The mining/smith rework is looking real good. A great example of taking the base systems and greatly improving on it and making them better. I have been stuck on OSRS the last several months and loving the mining system put into it particularly the mother lode mine. Smithing has long been the hardest and most time involved skill to 99 due to the difficulty or expense in obtaining the resources to get there. The blast furnace and artisan workshop helped a lot with that or LOL you can just spend a real $$$ fortune on Keys and lamp yer way to 99s. ANyway the biggest complaint I am seeing about the rework is that it will cause the price of addy and runite to fall on the GE since there are only so many rune rocks and the competition for them is usually pretty stiff and world hopping 30-40 servers to get a load of rune has always sucked. Instead of making it nearly impossible to obtain the ore you want RS3 is making it easier and being very communicative with the player community along the way as well as soliciting player feed back. LOL someone figured out that the way to defeat scripters/bots is to devalue what they are scripting NOT making the system so difficult that it becomes a bot/scripter only activity. Plus RS actually seeks out and kills bot accounts
RS has always been a much more player involved game than UO when it comes to delivering what the community wants and communicating and seeking feedback from the players. UO has largely been more of a "Here is your turd stew, now shut up and eat it whether you like it or not" kind of approach to the player base. Of course that is probably why on most shards there is no one to be found in UO and in RS on most worlds you see other people actually playing the game...... and the sheer numbers of people logged in on RS3 and OSRS at any given time. Something I find amusing is that OSRS and the old java client have a much larger player base than RS3 and NXT client and OSRS has its own Dev team, more important is that any changes or new content must pass the player polls before they introduce it into the game. Where RS3 does not have the same content polls and thresh holds for new content.
