May is over and we’re now into June, so with that being said, let’s have a look at some of the content from the last month! Much to my dismay we started off the month with a Star Wars article talking about the convergence of EA and Star Wars and if that has ruined the game franchise ‘forever’. In May we also had good discussions about the new emerging direction for RuneScape. With that of course comes a focus on one of the game’s core bedrock principles, combat! David not knowing we’d be talking about Weapon Diversity sooner or later provides some more input on full manual combat and how it can improve your DPS. May also was tumultuous due to the back and forth on the comp cape rework. Jagex ultimately settled for a simple design but it brought up the business case in Be Bold, Be Brave: The Competing Business Case. Finally, we’re now almost 6 months down from the Mining and Smithing rework. Tanis has a look 6 months on at one of RuneScape’s biggest updates ever and evaluates where it’s at.

May also marks the start of Jagex’s summer strategy. This will include a Hunter rework, a new area, and a new storyline. We saw the first of the new storyline in May, Desperate Times, a quest that continues on from the events of Sliske’s Endgame. Alex summed up the story and his fears for the future in Alex’s Analysis – Digging a Deeper Hole. On the same note of Desperate Times, there have been questions asked about the actions of our character in that quest. Cireon wrote about this in Player Agency in Desperate Times, in particular how player agency is important to this RuneScape storyline. Would your character have made the decisions made in the quest?

May also saw the re-launch of our Skill of the Month skilling competitions. We ran two in May: Firemaking and Slayer. In our Firemaking competition Jamandy52 gained 14,035,667 experience to take the win. In second place we had Pyrnassius with 7.7m and in third we had Comp Sci with 1.3m. Our Slayer competition was less interesting but Tanis won it all with 3,715,006 Slayer experience gained. In second we had Jamandy52 with 1.3m XP gained and Pyrnassius took third with 789k.

Here are your trophies:

This June we’ll also be running a Divination contest that kicks off on the 14th. And our first Runecrafting contest since 2010(!!!) which kicks off on the 21st! You can sign up for those contests here https://www.rsbandb.com/skill-of-the-month/june2019divination and here https://www.rsbandb.com/skill-of-the-month/june2019runecrafting.

We’ll see you next month for more Runescape and skilling competitions!