almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Chigzy

Thanks for taking the time to write this out.

If it helps to clarify the stance in one easy to view post instead of looking at comments spread across a thread then it's worth it, I hope it helps :)

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Sebastiaan_RS

Thank you for writing this, it's better to have a clear statement from jagex than from me haha

Still sad to hear, but at least it's more understandable now, and I do hope placeholders get some sort of ETA relatively quickly.

Still sad to hear, but at least it's more understandable now, and I do hope placeholders get some sort of ETA relatively quickly.

Of course having an ETA plan would be the dream, we have to see how feasible it is from our prototype, I'd love to say more than anything it comes out at "x" but we're not at that point yet.

channels energy into the prototype

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Futondragon

Can you please then allow for players to get multiple of certain effect outfits like globetrotter and elite skilling outfits and house draken? I'd be more then willing to recollect the shards/redo the quests to get a second set of these items and many others since placeholders aren't happening next year more than likely.

Edit - Also allow augmented items that are lvl 20 same dyed state and same perks to stack in the bank is also something that i'd pay for getting a second item of in the long run.

Not a bad shout whatsoever! I think it could be worth seeing how the prototype goes first? Just my two cents

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Non-Random-User

does seeing how much the players want the bank rework affect your choice in considering working on it sooner than without?

or do you have a known order of things you want to do before then? or just when u feel like its needed?

I can't speak on the overall opinion of Jagex when it comes to the questions as I'm not a release manager and that wouldn't be fair to make that decision.

What I can say is that it's pretty much obvious to see the fallout from it, hence the need for my post but not much can be discussed internally until the new year as people are out of the office.

Does that make sense?

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Zowskii

Thanks for making this post. I personally believe if this is how we found out the rework was shelved and not in a very untactful comment the outcry might not have been so bad.

I agree I'd have wanted such a significant statement like this to have been posted with a full in-depth explanation on why we're doing "x" "y" and "z".

But... I'm glad I got to do this post now to try and clear it up!

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by metazombii

Dont you think past two years there has been a trend set of Managers/Product Owners like Osborne/Kelpie/Connor shouting out updates and promises and not delivering them while keeping people hooked.

Expansion system was hyped and during expansion regular updates were curtailed and then after a year of nothing expansion system was stopped. Mining-Smithing was supposed to be two years ago same as bank rework.

There are devs who are good at their job but your management is just at this stealing time and making excuses.

I'll try to answer what I can based on how I was involved in these somehow!

Expansion system was hyped and during expansion regular updates were curtailed and then after a year of nothing expansion system was stopped. Mining-Smithing was supposed to be two years ago same as bank rework.

The expansions stuff stopped after the Menaphos release, we had to reset our development process to which we had a very lengthy livestream about that back in 2017.

Mining-Smithing was supposed to be two years ago same as bank rework.

It was actually on track to launch in 2016, but we scrapped it in September, as the streams we ran and dev blogs we posted in the run up to it showed we were going completely the wrong way, so we had to restart it all.

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Futondragon

Honestly i rather not wait. I'm extremely frustrated at the rate of needed qol this past year and have nearly given up on simple things like convert x on clue down grades and simple ed1 fixes cause the combat system isn't understood by devs.

I bit the bullet and downgraded 3000+ clues to finish easy/med logs and am now finished. After the holidays i'm just going to finish ed1 and be done, and rage alot at dieing for things out of my control. I shouldn't have to work around bugs. So be asked to wait a year for place holders to fail just to get this as a backup isn't a good option at all.

Note the p4 solak bug with defensives being canceled happens at all bosses in ed1 as well.

I believe /u/JagexDaze has mentioned they're aware of the convert x on clue downgrades thing.

Which ED1 fixes in particular just so I'm aware? CC: /u/JagexOrion /u/mod_sova

Note the p4 solak bug with defensives being canceled happens at all bosses in ed1 as well.

I want to say this is known? CC: /u/JagexRamen /u/JagexIago

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by WeebsDontDeserveLife

Good. Focus on fixing the current bugs in the game, please. Some of them make it almost unplayable; for example, in PvM clicks just don't register incredibly often.

List some specifics so I can get an idea :)

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Zyvyx

Hey man thanks for explaining this to us! I have a question though. If we can't get more bank space, can we get the filter that tells you which items kn your bank are useless updated to include more things? Ive noticed that it lets you keep a kot of useless quest items that clog up bank space. Thanks very much for the communication and have a merry Christmas!

Let us know what items in particular and we can try do some more in an update?

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by Shaunyowns

Hello everyone,

It goes without saying you've vocally expressed your displeasure at the recent comment about the bank rework and bank placeholders.

There had been replies through the day but none really getting to the point of actually clarifying what our future plans are for this.

First of all, let's just clarify a few things then we'll get into the nitty gritty.

  • As originally stated, there were no plans for Bank Placeholders, this is not true, as mentioned by /u/JagexHunter last night (one of the developers of the initial bank rework concept) bank placeholders are currently in the process of being prototype by the engine team. This has been very under the radar, even more so internally, as you can imagine we're just as excited about the thought of it as you.

The prototype being under the radar was simply due to the fact that we didn't want to raise expectations especially when it's still possible this approach won't work, but it's better to say that it's being prototyped than to incorrectly say it's not worked on or planned.

So, can't you give us more bank slots?

For this I'll take a direct quote from what we've said on a recent Developer Q&A stream while at the same time diving into the specifics to help clarify.

Bank space is something we're always looking into. People are aware that we're technically at our limits in terms of bank space, so we need to do further work to remedy that. There are two aspects we have to consider:

  • Save-game size:

    • Think of an item with the most amount of variables attached to it (Augmented, both gizmos etc) - this item is the most costly per bank slot server side. Multiply that up by the number of bank space, then add a bit more. Now multiply that by the maximum amount of players that you need. That's the amount of storage space we need to make sure we always have allocated at all times to make sure we can always save the player's game state.
    • Adding a little bit of bank space per player equates to a huge amount. We're aware of the problem, and we're not unsympathetic to the issue players have.
    • We did a study into how many people it affects. It affects quite a decent chunk but not as much as you'd expect.
    • This is why our emphasis on content has been focused around "inventories", one example is the upcoming Player Owned Farm farmhand update which we're using to help save on your bank space.
  • Impact on other content:

    • Adding extra slots to the bank also affects other content, such as things that check whether you own an item. A recent example of the potential impact of this is in the Diango system, that stores items for you and allows you to retrieve them. As recently as last month we had a bug with Diango which led players to crash the moment they clicked on him (this was hotfixed immediately). This was a result of enabling him to search additional inventories for your items. Adding additional slots to the bank could have a similar effect on other content.

Why did you not announce it at RuneFest?

  • The Bank rework and loyalty point rework were not spoken about because the reveals for things that are definitely coming out before February 2019. At the time of RuneFest the previous status of the bank rework had not changed.

Why can't we do what Old School RuneScape has done?

(bits taken from /u/JagexHunter 's post)

It's the most frustrating thing about it for sure, why can they get these features that we can't?

The key answer there is in items. Old School placeholders are automatically generated objects, like notes. This means each item actually has multiples types, for example:

  • Item
  • Item (Noted)
  • Item (Placeholder)

Being the game from 2007, Old School has a significantly lower amount of items. We can't take this approach as it would push the item ID over the current limit. That limit can be raised, but a lot of non-game features would need to be updated. That's things like GE, adventurer's log, forum avatars, and many more like that which becomes a huge amount of work. Additionally stuff in particular such as the GE will also impact Old School as both games share that module (same as how both games have to receive the same friends chat updates at the same time)

Why shelve everything else?

First thing to say here is that this has been the status for a long time. It doesn't mean it would never be picked up in future, but that the benefits the rework offers don't offer as much as we could get from other smaller engine features that have also been requested over the years.

The rest comes down to the sheer complexity. To start a game engine update is very different to a regular content update, if it breaks you have to turn the game off until you can fix it. That can be mitigated through beta servers of course, but it's still makes large-scale changes risky.

It's especially risky, as to the engine all inventories are practically the same thing. Shops, worn equipment, beast of burden, bank, etc... are all the same thing at the core. Game scripts generally define the behaviour for the inventories. That means making a change in the engine to support bank features doesn't just have the potential to break the bank, but practically the entire game.

On top of that there's part-deprecated systems that need to be supported. Any changes that were made to the engine which the client needs to know about would need to be implemented in NXT, java, and HTML5 (in which the comapp is based). All very different languages, which could break in very different ways. It's not straightforward to just turn these off, but it's obviously ideal only to implement in one location.

Why did we say we were doing it to start?

We were experimenting with ninja taking on larger-scale projects which were Quality of life rather than the typical ninja fixes which had less impact on gameplay than when ninja first started.

We had the means to do engine work in-team and looked into a lot of the technical complexity to feel like it was possible, even if it would take a long time. Ultimately it wasn't possible, but that didn't become apparent until months after we made the announcement at RuneFest 2016.


TL;DW

  • In short the bank rework as a whole is shelved; we are not working on it and will not be for foreseeable future.
  • We are investigating bank placeholders on its own as a feature you want. It is at this stage purely an investigation into feasibility, and we make no promises about being able to deliver this.

As a note, due to how extremely close to Christmas it is and with staff taking holidays, etc our replies will be pretty stagnated, but we'll try to respond over the holidays where we can.

Thank you for reading :)

Just going on lunch so I'll be back at 2PM (40 minutes) and then will continue to reply where I can!

almost 6 years ago - /u/Shaunyowns - Direct link

Originally posted by The_Wkwied

Can you tell us the technical difference between all these 'inventories' and the bank?

Why can Diango hold seemingly every cosmetic and MTX item in the game, but our bank can not? (I counted, Diango can hold 665 items)

How come the POH Treasure Chest can hold just shy under 300 items?

How come the Sophanem Slayer Dungeon and Elite Dungeon Chest each hold 30 unique, separate items (60 between the two of them)?

With the above, how come there are places to store over ONE THOUSAND ITEMS that are not in the bank, but we can not store those same items in the bank?

Courtesy of Mod Helen


It's less of a question about save-game size (though it is still a consideration), but more to do with the computer processing required. Consider that to display an item within an inventory to you and set up particular interactions on it, takes an amount of time, and a particular number of actions.

Now multiply that by the number of slots allowed in that particular inventory. For a bank, that time and number of actions is significantly more than a smaller inventory such as the chests mentioned.Now, let's think about a piece of content (like Diango for example), that requires us to check whether a player has an item.

It takes a certain amount of time and number of actions to check a particular inventory slot (e.g. bank, backpack, worn items, grand exchange, etc etc). Each time we add more inventory slots (whether that's to the bank, or a new inventory), we increase the total length of time, and total number of actions that search takes. We have a finite limit on the number of actions a particular piece of script can perform, and the longer a piece of script takes to run, the worse your user experience will be.


Does this help /u/The_Wkwied? :)