JagexJack

I don't know how that's your takeaway.

I believe what you said is true of FF14. It's not true of WOW.

The most recent WOW expansion required players to complete the entire expansion story before participating in endgame (effectively hardlocking the entire game behind a very long questline). This was constantly raged against by the community (along with a whole bunch of other stuff) and appears to have been an extremely unpopular move.

In previous expansions, it's rare that content is questlocked - participation in the endgame tended to be level locked, and quests were an efficient way to level, but typically gave no useful or meaningful rewards and so anti-lore players would strategise how to skip as much of the story as possible.

Technically it doesn't really work that way. Modelling and texturing is a lot of work, but rigging and animating takes even longer. The Jas model just sits there ticking because it was never designed to do anything other than that.

No worries. She's actually really nice too, she wanted us to send her the cutscenes when they were finished and got really into the character's personality and motivation.

It's the same voice actor.

Yes this is correct.

I can see the cinematic appeal of the scene you've described, but there are a few reasons we didn't go in a direction like this:

1) We want to de-escalate, rather than escalate, the storyline. Some fantasy settings seem to feel that the only way to follow a threat is with an even larger, more dangerous threat with even bigger stakes, but personally I think this is a mistake.

2) The scene and resolution as depicted isn't something we are really able to depict in our game, at a technical or logical level.

3) Perhaps most importantly, the scene doesn't give any agency to the player character. While some might argue with some accuracy that the same is true of our 2D cutscenes, typically those cutscenes are small moments within a larger quest in which the player has either personally brought about about the events depicted, or played a key role in responding to them.

Lorewise they're the same being. The only difference is that RS3 Zuk has Ek-Zekkil, which is probably a pretty big bonus.

In general they do. We have to be careful not to totally overcrowd, but you can see e.g. Hannibus and Moia pretty prominently included in the artwork. We don't want every quest to just be about Azzanadra.

Yeah that's a great point.

Well, that's a separate but good question. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive, and I don't think we have to rule PVP out permanently. However that's separate from the status of the wilderness, which is a very specific kind of PVP. The most well regarded PVP content I can think of in recent memory was WE2, which is still highly regarded internally.

I corrected myself on stream from something like "remove PVP" to "make PVP optional" (I don't have time to go look up my exact words right now) for exactly that reason. It could be, for example, that the Wilderness has open PVP enabled on some worlds but not others, and that playing on an open PVP world gives small bonuses. Whether PKing should be mechanically incentivised is a whole other question, but in principle it's a way to both "reclaim" the wilderness but also retain the option to PVP.

AFAIK it really depends on the dev. Not just ninja strikes, but just in general when some time is allotted for fixes (this often happens when someone is working on something related) they're either coming to the project with an existing strong sense of what needs doing, or they need to gather info. Sometimes they'll research existing stuff, other times they'll post on twitter or reddit or something to gather ideas and then prioritise them.

The ingame bugfix tool is used. We should get QA to do a stream about it some time explaining the process and what happens, but it actually gets specific time allotted weekly both for processing bugs and for fixing them.

I'm not involved in this process directly so I can't speak to what bugs are and aren't getting prioritised. As with everything, we can spend more time on prioritisation to prioritise better, but that's then less time spent on actually fixing bugs. Hard to get the right balance.

Except that's not what I'm saying. I'm not talking about what players should do, I'm talking about what I believe they already have done.

You might say well, if you went back 10 years and changed the focus of the game quite dramatically at that time, things would be different now, and I agree. Maybe it's the case that focusing on e.g. skillcapes and virtual 120s etc was the path of least resistance at the time, and it didn't have to be like that. You might be right. In fact you'd definitely be right by my own logic - if RS in 2010 was a sh*t hot PVP game but kinda meh at skilling, then we'd keep PVP players and lose progression minded players.

Even so though, there aren't many PVP games from 20 years ago that are still massively popular today. This is the point I originally made to Rubic, and the point you clipped out of your summary of what I said. Again my personal take, not policy, but I think if RS 10 years ago had focused on PVP to th...

Multiplayer and PVP aren't the same thing in this context. My example would have worked better if I'd said that something like Resident Evil is a non-PVP game, rather than a single player game. I don't at all think it's the case that RS isn't a multiplayer game. That said the basic question of whether the game should include forced multiplayer content is quite a controversial one, and we had multiple questions about it during the Q&A.

Look I understand the points you're raising, and I don't even disagree with... any of them I think, but you're raising them as examples of critical fixes with a 48 hour turnaround and that's simply not the case. They're complex, endemic, long-term design issues which need to be addressed in largely all existing and ongoing content. We can't just pay a dev overtime for one weekend and knock them all out in one go. The fact that you raised five separate issues simply proves the point I made initially that MTX bugs can be fixed faster because there are less of them and they're simpler. My claim was never "we always fix everything immediately" - of course we don't, we couldn't, and no one ever could. I was responding specifically to a point about the comparative effort put into live ops and episodic content, and how that could happen.

I understand that you're frustrated when something you consider extremely important isn't being prioritised. I'm not even saying you're wrong, it...

I can't really answer the former, but to the latter:

It's super complicated and there are a lot of factors. I guess the key thing to say is that the episodic team is bigger. We actually have a lot of devs right now working on a lot of content. However, if you know anything about people management you know that it doesn't scale linearly. More staff means more coordination, more meetings, more project managers, more line managers (who are also devs now spending dev time on management), etc etc. The increase in effectiveness per additional developer drops pretty significantly.

On top of that, content developer is actually quite a demanding role. Runescape is a complex, storied game and our content developers have a very wide purview - they're expected to be game designers, good scripters, project managers, deal with players, write dialogue, etc etc. Sometimes we'll let some areas slide if we get a candidate who is very strong in other areas (for example a grea...

"great idea, we'll make this a priority since so many people are asking for it"

"what a great idea, I'll get those in the next patch notes since the community really wants to see this"

See this is the part that confuses me. Just because something is asked in a Q&A doesn't mean it's the thing that the community most wants. When devs work on ninja strikes, part of what they do is gather multiple suggestions and try to evaluate which suggestions would provide the most value for players compared to the time spent implementing them. That determination takes time, sometimes even technical investigation or balancing input on whether it's even something we should do. It's not something that can, or should, be just promised off the cuff because the guy on the livestream liked the sound of it.

For your other suggestion, I kinda agree but I guess it's a question of what the Q&As are for. In general I don't think, and it sounds like you don't ...

While there are many issues (some debateable, some not) there are devs working constantly to fix them - it's just a question of prioritising their impact, replicability, time to fix, etc.

Of the examples you gave, it's ridiculous hyperbole to call the scripture and trim comp "emergencies". I don't mean to say they're not important at all, and should never be looked at, but the comparison we're making here is with some blocker bug.

With scripture, and also with AG, safecracking and even EDs, it may be that content is crowding out other content, but it's also always been the case in RS that shutting the gate after the horse has bolted has produced resentment. Maybe it's still the right call, but that makes it significantly more complicated to fix than just some bug.

Looking around at people's attitudes to safecracking, I can't see a general sentiment of dissatisfaction. Now that might be an incorrect assessment and even so you might ...

I don't really agree with your take on PVP. While you're right that it's dominant in online spaces, that doesn't mean it's the right choice for every game - which essentially means that it may not be the right choice for the playerbase of every game.

The internet is littered with PVP tie-ins for what are fundamentally single player games. If I want to buy Resident Evil Village, I also get some multiplayer version I have no intention of ever installing or playing. GTA Online and Fallout 76 have fanbases constantly asking where the next main series single player game is coming from.

The thing about competitive online games is that they depend on an aggregate critical mass of players to work. If I want to play, say, Resident Evil Zero (or One Small Favour for that matter) I can just go and go that, but if I want to play the multiplayer mode for Resident Evil 6 (or Castle Wars) then I need there to be people online around to do that with.

Ofc RS isn't a...

I don't really get this take. Did you watch the stream, or is this in response to the TLDR?