Hello everyone,
I'm announcing this update before releasing it. It will go live tomorrow evening. I can't release it tonight because I'm running out of time, and the changes are too big and complex to leave running unsupervised overnight. I wanted to at least communicate what's done and ready for you tomorrow.
First, I'd like to apologise - both for not having this ready sooner, and for the weekend silence while I was heads-down trying to finish it. The scope grew over time - in my head I kept adding "just one more thing" and it grew out of proportion. It would have been smarter to release it in patches and to keep you updated along the way, but due to technical reasons and my planning mistakes, the new patch had to ship together with the new client.
TL;DR
- Client and in-game QoL changes, fixes
- Marketplace changes and 5% sales tax
- Lottery released
- Staking released
- Wilderness changes
- New combat formula trials
- State of botting and our fight against it
- Account sharing in the Wilderness
- Community questionnaire
- Future plans
The updates
Client Changes
- Client settings now save per-character on the server side. Reinstalling the client or logging into a different character will load that character's settings from the server, not from your local device.
- Sleep captcha reworked — new visual style, uses RSC-related dictionary words instead of random letters mixed with numbers.
- Fixed visual glitches when toggling various client effects on and off.
- Increased chat history on all social tabs.
- Added the ability to increase chat line count via client settings.
- Character name now displayed in the Desktop Client header.
- Improved client RAM usage on user devices.
Warning: The client received significant changes. If after the update you experience any stutter or anything feels slower, please open a support ticket with specifics. The more detail you give me, the faster and more accurate the fix will be. Thank you.
Fixes
- Ranged projectile sprite fixed to be replica-accurate.
- Ranged XP now follows replica logic — XP is awarded on every shot when shooting players.
- Draynor Manor Cabbage now correctly gives the 1–2 defense bonus.
- Fixed dialogue and quest guide inconsistencies in Pirate's Treasure, Ernest the Chicken, and Prince Ali Rescue that were causing players to get stuck.
- Firemaking no longer occasionally errors when lighting logs.
- Fixed an issue where some players couldn't enter the Wilderness because the server thought they had more accounts in there than they actually did.
Added or changed
- Bone burying is now batched, scaling with your Prayer level.
- Number input fields now accept shorthand — you can type 100K instead of the full 100000 or 1M instead of 1000000 .
- New command ::itemvalues — shows the value of items in your inventory and which items you'd keep on death based on your skull and prayer status. Values are calculated from the database, not player market prices.
- Skipper post-kill wait time reduced by 30 seconds.
- Announcements now appear in the Global chat tab and persist in history like other global chat messages.
- New punishments for global chat rule breaking. We can now mute players from global chat or add an additional delay between global chat messages, regardless of subscription status. These will be used after standard mutes for repeat offenders or toxic players.
Marketplace
- Tidied up the interface layout — it's now clearer whether you're interacting with items for sale or buy listings.
- Added extra confirmation steps before executing sales or purchases.
- Added a 5% sales tax on Marketplace items.
Originally we wanted to add the sales tax after 3 months of running the server, but the community is incredibly active and we need to introduce it now. This is likely to be one of the most unpopular changes since 2IP, but it's a necessary anti-inflation measure for the longevity of the server.
Lottery
The first RSC private server community event — the player lottery — is going live.
How it works
A lottery is started either by an administrator or by a player making a donation to seed the prize pot. Each lottery runs for 10 minutes before a winner is drawn. Single winner takes the whole pot.
Three lottery types
- Free lottery — One ticket per character, tickets are free. The full donation seeds the pot, no tax applied.
- One ticket limit (paid) — One ticket per character, tickets cost 25K (20K goes to the pot, 5K is taxed as a gold sink). Donation seeds the starting pot.
- No ticket limit (paid) — Players can buy unlimited tickets at 25K each (20K to pot, 5K gold sink). Donation seeds the starting pot.
Donation tiers to start a lottery: 125K, 250K, 500K, 750K, 1M.
Why the tax?
Lotteries also serve as a gold sink to help fight inflation. On paid lotteries, 20% of every ticket purchase (5K of the 25K) is removed from the game.
Commands
- ::aboutlottery — full information in-game
- ::buyticket — buy a lottery ticket
- ::donateforlottery — start a lottery via donation
Tracked stats per character
lottery_tickets_bought, spent_on_lottery, free_lottery_tickets, lottery_wins, biggest_lottery_win, lotteries_won.
Staking
Staking is being released with this update. The rules are standard replica behaviour. On the backend, I'm working on additional features — and one is already live at launch: detailed staking logs, including combat records, starting inventories, and damage dealt during each stake.
New Combat Formula Trials
The combat formula has been a source of debate — some players aren't happy with the number of 0's being hit, what impact worn armour has on the hits and other issues.
Next week we'll trial combat formula adjustments by splitting the Wilderness into East and West sections, with each side running a different formula. Combat against monsters and stakes will continue to use the current formula.
Combat formula changes are always controversial — they affect character build plans, and some players will be happy while others will be disappointed. If a lot of players end up unhappy with their staker builds after the new formula is finalised, we'll consider some form of optional stat rollback or similar measure.
State of Botting
Since launch, fighting bots has been a daily chore. It's one of the reasons this update is delayed and why I'm overall not as productive as I'd like to be. My goal is to have detection running mostly autonomously, with me and Terror just verifying findings.
At this point I can say it's working reasonably well. Not perfect, but I'm fairly happy with where it's at.
A message to anyone still running any form of automation: your characters are being tracked at all times. Even if we don't catch you red-handed, once you're flagged as suspicious, we can go back through your history and reassess whether we missed botting at any earlier point.
This week, someone shared an "undetectable" bot on Discord and as a result multiple players were banned. Some weren't happy because they "just tried it". Please understand that even just trying takes time away from us — time that could be spent on the new features the community wants or solving your problems.
State of the Wilderness IP Limit
Since the 2IP limit release we've had a few complaints about certain players evading it through various means. When we investigate these reports, sometimes it's clear who's offending — sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a legitimately shared character.
The easy solution would be to ban character sharing outright, but from experience that's very difficult to enforce properly.
I've decided to take a novel approach: on the backend I'll manually tag forum accounts who own characters, based on my knowledge. This will apply to known offenders and to players whose login history shows a suspicious number of characters in the Wilderness at the same time. These tags are identifying details that players cannot change themselves — meaning that even if a suspected offender switches IP, device, or platform, they'll still be forced to follow the multi-log rules.
If you see players breaking the rules, please submit a ticket reporting them.
Wilderness Changes
We're retuning the training zone spawns and adding more NPCs in deep Wilderness, with the goal of encouraging more PKing.
Exact changes will be posted separately.
Community Questionnaire
I'm running late on the community questionnaire, I announced it already and it's still not out. I am very sorry for being late.
Questionnaire will include your suggestions, pressing questions and feedback collection.
A draft will be prepared tomorrow or Tuesday. Once I get feedback on the draft, I'll finalise and post it, and email it out to users.
Future Plans
- Expand staking and prepare for P2P
- Continued Wilderness improvements
- Fix the combat formula (see trial above)
- Clearing community support tickets, respond on forums
Personally, I'm quite burned out from QoL changes, bot chasing, client work, and bug fixes. After this update I expect to pause QoL changes and client tweaks for a while. I think we've really stepped up the quality this month and the client is much nicer to use — but I'd like to shift focus toward developing more exciting and novel ideas for the community to experience.
Thanks for your patience — see you tomorrow evening.
Kleio
