[2022] (Unpopular?) Opinion: "It limits future reward space" feels like a lazy cop-out to avoid fixing longstanding problems (and itself limits reward-space)

lazy

What you're drawing attention to here is another of the pitfalls of trying to have more open communication - a dev gives an abridged answer to what was probably quite a long (hours, days, weeks) design discussion and conclusion, and gets insulted for it.

To be clear it's fine to disagree or ask for further clarification. "You said it limits reward space, but couldn't you just do X instead?" That's a question which prompts the developer to share more information about what they meant. Open discussion is great - it might be that actually what you propose hadn't occurred to the developer and you just made the game better, or it might be that there's a lot more to it than you realised and they didn't have time to explain hours and hours of discussion and decision making in an off the cuff but well intentioned attempt to answer a question.

EDIT: removed me reeeeing

Yeah that's definitely something I'm conscious of. Sounds like a good topic for a future livestream. The vigor passive was something that sponge had implemented for a future update (zamorak I think) so it wasn't being "saved" exactly.

This is something that's a big design priority for me - it's something we've gotten wrong in both directions in the past - i.e. fixes that could have been good rewards have been shipped "free" as QOL and fixes that are really necessary for the base health of the game have been locked behind demanding requirements. That said I don't necessarily agree with some specific complaints - passive adren for example is something that makes no difference whatsoever at low levels of play and doesn't need to be baseline.

I agree with the underlying problem you're outlining but I'm not sure rewards are the right way to handle this - any new feature or mechanic or item or ability can be used by the top end as much as the bottom end, probably more effectively.

I'm not completely sure what sort of effect you're imagining as a "gap closer" - do you mean something like a less skillcap-reliant alternative item which has lower performance but still higher performance than current options?

This comment feels like a lazy cop-out.

See I didn't say you were lazy, I just said your comment feels lazy. ;)

To be fair I overreact to the word "lazy" because it's used so often and it's usually so wildly inaccurate - like think about the stereotypes of the problems in the games industry. It's not that devs are lazing around doing nothing - it's that they're working unpaid overtime and never get to see their families. I've seen people come up with all sorts of explanations of what they "meant" when they said lazy, but ultimately lazy is an inherently personal attribution to what is likely quite a complex issue, or possibly not actually an issue at all.

For a while on discord I was spamming the title screen from the L word every time someone said it, and then I eventually resorting to just reeeeeing. I instinctively did that in my first reply to this thread but then I realised that for people who weren't used to the in-joke it might come across very weird.

I don't mean to describe it as some sort of threat or deal or ultimatum - the reason I keep bringing it up is because people often ask "why aren't devs responding?" and I'm doing my best to explain why. There's no conscious mass decision going on here, it's just a lot of individuals each making the right choice for them. When things happen there are usually causal factors, and a big part of my job is recognising them and doing my best to combat them - mostly in a game design context, but the exact same logic applies to internal company organisation and community interaction.

Nothing in your comment is wrong, but it kind of fails to recognise that the people involved are humans with lives and mental health and stuff like that. The game absolutely would be better if every mod was constantly on here (and other forums) chatting with players, gathering feedback, feeling a sense of personal obligation to the community - but such activity comes with a high cost when a significant part of the community feel that either any staff member is a legitimate target for any grievance they have, or that the right way to express their concerns is by making that staff member's day worse on purpose.

Like you say "you're reading too much into it" and this is in general a bit of a meme in online communication. Maybe I am. Part of the issue with online communication is that certain tropes and memes become embedded in conventional ways of saying things - we all watch streamers who make their living on being at least a little bit outrageous and overly opinionated and when you're saturated in that world and those are your role models, stuff which is obviously way over the line for normal social interaction can start to seem perfectly normal. Even worse, there are a lot of people who don't have a solid grasp on normal social interaction in the first place - the sort of person who starts harassing the staff in a shop because of some imagined slight. Neither of those factors makes a particular expression okay.

It's become a bit of a culture war point to say something along the lines of "grow thicker skin" or "if you can't handle the internet maybe don't be on it?" and that's kinda the point - if people make an environment unpleasant to be in, you always have the choice to not subject yourself to it and for your own mental health that's often going to be the correct choice.

Ultimately the internet has become a bit of a sh*tty social environment (not that it was ever spectacular) and rather than just accept that and not interact, I'd prefer to push back on it to the meagre extent that I am able to. As I said on the livestream, I want to be here interacting, and I'm sure a lot of my colleagues do too, but I'm not going to spend my Sunday doing that if it's more hassle than it's worth.

Possibly yeah. "Social media resilience training" is something that's been bouncing around internally for a bit. Honestly I think it might be slightly the wrong angle (not that the training is a bad idea) - ultimately you want the devs to be intrinsically motivated to engage with the community because it's fun for them to do so. I share the concerns of some players that it's not good to exist only in a hugbox echo chamber where everyone praises you - ultimately negative feedback is important for us to learn to do better. However, there's a pretty big line between "negative feedback" and "reading this feedback made me want to take a week off to seriously consider whether game development is worth it" and that does happen fairly frequently. Some players aren't very good at walking that line. Faced with that, of course devs will withdraw to smaller discord communities or just not interact with the community at all.

I agree completely about the skilling outfits, and it's something I'm investigating for the medium term. I wouldn't not fix something that matters just because I don't like the tone of a reddit thread.

I think there's an interesting design discussion to be had with the community on the role of loadouts within RS and to what extent that's core to RS's identity. Completely personally, I hate having to switch gear for every activity, but the idea that you start at the bank by selecting the right outfit for the task at hand seems like a core part of RS's identity to me.