It’s been a week since the nineteenth player-submitted polls were released for public voting. The first question was, "Out of the following, what is your favorite RuneScape boss monster to fight?" I haven’t done much boss monster hunting in the past, and I could think of my least favorite boss monster to hunt before I could think of my most favorite. I decided I would select "Undecided," or in this case, "I don’t know." But when I looked through the other options I had, I noticed that Jagex failed to modify the poll before posting it to the public.

The choices were Chaos Elemental, Corporeal Beast, Dagannoth Kings, Kalphite Queen, King Black Dragon, Skeletal horror, and TzTok-Jad. A pretty short list of boss monsters, if I do say so myself. First of all, where are the God Wars Dungeon bosses? Beaten in level only by the Corporeal Beast (already included in the poll), Spirit Beast (which is a quest monster that can’t even be fought conventionally), TzTok-Jad (already included in the poll), and Nomad (who is more of a quest monster than a boss monster), the God Wars Dungeon enemies are four of the most dominating monsters in Runescape. K’ril Tsutsaroth, General Graardor, Commander Zilyana, and Kree’arra deserve a spot in the poll options, so why were they left out?

Also, since when was the Chaos Elemental a boss monster? From what I perceived, boss monsters are monsters that have lower-levelled counterparts of themselves, and serve as the leader of all of those under him or her. For example, the Corporeal Beast is the leader of the monsters in the spirit world. The Dagannoth Kings are the leaders of all the Dagannoth. The Kalphite Queen is the leader of all the Kalphites. What is the Chaos Elemental the leader of, all the other Elementals? From my viewpoint, each elemental is unique in their own way, and if there were to be a leader for all the Elementals, it should be the Balance Elemental.

Finally, why is the Skeletal Horror included? Are time-based Slayer monsters also considered boss monsters now? And if so, why weren’t other monsters such as Bork or the Phoenix included? Some may say that the Skeletal Horror is the highest-levelled Slayer monster overall, but if you take a closer look, that’s only for the first form. After it loses 750 life points, you can bury its right arm to weaken it down to level 260, which is already lower than Bork. After losing another 750 life points, you can bury its left arm and bring it down to level 180, which is already far weaker than the Phoenix. Another 750 life points later, bury its tail and pull it down to level 100, which, believe it or not, is weaker than any of the melee Barrows Brothers, and only two levels higher than the mage and ranged Barrows Brothers. So think again, is the Skeletal Horror really a boss monster? And for the poll’s sake, wouldn’t it have been better if they were all combined into something as simple as "Slayer Bosses"?

It may have seemed throughout this entire analysis that I was picking on something insignificant and unimportant, but in my opinion, everything that Jagex releases to the public builds upon their image, whether it be positive or negative. Jagex should take a closer look at what they release to the public, even if they’re simply player-submitted polls. Jagex controls all of Runescape, so they could simply "combine" several player-submitted polls into one to make sure that each poll covers as many opinions of Runescape as possible.

On February 16, 2010, Jagex presented a guaranteed content poll on the Runescape homepage asking what the Runescape players wanted to see recolored. The Dark Bow won, receiving 24% of the votes. Immediately after (and somewhat during) the poll when the economists realized this could be a good way to make some money, they started stocking up on Dark Bows, expecting the demand on Dark Bows to rise even more once the update was released. Within a few weeks, the price of the Dark Bow sky­rocketed and nearly doubled. However, as these economists waited for the release of the update and the opportune moment to dump all their Dark Bows back into the market to make massive profits, Jagex idled. The recoloration of the Dark Bow wasn’t being released. Weeks, and even a month passed without the update. There was something wrong, and many people realized that they had made a terrible mis­take. The Dark Bows were dumped back into the market prematurely, and starting from the beginning of March, the prices of Dark Bows crashed.

What the economists failed to realize was that although Jagex said this was a guaranteed content poll, they never mentioned when the update would take place (only "in the future") or if the most popular choice would be picked to be updated. Today, along with the release of a new fishing activity called Fish Fingers, Rune guardian pets received an update that involved Infinity Robes. The guaranteed content recoloration poll effects were finally here, and they had nothing to do with the Dark Bow. Instead, they had to do with Infinity Robes. Jagex had selected Infinity Robes to recolor instead of the Dark Bow. There may be a handful of different reasons for this.

Is Jagex still releasing the Dark Bow recoloration update in the future anyway? They may still be observing the wishes of the members that voted in the poll, but they may be doing so at a later date. Jagex may have been planning the update with Rune Guardians for a while now, and they simply may have included the Infinity Robe recoloration update along with it to make Rune Guardians more appealing and useful, thus increasing the overall positivity toward the Rune Guardian update instead of claiming that it was useless. If you’re still looking to get your Dark Bow recolored, then hang in there, because the update for it might still be coming.

Is Jagex already planning a different update for the Ranged skill? If they were to recolor the Dark Bow, that would count as an update for the Ranged skill. However, they may be planning a different update for Ranged, such as the the long-awaited Dragon Crossbow or another feature similar to it. If they were to recolor the Dark Bow, that would count as another update for Ranged, and leave the Magic skill out. Jagex has been working hard to meet player demands and try to balance the combat triangle with respect to both power and updated features. Jagex merely may not have any other updates planned for Magic, so decided to use this opportunity to satisfiy the mages.

Is Jagex trying to combat merchanters that can change the economy? People have complained on the forums and during live question and answer events that merchanting clans are destroying the game. A single clan can trick thousands of people into following them so the leader can make massive fortunes of tens or even hundreds of millions of coins within a few weeks. Jagex has show interest in stopping these clans into ruining the game for others, so does that mean they’re starting by tricking the public into believing that the Dark Bow is going to be recolored, then do the Infinity robes instead? This possiblity is the least likely, as Jagex already knows that once an update for an item is released, it is still going to be skyrocketing in price, regardless of if merchanting clans do it or not.

Yesterday, a new free-to-play quest was released for the first time in a few years. It’s called The Blood Pact, and it was designed to be the first quest that free players did when they first sign up to play Runescape. Over the years, I’ve noticed that Runescape has become very centralized on capturing new members’ attentions and keeping them playing Runescape. When I first signed up for and started playing Runescape over five years ago, it was difficult. There was no Grand Exchange, people were more greedy, and there were no truly helpful and experienced players that I could ask questions to whenever I wanted if I was having trouble doing something.

Back when I finished Tutorial Island and came to the Lumbridge mainland, I wanted to start off with a good pile of gold, so I sold the some of the items I got from Tutorial Island that I thought I would never need. I took a look at my runes, and thought to myself, "I’m never going to become a mage, I’ll sell these to the general store." I barely got any coins from selling my runes, but I thought to myself, "A little is better than nothing." After getting a good pile of cold, hard cash, I headed east into the desert. Already down 10 gold pieces due to the gate toll, I headed into a massive pit with a bunch of rocks. I had kept my pickaxe, and I remembered how to mine from Tutorial Island, so I headed in. Suddenly, I was viciously attacked by a Scorpion. It kept hitting 2 damage on me repeatedly while I struggled to fight back. My health points quickly declined from 10 to 0 and I died. I respawned at Lumbridge, and noticed that I had only three of my most valuable items in my inventory. All my money was gone. Discouraged, I logged out and didn’t log back in for another week.

Back when I was a low level, Zezima was the most powerful player in Runescape. He was at level 99 in all his stats, and he was ranked first globally. After the release of Summoning, Zezima mysteriously disappeared and never showed back up in the first page of the Runescape high scores. After a little bit of digging, I learned that Zezima lost motivation to play Runescape as much as he used to because he felt as if Runescape had become far too easy. New players were given benefits that us older players were never provided. There were people that got Level 99 in a stat a hard way, such as Cooking, where older players used to have to click on each piece of raw food and click on the fire 28 individual times to cook their whole inventory. The Jagex came out with the cooking update where you could cook X amount of food with one command. There’s also the Prayer update — before the update, when sacrificing bones in the player-owned house altars, one would have to right-click on the bones, click Use, and select the altar to sacrifice the bones. After the update, people training prayer could simply do that action once, and have it automatically sacrifice all their bones. As if it wasn’t already easy enough to get 3.5 times the experience on a Gilded Altar than regular bone burying, now people could go AFK and not even have to watch their character train prayer.

I’m not the only one complaining about this, though. Everywhere I go, may it be the Runescape official forums or any fan site’s forums, people are angry that the people that sign up later get more advantages as time goes on. Many don’t have to work hard for their first 1000 coins. Some people several years ago had to watch their coins increase by intervals of one and two, but nowadays, someone can kill several cows and get an inventory’s worth of cowhides to get far more than 1000 coins. But are we all considering how much this influences us more experienced and higher-levelled players? What we fail to realize is that by giving these lower-levelled players an opportunity to excel, we’re also using them to get the resources that we need to train our own stats. For example, as higher-levelled players, we don’t like doing redundant tasks, and instead prefer to make our money using higher-risk activities with more action and excitement. We like doing things that catch our interest and give us the thrill of playing the game. Killing cows to train Crafting isn’t thrilling. Fishing for monkfish in order to get food for boss monster hunting isn’t thrilling. Cutting maple trees to train Firemaking to Level 92 so we can use the shiny Inferno Adze isn’t thrilling. But we have new players for that. Their low levels restrict them from doing thrilling activities, so they do the boring ones, effectively saving us time. We can make money much faster than them, so we pay them a fraction of what we earn for their services. Economists call this a comparative advantage. Regardless of what it’s called, without the lower-levelled players getting the boost from the beginning, wouldn’t that hurt us as much as them?