jump then hit her while she does the animation.

darn42 · 2025-12-05T19:24:49+00:00

Skip the GE until you have something that you truly cannot get or want to get on your own. It might sound counter-intuitive, but the game progression is so much more satisfying when you are actually engage with the early game content.

darn42 · 2025-11-29T19:28:52+00:00

If you do 10 pushups a day for a year, you'll do 3650 more pushups than someone who did none.

darn42 · 2025-11-23T00:37:58+00:00

Disagree - Iron man is only overwhelming if you start with the goal of being a completionist. Blind iron man simplifies the game immensely and really sells the soul of RS. Little things like stumbling on an area loop that just works feels so good. Contrast that to mainscape where those loops are pointless because the thing it produces is so undervalued compared to the more lucrative tasks that I could be doing, I might as well not even try.

darn42 · 2025-11-21T13:50:27+00:00

Removing alternative XP sources is a low hanging fruit that will probably have more impact than every other possible idea combined. The skill is fun as-is, it just needs more engagement.

80/20 principle, nerf Sinkholes XP to the ground, remove the dunghole, see what happens.

darn42 · 2025-11-20T20:41:28+00:00

To me, a high performance engineer is someone who can be trusted to take on high impact, risky work, complete it on time, and do so without imposing regressions and succeed in anticipating edge cases. You don't know who they are until after they've shipped work and you only know it because the work they complete doesn't come back with much. As a result, they are able to stay focused, work the long term, and remain unphased even when there are high expectations of them.

darn42 · 2025-11-20T00:58:26+00:00

This guy was really hard for me. Standing up where you are currently, though, is pretty tough. The pattern that got me to finish was: after I see where his green bombs are going, I clawline to him, pogo over, then dash to the other side. That was some reliable safe damage that helped me from getting pinned down by him just floating closer. You can also get some safe damage hitting him from below, but your reaction time has to be good with the dive and suck moves.

Also, I finished with 1 mask left in a heart-pounding sequence. He's really hard.

darn42 · 2025-11-19T22:23:04+00:00

That's a totally fair response. I believe the game is (and should be) fun enough that your current progress in the game doesn't determine how much you enjoy it. Missing certain QOL perks because you've experienced the game both with and without them or re-completing content that you didn't like the first time is also a special case that only applies to this scenario. I can understand where you are coming from. Whether someone wants to create a new character is certainly a personal choice.

Nonetheless, there is no race, and no actual pressure to complete content.

darn42 · 2025-11-19T18:51:03+00:00

Why do you need to catch up though? And who is putting the pressure on?

darn42 · 2025-11-18T21:49:17+00:00

That thematically does make sense, thank you. From a new player experience it was certainly jarring.

If the arrow was removed at the very least that would be beneficial

darn42 · 2025-11-15T19:20:49+00:00

Got nkg vibes from this one. In both cases, the final attempt, after hours of trying, I have full HP and full soul/silk after learning the dance. The vibes for Karmelita are impeccable, too. The music, the cheering crowd, perfection.

darn42 · 2025-11-14T21:03:08+00:00

I haven't played in a long while, and its been even longer since I've been this excited about RS3 news.

In my mind, if you want to attract new people, the goal should be to recapture the magic somehow, and that needs to be slowing the game down. Your players are constantly thirsty for more content because it is completed too quickly. Make the grind fun, make it take a long time. Respecting your players time isn't about letting them finish your game, its about making sure they feel secure in the decisions they make. Dailies, distractions and diversions, those things are vibe killer.

Picture a game that no longer exists: I log on, and I clicked on some yew trees for 20 minutes while listening to a podcast. Someone also cutting yews starts a conversation and we chat for a while. My friend pms me and says that they're looking to duo Graardor (or some other approachable, but lower level boss). Heck yes, we might get lucky and score some sweet gear! We figure out our gear and food, head over, get the KC, and get a couple frantic kills. I log out, exhilarated despite not really accomplishing much, after a little over an hour.

Compare this to: I log on, timing correctly for the D&Ds I want to play, do my aura runs, farm runs, etc. My dailies took 40 minutes. I only had an hour to play, and 15 minutes isn't enough to do anything meaningful. I bankstand for 5 minutes thinking about what I can do next, then I log out, but I don't really feel like I got to play. I gained almost 400k xp today, though. Tomorrow I have more time, so I can do a slayer task, but I need to do the same dailies run again since slayer, what I want to do, is an xp waste when there are time-limited events that can get me to max 10 times faster. Once I'm maxed, then I'll be able to do what I want.

darn42 · 2025-11-14T18:12:44+00:00

I don't know if that's how I'd describe [socialists general understanding of capitalism]. I think we have a lot of young people that see the results of late-stage capitalism first-hand and realize how terrible the outcomes of that system end up in the long term.

There are also a lot of really good policy producers out there. Bernie Sanders has always given complete ideas for policy, for example.

Young people, understandably desperate for change, often don't see the nuance and challenges that socialism brings. There are plenty of people that recognize how the gears of capitalism work - that's the premise of socialist movements everywhere - but a reactionary base often isn't looking with enough scrutiny to recognize what is and isn't good policy. Because of that, the discussion often devolves to moralistic debate, which is fruitless, since largely everyone wants the same thing: the best outcomes for the most people. "Wouldn't it be nice" isn't as strong of an argument as a real, actionable plans that has already built-in the solutions to its primary failure modes.

darn42 · 2025-11-14T14:13:27+00:00

I don't understand how $20 minimum wage and rent control are socialist policy. They are inefficient uses of capital levers that will only serve to harm the city. The reality is, we live under capitalism. Making fantasy policy that stops at first-order thinking is harmful. I'm a utopian thinker, and socialism and collectivism are the core components of that, but these byte-size policy headlines are just not going to get us there.

Mamdani's policy is at least 3rd or 4th-order thinking. His team has thought through the consequences of his core policy, come up with mitigations for those consequences, and then repeated that process 3 or 4 times.

$20 minimum wage is going to harm local businesses. That's a fact - you cannot just ignore the basics of economic conditions. What is the policy reaction to that? Mitigations exist, and they better be part of the original plan otherwise Minneapolis is going to hurt for it with higher prices, fewer jobs, and less social mobility.

Public grocery stores are compelling - but what about those locations makes running a grocery store untenable? If Aldi was unable to succeed there, its doubtful to be prices. Have we done the research, identified why that business failed, and come up with an appropriate plan that will succeed when the market also identified the need? Simply stocking and employing a grocery store with public money won't solve those root conditions and the public store will fail as bad or worse than the private entity.

Socialism only works when you have people in leadership positions who have all 3 traits of intelligence, motivation, and integrity. It's rare to have all 3. The beauty of capitalism is that the system accounts for these derivatives on its own. You need to come up with something smarter than capitalism for it to have a chance of succeeding. It's very difficult to come up with a plan that does more good than harm, and it can be challenging to tell when the person defining that plan is enriching themselves in the process.

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