JagexJack

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...

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.