JagexJack

This is kinda what I mean about derailing.

Like say we have a great quest coming up which would be perfect for that 250 feeling in a similar way to Chosen Commander. With our current planned storyline it happens to fall on 249 or 252 or something.

Should we rearrange stuff to make sure it hits 250 exactly on a technicality? Say that really great quests needs 2 quests to lead up to it properly. Should we cut those quests, and tell the story less well, in order to make sure that the highlight quest hits some arbitrary number? This is telling the story less well in order to make numbers line up nicely, which IMO would be irresponsible storytelling.

Every quest is special.

Dimension of Disaster was explicitly planned to be a celebratory 200. Chosen Commander I'm pretty skeptical about - it was probably a coincidence, and nothing about it seems celebratory even though in retrospect it is a very significant quest.

I'll explain this more later in the year, but it'll have to wait for more announcements and information first.

There will definitely be a quest at 250.

Right, I don't see any strong precedent in Chosen Commander - it's an important finale with some cool lore, but it's not a celebratory quest in the way that RFD was.

I'm very focused on delivering quests, lore and stories (as well as other things). That's exactly why I don't consider a fairly arbitrary number to be an important issue to prioritise over other aspects.

For example, if Fort Forinthry had no quests, and only skilling updates, and we saved all that quest time up and used it to make 1 250 quest, would that be better? IMO, no.

We are, but personally I don't see 250 as a milestone that we should derail the storyline for. It's also awkward given our current ongoing uncertainty about which miniquests actually count as quests - so we could have had an elaborate plan for 250, and then reclassify Unwelcome Guests and now it's 251.

Eh I get where you're coming from, but like... basically we will decide this anyway, and it's just an opportunity to give input on the process. We're not looking for reasons to not do things - we have a full schedule always working on something, and we'd rather be spending our time in the best way.

I emphasised on the stream that players don't have to answer all or even any of these questions. These are the questions we ultimately need to answer, so if I don't know the answer already I'll just have to ask. It's fine to raise a problem without proposing a solution, it's fine to propose a solution without considering alternatives, and it's fine to not know or care about other priorities.

I guess what I would want to emphasise is just not to be surprised or disappointed when we reach 5 or 6 and conclude that this is not the right fix, or it is the right fix but it's a very low priority issue.

These are more dialogue than they are personality - maybe deep inside the Raptor cares tremendously, but this is more about what he does and doesn't express than what he does and doesn't feel.

Yeah it's an interesting issue. The way I tried to deal with it was to have the Raptor be the straight man to the player.

FWIW this is "Rorschach speak".

This isn't a full character guide for the Raptor (because the basics like "always wears armour" and "stoic badass" are pretty obvious) but it goes into a bit more nuance about how to write him consistently. We wrote these during Unwelcome Guests to try to explore what does and doesn't make sense for the character and why, since even within "stoic badass" there can be a lot of interpretations.

The Raptor (he/him)

• "The Raptor" is an awkward name to work with. If absolutely necessary, he should be addressed as "Raptor" (as in Batman) rather than "The Raptor" (as in The Rock), but avoid having characters address him directly as "The Raptor" or "Raptor" by just not structuring the sentence in this way. Indirectly he should be referred to as "the Raptor", but the 'the' should not be capitalised.
  • Bad - "Hello, The Raptor, how are you?" / "Hello Raptor, how are you?"
  • Good - (speaking to the Raptor) "How are you?"
  • Good - (sp...

It is, but not because of stone spirits.

I'm kinda fascinated by the world view you're outlining here. What do you think my job is?

Imagine someone putting more time in for free and complaining they didn't spend more.

You're not wrong, but fundamentally that's just an hour I don't have. Besides, an hour isn't long enough to structure a coherent presentation that asks a question and goes through an argument to reach a conclusion - that's more like a day, maybe two.

I'm keen on more communication, and this is the time I have for it. More time would definitely produce better results, but it's always a balance. I could spent the hour I have on something else, like say talking to a dev in detail about some specific level 4 implementation issue.

Well that's what I mean about not deciding the policy - I talked about ironmen because I was asked about them, but within the context of the updates in question they were designed with that policy in mind.

Your point about active skilling is an interesting one, but I think you're writing off passive content too readily - a huge number of players engage with the game in this way, and while you're right that content like that is vulnerable to mass alts and similar, that doesn't mean we can just abandon that play type.

I didn't set our current ironman policy and to my knowledge I've never made a consciously pro- or anti-ironman decision. The policy, as I understand it as agreed when the mode was implemented is "we do not account for the existence of ironmen when making design decisions, they play the game as is". In principle I'm open to changing that policy, I'm just being honest about what it currently is, and it does exist for a practical reason.

The issue for me comes, and this applies to any subcommunity of the game, certainly not just ironmen, when the demands of one subcommunity come at the expense of another, or even the game as a whole. A lot of ironman concerns in particular conflict with any desire to improve the health of skilling, trading and the player economy beyond "higher level PVMers sell items to lower level PVMers".

It may be that there's a way to make this work for everyone, and if there is then I'm completely open to it. I'm also not completely convinced that...