Raising Construction

I recently spent some time raising a few construction levels in runescape. For the past 9 months or so I did not train any construction even though I had stocked up 30,000 or more oak logs. I guess I never felt inclined to train it up.

Anyway, my objective is to get to level 75 construction at least and therefore enable me to build the best altar available. This will make it easier to train prayer in the future, although it is expensive at the same time.

The long term benefits of building the best altar should enable any runescape member to enjoy quicker prayer training - if they train their prayer up using dragon bones or better. Although the pest control mini game does give prayer training some alternative and cheaper methods to train it with, I would still like to have the best altar available for my house so that friends can train their prayer in it if they wish.

I am training my construction using oak logs and building oak larders along with employing the demon butler. As I don't spend too much time ingame nowadays, I haven't found a more efficient method yet. I would be happy to find out any better methods - or even alternative metods than people have used when training their construction skill.

At the end of the day, the objective is to achieve 99 construction so that my player owned house will eventually be capable of having the best available materials in all locations. The downside is that it will cost a substantial amount of runescape money to achieve it. Slowly but surely, I am stepping closer - though I am unlikely to get up to level 99 for a year or more yet due to other real life requirements on my time.

Runescape Houses Boost Membership

Runescape Houses provided a boost to runescape members - people subscribing on a monthly basis. It can be viewed as a significant success in the development of runescape by Jagex.

Extract from an interview with runescape co-founder Andrew Gower:

1. What do you feel has been the biggest differentiating factor behind RuneScape's popularity in making it to the one million subscriber milestone?

• AG: I think one of the biggest things is the game's continual updates. We're constantly adding to the game, bringing new stuff in and improving it. It's interesting, but with each addition, we see surges of growth.
• We saw a huge surge with our recent addition of player houses, and again with our recent graphics update. The fact that we keep updating it, adding more to the experience, I think is key. Plus, people like having things to look forward to.

The full Andrew Gower interview can be viewed here.

Personally, I am not surprised that player owned houses provided a major boost to subscription levels as it was one of the most waited for additions to the game for a long time. I think it had a waiting time of 2 years or so.

However, after the initial boost to subscriptions and after people tried out their runescape houses, it would be interesting to find out how many people were disappointed and subsequently went back to free to play runescape servers.

Obviously those figures would be very hard to quantify as people choose to leave membership for a variety of reasons - normally to do with real life rather than any game specific reason.