Runescape - Double XP Weekend & 3 Bonds
It’s been quite a few weeks (months, actually) since I last posted about Runescape. Since that time, I’ve accomplished quite a bit and gotten banned again. Without further ado, an update on the current state of my Runescape account.
To follow up with the final thoughts of my most recent post, I did manage to get the remainder of the golem outfit pieces and combine them into a full Magic golem outfit. Between Trahaearn hour Harmonized runite mining and Seren stone daily challenges, I did a lot of mining. Since level 99 mining yields double Gemstone golem fragments, I was getting roughly 200 fragments every 5 minutes. I already had several pieces of the outfit, and more than enough fragments to finish it out. The only missing requirement was level 20 invention. I got that pretty quickly after getting 99 fletching, but unfortunately before I discovered that you can disassemble noted items. That’s right, I disassembled loads of unnoted unstrung maple shieldbows, 28 at a time, all the way to level 20. I didn’t realize that you could disassemble noted items until I saw another player disassembling Eyes of newt while waiting on a game of Pest Control to finish. Since then, I’ve kept a stack of 1000 noted bows with me during many activities, especially while waiting on new runite rocks to harmonize during Voice of Seren at Trahaearn.
In any case, I finally created and combined my Magic golem outfit and continued on to the Elder divination outfit. I had almost all the necessary fragments from grinding out 80 divination to unlock Invention, so it didn’t take long to finish out the remainder. I bounced back and forth between Memorial to Guthix for speed and the Brilliant wisp colony for divine charge packs. After creating and combining the Elder divination outfit, I knew I wanted to work on another elite skilling outfit, but I wasn’t sure which. I eventually decided on the Master camouflage outfit for thieving, but I’ll get to that later.
So, besides following up with my most recent post, a lot happened during these past few weeks. I finished the wilderness hard and medium tasks. I knocked out 99 Crafting. I found a much less click intensive way to train thieving. I was banned again… for the fourth time. I got some serious gains during double XP weekend. Yeah, it’s been a pretty busy time in Runescape for me.
The goal to finish the Wilderness medium and hard tasks, I embarked on because of the rewards. Specifically, the disease immunity of the herb patch in the wilderness. Herbs aren’t a huge source of income, but they are steady, and it gives a nice break from the monotony of other skills. Being able to ensure a little higher yield with disease immune patches was enough to convince me that the Wilderness tasks were worth it.
In pursuing the hard Wilderness tasks, I was most concerned about defeating the Chaos elemental and King black dragon. I don’t boss much (at all, actually), so I wasn’t really sure if I could kill them by myself. I geared up, with the expectation that I might lose some items. Especially since I had to fight both bosses in the wild, I knew that I was at risk of death by player killers. Fortunately, I didn’t encounter a single other player when going after either. Chaos elemental was cake, a much quicker kill than what I expected. The King black dragon was a little more difficult. Because of the dragonfire, I couldn’t use the Attuned crystal bow that I used to kill the Chaos elemental. I tried Zanik’s crossbow, but that weapon is absolute trash. Finally, I used a Rune crossbow and just managed to kill the King black dragon. With better gear, I’m sure the fight would have been significantly easier. Still, if I was only fighting it to get an achievement, it wasn’t worth spending any more money than I had to.
Through the early part of my membership, I was able to get quite a bit of experience from the Summer Beach Party. I trained strength before I used the bonds, and construction afterward. When I wasn’t making use of the event xp boosts, I was training crafting at the harps of Prif. As easy and afk as harps were, I decided to go for 99 crafting. It was significantly better than anything available to f2p players, even though crafting is technically a f2p skill.
As usual, I took advantage of the Voice of Seren in Prif. Most notably, I mined harmonized runite during Trahaearn, and I ran the Hefin agility course during Hefin. Specifically, I trained agility in much the same way that I trained magic with high level alchemy. I put the pointer on a pixel and spam tapped my phone screen for the duration of Hefin hour. I didn’t pay attention to where I was along the course because it didn’t matter. Unnecessary clicks were ignored, and clicking quickly reduced my time per course, and ultimately improved the number of laps that I could manage per hour. Unfortunately, consistent clicking for an hour at a time also set off the overzealous bot detection of Jagex. That’s right, I got banned. Again.
I was baffled, because I’d done the Hefin agility course numerous times before, across several Hefin hours, and I hadn’t been banned. I assumed, since I hadn’t yet been banned for it, I probably wouldn’t be. Maybe Jagex turns a blind eye to members that may or may not be botting. I didn’t know for sure, but I was genuinely surprised when I got kicked out of the game and was unable to log in again.
After my surprised subsided, it was replaced with intense frustration. Getting banned while I was a free player was one thing. I didn’t lose any monetary value. I just couldn’t play for a few days. My goals got pushed back, but it wasn’t like anything was riding on them anyway. Getting banned during a bond, though? I paid for that bond. Admittedly, through in-game currency, but still. Jagex was taking something from me that I purchased. That was insulting.
My ban would expire in 120 hours or 5 days. That meant I lost 5 days of earning potential to pay for the bonds I used. With 45 days of membership for roughly 54m gp, I had to make an average of 1.2m gp per day to keep up with the price of the bond. Down to only 40 days, I had to make 1.35m gp per day. Sure, it was a minimal increase in required profit per day, but it was the principle of the matter. I paid for my bond. I was playing legitimately. And still, Jagex banned me and rejected my appeal. Four times now I’ve been banned, and I haven’t ever cheated a single time in this game.
Because of the ban, I lost the last few daily items of the Summer Beach Party event. I also missed nearly the entire event for some cape cosmetic overrides. Even though it was only 5 days, I missed quite a few opportunities for xp and items. Once the ban was finally lifted, I avoided training agility at all. Eventually, I began running the Hefin agility course sparingly, and with quite a bit of mouse motion between actions. Finally, I kept my cursor at the same location, but I made a point to only click the next obstacle when the previous one was fully completed, and I wasn’t inputting any extra clicks. It’s absurd that I would have to filter my legitimate playing in a way that avoids triggering their absurd bot detection, but this is where we are. I’ll definitely be very careful, at least until my first ban comes off my record in November.
Double XP Weekend was significantly earlier than I expected it to be, from 31 August to 3 September. Fortunately, it was both after my ban expired, and before my bond ended. I took full advantage of the bonus xp, knocking out quite a bit of summoning and smithing. With expensive skills, I like to take every measure I can to reduce total cost. Making the most of my charms and corrupted ore means I spend less money and time gathering more resources, as well as less time training the skills themselves.
After DXPW ended, the bond was mostly uneventful. Voice of Seren steered most of my activity. When Trahaearn was active, I was mining runite to pay for the bond. When Hefin was active, I was cautiously running the agility course. When Ithell was active (or when I just couldn’t devote attention to the game), I was playing harps. I got to 99 crafting handily, and continued with harps occasionally just because of the lack of attention it allowed.
I learned that pieces of the agility xp outfit can be rewarded from the agility trainer event, so I made a point to actually participate in those, rather than ignoring them. I did manage to get a few pieces, and should be able to finish the outfit pretty easily when I use another bond. An extra 5% xp per action isn’t much in the short term, but it definitely adds up when I eventually want 99 agility.
As for the elite thieving outfit, it started with a daily challenge for pickpocketing. I did it begrudgingly, because I needed thieving xp, but I hate how click intensive the skill is. This began an investigation for afk methods of thieving. Turns out, players can now toggle whether the attack option is the left click option for other players or NPCs. So you can turn off left click attacking, and the left click option for any NPC that you can steal from becomes pickpocket. Find an appropriate leveled NPC (Yanille Watchmen in my case), pin them in the corner, single click pickpocket for minutes on end. When they break out of the pin, rinse and repeat. I got quite a bit of thieving xp and a few pieces of the elite outfit with just a few days of pickpocketing. Next time, I may very well be able to finish the outfit and make good progress toward 99 thieving. Once I get all the pieces of the elite outfit, I’ll probably get the Black Ibis outfit to increase xp gains. From there on out, the skill should be cake.
When I pop my next bond, I’ll hopefully already have 99 firemaking. Besides combat skills, the only f2p skills that I have yet to reach level 99 in are smithing, firemaking, and dungeoneering. Firemaking is easy enough to train by chopping and burning maples. Smithing is in the bag from Artisan’s workshop with the 40,000 iron ore I recently bought. Dungeoneering… is going to be a work in progress. I like doing A dungeon every now and then. Doing dungeons over and over again, especially via remote desktop on my phone? That’s painful. Here’s hoping they release RS Mobile for RS3 before I have to grind out dungeoneering. And combat skills are going to be almost exclusively reserved for when I’m training slayer during membership. As I’ve said before, there are almost no good monsters to fight in the f2p game.
To follow up with the final thoughts of my most recent post, I did manage to get the remainder of the golem outfit pieces and combine them into a full Magic golem outfit. Between Trahaearn hour Harmonized runite mining and Seren stone daily challenges, I did a lot of mining. Since level 99 mining yields double Gemstone golem fragments, I was getting roughly 200 fragments every 5 minutes. I already had several pieces of the outfit, and more than enough fragments to finish it out. The only missing requirement was level 20 invention. I got that pretty quickly after getting 99 fletching, but unfortunately before I discovered that you can disassemble noted items. That’s right, I disassembled loads of unnoted unstrung maple shieldbows, 28 at a time, all the way to level 20. I didn’t realize that you could disassemble noted items until I saw another player disassembling Eyes of newt while waiting on a game of Pest Control to finish. Since then, I’ve kept a stack of 1000 noted bows with me during many activities, especially while waiting on new runite rocks to harmonize during Voice of Seren at Trahaearn.
In any case, I finally created and combined my Magic golem outfit and continued on to the Elder divination outfit. I had almost all the necessary fragments from grinding out 80 divination to unlock Invention, so it didn’t take long to finish out the remainder. I bounced back and forth between Memorial to Guthix for speed and the Brilliant wisp colony for divine charge packs. After creating and combining the Elder divination outfit, I knew I wanted to work on another elite skilling outfit, but I wasn’t sure which. I eventually decided on the Master camouflage outfit for thieving, but I’ll get to that later.
So, besides following up with my most recent post, a lot happened during these past few weeks. I finished the wilderness hard and medium tasks. I knocked out 99 Crafting. I found a much less click intensive way to train thieving. I was banned again… for the fourth time. I got some serious gains during double XP weekend. Yeah, it’s been a pretty busy time in Runescape for me.
The goal to finish the Wilderness medium and hard tasks, I embarked on because of the rewards. Specifically, the disease immunity of the herb patch in the wilderness. Herbs aren’t a huge source of income, but they are steady, and it gives a nice break from the monotony of other skills. Being able to ensure a little higher yield with disease immune patches was enough to convince me that the Wilderness tasks were worth it.
In pursuing the hard Wilderness tasks, I was most concerned about defeating the Chaos elemental and King black dragon. I don’t boss much (at all, actually), so I wasn’t really sure if I could kill them by myself. I geared up, with the expectation that I might lose some items. Especially since I had to fight both bosses in the wild, I knew that I was at risk of death by player killers. Fortunately, I didn’t encounter a single other player when going after either. Chaos elemental was cake, a much quicker kill than what I expected. The King black dragon was a little more difficult. Because of the dragonfire, I couldn’t use the Attuned crystal bow that I used to kill the Chaos elemental. I tried Zanik’s crossbow, but that weapon is absolute trash. Finally, I used a Rune crossbow and just managed to kill the King black dragon. With better gear, I’m sure the fight would have been significantly easier. Still, if I was only fighting it to get an achievement, it wasn’t worth spending any more money than I had to.
Through the early part of my membership, I was able to get quite a bit of experience from the Summer Beach Party. I trained strength before I used the bonds, and construction afterward. When I wasn’t making use of the event xp boosts, I was training crafting at the harps of Prif. As easy and afk as harps were, I decided to go for 99 crafting. It was significantly better than anything available to f2p players, even though crafting is technically a f2p skill.
As usual, I took advantage of the Voice of Seren in Prif. Most notably, I mined harmonized runite during Trahaearn, and I ran the Hefin agility course during Hefin. Specifically, I trained agility in much the same way that I trained magic with high level alchemy. I put the pointer on a pixel and spam tapped my phone screen for the duration of Hefin hour. I didn’t pay attention to where I was along the course because it didn’t matter. Unnecessary clicks were ignored, and clicking quickly reduced my time per course, and ultimately improved the number of laps that I could manage per hour. Unfortunately, consistent clicking for an hour at a time also set off the overzealous bot detection of Jagex. That’s right, I got banned. Again.
I was baffled, because I’d done the Hefin agility course numerous times before, across several Hefin hours, and I hadn’t been banned. I assumed, since I hadn’t yet been banned for it, I probably wouldn’t be. Maybe Jagex turns a blind eye to members that may or may not be botting. I didn’t know for sure, but I was genuinely surprised when I got kicked out of the game and was unable to log in again.
After my surprised subsided, it was replaced with intense frustration. Getting banned while I was a free player was one thing. I didn’t lose any monetary value. I just couldn’t play for a few days. My goals got pushed back, but it wasn’t like anything was riding on them anyway. Getting banned during a bond, though? I paid for that bond. Admittedly, through in-game currency, but still. Jagex was taking something from me that I purchased. That was insulting.
My ban would expire in 120 hours or 5 days. That meant I lost 5 days of earning potential to pay for the bonds I used. With 45 days of membership for roughly 54m gp, I had to make an average of 1.2m gp per day to keep up with the price of the bond. Down to only 40 days, I had to make 1.35m gp per day. Sure, it was a minimal increase in required profit per day, but it was the principle of the matter. I paid for my bond. I was playing legitimately. And still, Jagex banned me and rejected my appeal. Four times now I’ve been banned, and I haven’t ever cheated a single time in this game.
Because of the ban, I lost the last few daily items of the Summer Beach Party event. I also missed nearly the entire event for some cape cosmetic overrides. Even though it was only 5 days, I missed quite a few opportunities for xp and items. Once the ban was finally lifted, I avoided training agility at all. Eventually, I began running the Hefin agility course sparingly, and with quite a bit of mouse motion between actions. Finally, I kept my cursor at the same location, but I made a point to only click the next obstacle when the previous one was fully completed, and I wasn’t inputting any extra clicks. It’s absurd that I would have to filter my legitimate playing in a way that avoids triggering their absurd bot detection, but this is where we are. I’ll definitely be very careful, at least until my first ban comes off my record in November.
Double XP Weekend was significantly earlier than I expected it to be, from 31 August to 3 September. Fortunately, it was both after my ban expired, and before my bond ended. I took full advantage of the bonus xp, knocking out quite a bit of summoning and smithing. With expensive skills, I like to take every measure I can to reduce total cost. Making the most of my charms and corrupted ore means I spend less money and time gathering more resources, as well as less time training the skills themselves.
After DXPW ended, the bond was mostly uneventful. Voice of Seren steered most of my activity. When Trahaearn was active, I was mining runite to pay for the bond. When Hefin was active, I was cautiously running the agility course. When Ithell was active (or when I just couldn’t devote attention to the game), I was playing harps. I got to 99 crafting handily, and continued with harps occasionally just because of the lack of attention it allowed.
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| As of 27 September 2018 |
I learned that pieces of the agility xp outfit can be rewarded from the agility trainer event, so I made a point to actually participate in those, rather than ignoring them. I did manage to get a few pieces, and should be able to finish the outfit pretty easily when I use another bond. An extra 5% xp per action isn’t much in the short term, but it definitely adds up when I eventually want 99 agility.
As for the elite thieving outfit, it started with a daily challenge for pickpocketing. I did it begrudgingly, because I needed thieving xp, but I hate how click intensive the skill is. This began an investigation for afk methods of thieving. Turns out, players can now toggle whether the attack option is the left click option for other players or NPCs. So you can turn off left click attacking, and the left click option for any NPC that you can steal from becomes pickpocket. Find an appropriate leveled NPC (Yanille Watchmen in my case), pin them in the corner, single click pickpocket for minutes on end. When they break out of the pin, rinse and repeat. I got quite a bit of thieving xp and a few pieces of the elite outfit with just a few days of pickpocketing. Next time, I may very well be able to finish the outfit and make good progress toward 99 thieving. Once I get all the pieces of the elite outfit, I’ll probably get the Black Ibis outfit to increase xp gains. From there on out, the skill should be cake.
When I pop my next bond, I’ll hopefully already have 99 firemaking. Besides combat skills, the only f2p skills that I have yet to reach level 99 in are smithing, firemaking, and dungeoneering. Firemaking is easy enough to train by chopping and burning maples. Smithing is in the bag from Artisan’s workshop with the 40,000 iron ore I recently bought. Dungeoneering… is going to be a work in progress. I like doing A dungeon every now and then. Doing dungeons over and over again, especially via remote desktop on my phone? That’s painful. Here’s hoping they release RS Mobile for RS3 before I have to grind out dungeoneering. And combat skills are going to be almost exclusively reserved for when I’m training slayer during membership. As I’ve said before, there are almost no good monsters to fight in the f2p game.
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