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Hey all,
I originally wrote this as a comment on Hero Pass as a whole, I just want to reiterate right off the bat, I think Hero Pass needs more refinement most of that if not all of the feedback I'd suggest has been covered by people here and elsewhere.
However... I wanted to use this post to talk about historical conversations from my memory around updates that have caused a lot of negativity and what we did at Jagex at the time to help with this.
*Please note: My thoughts, will, of course may not apply to Jagex as of today, it has been four years since I've left, but I feel like there's an awesome amount of engagement that still takes place here between Jmods and players.\*
Historical
I wanted to bring some historical context to some events from my time in CM on RuneScape that stand out (from a negativity standpoint), see below for each and a summary of them and how players reacted to it at the time.
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Sliske's Endgame... the Maze
When Sliske's Endgame released at the end of 2016 it was the culmination of that Sliske Quest Series, at the time I'd actually joined the Dukes (the development team working on it) to assist with Cutscenes while still doing my CM work, I'd often see ex-Mod Raven stay behind past working hours just to add flavour and finishing touches he wanted to make that experience that much more enjoyable and worthy of the occasion.
This release was during a time that there was no Completionist Cape amnesty so the moment the Quest went live, it'd remove your Comp Cape (used at that time for its Best in Slot combat stats) so players who wanted that back wanted to rush through it.
The launch had initial Maze hiccups, however these precious few hours those specific players weren't able to get a Cape meant that a small vocal group of players would literally wish harm upon Mod Raven when they found out the Maze system was his idea.
It was incredibly demotivating to see how much it impacted him, the reality is, these players would be fixed up within the day and would be able to grab the Comp Cape back.
From my experience working with developers, while they love/appreciate seeing praise, they will always focus on what players perceive to be negative and any incredibly negative posts will really affect the morale.
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Bounty Hunter Rework
A rather sad and similar theme here, ex-Mod Pi was working on the Bounty Hunter rework with the idea to re-incentivize the game mode while adding new reward methods for the PvP'ers in the Community.
Within the launch we saw players who wanted to rush for the rewards and would feel impeded and thus use that to reflective vitriol towards Pi which became very aggressive, and yes sadly resulted in more death threats.
You can read a comment I made on this *7* years ago here.
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RunePass
Back in July of 2018, we launched something at the time called "RunePass", the reception/reaction is similar to the Hero Pass reaction I see today.
It should be noted, that through all of the negativity back in 2018, we did not have an official response for a week (I believe we discussed it on the RS stream the week after).
We absolutely bore a lot of hate and comments that were excessively aggressive, any decisions made past the RunePass release were shaped by daily reports across Social as well as in-game, which were then delivered to specific stakeholders on top of any other data gathered by other teams (similar to what we're likely seeing with Hero Pass right now).
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So... if you've made it this far, first of all thank you! Historical context is important here (IMO).
I cannot stress this enough, if you want to be heard, do it in a constructive manner, while all feedback is digested, the wrong message on the wrong day can significantly impact a Jagex Mod, I sadly it saw it too much while I was there.
Updates like Hero Pass, are ones that are normally prepared a fair amount in advance, which means if there's such a kickback to it (like this one), then Jagex will need to digest all of the data in-game, plus sentiment and reports that the CM team are no doubt providing in an awesome manner before making significant changes, which I imagine they will communicate to you ahead of time.
I said it at the start of the post but I feel like there's still a lot of engagement that happens between Jagex and its players here on r/RuneScape which is a precious thing to have. But please be considerate of the staff (this includes direct attacks/witchhunting), because you're never fully aware of all the decisions that lead to things like this.
From my time at Jagex, the developers were always fantastic with how I presented player feedback to them, and they are always reading because they're just as passionate as you. The examples above are just some that stand out to me and quite frankly have shaped my entire experience of how I approach games/my job just because of how significant they are to me.
Anyway... just my two cents. I don't play anywhere near as much nowadays, but I always keep one eye on here/the game because it does mean a lot to me, and I wanted to post this in the hope it somewhat helps Jagex + yourself in providing the best kind of feedback to move forward.
Happy to have discussions on this if you have any questions also :)
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