[2022] This Pride Event is Absolutely Unacceptable

I think this might be a particularly disingenuous take and certainly a harsh way of thinking about this.

The Pride event was suggested, pushed and written by LGBTQIA+ people at Jagex and their allies. It was not mandated from any sort of business point of view. Certainly it was not intended to be a money making update. We made it because we wanted to tell some of those stories in game.

The reason it's not free to play is simply a consideration of the characters involved and the areas they need to be. Much of the F2P game is still a few years older than some of the more progressive approaches to character design and so a lot of these characters and their context simply don't exist in the F2P game. Some of the areas where there stories can be found equally don't show up in the F2P game either.

We could have made a separate version of the event only showing the F2P characters and stories, but it would effectively have been empty. We could have given out the reward automatically, but equally that would just make it feel like tokenism rather than have their stories show the context that we do consider LGBTQIA+ characters and their stories as important. It would also have taken time away from the development of the update, which could have meant fewer stories.

The event was also made to support the community Pride event being organised for the 24th (world 23 5pm game time) which is being run on a members server, so we wanted to align with that.

If there's enough support for the content to be available on a F2P world then I'll see if we can rejig the code to allow it in the future. But vilifying the event isn't the right way to go about that.

= Raven =

Try logging in later today. ;)

I spent a few days last week working on the code and have managed to get it working on F2P worlds. It should ideally be going live with the update today.