I really think you guys should look at how the Q&A streams work. I don't think they're performing as they could be. It's an hour of questions followed by "Yeah, maybe we need to look at that" and "We could do something like that". Then these things almost never get followed up on.
I'd like if it felt like the answers had substance to them. "Yes, I want to do that and I'll propose it internally", "That isn't in our current plans, but I'll try and get it added on the next poll to see what the community think", or even "No, I don't think that's something we should do".
Having the answer to almost every question be a vague wishy-washy answer that doesn't commit to anything feels like a waste of time for all involved. Like the Wintertodt changes to make you not be punished for having high HP. That was spoken about here, again, for what must be at least the 10th time over multiple years and the answer is always the same. "It would be cool yes, and it probably should be done". Then nothing ever happens despite it being a talking point for over 5 years, and the jmods saying it should be done every single time.
I hear you and that is an excellent point! The challenge is that our developers cannot always commit to something they have not worked on and that hasn't been discussed amongst the rest of the team, which is fair enough. It would suck for one developer to commit to a change when ultimately the work for any change needs to be agreed by the person or team in charge of actually developing and implementing it.
Bit of background - our developers are in several different teams that tackle different areas of the game. These teams serve different player experiences. For example, the teams are including but are not limited to: focusing on PvP; focusing on the enhanced client; small weekly updates; new player experiences; raids and larger PvM etc. (This was touched on in the most recent Gazettes).
Any developer is invited to be on the panel for our General Q&As, because the Q&As are a great way of communicating and interacting with you guys, the players.
Week to week, I'll take a look at the general questions you guys have submitted for us and will try to get a good mix of developers with different opinions to answer them. Due to the fact the questions are so varied, we could not possibly have a panel that would be able to answer all of them with any definitive and agreed changes. I try to reach out to relevant developers where possible to include answers from people who may not be present on the stream.
To get a bit more 'substance', we do now have themed Q&As, like the Guardians of the Rift one the week before last week. This includes the devs working on the project who will have a bit more 'control' over feedback changes.
General Q&As, like the one last week, are a bit more difficult to plan, because of the nature of the questions - they're random, varied, and they touch random areas of the game.
Back to your comment though. When there is a specific issue annoying you, such as the Wintertodt scaling issue, it's something that CM should recognise and bring to the attention of the devs in our weekly meetings.
I'll make sure it's brought up internally on our Friday meetings with the weekly updates team, this will be discussed amongst the wider team and we can see what the team says and agree any actions from there.
The questions go from text to pictures at some point, which is kinda odd.
Hoping to see more info about the third party plugin rules rework soon.
Hey there! Our news module has a 50,000 character limit for HTML, so we have to include images in there instead of text in order to upload it unfortunately.
I'll poke the relevant people about your second point. Thx!
Thanks for the response.
I guess my gripe with topics like the Wintertodt "issue" specifically, and other frequently commented on topics, is that if the Q&A is not a vehicle for actually getting these changes done, what is?
We get years of the devs saying that something should be done, and that they want to do that thing, and it's asked constantly by the community, yet that doesn't seem to be enough to get any plans in motion. Does this dynamic just go on forever? Are we going to be here 5 years later still hearing the same response?
I like watching the Q&A's sometimes, but they don't feel like they're driving the direction of the game like Jagex presents them to be doing. Personally, I prefer the more specialised Q&A's like you mentioned with the Guardians of the Rift one, as they feel like the feedback is actually having an effect on the game. I appreciate that not all devs can comment on certain topics though.
I just think it'd be better for everyone if it felt like the question and answer dynamic was more productive, and not just an hour of OSRS-centric discussion about nothing particular that doesn't seem to result in much of an outcome.
I did like Kirby and Ash's dynamic in last weeks stream though!
Ngl, the whole question about why things like this don't get done in itself is probably a pretty great Q&A question to ask and for us to answer.
I'm certainly not going to try and answer a topic about how we spend our time in this reddit thread. There's just no way I could do it justice
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