soft laurel
The loot room in Theatre of Blood is an absolute disaster. After clearing the only piece of content in all of Old School RuneScape that plays to the strengths of the MMO genre you're met with a phoned in joke of a conclusion. Verzik flies away and a hole opens in the stairs for you to descend- already a bad sign. Have you SEEN Lowerniel Drakan's blood fountain? To Vampyres, wealth is power, and they should do whatever they can to display their wealth as publicly as possible. The REAL Verzik Vitur wouldn't hide her treasure room under her throne, she would publicly display it with Morytania's most fearsome muscle guarding it at all times. Keeping it underground where nobody can see it? Pathetic.
Then you get into the room and it gets even worse. Why is there a strategy table in Vitur's treasure vault? She's not a military leader, and surely the nylocas have their own ways of preserving information without needing a host, so it's not their doing. There's so many more thematic alternatives, such as a hall of fame, a human-written newspaper about your recent conquering of the Theatre, or the Mysterious Stranger offering you further insight (this could happen in person or while utilizing a treasure in the vault to contact him with magically a la NPC Contact). And why does it have to be on the western end of the room? The exit of the room is on the east, so moving towards the MVP table moves you away from the exit.
Then there's the chests. Every chest is the same size no matter what. Molten glass, blood vials, and a scythe all get chests of the same sizes despite containing different orders of magnitude of wealth. Not only do these chests grow dull after a while, they're placed in the worst way possible. Every tile you travel towards one is another tile you have to traverse to reach the exit. COX has the chest on the way to the exit, and you can zig zag diagonally to the regular TOA chest before getting to the exit, minimizing extra tiles moved while attempting to collect your loot within the raid. Not only does it take a long time to navigate to and from the loot chest, it's not even equally balanced; there's an unnecessary blockage in the center of the chests preventing the player with the north chest from reaching it in a timely manner. It's so bad that many experienced raiders go as far as to not collect their loot inside the raid, opting to exit it before opening the more convenient chest near the bank. The only time these "giga guys" open the chest within the raid is when it's a unique item. Uniques in TOB can be exciting, but these terrible chests do nothing to hype you up. In COX, purples have a giant glowing lightbeam that, at most zoom levels, will extend beyond the top of your screen, creating a large visual effect. TOA angles the camera away from the loot at first to build excitement, and the purple glow not only takes place at a larger, alternative chest, but is very distinctive. The purple effect at TOB is a disgrace. It's a thin purple outline that takes up fewer total pixels on my screen than my catgirl mouse cursor, and it's easy to miss. The chest itself is unchanged, you see it immediately, and it's completely underwhelming.
Then there's the exit. The exit is too quick to reach from the entrance of the loot room, incentivizing players to skip reading the stats and opening their loot, as discussed earlier. Not only that, but the order that players leave the raid determines their position in the party when they leave. This is completely unacceptable, and can even allow hasty players to steal the role of party leader. If an uncooperative player does this, the entire rest of the party (including the original organizer) need to leave and re-create a new group. On top of that, the exit is a magical purple diamond floating on top of a pillar. The structure seems like something out of Arceuus, located at the opposite end of the world. A grand exit would be much more fitting, with a red carpet for the new champions.
lean plover
glass mural
sinful girder
plain valley