i think you guys should really look at bringing back TAPP. almost all tapp projects were universally loved and created smaller more consistent updates throughout the year.
Gamejam is essentially TAPP but formatted more in the way the devs have asked for. The problem with TAPP is that it was divided up into such tiny blocks of time that it was really hard to get anything done. Gamejam takes more or less the same total time, and blocks it together in a way that's much more effective.
Read moreI think there's a unique issue here.
Fort struck me as a means of solving longstanding issues and 'regrounding' Runescape's story content, whilst Necromancy provided the 'flashy' content.
Necromancy however is a double-edged sword. It's a new combat skill which addressed lots of bug bears (not least new players). But because it is another combat skill, despite being new in many ways and widely used, it is also not-new. And the area that came with it you would not habitually visit. This means that the 'new' stuff in the fort has a lot of weight put on it, perhaps disproportionately so, and feels a bit diminutive.
If I'm honest, I expect this is so unique that there's less to learn from it than may be expected. (Which is not to say that you shouldn't try to learn, obviously.)
However, and I don't mean this in a brow beating way, but I'd suggest the best thing you can actually do, strategically, is announce whatever is coming in the second half of 20...
This means that the 'new' stuff in the fort has a lot of weight put on it, perhaps disproportionately so, and feels a bit diminutive.
Yeah I think this is spot on.
How short can a "1 area focus" season be?
My conclusion is that the fort story taking 2 years to unravel is too long (for how minor most of the updates were). I think a slightly more fast-paced 1-year story would hold people's attention more. And then you can do a "year of the desert", "year of gnomes", "year of elemental workshop", etc. Maybe 6 months for a smaller story?
Conceivably yeah. Something like "gnome finale quest plus five months of gnome-themed combat and skilling updates in and around Arposandra" could be feasible as an off the cuff judgement. Kind of like an expansion but split into six parts.
I can't promise anything like that of course as a lot of people have input on what we do.
I'm not sure it's fair to call the fort updates "minor" but I do get what you mean. To an extent I think this isn't really a season problem so much as a skilling update problem. I'm working hard on trying to fix this but it's not trivial to resolve.
I am not denying it. I am just pointing out his contribution to this project is nothing other than just making a spreadsheet per his own words.
This is essentially correct. I'm not a developer anymore and I'm not currently set up to just jump into game and develop things. That said, don't understate the value of up front designs either.
Because Mod Jack has stated that he wants Runescape to adopt the seasonal update plan. We saw that last year, with the main focus being Fort Forinthry - Necromancy was a sidestep but after that it was right back to Fort.
Community hit lists being so well received should be the first sign for Jagex Leadership. Gamejams, being well received on social media should be the second sign. But hey, more Fort!
Jagex are notorious for burying their heads in the sand, Leadership especially.
I'm very interested in feedback on this. I would say in general that my takeaway is the same as yours, that the emphasis on the fort feels too repetitive across the whole year, and it's not a good approach to continue with.
That said updates can't just be swapped out one for one. If you look at what's happening in a fort update, for example from an environment art point of view, they mostly just add a single building. You can't take an update which is just a single building and use that "budget" to make, for example, a gnome finale or a penguin continuation. We certainly could focus on gnomes, but if we did that, the focus would be on gnomes. It wouldn't (and couldn't) be the gnomes one month and the penguins the next month and the fort the month after that.
A key part of the way I've had to approach thinking about joined up content basically comes down to this maths. Back in the day art was so lo-fi that more or less anything could be put together very qui...
Read moreI don't recall Mod Jack showing up in a Gamejam. He might have made a comment afterward, showing Jagex's interest in approving and implementing such an update.
At least, Mod Jack is not being accredited in the Woodcutter's Grove update:
I don't usually have time for game jam, but the baseline tier rebalance was something I put together a while before. I have lots of designs for little reworks knocking about, but it's no easier for me to just make things happen than for anyone else. I try to squeeze them into updates when I can, but the needs of the update itself come first and I also have to be careful about treading on the toes of the developers.
(The reason I pushed hard for the woodcutting changes is that they were blocking multiple other things, like being able to add new hatchets, being able to improve the woodcutting mechanics, etc.)
Regarding the multiple tables when the system changes, silly question but could you just do what was done with Vorkath "new system, you need to claim your current streak before doing more kills"?
As long as it was a rare enough occurrence (and potentially paired with advanced notice), it'd not result in much more than the usual complaining?
No - allowing you to claim your current streak requires the previous system to be in place.
Read moreYeah bad luck protection is a great example.
Features always have cost and benefit to be compared against other features. Design time, dev time, risk, etc compared to how many players does it affect and how much of an improvement is it for those players. BLM doesn't affect that many players, but it affects them a great deal (since dry streaks feel awful). That pushes it up the priority list compared to other things.
Having multiple different systems increases the cost of actually fixing the problem, which then pushes it back down. That's also likely exponential in practice. These numbers are probably lowball, but say it takes half a day to design a bad luck system and one hour to apply it to the handful of bosses that use that system. That's 1 day of work, pretty good for how much it will improve the game as a result.
Now say we have 5 different drop systems. Now we're up from 1 day to 5 days, which is a much worse deal. More than that, though, five days isn...
This isn't a hypothetical example by the way - this is exactly what happened when Shogun and I sat down to start making progress on this problem. We got around the initial time problem by doing it in the evening, and we "hacked" the prioritisation a little by sneaking some hygiene work into Raptor's Rampage, but the basic time issue still remains to be addressed, which is why Shogun is chipping away at it in game jams.
If you want a meaningful luck effect and bad luck protection, it would be a lot easier if boss reward systems were at least similar to each other (in implementation).
Meanwhile streaking is a completely different system that is difficult to manipulate without, for example, just one day changing people's Telos chests completely for no reason.
Yeah bad luck protection is a great example.
Features always have cost and benefit to be compared against other features. Design time, dev time, risk, etc compared to how many players does it affect and how much of an improvement is it for those players. BLM doesn't affect that many players, but it affects them a great deal (since dry streaks feel awful). That pushes it up the priority list compared to other things.
Having multiple different systems increases the cost of actually fixing the problem, which then pushes it back down. That's also likely exponential in practice. These numbers are probably lowball, but say it takes half a day to design a bad luck system and one hour to apply it to the handful of bosses that use that system. That's 1 day of work, pretty good for how much it will improve the game as a result.
Now say we have 5 different drop systems. Now we're up from 1 day to 5 days, which is a much worse deal. More than that, though, five days isn...
Read moreThis reply would make more sense if you could provide a valid reason as to why all drop tables should work the same across all bosses all of a sudden.
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:
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...
Read moreThat's it I'm removing it again.
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...
Read moreI 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...
Read moreI 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.
Read moreWasn't aware there was a stream. Just went and watched the VOD.
So, if I am understanding this correctly, I think the gist of your answer to "Why unmask the Raptor" is basically that the Raptor wasn't being valued as a character, and was used as a tool to further Ellamaria's character. Which isn't quite the way that you worded it, but I believe that's the gist of it, in a nutshell? Do correct me if that's wrong. That's what I am getting from the multiple answers given, such as not realizing people liked the Raptor that much, or that it was an Ellamaria reveal, and not a Raptor reveal. And it sucks, but it is what it is. We're here now.
To provide my feedback on some questions you posed to the chat during the stream:
Yes. I do think it is enough to have a quest companion like the Raptor show up, and just kind've be there, as a fellow adventurer. I didn't need a story about the Raptor, or for the Raptor to drive the story forward. He's a char...
Yeah that's spot on.
Part of the problem here, for me at least, is this:
"He's stoic, strong, powerful, never admits defeat, says little, values power in others, doesn't care for deception, and so on."
Ellamaria is not most of these things. She's not stoic. She talks a lot. She seemingly cares for others, regardless of their combat prowess (Roald), she is the one doing the deceiving.
I want to think of the Raptor as being the character he seems he is. But I can't with Ellamaria. The Raptor is just an act. A mask. I now know that the person under that helmet doesn't think the way they speak. It feels like Ellamaria has replaced the Raptor.
Also, if I might ask: Why was the decision made to unmask the Raptor at all?
This is what I talk about in the livestream.
Thanks for the feedback. When I wrote this post up my initial reaction was actually Nomad which was killed off as a character multiple times and is still used in promotional material (he's all over the Steam version of the game) because apparently he gets positive reactions by the fans. Do you have any real intentions of including a character like him in the future?
Zemouregal is also a character I like a lot. He seems to be the next in line for "Mahjarrat that are going to be written off." I find that a lot of the Mahjarrat are more self-centered and less evil based on their long history with Zaros and are only perceived as evil because their motives do not frequently align with Gielinor's best interests. If by chance Zemo's interests were aligned with Gielinor's maybe he could end up being seen as an ally? Azzy had similar character development until he became too powerful to say on Gielinor.
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...
Read moreRead moreContent creators promote the game so naturally they are targeted as testers, as "advocates" but ultimately it's one hand washing the other. The PAG never was a thing and really the only major source of feedback comes from these content creators and other inner circle players of the game who've been friends with Jagex for several years. This has always been the case and always will be.
And yes, it was the reason for the major push toward PVM content in the game. That became true following Nomad's addition to the game. That's where the major shift began toward all things involving or surrounding bosses in the game, despite the fact that clearly a good portion of the player base were into skilling rather than PVM at the time.
This will all be refuted, of course, but for those of us who have been playing the game for well over a decade and a half, we've been here. We've seen the trends. We voiced our opinions but were ignored in favor of those who were more in that Inne...
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.
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