Keeping in character, that is trusted Jagex for you

Or, to put it more bluntly, they fucked up once again. As with all games companies Jagex has its Q&A team. Quality control and Assurence this normaly means. They are supposed to test new additions to a game. Or a complete newly developed game.

This Q&A team tests various changes to a game, to see if it all works as it is supposed to. Soon after the start of what is called 'double xp week-end' one thing became obviously clear: This Q&A team forgot to do their job. Even playing for less than 30 minutes would have made clear mod Fnord (god, what a name) made a grave error. His formula didn't work as it was supposed to. The multiplier had a downward curve way steeper than was shown in the graph on the website. And thus the player didn't get the 10 hours before the lowest multiplier of 1.1.

In all honesty I don't really care about it dropping down to 1.1 in 7 hrs instead of 10. But those who did their calculations to maximise their xp-gain got caught out pretty bad. Spending millions upon millions to have their levels rise to a predicted one. They are the ones who should really be angry. And why this fuck-up? Because a formula seems to behave differently when it's numbers are rounded down. Or is the reason to be found in a different place?

You see, a formula is just that. It is a mathematical certainty it will behave a certain way. And fiddling with the numbers behind the decimal point has its effects. Supposedly that is where the test team comes in. Those who play and test the game. Maybe they should take their job seriously for once, and do what they are there for. TO FFing TEST THE CHANGES. But no, not the Jagex test team, they operate on a different plane of existence. They play the game, see where it goes wrong and then have mod Fnord try to save the day: "Yes, dear players, I made a mistake in my formula."

Well duh. It are the testers that should get their behinds kicked, and kicked hard. What on earth were they doing when testing the xp week-end? Sleep? Eat? Drink? Fuck their neighbours wife? Incompetence all around. If a player sees the mistake within 15 of play, all those highly educated nitwits should have caught it within 5 minutes. But no, they again failed to comply with their job-description: To test...

Truly in keeping with the Jagex dedication to exelence; exelence in botched-up updates. And the guilty party, once again, is not the one who took the blame. Q&A my foot.

The one responsible for the disaster:

Dean Olive

Dean Olive - Jagex

00:00:02 My name’s Dean Olive, I'm RuneScape QA Unit Lead, and basically that means organising all the testing of the games, make sure there’s no bugs, and any mad glitches that might come up. You have to find all that, report it, get it fixed, before it goes out to the public. There’s much more to it than just playing the games, we basically have to go into it and look at it from a really logical point of view, how you could break it. Sometimes it becomes really mundane, I mean we’ll have to check thousands of items. For instance in a previous company I had to go through the whole of one certain game without saving or dying, and I managed to do it in 45 minutes, when it was guesstimated at 8 hours approximate game-play time.

Video: http://icould.com/tags/primary-skill-sector/audio-visual-industries/dean-olive/

Rant over


The start of play itself got off without a hitch, that is for the first minute on Simple. Planning had me do a tree run: 5 magic, 5 palm, 1 spirit, 1 calquat. That should (and did) get me one farming level. But there was a hitch:  a random event within the first minute of play. Apparently, according to Merch's blog, a random event is triggered by xp-gain. I don't think so. I got my first random logging in. The second after checking my calquat and the third after checking the 2nd tree: my palm on Karamja. XP-driven? Then why can I gain large quantities of xp by finishing WGS without getting a random? (this was after asking around: Did you get a random after WSG? Since I have yet to start it.) At the end of the run I switched to herblore and finished the potions I had prepared. 2 planned levels gained and time for one I didn't plan but I had hoped for: 96 slayer.

Late Saturday evening, make that Sunday morning I got it. Finally.

Onward to Gwalagwic. And for her Herblore was the main and only planned event. Starting at level 32 it ended at level 47. 2 levels more than originally planned. After that I drifted to different skills. Some cooking got me from 49 to 57. Agility ended at 52 and access to the wilderness course where a revenant ork took Jagex's revenge on the bit written earlier. Some hunteringtingding raised that 13 levels to 25, and finally a few magic levels got me 4 levels to be able to teleport to Trolheim. All I need to do now is to finish the quest needed for that one and the Ardougne teleport.

To sum it all up, both Gwala's and Simple's stats as of this moment. Maybe I'll do some stuff later on, but for now these are the results:

XP weekend around the corner

And in all honesty I truly don't know what to expect. Well, I do expect a few things; apart from the odd level or two, for Simple, Gwala will try to reach somewhere around herblore 45. But that is not exactly why I am somewhat bothered by the whole thing.

You see, I think there will be loads of trouble. I haven't read anything about how Jagex is going to cope with the influx of players. Think about it for a moment: There are 84 member worlds and each hold at maximum 2000 players. Now we calculate, 84 times 2000 equals 168,400, and so a maximum of about 168k players can be on-line for the duration of the weekend. Sure, not all will no-life for the total period, but there will be players around who will do their best to maximize their investment in prepared items. And rightly so, it is after all the sole reason for the xp weekend: Try to get your levels up as fast as you can. So we prepared.

Gwala got her grubby hands on enough tarromin, viles and ashes to get that 45 herb. Simple only prepared by planting as many trees as possible and enough d-bones to ecto her to the next prayer level (even if double xp doesn't work with the ectofunctus enough bonemeals/buckets of slime are around to get it), and enough "unf potions" to get one herb level. For the rest I will just play as I always do: For the fun of it, not focussing on anything else but on 'am I having a good time'.

But I cannot help but wonder if I will have the opportunity to play. Will I or won't I be squeezed out by those who really prepared... Those who invested millions upon millions to get to 99 summoning or prayer, or herblore, or crafting or any other of the skills we have. 168,400 players at maximum... will it be enough? Or will there be a lot of disgruntled players after this weekend because they couldn't get enough playing time in to reach their goals.

One more thing that worries me: Lag. With that number of players around it stands to reason the amount of data sent all over the world could result in Lag... Ah well, we will see...

Good luck to all who really prepared...

A Grand Total

Or, it took me 7 days, 13 hrs of playing time to reach the 1000 level. Construction did it and got all my levels above 9...

Apart from that I have been fishing.... a lot. A lot for me that is, and with around 800 lobsters banked that should be enough for a reasonable cooking level come xp weekend. Planning for that: There is no planning. I will prepare by planting whatever seed I can but for the rest nothing. I might have a go at agility though. 52 sounds nice since it would give me access to the Wilderness course. The other thing might be range/slayer. I just don't know. We will see it when we get there.

For Simple I only have one thing planned: One farming level, courtesy of 5 magic trees, 5 palm trees, 1 calquat and 1 spirit tree. Since they are all protected it should be enough to get one level.