[2021] Slayer Improvements - Poll 75 (Weekly Game Update - July 14th)

So you won't get a duplicate task when you first store one, but you can receive duplicates after you've completed at least one task after storing.

Thanks for raising this. There will be some changes made later today, but these will be happening later on today and will be added to the newspost then. I've edited the newspost accordingly.

I appreciate you're looking for more information from us and it feels like a long time since you've had something to look forward to. Small changes can still take time to develop and QA, and hopefully these changes are quite impactful still to your day to day gameplay. As for what we've been working on, the Summer Summit (happening this month) should give more details on what's in store regarding upcoming content this year.

Was this on the normal hydra? And did you receive the drops/XP after they are defeated?

Any other information you can give us would be welcome. Thanks! :)

Thanks for raising this! The team is currently looking into this issue. Any other information you can give us is appreciated. :)

We're investigating issues related to the animations of the Hydra now. Sorry about that! Thanks for raising it to us, we'll update the Newspost once they're resolved.

Hey there, thanks for raising this. We're investigating this now, please check the Newspost for more information once we've deployed a fix.

We're investigating issues with the animation of the Hydra now, it looks like it's disappearing when it changes colour to swap attack style. We'll update the newspost once we've deployed a fix. Thank you for raising it to us.

Glad to hear it! Good luck with your task!

We're investigating reports of issues with the Alchemical Hydra and regular Hydra NPCs.

Updates to follow. Thank you for your patience.

Sure, I can take this one.

So first off, the dev team is split into several groups each with their own projects and responsibilities.

Wardens - Recently did AKD and ToB Modes, currently working on the A night at the theatre rework

Juggernauts - (The team I'm on), Recently did Clans and ERB and are now finishing off Combat Achievements for next week

Unknown - Working on the New client features, you recently got batch 1

Operators - Recently did the work to take Phosani's Nightmare from ideation into a real project and also work on the polls and things you see week to week outside of actual projects

??? - We have another team working on things which haven't been announced.

And naturally each of the project teams have unannounced projects we're working on whether that be design work/creative briefs/design documents etc. or being further along doing implementation work.

The Operators currently have the least amount of devs in the team and will methodically work through each of the jobs on the poll grouping them into content batches that make sense such as "Slayer updates", "Gauntlet updates" etc.

The Operators team also have release constraints in place to protect the larger projects. We don't want too many updates from various different projects all going in together, the more things from different sources the higher chance of bugs, this is also why you see no update weeks from time to time.

So the stuff you're seeing in this weeks update hasn't just been done this week, it's been worked on since Phosani's Nightmare by the Operators team.

I hope this gives a little clarity as to why some of this seems like it takes a lot of time, it didn't take 2 months just to do this amount of work, there's a lot of it that goes into such as resource management, scheduling etc. If it helps at all I've seen tons of other stuff from the poll and from other projects during sprint review so we are constantly keeping busy!

Thank you! :) We'll update you on the Newspost once we've deployed a fix. For the meantime, it is looking like we're going to revert the changes made this week so that the Hydra is working as intended. This will give us a bit more time to fix the underlying issue and then we'll put the changes back in once we're satisfied that it's working properly.

Edit: It should be resolved now. Thanks again for raising it to us.

This week is should be going ahead, unfortunately last week we didn't have enough guests available to be on so we decided to cancel. Lots of interesting streams coming in the next few weeks though! (Summer Summit reveal this month).

The issues that affected the Alchemical Hydra also had unintended effects on regular Hydra NPCs. For this reason, we have temporarily reverted changes with the Hydra in this week's game update. The Hydra Boss and NPCs should be working as normal, however this is without changes from Poll 75.

We will continue to investigate the animation issues and once we have resolved the underlying issue we will deploy the Poll 75 improvements. Thanks for your patience!

We have a Game Update Review meeting on Thursday mornings so I'll add this as a suggestion and see what the team say. If it's not something we can get in straight away, perhaps something we could look at long term in our player suggestions process.

Thanks for raising this to us. It looks like a side effect to an issue we're already investigating. A second hotfix is being readied for deployment now to fix this and we'll update the Newspost once it's out.

Thanks for your kind feedback. I can confirm, this bug was not present in testing. We'll review in our Game Update Review on Thursday morning when we have more information about where it came from and make improvements once we've identified why. :)

Thats awesome :) Yeah I collected a lot of the suggestions for Poll 75 so I am really glad it went through. We'll make sure it's fixed as soon as possible!

That's a good suggestion and I'll most certainly pass it on.

We are pretty regular with our schedule (most Thursdays at 5pm) and will typically only cancel if we don't have staff available. I appreciate that we could announce our schedule better though especially for extra streams.

Schedules can be moved, sometimes at last minute, depending on staff availability. Staff may have to be pulled at last minute to work on a project or deal with an issue. If players were cool with the fact our schedule may move around, and it doesn't create negative sentiment to do so, I don't see why an 'official' schedule on our newspost wouldn't work.

The issues with the Hydra NPCs have now been resolved and the intended changes that came with this week's update have now been reimplemented.

We will continue to monitor the situation and share any further updates. Thank you for your patience.

I've found out that there should already be a sound added but it's quite faint. We can review feedback on it to see how players find it and whether it needs to be adjusted.

I expect the indicator feature already existed in Runelite only. As for the freeze/stun orb thrown by Dawn, you're right - it should be considered as a stun and be covered by Poll 75. In this case, it was overlooked unfortunately due to a communication error. I probably mentioned Dusk to the team instead of Dawn. As soon as we have the time to do so, we'll get it in. Ideally by next week's game update, but cannot confirm that as I don't want to disappoint if we can't get it in by then.

Hey Merda, I'm sorry about that one it's likely a communication error - but I've brought it up to the team and have got confirmation that we will be able to fix this relating to Dawn's stuns.

I know you spent a lot of time talking with me about the encounter to help me understand some of the core issues relating to GGs so thank you for that.

I can't confirm when it is likely to be fixed however it is a high priority. Thanks for raising it.

The indicator may have been a runelite thing already. However, we intend to fix Dawn's predictability with the way her stuns will land. This wasn't included in the update but should have been.

We've updated the Newspost to confirm this but you're right - Dawn's stuns should have been included and were not. We'll look into fixing this as soon as possible. Sorry about that. It's likely a miscommunication error on my part.

I think they may have already had indicators but on runelite only. I've let the team know about this and we're going to make sure Dawn's stuns are included, as soon as possible.

We'll review this tomorrow to clarify for sure, but I've got the general 'yes' from the team that it'll be fixed at some point when we can. Sorry again!

Can you give more details on this if possible? It should be fixed and working as intended now so I am keen to understand if further fixes need to be made.

Edit: We've identified an issue with the final phase and have deployed a hotfix. Thanks and apologies for any inconvenience caused. :)

Hey, can you confirm if this is still happening? I'm seeing a couple of reports of it feeling bugged but I am not sure if these are after we deployed the hotfixes.

Edit: We've identified an issue with the finak phase of the Alchemical Hydra and have deployed a hotfix. Sorry for the inconvenience caused there.

I raised this as a possible bug since from the way you phrased it, I thought it could have been. Mod Arcane let me know this was polled a long time ago and failed, apparently.

I'll bring it up with the team when we discuss PvM QoL stuff to see what happened there. I started working here in January, so I'm not too sure about stuff prior to Poll 75, sorry about that!

There were a few unintentional bugs with the Alchemical Hydra this week but we've deployed several fixes that should have resolved the issues now.

As for your suggestion, there should also be a faint sound for the Hydra, but it's a bit quiet at the moment. It was temporarily hotfixed out as we worked on some of the animation issues but it's back in game now. We can certainly look at making this louder or more obvious - thanks for raising this.

I'll ask our team about this. How frequent does it happen?

Ah okay, sorry about that. I will bring it up in our game update review tomorrow. I appreciate the response and clarification

Thank you, I will make sure to raise this with the team and find out more tomorrow.