Once upon a time in RuneScape, there were “real world traders” (aka “bad people”) who went into the wilderness to allow another player (who has paid them cash) to kill them and take whatever valuable item that they had been carrying (that the other player had paid for). After said transaction, someone in a broom closet somewhere made $20 (or in some cases much more), and someone else got ahead in the game with little or no in-game work. This caused many players to be upset, not only because someone did in minutes what took them hours, days, or months, but also because the person who sold the goods, in almost all cases used some sort of autoing program to get the goods in the first place.

This caused a huge headache for RuneScape’s big wigs (most likely in their early 20s or teens), and they had to ask themselves how they could eliminate the problem without causing RuneScape fans to jump ship and swim for the waters of WOW. The way they did this was to remove player vs. player in the wilderness and place monsters with the same dangerous threats in the wilderness…. justified yes, but this is the start of my rant:

These wilderness monsters, known as revenants are far worse than any original pkers (player killers) because of numerous reasons that I will now explain:

• They are always in the wilderness on all worlds - while certain times of the day or certain worlds where once a safer area for clue scroll enthusiasts, all worlds now have revenants all of the time.
• They can attack with multiple different combat types (magic, melee, and range) in succession - while pkers typically had to choose carefully between what equipment they would take into the wilderness for fear of losing it, these revenants have all capabilities all of the time, so they can switch between range, melee, and magic freely. This makes defending yourself much more difficult since you need a more diverse selection of armor (I typically wear black dhide legs and a splitbark top) to defend yourself.
• They are very persistant - They will chase you without mercy once they start attacking you. I have had one chase me from the middle of the wilderness all of the way the the chapel (in deep west wilderness). Luckily for me, they cannot open doors. That was the only thing that kept my player alive.
• They always know where you are - With pkers of the past, you could run in one direction, then another, and try to make it harder for them to know exactly with direction you went to, but the revenants know exactly where you are even if you are screens away, so if you stop thinking that you are safe, it may only be a matter of seconds before they catch up and finish what they started.

For these reasons, I believe that the wilderness is far more dangerous than it initially was with pking. I do not mind the removal of wilderness pking since I didn’t pk initially anyway, but I do not like the increased complexity that makes clue scrolls and other wilderness activitys far more difficult, and in some cases nearly impossible. I have been reading the recent posts on the runescape website, and it appears that they want to revamp the wilderness, so hopefully they will fix this. I just hope that they at least keep the wilderness on par with the difficulty that it once had, and not make things so much harder for the people who haven’t had anything to do with the real-world trading that is all but a thing of the past now.