July Oldschool OSRS Wilderness Update

When it comes to Old School OSRS , fewer locations can summon more emotions in a player than The Wilderness. At this point, the Wilderness is 20 years old. There are players in the game that weren’t born when The Wilderness was added to the game.

            Regardless of how long you’ve been playing you know that other players come to revel in The Wilderness or fear it, clans rise or fall within its tide, and its balancing has always a task viewed as daunting if not entirely laughed at. But recently, after extensive surveys and discussions amongst the developers, the OSRS team is attempting a hard re-balance of The Wilderness. Their goals are to make it fun, tempting to players of all skill levels, and unexploited by those who would use its special conditions to grief other players or gain a profit for themselves.  In the past, many players have chosen to buy OS OSRS pures to get an advantage in the wilderness but that looks like it is coming to an end. But what sort of drastic changes would need to be made for such a balancing act?

            Firstly, changes to The Wilderness are aimed at stopping the exploitation of PVP worlds. Issues with Skulltricking and Luring, based on the survey taken, were what kept most players away from The Wilderness. Skulltricking, or the uninformed, is tricking the victim into attacking another player and thus earning them the Skull used to mark those who attack player characters. The devs said the initial way to combat this is to turn off auto-retaliate, but they felt that discouraging people from fighting in a PVP zone was counter-intuitive. Instead, currently, other options are being explored including more specialized options to prevent a player from acquiring an unintended skull.

            The changes to counter the issues with luring are a lot more direct. Luring is when you attempt to bring an unsuspecting character into a danger zone without them knowing, most likely in order to kill and loot them. The usual sort of skulduggery, which can be appreciated to some extent but generally isn’t in the spirit of Old School OSRS PVP. The way to counteract this type of player-killing is a simple correction to the mods. Extend the bubble of safety around player hot spots in PVP worlds, namely places like banks. The second change would be to keep doors permanently open in PVP worlds. A helpful change that we could honestly not see a lot of downsides to.

            Another big change is actually just more strict prioritization of combat area rules. There are three types of combat areas in the Wilderness. Single-way Combat Area, where players can only attack and be attacked one at a time. Single-Plus Combat Area, which means that if a character is fighting a monster, they can still be attacked by another single-player, and Multi-Way Combat, which basically means anything goes in terms of numbers. There used to be a lot of ways to exploit this in order for teams of people to attack single players, but the mods have changed it so the more restrictive combat rules will always take priority,

            Another change is being made to these combat zone mechanics in order to restrict the use of NPCs as shields from getting killed by another player. All Single Way combat zones are being changed to a format called single-plus. Single plus means that PVP will always receive priority, so if someone is attacked by a player, the monster they might have been fighting will lose interest.

            One of the most controversial changes to the wilderness is the addition of what is being called the PJ timer. The PJ timer is designed to stop players from targeting players already weakened from PVP fights. The implication is simple. After you have finished a fight with another player in The Wilderness you get a 10-second cooldown where you cannot be attacked by other players, therefore preventing pile jumping or PJ.

            One more big change we are seeing, one that could shift the entire flow of The Wilderness and how it functions and is perceived mechanically, is the introduction of Loot Keys. The Mods feel it doesn’t encourage positive play to have some player’s primary goal in the wilderness be to scavenge the leftover loot from other people’s kills. To correct this, and other related issues, the Loot Key mechanic is being brought back from Deadman mode. Some change have been made to the Loot Key mechanic to make it more long-term sustainable.

            The key will take the place of all the loot acquired from killing other players. The keys will take up one slot and will not be able to be traded. A player can hold up to five keys at once, after which PVP drops will revert to normal until the keys are redeemed. Keys can only be redeemed at a bank or destroyed. If you are skulled your skull will also show how many keys you have on your person, a neat little bonus target on player killers. If you do kill someone with keys, you will receive the most valuable keys on the person until the killer reach the maximum amount of keys. The loot keys will also be customized via settings to allow for certain loot to be included and excluded. This is certainly an interesting attempt at re-balancing the nature of looting and we are interested in seeing how this changes the nature of The Wilderness and PVP.

            Several pieces of equipment are also being respected just due to their nature and how they interact with PVP. Elemental staves have been given a general magic buff. Dragonhide is seeing a nerf, but the nerf is being nerfed, which is not something we see too often, but we are sure it will make dragonhide people happy. Xerician Robes are also receiving a nerf to make their power level in PVP equivalent to their cost.

            Tons of things happening in The Wilderness all at once and one of the biggest attempts at balancing we have ever seen before. Will this have the desired effect or has it been on over-correction. Only time will tell but until more changes come we will be seeing you in The Wilderness.