16 May 2008 - Item Lending and Clan Wars

Over the last couple of months, we have mentioned a few forthcoming updates that haven't been released yet. This has largely been done in the State of Play, which gives details and progress of a number of highly desired updates. Since there are so many things we want to talk about, and we want as many people to read them as possible, the State of Play is concise and tends not to go into fine detail.

This forum post allows us to go into that fine detail. We have asked Mod Ash, who is the developer of item lending, Clan Wars changes and the random events project, to give you a tour of his current work. You are in good hands!

Mod Mark (over to you, Ash!)


~ Item lending ~

Item lending is something we mentioned in the first State of Play newspost back in February. At the time, I'd just written a plan for how we could code it, so we were pretty confident that we could safely release some form of item lending system. Once we got the required tools from Andrew's Game Engine team, progress was rapid.

It's actually a bigger job than it sounds, however. For example, we've got code in place for letting players chop a tree with a dragon axe, but the game engine would have to understand about letting players use a 'borrowed dragon axe' with the same result. That's got to work even in strange places, such as the Yommi Tree in Legends' Quest and the special trees outside of the cave in Mountain Daughter. Plus, you shouldn't be allowed to equip a 'borrowed abyssal whip' without the same requirements that a real one would have had. Oh, and you really mustn't dismantle someone else's godsword. All this work is in addition to the core element, which allows people to lend stuff out in the first place.

The point is that this project requires a serious amount of testing. For a start, we want to be REALLY sure that lenders get their stuff back correctly! We also want to make sure that borrowers can use the borrowed items properly in all kinds of obscure places. Our Quality Assurance team's always got a lot of work on its plate; this spring is no exception, and this isn't the kind of project that they can rush through, no matter how keen people may be to receive the update.

This is a priority for us, but with the sheer amount of testing (getting item lending working for everyone, in every circumstance) we cannot put a definite release date on the project. Needless to say, we will be keeping you up-to-date with how it is progressing.

The design has changed a little since the last State of Play on this topic. I'll give you a few more details of the current plan, so that you know what to expect:

1. Only certain specific items will be lendable. We can't allow people to borrow items that are untradeable, that degrade during use, that have charges or get used up. We've focused on high-level combat kit such as Third-Age clothing, Waterbirth Island armour, rings, godswords, dragon weapons and armour, most rune stuff, mystic armour and dragonhide. These will allow you to help friends who are fighting large creatures with you. More items can be made lendable in the future.

2. Players may only lend out one item at a time, and borrow only one item at a time. We accept that this is a pretty tight restriction, but there are reasons for it. In particular, people have raised concerns that there will be no incentive to buy items if they can be borrowed easily with a guarantee that they'll be returned afterwards.

3. When you lend an item, you'll be able to choose whether you wish to lend it for two hours, for a day, or just until log-out. Items lent out for a specific duration cannot be retrieved until the end of the loan period (due to technical restrictions), whereas items lent out for the rest of the login session can be demanded back at any time. This is a bit of a change from what we said before; thanks must go to the players who suggested it.

4. Borrowed items are protected over ALL other items if the borrower dies, and cannot be taken into Bounty Hunter. So, if you whimsically decide to borrow someone's santa hat to wear during a KQ trip, you're risking the loss of your own valuables and not the hat.

5. After some discussion, we decided to allow the lending of party hats, santa hats and Hallowe'en masks; before the trade restrictions came into effect, people frequently lent these items to their friends, so we're going to allow it with the item lending system too. I appreciate that people may feel this detracts from the glamour of showing off their valuable possessions, but people have been lending out those discontinued holiday items throughout the history of RuneScape, so we're going to permit it again.

~ Clan Wars ~

Now, it hasn't escaped our notice that the Clan Wars minigame is basic. Ever since I finished coding item lending, I've been gathering advice from forums and fansites, colleagues and in-game friends who are experienced at organising clan-battles, trying to work out what I can provide in Clan Wars that will cater to their tastes. Inevitably, I got more suggestions than I could use in a million updates, but players' support is always appreciated.

What I've coded so far is this:

- Two players challenge each other in the Challenge Hall.
- They get an Options screen, a bit like in the Duel Arena, allowing them to choose the settings for their battle.
- Once they've agreed on the settings, they are taken into their arena, and other members of their chat-channel may join them.
- The battle ends according to the rules that were chosen at the beginning.
- If a player wishes to enter the arena, and they're a member of that chat-channel, they'll be asked whether they wish to fight or watch, where appropriate.

Rules:
- If you want people to be able to run back into the battle after dying, you can enable that. You'll need to choose an option such as 'First team to X kills wins' or 'Team with most kills after X minutes wins'.
- You can choose an option that will allow a winning team to end the game abruptly when the opponent has got 5 or fewer players remaining in the arena. This might be handy if you hate chasing down die-hard people with too much run energy.
- 'No melee', 'No Ranged', 'No Magic', 'No Summoning' options. Don't choose them all at once! 'No food', 'No Prayer' and 'No potions' will also be available.
- You can choose to allow only spells from the standard spellbook, forbidding Ancients and Lunar.
- You can choose from a menu of arenas with different landscape features. Do you like hugging trees or rocks? Do you want a plain arena without obstacles? Do you want a load of towers for your rangers and mages to use for sniping? Or would you prefer to stick to the existing Clan Wars arena? (We ran a poll about this sort of thing. Thanks for voting.)

- You CAN choose to make players drop their items when they die. We mustn't let players abuse this minigame for transfering items to each other, so other people won't get to collect the loot, but it'll make the battles a fair bit more risky. If you're in a really rich clan that doesn't mind risking its good armour, you can use this to give yourselves an advantage over clans that daren't fight in anything expensive.

I know this isn't going to cover everything that people want from Clan Wars. So, in addition to the formal fights described above, I'm planning to create two large arenas for free-for-all action. They'll have a variety of scenery and no rules whatsoever: you just walk in (with or without friends) and make your own entertainment. One of the arenas will be 'safe' (items protected on death) while the other will be 'dangerous' (items are dropped on death). Jagex has historically kept out of the way and let clans organise competitions and battles in any way they liked; I'm hoping that these free-for-all arenas will provide a place for players to visit and use in whatever way they wish with their own choice of friends and opponents.

I've got most of the code in place, but our Graphics guys will have a vast amount of work to do with all the arena plans we'd like to offer. They're already heavily loaded with other projects (which is why they haven't managed to update the appearance of the Friends list, as we'd hoped), but they should be starting on this soon.

~ Random Events ~

With item lending and Clan Wars being worked on, this project has received slightly less attention.

What we're doing is listing the random events and investigating just how well they are doing their jobs. We plan to then remove those that are no longer successful and give better rewards to those that remain. Now, simple events like the Genie are really quite boringly easy to solve, but people like the Genie because he brings lamps of XP. The frogs, on the other hand, don't offer any useful reward if you've already got their kit.

The plan is to make random events offer a choice of rewards, including coins, gems and other handy items, and maybe a costume item if appropriate. Among the options may be a genie lamp. That way we won't end up discontinuing items or deleting rewards that were popular.

This is in the briefing stage, so the details may change in the final release.


Thanks for reading!

~ Mod Ash ~