number of players have pointed out a potential problem with our original plan of duplicating everyones save-games to both RS1 and RS2.
The problem is this idea effectively duplicates all the items in the game, and gives people a whole extra set of items. Say someone decides to keep playing RS2, and knows they are never going to play RS1 again, then that player then has a whole set of items in RS1 they don’t want or need. They are likely to try to sell these ’spare’ items or try to swap them for RS2 items, or just give them away. All these extra items being disposed of will cause complete havoc with the RuneScape economy!
Another problem is that by having a cut-off point after which the account is copied, many players feel they have a ‘time-limit’ in which to gain as much as possible before the copy, and that after the copy it will be twice as hard to advance in both games at once as it was before it. This is clearly also a problem.
Many players have suggested that we just keep RS1 and RS2 linked, so that item/stat changes in one game also affect the other. However this unfortunately has even more problems.
Some things are inevitably going to be slightly easier to advance in RS1 and others slightly easier to advance in RS2. We will never be able to balance it EXACTLY. So if we share the stats between the games many players will continually switch between the games depending on what they are doing at the time. If everyone feels compelled to play both games together like this, then it is like it is just one game where the graphics vary depending on what you are doing! The whole argument for keeping RS1 was that it is a different game, and so shouldn’t be scrapped. If we join them together into one giant game, it makes a nonsense of the whole reason for keeping RS1. Also another problem with joining them together is that as we develop RS2 further we will be forever restricted with how we can improve RS2 since we will be forced to try to keep it compatible with RS1. This sounds truely horrible!
So here is what we are planning on doing instead:
1) When we launch RS2 the beta-accounts will still be scrapped, these were only for testing as we said all along.
2) Players profiles will NOT be copied, instead players will be given the choice of moving their profile to either RS1 *OR* RS2. So for instance players with a pure and a non-pure might decide to leave their pure on RS1 whilst moving their main account to RS2. We know some players will change their mind and want to move back and forth a bit. So for a 1 month period you will be able to move your profile between the 2 games, but no more than once every 3 days. After that everyone should have a good idea which they want to keep their account on, and no more moving will be allowed to stop RS1 from holding our new game back.
3) Since runes have a different value in RS2 compared to RS1, moving the profile will multiply/divide the number of runes in a stack to keep the overall value consistant, and stop players bringing loads of runecrafted runes into RS1.
