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Hello, I imagine this has either been suggested already or thought about and not implemented for whatever reason. But i was thinking how about adding a live communication chat box to the home page of the forums, so us members can instantly communicate back and forth with small talk or whatever. I see this forum template is powered by the same source other forums use that have a chat box implemented. The chat box could be used for necessary instant communication for game or forum related things, it would come in handy and be enjoyable i believe by many members!

Okay guys: the enchantment system in minecraft is powerful, but very frustrating. What Admiral would call "quirky" saying it "adds to the feeling of the game". I don't know why people think that shizzle is a good argument, but there we are. The problems with it are: Gathering experience can take a while and thus can necessitate grinders (not an issue to me, grinders are a decent part of the game and just hunting generally gets you enough for level 30). Enchantments are entirely random, with no way to choose which you want. Some enchantments are considerably worse than others but are just as likely to get. Experience cannot be stored, and it is thus dangerous to walk around as a high level (not too much of an issue, but not ideal). Another issue with the game is that navigation isn't what it might be. You have a compass pointing to where you originally spawned and you have a map, but if you go too far out it's going to be very difficult to find your way back. A little like real life, but there is a solution: f3 gets you co-ordinates. Why don't we put them in game and solve enchanting too? Here's the idea: enchantments should be controlled by the stars. Using two new items, a sextant and a telescope, you can gain co-ordinates in the day with the former (thus making it easy to navigate across large worlds) and look at constellations in the latter. You can set a telescope on a stand in the floor to make an observatory where the scope can even see through glass. Set a telescope, or several, into the roof, and point them between the stars and your enchanting table. Look at the constellations: they represent different enchantments. For example, the silk worm constellation gives silk touch, while the fire constellation gives flaming enchantment, while the sword constellation gives sharpness. You get me. Then, you can focus your telescope in the roof on different constellations and it will shine the correct light onto the pages of the book, making it magically turn to relevant pages. (This isn't quite a telescope...it's slightly more powerful, and probably requires a pearl for the lens and a diamond for the focusing crystal, like the oculory in Mzulft). So you do enchanting at night and with that stuff. That way, you can choose your enchantment, ensuring that you don't have to work way more than someone else to get something just because chance hates you. Focus the telescope on the moon for a random enchantment, I guess. Unbalanced? Nay, it requires decent tech and makes sense. Also, storing experience: either we can go with bottles and brewing stands, or books. Why not books? Pop a book on the enchanting table and the moonlight should make it work as an XP holder. Read it, and you'll get your level back again. Finally, unwritten books, written books, xp books, and half-written books should all be storable on bookshelves. Yours, Helm Lardar

I got Skyrim. I'm amazed, but happy that it runs. There is a little lag. I want to point out what could have been improved, because you already know that this game is amazingly fun and that it's got lots of cool stuff, etc. Dragons and the Thu'um I'll start with dragons. They're a bit of a joke. Supposedly, they're this great threat, they enslaved the world, everyone's terrified of them, and their new arrival means doom for Skyrim. The problem is, they aren't. All you need to take down a dragon is (a) a bow and arrows, and (b) a bit of patience. Then if you go a bit through the main quest, you get hold of an old dragonslayer sword, dragonbane, which means you can kill a dragon after it lands. Yeah. Dragons land. Their greatest strength is that they can fly around you breathing fire/frost/lightning/whatever other type of magic from the air, and they land: they are big beasts that you could start skipping around before their mouth will touch you, and hitting the ground makes them incredibly vulnerable, not to mention that with dragonbane if they land I skip around their head and barely get munched, and with a bow I'd attack from a distance and they'll sit there. Sometimes they'll breathe fire. I'm level 18. That doesn't seem to be very high. Speaking of dragonfire, what happened to the whole "language of the dragons" thing? Like, you're a dragonborn so you can use Thu'um and that means you're awesome? And dragon battles are fierce and epic debates? No. Dragons use magic, like frostbite and flames: those aren't shouts, you can't hear words. When dragons do speak those words it's obvious, like when Parthurnax tells you about Alduin and when Alduin's chatting to you. Why don't they have that, instead of breathing fire? It'd be different, but it would work, as shouts are varied and useful enough to be better than dragonfire, potentially. I mean, the whole point of the shouts system in general is that it would rationalize dragon hunting. Dragonborn can shout, so they're miles ahead of everybody, right? No. Shouts are a bit like potions: they're nice every once in a while, but they're more like a sort of panic button. At the moment I use shouts, but I don't have any that would be particularly helpful against dragons. It's more about a 1-hit fire breath kill or slow motion against 2 tough enemies. This means that shouts aren't an advantage. If they were more along the lines of a little and often, I might be more interested, but that has problems too. What it really comes down to as far as I can see is that they want the dragonborn to have epic power for story etc, but don't want the game implications of that, which would make things a pushover. I'd prefer it if they'd gone for one or the other: the halfway house doesn't Shouts aren't an advantage, which means that 4 bandits can kill a dragon, or a few guards, or even a giant or mammoth. Look, those things are the most stupid ideas in the game. Hey, I'll have an NPC that looks to be about medium strength but he's got the club of the ancients, 1-hit melee kill. If people were actually worried about alduin, I tell you what they'd do: they would bribe the giants to guard all of the ancient burial places and kill the remaining dragons. The problem would be solved in days. Mammoths, too: it might have been funny for 5 minutes of testing, but having these weird invincible NPCs just dotted around the landscape is supremely odd and, in a way, immersion breaking. Anyway, dragons aren't a pain to kill so the dragonborn isn't really necessary except to absorb dragon's souls, which also seems a bit unecessary. Like, nobody did it last time and that worked fine. People just killed them (easy enough) and buried them. Alduin's the only one who can ressurect. Why don't they just kill him, he can't be that much better than all other dragons? Ah, here we go, the "Elder Scroll". As it happens, the greybeards know and understand the principles of dragonrend, and the blades get the principles of killing alduin. Sounds good, right? Okay, well maybe the greybeards won't say it, in which case we'll get someone who is equally good at the voice. Ulfric Stormcloak is your man: he uses it regularly in combat, shouted the high king to death ('cept it was really his sword) shouted the forsworn off the walls at Markarth, etc. He gets thu'um as a combat tool better than me and is the ideal man for the job: he's also a nord, which means he'd jump at the chance of killing alduin. What's the companions stance on this issue? Well, they're pretty nationalistic, so I'm sure they'd stand up for Skyrim against another dragon threat. They've got the warrior skills to actually take skyrim and put Ulfric on the throne, so that means his time would be free to kill Alduin. I'm sure some people at Winterhold will be happy to provide info on the dragonrend scroll, so that would work. In other words, the dragonborn is unecessary. Just kill alduin properly and bury them all again. Hell, at the moment the transformation between "soulful dragon" and "not soulful dragon" seems to be that one is a corpse and the other is a skeleton. So strip the corpse, people. Dragon steak makes good eating, and their brains can be used to make candlewax and other magical things. Alchemy and other skills This is a bit of a waste of time. Lots of potions, lots to carry, not much to do with it all: as Yahtzee said, necking health potions and swinging wildly is better than anything else, unless you have to kill some unecessarily tough boss for a quest or whatever. Smithing is fun, though I'm not sure where to sell my jewellery. Enchanting's good too, although if I could disenchant a weapon to make it better I'd be even more keen on it. My frosty blades sword could really do with a healing enchantment, say, or perhaps one that gives me magicka. Lockpicking is fine, but expert locks are more punishing than anything else. Works fairly, I'd say. Sidequests are great, and sometimes more fun than the main one. Like, a dwarven ruin with falmer and those horrible horrible insects are terrible but a nice quest to restore the gildergleam is decidedly not. I'd love to delete quests so that I don't have a note reminding me to really try out cannibalism (it's great!) or burn down someone's honey mansion. I've rambled long enough. No I'm not interested in modding, my game is slow enough, unless it's a mod that makes everything really quick. If it is, please tell me about it and make sure it isn't on steam. Yours, Helm Lardar P.S. Most of the new armour looks great! Looking forward to seeing a better Torva, though: it looks worse than initially.

http://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/q70ec/the_second_bot_nuke_is_needed_now/ Things like this are interesting. Jagex has consistently commited to fighting bots since the nuke. They've been updating quietly, without flourish, but bots are popping up. Lots of people immediately say that this shows Jagex are in a losing race, that they can't win, and that botters will always be one step ahead. They're wrong. Something like the bot nuke shows that's wrong. Bot makers were out for months. They were on the back foot. That hadn't happened before. Jagex are cracking on with Optimus. They're working hard, they're carrying on, but the above link is still a problem. Bot makers can update constantly, and it's obvious that Jagex find that more difficult to do. They're doing well, but it's difficult. So what's the solution? More staff, more money? I don't think so. There'll come a point where all Jagex can do is wait and see what botters come up with before they respond, and that means that they can't do that much. Equally, it's far more important for Jagex to rehabilitate botters (IMO) than ban them. You want a dedicated userbase who understand the problems associated with botting and don't want that in the game and you also can't ban every player. Apart from anything else, it's ruinously expensive. Jagex can't run the game, let alone fight bots and release updates, without money. Bot makers are just as commited to making bots as Jagex are to breaking them, so the solution has to be different: the community needs to be able to help. Ultimately, they are the ones who this botting problem really impacts: for Jagex botting will only hurt in the long term, but for the player, it hits them hard immediately right where it shouldn't. All of a sudden commodities go up and down, fluctuating in confusing ways, until basic money makers can't be used any more. Green dragons cease to be profitable as the spots are flooded: red chinchompas are no longer as expensive as they might be and are hard to get: herbs go down in price as they flood in from the sorcerresses' garden. If I get the chance, I'll try to make lots of money and buy lots of chinchompas, but money making for me will still be hurt because bots are more efficient than I am and they flood me out. Where am I going with this? The solution. We need a community wing against bots, not just a Jagex one. We need to instill an ethic in players that it is worth their time to go and report bots. Finally, we need to make reporting bots more possible. Random events are designed to catch bots. In my opinion, they are where Jagex should focus a whole load of attention, releasing new randoms and reconfiguring old ones. They have done that recently to combat colour bots, but they still have a problem: once a bot is stuck in there, it doesn't move. It can't be seen, and it can't be reported. 1. Add viewing galleries to random events so that players can report stuck bots. The second problem is that commonly botted areas are often hidden away from the average runescaper, so that a botting problem is hard to see. How many players notice that there are bots in South-East Al Kharid? How many of you regularly visit Turoths if you don't get them as slayer tasks? When was the last time you hunted chinchompas, or slayed green dragons in the chaos tunnels? All of these are botting volcanoes, with eruptions of automated players, but because they're quite far away from player hubs and sometimes underground or on a seperate plane, they aren't too noticeable. Here's an idea: why don't we reward players that consistently manage to report bots that later get banned? Jagex could keep records of what players report who, and whether they were later banned. If a player consistently does this, they should be rewarded: loyalty points would be a great way to implement this with little development time involved. Report 50 genuine bots? 1000 loyalty points. Why are they loyalty points? You're being loyal to the game by helping keep it free of rulebreakers. In order to prevent abuse, you'd probably end up needing a few tweaks: if you're the only person to report one bot, it might get more points, for example, to stop people crowding around one single, simple area. 2. Reward players with loyalty points for reporting bots that are later banned. Finally, bots need to be targeted at where they are. I have been to green dragons and the summer garden regularly, and I have not seen these areas being updated in a way that might target bots themselves. The wilderness was graphically updated, but what if we could focus on the jungles, the dragon's drops, the sorcerresses' herbs? What if we could implement things here to deliberately confuse bots regularly, a la LRC portal? I can't imagine this takes vast amounts of time, but it would really help! 3. Target bots specifically at their areas much more often. Well, those are my suggestions for getting rid of the bots with more than just game engine updates. In my opinion, they'd add huge benefits to the community-led fight against the bots with minimal Jagex time taken up: sure, it would take some time, but not nearly as long as the bot nuke! Things like this are simple but can be hugely effective, allowing far more people to take part. Besides, the game engine team is already really busy with the FPS updates, so things like this could help take the weight off their back. I'd love to know what you think! ~Helm Lardar~

Here's something I noticed recently. Clothing shops and cosmetic, no-stat items in general suck. They're terrible! They're either expensive and useless, or cheap and useless. It's not because they all look bad. You've obviously got a range of ideas, from fremmenik shirts (eh...) to ceremonial robes (ooh...eh). It's actually because instead of having something useful, you're stuck with something that has no stats and is no use, and you can't put anything on top. Many of the member's loyalty programme outfits look amazing! I still won't buy them, though, because...if I want to use the full set, I have to sacrifice a headband, a top if I need to wear one, legs, boots, and so on. I won't wear them, and I won't buy them, because to look good they take up slots and...well, that's sort of it. They just take up lots of space, they feel like you're wearing armour, but you aren't. Poor beef, but here's a sweet solution: what if every clothing shop was a clothing shop? Like Thessalia's. You go to a shop, they sell clothes, capes, hats, boots, whatever. You can go into an interface and select the clothes you want to wear by default from there! I can go to Yrsa, and decide to wear fremmenik shirts, gloves, capes automatically! I can go to that place in Canifis, and have a teal hat by default! I can go to Xuan, and wear Saxon clothing when I'm not wearing anything else! I like that idea, but I'm not sure I can explain why I like that idea so much. In any case, I think it would mean that I would (almost always) be wearing unusual clothing, not Thessalia's standard, and that would be a good thing. You'd go to unusual places to get fancy new default gear. What do you think, people? ~Helm Lardar~

Yesterday I was bored. It wasn't that I didn't have anything to do, more that anything I had to do didn't seem to be particularly interesting, so I was browsing reddit, Sal's forums, and playing minecraft. My minecraft house is a pretty ugly fortification type thing, which I'm not sure I'm happy with but I don't want to keep building. Anyway, part of this was that I decided to further my education I'd research something on wikipedia. So I typed in 'cow'. All manner of interesting things popped up: firstly, that their true name is cattle and that other livestock are not cattle, secondly, some of the many different breeds, including the Nazi-bred 'Heck Cattle', and attempt to resurrect the Aurochs that have been extinct since 1627 (it's an agile cattle that made 'challenging' hunting), and the modern day attempt to do that a lot better nowadays with the Netherland's Taurus project. Other interesting facts included cow urine's role in Indian medicine, why Jersey cows are brown, and that there's some african cattle with incredibly wide and cool horns. Also that the wind cave buffalo herd is the only one not susceptible to some particular disease, and a whole bunch of other stuff about cows through the ages that interested and intrigued me: did you know, for example, that a large part of the Jersey isle's economy is the trade of Jersey Cow semen as well as milk? One thing that particularly interested me was the article on Oxen: they're trained, crucially, to respond to vocal commands, are strong, patient, surefooted beasts, the yoke used by them meant that they were more effective than draft horses until the horse collar was made (it used their strength better). What particularly struck me was this picture: Now apparently, riding an ox isn't that hard and never used to be that unusual. Oxen are slower and less tall than horses, but crucially they're more sure-footed and decidedly less flighty: they stick around and get the job done. People often asks for horses in minecraft, and sometimes controllable pigs, and I suggested donkeys: but here's a much better, more quirky, and more consolidatory idea: why don't we ride oxen? This could be part of a large update involving minecraft's least appreciated beast, the cow. Now, in minecraft cows are a bit weird: they produce milk, and they produce beef, and they produce leather, and you can breed them, but they aren't that popular. What if we put them into herds where we had female cattle that could produce milk and children, and male cattle that could produce beef, and that could be ridden? (Both produce leather when they die) You'd need to tame them with a bit of grain, you'd need to saddle them, and you'd need to make a set of reins, but once you've done that, you'd be set! What do you think, readers? ~Helm Lardar~

The smithing skill involves the melting down of ore and coal into metal bars and then creating weapons, tools, and armour. These are used to protect the adventurer, help him fight, and help him perform other skill related tasks. Smithing has a consistent level up table to 99 and is therefore arguably one of the most complete skills. In addition to its normal armour creation and bar creation functions, smithing also allows the adventurer to pay an NPC less to repair the adventurer's high level armour. Unfortunately, smithing is one of the least useful skills in the game. Although it has received its fair share of content over the years, including minigames such as the Blast Furnace and training areas such as the Artisan's Workshop it fails to deliver any reward other than a higher level in the skill itself. Smithing's core activity, the creation of objects, normally loses money, and as this is the main method of training smithing it means that the skill is not as profitable as it would be in the real world. Although smithing has been integrated into several diaries and quests, requiring the adventurer to train it for reasons outside its own merits, this does not change its useless position: every skill requires some training in order to unlock the best diary rewards: for example, the most useless skill, firemaking, must be trained to 75 to gain an enhanced excalibur, a sword that is useful for everyday free rechargeable healing and therefore has an important role to play in questing, the slayer skill, and combat as a whole. Many ideas have been suggested to 'fix' smithing, many on this blog, but in truth training smithing is not an issue: it is fairly simple and practical to train, and while this training may be expensive it is the lack of any reward for training the skill that makes it unfulfiling, not the cost itself. There are several possible high level rewards: new and extra additions to armour, sharper weapons, or even combinations of the two: what about a shield that rebounds damage, for example, or a sword weighted to defend as much as attack? The truth, however, is that Jagex implemented the perfect high level updates for smithing months ago and simply failed to pick up on their missed opportunity. As pointed out at the beginning, smithing is the production of metal and the use of it to provide adventuring gear. But what about the repair of items? That clearly has a role in smithing, and it's one that thus far has been taken care of by allowing players a slight discount on a weird money sink. Let's clarify that last sentence: to repair degrading armour, players take the failed armour peice to an NPC or a stand in their house and pay a certain number of coins to have this thing repaired. Some coins are discounted for a high smithing level, but this in no way manages to compensate for the expense of a high smithing level that would actually make a difference unless that same gear is going to be repaired far more times than actually happens. Let's go back to when smithing should have recieved an update it deserved. Almost 7 years ago, the Barrows were released. With them came a new tier of level 70 armour and weapons, the best runescape had ever seen. These offered unparalleled defensive and offensive capability that has only recently begun to be challenged in many categories, so to balance it Jagex implemented a repair mechanism: barrows armour would degrade and would necessitate a little money spent in a shop every now and then. Almost 2 years ago now, Dungeoneering was released. One of the higher level rewards for training the skill (hey, this skill has rewards for training it!) was a new set of level 80 shields and weapons. They were made of a strange new metal, nicknamed 'chaotic' and degraded: they have to be recharged at a shop run by an NPC. 1 Year ago, the nex section of the God Wars Dungeon was released. Players could gain a new set of excellent armour: Torva, Pernix, and Virtus were the best armours ever known. They degraded, and had to be recharged with coins at an NPC or one's house. Why, Jagex? Why? What possible relation do coins have to an armour stand? Why does that thing want them? How is bob more skilled at smithing than a level 85 smith? What does tindal merchant do that makes him so marvellous at repairing wondrous 2nd age armour that hasn't been seen for millenia? Can he even smith rune? Isn't his job simply buying rusty swords and cleaning them? The most obvious possible use for a high smithing level would be to make it necessary to repair special, degradeable armours that were unusually powerful. As a result, at a high attack and defence level, you would need to get your smithing up too. Not so much that it's pointless, as happened initially (nobody smiths rune to wear it as an armour) but at the appropriate level for other skills: level 70 smithing for barrows, level 80 for chaotic, level 85 for nex. Let's briefly outline how it works using the concept of a torva platebody. I own a torva platebody, the finest chestplate in game, and notice that it has degraded. After entering the zaros section of the god wars dungeon, I buy some enchanted metal and cloth from Ashuelot Reis, an NPC there who might have a stockpile (remember, Jagex still needs a money sink: of course the special materials would be tradeable on the GE and indeed stockpilable). I then take these materials and the platebody to a smithy. I then use the armour and the materials on an anvil to create a fully repaired platebody. That's how it should work with all armour repairing. You buy material, you smith it yourself, you need a smithing level. This would be applied to future updates as well: for example, when Jagex release a level 90 or 95 set of armour and weapons they will make those require smithing to repair too. Now, despite this advantage of actually making smithing worthwhile (you can still trade in uncharged variants if you don't have the level, remember), some people would think of this as a bit of a shock. But what else are you going to add to the smithing skill that won't be utterly contrived, and why should you spit at the perfect content for high level smithing when the change is there to be made. Initially, some people would not have the right smithing level to maintain their armour. The barrows people would suck it up and trade armour on the ge for recharging in the short term, while getting better smithing so that they can do it conveniently. The higher levels would know how to train a skill, suck it up, and do it: 80 smithing is not unreachable, after all. Finally: "but then chaotics as a dunge reward will be pointless! they require smithing now too!". Well, they always required attack. Good armour always required defence. As a result, being able to take care of your equipment should (naturally) require a good smithing level. ~Helm Lardar~