Last Man Standing Beta
Next week sees the release of Song of the Elves! This is the second main expansion revealed at RuneFest 2018 and includes loads of extra content within the elven city of Prifddinas. As mentioned in last week's newspost, we won't be adding new content this week so the team can focus on preparing for the big launch. In the meantime, some smaller changes have been made to the currently active LMS beta.

Last week we launched a beta to demonstrate and tweak the changes to Last Man Standing described in the State of PvP blog from May. Since then, the beta has proven popular among regular PvPers as well as players just starting to learn how to PK.

Shortly after launch, the following hotfixes were made to the LMS beta following initial feedback:

• The PJ timer was increased to around 20 seconds to give players time to collect loot from bloody keys and prepare for the next fight
• Crates were fixed to give appropriate ammunition after awarding a Heavy ballista or a Dark bow
• Starting equipment was removed from the loot after killing another player
• The initial countdown was increased to give players time to prepare their inventories
• Karambwans were fixed to heal players correctly
• Special attack and run energy were updated to fully restore instantly after killing an opponent
• Dropped food and potions were changed to disappear after 5 seconds
• Players may only have one Saradomin brew in their inventory at a time

The above changes were possible thanks to Mod Roq and Mod Maz keeping a close eye on feedback right after launch and making changes on the spot to suit the immediate feedback.

Since then, the team and Mod Roq especially have kept a close eye on the suggestions and prepared the following changes to the beta to go live with this update:

• Combat is now permitted as soon as the shouted countdown ends. Previously there was a 6 second grace period during which players could move but not fight
• Players are now given 11 sharks rather than 12 as the basic supplies
• Ava's accumulator has been removed from the starting equipment after feedback that it was unused
• The Dragon warhammer was deemed not powerful enough to warrant a place as loot. It has been replaced with a Mage's book
• 6 players will now spawn in each group at the beginning of a game. This will reduce the chances of players being the odd one out and not getting a fight at the start
• The final area has been doubled in size and will now have glowing orbs to indicate its boundary. Some chests have been moved into the newly expanded final areas
• Dragonstone bolts have been replaced with diamond bolts to reduce the RNG element of the fights
• More chests have been added to areas that were deemed too few including all final areas

The beta is still ongoing with no confirmed date of closing. If you haven't had a chance to play yet, we encourage you to give it a try if not least for the free practice! Any and all feedback is hugely appreciated and will be used to refine the minigame until the changes are ready to be polled.

In particular, we are keen to hear your thoughts on the rewards that were pitched in last week's game update newspost. Let us know on our social channels what you think of these or if you have any other ideas!

Click/tap here to see the proposed LMS rewards

Let's talk rewards. Currently, LMS doesn't offer any rewards outside of the GP prize awarded to winners of high stakes games. This is unusual for a minigame given that they typically offer rewards that are also useful elsewhere. Below is a list of proposed rewards, most of which have been suggested by the community. Let us know what you think, and if you have any ideas of your own, feel free to send them our way! In the currently retired Deadman mode, there was a set of armour that players could purchase for blood money. Unfortunately, because the armour wasn't very good and blood money could be farmed, the armour was not widely used. So our first reward idea is to remove the stats from the pieces (top, bottoms, and cape), making the set cosmetic only, and add them to the LMS store. While in the Wilderness (under level 20), some untradeable items will break on death instead of being lost. Players can take these broken items to Perdu who will repair them for a fee. In order to encourage use of these items in deeper Wilderness, we propose a consumable scroll that can be handed into Perdu. He would then use it to enchant one of these items. An item enchanted this way would not be lost on death above level 20 Wilderness. Instead, the item will lose its enchantment and be kept in its broken form as if the player had died in under level 20 Wilderness. This will also occur for PvM deaths. In a PvP situation, 75% of the repair fee of the item will be dropped to the floor for the killer as coins. This is expected to widen the range of items used in the rest of the Wilderness. Because players will no longer have to go get these items again and possibly endure the grind again (defender, void, etc), you're more likely to see them appear. The cost of the scrolls is subject to balancing and testing. For many years Castle Wars have offered the standard 3 God Halos as rewards. But what about the other gods? Armadyl, Bandos, Seren, Zaros, and Brassica Prime have been underrepresented in the headwear department. As a result, we would like to offer 5 brand new Halos as rewards. These will have the same stats as the existing halos but will allow you to support the god of your choosing. For the top 5 players in any competitive game of Last Man Standing, we would like to offer an XP reward, through a tome or token that can be redeemed in a combat skill of their choice. The XP awarded will be 35 x skill level. This number is subject to balancing through testing and the beta phase. These would be similar to the capes awarded for Chambers of Xeric or Theatre of Blood completion milestones. We would like to add two separate versions: one to show games played and another to show games won. For a long time now OldSchool has had the Event RPG and more recently received the Ham Joint as quick weapons to help train certain pure builds. We would like to offer another weapon to add to this list: one that is a bit more thematic with the regular weapons of Old School. This weapon will attack once every 3 ticks and will be one handed. In early 2018, players gained the ability to add a Saradomin's Light to a Staff of the Dead. This added some variety as a high level magic weapon that could cast Saradomin Strike. But what about Guthix? With this reward, players would be able to take the Guthixian Icon to Juna. She would then infuse it into a Staff of the Dead, creating the Staff of Balance, The staff of balance would have the same stats as both the Staff of Light and Staff of the Dead, and would be able to cast/autocast Claws of Guthix. The bolas is a thrown ranged weapon that would require 70 ranged to wield. When a bolas is thrown as an auto-attack, it binds the player for around 10 seconds. It is possible to miss the bind as with other attacks from a weapon. Thrown bolas cannot be retrieved from the ground or by any Ava's device. The bolas will carry the same offensive stats as a rune knife but with an attack speed of 6. The attack range of the bolas is 7. The Staff of paralysis is a one-handed staff which requires 70 magic to wield. The staff would hold up to 1,000 charges and require 3 Nature, 4 Earth, and 4 Water runes per charge. On each cast, the staff of paralysis would have a 1/10 chance of turning off your opponent's run. The staff would have a maximum damage of 10 and has an attack rate of 5. When we're good at something, we like to show it off. With this in mind, we want to offer the ability to unlock cosmetic changes to the starting equipment described earlier. For example, you could change your mystic robes to light/dark/dusk, your ranged equipment to gilded, and your rune equipment to any of the god and gilded variants. We have heard your suggestions on some other items, such as moving imbues, Korasi, etc. However, with other discussions taking place, we have decided that these may be better suited to other upcoming content. One suggestion we've had had been to add negative XP reward lamps as an LMS reward. Since they were last polled, there has been continued demand for and discussion around the topic. These would allow players to remove a small amount of experience (~500xp) from a combat stat below level 50. Doing so means players could 'fix' their accounts by removing unwanted experience. This would be a use per account. These lamps could potentially be used to remove XP awarded from quests, increasing the range of account builds possible for PKing. This would also open up a number of exciting possibilities to shake up PvP. However, there is also a technical issue to overcome. Currently, XP removal has very strict restrictions built into the game engine to minimise the risk of accidental XP loss, which could be very serious for a player's account. Now that players would be able to trigger it arbitrarily, we would need the engine changed to ease these restrictions while still providing the necessary safety checks. Let us know what you think of the idea. If the suggestion is taken forward, negative XP lamps would be polled again before being added into game.

Warding  
On Monday we posted the second Warding blog with major changes since the last design we pitched to the community. We highly encourage you to give it a read and form your final opinion. The skill will be polled separately from the other features put forward. The poll can be expected to go live this Friday, July 19th.


Song of the Elves Login Screen Competition
For major releases we typically hold a design competition to allow the community to create a custom login screen. The best entry is then displayed as the in-game login screen upon release.

This time around we had a huge number of fantastic entries and the poll to decide the final winner is due to close later today. When the poll has closed, we'll announce the winner from our social channels. If you haven't yet cast your vote, head to the nearest poll booth to take a look!

In the meantime, let's take a look at some of the other amazing entries from our shortlist that didn't quite make it to the final four:
 
Rushlash (top) and Tamara (bottom) depicted the gates to Prifddinas in their designs. Rushlash focused on the crystals woven into the elven architecture while Tamara showed the missing city behind the gates with a detailed background.  
Gamez X (top) and Runezilla (bottom) continued the popular choice of the city gates for their designs. In Gamez X's design, crystal gates and wooden architecture surrounding them are beautifully rendered. Runezilla opted for a more mystical feel with bright glowing colours and luminescent plant life.

UIM Herblore's design completed the set in its own unique style. We particularly enjoyed the cleverly mirrored lettering on the signposts directing players to Zul-andra to the west and Ardougne to the east.
A massive thanks goes out to everyone who entered the competition! We love to receive your designs and choosing our favourite four to bring to a poll was especially difficult.

The video and lore competitions are now also closed. The winner of the video competition will be announced in next week's livestream the day before launch and featured in the update post on Thursday. Players who submitted successful lore entries will have their entries featured in game!

Other Changes

• Song of the Elves has been added to the quest list displaying the requirements for the quest
• Various unnecessary game messages from candle-stealing on Entrana have been filtered or removed
• Some incorrect info regarding XP loss for unskulled players in DMM (W45) has been edited
• A piece of Evil Dave's cellar was removed from the Gnome Stronghold