devtrackers.gg
It may be rude of me to say, but I’ll say it now since it seems the most appropriate.
I do not think Mod Pi is a good game designer. Nearly every piece of content he seems to have control over always ends up ruining a core portion of the game.
- Runespan threw actual runecrafting out the window.
- EOCs initial design and concept had a multitude of flaws.
- All PvP updates have caused situations in and out out of PvP to be worse.
That being said I think Mod Pi is brilliant when it comes to implementing cool concepts and ideas. It’s almost always really creative and has an interesting approach to introducing content.
I think he plays a really important role at Jagex in implementing updates and providing interesting ideas for discussion, but I don’t think he should be the one deciding the exact implementation from a balance perspective.
That is just my personal observation though. I could be complete wrong on the actual internal stuff.
Hey,
Thought I'd retort here to what is some very useful and very fair feedback from Rubic here. These are also points I’ve wants to say for quite a while and I still to this day kick myself for but I live my life by a set of rules and one of these rules is that I can forgive myself for my mistakes provided that I learn from it and don't make it again. That said the points that you have raised specifically I do have more info that I'd like to share it has been a while and we have learned from what we did wrong with these updates.
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Runespan
Initially the aims for the runespan update was to release a minigame which the players could do for some runecrafting xp to break up the grindy-ness of the skill. When I approached this I raised that this will not fix the players issues with runecrafting in that it is a very dry skill that is not fun to train. One of my designs for a minigame was a game where you siphoned runic energy out of barriers that broke down and got you through a maze, this eventually turned in to the runespan and I pitched the design which was liked and the aims of the project changed at that point. (the minigame was later picked up and turned in to the rune goldberg machine).
My aim with the runespan was to offer a separate track through runecrafting that offered an alternative to the grindy option and to offer a more social and more dynamic way of training runecrafting. My initial design pitched XP rates on par with existing runecrafting, but you do not get runes. This was later changed based on feedback I received that if you're not getting runes then you should instead get a bit more XP.
The way in which the Runespan works today is not the way in which it originally worked, nowadays the runespan works off of invisible things in game that kill a node and spawn a new one based on timers. The original one utilised a message passing system I designed that meant that nodes lasted until they were depleted and when it was it sent a message to the invisible things that spawned a new node. Now on release this broke as messages were somehow duplicated and caused the node chaos everyone saw on release. We made several attempts to fix this but the system was this large complex net of 100s of messages passing around and duplicating. After a few days I decided enough was enough and I wrote what Mod Easty refers to as the scariest hotfix he has ever done. I redesigned the whole node spawning system from the ground up and wrote it in a way in which it could be hotfixed in to the live game without turning the servers off to decommission the old system and turn on the new one over the course of an hour. This worked and is the system which is used now.
When you change a system, you also change the balancing heavily and the rates were inflated, therefore we did a rebalance shortly after release. My initial balance was a lot heavier handed and again was a lot closer to classical runecrafting, but we had recently seen the death of a minigame (rogues den) after a heavy handed nerf and a lot of time and effort was invested in the runespan so the nerf was brought back to be less heavy handed and these are the rates we have today. This compound with EoC massively reducing rune usage and thus profit from rune running lead to the XP or GP gambit originally planned not being impactful and runespan being the obvious choice.
I'm not trying to absolve myself of the XP rates of the runespan because at the end of the day the content is my content and it is my responsibility but I have never been happy with how rewarding the runespan is for the effort. In fact, the introduction of the demonic skull (Mod Hunter and myself) was a deliberate effort to help resolve this. What I am proud of though is the mechanics of the runespan, if you play it the way I originally designed (i.e. you need to pay to use the bridges) to get the max xp out of it you need to hunt for good nodes whilst maintaining enough runes to be mobile enough around the runespan. I learned a lot from the Runespan, what I did right and what I did wrong, and I apply it going forward.
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EoC
EoC's initial design and concept was not done by me, if you look at the timelines I was making and releasing the Runespan during this time. I was however brought on to EoC right after runespan and yes, I definitely played a large part in EoC's initial release. At the time I was a very Junior developer and did not speak up nearly as much as I should have as I just wanted to impress and learn from those on the project as I loved combat. One of my biggest take aways from EoC was to learn to trust my gut and speak up, something I do now quite a lot behind the scenes.
They say you learn the most from your failures and while today I don't feel like EoC was a failure at all, it's definitely felt it at times and my god have I learned a lot. An awful lot of the original balancing of EoC was off, this is not a failure of a single person in my mind as lots of people (including me) contributed to it. It was more a failure of being hugely ambitious in re-balancing the whole game and not giving it enough time in development to balance it appropriately. This re-balancing is something we have chipped away at since release, I am still doing and hit it hard with the legacy update, something which I pitched heavily for since EoCs original release (revo was a player design however, deffo cannot take credit for that). During legacy I totally rebalanced the original balancers numbers to be the ones we see today and from the feedback I have received it is much better. I have fixed a hell of a lot of the original EoCs numbers, a lot of it behind the scenes with others and tbh you'll be hard pushed to find anyone who has done more to deal with the original EoCs release issues than myself. So yes, while I was there and did play a large part in EoC I have also been a pivotal person it transforming it from what it was to what it is now. To pin original EoCs issues solely on me is rather unfair I believe.
If I could turn back time and redo EoC, would I do it totally differently, oh hells yes, I have learned more from doing EoC that I have learned from any other update and it is still teaching me things today.
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PvP Updates
On this one I must agree, I am absolutely the wrong person to be updating PvP. I took on the mantle of PvP because I had fond memories of clan wars in PvP and as part of trying to resolve the issues original EoC introduced I wanted to give it a go as I was the only developer at the time who wanted to do it. I may have not been the right person, but I was the best person we had at the time to try it.
I've talked lots in my approach on PvP including a large one somewhere else on reddit clearly stating I will not be addressing PvP in future as what the community wants and what I deliver never align and in places I did indeed do more harm than good. Aside from dealing with BH and passing on what I've learned I don't think you'll be seeing me doing PvP work on RS3 in future because I agree, I am the wrong person. I don't actively PvP in RS3 and as such I don't align with what the community wants so I have chosen to take a step back.
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Overall, yes, I have made plenty of mistakes, I will happily hold my hands up and tell you I made them but I think you'd be hard pushed to find someone who goes out of their way to rectify and learn from past mistakes than me and those mistakes you've highlighted are what has shaped the game developer I am today. Does that make me a bad games designer, if you took all of my bad decisions and piled them up, it certainly would look that way but I like to think I've learned from and not repeated previous mistakes and if anything the designer I am now is a hell of a lot better than the one that made the updates you're citing and it is primarily because I made the mistakes.
I love RuneScape, seriously, RuneScape before I worked here saved me from getting involved with lots of bad stuff I would have othewise when I was younger, the friends I made on it helped me though depression, it’s given me a career and friends for life both on the game and at Jagex. This game is special, it has been the driver of thousands of stories like mine where it has impacted a life. I hold a massive place for it in my heart for it just as all of you do. That love and passion for the game does indeed lead me to make some mistakes along the way but believe me when I say I carry each mistake and impact I make on the game and do everything I can to not only fix issues I have introduced but also use it to drive myself to do better and better. So you’re right Rubic, I’ve done some stuff which has negatively affected the game but things are never as clear cut as they seem and I’m happy to own every single one of those and use them to make sure they don’t happen again. The game designer writing this now is way better than the dude who made the updates you’re citing, he loves the hell out of the game and will do everything he can to continue to make it awesome.