Runescape Dev Tracker

Gz!

Still waiting on seeing the triple and then the triple + pet

The team are still spooling up for the year so it's a smaller update week this week as we build up to the year ahead.

Next week, we'll be dropping info on our next big content drop arriving in February as we enter the New Year in earnest with Fort Forinthry's first update!

We'll also be following up on the Design Q&A as soon as we can with more answers. Due to availability we couldn't quite do that this week, but we'll hopefully be able to do it next week (either written or streams).

I like it. Definitely worth considering.

I'd also like to compliment the format of the suggestion - it's fun, short and clear. It asks for exploits which is basically doing my job for me since our primary concern is always going to be "that sounds broken, what exploits does it allow?"

Yeah my plan is to do exactly this next weds.

I completely agree, and that's the exact point I was making.

In a game where ability to grind is uncapped, and items are freely tradeable (both of which appear to be considered sacred runescape design pillars), the value of any item is set by the players who are grinding the most. If we don't balance around those players, then that item floods the market in tremendous quantities and there essentially is no drop table. What are you even killing the boss for if everything on its loot table is at alch value?

The connotation of what you're talking about though is time gating. The only way to push some degree of parity between uncapped grinding and players who are playing even slightly casually is to cap the ability to grind in some way. That's certainly something I'm prepared to countenance, and Raptor's Rampage was a gentle experiment in that direction, but it would be incredibly controversial and isn't something we can just do.

Although I don't completely agree, you've argued your point well. The target values you've given are short term from the point of view of balancing the game, but I think we (Jagex) also need to question to what extent this content needs to remain relevant.

There are a bunch of reasons why it's almost certainly not a good idea to buff the drop rate by 10x to achieve your target value. That said, this (and similar feedback from elsewhere) has definitely convinced me to go back to the devs and talk it through again.

This wasn't "no we're not doing it for this reason". I specifically said this was something that we should do, and that I'm actively working on making happen, but because the content would be redundant for a majority of currently active players it's not something that necessarily justifies a big update in its own right.

Like with Garden of Kharid, my strategy is to try to find ways to bundle midgame health improvements along with enough content to make it feel like a meaty update. That's still something we're experimenting with, but so far I'm optimistic we can achieve a lot this way.

The summary is slightly inaccurate, what I said is closer to "it doesn't solve all the problems".

BLM only solves drop rate issues for people who've gone dry for an incredibly long time. I'm not saying that isn't a problem and shouldn't be addressed, but it's only a subset of the general problem of rarity of drops.

As I also mentioned, as part of Raptor's Rampage Mod Shogun made some technical fixes behind the scenes which make BLM easier for us to implement in the future.

I think some of these answers are being misinterpreted as "we aren't doing this, and here's why" but it's actually "we are actively working on this, and here's why we haven't shipped it yet" or "we are planning to fix this, and we need to resolve these issues before we can move ahead with a confident plan".

As I said at the start of the stream, there are player questions about fixes where I know a project has been scheduled to look into it, but I'm reluctant to announce that or promise anything because until it's been looked into we don't know whether we're going ahead or what the solution is. It's possible that I'm being overly cautious in that regard.

Once I'm confident that time has definitely been allocated to something and the devs have at least had a preliminary look into the scope and consequences of what's being asked, I'm happy to then say that we're definitely doing something.

This is awesome Rubic!