JagexJack

This sub can be quite a hostile place for developers, who will often get a lot of unpleasant messages in response to anything they post. To be clear it's not usually about the complaint - like the question being asked here isn't an unreasonable one - it's usually about the framing and tone. Developers aren't paid to get on reddit and interact with the community, when we do so it's our choice to, and making it unpleasant to do so discourages us from choosing to spend our time doing so.

EDIT Have edited the comment to use less inflammatory wording - should probably practice what I preach.

There's a big difference for me between "it was annoying, and we didn't change it, and it's still annoying" and "we changed it, and it's slightly more annoying now". In the former case I think "the update isn't about that" is a good reason to leave something alone to avoid scope creep, but once we've touched it that principle doesn't really apply anymore. In this case I believed we hadn't touched it, but it turned out we had.

Sorry I don't mean change it back to as before, I mean change it so the abyss neither skulls you nor requires you to be skulled.

I didn't realise that you now have to toggle PVP before entering the wilderness to access the abyss. (In dev it worked as before, skulling you when you enter). I've asked for this to be changed to remove the skull requirement from the abyss entirely (and not autoskull you as it used to). I doubt a change like this will qualify for hotfixing, but I'll talk to the developers about it tomorrow.

EDIT: clarity

Sorry I should have been clearer. You need the full set on to fill and to use the essence, but you can "carry" the essence without the gloves equipped.

Honestly the update is a delicate balance of reducing or concentrating but not completely removing PVP. The demonic skull was intended to be, and makes sense to remain, a reward for PVP, it's just that it interacts with runecrafting in an especially notable way. I'd like to see a much more substantial improvement to runecrafting as it feels very outdated to me, but this wasn't a runecrafting update.

Given that nothing has actually changed mechanically, my expectation is that after the initial excitement of people trying to PVP things will return to how they were before, which doesn't alleviate the need for other changes but should mean the abyss remains basically as-is for now.

Yeah I have no objection to this. There are all sorts of ways to think about this problem.

AFAIK the essence you fill with isn't lost if you temporarily unequip the gloves.

Yeah there's definitely a bunch of possible reward spaces or tweaks that could be made here.

Not AFAICS.

I'm aware of the outfit, but to my knowledge there's no reason you need to have the set bonus active as you enter the abyss when the bracelet triggers. Am I forgetting something?

The threat system doesn't really interact with the abyss very heavily - it's a wilderness danger system, but you're only in the wilderness for a few seconds at a time. I think there's a strong case to just completely rethink how runecrafting works (it's super weird that a PVP method happens to be the best way to do it, and it became meta because no one PVPs) but that's a pretty substantial update in its own right.

https://runescape.wiki/w/Forinthry_bracelet

No, these are changes to the baseline mechanics, not a reward or unlock.

It's the evening in the UK.

Yeah colloquially we call her a she because of the hair. Lorewise though Croesus is a genderless fungal entity which isn't even intelligent.

Croesus is an it.

Elder demons are just Tsutsaroth demons. This isn't new lore.

I've never time trialled it in game, but the underlying balancing assumptions are here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c4ZfTXNCHMp_SocZ99eDMfdbPdFXbl0M6U_oQlOpyM8/edit?usp=sharing

The distinction with the strategy of the EDs as opposed to the EGWD is that the EDs follow the model of Mazcab - they set their own story and aesthetic, separate from the "main" story of RS (although there kind of wasn't one at the time, we were still in a holding pattern after Endgame). The EDs do a better job than most similar things by making a high degree of effort to integrate into the existing world (characters like Bryll, recurring stuff from Ports and the Arc, dragonkin, etc) and also by starting and finishing a story across a short series of updates rather than leaving it hanging.

The EGWD though works quite differently to this by being part of the main story, in terms of quests leading up to it and out from it - rather than a story separate from RS, EGWD "is" the story of RS during that period.

Funnily enough Archaeology was also intentionally developed not to plug into the main story. There's more to say about that in a future livestream or something, but...