Managing your Port

Using the resources you bring back from the Eastern Lands, you’ll be able to build and upgrade structures within your port. As well as making your port truly distinct, these offer benefits when managing your captains and crews. If you want to attract potential crew members with better-than-average Seafaring stats, for example, adorn your port’s bar with nautical regalia to get the saltiest sea dogs in Gielinor on board.

Your port will grow to be a living town that’s well and truly yours. The content is fully voice-acted throughout, the decor and buildings are of your choosing, and your captains (whose appearance can also be customised) and adventurers can be found at the town bar for a chat.

Random events will occur while you’re away, and you will determine their outcome by taking the role of a port inhabitant in flashback. You’ll help the Black Marketeer ward off some dangerous debtors, and get the Barmaid through a particularly rough shift, in exchange for items conferring helpful effects, such as temporary stat bonuses for your ships.

Scrolls

Forgotten scrolls, pieced together over the course of your voyages, will unlock the permanent ability for your character to make some of the best food and gear in the game.

Melee fighters will find themselves honour-bound to wear the lordly tetsu armour; eagle-eyed rangers will love the Death Lotus gear; and the elite mage will settle for nothing less than the sea singer’s robes. These come in both tradeable and non-tradeable versions. The non-tradeable versions have even better stats than the tradeable ones, making them not only the best armour in game, but true status symbols for RuneScape’s most dedicated players.

High-level fletchers can also make accessories known as scrimshaws, which fit into a new equipment slot called the pocket. These impart a range of benefits, many of which are geared towards increasing level gain during that steep curve towards level 99.

Finally, RuneScape’s best food – rocktail soup – can also be made in your port’s workshop, if you happen upon the recipe.

Meg

Meg – a wannabe adventurer – can be found in the port, regardless of whether you have the levels to take over its management. Even those of you who do not have the levels to own a port will find that you can give Meg adventuring pointers, offering a taster of the player-owned port voyages. Even once you’ve taken control of your port, Meg will still hang around looking for advice – she needs all the help she can get!

Once a week, she’ll ask you a set of questions about adventuring scenarios and then head off to tackle dangerous dungeons and ferocious monsters. Depending on the quality of your advice, she’ll come back bright-eyed and beaming with a healthy cut of her profits for you, or bruised, abashed and with more meagre pickings to offer.

There’s months of amazing content and truly epic rewards here for high-level players, so what’re you waiting for? The East beckons!

Account Hacking from In-Game

As I explained before, you can not get hacked from in-game. I also explained how the client works. In this part I will explain how you can not get hacked from in the game, it’s impossible.

People think that you can get hacked if whispered to or traded. To explain this, I looked at a few packets (legit). When the client sends the whisper packet, it sends the header, same as in all data packets. After that it will send the recipient and the message that you are sending that person. Based on the recipient, the server will most likely then send a data packet to the receiver. Nowhere in this relationship to the two clients communicate at all in any direct way; the server does all that for them, as it should. In no way can a hacker abuse whispers.

Trades are similar. The client will send a packet for spawning a trade, the server will then most likely make a new object for that trade. An object is basically a data space reserved for a set of data containing properties and such. After that multiple packets are sent between the two clients and the server, but the two clients never directly interact in any way. A hacker can not abuse this relationship in any way either.

Surly you must think that the clients have a link when you are in the same map. Sadly, that is not true. There are packets for spawning the player, moving the player and just about everything you can think of. When coded properly, this does not lag at all. Look at google; it searches over 8000000000 pages every search in less than 1 second.

Roundtable: Has The Industry Grown Up?

Was this the year that gaming grew up? GameIndustry ask their international staffs this question. Four persons bring us to the hard look at the industry’s growing pains. What’s your opinion?omething seems to have changed in the last year or so. We’re not sure when it started, but nearly all of us could point to a spot where we noticed it happening.You might have seen it on Twitter, arguments cast in 140 characters or less. It may have been the sudden, vicious turn of a comment thread or the undertone of dissatisfaction in a headline. You might even have felt like this all along. Things are being challenged, conventions called to account.

 

Gender imbalance, the lack of inclusivity, the corruption of journalists, issues of maturity, sex and violence, copycatting, the exploitation of the customer – all these issues have been pushed to the fore over the last twelve months. Turned over and inside out, vaunted or ridiculed – there seems to have been barely time to draw breath this year between long, hard looks in the mirror.
For some it’s been a welcome change, the relief of realising that there are other people who feel just as angry, marginalised or outright excluded. For others it’s been an unwelcome distraction, unnecessary navel gazing which only leads to a pointless stirring of the pot and no real progress – frenzies whipped up by the press for cheap hits and self-glorification.
Whatever you feel about them, many have been almost impossible to ignore. Whether it’s the storm of abuse endured by Anita Sarkeesian, the crisis of confidence ignited by Rab Florence or marketing tactics which are somewhere on a scale between condemnable and very clever, this has been a year in which our industry has been pulled from many ruts, asked to reassess and re-examine.
How much has actually changed is debatable, but what is clear is that it’s unlikely we’re going to see these issues swept back under the carpet. Like it or not, these debates aren’t going away. We’ve hosted and participated in all of these discussions, and more, but we rarely get to comment on them directly. So, read on as we ask our international staff – was this the year that gaming grew up?