April Behind the Scenes

April's behind the Scenes article is out and the goody bag of updates that'll be happening this month has been opened! The following game updates are planned:

• New Livid Farm Activity/Area on Lunar Island (either a quest or a D&D)
• New Lunar Spells, including Group Vengeance
• New 'Clan Camp' area
• New in-game clan feature allowing specific ranks and official memberlists
• New flagstaff and capes for clan members
• Website page for every clan
• Rated Clan Wars
• New Death Mechanic - when you die you choose the 3 items you want.
• Easter Event
• Royal Wedding Celebration (special items from Diango)

So it looks like the majority of this months updates will be clan-related with some other stuff thrown into the mix. I'm not sure if the Lunar Isle Livid Farm is supposed to be a quest/activity or just a Distractions and Diversions thing. In other news, players who are part of a clan on April 30th will be entered into a $10k prize draw.

The Winning Design for the Veteran's Cape (from the Runescape Website).

Last but not least, the Guaranteed Content Poll for the Veteran's Cape Design has been closed and a winner has been announced! It looks pretty awesome with a combination of fiery and heroic designs, and should be a favorite of players everywhere. Time will only tell when this cape will be released! Oh, and if you haven't seen Jagex's Runescape Behind the Scenes April Fool's Day 2011 article, you may want to check it out while you can. Have fun and keep on 'Scapin!

Tee 3

RuneScape Voice Chat?

If you've been keeping up with RuneScape news like many of us have, you've probably been seeing this coming. Jagex has been asking people about how and why they use voice chat on the forums for a while, but they've finally released a news post and a poll about your voice chat habits.

I'm assuming that in the long run, they're planning to release a [hopefully free] voice chat client of some sort for use with RuneScape and they're using this poll as a form of 'market research' to analyse what RuneScape players want from voice chat programs and what they use them for. The results of the poll so far are surprising in my opinion. Although i rarely ever use voice chat (i think I've only used it once, and it was with Ventrilo), Skype has been voted as the most popular voice chat software! This surprised me, as i know little about Skype and i thought it cost money to use...

Anyway, head on over to the RuneScape website and vote in the poll. Perhaps sometime in the near future we'll see voice chat as a commonly used and easy to access communication medium...

In the meantime, keep on 'Scapin.

Tee 3

Bonus Exp Weekend: March 11th to 13th

That's right everyone, once again Jagex will be hosting a double experience weekend for Runescape Members. From Friday, March 11th to Sunday, March 13th players can earn bonus experience in all the various skills. The official news post can be found here, and the Dev Blog can be found here. Here's the basic information:

• Bonus Exp will only be available to Runescape Members.
• Bonus Exp is calculated on game time. When you first get on you'll start at a modifier of 2.7x the normal experience, but as your game time for the weekend increases your experience modifier will steadily dwindle. After ten hours in game your bonus experience will be reduced to a steady rate of 1.1x.
• Summoning will only get 1.1x normal experience all weekend long.
• Brawling gloves, penance horns, sacred clay tools, etc. will not provide extra experience over the weekend. Save them for later guys :P
• The Experience counter will change from (XP) to (XP+) to display how much bonus experience you've gained over the weekend, but you can hover over the counter to check your actual experience counter.

So gather up your herbs, logs, and bones and get ready for an epic skilling weekend (and a way to let the bank take a rest... technically everything costs less since they're worth more exp, or something...). Good luck, and have fun 'Scapin!