OSRS Trailblazer Prizes

            OSRS saw an end to its second season of league play on the 6th of January. The league, this year known as Trailblazer, lasts approximately two months with the goal to complete as many tasks as possible from a pre-established list while playing on a specialty server with its own characters, restrictions, buffs, and barriers.  This season was separate from the OSRS accounts for sale that you see on this website.

            The theme of Trailblazer was speed as if the name didn’t tell you enough, and the name of the game was getting to the top before anyone else could. As with the previous season, points would dictate your placement and the trophy you received. The trophy is the primary prize players receive without having to trade in any of their points. There is one other prize that requires no points to obtain, but we will get to that in just a bit.

            OSRS offers two types of rewards for players that participate in their seasonal leagues. The first type of reward is the main game rewards. These are prizes that only alter the aesthetics of gameplay. They show off to other players how much you were able to pull off in league play. The second type of prize is league-to-league. An L2L prize is specifically something that will only carry over in your league accounts. We want to talk about all the prizes that are available to players who participated in the Trailblazer league.

            To start let’s talk about the main game prizes. We mentioned the trophy before but not the specifics. There are seven trophies in total, all of them equipable. The bronze, iron, steel, and mithril trophies are equipable to the shield slot, and the adamant, rune, and dragon trophies are two handed equips. Equipping the trophy also gives you access to a custom emoji.

            The main game prizes also consist of a plethora of items you can purchase with your league points. For 6K points, you can get a Trailblazer Graceful Set Ornament Kit to recolor your entire graceful armor set in theme with the league. There is also the Trailblazer Relic Hunter Outfit which comes in three tiers for 1K, 3K, and 15K respectively. In a similar style, we have the Trailblazer Dragon Skilling Tools Ornament Kit for 1.5K which can be used to re-skin the dragon harpoon, dragon pickax, or dragon ax. One of the coolest rewards, which incidentally only costs 1K, is the custom Trailblazer teleport animation. Your avatar will carve the directional compass in the ground before teleporting and we think that a pretty awesome exit.

            While there is a lot of cool character aesthetic items, don’t think that Trailblazer left your player home out of the mix. For 5K you can get a beautiful Trailblazer themed rug for your home. Or for just a  little less, 4K points, you can get an awesome globe of the OSRS world to display in your player’s home. For lower-scoring players who still want to show off their pride for toughing it out in the Trailblazer league, you can pick yourself up a Trailblazer banner for just 500 points.

            Now, we mentioned that there was one other prize that didn’t require any points. That prize is an attachment you can procure for your player home, a league room. You don’t need points to build it but you do need 27 construction and 15K gold. The League room contains displays and cases that allow you to show off all the league prizes you managed to claim, from Trailblazer and beyond. Whether you want to show off or just looking for a place to kick back and lavish in all your loot, then we can’t think of a better cherry to top your main game prizes.

            What about the league to league prizes? Well, much of it is aesthetic as well, allowing you to roll over previous items you obtained with your league character. Any pet you managed to secure during league play will stay with your character from one league to the next. You also get to keep any specialty right-click icon you may have obtained during league play.

            Originally there were going to be more league-to-league prizes but there were some issues. The first inter-league prizes were going to include bonus armor sets and world access. Based on your previous league placements you were going to get to have access to unlockable worlds that were only accessible from certain point tiers and special starter equipment that was going to be better than the base starting equipment based on your previous ranking.

            So why weren’t these prizes included? Well, when we first heard about the inclusion of advantages based on previous placement, we were a bit concerned. Giving someone an advantage because they did well before tends to enter into perpetuation. They are rewarded with enhancements for doing well so they continue to do better than others and continue to claim the rewards first. For a tiered role-playing game this isn’t a huge deal, but for a point-based competition, this becomes quickly, and clearly, unfair.

             Which is exactly what the development team figured out. They were having too many balancing issues getting the starter league-to-league to balance properly, which we don’t think is possible at all. So they discontinued the idea and decided to stick with cosmetic rewards for league play, which we think was the soundest decision. People play in a league to see what they can accomplish when they have to start from the beginning. It is an improper measurement of skill to give any player any sort of advantage.

            Balancing issues aside, we are excited to see the Trailblazer league come to a close. And not just for all the awesome rewards that players get to show off on themselves or in their home.  Furthermore, accounts with these rewards should fetch a premium price when players decide to sell their OSRS accounts.  No seeing the end to another fun and successful season of league play means that the dev team will be encouraged to run another next year. Now we just a whole year to think about what sort of tricks they will have up their sleeve next year.