When I found out that Emps-Scape (Emps-World) was back, I immediately took my mindset back to where I was right before it went offline. Unfortunately, I was met with a few concerns: a new set of graphics, a wiped out bank, and, soon to follow my return, a new combat system.
New graphicsWhen I first played Emps-Scape, what really drew me into the game was the graphics. I was so nostalgic for the graphics that I ended up getting 99s across the board in a matter of weeks. When the graphic changes came along, I wasn't turned on by this. At first, I tried to adjust, but I just felt like I was playing RuneScape 3, and so I played less. What I enjoyed playing was a fixed client, with simple graphics, just like the old days of RuneScape. In fact, when Emps-Scape closed, I went directly to Old School RuneScape and worked diligently on an account that now has many high levels. It doesn't seem like the new graphics were introduced appropriately. They should have been polled first, with the community agreeing to have them added or not. It seems like what ended up happening is that we went forward with new graphics. We then gradually started to drop old graphics because they were 'causing more problems', and those kind of problems were never addressed appropriately, so we ended up sticking to new graphics only. The classic client that exists now not only lacks
any old graphics, but it is also more dysfunctional than the new, OpenGL client. I am also having issues running it on my Mac, so it is not efficiently tested across multiple platforms, which may account for some player count drop.
Wiped out bankEverything that I worked for in Emps-Scape was completely gone when I checked my bank on Emps-World. This was a
severe disappointment. I had not only put in time and effort, but also my own money (donations) towards that bank. All of it was removed. Now, don't get me wrong, I can understand that it may have addressed the concern for the inflated economy on Emps-Scape, but even with such an economy, it was still a
highly active economy. You could log into Emps-Scape and you'd see hundreds of people standing outside of the Falador East Bank selling a variety of items. This was convenient because everyone was selling something that you could find use for. I can't give an honest opinion of what the economy is like right now because I've still been working to get my original bank back to where it once was. Every time I am in Falador though, it seems like there is nobody there selling items. This may be because I'm on at the wrong times, or that the economy is a lot less active than it once was.
New combat systemA few weeks ago, a new combat system was introduced that completely wiped out the existing bonuses. It doesn't seem like this new system was adequately polled, or even prepared. There have been dozens of 'tweaks' to items because they're too powerful or too weak. The items that players once thought were useful are now completely useless, and vice versa for other items. I would take an educated guess that even if a single person makes a post that says "X item is broken", there is another 10 players in-game that are frustrated because they're experiencing the same issue, but don't know that a fix has been addressed. To be completely honest, I don't even understand why the old combat system was replaced if it worked so efficiently for so many years in Emps-Scape. Even if it was 'messy', it was still something that people used and loved.
I would also like to add that having 99 in a lot of skills seems to have no real monetary gain:
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4. As much as I remember from the old days, this game was about pking. Since pking is dead people quit. The second most popular activity was skilling, but that isn't profitable so no point in that - people quit.
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The first thing I did in-game when I logged in was mining Runite ores, smelting Runite bars, smithing Rune platebodies, and alching them. This gives me about 100K per inventory. This is equivalent to 10 Ranarrs, according to current market prices. What a joke. The only way to make any decent money in Emps-World is to kill monsters and get rare drops. If I get 99 Smithing, that should give me the ability to make good money because I worked so hard to get that level.
