[2023] "Sit tight while we review the data"

Greater Ricochet:

Released 7 December 2020
Clearly extremely powerful - some would say broken - relative to the PVM tools available at the time
Jagex decides to sit tight and review the data
16 August 2021 - 8 months later - it is nerfed

Grimoire pages:

Released (in current form) 30 July 2018
Pages immediately are an issue, with significant upkeep time to use. This only becomes more of an issue over the years as crit-based buffs are more and more necessary
Players ask, beg, plead for better Grimoire page rates. Many simple solutions are proposed, including making pages a guaranteed drop every kill
Jagex decides to sit tight and review the data - for YEARS
Excuses are given, such as it's too complicated and the players wouldn't understand the effect on the economy
28 June 2021 pages are added as a 1/512 from the slayer creatures on task. This, of course, does nothing, which any 5th grader could have told you
9 August 2021 - 3 years after release - pages are now guaranteed every kill. Solak also now drops a cluster of 25 pages with a 1/200 rate
The prices for Grimoire pages end up increasing

FSOA:

Released 26 July 2021
Within 2 days, the spec is paused due to players literally crashing worlds with it. It's restored, but still incredibly broken, both in the consumption of runes and the DPS output
(Some) players ask for early action on nerfs - which, as a reminder, it was clearly, clearly broken after 2 days
Jagex decides to sit tight and collect data
Along the next 2 YEARS, they put out spot fires with Onslaught, Magma Tempest, and dummies.
5 June 2023 - just under 2 years later - the Staff is nerfed (huge coincidence, I'm sure, that this was done just before Necromancy release)

AOD Chests:

Released 30 January 2017
Individual chests are 1/20,000, and they don't drop in order
Boss collection log added 4 September, 2017
It's immediately clear that AOD is far and away the worst log to chase, even if you only need 1 chest. People do the maths, learn that 1% of log hunters will go 20,000 kills without a single chest
Jagex decides to sit tight and review the data
Multiple people do in fact go 20,000+ kills without a single chest
16 January, 2023 - 6 years later - the chest droprate is adjusted to 1/4096 and chests drop in order

Arch Glacor:

Released 31 August 2021
Very quickly it becomes apparent that the unique droprates are extremely rare and don't scale nearly enough with enrage, making 0% kills the fastest way to get rares
13 December, 2021, rare droprates are increased. Once again, it quickly becomes apparent that they still aren't nearly high enough
Jagex decides to sit tight and review the data
Recently on Twitter, JMod hints at a buff to Leng core droprate
We are still waiting for this one, coming up on 2 years

God Dinarrows:

Released 3 May 2022.
Within the first hour of making arrows, it's clear that the upkeep will be in the realms of 10 hours gathering to 1 hour using
Anima rates from bosses are adjusted to produce slightly more per hour, but manufacturing:usage rates still remain around 6:1
4 July, 2022, arrows are adjusted to only be consumed at 1/3 per hit
Players say that it still takes around 2 hours of making for 1 hour of usage, which is completely unprecedented
Jagex decides to sit tight and review the data
Next week's update: 17 July 2023. 14 months after release. A buff is available to reduce anima consumption to 1 per arrow instead of 3, and increase the speed of this process significantly.
This buff is only available after making 7500 arrows of each type, taking 45 minutes each (not including making the untipped arrows) and 22,500 of each anima
Players say that this fundamentally fails to address the problem
Jagex says they will sit tight and review the data

There are many examples I haven't included in this post. These issues go in both directions, with some clearly broken things being ignored, and some awful grinds being ignored, at times for years on end, before they are fixed. Issues like these should be fixed within a month of release (granted, Grimoire pages only became a significant issue later on, but they were still a major problem for well over a year). Not only is this a slap in the face to the players who complete these grinds prior to buffs, but to me this is embarassing, to continually claim to be reviewing data and then inevitably implementing the suggestion the players made nearly immediately after release.

External link →

Thank you for providing detailed feedback on this. This is a great conversation to have, especially with what we've been saying about wanting to be more reactive to feedback going forward.

In general, what you've highlighted is a need to either have more in-depth conversations on feedback like this closer to releases and/or quicker reactions based on how you are finding the experience of something we've implemented. As others have mentioned in the thread, data does also tell a story so we need time for things to 'settle in' - but that period of settling likely doesn't need to be as long as the time some of these have taken.

The reality is, with the amount of content we're producing, developers move on to their next projects quickly to ensure we're delivering major updates on the monthly basis.

These more complex balancing tasks of high end consumables are a significant time spend for development - they need to assess data and feedback against design intent, then design effective, balanced changes between feedback/design, then test to gather data of how it operates in practice, then review and potentially further modify the balancing to achieve the design intent, followed by further testing before final release.

This then has to be balanced between work on delivering new content and all the other Patches / Feedback Changes / Fixes you want to see as well which is primarily why a lot of this happens later than desired.

While I hope that's some helpful context on what these changes entail, we have stated we want to be - and continue to be committed to - doing a better job at being on top of pressing concerns from the community. We've talked about this as improving in a 'Crawl, Walk, Run' fashion and this shows why we still consider ourselves at the Crawl phase of how we approach this right now. This is a good example for us to take away and consider how we allow for more timely changes or have earlier conversations on balancing feedback. If there's a reason we aren't making a change, we should also be having a clear conversation on the design thinking behind that as well.

To Azanna's point in the other thread - the Wisdom of Anima bonus wasn't introduced explicitly to address God Arrow feedback in it's entirety, but provide a way to improve the production rate as a bonus perk of it - knowing that a trade off to sacrifice XP for time gains was one thing that players might value a choice over. There's other great, clear feedback points in this thread around God Arrows that we can bring back to the team for further discussion, and we'll be sure to do so.

Again, thank you for starting up a valuable conversation on this and the effort you clearly put into your post.

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