[2023] Common Drops Stream: summary and key clarification

Originally posted by Lazzed

Have you thought about how MTX has an impact on the economy? For example all of the proteans created that trivializes drops from bosses as they grant insanely high exp. Or maybe a protean processor giving out 5m xp at once instead of them needing to buy 30k uncut dragonstones they can just use 1 protean processor. Pretty crazy huh

Originally posted by literallyanoob42

The general idea is great but what will be the basis for balancing the respawn timers? Will it be average kill times? Kill times in mid tier gear?

Originally posted by yuei2

So one thing I saw suggested was instead of messing with the boss timer, was setting a timer on commons. Like you could kill a as many bosses as you want as generally fast as you want, and each kill still roll for a unique, but commons would only be rolled like every couple of minutes.

So farming rares and logs is unhindered, but there is still a cap on the amount of commons you can farm per hour. Which means getting strong/better at the boss still has incentive as you’re improving your unique chance per hour. Your just not getting more commons per hour preventing growth in resource flooding over time.

Originally posted by stumptrumpandisis1

I've seen the various feedback, a lot of which is essentially ideological. ("It's simply wrong to limit what a player can do with their own time.") Obviously you're welcome to your opinion and your view of game design. The main conclusion to the stream, and the point I don't make as well as I should, is that the proposal at hand is basically just an alternative to just nerfing Vindicta. Personally, I think it's better for the game to be able to have a range of content available for players of different gear and skill levels, without having to intentionally nerf the older, easier content for fear of elite players rinsing it.

i dont like the idea of barring high level players from lower level content. part of the fun of a MMORPG is the power progression, if i am not feeling stronger over time i am just running on a power treadmill. going for fast kill times and crafting efficient rotations is also fun, but if theres a 30 second respawn timer that makes it so theres no difference between a 10 second kill and a 20 second kill, why bother upgrading my gear or push myself to be better?

if endgame bosses came out more frequently you could argue that we should just stick to those, but if they continue to be released at the pace they are now that isnt gonna cut it. the same boss for a year+ gets stale.

Originally posted by Matrix17

If you change alching, you'll kill ironman mode

I know you don't particularly care, because you've made it clearly that you don't want to design around irons. However, being directly antagonistic towards irons is different than catering to them. I couldn't have predicted 5 years ago you'd be taking this approach when I made my iron

All this in saying, you're going to see a lot of irons quit if you do something like that. And I do mean quit. Most don't want to play a normal account so they aren't going to deiron. Theyll just give up

Originally posted by zenyl

Thanks for taking time out of your day to have this type of conversation with the community, both on Twitch, Reddit, and elsewhere. :)

It's great to see this level of transparency, and get a look into the thought processes and considerations that go into designing the game.

Originally posted by stumptrumpandisis1

but if i am understanding right, someone weaker than me that can still kill it before the respawn timer will be just as efficient as i am, since theres effectively a cap on kills per hour. if getting faster kills on the boss isnt more rewarding then its gonna feel pointless to go faster.

i know you guys cant design the game purely around what feels good, but that feels really bad.

Originally posted by RaizenInstinct

This should also consider what tier a boss is. I would even vouch for a stricter timer, this way the early bosses could be buffed a bit (looking at you mole / kq).

It shouldnt be hard to group bosses in similar tiers as combat gear (e.g. Mole + kq t60, gwd1 t70, gwd2 t80, telos 1-100 t85, 100-500 90, etc) and adjust the spawn rates to suit a player in the intended gear tier, and deduct lets say 30% from avg kill time to make it still rewarding for higher geared players.

Originally posted by Klankatar

I think part of the confusion is due to how that stream in particular was handled, it felt very unprepared in how the ideas were communicated (not in the ideas themselves).

If all the graphs and examples wre prepared ahead of time then you can just focus on the balance discussion, rather than wrestling with the software and having to come up with examples on the fly.

Originally posted by Matrix17

Vindicta was used as an example though, and it's an important boss for a BIS invention perk. If someone's throwing 10m/hr into supplies at vindicta to kill it as fast as possible, and someone else is throwing 2m/hr and killing it at a slower rate, but they both effectively come out at the same kills/hr, I dont know if I agree with the approach. I could be wrong, but I think you said one of the core things to keep in mind is that the amount of effort put into pvm should be rewarding. And in this example, ones putting significantly more effort/money into the kills and they're being handicapped by an arbitrary system to be brought down to the same level as someone putting way less effort into it

You can make the argument that this theoretical high level player should just do a new boss, but not everyone's going to like new bosses. Maybe there's someone who just likes vindicta a lot. And the fact is, eventually the highest level bosses will fall into this overpowered players farming them category and maybe there's a slowdown on boss releases so now people really only have 1 or 2 high level options

I think in a case like this you need to reevaluate a lot of old bosses first. The only way something like this works is if older bosses become less profitable and more of an entry into pvm. As it stands, a lot really aren't just an entry but a viable money maker for end game players. It shouldn't be both. I don't think all items and bosses should be retaining value over time. For collection loggers it's whatever. That's a separate thing that they're doing and shouldn't be part of the discussion really

Originally posted by RS_Holo_Graphic

Where do we even start with a subject like this when it feels like everyone involved is perpetually distracted by tangents and missing the core internal conflict of Runescape's loot mechanics?

Before we can even discuss the pros or cons of potential loot system changes, we first have to be clear on the scope of the design space that valid solutions can exist within. I think this is the reason you're seeing so much whiplash to the suggested solutions you've listed above. Players fundamentally feel that various solutions, for various reasons, exist outside the space of acceptable changes to what makes Runescape feel like Runescape. Rather than get caught mired in endless rehashing of feedback on any given solution, I think energy is better spent understanding the relationship between loot system design and player drive. I heard more than a few statements made during the stream that threw up red flags for conflict between design intent and player incentive. Without properly addressing how your design intent impacts player incentive, feedback on solutions to implement that design intent are potentially meaningless.

At the very beginning of the stream you made a premise statement along the lines of (paraphrasing),

"Players want each kill to be profitable to offset the pain of dry streaks."

I think this statement was very insightful. It expresses some problem between player incentives and loot systems. It should inspire an exploration of the systemic factors that can give rise to the problem it expresses.

It is not an axiomatic statement, or something to be taken as a design pillar.

Yet the longer the stream went on, the further and further the discussion vortexed around "kill profitability" as the sole factor that player incentive was boiled down to. Drop table design intent was similarly boiled down to increasing "engagement" for new pvm content. When the solution space is defined primarily by "kill profitability" and "engagement", it makes a lot of sense why suggestions like kill timers, daily kc caps, and combating the exponential increase of commons were discussed on stream. It's not that these suggestions are "bad" for the context given, it's that the solution space is the core of the problem with this anlysis. It's a venn diagram with only 2 circles, when there are more circles to be considered.

• Why does each kill being profitable offset pain of dry streaks?
• Why are dry streaks considered painful?
• Why do dry streaks exist?
• What happens when there are no dry streaks?
• Does profitable kill incentive exist independently?
• What is the relationship between profitability of single-kill and kills-over-time?
• What is the relationship between profit and pvm engagement?
• What incentives do players have outside of profit?

Answering these questions extends the scope of player incentive far beyond a numerical comparison of profitability between boss kills. This missing scope became readily apparent when the feedback request was turned over to the viewers to explain why they had a problem with the idea of kill timers to push players away from lower or easier bosses. The internal conflicts this caused with incentivies like power creep satisfaction, optimization play, boss log completion, iron-style gameplay, skill disparity, attention demand, and encounter design preference were all obvious to the players who voiced their criticisms. And the response given these criticisms was "Well if we address these edge-cases, then would you be happy?" which just demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the role these incentives play. They're not edge-cases, they participate along side any profit incentives. To satisfactorily address these concerns you would need a loot system that functions outside of the profitability constraints you've limited the analysis to.

It's not just player incentive that is being lost by the scope, the design intent is similarly constrained.

You spent a significant amount of time on stream explaining how common drop tables got to where they are because of the design intent to drive player engagement with increased profit. This presupposes several historical design considerations, such as bosses have to have drop tables, that drop tables have to have commons, and commons have to be more profitable with each released boss. But solution spaces exist where these assumptions are not help true.

• What makes a boss profitable?
• Why is loot table design overwhelmingly focused on profitability?
• What can loot design achieve beside profits?
• How could boss profitability be decoupled from loot tables?
• What is the role that randomizations plays in loot systems and dry streaks?
• How do randomized loot systems affect player behavior and incentive?
• What are ethical considerations when trying to affect player behavior?
• What is reasonable to expect of players engaging with pvm and its loot systems?
• How connected are the loot system designers to the players engaging with them?
• Are these connections sample-representative of the player population?

It feels almost comical to fret over mitigating the effects of printing common drops on the economy when that could be null issue in a loot system design that has no commons. So much emphasis is placed on making new pvm content more profitable than older content without addressing the issues that are barring entry for players into that new pvm content. There's no amount of profit you can give a player to keep them from burning out going 3000 HM glacor kills dry on core. The players slaving AoD for chest drops or 10k corp kc for a sigil aren't doing it for the cash. The players who want to make reliable cash camping a boss don't care what form that cash comes in (coins/commons/rares) as long as they can leave each camping session feeling like they made money rather than walking away empty handed hour after hour.

There are solutions to these kinds of problems if the scope doesn't limit the factors involved.

Originally posted by Legal_Evil

Ok, this seems not as bad as originally pitched, but I still don't like it because it barely solves the current problem since pvmers normally want to pvm at bosses that match their skill level, not bosses easier than they can do. This also does nothing with afk bossing methods. Common drop tables need to be nerfed to address all these issues. Merely adding more gold sinks will just be a band aid fix delay the problem when more and more of them need to be added every time a new bosses comes out. Nerfing the common drop tables directly fixes the issue completely and Jagex can just set it and forget it.

a crude option like allowing you to force a respawn by disabling commons.

This is a good additional solution if we can gamble common loot for a slightly higher drop rate at rares, but shouldn't be the only solution.

Originally posted by 068152

Missed the livestream so am kind of confused as to what all might be affected if drop tables get altered.

Although not a common drop by any means, would drop rates of the 3 shard thingies from zamorak Egwd be affected? I’m hoping not as that’s my only hope of getting those enchantments atm since I suck at high lvl PvP lol

Already like 1/500 from the mini bosses so I doubt it? But wanted to see if I could get some clarification on this! Thanks for all the hard work!

Originally posted by Adventurous-Radish26

I really dislike seeing comparisons be made to mining ores and how players with access to higher tier resources shouldn't be farming lower tier resources.

So many factors are ignored with that analogy. PvM is not just stats/gear but also skill, knowledge and effort based. Why should someone who's putting in almost zero effort in tank gear fully afking a boss be rewarded equally to someone who's making efforts to optimise something and using supplies (familiar scrolls, more runes in the case of mage special attacks etc)? That makes no sense to me, regardless of what tier content it is.

Balancing this economically while trying to hold onto some kind of effort to reward ratio sounds impossible. The skill ceiling in this game is already crashing down, while the floor is at an all time low for increased accessibility. Even 'end game' pvm these days starts off with an incredibly low barier to entry.

Please stop trying to kill off increased apm and efforts. This company already has an idle game, it doesn't need another one.

Originally posted by pkfighter343

It’s a little appalling to me that you don’t (seem to) realize content being speedfarmable makes it worth less, and therefore makes it less speedfarmable. You could say you want to make sure those drops maintain value, but that’s addressed by supply and demand - if something becomes overfarmed it becomes not farmable anymore. This whole thing with vindicta, for example, if it was killable at rates that made it worthwhile to do over Zamorak, it would quite quickly become not that way, purely because there would not be a proportional increase in demand to sustain the value of its drops

Originally posted by Virtually-Sensical

How exactly is it a separate topic, when it's been clearly observed to have an absolutely massive impact on the ingame economy and inflation? If you don't believe me, look at how the ingame economy reacted every time there's been some ridiculously overpowered MTX promotion.

If it wasn't for MTX, the issue you're trying to solve here wouldn't be nearly as massive and damaging. It would still exist, sure, but I think you get my point.

I understand that from your position you can't openly and publicly admit this, but to tell the community that something so obviously connected is a separate issue and that they're wrong about what they can clearly see happening just comes across as condescending to me. I know it's not intended that way, otherwise I wouldn't even bother to write this, but it does very much come across that way.