Give me wailing or give me death.
Today, dear reader, I found out about the accursed Nail Beast. This unassuming creature from Old School RuneScape isn’t much to write home about on paper. It’s a level 69 (nice), 98, or 141 critter found in the Temple Trekking minigame, and it looks like something between a mole and a panther. They’re kind of cute, in a doofy, feline-looking way.
(Image credit: Jagex / The Old School RuneScape Wiki.)
They’re also goddamn loud. For some inexplicable reason, the Nail Beast has a disproportionately angry screech that seems designed to give you a migraine—sadistically, they also show up in packs of three minimum. Meaning their caterwauling will sometimes overlap to produce a noise that is, I might say, the absolute worst.
Jagex, reasonably, made the Nail Beasts’ volume subject to a vote in Poll 82 (thanks, GamesRadar). Since OSRS is an ancient game with a lot of nostalgia bundled up in it, its devs like to take community temperatures on its alterations to old content. Nail Beasts, naturally, were on the docket—as the subject of the poll was minigames.
“Should we make the Nail Beasts’ attack sounds quieter?” asked Jagex. Yes, said 28,676 very reasonable people. No, said 19,238 people who are less reasonable, though I like the cut of their jib far more.
You might have also noticed that these Nail Beast defenders are fewer in number—despite that, we’re talking about the fact that nail beasts are still loud. That’s because Jagex only enacts these changes if a significant majority—70% or more—are on board with it. The status quo endures.
“Help us understand,” Jagex writes—presumably with its heads in its hands, next to a bottle of empty whisky, in a very dark room, weeping—”Do you want the Nail Beasts to be louder? Maybe a small chance to play the sound at full volume whenever you get an XP drop?” Nay, say the players. We are never full. We wish for more. “make them louder please (:” writes one player with over 79 likes and the most threatening emoji I’ve ever seen. “AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE” types another, loudly. “Make it ignore the mute settings,” another diabolical monster chimes in.
Meanwhile, on the game’s subreddit, one player suggests that Jagex make a separate poll asking players if they’d like to turn the volume up. At the time of writing, about 842 upvotes suggest at least that many people agree with them. “Thank God,” writes another Nail Beast appreciator: “I was gonna quit if they made the sound quieter.” User neoscooby6 just about hits the Nail Beast on the head when it comes to why things are this way: “We like to keep things a little sh*tty around here. Nice job, community.”
Honestly, I respect it. I already knew Old School RuneScape players were simply built different, but the commitment to the bit here—at the cost of speakers, eardrums, and likely sanity—is admirable, in the same way that one guy who did a minigame for almost 150 hours to just to get a crime-free racoon was. Woe betide the fool who gets between an OSRS player and their self-inflicted punishment.
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