Apologies that I sound so incredulous, but... really? Your associates who personally visited Jagex HQ told you that the Live Ops team is twice the size of any other team, and that they never talk to other developers?
This is so thoroughly disconnected from my awareness, of how proactively that relatively small team of JMods communicates and works with others, I honestly didn't think they were serious questions. My bad!
I'll acknowledge that, yes, we do work in an open plan office with all RS development teams on one floor, and epic, corexp and liveops are grouped together to focus on our team goals.
Physically that can be a little disconnective (some devs on the opposite side of the office I don't get to see as often since moving to corexp), but a lot of the daily communication happens through open Slack channels, face-to-face meetups, shared reviews, and even just kitchen coffee breaks, so inter- and intra-team communication feels inclusive to me.
I can also confirm liveops are composed of hard-working JMods who play the game and are passionate about it. Some I've also mentored or been involved in training.
If anything I'm amazed, given their team size and the ambitious targets they work to, how liveops manage to consistently smash their deadlines (bear in mind they typically have to deliver a month's worth of promotions in advance), and still communicate openly with and provide feedback to other teams.
We have had issues with being silo'd in the past, though, so perhaps your friends' visit took place in darker times. We've certainly gone through a number of team re-structures over the years.
But I've never known a time where I could say 'true' to any of the above 4 questions.
Though I can appreciate the difficulty liveops must have with volunteering to be player-facing when the projects you're assigned are seen by some members of the community as contentious, having worked in that team myself.
Monetisation has been a topic we as developers don't feel safe talking about with the community. I don't include my Squeal of Fortune updates on the wiki page listing my contributions, out of fear of judgement by players. That's a problem.
On social media we have to be so careful of what we say, in case it's quoted out of context and used against us in the future.
Hopefully the strategy Mod Warden is working towards will get us to a place where we can communicate openly on all topics, without fear of harassment and walking on egg shells around it.
MTX is an integral part of the game now, and we're on this journey together, playing the game along with you.
We need to be able to talk openly with you, with no taboo topics, because as developers we want player feedback, we want the projects we develop to be successful, we want an open dialogue, and we want RuneScape to have a bright and profitable future.
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