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This is so brilliant and I'm now eternally jealous.
This is so brilliant and I'm now eternally jealous.
Why is it included in this weeks update section, though, if it's not an update to begin with?
Fair question actually. We have repositioned this as This Week In Runescape but we're talking about it outside of the current week.
We do want to carry on doing this - it's important to signpost our bigger updates - but we can look at how to make it clearer (on top of avoiding a less of specification in the actual text that it's next week!).
Read moreHonestly, just because players use it a lot, does not mean it's a good thing for the game. Even if 'most' players aren't using half of it, even if players are logging in for it, it's plainly obvious that it devalues things. People would vote for free money if they could be convinced it wouldn't screw the economy, but 90% of the time it would.
Herblore especially: DXPW is just a barrage of 99/120 Herblore broadcasts, and this can be seen in the prices of herblore materials and how much they inflate every time you announce a DXPW. With a quarterly release like this it is inevitable that many are going to not even bother training these skills outside of DXPW, and they're frequent enough that, for all intents and purposes, Herblore as a skill is now arbitrarily twice as fast.
People get excited when things get made easier or faster for them, but for the long-term health of the game, you're making resources spike and slump in price and demand, making significant achievem...
These are all great comments (and I've seen many others raise similar concerns) that we want to talk about.
Might take a bit to coordinate, but we're going to try and talk about these topics within DXP Live in more detail.
Like everyone else is saying, how dare you guys try to keep using COVID-19 as an excuse for the lack of content. You guys have barely pumped out content even before the pandemic. Using this as a means to divert aggression is absolutely disgusting and you guys should be ashamed. There are people who genuinely have been impacted by this and you guys merely using it as an excuse belittles that to such a degree. On a similar note, how is OSRS continually pumping out quality despite this?
I mentioned something similar in another comment, but I get the scepticism. I just want to be clear that no-one is using COVID-19 as an excuse.
We did our recent stream to give you an honest look at our development challenges right now in developing from home (a productivity hit of around 30%) and what we're going to do about it. Our silence was deafening for a few months there while everything all of a sudden looked uncertain and it needed to be addressed.
As someone who works here, and just recently came from another studio developing from home, it's been challenging in both places for me personally. I can't speak for every developer, but I know a bunch of my friends in dev are struggling (a couple prefer it though!).
Regardless of your thoughts on the team's past output, we're not trying to use it as a lever to 'forgive all'. We want to bring you closer to our development and always be present, and this is just part of explaining what was going on.
...The whole 'but coronaaaa!!!!' is a asspull and you know it. RS3 has been experiencing a content drought long before it, the current pandemic isn't responsible for what has become a established pattern.
It is, however, a easy excuse to latch onto rather than making the hard admissions, so hey... No real surprise that Jagex is playing that card heavily.
I get the scepticism, I really do.
There's a lot of impact from developing at home and much of the long-term impact of that is being felt in the past few months than right at the start.
For example, the AAA game I worked on prior just changed their Season length from 12 weeks to 18 weeks by the looks of it.
It's not easy (at least for a lot of teams) and it has had a major productivity impact hence the reshaped planning. Hopefully you'll feel the impact of that through the rest of this year, which we need to deliver on.
You say that yet Warden has said that the roadmap would come out pre-Corona ('start of the year' = at best the entirety of Q1, which is up until March).
Road map when? Ah right, you ended up uprooting the concept 'cause you can't dish out proper content on proper times... I see...
Like I said, action is what matters now.
Mod Warden outlined the move towards smaller scope but still meaty content updates more regularly (with an ultimate goal of it being monthly) during our Develop from Home world.
We have to go deliver on that. But we'd rather be open from a development perspective than throw at a Roadmap that - let's be honest - you likely wouldn't trust anyway given recent output.
Read moreWhy I personally hate this DXP event(s) is because you really don't even listen to your player base that DON'T want them this frequent and you only care about your "data", why don't you share that data to your community so we can see how many people truly wants this event and are part of that "silent majority".
Another thing I really hate about it is that you don't care for your players or do something about it that don't want to engage with the event but still get affected by it because when they want to train slowly in certain skills and then suddenly needs something they need to overpay on stuff because the demand suddenly sky rockets, it always happen with resources when this event gets announced every single time. What are you going to do about those people that don't engage in it but still need to overpay, and with this quarterly DXP you Jagex planned makes it even more horrible for those players to play normally when every 3 monts there will be a DXP event and every ...
All great questions. We're talking to the team about if we can put something together to continue this conversation in more detail - whether that's here or in a stream of some sort - to provide more context/insight.
This does leverage the development team's time a little, so it may take a while, but we are actively interested in getting more info out.
Just like mtx events aren't supposed to replace content updates? Meanwhile we are having the same amount of yak tracks released as new content updates, with treasure hunter running along it the past half year or so. Kinda hard to believe things you and your colleagues say when the facts say somwthing different
We get that. There's been the change in our content plans to bring more, but it's all about action. Not expecting you to be convinced by a response saying it alone.
If we go and deliver what we're saying, the balance should be much more evident.
You are literally just a Jagex mouthpiece. Don't pretend you care about the community because we don't buy it.
Caring about the community is interacting.
Part of my responsibility is to relay the reasoning behind the decisions made and contribute to the conversation. It's way easier for us to not respond to difficult conversations, but having a discussion on something begins with interaction.
It's something I've seen asked for often here, and we want to do more of it. Just as we're passing information to you, we're also passing the feedback to the team on your thoughts. Just adding perspective.
It has been just words, marketing words. There was expansions, promises, hype, surveys etc. Everything but content updates.
Why is there no delay or lack of updates on the osrs side. RS3 cant seem to match even 10% of the content updates. It is come to the point that fixes to the game, ninja updates, patch notes are highlighted in your news posts as 'content' to look forward towards.
How is that the same company 10 years ago with lesser revenue generation released 10x the amount of quests, had at least a summer boss release and 2-3 slayer mobs released all in same year. BUT now with all the mtx money generated cant even hit one of the targets.
For sure - as I said, it's just words until we deliver on it. We know that, not expecting to convince anybody with a post response.
We don't see Ninja as a content replacement to be clear - hence the new plans we shared in that stream.
But at the same time, a bi-weekly delivery of player-suggested / guided improvements is still worth celebrating - especially given the positive feedback we see around each drop.
Can you not come up with better ideas than DXP? Seasonal tournaments, double drops, Winter/Summer weekends?
The team are investing in Seasonal Events as well - bringing back The Beach is a small part of that but they're also looking at what Halloween could be etc.
Excuses excuses excuses
The osrs team has no problem putting out updates even with covid
There's a lot of games in the industry announcing delays or impacts to content right now. Everyone is feeling the impact.
I think a lot of the complaints about DXP stem from the community believing that constant DXP drops are not healthy for the long-term viability of the game. As in: people get maxed and move on or burnout from playing a lot in a short period of time.
Do you guys have anything to say to address that? Does your data show burnout or less play time following these events?
Riot Games had a similar issue with League and URF mode, which is a very popular limited time game mode that the community engaged with heavily, but it causes a lot of burnout so the devs have been hesitant to release it as much because it wasn't healthy for the game even though it was generally well-liked and interacted with.
I'm just curious what you guys have noticed now that these events have been pretty frequent.
We haven't seen that effect happen with any Double XP LIVE events so far according to the team. To your point, no-one can say for sure until we've got 4 quarterly events back to back, but it's been thought of and not something we expect to see.
Something that you may find interesting is that the burnout rate was higher for past Double XP Weekends than any Double XP LIVE - even with the first quarterly event in May.
We believe a lot of that change was due to the player feedback that led us to Double XP LIVE. It takes a lot of the intensity off it, and instead lets you balance it around your life more rather than 'now or never'.
Not sure if you caught our stream recently, but the intention of DXP Live is very much not to be a replacement of anything, but be additive on top of. We confirmed DXP Live was going quarterly back in May. We don't disagree with what you're saying on that front.
The team recognize the desire for more content and the gap that emerged lately. It was a symptom of COVID impact really knocking our productivity rates down (you can see the impact it's had on the industry a lot lately actually, a bunch of major games have shifted their game or DLC release dates in the past few weeks).
It's now something we've adapted our plans to in order to deliver content smaller in scope but targeting releasing more often, which will lead to the content AND DXP future you're hoping for if all goes well.
Obviously it's just words until we deliver, but we're making good progress - our Stream TL;DR has a lot of the details covered if you're interested in reading more: ...
Read moreSeen it brought up here a fair bit, but just to confirm, the plan is to run a Double XP Live event quarterly. We announced that with the last DXP Live in case you missed it.
The increased regularity is one of these balancing acts we face as a studio. None of us are going to pretend this thread isn't more negative - but even here, there's people getting excited in comments (and elsewhere online) about hitting the DXP grind.
This is where we face a balancing act, specifically the 'silent majority'. I'm sure many of you have heard this before, but the picture the team makes of our playerbase is a mix of extensive data and player feedback combined as much as we can.
What the numbers show is a huge desire for these events - one that didn't diminish with our first 'quarterly' follow up DXP event, even shortly after a new skill release. Of these players, the vast majority don't use all their time - in fact, the majority don't even use half of it - but they obviousl...
Read moreDo you not think it should be treated as a priority? I’ve been playing for 14 years and using Mac only for 8... and the client is consistently poor, and when it ends up being ‘fixed’, another update brings another problem which then starts the cycle again.
The engine work excuse is really tiresome. And your response was vague, quite frankly, “engine work, soon tm”. If I can just have a client that doesn’t crash spontaneously, I’d take it with the lag. But we have crashes, lag, and bad support around us as Mac users, as well as being the butt of the joke to the community who merely respond with “get a windows”.
It is a priority, it's just engine changes take time to deliver - not only through implementation but also through testing (on any game, engine changes have a much higher risk of knock-on effects).
Progress is ongoing but we don't have a firm date to relay just yet for the exact reasoning above. As much as I know that's frustrating to hear, as I mentioned, you shouldn't be waiting too long for the first implementation targeting improvements.
Hah, now that you mention it, this is definitely something I deal with often.
We've flagged it to the Ninjas - make sure to pop it into the Dojo as well if you could. It's the best way to ensure any suggestions are logged!
Feel free to reach out to me @jagexhooli as I’m honestly at my wits end and willing to provide as much information as you need. I’m tired of being the butt of all jokes in the RS community and being told to get a windows, because I have a Mac.
Thanks! Will do if we need more info.
The team have identified a couple of things we can address to hopefully improve things. They are engine based so they'll take a little time, but the time range for deployment we have for both as it stands isn't too long.
It's a little early to share when we are targeting - stuff like this always has the potential to move if it turns out to be more complex - so apologies for the vagueness. As soon as we can be a bit more certain on timing, we'll let you know.
We are not in a position to make Archaeology level content, it isn't feasible.
What does this even mean?
I swear to god, every time i see these kind of posts, they always talk about how they are so busy at work, multiple teams doing things left and right and i quote : Within each team focus on building a monthly cadence while having multiple teams working in parallel.
Where is all that work? I seem to realise that jagex really has like 10-15 devs max, thats it, and a "team" consists of 2-3 members. I'm dead serious, they can't have 50-100 devs with that kind of content rate
This refers to the current situation - we loved making something as huge and far reaching as Archaeology.
What Warden meant by that comment is that, with our current production impacts, delivering that scale of content just isn't something we do feasibly. At least not on a cadence we think any player would be happy with.
It's part of what Warden was talking about with regards to reshaping the kind of content we make in this develop-from-home world, with a focus on delivering smaller scale (but still meaningful) content more regularly.
Jagex: Submit all your questions and we will answer them in a QA stream.
Also Jagex: wow, they actually posted questions, lets quietly cancel the stream
Even if we didn't do the stream, the Q&A very much formed a lot of what we made sure to cover in here - I hope it feels like we hit all the most asked ones at a minimum even if the format was reworked to provide time for detail.
/u/JagexPoerki has also done a great job working with the team around the (virtual) studio to get answers on many of the remain questions that were asked. We'll be posting those soon as well.