[2020] TL;DW 470 - General Q&A with Mod Warden

VOD

• Mining and Smithing changes for 3 Feb:
  • Stamina penalty increased from 20% to 80% less damage per swing. Does not affect arc crablets or red sandstone.
  • Invention will now give 4 components per bar used.
  • Elder rune will have a slightly higher chance of breaking down into components instead of parts.
  • Breakdown perk's activation chance changed to a flat 0.8% per rank instead of 0.8% per bar.
• Do we base success off of player engagement? Different teams have different things that they look at. When we say engagement, we mean reach which comprises of a lot of factors. For example, for the live ops team: how people are participating/spending, differentiating between people using just daily keys/free currencies. It's not as simple as '100% people have used this today, so this is successful content.'
• How do we feel our approach is different now for MTX in comparison to October 2019? The speed of changes have been amplifying, we've addressed where a lot of the RNG aspects are and what we want to move forward with, transparency, player choice, and we made some declarations to remove the blind choice side of it. These are some good first steps, we'll try out bigger moves. We haven't removed all of the things we want to remove or change yet. Yak-track feedback was really good so we're going to do more of those. More of the 'glass case' promo was super transparent in terms of prizes, ring of shards too. We're working on a 'build your own chest' promo in March. We're looking at adding choice and transparency to the older promos until we have a more future-proof plan.
• We have some plans for a more unified store for unlocks from yak-tracks. There is no hard-and-fast rule for unlocks from previous tracks, we just want to do it in the right way.
• There are plans to add to the rare token store.
• Vic will be back. 'He only came twice a year, I think we want him to come back more often. Maybe once a quarter.'
• We are having a meeting tomorrow about the PvM Hub to go through feedback and see which ones we want to implement.
• We are pushing hard for iOS beta. We aren't super far away from it, possibly at least a couple of months. We'd rather it be sooner rather than later so we can benefit from the feedback. Unfortunately Apple has fixed caps on beta releases.
• We have our sights on Duel Arena and want to work on the right solution for it. Sit tight on this one for a little bit and we'll come back to it. It's part of our duty of care blueprint that we've talked about. It's difficult to deal with it in the right way, it's a studio-wide issue since OSRS has it too.
• The art team is looking to do more things to give the feeling of weather in areas.
• In previous years we would've announced the road map by now, but Mod Warden is adamant we do it right, that we can finish those updates, which means doing an additional level rigour that we haven't done before. It's worth the wait. We want a unified product strategy so it's just: promos that exist here in a corner, and then episodic content goes here etc. It's one live game and it should that way. We're currently going through a sizing exercise for the road map to see where we're over-committing ourselves/under-delivering. From there we'll get it into a form that we can discuss more broadly in the company and then a thumbs up/down.
  • Archaeology - coming soon.
  • Farming and Herblore: released.
  • GWD3 - still talking about it.
  • Tech improvements - some launched, others are still there.
  • Managing Misc - still on the cards.
  • Mod Warden has been looking at things Jagex have promised in the past and assessing which of those can be carried forward. 'I just found out about the weather system (from Twitch chat) and that's got me asking more questions.'
• No month ahead for February so Mod Warden can have some more time with figuring things out.
• QOL will play a huge part of our 2020 story, we're building a QOL strategy. It should be an easy thing for us to do, it's an obvious thing for us to do. Mod Warden regularly empowers team members to say: 'hey today lets put a smile on a player's face, what can we do about it now.' I've seen a bunch of things come through player emails which we've been able to fix. There was an aquarium bug, 'its kind of ridiculous its been out 2-3 years and not fixed', so we got it fixed.
• Working on: (from what we can discuss)
  • Farming&Herblore post-launch.
  • Archaeology.
  • War's retreat post-launch.
  • Max Guild improvements.
  • One team is 'hammering away at a lot of things, a lot from Runefest.' - and mobile.
  • Maintenance to achievements to reduce client stress.
  • Live ops will be releasing a (slime?) quest, will talk about it next week.
• Daily challenges rework seems to have been very positive. Maybe we can do more.
• We want to reuse assets where it makes sense to, but we don't want players to feel like we're shortcoming something either so we have to strike the right balance. There was a player suggestion of making Hati and Skoll into a monthly D&D.
• Mod Osborne is a fan of reducing the number of worlds, get more people together in the same space. 'I think we've solved a lot of the competing for ores and mobs issues that people have had in the past.' We'd like to get players talking about it and see what they think.
• For slayer creatures, we like to give them 1 or 2 mechanics and so it becomes more and more difficult to find new ways of making unique slayer creatures. 99-120 still isn't there.
• Time-limited modes like OSRS has (twisted league, king of the skill etc)? One of the things we find fascinating is there is a lot of love for Darkscape. Mod Pi was convincing in his pitch for the fixes required to make Darkscape seasonal without falling into the pitfalls of what made the full time game mode unsuccessful. There are a lot of benefits to doing that and it isn't as big of a job as initially thought. There are issues of fragmenting the audience, and we are still suffering a bit from the missteps of the past in the way we dealt with time-limited modes. We don't want to get people's hopes up, there is nothing planned, and it isn't on our road map.
• Activity pets will be outsourced. 3 of them have been concepted. When they're done, if it feels right we'll release them right away but if we feel it's better suited for a month that is lacking in content we may assign their release for then.
• Mod Ryan asked What sort of crazy huge updates would you like to see happen in RuneScape that really change the game? on Twitter which was met with some backlash about 'why are you asking this on Twitter instead of in-game polls.'
  • We understand where those players are coming from but it was just an ice-breaker tweet for conversation, not an actual poll.
  • If we told individual developers to stop tweeting like this, it would take away from the culture of our devs being on social media.
  • On the flip side, when we take information like we are doing with the road map, we pull information from dozens of sources.

Archaeology

• We aren't quite in a position to shout about the 2020 updates (even though they're fantastic) so we've been evasive with Archaeology and we think that evasion has caused fear; that feeling of 'archaeology isn't going to come out in the second half of the year or for ages' but that is not the case.
  • We've done longevity testing, we've played it a lot. We're now seeing the feedback from those tests and seeing how much of that needs to be implemented for us to get hammered on a certain release date in the near future.
  • Holding back Archaeology to get it polished has made it so much better.
  • Definitely won't be it's own isolated update. We are going to spend more time post-launch than we have for any of our previous skills. The story of the skill will continue in future updates. Supplementing archaeology with things on the top end throughout the year and beyond.
• The most story-oriented skill we've ever produced - far more than Dungoneering.