Runescape Clan Citadel Planning

I thought that introduction of Clan Citadels would affect Runescape greatly, but I couldn't even imagine how profound the change would be. It's not only clans that got affected - everything, including gameplay has changed. At least from my point of observation.

Now people have a huge incentive to join a clan and not just any clan, but a big one. It looks like the time of small 4-10 people clans is over - no one wants to struggle with a low level citadel -it's all or nothing. And then comes resource gathering - let's face it, it's quite tedious, even at 1000 mark. Right now it amounts to 2-3 hours of chopping wood in a week, fortunately, not always alone, but still it's a lot of time if you don't play much. My average playing time is somewhere around 5 hours per week, spending 50% of that time on one activity is a daunting prospect. I did 1000 in the first week and I am at 700 this week, but it'll have to change - I am not happy with my Runescape experience. I'll have to find a balance between my inner commitment to Canting Away and the way I prefer to play the game. And I have a feeling that it's not just me who is going through this kind of struggle. And what will happen when say 50-60 members clan stop producing enough resources to advance through the tiers? Dissent and finger pointing? Breaking up? It is a possibility. I hope Canting will be immune from it, but only time will tell.

Will we end up with only really really big clans left standing in a half a year?

Why half a year? Apparently this is a minimum time required to build a tier 7 clan citadel. See Teacuptime's calculations, finding and suggestions for planning clan citadels here:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Very insightful. An interesting twist is that apparently after Tier 7 citadel is built, it's not that hard to maintain the level. If only 12 people out of 50 do their max in resource gathering in a week, the citadel will stand. So maybe, there is a chance for middle size clans after all :)

The magic number is 27775. If a clan makes this number of resources per week on a regular basis - it'll live. If not, I am afraid, there is a good chance of the clan eventually breaking up.

Share your thoughts, please. Especially if you were in a well established clan before the update. How did it affect your clan? I am very curious :)

Runescape year: 2010

Full summary of major changes in Runescape during 2010 from the Informer. Amazingly Dungeoneering appeared in Runespace in April 2010 - less then 9 months ago! Somehow it feels like Dungeoneering was part of the game for a lot longer.

And here are my personal highlights of the year:

• Quests! Jagex continues to make awesome quests. I wouldn't say they outdone 2009 quests, but still I enjoyed pretty much all of them. Especially the Love Story.
• Dungeoneering - duh! A new skill which I found very relaxing.
• Bonus XP weekends - I loved the preparation for the second one (I missed three weeks before the first weekend). It also helped me to get 99 in Herblore, which was nice :)
• Canting Away summer and winter festivals - pure fun and joy
• Partnership with Sal's - very important, huge and somewhat scary step for Runewise
• Series of interviews with Ruescape and Stellar Dawn fan site founders, owners and developers - apart from enjoying the actual interviews I also had very interesting time reaching out and talking to all involved fan sites. Priceless experience.

Canting Away Winter Festival and Clan Wars

This year I was able to attend more events from the festival's 24 hours marathon than ever before. And it was fun! Truly the best part of my year in Runescape!

Somehow we ended up being in the wilderness a lot :) I guess, unconsciously, saying good-bye to it, before the "old wildy" is back. I doubt we'll have any events in the wilderness next year... So, yeah, both opening and closing parades ended up in deep wilderness (in F2P) and ended by encountering a revenant knight (with a number of deaths accompanying those encounters). The first parade was truly suicidal and crazy. Everybody had their best and fanciest gear/costume on with a number of rares and non-replaceable/very expensive items - all that in F2P where revenants are especially deadly. Add "no food" clause to it and you'll get perfect conditions for yet a few more Santa hats and Halloween masks leaving Gielinor for good.
Then there was a number of KBD trips (including a suicidal one without armor where we managed to kick KBD to death once :)), hide and seek, and, of course, an epic clan wars match between Canting Away and Sals. Merch's full report is here, but I do want to add that I actually thought Canting Away had a very good chance to win (and we did!). I mean, even a "non-pking" clan (such as Canting Away) with a few leaders who knows what to do and members being disciplined about following leader's instructions would win a battle against an unorganized horde pretty much 10 out of 10. Plus Canting Away is no longer "a baby cc that lives in Sals blogs". I mean, it does live in Sals blogs (at least a big part of it), but it's not a baby anymore.

Thank you very much, dear "canters"! It was a great festival. I love you all.

Living Rock Caverns Guide

Great guide for mining and fishing in Living Rock Caverns from the Informer. I plan to start spending some time down there, now when I do have 77 Mining :)

In other news, for those who hasn't seen this before, Canting Away Winter Festival is scheduled for December 27. Don't miss - it's pure fun and joy! Click on the banner for more details.

Bonus XP weekend and links

I went down with severe cold yesterday, so it looks like my plans for the XP weekend got radically altered (that is toward "drink a lot and sleep whenever you can" one). But I did spend 5 hours skilling on Friday and Saturday before it happened. Among other things collected 2.8M Herblore and 0.5M Smithing XP. I didn't do any upfront calculations, but incidentally spent my last unfinished pot only 300 XP points short of 99 Herblore. Now I need to decide when and how I'll take the last step.

I general I am happy with the way the Bonus XP weekend turned out. Last time I pretty much missed it, but this time I did do some preparations and it was fun: hunting Grenwalls, killing Nechryaels, Dagannoth and Aberrant Spectres for seeds, growing herbs, collecting seconds, making bars and hunting dragons. And the XP was fast, very very fast - 2700xp per Overload potion ftw!

As far as links go, I have two completely unrelated ones:

• I've been looking for interesting posts at Runescoop and only now realized that Qeltar has officially stopped working on it. It's a mid Aug news, but somehow I completely missed it. Very sad news, though not particularly surprising. Qeltar put enormous amount of effort into the site and made it one of the most unique Runescape sites, but couldn't monetize it to justify continuous support. Unfortunately, that's the story of pretty much all small and medium Runescape sites - they are all based on enthusiasm. There is no money in it. So they will only live until their owners care about Runescape. Or maybe it's a good thing?
• And the second link it for Canting Away web site. No comments there, if you read this blog regularly you know what Canting Away is. It's a clan community, of course.

Canting Away Summer Festival. Report

What can I say? I enjoyed the festival tremendously. This time I was able to attend quite a few events - 8 !!! And even made a run for #9 (KBD trip), but was stopped by a lightning which caused my internet connection to disappear for about 20 mins.

I want to say huge THANK YOU to Merch Gwyar, all the people who hosted the events and all the people I met there. It was one of the best days I had in Runescape.

Also a special thanks goes to Zach, who was kind and patient enough to run a two hour Dungeoneering party on a large floor with zero prestige bonus for himself. The Dungeoneering trip was tough (and long). We killed the boss, but couldn't unlock all the rooms. Every one of us died out there, and we exited the dungeon after Full of Pie got buried under falling rocks in the Mining room at the end of the second hour.

I loved Fred's clues, got me to jump over Gielinor quite a bit :) I even won one - luckily I guessed it right from the first clue ("It's cold around me but many dragons can heat up the place"). Almost died at the Chaos Elemental, but didn't, fortunately - there were enough deaths already.

An hour at Brimhaven was fun too, though, I was lagging badly. It is indeed much more entertaining to train Agility in a good company and be able to race against each other.

Great Orb project event was intense. Very competitive too. I had to remind myself to breathe at the end of the rounds :) Comparing to that the Clan Wars was a walk in the park and a time for relaxation.

After the lightning accident I was just in time for Stealing Creation. I am glad I did, every player counted :) Finally Merch Gwyar's house party with Aximili E I's narrative was great (and, yes, Merch has chairs facing the wall, graffiti, evil means to teleport guests far away and an awesome dungeon nowadays).

Two pictures I got (yes, I am a lousy photographer):

The Beginning



Cabbage/Orange bombing of the GE

Canting Away Summer Festival

Getting swamped a bit (partially by requests from Sal's regarding Runewise - which is a good thing), so no detailed post today.

Just a reminder that Canting Away Summer Festival starts tomorrow (at least for US folks). The winter festival last year was great, I hope to get into more events this time. Detailed information and schedule is here.

Personal Information in Clan Chats

You've probably already seen Merch Gwyar's post about inappropriateness of disclosing personal information in Canting Away clan chat. If not, take a look, before you read further. It is an important topic and, as usual, Merch stated her position perfectly.

What's my view on it? As related to Canting Away, Merch is absolutely right in demanding that personal information would not be disclosed there. She has all the rights to set safety standards for the clan she runs. And non-disclosure of personal information is not an unreasonable requirement.

But talking broadly, I personally don't believe that we can hide our real identities in internet. One have to try really really hard in order to do so. And it's going to be harder and harder as time goes on. Unless something changes drastically in the way internet works, our real lives will get so tied to our online identities, that we won't be making a clear distinction anymore. And I don't think it is bad. It is just the way it is. Instead of trying to shut the world out, I believe that we all need to learn how to live in an open, with our lives exposed.

We need to teach our children and ourselves how to be prudent when making new friends using internet and especially when making transition from online to RL contacts. We need to be aware about identity theft menace and learn how to keep important internet accounts safe and secure. We need to know about computer security and follow required procedures and precautions required by it.

But we cannot simply build walls. In a long run, it won't work.

Follow ups

A few links today.

• First Xela's response to Qeltar's suggestions on resolving items binding problem in Dungeoneering. Xela has a good point about potential temporary slots being filled early by players made items and offers new approach of separating players made items and pure drops. If such separation could be made, extra binding slots could be applied to such dropped items only. There is more in the article, but as far as I understand that is the key idea. I like it, but think it is highly unlikely that Jagex would add such distinction between players made items and items dropped by monsters.
• Secondly, G turned my post about teleports into action and actually walked Runescape from one side to another. It took him 26 minutes - so here we go, the size of Gielinor. Thank you, G.
• Finally, Canting Away has a dedicated forum now.