Don’t worry, its crossed all our minds at one point or another. So do hacks and dupes really exist? I know from personal knowledge that less than a year ago, botting was a very prevalent.  Players began looking for RuneScape cheats or RuneScape hacks. Some did have luck cheating in games such as RuneScape, which lead to even bigger ambitions, you can read about an example in our other article about the dark side of runescape cheating. Let me say that bots did in fact exist at one point, but now selling gold in RuneScape is nearly impossible. All the major runescape gold sellers have now shut down, but this cost jagex many many players.

There are however legitimitate ways to leveling up and obtaining items, many players began to look for RuneScape tips, RuneScape money guides, RuneScape quest guides. Many of these players prevailed and these are the types of players that didn’t get banned. So to sum up this article, bots and dupes DID exist at one point.

RuneScape Bots came in all types and sorts. There were Auto Miners, Auto woodcutters, and so forth. In general, there were many different ways to automate your character and make money. To not get in trouble from anyone, (especially jagex), i am not going to go into detail on what other existing programs there are that are still being used.

Some of the older players, well maybe even recently started RuneScape players can recall the massive amounts of bots patrolling woodcutting spots like behind the lumbridge castle, or in edgeville. Massive scale botting was done by companies like “Lewt Gold Supplies” in free worlds since they did not have to pay for membership. Here’s a lowdown on how it worked.

Bots Collect Supplies ( Yews, Ores ) -> Dump at nearest bank -> Repeat -> On a periodical schedule, transfer all collected supplies to a main account -> Sell Supplies -> Get gold -> Sell for USD or other currency

As you can see, they were making a lot of money with this. Believe it or not, many many many players actually went out and PURCHASED runescape gold. Yup, it was cheap, and effective. Only problem was, jagex tracked all gold trades, or they said they did. Either way, people got banned and yeah, you could imagine the chaos.

All of this eventually led up to the horrible trading system we have now, the introduction of the grand exchange system and the stop to pking.

Some of you may not understand why PKing was removed, well let me explain. As people started to realize that jagex were banning RuneScape accounts, gold merchants decided, well. Lets go ahead and pretend that you killed me! So these players would carry the sum bought by the customer into a secluded place of the wilderness and then let the customer kill the seller for the gold. This is how drastic gold selling became as Jagex got tighter and tighter.

The trading system was also set to being limited the way it is now for a reason. So people don’t scam the old way. Obvious right? That’s where the Grand Exchange came in. It was the replacement to the trading system. People could make money exactly the same way they did before, except they wouldn’t know who or what they were buying or selling to.

There were many limitations to this system though. People could no longer give each other RuneScape presents or even a decent free give away. Everything was simply. Well in communist state.

Recently however, due to a big community uproar. Jagex seems to be devising a replacement to PKing. Although much information of this has not surfaced. There is a post on RuneSociety Forums discussing this. You can view it here.

Earlier on in RuneScape there were also other client based hacks which Jagex fixed right away such as a Stat Changer.

This post was simply written to tell some of the new RS players about the previous RuneScape, the one they were never a part of. It was not intended to induce cheating or anything of the sort. So don’t flame me ;]

2. Free RuneScape Membership. Yes yes, in this day and age, everything is free somewhere. You can obtain free runescape memberships. But don’t expect me to point to anywhere

3. Do to others what you want done to you. When i used to play runescape, me and my friends were fooling around and cursing and whatnot. Guess what? My own friend reported me! I asked him why, he said he wants to be a player mod. Tsk tsk. Please don’t report your friends just to try and become a mod, its selfish and foolish. Plus the chances of getting PMOD are pretty much impossible now since theres no cheating anyway.

4. Moparscape Servers are generally just private runescape servers. Now go do research.

5. Feel lucky! Back when i used to play runescape, the game wasn’t nearly as secure as it is now! There were no bank pins or such protection, only pure trust.

6. RuneScape is just a game! Come on!, you don’t need to play all the time or for very long periods of time, get out, get some exercise, build your social life. Believe it or not, Real life is the harder game! RuneScape won’t go anywhere anytime soon, so just play in your spare time and you’ll enjoy the game much more.

7. There are NO Runescape cheats.. at least ones that work really well. Cheating in runescape used to be a big market but now there really isn’t any at all, so don’t bother looking up “RuneScape Cheats” on google.

Keep these tips in mind! Happy RuneScaping!

Now, its been almost a month since the full edition of High Detail has come into play and i must say. Its amazing. For once, i will fully say that jagex has pleased a great deal of the RuneScape community. The real thing that impresses me is that they managed to do all of this with java. So such a great looking game loads up fully in your web browser and requires absolutely no installation. That’s simply awesome. So lets go ahead and break down some of the main things that RuneScape HD has introduced.

Full Screen Mode

This is arguably the coolest and long expected feature for RuneScape. Sure, it requires players to subscribe to RuneScape. But seriously, this is the type of game-play that is worth the 6 dollars a month. ( Yes, i know its 5 right now, but they will be increasing it to 6 soon, if not already. ). Below is a screenshot of the new full screen interface.

At the top right corner, you can see the new RuneScape Map. It has a few enhancements too, they’ve added a few useful things on the side such as your HP, Prayer points, run meter, and summoning skill. This should be alot more efficient then having your skill menu open! Plus, it looks 10x cooler. Lastly, they even built in the world map which you can directly use within the game now.

As you can see, the whole interface has gotten a face-lift. The chat area is pretty similar to the old interface, but it is now transparent, and in my opinion, it feels alot faster and smoother than the old chat. Plus, you can view older messages and fit more messages into that box. The private message category on the other hand hasn’t received much attention from jagex, you can still recieve messages ontop of the chat box or within the chat box. I guess that really seems like the easiest way to go about it, but it would have been nice if they added a separate tab for private. So above the chatbox, they would have a public/private toggle. Maybe they plan to introduce this in the future.

The other tools that we are used to toggling, such as the friends list have gone onto the corner on the right hand side. Most of the interfaces will be easy to learn, such as in the screenshot, the friends list pretty much looks identical to what you have become used to. The length of the actual row depends on the size of your screen i believe, because on my screen that whole row was on one line instead of 2 as dipicted on the screenshot. They’ve also left one of the boxes empty, so as an educated guess, i think they plan to add something there soon .

Graphics Update:

Well, this is probably the most obvious thing about this update. No one can now say, “RUNESCAPES GRAPHICS SUCK! WHAT A $#$ GAME”, yeah we’ve all heard that from at least one negative runescape player. But guess what? Now you can tell them about RuneScape HD .

All the textures have been revamped, even the movement of the characters has been improved. No more will you see those nasty box like character movements, the characters actually walk and run more realistically. In overall, everything from monsters, all the way down to trees has been redone graphically, without a single sacrafice to performance.

Final Thoughts:

Theres not really much to say other than the fact that this was probably the result of all those RuneScape 3 rumors from previous years. Boy, we’ve gotten far from RuneScape Classic haven’t we? Cheers to Jagex and the whole RuneScape community.

Now go whip up some HD.

2001

I started playing Runescape classic (on a really bad computer with a dial-up connection) when I was 14 years old and just entered high school, this was right around the time Christmas crackers were dropped (December 2001). I had no clue what was happening that day and some guy gave me 2 partyhats, which I dropped after a while because they took bank space. My classmates introduced me to this game and about everyone in my class started playing. It was all just fun and new for me, I had never played a MMORPG before and was only used to games like red alert. I started doing some quests with my classmates and got addicted pretty fast. And after my mom saw the phone bill for that month she wasn’t very happy. Luckily we got cable pretty fast.

2002

I was still very noobish, because all I did was a few quests and training a bit on cows, I figured I needed to get myself some money. The Runescape world was still very small back then and members or f2p didn’t exist yet. So I spent a few days picking up bronze scimitar’s in Rimmington (the house with the bronze pickaxe), and sold them to the general store on the other side of the road for a few GP. After a while I could finally afford my black long sword from the sword shop I had seen in Varrock, sadly I died in a cave when I started training with it and lost it pretty fast after. Luckily one of my classmates that had been playing for a while longer could give me a Mithril (which I used to think was rune) one very easy. Once I had my mithril armor I spent most of my days getting my combat up and doing quests, it didn’t take me to long to do all quests besides dragon slayer. Which had the reputation of being a hard quest (this is a time way before there were any rune smithers). After training up till about level 80 I finally took the courage to do dragon slayer and finished it pretty easily.

After I was done with all the random stuff I started working on two skills in particular, woodcutting and Firemaking . You would mostly train woodcutting and Firemaking at the same time since you took a full inventory to a forest (Draynor forest) and you would automatically drop the logs you cut, u just used your tinderbox on the logs that fell on the ground (you couldn’t burn any logs besides normal logs). The only other way to train it was with someone else dropping lines of normal logs and you walking after them lighting the logs. I was finally done with Firemaking somewhere December 2002 and was 3^rd to get 99 Firemaking and 7^th to 99 woodcutting a little later.

2003

After this I started PK’ing a lot with 2 friends that lived in the same street as me. We starting making tactics like luring in the lower wilderness around the castle above Edgeville by having one of us pick up runes without armor to lure people in attacking him. When It had worked one would close all doors in the castle and the other logged in next to the one fake collecting runes. As far as I know hardly anyone PKed in the higher level wilderness at that time and the person with the highest combat level was far from maxing out since combat training was only about 30k an hour max. At this time I created a pure and trained him to like 60 att, def and like 80 str. But we got bored with the PK’ing after a few months and I decided to go back to my main and train his combat up some more.

This is a time I remember pretty well because I spent days and night in that one area never having to leave since the spiders I trained on didn’t hit that hard. I think it was about 25-30k an hour training on the spiders in Underground Passage. I remember there was a really ugly spider called Balrog in there that was just a tiny level 3 spider with increased size. I also was in this cave when Scythe’s were dropped (not sure where I was when bunny ears were dropped, but I have those as well). After getting my combat up to about 100 (pretty high for that time, halfway 2003). I spent a lot of time training agility at the wilderness course and got it up to about 82 (pretty high for that time).

After I got enough of agility (August 2003) I set my eyes on a new goal, rank 1 Firemaking. I quit Firemaking right at 99 and I am not quite sure what XP the rank 1 (jamie2002) had when I started going for rank 1 but I remember him being ahead about 10mil XP. But when I started Firemaking so did he and this turned out to become a long battle lasting several months, I finally overtook him around December 2003 (A year after I got 99). We had around 38-40m XP back then and the discussion about RS2 and the BETA were starting up. While I was still trying to get further ahead of Jamie I heard “dropfishing” was removed and bought a ton of feathers and started “dropfishing” right away, I got it to about 93 in a really short time (was about 120k/hour).

2004

Runescape 2 was launched and I had to change my way of Firemaking, not sure what was the best way yet I started cutting willows in Draynor and burning them when my inventory was full. I did this till about 60m experience and if I remember correct I was first to get 60m XP in a skill. But when I thought I was far enough ahead I stopped doing Firemaking and started doing some random skills, not really focusing on something. I remember woodcutting and fletching a lot though. But I wasn’t doing the fasted methods back then (I think I cut inventory’s of maple and fletched them to unstrung bows.

2005

I was doing all quests when they came out and making guides for some as well, then when slayer was released I spent a while doing that and making the guide for it. But after that was done I got bored with Runescape and quit for a little while until I heard about farming coming out and you could get seeds already by thieving the master farmer, so I spent a few weeks thieving the master farmer in Draynor. When farming came out I jumped right in it and made the farming guide and got to rank 7 farming, but when I ran out of good seeds I quit again.

2006

In my quitting period which lasted for a few months I did check hiscores every now and then and when I saw “Leronea” getting closer and heard “Xxx Neo Xxx7” was after my rank I decided to sell my blue partyhat for 200 mil GP and I bought enough yew logs for 200Mil Firemaking XP (I had 60m XP at this time). From December 2005 till end May 2006 I spent doing about 1m Firemaking every day. When I was finally done with this construction had come out (may 18^th) and I decided to start doing that by cutting oak logs outside my house portal in Rimmington and let the butler plank them then build oak dining tables. I did this till I was 87 construction.

Then I decided to get 99 thieving on knights in Ardougne which was about 100k XP an hour (Pyramid Plunder wasn’t out yet). And when I finally got it I heard about Pest Control being really fast combat experience and since I had been 108 combat for ages I thought it was time to get this up. With about 120k XP an hour it turned about to be really easy to max my combat stats (I did a lot of Pest Control each day, because there were a lot of rumors about it getting nerved soon and huge complaints on the forums about it). I think I ended up with about 123/124 combat and maxed out range (planned on doing magic later by alching the bodies from crafting).

After selling my blue partyhat for 200m Firemaking XP and losing my red partyhat because of my own stupidity, I still had a lot of them left and they were worth huge amounts at that time so I decided to sell one for 99 Prayer and 99 Smithing. I made a alter in my house and got 99 prayer in a few days, after that I bought enough bars for 99 Smithing and got that a few weeks later. After this I spent ages trying to get 99 fishing on monkfish, I didn’t play a lot at that time and the experience was really slow but I managed to get it 99 mid September 2006.

After this I decided to downgrade one of my partyhats (I am not sure which color because this were all one day decisions) to buy 99 crafting and I bought a lot of blue leathers and crafted them to bodies and got 99 crafting mid October, I was planning on alching the bodies but decided that was stupid and sold the bodies and went back to Pest Control and got 99 Magic in a few days (I got 99 Crafting and Magic on the same day because I waited a little with the last few XP from Crafting so I could get them together). After this I quit till January 2007.

2007

I was slowly picking back up in January by doing a few skills at the same time Farming, Herblore, Hunter and Agility. I had to work and learn at a company for school but since there wasn’t a lot of work to do I did a lot of Agility and Hunter there. But slowly I got more addicted again and was doing a few hours of agility every day and combining that with doing 2 farm runs every day, 10 Magic trees, 4 Palm trees and 1 Calquat (Since Partyhats were still pretty high at this time I sold one of my party hats and bought enough seeds for 99 farming at once, which was I think about 200m in total) every day for a pretty long period. A Month after starting again I got 99 Agility on 4 February, I started with 94.

Right after my Agility was finished I jumped to Hunter which was 91 and I was still doing Farm rounds daily, my level was about 93 when I started Hunter. It took me about 2 weeks to get 91-99 Hunter, not sure how much I did every day but I was playing quite a lot again. After this I bought enough oak planks for 99 Construction and did Oak dungeon doors for a week and a half and got 99 Construction late February. Having done Farming rounds for the entire period of hunter and construction I got Farming from 93 to 97.

With march starting I was getting pretty bored with Runescape and my Work/Learn project for school was almost over, but I wanted to finish Farming so I decided to do a bit of mining while waiting for my trees to grow I got 90 to 93 mining and 98 + 99 Farming. After my Farming party on 10 March I quit again till mid May.

After taking a nice 2 month brake I wasn’t quite sure what to do yet, but I wanted to get Herblore 99 for a while now. I was planning on paying for this with Runecrafting so I sold a low party hat and bought enough pure essence for level 99 Runecrafting. Starting out with 82 Runecrafting I still had a very long way to go, I wanted to start off with fast free laws W66 till 91 (Double Nats). But when I finally reached 91 Runecrafting mid June I realized there was a double nat crafting company which was a lot faster than running yourself.

So I sold all my pure essence and decided to buy 90 to 99 Herblore before getting 99 Runecrafting, but I wanted to get this real fast so I no-lived Herblore for a week. First off course I had to buy the supplies, I decided to do Saradomin brews and bought a lot of watered vials a whole lot of toadflax and crushed nests. This was well before GE so a lot of spamming on the Runescape forums and buying in small amounts. I Reached 99 Herblore about a week after I started and was ready to do the last bit of Runecrafting. Since it was vacation I nolifed badly and managed to get 91 – 97 Runecrafting (in just a little over 2 week) before I went on Vacation for a month on 10 July.

After my vacation I was still going to the beach and such so I didn’t have a lot of time for Runescape but in august I managed to get 98 and 99 Runecrafting. After this I was planning on getting 99 Mining but after just one level I decided it was not worth wasting my life like this so I quit for well over 3 months and didn’t get any levels in September, October or November. In December I heard about Summoning coming and I wanted to start playing again and because I had a few weeks off I decided to start again and this time I really wanted to get mining over with and got 99 Mining on 29 December.

2008

January 2008 I had just finished my Mining and Summoning was coming soon and since I was really low slayer (75) and all other skills were maxed out there wasn’t much to do then the skill I had hated like forever because it was really slow and I didn’t really like training combat skills since I was maxed. So till Summoning came out I did the easy slayer levels and when Summoning came on 15 January I had 82 Slayer. But very soon I realized that Slayer and Summoning were pretty easy to combine and I was pretty happy.

So with Summoning out there was new interest for me in doing Slayer, doing research on which tasks were the best for which charms and collecting loads of charms kept me interested. As well as the news of the second batch of monsters coming. When that finally came 31 March I was already 95 Slayer and trying very hard to sell my Yellow Partyhat. When I finally managed to sell that I was trying to buy a lot of Seconds in GE, but so was everyone else so that didn’t go to fast. When I had a few Summoning levels banked I got them and reached 91 Summoning on 20^th of April. Still doing slayer mostly I got 98 Slayer on 26 April.

I didn’t do that much slayer in April and wanted to max as fast as possible and finally be done with this game, so I got 98 to 99 Slayer in 9 days on 4 May. With the charms from my last Slayer levels I was able to get 93 Summoning. After this I went to Waterbirth island to barrage Rock Lobsters for my last charms and got 99 Summoning on 13^th may. I am currently doing a bit of Fletching, Cooking and I might do some thieving later on but I am not sure what the future brings for me. I am not really feeling like putting much effort into getting a few ranks. Wasting this much time on a game is kind of sad but playing even more while done, I am not sure.

The End

I would like to welcome our two new members of this blogging team:

Deja Vu Xiii – A fellow Runescape player and now part-time writer *big cheer*, and;

Cmafai – A coding genius who is here to keep this place looking smooth and running even smoother. *big cheer*

Let the fun begin

Stay tuned for more updates!

~11

To kick things off I will introduce myself, my parter and the communities that make this blog happen :).

Firstly you can call me 11. I’m a Runescape player and I have been since 2002. I enjoy many of the aspects of the game and i find that the most pleasurable part is definitely partaking in player vs player battles. If you want to know more about me, then ask!

Secondly, I would like to introduce my partner, Soul, he is a coding genius and very competent on the internet hehe. His servers will be hosting The RuneScape Blog and he will also be taking care of the site.

Thirdly, I would like to acknowledge the two online communities that have given Soul and I this chance to fund and publish this blog:

• RuneSociety
• RuneCrypt

Both of these wonderful communities have contributed time and effort into getting this blog up and running!

Now I bet you’re wondering what this blog is going to focus on… well listen up!

The Runescape Blog is going to focus on everything Runescape! (der. I hear you say) Well it’s more interesting than that… we strive to provide you with ideas and opinions that are original and interesting to read and we hope that you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy writing them.

Before I finish i would like to say that if you have any queries, ideas, or just want to chat then you can drop us an email at: rsblog@runesociety.com

So in conclusion I would like to say: Get ready for a big 2008, RuneScape Blogging has never looked this good

~11