Dev Blog: Rejuvenating the wilderness

[Sp33dy20]

INTRODUCTION

Loads of you have been asking us to look at how we can make the Wilderness the vibrant and busy place it once was. We have been talking extensively to all sorts of communities to find out what you want from the Wilderness. It became clear quite quickly that you wanted to see more players using the Wilderness, but critically, these players needed to be risking items. What is the point of killing a player if you are not getting anything from it?

Once Pkers are in the Wilderness PKing the skillers, more PKers will come along to PK the PKers which in turn encourages more PKers. You will see from the suggestions below that skillers are at the bottom of the Wilderness food chain. However, a skiller stands the chance of great rewards if they can escape the Wilderness in one piece. 

We’ve taken hundreds of different ideas from your posts on the forums and other site. In this blog we’ve written up a wide variety of these ideas. Now we’d like to discuss with you how we can use them to rejuvenate the Wilderness, to see which ideas you most support.

Below you will see a map of the rejuvenated Wilderness. To help you quickly identify the benefits of the changes we have added the loot or types of players we expect to frequent those areas. Underneath the map, there are more detailed descriptions of each change.
 

MAP
 

Click the map to enlarge it.

 

Monster Spawns

Monsters are a great way to encourage players to risk their weapons & armour in the Wilderness, so we’d like to add a greater variety of useful monsters to the Wilderness. To make them a bit more exciting we would like to add some higher-level versions of existing creatures including chaos druids, bandits, dark warriors and rogues, with monsters that have high HP but low defence (similar to rock crabs).

We also think a new Wilderness dungeon would be a popular draw. In it, we could add God Wars creatures that are escaping up through a crevice from the main God Wars Dungeon west of the Wilderness. In this dungeon, aviansies would drop adamantite bars in banknote form.

Red dragons also need to have their drop tables beefed up to make them more desirable so we want to do that too.

We also think the Wilderness will benefit from green dragons being more competitive so we want to make all green dragon spawns a multi attack area.

Finally, a lot of you have been asking us to add revenants which we would love to do, the question we need you to answer is what do they drop?
 

Resources

We think any resources which are add to the Wilderness should be designed to encourage skillers to either bring armour and weapons with them or to collect large amounts of resources as that will encourage PKers to try and kill them.

Although you may be able to collect resources more efficiently in the wild, you will always run the risk of losing everything you have on you if you are killed. So, what ideas have we found?

Ents
We want to introduce a brand new creature to the Wilderness, Ents. When you kill an Ent it will lie on the floor as a log and you will need to use your hatchet to cut up the log. You will receive noted logs in your inventory up to the level of logs you can usually chop. The type of hatchet you use increases the chances of getting the best logs you can.

In order to collect this resource you will need to bring armour and weapons to defeat the ents and any person doing this is likely to have a significant amount of noted logs on them.

New fish
We have had a lot of requests for a new fish to be introduced into the game which heals 22. We could use the manta rays but we thought you’d like to decide on a new fish yourselves. This fish will be available from the two fishing spots in the Wilderness. As an extra twist, the bait needed to catch these fish will only be available from a spawn of zombies at the ruins in the Wilderness. This will add two new profitable resources in the wilderness while limiting the impact on the shark market.

Other resources
Some other resources we would like to add to the Wilderness are two or three extra runite rocks to the frozen wastes and the introduction of a red chinchompa hunting ground where you can use an additional trap than you have the level to.

Both of these resources will add a profitable way of collecting resources, which in turn attracts PKers to take them away from you.

Since chinchompas currently vanish when you die carrying them, they currently aren’t much good as a PK reward. We can change their behaviour so that chinchompas can be picked up by a successful PKer.
 

Demi Bosses

Around the Wilderness map you will see three ‘demi-bosses’, this is what we are calling soloable bosses. These three bosses will be vulnerable to a different attack style but all have a chance of dropping a shield piece. You will need to collect a shield piece from each of these bosses and smelt the pieces into a shield at the volcano in the north east of the Wilderness.

We’d like to introduce two new shields in this way, and make them range and magic variants of the Tzhaar spiked shield.
 

Bosses

We would also like to introduce three new bosses, a wandering bear, a spider and a skeletal warlord. These bosses will require groups of players to kill and should drive a lot of group activity in the Wilderness. These bosses will have a chance of dropping the dragon pickaxe.

Of course, we don’t want to forget about the King Black Dragon and the Chaos Elemental so we’ll be beefing up their drop tables and adding the dragon pickaxe to those too. In addition we would like to stop players teleporting out of the KBD lair, so players have to get out of the Wilderness with their loot.
 

New activities

We think activity in the Wilderness will benefit from a few extra activities. So we have pulled together some more ideas here.

Fountain of Rune
To start with we liked the idea of a runic obelisk where you can cast any spell you like without using any runes. You won’t get any XP for the spells you use but we think it will encourage some players to do a bit of alching or super heat some ores when they have run out of nature runes or want to make a bit of extra cash, both are great targets for PKers.

Resource Area
We want to add a new fenced off resource area that contains many high level resources, such as magic trees, ores and fishing spots. In this resource area we would also like to add a Runite Golem. When you kill a Runite Golem it will leave behind a runite rock which can then be mined if you have the Mining level.

Each time you want to access the mining area you will need to pay a guardian at the gate a sum of money. The guardian is there to protect you from PKers… however there is nothing stopping a PKer from paying the guardian some money to come in and kill you. These guardians are not known for their moral fortitude.

Slow Prayer Recharger
One great idea we saw was to include an effect to the Demonic Ruins which recharges your prayer if you are standing in it. This will help to add a focal point for group PvP action. Those that are in control of the ruins are going to have an advantage.

Thieving Chests
The Rogues Castle seems the ideal place to add a new high level thieving chest which gives out a selection of noted loot. There will be high level rogues protecting these chests so anyone wanting to get some loot will need to bring some food and armour to keep these rogues off their back… making them an even more appealing target for PKers. Unlike the chests around Ardougne, these chests would not teleport you away when you’ve got the loot.
 

Other changes to the Wilderness

Non tradeable items
There’s been a lot of discussion about how non-tradeable items are treated on death in PvP. There are many players who want to PK but not risk too much while still making a good fight of it, while there are those who feel frustrated that they can kill someone who is wearing good non-tradeable armour and profit very little from it. One compromise for this would be if you die in the Wilderness beyond level 20, any non-tradeable items you drop will appear to your killer as piles of gold.

Wilderness Ditch
We know many of you want this removed and we’d be happy to do it to. The one proviso is that we need to solve the problem which caused the ditch to be included in the first place, but we believe we can do this.
 

Swag Bag
One limitation which has been raised for us is that if you kill a player carrying a whole load of resources it isn’t always profitable to pick up what they drop as the PKer will have to drop items from his inventory to do so. We think a good solution would be to introduce something we have dubbed a ‘swag bag’. This bag can be obtained as a drop from monsters in the Wilderness. While you are in the Wilderness, you can store up to 28 tradeable items in this bag; you can’t add anything to the bag elsewhere. Stacked items will behave in the same way as they do in your inventory. However, you can only empty the bag when you are at a bank.

If you die while carrying a swag bag, it will disappear and the items it contains will drop on the floor for your PKer to loot. You can only carry one swag bag at a time in your inventory.

Edgeville Lever
We want to put a lever in Edgeville that will teleport you to the Deserted Keep in the high level Wilderness. When you use the lever in the keep, you will still teleport to Ardougne.

Anti griefing mechanics
We recently have had a discussion about griefing in PvP areas and we believe the best solution is to encourage PKers to move away from the safe zones to PK. We think rejuvenating the Wilderness is a great start to that, but there are some smaller updates we can make to solve some of the common ways of griefing. We would like a crystal bow to revert to a seed should you die with one, and we can remove the spam created when you eat a rock cake.

Flaming
We know that flaming is part of the PvP experience and it can add to the atmosphere and tension that surrounds PvP. However, we have seen a number of people who have taken this beyond any acceptable limits on a regular basis. We want the PvP experience to be fun but when we see some players regularly making obscene comments about other PvPer’s family members, state of health or gender then we have to step in. Although most members of the community know where the line is, there are some unreasonable individuals who do not and we don’t believe you want these people as part of your community. We have identified these accounts and been monitoring them for some time and as of now they will find their accounts permanently muted.
 

What’s Next

This is simply the first draft of the Rejuvenation of the Wilderness and your input is essential to make this right for you and the community. We will continue to talk to you about this over the next week, to see which ideas you support, and in the next blog we’ll write up a series of questions for the poll. You will then have a chance to give us feedback on those questions before the poll opens.

The Rejuvenation of the Wilderness can be a big success for the Old School community and working together gives us the best chance of making this the success it should be.

Mods Ash, John C, Mat K and Reach

[markymark]

OMGOMGOMG YAY

[Dr Destiny]

dood  clans gonna take adv of it..

 

rot has an event and if someone attacks they pile em.. gg LOL

[R U H O N]

FUCK YES ! 

[ChainGang815]

Awesome thx to his lordship! !

[purple]

Make it so theres only specific worlds with only the wildy as the available rs area.

[Shadow_Dl]

PAthetic swag bag.

No reason to remove wildy ditch besides luring