[2024] Araxxor Tweaks & Poll 82 Updates

Alright, lets give an update on all the above.

Chromium Ingots

We don't want to just remove them, rather it's something longer term we'd actually love to explore adding to a variety of PvM features, as something that could in theory be a PvM exclusive drop involved in recipes for various items. At the point we do that, we feel there'd be multiple options to obtain the things and it'd be in a better spot.

However that doesn't alleviate the immediate concerns and may not be something we do soon nor do we know how the community would feel about that.

We are going to look at a way for being able to pay an NPC to create the rings for you at a cost to bypass the chromium ingot requirement. This is primarily something that'll aid ironmen and has little use for mains who should just buy the ingots. The cost will be positioned such that it's never worth it over buying the ingots, but shouldn't be too big a bank-breaker either.

Crystal Shards

We created a big balancing sheet and went through all the sources of shards and have determined various buffs. These have been implemented and tested!

So you should be able to expect these changes next week :)

Missing Teleports - Portals & Nexus

We know this is something you all want to see, it's just not got to the top of the priority list amongst all the other QoL work that's been focused on (big wintertodt changes, more run energy work to come, etc). We'll see what we can do on the next couple QoL polls - but no promises just yet.

Inquisitor's

We are going to adjust it as per the original blog's design. I don't have an exact time frame at this stage.

God Alignment Prayers

To be perfectly honest, I don't know when or if we'll revisit these currently. Our first draft of these was poorly received and in later design conversations we genuinely found it difficult to determine a clear path forward for the system that met player needs/concerns. We absolutely can come up with 1 or 2 alignments that we feel work but it starts to get harder when longer term we want many many more. Prayers are such an important part of the combat system, we are naturally averse to taking big risks that may make combat simply less fun.

Overall, prayer is still lacking some high level rewards - how we tackle that is still an open question. I'm not saying these are off the table forever but they do have challenges.

Scorpia Unique

Genuinely sorry this has taken so long to get round to.

We are considering whether blighted overloads could be what we introduce here. We are now waiting for an appropriate PvP focused blog to have that discussion with players.

House on the Hill shortcut

As stated originally, we struggled to make a zipline work that wasn't buggy or didn't require a fade to black. That led us to leaving it out. Players made clear they want it even if it's a fade to black cause hey, it's a useful shortcut.

Less clear on timeframe for this but we will look at it further and try find a nice implementation - likely you'll see it in a QoL blog at some point. The shortcuts overall have made a nice difference for making agility more meaningful so it is something we care about. If we haven't got anything in 2024 then you have my permission to post about it every week again!

PvP Arena broken matchmaking

Matchmaking is one of the biggest issue with PvP Arena. We need to take some time to investigate and work out how we solve the underlying issues there.

We cannot really commit to a timeframe here as it's unlikely to be a high priority immediately. We aren't looking to dedicate full project time to it which we do believe it'd take to fully address everything else (lack of rewards, etc).

Forestry

There absolutely remains balancing concerns with how it was left. There was no malicious intent though, we're well aware there was a lot of mixed feedback over forestry originally.

We set out to reduce all the extra stuff you needed and broadly to reduce the frequency of events such that there was more normal woodcutting in between them. We also wanted to limit the "gaming" of the system, hopping and running to other tree locations to just focus on events and not WC. The problem is that these things are also affected by traffic and as traffic reduces it's had a bigger effect. On top of that, despite lower event rates, they weren't suitably buffed to account for that lower frequency.

So what are we doing? Expect some forestry stuff in the QoL poll blog that looks directly at event frequency for example, from there more discussion can take place.

Ancient Sceptre

Is a bug that's existed since bloodbark was introduced! When the ancient scepre hooked into the same code, it inherited the bug it seems. Bloodbark doesn't get a ton of use so it was never noticed at that stage I presume.

It's been logged as a bug and should be fixed at some point in the near future.

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Lastly, just an apology it's taken so long on these!

• We never intend to tell you all we're going to do something, then not do it. It really is a case that there's just a lot of things on our plates, we're always juggling what we should be doing next.
• We need to do better at communicating when these things get posted and you all rightly want answers. We'll make sure between CM & Design we're more empowered to prioritse getting you answers on these things.