[2023] Woodcutters' Grove - Fort Forinthry Season Update

The new Birds Nests - which contain the Imcando fragments - are also not available from Miscellania at present.

They did! Shown here at the timestamp I've linked: https://www.youtube.com/live/3F_nnyEe2Mo?feature=share&t=2111

It's primarily down to the team wanting to make Fort Forinthry's alternative construction method a viable way of training the skill. The prior XP rates were much lower, which are being changed along with the resources required.

The XP hits that come with it are massive, but the cost is having to gather or buy expensive resources - then process them into frames - for those builds.

Birds Nests.

It's one of my last three as well! 99'ing in the Grove for sure.

Correct. Only the new type that will drop once you get your Cabin to Tier 3.

It's a good note. I get the spirit of what was written here (ie. the hatchets will now be properly paced through the levels rather than at odd values) but we don't have a Tier 90 being introduced with this update. Imcando is Tier 80.

We'll get this changed now.

It won't no.

I wanted to give you my perspective on your first question having been a part of M&S rework, and being involved early on with the high level design and some granular details of this project. I don't like using the word 'rework' sparingly but we'll use it for now :P

The bulk of what made M&S such a huge project was not the core skilling flow but rather every other thing that plugged in to both skills which had to be reworked. Each and every single one of these (invention tools/perks, potions, drop tables for monsters/rewards across the game, miscellaneous rewards such as Varrock armour, scrimshaws, quests, summoning familiars, worn gear and so on) required at the very least design work, dev work, and QA. Other things may have also required artists and audio for example. All of this bloated the time needed for the project.

From our learnings, the approach we've had since then is to do smaller, more contained "reworks" or rebalances that we can try and fit into projects on our road map or schedule somewhere, whereby we could do the full rework over time but in segments. One recent example of this is the Divination "refresh" Mod Shogun was also a part of. It's easier to justify and deliver reworks - or steps toward a full rework - in this manner.

To do that we have to be very critical of what we allow in that contained design or otherwise we start to bloat scope again or sacrifice another part of the update, or another update altogether. RuneScape's huge and has a lot of content over its 20+ years of life, there's a lot of interconnected content, and we're a super passionate bunch so it's hard to say when we should stop. Woodcutting is connected in ways to Fletching, Firemaking, and Construction. It also has it's own variety of buffs and bonuses we need to be aware of. The question of "how far do we go?" was constant because it's not obvious when to stop. How far do we go getting involved with firemaking, fletching, construction? How far do we go changing misc content/buffs/skill boosts? How far do we go changing quests or other content? Does it all make sense or is it broken if we release it with X, Y, and Z? The WC changes you see displayed here in this project are all that we decided would 1. fit in scope and 2. actually make sense and work being released without a full scale rework.

Another challenge we had early on with this project's scope was that we needed to release new content in the same update too, not just the WC "rework" stuff. It needed to be tied into the fort and progress the season story in some way - and that's why we have an update to the fort in this update. We had to play a big game of balancing the scales so that we could appropriately balance on one hand - a new update that delivers some new content for players to play and advance the season, and on the other hand - some core WC changes that could effectively make the skill better as well as giving us a better platform to do any future rebalances/reworks to WC content (or FM/construction/Fletching etc.)

TL;DR - It's easier to justify smaller and contained reworks for a skill, in segments, inside projects over time that can lead to eventual full scale reworks rather than outright doing a full rework all at once.

Hopefully that gives some insight in to it all, and well done to the core team on this project - they've done a wonderful job!

UPDATE : With Woodcutters Grove coming out on Monday the 19th there will come an update to the costs of buildings in the fort.

These changes are being made so we can substantially increase the XP for making the higher Tier buildings in order to make this a viable training method for Construction as intended. To compensate, the material cost has been increased.

We have updated the Woodcutters Grove Blog with a table of these new frame costs and the experience gained.

https://rs.game/woodcuttersgrove

Yeah the very reason we're doing it this way is to give ourselves the platform to do more in the future, without necessarily planning it/for it. Now that say the core of WC has been done, in another update we could do a mechanical rework to how it's trained more easily, or target some specific content tied to it, or repeat the same approach for another skill. It's very much like working away at layers of the system with each update. I can't say anything on plans, however.

Side point but you may or may not remember before M&S started, there was a poll that asked players if they'd like a full rework, or only a core rework of tiers and such (and maybe some other options). The full rework won the poll. I wasn't at Jagex then, but i can imagine that the conversations they were having about how to approach the rework was exactly what we're discussing now. What can we best offer players with X amount of time? I believe "only a core rework" was part of the poll because there were concerns from some about the risks involved with the amount of time it required and how it might go down etc.

As for the second question, that's a whole different beast. Discussing basically removing or reworking a system like the PoH is no small feat, but it'd also vary for each skill. These things for me would fall into the same area as the "rework all other content" part of M&S simply due to their size and complexity. In Construction's case, i believe that's why it's been better for us over the years to have created more modern alternatives as opposed to direct fixes or further additions. It's a game of what can we do best with this time we've been allotted. This is in comparison to WC again where it's much easier to rebalance the skill in terms of level bands and XP/h etc with some new tiers and all that. Requires a fraction of the time, and can be justified being part of an update.

But yes, in general, we want to (and have wanted to for a while) slowly rework these core parts of RuneScape, not just skills but also in other areas such as combat. I know the combat council is wanting to start looking at making combat more dynamic and diverse in their own ways. Basically we'd all like to tweak core parts of our favourite bits of RS :P it'll just come with time. How we execute on each will be a learning and i'm sure things will evolve as we go down this path just as they have with M&S to where we are now.

And thank you for the comment, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I've been considering doing another Q&A so it's good to know there's interest :)

They would be used to make T3 versions of the Chapel, Guardhouse and Command Center.