Hello everyone,

The comp cape rework has been under discussion for some time now. We’ve been continuously talking with you and reading your pieces of feedback on various platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, Discord and the RuneScape Forums. We’ve been a bit quiet recently, because we’ve been having some bigger discussions amongst the Four Direction team and the wider Runescape team.

Over time, we’ve received various points of feedback regarding the complexity of the pitched design, and how players perceived the complexity. We sat down to discuss the reasons for this, and how we could tackle them in order to simplify the design. We want the new reworked system to feel familiar and comprehensible to new players and old ones, so in this dev blog we’re going to discuss our new simplified design pitch for the comp cape rework. This design is a much more cut-down version of the previous iteration, but still tackles all of the major points of feedback regarding comp.

The Design

We’re stripping away a lot of the previous design. As such, the completionist and trimmed completionist capes will remain as they currently are in game. We won’t be adding any new capes, new tiers of capes, new meta-achievements, or making anything into a "legacy cape". With the changes listed later, we hope to make the path to obtaining comp, and maintaining it, a much more enjoyable and satisfying journey - as well as opening up room for more achievements with new and old content, and the introduction of new capes in the future.

The “Reaper Crew” achievement will be removed as a requirement from the comp cape. Reaper has caused issues ever since its introduction, years after comp was initially brought into the game, frequently locking many players out of a cape they were otherwise always able to obtain. Hard bosses are intentionally designed to be harder than many players are comfortable with, which makes for a poor combination with the comp cape. Where most other content is normal easily accessible and solo-able, many various bosses introduce difficult, and forced group, gameplay. As well as this, reaper can sometimes limit developers from pushing difficulty on new high-end bosses as it can cause an uproar in the comp community - we’ve seen various instances of this in the past.

The “How Many Games?” Castle Wars achievement will be removed as a requirement from the trimmed comp cape. This achievement has also been controversial over the years - requiring a huge amount of time from the player. At one point it also had to have its requirement reduced, yet it still hasn’t improved since. It’s wildly out of sync with other achievements on the trimmed comp cape and quite frankly needs to be addressed. If we were releasing Castle Wars today, we would never put an achievement like this on it.

The comp cape stats will be taken off of the cape and added as a passive bonus to the “Reaper Crew” achievement instead. (This partially compensates for it being removed from comp, and seems like the most logical place to put them.) As with the previous design, these passive stats will be on the player at all times. You can combine your passive stats with any cape, which means that capes matter again, and frees us up to add better capes as rewards and drops in the future. The reason for this change is that the need for best in slot stats pushed a lot of players to pursue the comp cape when they actually had no interest in completionism. Moving the stats allows the comp cape to have more demanding requirements added to it in future.

Utility benefits that are currently tied to the cape item, such as teleports, will be changed to permanent unlocks on the player rather than the cape. These, alongside the stats, currently make the comp cape feel as a mandatory item to have at all times. Moving these elsewhere, for example making the Ava’s alerter ammo collection effect a permanent passive unlock from completing the “Do No Evil” quest, yet again allows for new and more powerful capes to be introduced. Teleports like Max Guild and Kandarin monastery will be made unlockable from their respective pieces of content, and activatable at all times through some form of interface or right click option.

The following benefits which currently are inherited by the comp cape from other capes, will be decoupled from the comp cape and become accessible in game through other means. As specified above, these will become permanent effects, toggleable, or activate-able depending on the benefit.

• From the max cape/99 skillcapes
  • Max Guild teleport
  • The ability to add 3 skillcape perks to your ‘cape slot’
• From the Ardougne cloak 4
  • Kandarin monastery teleport
  • Manor farm teleport
  • Summoning restore (once per day)
  • All task rewards (from Ardougne tasks) that require the cape to be worn
• From Ava’s alerter
  • The arrow retrieval effect
• From the bonesack (e)
  • Skeletal horror teleport
• From Jerrod’s cape
  • Various thieving bonuses and effects
• From the spirit cape
  • 20% less summoning special energy when using summoning scrolls

The only benefit not included here from the current comp cape is the fire/kiln cape effect which allows for bonus damage when fighting Ice Strykewyrms as we’d like to return this to being a cape-exclusive bonus.

Clearer definitions will be written for future comp and trim comp achievements. Since we are no longer redefining the capes, this shouldn’t be too different from what it is now. Moving forward, players and devs will have a clearer understanding of what should and shouldn’t be required for either cape. This way, with new content, players can know what to expect from new comp requirements and the requirements for comp and trim can be much more coherent.

With the previous changes implemented, future additions to the comp capes in terms of achievements should not cause any further controversy. As such, we plan to be more active in adding comp/trim comp related achievements with new content in the future.

Likewise, any existing content could have achievements created and added to the comp/trim comp capes. However, initial polling suggested that players don’t want a huge batch of requirements to be added all at once, so this should be something that is done over time and not part of this rework.

So to sum up, the new design is to make the smallest changes we can to the comp and trim comp capes while still fixing all of the major complaints and issues. This is a major change based on the feedback we've received, and of course we still want to hear your thoughts. You can get in touch with us via our forums, Reddit and Discord.

Forums

Discord

Thanks,

The Four Direction Team

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