JagexJack

We talk a lot about technical debt and design debt, and this is really what that looks like in practice.

Maintaining 10 systems takes 10 times longer than maintaining 1 system. Even more if some of the systems are significantly more complex, and probably longer still because complexity doesn't scale linearly. Maintaining unnecessary systems is bad because time spent doing that is time not spent doing something else - like making content.

It's worth maintaining multiple systems if they're important and hitting fundamentally different things - like you can't fold bosses and quests into a "single system" in order to make maintenance simpler. Drop tables, by comparison, are a relatively simple concept and while it's not that there's no possible benefit to having different bosses work in a different way, from a cost/benefit POV the tradeoff is significantly worse.

Posting a top level comment for visibility, but Monado replied:

You and I both know this is about Jagex making it so skill expression/ceiling isn't rewarded economically above a certain point.

In a sense this is true, but also a little misleading. Skill (as in player ability) is (and should be) rewarded, but it's currently rewarded in at least four different ways:

• Higher skill means faster kills.
• Higher skill means access to harder bosses.
• Higher skill means ability to beat higher enrages.
• Higher skill means ability to get longer streaks.

All of these multiply together - the problem isn't that higher skill is rewarded, but that higher skill is rewarded exponentially via multiple explicit mechanics.

What's not necessarily obvious externally is what a technical problem loot streaking is. It's not, as some replies are implying, a lack of willingness on our part to put th...

RemindMe! 15 years

Despite appearances, I'm not actually averse to this. Part of the reason I spend so much time chatting to players on social media is just to keep myself constantly reminded of all the various options on the table. A kind of self-inflicted "daily reminder that you still didn't finish the gnome series." I've pitched various tie-ins at various times over the last few years (trying to fit gnomes in here or desert in there), there are just a bunch of factors to take into consideration.

One is a general strategy of tying content in with what else is going on. If we end up in a situation where we want a quest, and we also want something nearby for which Arposandra would be a really good option, then that would be a point in favour of gnome content. To an extent you can force anything to fit with anything else, but I mean something more inherently fitting. Elder Gods + God Wars Dungeon = Elder God Wars Dungeon. Likewise e.g. Runecrafting has a direct connection to the Abyss whereas...

I think reddit is the single largest source of player feedback, but it's not the "main" one because that implies that it's the only one that matters. The CM team gather information from every source we have available to us. Even Facebook.

I think there's a bit of a misconception about polls as being somehow sort of "morally authoritative" in a way that alludes to direct democracy. Participation in polls is historically pretty low, and while I don't think that makes them invalid (if you want to vote you can vote) it doesn't make them especially informative if what we want is the best understanding we can get of what our players really want for the game. I don't mean polls are bad, and they do serve a purpose that we should make better use of, but they're "inaccurate" in much the same way reddit is.

(There's a complex tangent there on how difficult that question is to answer even in theory - for example, to what extent should currently inactive players be tak...

I agree with you here. It would be inappropriate to balance the game around assuming the buffs are active. That's a big part of why the charge system exists, to make sure that the buffs are a limited thing and not something that's just "always up" for highly engaged players.

Yeah that's spot on.

This is what I talk about in the livestream.

Yeah honestly I think the point about Nomad is a really good one. He's barely a character, but he's (I assume, I haven't been involved in that sort of decision) proven powerful as a marketing asset.

I can't promise anything specific on any timescale, but broadly yes my big takeaway here is "there's a whole character archetype here that we're missing that a lot of our audience really want to see".

As for Zemouregal, for me he doesn't do a good job of satisfying the right need. I mean I'm interested in hearing from you and others but I feel like Zemouregal has been too demeaned and mocked in the past to really work in this role.

Nah you're misinterpreting me here.

I'm not talking about "male characters" I'm talking about a very specific archetype. As I said on the stream there's a whole stream on each of these topics so I was just giving quick answers, but the Raptor isn't just "a male character". He's stoic, strong, powerful, never admits defeat, says little, values power in others, doesn't care for deception, and so on.

Most of the characters on your list aren't really in that archetype. Sliske is almost the opposite of those traits: capricious, duplicitous, smarmy, eloquent, rambling.

the writers do not like writing about them.

Again I'm talking specifically about the stoic archetype. The only other character I can think of that really fits well is Zuk. I'm sure there are others but part of what I'm acknowledging is that there aren't many. Ironically of the major characters in recent storylines I think the one who most fits the archetype is actu...

This is kinda truth-adjacent but not really accurate as you've described it. You're inserting a conspiracy where none is needed - devs have visions for the future of the game and they pursue those visions where they can. They don't need to be working with a shadowy cabal of players to implement their vision.

Hm. It's interesting thinking about the decision making process here, because I think we have a situation something like:

Player A supports decision A. Player B supports decision B. We go with decision A, which is what player A wanted, therefore we "listened to player A". In practice it doesn't really work like this - we don't choose between two players based on some criteria and then just do whatever they say. We'll take input from many players, and then weigh that against all of the other relevant factors as well.

I wasn't heavily involved in the FSOA/AD changes but to apply that framework, balancing is very relevant to it. To oversimplify the argument slightly, if you say "do you want to be immortal?" then some players will say yes and some players will say no, but it's not just a case of listening to the players who say no and doing what they want. There are design and balancing considerations involved beyond pure preference.

As far as comp goes, I was h...

I think it's a bit of a misconception that we only or primarily listen to content creators. I see this come up a lot and I'm honestly not sure where it comes from. There are specific times where we've invited content creators to the studio (like the recent Necromancy visit) but they're not the only players we have in to discuss content, just the ones where talking about the experience is part of their job. We also do very much bear in mind where the feedback is coming from - one of the many great things about content creators is that we know their general thoughts on where the game should go from their content, so we can account for that.

The design channels on the official discord are open to anyone who wants to join (as long as you can behave yourself) and are a great place to talk about the design of the game - more so than the "secret content creators discord" which isn't really for that purpose.

In defence of RSGuy specifically, people seem to think that he has...

Yeah as you say it's tricky because it's a huge topic.

The section you quoted wasn't about not doing finales, it was about how we need to finish storylines when they still matter, not just leave two years between quests. Basically the situation where some questline is still not finished is bad, and my priority is making sure we don't keep doing that, hence the "we should push ahead with a specific storyline to finish it" attitude.

All that said, I'm not against doing old finales - I would go so far as to say we should do that, but there are just a bunch of factors. We can't just "ship Arposandra" - the anticipated scope is huge, it's not a monthly update, it's the environmental focus of the year. I actually pitched "Desert Finale" for the period that became LOZ, and in retrospect if I could go back I would push it harder. (Part of the consideration is that at the time Rowley was busy with Necromancy, and I think we'd all prefer that he was involved...

That's nothing like what I said.

It's probably worth watching the full livestream. I talk about it in more detail there.

I've been thinking about this overnight.

I still don't agree with the precedent set by Chosen Commander, and I don't think X50 is a particularly significant milestone. That said, regardless of my opinion on the subject, clearly a lot of people in the thread do think that so it's worth taking a second look at.

Here's what I'll do. If I see an opportunity to arrange content in a way that makes the 250th quest something a bit special, I'll try to make that happen. I can't promise anything, because as I've mentioned in my other examples I'm not going to go to devs and tell them to lower the quality of their work in order to accommodate it.

I get where you're coming from, but my take would be almost the exact opposite.

Devs who are here excited about the game have their heads down making the best content we can. We have to account for business factors because we're professionals and we want the company and game to keep going, but what we want to do is make great content.

Lining numbers up isn't a passionate creative thing, it's a business thing. It's a way of creating a marketing moment to drive engagement. I don't mean that's a bad thing, but it's kind of up the other end of the spectrum from raw passion. The sorts of things that devs don't like, but have to accommodate for for the good of the game from a business perspective, are things like "you need to change what you're doing to make a great marketing moment".

I think I should mention, counter to what I've said elsewhere in the thread, that it's 250 that I'm specifically skeptical about. I don't think Chosen Commander sets any real precedent that X50 quests are celebrations.

I wouldn't apply the same logic to 300, which obviously has a much stronger precedent set as a huge milestone.

That's what I mean though like... right now we're doing much more and more coherent planning than ever before. It's actually lack of planning which makes it easy to switch things around.

As I mentioned at the start, Unwelcome Guests wasn't intended to be a "quest" in the sense that anyone would think to count it towards the total number of quests released. As it happens, the team did a great job and shipped a "miniquest" to which players responded "this is a perfectly good quest, it should be a quest and give a quest point".

We agreed and responded to that feedback by adding a quest point, and now Unwelcome Guests "counts". If we had arranged an elaborate schedule to make sure that a certain quest launched as 250, we would have had to say "no, sorry, we're not adding a quest point to Unwelcome Guests because it will throw our completely arbitrary numbers off" or tell the devs "make sure you don't put too much effort into your miniquest, we...