After two pretty tough weeks of having to look after the family business and take care of our dog by my­self, it seems like I’ve gotten a little bit of a fever.

Believe it or not, taking care of the dog is actually more difficult than running the family business. It’s hard to imagine exactly how much work it takes to keep this dog entertained because she’s so small, but it’s unbelieveable (without even mentioning how many times she needs to go to the bathroom in a single day).

Something that I like to do when I’m sick is eat McDonald’s and play RuneScape. McDonald’s is my comfort food, and RuneScape brings back memories of the old days – it basically puts me in a very relaxed mood that helps me recover.

If you’ve been keeping up with my posts from the past few weeks, you know that I’ve been grinding quite a bit of RuneScape lately, and decided to take a short break from it after my membership ran out at the end of July.

Today, I saw a news post about changes to player-owned houses, and I thought that I was going to re­sub­scribe right away.

I like creating things on my own, and the Construction skill lets me do that. There have been talks from Jagex about the Construction and player-owned house systems getting an overhaul, and I’ve been excited to see what they can do to make it better.

I thought that update came today.

Unfortunately, it didn’t.

I read through the news article and patch notes, and realized that there wasn’t really an actual update to player-owned houses.

They made it so homes can be set to day or night (and it’s just that – a setting – it’s not a day/night cycle). They also implemented individualized designs, where basically it can look like you have a home fit for a de­sert, sitting on top of a lawn of luscious green grass.

I was hoping that construction training would become more useful and less grind-heavy. I was hoping we could rearrange our rooms and redesign our layout without having to destroy our entire home. I was hoping that the build interface would be improved so we could upgrade things rather than having to destroy and rebuild them.

None of that happened today, and my high hopes were let down. I’ll definitely be remaining a non-member for a little bit longer.

It would be pretty nice if Jagex got a little bit more creative with their updates. For example, they’re con­stant­ly introducing new outfits into Solomon’s General Store.

I’m not sure if they’ve realized this yet or not, but you can only wear one outfit at a time. This somewhat deincentivises people from continuing to buy from Solomon’s General Store, seeing as pretty much all they release are new costumes.

Why not integrate Solomon’s General Store better into the game and provide aesthetic upgrades for in-game content? For example, why not release a pack of skin overrides for your player-owned home so you can get some new fancy building materials for your home?

There are a lot of crazy and innovative things Jagex can do with their game, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they’re thinking outside the box that well.

Yes, I’m sure that I’m being particularly critical because I’ve been so demoralized by the poor quality of this player-owned house update, especially because this has been the one update I’ve been waiting for, for so long.

But still, I’m sure that most of us can agree that Solomon’s General Store can be put to better use than for massive pet dragons that take up a quarter of your screen.