[2020] Request for Mod Stu: Could you kindly give a week of your time to optimize social slayer for low levels? Some spawn clusters are so small two people can kill three things and be waiting a long time on spawns. Also killcount desyncs make it incredibly inconvenient to do.

I felt like writing this because I don't think anybody bothers to report playability issues of pre-level 50 content. In this context, pre-Vanakka slayer. Maybe I should include Vanakka. I get that a lot of low level content hasn't been optimized ever, even before pre-EOC. But despite having social slayer some mobs are clearly just there to be done single player and its quite upsetting to land on a task that has you waiting forever for spawns. Check out ice giants or hop goblins for example and you'll see what I'm talking about.

In addition, keeping slayer killcount synced with your partner is rather technical and isn't explained anywhere. Overall its just frustrating to do.

Its also worth mentioning that low level slayer generally wasn't designed from the scope of a low level player. So in introducing new players to the skill via Turael and Mazchna, it feels like they're purposefully pushing uninteresting (and old content) trash mobs on you to slog through, and that's obviously quite the turn-off for new people who have raised standards from playing other games. I get that slayer is great fun but the story is different at lower levels.

A lot of this goes unspoken and I wish something would be done about it.

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I wish I had the luxury of choosing how I spent a week of development time! That is not my decision to make, however.

You touch on several points I would like to address if I had the opportunity. I certainly felt the limitations of Social Slayer you describe when attempting to slay with friends I introduced to RuneScape. (Particularly as you'll likely both need to world hop to find Slayer mobs you can grind, leading to the desyncing issue you mentioned.) Though realistically it'd likely take more than a week to rewrite Social Slayer.

Mod Shogun also did some work on improving low-level Slayer assignments in CXP, as I was able to convince our producer of the importance of doing so, before Mod Shogun was re-assigned to the ninja team. It sounds like that'd address several of the issues you raised.

His new team is aware of the remaining work to complete the project, and we're hoping he'll be able to finish it between other ninja priorities.

Given that, as noted above, prioritisation and allocation of projects and release dates is not within developer control, I'm unable to give an ETA (I've probably already said more than permitted).

Where it comes to addressing specific issues like certain spawn clusters being under-subscribed, I'd recommend making bug reports for those issues using the in-game Report a Bug tool, being as specific as possible (the more focused the scope of the task, the more likely it can be addressed as a patch note).

The one area of liberty we're allowed to work on something other than our assigned project is a fortnightly live bug fixing day at the end of every project sprint.

If your bug report is registered as a reproducible issue in our bug tracking system, that therefore is the space (prioritisation permitting) in which other developers and I may be able to work on some of your specific issues.

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