JagexJack

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 My take would be that the Mr Ex option is slightly outdated in terms of the way that we think about accounts and account security and that the player should always have control over their account.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 ...

I'm actually not sure. It did stream on youtube so I assume the VOD is still visible there.

Ah yeah here is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t4n6rl3EWQ

This comment feels like a lazy cop-out.

See I didn't say you were lazy, I just said your comment feels lazy. ;)

To be fair I overreact to the word "lazy" because it's used so often and it's usually so wildly inaccurate - like think about the stereotypes of the problems in the games industry. It's not that devs are lazing around doing nothing - it's that they're working unpaid overtime and never get to see their families. I've seen people come up with all sorts of explanations of what they "meant" when they said lazy, but ultimately lazy is an inherently personal attribution to what is likely quite a complex issue, or possibly not actually an issue at all.

For a while on discord I was spamming the title screen from the L word every time someone said it, and then I eventually resorting to just reeeeeing. I instinctively did that in my first reply to this thread but then I realised that for people who weren't used to the in-joke it might come across very weird....

I'm not completely sure what sort of effect you're imagining as a "gap closer" - do you mean something like a less skillcap-reliant alternative item which has lower performance but still higher performance than current options?

I agree with the underlying problem you're outlining but I'm not sure rewards are the right way to handle this - any new feature or mechanic or item or ability can be used by the top end as much as the bottom end, probably more effectively.

This is something that's a big design priority for me - it's something we've gotten wrong in both directions in the past - i.e. fixes that could have been good rewards have been shipped "free" as QOL and fixes that are really necessary for the base health of the game have been locked behind demanding requirements. That said I don't necessarily agree with some specific complaints - passive adren for example is something that makes no difference whatsoever at low levels of play and doesn't need to be baseline.

Yeah that's definitely something I'm conscious of. Sounds like a good topic for a future livestream. The vigor passive was something that sponge had implemented for a future update (zamorak I think) so it wasn't being "saved" exactly.

lazy

What you're drawing attention to here is another of the pitfalls of trying to have more open communication - a dev gives an abridged answer to what was probably quite a long (hours, days, weeks) design discussion and conclusion, and gets insulted for it.

To be clear it's fine to disagree or ask for further clarification. "You said it limits reward space, but couldn't you just do X instead?" That's a question which prompts the developer to share more information about what they meant. Open discussion is great - it might be that actually what you propose hadn't occurred to the developer and you just made the game better, or it might be that there's a lot more to it than you realised and they didn't have time to explain hours and hours of discussion and decision making in an off the cuff but well intentioned attempt to answer a question.

EDIT: removed me reeeeing