devtrackers.gg
General
- The next community manager will be joining us late February/early March.
- If you have alternative suggestions to upgrading the Passage of the Abyss, share them with us.
- Mod Jack plans to do more design livestreams this year.
Topics
We are reluctant to talk about what fixes are being worked on because plans may change. For example, we may to put more work into something to do every part justice rather than fix one small part of a larger problem. So when we have concrete information we will share it with you.
| Topics | Timestamp |
|---|---|
| Player Avatar Refresh | 14:00 |
| Skillcape Perks | 16:30 |
| Combat Accessibility | 19:53 |
| Maxed Guild | 25:18 |
| Archaeology Relic System | 30:43 |
| Craftable Ranged/Magic Equipment | 39:20 |
| Wilderness Reborn | 40:50 |
| Drop Rates/Bad Luck Mitigation | 49:54 |
Player Avatar Refresh
- Q: What is the status of the Player Avatar Refresh?
- A: It is on the shelf.
It is not in the plan for, 2023. There is a huge scope for the project and would require a lot of work and the team has decided to prioritize other projects. It could still happen in the future but there are no current plans. Whilst there are short-term alternative approaches of restricting new outfits to a new avatar that's not what we want to do since it would be jarring.
Skillcape Perks
Q: Are there any plans to change some of the skill cape perks?
A: The premise of a skillcape perk needs rethinking first.
It makes sense intuitively for a skillcape to have a perk, but it is also an annoyance to have it on a skillcape rather than a passive due to bank space. But what is the exact aim of a skillcape perk? To provide xp, gp, or make the skill easier? The Smithing one effectively adds a new training style with 2 tick smithing, but is that what they should do? What if the skill cap is raised to 120, should this be the new training style?
Combat Accessibility
- Q: Will combat ever be made more accessible?
- A: Yes, but that does not necessarily mean easier.
It comes down to what our end goal with combat is. There are a lot of niche systems in combat which are untouched that we want to clean up and make more accessible, but we don't want to remove the challenge from bossing. The issue is determining the performance gap between 'sweaty' methods and 'non-sweaty' methods. How much more rewarded should you be if exerting x amount of effort?
In addition, the player's focus in combat is in the wrong place, looking at their action bar. It feels unintuitive and convoluted. You should be focusing on the monsters/mechanics. High APM combat and the focus on basic ability rotations is really only concern for players who don't use revolution, which isn't necessary for most bosses.
Maxed Guild
- Q: Are there any plans to revisit and give the Max Guild some more usage?
- A: There are no plans, but we would most likely help players get to other places they want to quicker.
Lately we've been discussing hub content about where should players go, what should they do there, and what reqs do they need?
The Maxed Guild inherently segregated the playerbase between maxed and non-maxed players by its design. It's one thing for it to provide a benefit, but it's strange to design it in a way where you avoid other players. For example, Artisan's Workshop is designed to involve all smithers into one place and encourage players to be around each other which is good for the game.
We understand players want a hub where everything is close to the bank and convenient but in doing so you have less players exploring the world. Rather than taking 1 thing from a location and adding it to another, which is the issue, we would rather make it so it helps players get to the places they want to get to quicker.
Archaeology Relic System
- Q: Does Jagex have plans to improve the luck relics/enhancers or find another attempt at improving switchscape?
- A: In terms of improving the relic, unlikely.
The relic system was supposed to cater to different niche playstyles and provide tradeoffs. There's basically two types of relics:
- QOL Relics - Abyssal Link- Letting you teleport without runes
- Power Relics - Combat players primary focus.
Players who choose the Luck relic prefer the QOL aspect over the additional Power. The Luck Relic's flaw is more due to the flaw in the luck system where players swap rings at the end of a kill. During a Gamejam Timbo investigated requiring the ring to be equipped from the start of the skill but Telos messed that idea up.
- Q: Why does everybody want everything? Why cant there be room for choices made, and choosing your priorities?
- A: The Relic System is trying to do exactly that by providing mutually exclusive choices.
Some relics are betters than others and the worst ones seem like a noob trap, or they are useful for different purposes in which case you have to constantly switch between them.
It isn't an inherent problem in the choice system that there are worse options. And overtime there isn't a problem with allowing more options to be stacked. Throughout it's history, Runescape has always introduced mutually exclusive choices and eventually allowed them to be merged as a reward. The relic system works well in doing exactly that. If we remove the system entirely you have just a stacking buff and we don't want to give the players a whole ton of invisible buffs for no reason.
- Q: Relic Presets?
- A: We like the idea of Relic Presets where swapping presets would be cheaper. However, Archaeology fundamentally needs relic costs to function economically since chronotes need to go somewhere.
- Q: How many chronotes would it cost me to permanently switch to a relic so that it is free?
- A: Probably something with 6 figures, millions.
Craftable Ranged/Magic Equipment
- Q: Are there any plans to bring craftable Ranged and Magic armour and their respective skills into parity with Melee in the near future?
- A: Our mid-long term strategy is to work towards doing this.
This is fairly important, but it has dubious value to high level players and wouldn't be an exciting update. Why craft t80 shortbows? There are also obstacles with how fletching is balanced, woodcutting is structured, and does magic gear come from Runecrafting, if so how?
Wilderness Reborn
- Q: Wilderness Reborn seems to have been quite successful in reinvigorating interest in that region; what lessons has the team learned from it over the past few months?
- A: Our takeaway is that the Wilderness Reborn hasn't worked out. We will be removing the Threat System in the future.
The Wilderness did become more accessible but we wanted to substitute PvP risk for PvM risk. The threat system failed at doing this and became more of an annoyance. The players who were engaged with the wilderness aren't engaging with the risk vs reward element.
We've discussed the best way to deal with it, and we've decided to remove the threat system and tweak the balance of the content which assumed its existence (Mandrith). The alternative is to rework the threat system but even that may not work. There's no timeline when it will happen, but we have devs looking at the problems.
This doesn't mean we won't add risky content to the wilderness such that engaging with it is dangerous, but we won't make the wilderness itself dangerous to enter.
- Q: Could you address the Dark Onyx Core concerns?
- A: We understand the complaints but we don't think it is intrinsically too rare.
To address the drop rate we'd have to buff it an enormous amount, since a small buff wouldn't change the situation. One of the major factors affecting the drop rate is the balance to the economy. We want this item to be expensive and rare so players engage with the content for a long time.
Largely we don't balance anything on the assumption players are DIYing it as that's not how Runescape's end-game works. However, a lot of the concern comes from the end-game Ironman community who focus on maximum completion. It's hard to address that Ironman community without upending how Runescape has always worked and hurting the economy. Essentially different players want the game to built differently and we can't satisfy everyone.
Drop Rates/Bad Luck Mitigation
- Q: Drop Rates?
- A: We need a whole stream to go into detail, however we are continuing to look the problem to find the correct approach/solution.
There's a balance between making items too rare for casual players and too common for players who play 18 hours a day grinding them out. Since these drops are tradeable these grinders contribute a majority of the drops into the economy.
One big aspect of the The Raptor's Rampage Event was that Shogun spent some time tidying up the drop table code which allows for changes to be made more reliably in the future.
It was also an experiment on letting casual players experience a daily drop boost if we go down that route again in the future. There was a conspiracy theory that it wasn't implemented but it definitely was. However it's difficult to choose what the multiplier should be. If it's too low it feels like nothing, but if it's too large it would have a big impact on the economy.
Finally we need to address how the end game going to work because currently we are creating staggeringly rare drops with uncapped grinding. The problem no one can agree on alternative options.
- Q: Bad Luck Mitigation?
- A: I'm not opposed to it, but it doesn't solve the problems.
There's the approach where bad luck mitigation has little effectiveness early on and gains effectiveness based on how many kills you are dry on. But that would only benefit players going for collection logs/grinding a lot. If we want to implement it for casual players we would be taking an aggressive implementation which essentially is just buffing the drop rate. There's also the concern of players doing bosses to reach end game as opposed to being at the end game.
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