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JagexJack

JagexJack



25 Mar

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by Rune_Man

Mod Jack telling people who remotely like any form of PvP or multiplayer content to pack their bags and leave Runescape makes me sad.

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.


24 Mar

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by 5-x

Always looking ahead, dangling a carrot in front of players, and not taking care of what we already have in the game is the type of approach that will eventually kill this game. It worked in 2006 but won't work now. It's not surprising that players are getting more frustrated with Jagex's communication and livestreams, when all devs and designers have to say is "guys, game design is hard".

Address these issues. Halve all salvage values, or nerf ED thrash runs, rebalance the gp & xp fountains. Tone down safecracking and Bik scripture. Do something. It's not hard, if you can assign just a little bit of time to it, and teach devs to take responsibility for their content. The huge success of the recent combat tidy-up update should give you an idea that revisiting existing content is worth it.

You reportedly even hired real-life economists to look at the game's ecosystem, and what? Nothing happens?

And lastly, the (trimmed) completionist cape becoming a joke is ...

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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...

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TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by MyCabbagesHelp

  1. What's the drop rate of a lucky dragonkin coin from Nodon dragonkin? I was hoping this would be released in December with gwd3 drop rates.
  2. Why can't we just make the episodic team bigger? I know hiring staff has costs, but if the team is bigger they can produce more content (in theory). Why wouldn't the budget for more hands be approved, even if it takes a few months to train?

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...

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TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by Kye7

Watched all of it. Almost all the answers were wishy washy or "well bring that up later", or "we don't have plans for that", unconfidently. Instead of saying "great idea, we'll make this a priority since so many people are asking for it". This is the type of answer we expect from mods who claim to love the game just as much as us.

Yes they did address some things, but so many of the answers have been lackluster or a Dodge at really answering it. "that sounds like a good target for a ninja strike", avoiding responsibilort/deflecting, instead of saying "what a great idea, I'll get those in the next patch notes since the community really wants to see this". It's always something months if not years later. Maybe have a community poll on the top 3 to 5 things the players want NEXT WEEK (easy things), like changing gconc to 3 ticks, filling rune pouches from banks, other huge QoL stuff thatwould be seemingly easily implemented, but is always put off for the "perfect" ninja strike...

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"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 ...

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TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by 5-x

content issues are just left to fester, but this simply isn't true

Yes, it is true. Critical content issues are left to fester.

  • Elite Dungeon trash mob farming continues, injecting gold and experience, causing significant inflation.

  • Arch-glacor is being farmed to infinity on 0 mechanics for unreasonable amounts of effigies and other drops.

  • Trimmed completionist cape is in shambles, despite repeated player pleas to add missing requirements.

  • Scripture of Bik trivialised all other methods of gathering clue scrolls in the game, which even Mod Sponge admitted.

  • Safecracking has not been balanced and is spewing out insane amounts of thieving experience, leaving everything else in the dust. Mod Shogun promised rebalance but nothing happened.

I could go on with examples. These are all content-side balancing emergencies that are ...

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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 ...

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TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by ImRubic

PvP can take many forms, and only 1 small form of that is Pking. Most people agree, Pking isn't actually PvP (Player vs Player). As for whether PvP has a niche audience or not, it isn't. PvP is by far, uncontested, the most popular activity in gaming which is exactly why the most popular actively played games are all PvP focused.

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...

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TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by Kye7

It was a total cop out. These guys run the game yet don't have any solid opinions of their own. Political answers.

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

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by TheHotstreak

Hello! My question is regarding the Gielinor Games, even if they can't be brought back, can we at least see the return of the Bronze, Silver, and Gold Athlete outfits by some other means? I believe that's what people wanted from the event anyways.

Yeah that makes sense. I can't see an obvious place to do that off the top of my head, but I'll try to bear it in mind.

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by Proper_Shiny

Though, I did mean that return on investment was measured in dollars, I feel the teams related to MTX are starting to become assigned much, much more time than any other. It seems to become the case hasince the introduction of the Carlyle group.

This is understandable as their whole purpose is to create value for their investors, which MTX would create. For the ninja and episodic teams, I get that your objective is not to produce money but I don't think it's correct to say that 'at Jagex we're always trying to assign time in the best way we can'

So I still think it's valid that ROI is measured in dollars at the moment, and true in the way I meant it. I feel sorry for the Devs, it's not their fault, I just assume that's how the company is run now.

I gave a longer response to a similar concern here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/tlu2ks/tldw_536_march_general_qa/i1zb8r5/

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by 101perry

I mainly wanted to know 2 things that are on my mind.

1) If you hide cogs on augmented items, you get a weird bug where if you had weapons sheath automatically, they don't actually sheath, so you have to click to pull them out (which changes nothing), then sheath again. That resets every time you teleport too, it's only a minor thing and not game breaking but it's something I'd have loved to have known if they could fix it or not.

2) Second one is something that has been happening a lot to me lately, and that's when ranging if I click on enemies that are a distance away, or in certain specific places, I will run up to melee distance of them before attacking. Biggest offender is Zuk, where I click to attack him when he's sitting down and I'll run up to him before attacking, yet I can move away to attack. I even had it with one of the Jad, where I clicked on them and ran right up to them despite having line of sight as they were attacking me. Led to signing instantl...

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To be honest I don't think either of these is really a good topic for a general Q&A stream. The best thing to do is report them through the in-game bug feature. We have QA assigned time every week to process and try to replicate these issues, where they get prioritised and assigned to devs.

I'm not a developer, but my instinct is that the former is probably not that hard to fix, but also not that important to fix, so it might not get prioritised. The latter sounds like something more complex - when you report it, include as much info as you can so it can be replicated.

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by Thaldrath

Why is every question regarding content, game balancing or bug fixes is always answered with a version of "We're looking at it / it's hard to do"

But everytime it touches MTX, it's swiftly fixed or given an appropriate answer or is being adressed carefully.

We're asking for qol, graphical touch up to bring the game more in line with itself, it's a monumental task. Even Elite Dungeon boss farming took months to fix.

But when there's a Treasure Hunter bug, it was found, reported and FIXED within 48 hours, having people work on it and make a god damn update to the game on a January 1st holiday.

I don't want to sound like another "hurr mtx bad" crybaby, but this is what we're being shown, unfortunately.

I know that there are passionate people at Jagex who want to bring the best to the game, but stuff like this makes it really hard to have hope with the management having more commitment towards shareholders than the actual customer base, aka the p...

There are a few answers to this but they're both essentially variations on there being specific people who work on specific things.

Firstly, MTX stuff can be complicated to answer, and Mod MIC is one of the few people who can answer authoritatively, so when he's on it makes sense to ask him those questions. I, or for example some member of the combat council or lore council, probably couldn't give any useful info.

Secondly, it's a matter of prioritisation within the teams - the live ops team don't (usually) work on general content, and vice versa the episodic team don't touch live ops projects. This means that those teams are only prioritising within their own area of specialisation.

Thirdly, the nature of those two types of content is really different, which affects how the second point plays out in practice. There is simply less total live ops content than episodic content, which means not only less issues to deal with, but also each issue is individually ...

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TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by Proper_Shiny

I guess it's all about ROI now

This is true, but not I think in the way you meant.

Probably worth going into on a future livestream in more detail, but we have teams which are effectively "ringfenced" (I know, horrible corpo term) to specific work - live ops, ninja and episodic. For the ninja and episodic teams, our remit isn't to produce money directly, but to make the game better in such a way that players want to subscribe.

As such, we're always trying to assign time in the best way we can. We want that ninja and episodic dev time being prioritised to the thing we think will make players enjoy, and play, the game. In that sense, we always want to maximise the return on investment, but we don't (and can't really) measure that directly in dollars.

TL;DW 536 - March General Q&A

Comment

Originally posted by 101perry

This honestly was a shitty stream. There were some really good questions that weren't answered, or even put up on the list. Then the answers we got were "uhhh we're looking at it".

If there are particular questions you want answered, it never hurts to reiterate them in a comment like this


10 Mar

Today's Q&A was one of the best in recent times

Comment

Originally posted by Fren-LoE

I wish they’d relax more and be open and honest about their opinions on things. This stream really reminded me of jagex from back in the good old days

I would say I think this very much depends on how much the chat agree with your personal opinion.


08 Mar

RS3 Woodcutting/fletching rework needed

Comment

Originally posted by DatShokotan

Surely this is not as big of a problem considering that ranged only has one type of craftable armor per tier and 3 types of weapons per tier? (bows, crossbows, thrown items). One could say you actually knocked out the most complicated one to rework of the combat triangle.

Melee had too many types of redundant equipment gumming up each tier which made it nasty to work with. Also I am of the opinion that you could’ve just reduced this mess by getting rid of redundant weapons with the update and making each tier only have a few weapons instead of carrying over everything. For example each low tier melee did not need to have a sword, long sword, scimitar, battle axe, 2h, claws, spears, halberds, mace, etc etc etc. It would’ve been smart to use that M&S rework as an opportunity to shave off most of them and follow it up with some statement to appease the community. Would’ve given you much less redundancies to worry about. (And yes, some weapon types are woven into quests and tho...

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It wasn't melee that was the issue - as you say a lot of it was redundant and we hugely simplified things by standardising e.g. helmets, shields and legs. We got a few complaints about "laziness" by not including every weapon type in the new tiers but I think most people recognised they were redundant.

The issue was the rewards for mining and smithing themselves - all the little quest rewards and reward shop rewards and things which have accumulated over the years.

This list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YTW--SnG2me00FHY3QjoNx_wQ8oJuQmuClpQ1tDeDc4/edit?usp=sharing

and this list: ...

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RS3 Woodcutting/fletching rework needed

Comment

Originally posted by azovbattalioncrimes

they said a few weeks ago that it took two years or something to do the update with four devs and it's like... ok, anyone with knowledge into game development or project management would suspect there's deeply something wrong happening there [which, there's a lot of stuff from ex employees about upper management] considering how much the update actually added whether with under the hook systems or in regards to items, environmental rocks, etc.

As I say often, the time consuming part wasn't developing the new systems and content - we had a basic version of that up and ready for external playtesting within a few months. What was time consuming was reworking 20 years of rewards that plugged deeply into the old systems, as well as carefully balancing the economic impacts since M&S were so deeply embedded into PVM drop tables.


01 Mar

Eye of Het II miniquest is broken because of new update

Comment

I've passed this on to Mod Shogun. He'll take a look at it.


11 Feb

TL;DW 533 - February Modcast Q&A Part 2

Comment

Originally posted by FatNWackyRS

That's Mod Jack for you!

I'm with you, it's dreadful.

:(


21 Jan

Does is matter which gang you join in new Varrock for shield of Arab?

Comment

It did up until Battle of the Monolith where we ignored your choice and it no longer mattered.


18 Jan

Orikalkum ore / bars ???

Comment

Originally posted by 10_Health

Either way this lore that was missing for me was the coolest birthday present I've had, cheers Jack, made my day and my year

That's great to hear. There's a small lore entry for Necronium somewhere but I can't remember where to find it.