Greetings,

Summer is over and we’ve just witnessed one of the largest RuneScape updates ever this past summer. This month our articles hover around Anachronia in places and have honest discussions about the future of RuneScape (though we do that almost every month). We also managed to come up with an impressive slate of articles given that August was mainly a patch-week month.

Games evolve and grow over time and what is powerful today may not have been powerful only a couple years ago. This is of course talking about power creep. RuneScape has had a history of combat evolution, forced and natural, that has brought us to where we are today. This month Cireon talked about power creep in combat in The Combat Levels Are Over 9000!

On the same plane as combat comes the inevitable grind of boss killing. RuneScape being an MMO is grindy by nature in areas and that happens for combat as well. There’s something called the IFB achievement or Insane Final Boss achievement that requires players to kill every boss numerous times and get their pets. David this month is talking about his greatest challenge, Going Insane (Final Boss).

Combat aside we also have the continued focus on Anachronia. I sometimes also just say things off the cuff that get people interested in things. This happened during our monthly roundtable where we went on a brief discussion about the future of Anachronia. This got Tanis thinking about combining Anachronia, dinosaurs, digging, and a new skill. The result is Archaeology and you can read more about it in Digging Up the Future.

The Dragonkin also feature prominently on Anachronia. Everywhere you look you’ll see Dragonkin emblems or statues. There’s definitely something going on there as evidenced by the end of Desperate Times. With the Dragonkin in question and a look towards the future, Alex summed up what we know about the Dragonkin and brought forward ideas of where that story-line could go in the future in The Dragonkin Story.

Finally… finally… finally… this month I can reveal something that I’ve been working on since the end of June. The end of June saw the launch of Breaking the Storm, the event that built the boat we use to get to Anachronia. Long story short, I activated one of my old tutorial test accounts, got 60 Construction, 28 Farming, and then set out to see how over powered the Player Owned Farm is. I’m now 96 Farming after only 2 short months. You can read more about this adventure in Farming for Answers where I detail the steps I took and ask some thoroughly shaking questions about the future of RuneScape.

This month we held two Skill of the Month competitions. The skills were Farming and Crafting. Congratulations to Jamandy52 for winning the Farming competition with 11,777,899 experience gained and to Ukn Raptoid for winning the Crafting competition with 22,783,279 experience gained. Here are your trophies:

That’s all for this month! See you in October.