Pest Control - For better or worse?

Jagex just did a major overhaul to PC. Here's what they have to say:


We've made some adjustments to the Pest Control minigame. The biggest change is to include the very heavily requested feature to have three different boats with three different level requirements. Boat 1 requires a combat level of 40+, boat 2 requires a combat level of 70+ and boat 3 requires a combat level of 100+.

Now, this change makes a big impact on the game, so we've had to put a lot of thought into rebalancing other areas accordingly. We needed to make sure each boat provides a game which is correctly balanced for its level requirements. This means that in each boat we needed to determine such things as monster levels, Pest Control points given per game, experience given per Pest Control point, and make a change to the way killing portals works.

If you are interested in what these changes are and our decision process in coming to them, then this is detailed in the bottom section of this news story.

We have added an intermediate points-for-experience deal. Before, you could only trade in points for experience in batches of 1 or 100. You can now also trade 10 points for experience which will give you a 1% experience bonus.

We've slightly increased the stats of the Void Knight armour.

We've made some new things to buy with your Pest Control points, too. We've released 3 new helmets. One is for rangers, one is for mages and one is for meleers. When a helmet is worn with the top, robe and gloves you will receive a set bonus appropriate for the corresponding character class. You don't need to wield the mace to receive the set bonus. The player owned house costume room will store the new helmets.

Another new item to spend points on is the Void Knight seal, an item specifically for helping you in the Pest Control game. The seal has 8 charges and will deal 8-12 damage to all adjacent monsters. This can only be used within Pest Control, and it does not contribute towards the minimum 50 damage needed to earn points.

The squire now has a right-click "quick leave" option so you can now leave the island even when under attack.

Bottom section of this news story.

As outlined earlier, once we split the game into three boats, there were a lot of knock on effects we needed to address, which are explained in this section.

Firstly, we've had to adjust the strength of the monsters according to the boat you are on. A boat containing only level 40-70 players couldn't beat the game before. Now if the game is harder on a high level boat then it needs to give more points or it wouldn't be fair. Now, winning a game on boat 3 will give you 4 Pest Control points, winning on boat 2 will give you 3 Pest Control points and winning on boat 1 will give you 2 Pest Control points.

That's a lot more points per game! We obviously can't give as much experience per point if points are that easy to get, so the amount of experience you get per point is now 35% of what it used to be. You may be wondering what will happen to the Pest Control points you have collected already - we thought of that, and you will still get to cash in your old points at the old rate. (Phew!)

To do the maths for you, that means that on boat 2 you'll be getting just slightly more experience per game than previously and on boat 3 you will getting a lot more experience per game. This isn't as extreme as it sounds because games can take longer to complete now (more on that below). You'll be getting less experience per game on boat 1, but that's okay because low levels will probably be able to win more games than they could before. The experience you will receive per point if you choose Ranged and Magic has been reduced by a further ten percent as we felt receiving experience in those skills without using runes or arrows is rather generous anyway. Herbs, seeds and minerals have also had their point cost tripled to stay in line with the new point rewards. The Void Knight equipment has retained its old point value, effectively making it cheaper.

Pest Control has always given very generous combat experience. In a strange way, the main thing which kept the experience rate from reaching ludicrous levels was that the presence of enough people with low combat levels made the game hard to win quickly and consistently. Not the best balancing mechanism, I'm sure you'll agree! It was rather unreliable and could unfortunately even lead to verbal abuse of low level players who were doing no harm beyond wanting to play a minigame - not really the community building we'd hoped for from this minigame.

So, since that effect is now greatly reduced (low levels have their own boat), and since the high level boats now give more experience per game, we've had to compensate for that in some way too! The rate of experience is now kept in check by the fact that the portals will start the game being shielded and invulnerable. One portal will become unshielded 15 seconds after the game starts, then another every 30 seconds, until after 1 minute and 45 seconds every portal is unshielded. This actually brings about the strategy in game play that we had always intended as you actually have to put up a proper defence up for the Void Knight rather than simply relying on people killing the portals very quickly. Our general aims with rates of experience are to make features worthwhile training on while not being so good that they render other training methods obsolete and it is this balance that we have worked hard to achieve.

To further fine tune gameplay, the behaviour of a number of the npcs has changed. Most of the npcs now do not block players except for the brawlers and the portals, so it's much easier to move around the island now. Spinners will poison nearby players when a nearby portal is killed, portals can no longer be poisoned and shifters teleport around a lot more.
____________________________________________________________

What do you think? Has this killed or improved the infamous minigame? Faster or slower? I imagine that if nothing else, PC clans are dead.

 

I think it's improved it. I hat eit when lvl 40's come in in their gay cw red/blue armor with a steel 2h and get points.

 

its improved by alot, its also faster to get 100 points and you dont have lvl 40 noobs sitting around doing nothing when they get 50 points >.< i hated them

 

yea, server busy thing

 

dumb busy server

 

sorry...:\

 

okay well tell that to the people in fally in world 99

 

I like:
Novice, intermidiate, veteran.
More than 1 point a game.

I hate:
Low amount of exp (I don't mind getting 1 point a game with the old exp)
The shields on the portal make the game take 2 minutes or longer, even if you're in veteran.
Jagex

 

ok it is good for the 100s who just want to train but its kinda bad for the lvl lets say 50-70 pures because they will b pcing with a bunch of noobs

 

After trying it for myself, I found that I dislike it. The premise of the change is good, but a lot of the details just don't work out. The whole idea was to make PC better for both the higher levels (who tried to make their own worlds) and the lower levels (who desperately tried to find these worlds). Unfortunately, in my opinion, this update just made it worse for both groups.

I took a quick screenie of the "protest" which has been going on in world 78 for some time now.

 

i like the idea ima try it out

 

Even the mods were protesting

 

For me (lvl 78 staker), PC is crap now. And even for lvl 100+'s it's slower XP now. Before, with a 100+ clan the game last about 30-45secs, and it's about 100points per hour. For example attack lvl 90 would got 1350XP per point = 135K per hour.
Now, with the new PC, one game lasts about 2 minutes=30 points per hour. And You get 4 points per game, but less XP per point. So per game, lvl 90 attack gets 1890xp*30=56 700 per hour.

 

its ok for the veterans, but pure maulers and ddsers like me, around lvl 60/65 are stuck with noob lvl 40s n shit. there should b 40+, 60+, 80 +, 100+ and 120+. thatd be awesome. and ofcourse relative point and exp rewards for the respective boats too.

 

if ur a pure then the update is the worst update for u but im not a pure and i dont like it cause i cant get lvls fast but oh well they dont give a shiz about us just or money :] theres also been a huge riot in fally square world 99 yesterday and about half the ppl there today i got a vid on it i might post in forums somwere.

 

does anyone think that there is a possibility of them changing back to the old PC? Or perhaps taking down the whole shield bullshit? Or is PC now and forever useless?

 

R.I.P. Old pc.


I hate the shelids and less xp. Boat idea was good though.

 

Pc is destroyed

 

boat idea is good , but comon stupid shields take them off

 

It has gotten worst. Even though you get 4 point if your level 100+ it is still almost equal to one ticket that it was before. They decreased the value of each ticket leaving it almost the same. Also now your not able to just run in and kill the portals, you have to wait about 2 minutes.