[2021] Without new skills, OSRS is not the "Old School experience"

Originally posted by Tangibilitea

What would've happened if warding was released:

People would initially be excited. Then they'd look for the cool rewards - There weren't any.

They would then not train the skill, then the dev time would've been wasted on an item sink that didn't work.

Warding was pitched with rings that lowered your exp/hr, garbage robes that'd be dead on arrival (like swamp/bloodbark), and alternatives routes to rune pouches/imbues (you would've still done NMZ/slayer).

You can't pitch an item sink if the rewards aren't worthwhile. Like, that just fundamentally doesn't work. Warding deserved to fail the poll, not because it was a new skill, but because it was poorly designed.

Tbf there were initially very good rewards and players flipped out that they were too good. Trying to please everyone is a tough balancing act. To claim that the item sink wouldn’t have worked is also quite short sighted as - much like current skills - they weren’t released and then never touched again. Skilling updates happen all the time and they’re based entirely on how the players interact with them.

Warding was an attempt at an old school style skill, most skills are fairly mundane and simple and one of those hadn’t been pitched before. Clearly that isn’t a good direction to go in as while it got majority support, it didn’t get the required super majority. Maybe it was poorly designed, most voters thought it had potential. After all, with skills like firemaking the bar is pretty high.

If a new skill is to be approached again it won’t be a flashy announcement. If anything, running a fairly basic poll - should we work on a new skill? - Before even mentioning a concept. If that gets anything lower than 85% it’s probably not worth pursuing as any concept will lower that number rather than increase it.

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