My playing of OSRS, generally, is pretty casual. I’m usually preferenced to more PvP/risk focused MMOs and games, so I’ve been on the lookout for the next Deadman run since I missed the last one. Once this was announced, I was a bit sad that the 1v1 finale was out (but I do understand why), but I still wanted to give it a go.

The Good:

• Theorycrafting a strategy for Deadman is far, FAR more interesting to me than anything the main game or leagues can offer. This is because there is player competition for resources- the best THEORETICAL option is countered by the fact that more people will be there doing it, and more people will be there killing other people. Putting together effective money-making and training strategies for my little crew (and adapting on the fly) was by far the best part of DMM, because unlike main game there isn’t already a full guide for every little thing under the sun.

• The Mean Streets of the Falador Underground: The funniest part of the game by far was the PvE/PvP ecosystem that revolved around the Mining Guild with how powerful mining was as a moneymaker. People going back to get weapons to attack people stealing rocks, folks attacking miners, miners fighting back, the social atmosphere in there.

• Swapping: It definitely has a lot of problems, but also provides a useful out for folks with more limited time or who find themselves less interested in specific things like Breaches or multi/clan fights. I had some friends who could only play for about half the mode’s run- this game them a way to have goals that made sense, when playing for points would have been hard/impossible when being unable to play for most or all of the latter 1.5 weeks including the finale.

The Bad:

• I’m no economic expert, but Sigils in starter packs seemed like a massive mistake. Everyone starting off on the same footing is somewhat hampered by the ability of someone to roll a Stamina sigil and chop massive amounts of time off the early questing and running, meanwhile someone else has a Preservation sigil for all the potions nobody has, or something similarly useless. It also definitely helped crash the price of any sigil that could come from packs pretty quickly as people spammed starter packs on every account they owned, which heavily dis-incentivized trying to get sigils through other means especially early on.

• Is there supposed to be a way to tell where you are tier-wise with points? Having no idea where I was points wise was definitely a big demotivator from grinding points or aiming for a tier, because how am I supposed to know where I stand? Especially since, as far as I’m aware, leagues had it.

• OSRS is not built for PvP Breaches, at least, not the singles ones. With so many people it was torture trying to get any real sense of what was going on. Chaos can be fun, but “I literally can’t find who’s attacking me” is a bit less engaging. The fact that the streamers I saw actively chose to turn all other player models off just to see bosses and loot is a pretty strong tell of how poorly the system is designed for that. My guess is that multi breaches did not have similar issues, as having 50 people stand directly on top of each other means they all get barraged to death, so naturally it plays out more clearly with teams moving together and attacking each other. I didn’t have enough friends to participate in that though :(

The (Hot?) Takes:

• Alchemy Spells really warp the economy. I would love to see what happens if they were disabled- suddenly, the price floors for a wide variety of items become vastly different. Do you risk taking the things you’ve made to a store in a risky area to sell at better rates? Do you try and make something unusual so you’re the only person selling it to shops? Are alternative forms of raw GP getting more lucrative as suddenly alchables have lost significant value?

• I, it turns out, really dislike the way freeze & bind mechanics play out in OSRS PvP. It’s possible it’s just a skill issue, but the fact that you can/do spend most of a fight unable to move and the subsequent mechanics attached to it (particularly step-under, but also to a lesser extent kiting behind trees/stuff). To the best of my understanding, the only way to really force that to not be the case is to go with some kind of range tank build, which is then quite expensive and makes you a big target, whereas with more “normal” cheap gear, especially given the fact everyone has access to Void, its somewhat unavoidable, especially in lower brackets. I suspect I would prefer multi-zone PvP where these shenanigans are less prevalent, but didn’t have the homie count to get to that point. It really feels like in order to be vaguely allowed to go out and about I just have to trap myself in the LMS prison for 200 hours suffering, since LMS isn’t really interesting to me.

In the end, I did have a lot of fun with the theory, and I wish I had a slightly bigger group to play with and better goals to aim for. Hopefully next time they can get some improvements on things like points tiers and the economy, and find some fun ways to mix up the meta once more.