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I love it! Are you going to display it on a shelf or is it for a cosplay?
I love it! Are you going to display it on a shelf or is it for a cosplay?
It’s a little appalling to me that you don’t (seem to) realize content being speedfarmable makes it worth less, and therefore makes it less speedfarmable. You could say you want to make sure those drops maintain value, but that’s addressed by supply and demand - if something becomes overfarmed it becomes not farmable anymore. This whole thing with vindicta, for example, if it was killable at rates that made it worthwhile to do over Zamorak, it would quite quickly become not that way, purely because there would not be a proportional increase in demand to sustain the value of its drops
That's definitely an important factor, and important to an overall discussion of drop tables as a whole rather than splitting it into separate discussions of rares and commons, and I agree it's especially true of Vindicta. I didn't really have time to go into it in detail, although I did mention in passing that bosses with limited drop tables are self balancing.
Read moreI really dislike seeing comparisons be made to mining ores and how players with access to higher tier resources shouldn't be farming lower tier resources.
So many factors are ignored with that analogy. PvM is not just stats/gear but also skill, knowledge and effort based. Why should someone who's putting in almost zero effort in tank gear fully afking a boss be rewarded equally to someone who's making efforts to optimise something and using supplies (familiar scrolls, more runes in the case of mage special attacks etc)? That makes no sense to me, regardless of what tier content it is.
Balancing this economically while trying to hold onto some kind of effort to reward ratio sounds impossible. The skill ceiling in this game is already crashing down, while the floor is at an all time low for increased accessibility. Even 'end game' pvm these days starts off with an incredibly low barier to entry.
Please stop trying to kill off increased apm and efforts. This co...
I agree that skill, effort, gear, progression should be rewarded. The whole point I'm making is that they should be rewarded with harder content having better rewards and that the reason we're in the situation we're in is that players will farm trivial content faster if they're given the choice to.
Missed the livestream so am kind of confused as to what all might be affected if drop tables get altered.
Although not a common drop by any means, would drop rates of the 3 shard thingies from zamorak Egwd be affected? I’m hoping not as that’s my only hope of getting those enchantments atm since I suck at high lvl PvP lol
Already like 1/500 from the mini bosses so I doubt it? But wanted to see if I could get some clarification on this! Thanks for all the hard work!
Making rare drops rarer is definitely not something we're currently considering.
Ok, this seems not as bad as originally pitched, but I still don't like it because it barely solves the current problem since pvmers normally want to pvm at bosses that match their skill level, not bosses easier than they can do. This also does nothing with afk bossing methods. Common drop tables need to be nerfed to address all these issues. Merely adding more gold sinks will just be a band aid fix delay the problem when more and more of them need to be added every time a new bosses comes out. Nerfing the common drop tables directly fixes the issue completely and Jagex can just set it and forget it.
a crude option like allowing you to force a respawn by disabling commons.
This is a good additional solution if we can gamble common loot for a slightly higher drop rate at rares, but shouldn't be the only solution.
Yes absolutely - this is why in retrospect I probably shouldn't have even mentioned it, as this is a couple of steps down the line of assuming we nerf a lot of top end commons first, and still need to do more.
Read moreWhere do we even start with a subject like this when it feels like everyone involved is perpetually distracted by tangents and missing the core internal conflict of Runescape's loot mechanics?
Before we can even discuss the pros or cons of potential loot system changes, we first have to be clear on the scope of the design space that valid solutions can exist within. I think this is the reason you're seeing so much whiplash to the suggested solutions you've listed above. Players fundamentally feel that various solutions, for various reasons, exist outside the space of acceptable changes to what makes Runescape feel like Runescape. Rather than get caught mired in endless rehashing of feedback on any given solution, I think energy is better spent understanding the relationship between loot system design and player drive. I heard more than a few statements made during the stream that threw up red flags for conflict between design intent and player incentive. Without properly ad...
Yet the longer the stream went on, the further and further the discussion vortexed around "kill profitability" as the sole factor that player incentive was boiled down to.
That's because that was the explicit scope of the stream. Several of the factors you've covered were addressed in the previous stream, and there's definitely a potential third stream in addressing the two together holistically.
The purpose of these streams, though, isn't to identify a concrete solution and commit to it within the hour, it's largely to just explain the problem. In retrospect I think it was misleading to talk about solutions at all, but streams which only present problems with no possible solutions get complaints about that instead. The scope here was explain why common drops are in the state they are, with the explicit up front explanation of rare drops as the original root of the problem.
The questions you're asking are the exact questio...
Read moreRead moreVindicta was used as an example though, and it's an important boss for a BIS invention perk. If someone's throwing 10m/hr into supplies at vindicta to kill it as fast as possible, and someone else is throwing 2m/hr and killing it at a slower rate, but they both effectively come out at the same kills/hr, I dont know if I agree with the approach. I could be wrong, but I think you said one of the core things to keep in mind is that the amount of effort put into pvm should be rewarding. And in this example, ones putting significantly more effort/money into the kills and they're being handicapped by an arbitrary system to be brought down to the same level as someone putting way less effort into it
You can make the argument that this theoretical high level player should just do a new boss, but not everyone's going to like new bosses. Maybe there's someone who just likes vindicta a lot. And the fact is, eventually the highest level bosses will fall into this overpowered players fa...
If someone's throwing 10m/hr into supplies at vindicta to kill it as fast as possible, and someone else is throwing 2m/hr and killing it at a slower rate, but they both effectively come out at the same kills/hr, I dont know if I agree with the approach.
I think this is fundamentally wrong, and one of the other key aspects of the economy that I mentioned in more detail in the rare drop stream a month ago. It's already a problem that supplies have to be money positive, if you insist on top of that that supplies have to be money positive even if you're wasting them then the economy is nonsensical. If using 10m isn't profitable, don't use 10m.
You can make the argument that this theoretical high level player should just do a new boss, but not everyone's going to like new bosses.
Again I think this is fundamentally wrong. This is exactly analogous to "I like vinesweeper and not PVM, so you should buff...
Read moreAlso stop shilling killing off old content players will quit if you force them to play newest content, if we wanted that we'd play wow.
IMO there's a big difference between intentionally killing old content, and not going out of your way to add new rewards to old content to encourage people to keep playing it.
I think part of the confusion is due to how that stream in particular was handled, it felt very unprepared in how the ideas were communicated (not in the ideas themselves).
If all the graphs and examples wre prepared ahead of time then you can just focus on the balance discussion, rather than wrestling with the software and having to come up with examples on the fly.
Oh yeah totally, that's just inevitable sadly. I have to carve out time for these streams anyway - preparing a high quality presentation takes a day at least, and practicing and polishing it at least another half day. That's a reasonable time investment for something that's occasional, but not weekly. I simply don't have the time for it.
This should also consider what tier a boss is. I would even vouch for a stricter timer, this way the early bosses could be buffed a bit (looking at you mole / kq).
It shouldnt be hard to group bosses in similar tiers as combat gear (e.g. Mole + kq t60, gwd1 t70, gwd2 t80, telos 1-100 t85, 100-500 90, etc) and adjust the spawn rates to suit a player in the intended gear tier, and deduct lets say 30% from avg kill time to make it still rewarding for higher geared players.
Yeah I hadn't considered that but the ability to buff older bosses would actually be an additional benefit.
but if i am understanding right, someone weaker than me that can still kill it before the respawn timer will be just as efficient as i am, since theres effectively a cap on kills per hour. if getting faster kills on the boss isnt more rewarding then its gonna feel pointless to go faster.
i know you guys cant design the game purely around what feels good, but that feels really bad.
That's essentially correct, but only for very weak bosses. That's the root of the problem - imagine if copper ore could be free converted into light animica. As a high level player you'd not bother to mine animica at all, you'd just sit at copper rocks instead. To fix this, obviously we would disable the conversion, and then copper isn't a useful thing for a high level player to mine. I don't think it would be reasonable to say "it feels bad that as a high level player I'm locked out of mining copper".
Thanks for taking time out of your day to have this type of conversation with the community, both on Twitch, Reddit, and elsewhere. :)
It's great to see this level of transparency, and get a look into the thought processes and considerations that go into designing the game.
Thanks. I want to see the game continually improve, and I think the best way to do that is with the players.
If you change alching, you'll kill ironman mode
I know you don't particularly care, because you've made it clearly that you don't want to design around irons. However, being directly antagonistic towards irons is different than catering to them. I couldn't have predicted 5 years ago you'd be taking this approach when I made my iron
All this in saying, you're going to see a lot of irons quit if you do something like that. And I do mean quit. Most don't want to play a normal account so they aren't going to deiron. Theyll just give up
I didn't invent the policy "we don't design around iron man, it's supposed to be a challenge", it just is the policy. I even mentioned in the stream yesterday that if the proposed change ended up being a significant problem for irons, we should consider breaking the rule for it.
Read moreI've seen the various feedback, a lot of which is essentially ideological. ("It's simply wrong to limit what a player can do with their own time.") Obviously you're welcome to your opinion and your view of game design. The main conclusion to the stream, and the point I don't make as well as I should, is that the proposal at hand is basically just an alternative to just nerfing Vindicta. Personally, I think it's better for the game to be able to have a range of content available for players of different gear and skill levels, without having to intentionally nerf the older, easier content for fear of elite players rinsing it.
i dont like the idea of barring high level players from lower level content. part of the fun of a MMORPG is the power progression, if i am not feeling stronger over time i am just running on a power treadmill. going for fast kill times and crafting efficient rotations is also fun, but if theres a 30 second respawn timer that ma...
I agree that developing power over time is really important, but that would still apply regardless. All that's being set is a cap on how much power is actually useful to have on content you significantly overpower. You're still going to be getting faster and faster kills on every boss.
So one thing I saw suggested was instead of messing with the boss timer, was setting a timer on commons. Like you could kill a as many bosses as you want as generally fast as you want, and each kill still roll for a unique, but commons would only be rolled like every couple of minutes.
So farming rares and logs is unhindered, but there is still a cap on the amount of commons you can farm per hour. Which means getting strong/better at the boss still has incentive as you’re improving your unique chance per hour. Your just not getting more commons per hour preventing growth in resource flooding over time.
Yeah this works as essentially a UX variant of the other suggestion of disabling commons to avoid the timer.
The general idea is great but what will be the basis for balancing the respawn timers? Will it be average kill times? Kill times in mid tier gear?
Well it's nowhere near a final design (it's not even a plan) but the basis of the calculation would be "if you can kill it faster than this often, it's more profitable than the next boss up". I went through this logic in the stream comparing e.g. Vindicta to Zamorak. If I can kill Vindicata in 15s and Zamorak in 3m, Zamorak must at minimum be 12x more profitable just to break even, before even accounting for the fight being significantly more demanding.
There's no way to calculate that number objectively, and it also does depend on the state of the economy (for example by the above logic Vindicta would need a longer timer than Twin Furies), but that would be the starting point.
Have you thought about how MTX has an impact on the economy? For example all of the proteans created that trivializes drops from bosses as they grant insanely high exp. Or maybe a protean processor giving out 5m xp at once instead of them needing to buy 30k uncut dragonstones they can just use 1 protean processor. Pretty crazy huh
It's definitely on my mind, but it's really a separate topic and one that largely has to be discussed internally rather than externally if you see what I mean.
Reading over the feedback, a key error I made in the livestream yesterday has been pointed out to me. The question was asked and answered at the time, iirc, but I didn't appreciate how misleading that specific point was and I didn't emphasise it heavily enough.
If you're not sure what I'm talking about, yesterday I did a livestream about common drops and their impact on the game. Most of the stream was explaining the problem, but at the end I posited a possible solution. You can find the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1752649536
If you're wondering why I'm proposing anything, or you think it's obvious that the solution is something different, I wou...
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