Hello everyone,

It goes without saying you've vocally expressed your displeasure at the recent comment

about the bank rework and bank placeholders.

There had been replies through the day but none really getting to the point of actually clarifying what our future plans are for this.

First of all, let's just clarify a few things then we'll get into the nitty gritty.

• As originally stated, there were no plans for Bank Placeholders, this is not true, as mentioned by /u/JagexHunter last night (one of the developers of the initial bank rework concept) bank placeholders are currently in the process of being prototype by the engine team. This has been very under the radar, even more so internally, as you can imagine we're just as excited about the thought of it as you.

The prototype being under the radar was simply due to the fact that we didn't want to raise expectations especially when it's still possible this approach won't work, but it's better to say that it's being prototyped than to incorrectly say it's not worked on or planned.

So, can't you give us more bank slots?

For this I'll take a direct quote from what we've said on a recent Developer Q&A stream while at the same time diving into the specifics to help clarify.

Bank space is something we're always looking into. People are aware that we're technically at our limits in terms of bank space, so we need to do further work to remedy that. There are two aspects we have to consider:

• Save-game size:

  • Think of an item with the most amount of variables attached to it (Augmented, both gizmos etc) - this item is the most costly per bank slot server side. Multiply that up by the number of bank space, then add a bit more. Now multiply that by the maximum amount of players that you need. That's the amount of storage space we need to make sure we always have allocated at all times to make sure we can always save the player's game state.
  • Adding a little bit of bank space per player equates to a huge amount. We're aware of the problem, and we're not unsympathetic to the issue players have.
  • We did a study into how many people it affects. It affects quite a decent chunk but not as much as you'd expect.
  • This is why our emphasis on content has been focused around "inventories", one example is the upcoming Player Owned Farm farmhand update which we're using to help save on your bank space.

• Impact on other content:

  • Adding extra slots to the bank also affects other content, such as things that check whether you own an item. A recent example of the potential impact of this is in the Diango system, that stores items for you and allows you to retrieve them. As recently as last month we had a bug with Diango which led players to crash the moment they clicked on him (this was hotfixed immediately). This was a result of enabling him to search additional inventories for your items. Adding additional slots to the bank could have a similar effect on other content.

Why did you not announce it at RuneFest?

• The Bank rework and loyalty point rework were not spoken about because the reveals for things that are definitely coming out before February 2019. At the time of RuneFest the previous status of the bank rework had not changed.

Why can't we do what Old School RuneScape has done?

(bits taken from /u/JagexHunter 's post)

It's the most frustrating thing about it for sure, why can they get these features that we can't?

The key answer there is in items. Old School placeholders are automatically generated objects, like notes. This means each item actually has multiples types, for example:

• Item
• Item (Noted)
• Item (Placeholder)

Being the game from 2007, Old School has a significantly lower amount of items. We can't take this approach as it would push the item ID over the current limit. That limit can be raised, but a lot of non-game features would need to be updated. That's things like GE, adventurer's log, forum avatars, and many more like that which becomes a huge amount of work. Additionally stuff in particular such as the GE will also impact Old School as both games share that module (same as how both games have to receive the same friends chat updates at the same time)

Why shelve everything else?

First thing to say here is that this has been the status for a long time. It doesn't mean it would never be picked up in future, but that the benefits the rework offers don't offer as much as we could get from other smaller engine features that have also been requested over the years.

The rest comes down to the sheer complexity. To start a game engine update is very different to a regular content update, if it breaks you have to turn the game off until you can fix it. That can be mitigated through beta servers of course, but it's still makes large-scale changes risky.

It's especially risky, as to the engine all inventories are practically the same thing. Shops, worn equipment, beast of burden, bank, etc... are all the same thing at the core. Game scripts generally define the behaviour for the inventories. That means making a change in the engine to support bank features doesn't just have the potential to break the bank, but practically the entire game.

On top of that there's part-deprecated systems that need to be supported. Any changes that were made to the engine which the client needs to know about would need to be implemented in NXT, java, and HTML5 (in which the comapp is based). All very different languages, which could break in very different ways. It's not straightforward to just turn these off, but it's obviously ideal only to implement in one location.

Why did we say we were doing it to start?

We were experimenting with ninja taking on larger-scale projects which were Quality of life rather than the typical ninja fixes which had less impact on gameplay than when ninja first started.

We had the means to do engine work in-team and looked into a lot of the technical complexity to feel like it was possible, even if it would take a long time. Ultimately it wasn't possible, but that didn't become apparent until months after we made the announcement at RuneFest 2016.

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TL;DW

• In short the bank rework as a whole is shelved; we are not working on it and will not be for foreseeable future.
• We are investigating bank placeholders on its own as a feature you want. It is at this stage purely an investigation into feasibility, and we make no promises about being able to deliver this.

As a note, due to how extremely close to Christmas it is and with staff taking holidays, etc our replies will be pretty stagnated, but we'll try to respond over the holidays where we can.

Thank you for reading :)

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