Vod | This Week In RuneScape - 02/11/20

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Company Direction

Upcoming Updates

^{Just those mentioned on stream.}

Update	ETA	Bonus Details
Construction Contracts	November	Similar to OSRS's Mahogany Homes and Mod Ryan's Gamejam Project. More info in a newspost coming tomorrow (Nov 4th).
Yak Track	November	More festive and has really cool pets .
Violet is Blue 2	December	Sequel to Violet is Blue.
New Boss	December	New boss following the Desperate Measure -> Orthen storyline.
Elder God Wars Dungeon	2021	Different than a standard GWD (4 bosses with slayer mobs in the center).

Team Attitude/Planning

• Everyone is knackered coming off the large Steam release and Orthen/Halloween following it.
• Currently busy creating/planning the 2021 roadmap and mapping out the next year+ of events.
• Posted a number of job opening to hire more staff for a large push of more content for the next year.

Monthly Approach to Content

• The monthly update cycle has received a lot of praise.
  • It's benefiical to developers behind the scenes as they can see reactions to updates more frequently.
• This cycle allows us to hit smaller targets more impactfully and allows story content to build momentum.
  • Desperate Measure -> Effigy Incubator -> Orthen -> Solo boss.

Other

• macOS High Sierra broke following a stability update.
  • There is a fix in-bound and it will be in for the next client release planned for Nov 23.
• Mobile is likely our next big growth release next year and that's when iOS will be released.
• Additional action bars are now free and and you will see more things like that soon.

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Questions and Answers

Steam

What's the impact of Steam been like?

We've been looking at the data (daily active users, peak concurrency) and it has been super solid. We've been taken aback by all the positive feedback about RS on steam. And completely impressed with how the community mobilized to welcome newer players.

Now it's about building support and bringing Steam to Mac so watch out for that.

How's it looking from a size perspective?

We maintain over 10k peak concurrent. We hover between top 40-75 and even higher if you look at free to play games.

Will more Steam achievements be added?

For sure, it's something we've already talked about.

 

Updates

Any news or plans for previously announced content from the past?

Over the past 4-5 years we've felt the burden of all the things we've promised. We've decided to focus on doing what the games needs most (construction contracts alleviates some of the problems with construction). If we inflect it in a way to do both then we'll do it.

We have our sight on the future and want to maintain our DNA and identity and carrying that forward. Modernizing our game, what does that mean? Everything from improving look/feel and the responsiveness and accessibility of the game.

Is there a team dedicated to restoring/revisiting/pruning old content?

There's no single team. We have several teams where it's already apart of what they do such as with Ninja team with small QoL stuff with 5 years worth of changes from the Dojo. We also have Core Experience/Mobile team who is looking at reworking/improving the new player experience. Episodic teams are willing to change stuff such as the with the Penguin D&D.

 

Microtransactions (MTX)

State of MTX

We've talked about Treasure Hunter (TH) and if we have the balance right. A lot of our plans next year are continuing to get that right and to have the right balance of events that people enjoy. I know we've had issues with overlapping recently.

We also want to take away some of the bits where there's a bit of negativity around the MTX services. We are going to work through a program of steps there all the way up to how we want to develop TH. This year has been experimental to get info on what works, and you'll see more of that happening. But we want to get that balance right, so we can have a good healthy game players can enjoy moving forward into the future.

What latest comment regarding Yak track impacting the presence of Treasure Hunter?

It's about the balance and where we need to put the emphasis. Is it about TH promos that we feature very heavily or are we in a situation where we can put those more on the backseat a bit? We've tested out things like changing the duration, and they set better with systems like Yak Track.

What's the latest on the recent Treasure Hunter bug that was exploited?

We needed to do a full investigation and have full diligence in checks before we took action. We have identified a small number of accounts and have issued temporary bans and are taking back illegitimately gained xp/items. We are also looking into our internal processes to how we can better catch and prevent these situations from occurring.

Do we have any plans to look at rare tokens?

We probably should, I think integrating them into oddment system is a good suggestion. We need to have a chat about that.

 

Events

Have we ever though about a League type gamemode for RS3?

If we were to do it we would find things that make sense for Runescape. We don't need to duplicate everything they've done. There are things we do really well, we do PvM, Skilling, Clue scrolls. We could do more with competition, world firsts, leaderboards, etc.

What sort of impact has been had on the game as a result of holding DXP four times a year?

We look at the data around this all of the time. The games in a really good state right now, we have more payers, more activity than about 7 years now. We have new players coming in through Steam who are really excited about experiencing Double XP Live. So we will see how that goes. But it has had a good impact overall.

We've been talking about doing more events as well, and it sits alongside this as well. We wanted to get more balance with those seasonal events (Halloween, Christmas, Easter) and improve the way we do those. And have less overlap or too much crowding around events.

Why are restoring artifacts excluded from DXP this round for those not in the know?

In the end, what it boils down to is, 'Do we want to change how Archaeology is trained or do we want to keep how Archaeology is trained?' and we opted for the way we retain the way archaeology is trained. We think this is for the better of the game in the long-term.

Any plans to change Summoning to be more like Archaeology when it comes to DXP.

We will leave it as is right now, but its something we have and would still need to discuss.

 

Free to Play (F2P)

Was the F2P level 20 limit for Archaeology considered a success?

We didn't see a huge up-tick from it. The problem with raising the level cap for other skills is that it works better for some skills than others. There are some geographical issues some skills don't have content in the f2p.

We will probably look at addressing F2P from a different avenue than that.

 

Skilling

After the new construciton alt training method is out, which skill would you ideally visit next?

Agility, such as what you get from agility, run energy isn't the thing it was.

Divination, it needs some sexification, needs to be a reason to train it. It needs more joy in the core loop of it.

 

Tech

Is the tickrate improvements still being worked on/in plans?

We were looking at tick-rate and performance overall. We launched the back-end work we did to achievements, that is is one of our most costly scripts on our servers so the overhaul was necessary to check off our list and move onto the next one.

What we showed at Runefest last year is a crazy problem to try and solve. We'd have to change the entire behavior of the game and how PvM works or other elements. It's not an easy problem to solve for and is a much bigger problem to try and solve for.

Where we can get a lot of other gains are what we are doing with achievements things like the tick-rate of our scripts. There are other things that deal with the performance of the game. Chatting with the Brazilian, our servers are based out of Miami, and so we are looking at bringing if we can bring something closer to home for them.

Other

Will there be a Premier Club this year?

Yes, it will be announced fairly soon.

Will Ashdale ever get something to do there?

It's build in such a way where it isn't modular. To update it is very difficult, there are building there not like anypart of the game world. So it is problematic to bring it up to standard. From a narrative perspective it's so dislocated, it's hard to bring it into the core narrative of Runescape. There's many reason why we did Ashdale as we did but a lot of those we've moved beyond.

When we look at the tutorial, first time user experience, we will probably look to go into a different direction. So long term Ashdale is being pushed to side than integrated.

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