Tip: Earning Cash On A New Player

As one of the steps in preparing to do a serious upgrade of the Runescape Newbie Guide site, I'm going through all of the comments that are in need of moderation. I'm down to 606 comments left, out of the 1080 that existed when I started wheedling down recently.

There was a great tip by Uncle Vernon that I just published to the "Starting A New Character" posting, I'd like to share it, as it's a way for a brand new character to make 10-15k without having to deal with selling to other players:

One of the easiest ways to make money is killing chickens by Varrock or Lumbridge;

1)collect about 500 feathers
2)collect 20 raw chickens
3) bury all your bones

go to port sarim and cook all chicken (raise cooking) eat them or sell them by the wilderness later, now for "the real money"; go to fishing shop and value feathers they stay from 1 gold to 4 gold, when they are 3 or 4 gold sell them 10 at a time with 500 feathers you can: make 15 to 20k, raise a little combat, and the most important... raise cooking level!!!

Thanks for the tip Uncle Vernon!

Tutorial Island And What You Can Leave With by Epza

One of the most commented-on articles on the Runescape Newbie Guide blog is the one about Starting A New Character. The comments are there mainly because I made some errors in my recommendations and some friendly folk were helping me to fix it. One of the best comments on the topic was by someone who used a player name "Epza" to test out Tutorial Island fully and reported back on their results:

NOTE! I didn't write this part that follows, this was from a comment on my blog that I thought was great and wanted to share as a post of its own.

"Epza, the character (toon) I used, was created solely for the purpose of checking the limits and boundrys of Runescape's Training Island. What follows are my findings.

On the Runescape Training Island, you can NOT go higher in any skill than level three (3). Not even one point higher. On the training island all skills are capped at level three (3).

You can melee kill as many rats as you want, and you don't even have to use food to heal with because you will never go below one (1) hitpoint. In otherwords, you won't die fighting rats on Training Island.

You can collect all the inventory items you want while on the island, but when you leave the island you will end up on the mainland with the following items in your inventory:

one bronze wood cutting axe
one tinder box
one small fishing net
one cooked shrimp
one bucket
one pot
one cooked bread
one pickaxe
one bronze dagger
one bronze sword
one wooden shield
one short bow
twenty five (25) arrows
twenty five (25) air runes
fifteen (15) body runes
six (6) water runes
four (4) earth runes
two (2) body runes

and in the mainland banks you will find:

twenty five (25) coins

Any stockpiles you made to your inventory, regardless of whether you stockpiled arrows, shrimp, bread, bronze bars or whatever, will NOT reach the mainland with you. You will get exactly that which I listed above and not a bit more.

Fishing skill-ups are a little faster on Training Island than on the mainland, and so are fire skill-ups, but leveling attack, strength, and defense are slower because you hit less often than you would with either normal rats or chickens on the mainland. This same slowness could apply to ranged, but killing chickens with free runes from the wizard might be worth considering.

But truthfully, my recommendation would have to be not to waste your time on Training Island. On Training Island you can't get loot to make money with. In the low level mainland areas, you can get loot from your kills, and loot from the kills of other players who just leave it on the ground.

And one last thing, the very easiest and quickest way for a "newbie," at least on the f2p (free to play) servers, to earn money is probably one of the most boring. It works like this:

Step 1) You get the "Rune Mysteries Quest" from Duke Horacio on the 2nd floor of the castle. (The castle you ended up in front of when came off Training Island.) You take the talisman the duke gives you to the head wizard, Sedridor, in the Wizards Tower south of Draynor Village. Sedridor wants you to take a package to Aubury, the owner of a rune shop in north east Varrock, and gives you directions to Varrock. (In the last update, Runescape made the barbarians hostile and they will now aggro newbies, so if you can't figure out how to avoid their village, don't walk through it, run.) When you find Aubury, keep in mind where he's located, and that there is a bank just north of him. Aubury gives you his notes and asks you to give them to Sedridor. Take them to Sedridor and in return he gives you the privilage of being teleported to the rune essence stones via various npc's.

Step 2) The the boring, but rewarding part. Go to the bank and store everything but your pickaxe. Wield your pickaxe. Your inventory should now be empty, the pickaxe in your hand. Go to one of the teleportation npc's and get teleported to the rune essence stones. Mine the essence (ess), fill your inventory, then use the teleportation device back to the teleporting npc. Next, go to the bank and store the twenty eight (28) ess you've mined. Now go back to the teleporting npc and repeat this operation thirty five (35) times. (I said it was boring.) 8-)

NOTE: Don't try to sell until you have at least 1000 ess. Buyers don't like piddly amounts, and you can always take breaks if it gets to boring. Oh, I almost forgot, you should be able to sell your one thousand (1000) ess for thirty thousand (30,000) if your patient--most likely to just a single buyer. If you are willing to sell for less, don't let them get you down to low, because there are buyers that will turn around and sell the thousand essences's they bought from you for 35,000.

Good hunting.

Epza"

Finding a Job in Runescape

One of the main things people leave notes about in my blog is about "getting a job" on Runescape to allow them to earn some cash for their decently-leveled players so that cash can be turned around and turned into the expensive, cool, unique equipments that float around from all the various sources.

How I Found Workers

When I was playing regularly, I started out as a "solo" player who would collect all of my own materials and process them all and then use them up. I became a Member partially because I wanted to make my own arrows instead of buying them, and for the first while, I was happy with this. Cash was accumulating because I mined my own ore, blacksmithed the results, and took pains to sell them in small doses to shops on different worlds to get as much cash as I could.

At some point, however, I ran across someone who offered to do some mining for me, or some wood chopping, to speed up my creation and levelling processes. Ken was 11 years old and AMAZING at making deals with others - he became my middle-man. I'd tell Ken what I wanted and how much I'd pay for it (note, I always pay well compared to the market, it's part of why Ken would work so eagerly for me), and he'd go out and buy materials for cheaper than that, and resell it to me.

Then, Ken stopped playing for a while, but I had become addicted to having someone else do a lot of collection work FOR me so I could just produce product, sell it, and get bigger, stronger and better, faster.

So, I had to find other workers.

Truthfully, I find going to a busy bank and calling out that I'm looking for a worker to gather wood in lots of 100 will get me a LOT of responses. From the "employer" end, there's no shortage of workers.

From the worker end? I could only choose one. So, how did I go about choosing?

Traits I'd Look For In Workers

Generally I am not going to have a forever-ongoing need for any one commodity on the game (logs, ore, fish), so the first thing I'd look for in an ongoing "job" situation would be for the person to have high skills in the following:

• Mining
• Woodcutting
• Fishing

At the very least, be able to mine coal and fish lobsters. Most of the logs I'd be buying off of you would be regular low-level logs for fletching into arrows, but many players would buy up every bit of Yew you have if you can advance that far and get into Members areas.

The second big thing I'd look for in a worker is the ability to sell product in lots of at least 500 at a time. Some things I'll buy in lots of 100 at a time if I absolutely must, but if I have 5 people providing 100 at a time and find one new guy who's willing to provide 500 at a time, those other 5 people are out of a "job" with me. Thus, before you offer to sell anything, gather up at least 500 of that product if at all possible, with 100 being a bare minimum.

Finding Buyers On The Web

Forums are another place you could turn to in order to sell your wares or buy wares from others - here are a few sites I found when I searched on Google this morning:

• RS Boards
• Rune Market
• Nomad Gaming Runescape Market

Note, I haven't used any of these boards myself, just did a search on 'runescape market' and keywords like that in Google to provide links here.

What's Your Favorite Runescape Market Site?

If you know of better sites to list here, be sure to let me know!

Get A PK Noob Going Quickly

Here's a great comment that I just approved on the post about The Wilderness, aka "wildy":

Hey I have some tips for new players for the Wild(lvl 3 players). First, sell all the stuff you start out with. make sure you go to the specialty shops to do this. then you should have enough for bronze pl8 and legs. Then buy a bronze or iron weapon. Then get defence and attack to 5. then unequip everything and go into the Wild. Make sure no one follows you. Stay away from mosnters and run through the graveyard. You should find a steel dagger. equip it. Next find some ruins and get steel legs that are there. Also theres gold ore there. Then speed back to non-wild area. There now uyou have steel legs and a dagger an money from selling the gold ore.

Excellent advice! And since some of those things reset, by doing it every time you can, you'll earn a bit of extra cash as well, which is always important!!

Merchanting (Price Gouging) -vs- Scamming

(aka, "On Scamming, part 2" Part one can be found here)

On the continued topic of Scamming on the free online role playing game Runescape, I'd like to add some of my own thoughts.

I've often heard people cry "scam!" when really, they're mislabelling what just happened to them - they've either been price-gouged by an or are uninformed about what they're buying, and neither are really the seller's fault nor problem.

Not the seller's fault??! What on earth do I mean by that??!

I mean this:

If you're desperately looking for an item, and someone charges you twice the regular cost for it, and you pay that price they request, that's opportunism, aka price-gouging. Personally, I like to sell things to people who are desperate to get them, precisely due to the fact that I can ask for 1.5-2x the normal selling price, and I'll generally get it.

In real life, the government protects us as citizens from price-gouging, as an attempt to keep things "fair". In online multi-player games, the game government (Jagex) is a much smaller presence, and thus Merchanting (sometimes negatively referred to as price-gouging) is NOT bad nor evil, since Jagex is more worried about other types of "crimes". The raw truth is that the prepared adventurer will think ahead about what they're going to do in the future, and NOT get caught so desperately needing something that an opportunistic player could overcharge for.

Regarding the "uninformed buyer" thing, if someone tries to sell you a pair of white boots for 5k and you buy them, not knowing they cost under 50 coins at a shop in Al Kahrid, it's NOT a scam. Ignorance of the value or availability of objects is not an excuse to shift the blame of you feeling "ripped off" onto the seller.

Personally, I refer to the following web forum page when considering all my buys and sells:

UPDATED SEPT 2007!

http://www.zybez.net/priceguide.php

Page 1 and 2 have prices for almost everything on the game, and the post is updated as required.

There ya go, more information you may not have known.

If you have suggestions for topics for me to post about, please leave comments!

Part three of this On Scamming topic can be found here.
Part four got lost somewhere but will probably come in the future.