Why has Jagex relegated proper content development to GameJams?

I don't usually have time for game jam, but the baseline tier rebalance was something I put together a while before. I have lots of designs for little reworks knocking about, but it's no easier for me to just make things happen than for anyone else. I try to squeeze them into updates when I can, but the needs of the update itself come first and I also have to be careful about treading on the toes of the developers.

(The reason I pushed hard for the woodcutting changes is that they were blocking multiple other things, like being able to add new hatchets, being able to improve the woodcutting mechanics, etc.)

I'm very interested in feedback on this. I would say in general that my takeaway is the same as yours, that the emphasis on the fort feels too repetitive across the whole year, and it's not a good approach to continue with.

That said updates can't just be swapped out one for one. If you look at what's happening in a fort update, for example from an environment art point of view, they mostly just add a single building. You can't take an update which is just a single building and use that "budget" to make, for example, a gnome finale or a penguin continuation. We certainly could focus on gnomes, but if we did that, the focus would be on gnomes. It wouldn't (and couldn't) be the gnomes one month and the penguins the next month and the fort the month after that.

A key part of the way I've had to approach thinking about joined up content basically comes down to this maths. Back in the day art was so lo-fi that more or less anything could be put together very quickly, so an update could really be anything the dev could imagine. As our quality and standards have risen, we have to think more about intelligently re-using content across updates. For example I think City of Senntisten does this fairly well (albeit not in retrospect because the dungeon isn't quest locked, but on launch). The quest got an amazing new environment to be excited by, and then the subsequent Nodon Front turned that into a permanent part of the game world you had good reason to spend time in.

The tricky thing about doing it this way it that it requires fairly ruthless top-down direction about what updates are and how they fit together, which kind of directly contradicts with the emphasis of this whole thread, which is that developers left to themselves will do great work. We also ran into an unexpected problem we'd never really had before, which is working on the followup to something before the first part is even out yet, which prevented us from reacting to feedback in the way we normally would. (For example, when the Nodon front came out and we could see the reception, it was too late to make significant changes to the Glacor and Croesus fronts.)

If you compare EGWD, the Legacy of Zamorak updates, and the Fort, you can see various approaches there to synchronising updates together, with varying degrees of success.

This certainly isn't the only possible approach to content we can take, I just want to highlight that it's not being done on a whim, it's trying to solve a specific problem and create better updates.

Similarly my chief concern with the story isn't seasons in and of themselves, but rather than a story should be something that happens and goes somewhere in a reasonable timeframe, rather than something which essentially meanders on indefinitely. Seasons are a means to that end (it essentially forces the story to progress rather than progressing whenever we feel like it - which is exactly what happened to e.g. gnomes).

The feedback here is a bit more mixed, and it's hard to really gather anything meaningfully quantitative on, but my impression is that it leans a bit more towards "we'd rather have a slow paced story that we like than a fast paced story that we don't like".

This is essentially correct. I'm not a developer anymore and I'm not currently set up to just jump into game and develop things. That said, don't understate the value of up front designs either.

Conceivably yeah. Something like "gnome finale quest plus five months of gnome-themed combat and skilling updates in and around Arposandra" could be feasible as an off the cuff judgement. Kind of like an expansion but split into six parts.

I can't promise anything like that of course as a lot of people have input on what we do.

I'm not sure it's fair to call the fort updates "minor" but I do get what you mean. To an extent I think this isn't really a season problem so much as a skilling update problem. I'm working hard on trying to fix this but it's not trivial to resolve.

This means that the 'new' stuff in the fort has a lot of weight put on it, perhaps disproportionately so, and feels a bit diminutive.

Yeah I think this is spot on.

Gamejam is essentially TAPP but formatted more in the way the devs have asked for. The problem with TAPP is that it was divided up into such tiny blocks of time that it was really hard to get anything done. Gamejam takes more or less the same total time, and blocks it together in a way that's much more effective.