JagexJack

I think this might be the root of the issue here - despite the archaic name, "jmods" aren't really moderators. We're not PR people out here trying to make the company look good, we're developers sharing info available to us in our spare time. If the baseline requirement for being allowed to do that without harassment is a different job entirely, they just won't do it which is exactly what Luma is saying.

What you're asking for here is less interaction. You're gatekeeping the ability of a mod to comment on what they can say behind some issue that they either can't comment on or don't feel comfortable commenting on.

Let me give a similar example in a different context - open world games are pretty normal now, but back in the days before GTA3 there was a player perspective that the whole world should be interactable. This was a pretty common design ideology and a lot of games were built in accordance with it - for example Elder Scrolls RPGs have worlds in which every building can be entered, which adheres to this design philosophy.

However this isn't "correct design", it's just a way of making games. Skyrim has completely accessible "cities", but one of the costs of that is that the cities are all absurdly tiny. "Capitals" have populations in the dozens. "Villages" have less than ten people living in them. They've traded off the interactibility of the world against the realistic scale of the world, which is a perfectly fine design choice for the game they wanted to make.

By comparison any of the myriad open world games set in Manhattan don't depict the world in anywhere...

I'm not saying "we shouldn't fix things". Right now my highest priorities are all fixes (PVM, economy, skills, the way we tell stories, the world building of the game, etc etc). There's an enormous amount to work on and I'm trying to find production solutions to make sure this happens at the same time as shipping new content for people to play.

However, that doesn't mean that I agree that any given thing is actually a problem that needs fixing. To pick a non-lore example, some players believe that it's a fundamental error on our part that some (most) minigames have lapsed into redundancy and there's no reason to play them.

Your original comment was that this "problem" indicates a lack of competence or ability on our part, but that's entirely predicated on the assumption that this is something we should be fixing, which is exactly what I was addressing.

Could you expand on this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/y9icwf/literally_unplayable_fiaras_possible_death_during/itbq3nb/

I talked about this in some detail in one of my runescape youtube videos but I'm not entirely sure which one - I think it might have been Icthlarin's Little Helper but I'm not entirely confident.

TLDR you kind of summarised it yourself - a lot of work for little clear benefit. One of the core things that separates a professional developer from a hobbyist (which is for example what I was earlier in my life, and still am in my side projects) is the ability to prioritise what is most impactful, because time is limited. When I'm making something in my spare time I can ignore this if I want, because if the thing I'm working on never actually ships that only really affects me. In a professional capacity, I have a responsibility to my players and my company to devote my efforts to what creates the most benefit to both.

You can assert this as your opinion of how you think RPGs should work, and that's perfectly fine, but even the majority of single player RPGs produced in a single span of 2 years and shipped complete don't work like this. Expecting it from a 20 year old continually updating MMO just isn't realistic.

This sounds like a good topic for a livestream, I'll put it on my list.

Bugs are classified according to how much impact they have on players and prioritised accordingly. Lore bugs are pretty much Cs by definition. This one is arguably not even a bug, since dialogue doesn't automatically update with changes to the story, and can't and shouldn't.

Thanks for saying so, and don't worry. I can be rude sometimes. Telling it like it is is quite a difficult line to navigate.

Part of the reason to start with Farming even though, as many have pointed out, Farming doesn't feel like the highest priority is that it makes the most intuitive sense to function this way as seeds are necessary in a way that doesn't really apply to e.g. ore and fish.

Assuming the economic aspects work out though, yes, I would like to find ways to make all the gathering and artisan skills relevant in the same way.

Damn, I wish I'd thought of this. Would have saved us so much reward space.

Hooli offered to come on and help if we needed him, but he's pretty busy and I thought we could manage without.

Thanks. I'm hoping over time it will just become more of a regular and expected thing and we can just have open Q&As and stuff.

Not averse to this at all personally. My take would be that the Mr Ex option is slightly outdated in terms of the way that we think about accounts and account security and that the player should always have control over their account. It should be up to account level stuff like 2FA to protect your account, not irreversible in-game decisions.

I'll raise it internally if there's a sensible avenue to do so.

That's a hard question to answer definitively for all cases, but to pick one specific example I would say e.g. fixing woodcutting is a higher priority than fixing kandarin.

I agree completely about the skilling outfits, and it's something I'm investigating for the medium term. I wouldn't not fix something that matters just because I don't like the tone of a reddit thread.

I think there's an interesting design discussion to be had with the community on the role of loadouts within RS and to what extent that's core to RS's identity. Completely personally, I hate having to switch gear for every activity, but the idea that you start at the bank by selecting the right outfit for the task at hand seems like a core part of RS's identity to me.

Possibly yeah. "Social media resilience training" is something that's been bouncing around internally for a bit. Honestly I think it might be slightly the wrong angle (not that the training is a bad idea) - ultimately you want the devs to be intrinsically motivated to engage with the community because it's fun for them to do so. I share the concerns of some players that it's not good to exist only in a hugbox echo chamber where everyone praises you - ultimately negative feedback is important for us to learn to do better. However, there's a pretty big line between "negative feedback" and "reading this feedback made me want to take a week off to seriously consider whether game development is worth it" and that does happen fairly frequently. Some players aren't very good at walking that line. Faced with that, of course devs will withdraw to smaller discord communities or just not interact with the community at all.

This is a complicated topic with a lot of factors. While I've never written a full design for it, I have given a lot of thought to this problem. It's probably a topic which in and of itself is worth a whole livestream to discuss, but I'll try to do a quick answer on a couple of points.

The simplest is that it's hard to do much with Woodcutting without also updating Fletching and Construction. This isn't insurmountable, and something like the core mechanics of Woodcutting don't inherently depend on Fletching being different, but anything more complex like new woods (which are needed really) or new reasons to train the skill would do so. Nevertheless the best angle I can see for chipping away at this problem is to start small and fix WC first.

On the other hand, any changes to the core mechanics of the skill do wreak havoc with the absolute ton of existing mechanics in the game. Totally revising the woodcutting mechanics is actually fairly straightforward - t...

I don't mean to describe it as some sort of threat or deal or ultimatum - the reason I keep bringing it up is because people often ask "why aren't devs responding?" and I'm doing my best to explain why. There's no conscious mass decision going on here, it's just a lot of individuals each making the right choice for them. When things happen there are usually causal factors, and a big part of my job is recognising them and doing my best to combat them - mostly in a game design context, but the exact same logic applies to internal company organisation and community interaction.

Nothing in your comment is wrong, but it kind of fails to recognise that the people involved are humans with lives and mental health and stuff like that. The game absolutely would be better if every mod was constantly on here (and other forums) chatting with players, gathering feedback, feeling a sense of personal obligation to the community - but such activity comes with a high cost when a significant ...