I just watched Gnomonkey’s recent Bronzeman video and wanted to give the perspective of someone actually playing as an unofficial bronzeman on my alt. I think he makes some valid points, but I personally think his perspective as such a late-game, PvM-focused player causes him to miss some of what makes Bronzeman appealing to more average players like me. His argument basically came down to four things: Unbound Bronzeman has obvious integrity issues because PvP unlocks can be fed through friends, alts, or intentional deaths. Jagex needs to better define what counts as an unlock. Bronzeman solves supply upkeep, but doesn’t solve the “real” Ironman problem of going dry on long PvM grinds like CG. If you want to earn your own gear without all of Ironman’s restrictions, you can already play a main and self-restrict. I’ll get #1 out of the way first because I completely agree with him there. I don’t like Unbound Bronzeman either. The integrity issues with PvP unlocks are pretty obvious there and I’d rather see regular Bronzeman stand on its own. On #2, I also think this is a fair point and I agree. Jagex definitely needs to clarify exactly how unlocks work, and I honestly wouldn’t be opposed to requiring players to actually make certain items themselves before they become permanently unlocked. Where I disagree is with #3 and #4, because I think those miss what Bronzeman actually solves for a lot of people, and it’s not about trying to solve the RNG of PvM grinds. It’s about everything else around it. Bronzeman isn’t about avoiding bad RNG or making PvM grinds easier. The appeal, just like Ironman, is that you still have to earn your own gear no matter how long it takes. If I’m going for a Bowfa, I want to have to get the enhanced seed myself. If I go dry, that sucks, but that’s part of the restriction I signed up for. What I don’t want is to potentially spend hundreds of hours at CG and then also spend hundreds more gathering herbs and secondaries, fishing food, mining sandstone, farming seaweed, collecting skilling materials, and constantly rebuilding supplies the ironman way just to keep doing the content I actually enjoy. That’s where I think Bronzeman fits in perfectly for a lot of people. It’s not just about reducing the upkeep of food, potions, death runes, blood runes, and other supplies once you reach late-game PvM. It also cuts down on a lot of the resource gathering required just to level your skills in the first place. On an Ironman, training things like herblore, crafting, and construction can mean spending a huge amount of time gathering herbs, secondaries, sand, seaweed, planks, battlestaves, hides, and other materials before you even get to worry about maintaining supply upkeep for the PvM content you want to do. Bronzeman still requires you to earn the levels and unlock the items, but it lets the GE take a lot of that repetitive gathering and brutally slow skilling methods out of the equation. I still need to obtain things legitimately before I can buy them. But once I’ve caught and cooked a Karambwan, I don’t need to fish thousands more. Once I’ve made a potion, I can buy more. Once I’ve unlocked a resource to train a skill, I can use the GE instead of gathering that resource forever. But I get it, then the obvious response is “why not just play a main and self-restrict”? Gnomonkeys argument was that if you want an easier ironman, than you can just play a main and self restrict. And you don’t have to play GP-scape or always do the most efficient money maker either, just play how you want and have fun. And just earn your own gear anyway. I get that argument, and I agree that people should be allowed to play their version of fun without worrying about efficiency scape, but I think it’s also missing the point and his perspective is too all-or-nothing. RuneScape is an MMO, and people like being able to show off what they’ve accomplished. That’s a huge part of why things like Blood Torva, Radiant Oathplate, skillcapes, max capes, pets, and ironman status itself have value. On a self-restricted main, I can say I earned all my gear myself, but nobody can actually know that. But with a bronzeman, they can. If I see a bronzeman with a fang and oathplate, I know they got those drops themselves. Maybe they bought their food and supplies, but they didn’t farm Vorkath for cash and simply buy those items. They got the drop. No way around it. And that’s the real distinction I care about. I don’t care whether a player farmed Vorkath to get the cash to buy the resources needed to get 81 Herblore for Sara brews. But I do care to know that someone grinded out CG for Bowfa, Royal Titans for Twinflame staff, or Doom for Avernics, because those are the things they couldn’t buy and had to earn directly. For some people, going dry at CG will still be the breaking point, and Bronzeman won’t solve that. But for others, going dry is a risk they’re willing to accept if they don’t also have to take on all the skilling, gathering, supply upkeep, and resource management that comes with Ironman. Bronzeman doesn’t remove the grind you chose the mode for. It removes a lot of the extra grind surrounding it. It’s not Ironman without bad RNG. It’s Ironman where you still have to unlock things yourself, but you don’t have to maintain everything yourself forever. And for people who are at a stage in life where they simply can’t dump the kind of hours into the game that a dedicated Ironman can demand, I think Bronzeman hits a really nice middle ground. You still get a meaningful self-restricted account with real gear progression and recognizable accomplishments, but in a way that feels much more realistic to commit to long term. That’s the niche Bronzeman fills, and as someone already playing that way unofficially, I’m genuinely excited to see an official version of it. submitted by /u/DarkGodVecta
Originally posted by u/DarkGodVecta on r/2007scape