Runescape Dev Tracker

This isn't a hypothetical example by the way - this is exactly what happened when Shogun and I sat down to start making progress on this problem. We got around the initial time problem by doing it in the evening, and we "hacked" the prioritisation a little by sneaking some hygiene work into Raptor's Rampage, but the basic time issue still remains to be addressed, which is why Shogun is chipping away at it in game jams.

Yeah bad luck protection is a great example.

Features always have cost and benefit to be compared against other features. Design time, dev time, risk, etc compared to how many players does it affect and how much of an improvement is it for those players. BLM doesn't affect that many players, but it affects them a great deal (since dry streaks feel awful). That pushes it up the priority list compared to other things.

Having multiple different systems increases the cost of actually fixing the problem, which then pushes it back down. That's also likely exponential in practice. These numbers are probably lowball, but say it takes half a day to design a bad luck system and one hour to apply it to the handful of bosses that use that system. That's 1 day of work, pretty good for how much it will improve the game as a result.

Now say we have 5 different drop systems. Now we're up from 1 day to 5 days, which is a much worse deal. More than that, though, five days isn...

We talk a lot about technical debt and design debt, and this is really what that looks like in practice.

Maintaining 10 systems takes 10 times longer than maintaining 1 system. Even more if some of the systems are significantly more complex, and probably longer still because complexity doesn't scale linearly. Maintaining unnecessary systems is bad because time spent doing that is time not spent doing something else - like making content.

It's worth maintaining multiple systems if they're important and hitting fundamentally different things - like you can't fold bosses and quests into a "single system" in order to make maintenance simpler. Drop tables, by comparison, are a relatively simple concept and while it's not that there's no possible benefit to having different bosses work in a different way, from a cost/benefit POV the tradeoff is significantly worse.

Posting a top level comment for visibility, but Monado replied:

You and I both know this is about Jagex making it so skill expression/ceiling isn't rewarded economically above a certain point.

In a sense this is true, but also a little misleading. Skill (as in player ability) is (and should be) rewarded, but it's currently rewarded in at least four different ways:

• Higher skill means faster kills.
• Higher skill means access to harder bosses.
• Higher skill means ability to beat higher enrages.
• Higher skill means ability to get longer streaks.

All of these multiply together - the problem isn't that higher skill is rewarded, but that higher skill is rewarded exponentially via multiple explicit mechanics.

What's not necessarily obvious externally is what a technical problem loot streaking is. It's not, as some replies are implying, a lack of willingness on our part to put th...

Oh lord, what a gent.

Add some angry eyebrows and we can keep em as a slayer mob though.

Have you managed a kill on both NM and HM? What's the average kill times for those looking like for you?

What would be appealing, out of curiosity?

Year's not over yet, Garl... 👀

In all fairness, OSRS nabbed that spot and then, with everyone taking time off, there wasn't another spot. Azanna is currently working on an End-of-Year wrapup style retrospective which I'm looking forward to.

Is a Q&A all you consider to be "improved" communication? Not surveying players for updates, reopening beta worlds, re-enabling Quick Polls on the website, increased presence on social platforms (including out of hours)? None of those? We could scale everything back and only post 1 Q&A thread a month next year, but I'm unsure if this would improve communication in the way you think it might. I could be wrong though! The future is a mystery to us all.

We're still having discussions with the team and looking to make another change. It wouldn't be something dramatic like a new BiS item but we have some ideas with what we have that we can explore for the new year.

I couldn't give you a concrete ETA but I know that the team are working on testing a fix for this right now and so hopefully we'll have that in ASAP! I'll keep an eye on the bug ticket and give it a nudge in a few days if I haven't heard anything!

Hey - this one's with the team and there's a fix being tested right now.

We're hoping to get that implemented as soon as possible, so you can get back to fighting the big man! (Not Santa. The one with the horns.)

Alright folks, the last "TWIR" of the year! We'll still be around working on things such as Game Jam and sharing information on what's to come next year, but we'll be back with regular updates on January 8th.

Read more here - https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/december-game-jam---this-week-in-runescape

Every letter you hand in gives you a present as well, its just frontloaded instead of given to you on Sunday when you trade in the nice points.

Reasonable responses only, surely... right?

https://preview.redd.it/385f9zk1t35c1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b8424c55b70e730cb6906628f1e85c66441ce62c

Hey, thank you for completing the Survey back then! The engine team have been diligently working on exploring ways we can introduce more accessibility options into the game and help the team build better accessibility features. It's still very much work in progress, but the team are working on it non-stop! (I literally got an update email on this earlier this week!)

Shame us for it not being in your hands by now, if you absolutely must, but I assure you we can't be shamed for not trying.