Also stop shilling killing off old content players will quit if you force them to play newest content, if we wanted that we'd play wow.
IMO there's a big difference between intentionally killing old content, and not going out of your way to add new rewards to old content to encourage people to keep playing it.
I think part of the confusion is due to how that stream in particular was handled, it felt very unprepared in how the ideas were communicated (not in the ideas themselves).
If all the graphs and examples wre prepared ahead of time then you can just focus on the balance discussion, rather than wrestling with the software and having to come up with examples on the fly.
Oh yeah totally, that's just inevitable sadly. I have to carve out time for these streams anyway - preparing a high quality presentation takes a day at least, and practicing and polishing it at least another half day. That's a reasonable time investment for something that's occasional, but not weekly. I simply don't have the time for it.
This should also consider what tier a boss is. I would even vouch for a stricter timer, this way the early bosses could be buffed a bit (looking at you mole / kq).
It shouldnt be hard to group bosses in similar tiers as combat gear (e.g. Mole + kq t60, gwd1 t70, gwd2 t80, telos 1-100 t85, 100-500 90, etc) and adjust the spawn rates to suit a player in the intended gear tier, and deduct lets say 30% from avg kill time to make it still rewarding for higher geared players.
Yeah I hadn't considered that but the ability to buff older bosses would actually be an additional benefit.
but if i am understanding right, someone weaker than me that can still kill it before the respawn timer will be just as efficient as i am, since theres effectively a cap on kills per hour. if getting faster kills on the boss isnt more rewarding then its gonna feel pointless to go faster.
i know you guys cant design the game purely around what feels good, but that feels really bad.
That's essentially correct, but only for very weak bosses. That's the root of the problem - imagine if copper ore could be free converted into light animica. As a high level player you'd not bother to mine animica at all, you'd just sit at copper rocks instead. To fix this, obviously we would disable the conversion, and then copper isn't a useful thing for a high level player to mine. I don't think it would be reasonable to say "it feels bad that as a high level player I'm locked out of mining copper".
Thanks for taking time out of your day to have this type of conversation with the community, both on Twitch, Reddit, and elsewhere. :)
It's great to see this level of transparency, and get a look into the thought processes and considerations that go into designing the game.
Thanks. I want to see the game continually improve, and I think the best way to do that is with the players.
If you change alching, you'll kill ironman mode
I know you don't particularly care, because you've made it clearly that you don't want to design around irons. However, being directly antagonistic towards irons is different than catering to them. I couldn't have predicted 5 years ago you'd be taking this approach when I made my iron
All this in saying, you're going to see a lot of irons quit if you do something like that. And I do mean quit. Most don't want to play a normal account so they aren't going to deiron. Theyll just give up
I didn't invent the policy "we don't design around iron man, it's supposed to be a challenge", it just is the policy. I even mentioned in the stream yesterday that if the proposed change ended up being a significant problem for irons, we should consider breaking the rule for it.
Read moreI've seen the various feedback, a lot of which is essentially ideological. ("It's simply wrong to limit what a player can do with their own time.") Obviously you're welcome to your opinion and your view of game design. The main conclusion to the stream, and the point I don't make as well as I should, is that the proposal at hand is basically just an alternative to just nerfing Vindicta. Personally, I think it's better for the game to be able to have a range of content available for players of different gear and skill levels, without having to intentionally nerf the older, easier content for fear of elite players rinsing it.
i dont like the idea of barring high level players from lower level content. part of the fun of a MMORPG is the power progression, if i am not feeling stronger over time i am just running on a power treadmill. going for fast kill times and crafting efficient rotations is also fun, but if theres a 30 second respawn timer that ma...
I agree that developing power over time is really important, but that would still apply regardless. All that's being set is a cap on how much power is actually useful to have on content you significantly overpower. You're still going to be getting faster and faster kills on every boss.
So one thing I saw suggested was instead of messing with the boss timer, was setting a timer on commons. Like you could kill a as many bosses as you want as generally fast as you want, and each kill still roll for a unique, but commons would only be rolled like every couple of minutes.
So farming rares and logs is unhindered, but there is still a cap on the amount of commons you can farm per hour. Which means getting strong/better at the boss still has incentive as you’re improving your unique chance per hour. Your just not getting more commons per hour preventing growth in resource flooding over time.
Yeah this works as essentially a UX variant of the other suggestion of disabling commons to avoid the timer.
The general idea is great but what will be the basis for balancing the respawn timers? Will it be average kill times? Kill times in mid tier gear?
Well it's nowhere near a final design (it's not even a plan) but the basis of the calculation would be "if you can kill it faster than this often, it's more profitable than the next boss up". I went through this logic in the stream comparing e.g. Vindicta to Zamorak. If I can kill Vindicata in 15s and Zamorak in 3m, Zamorak must at minimum be 12x more profitable just to break even, before even accounting for the fight being significantly more demanding.
There's no way to calculate that number objectively, and it also does depend on the state of the economy (for example by the above logic Vindicta would need a longer timer than Twin Furies), but that would be the starting point.
Have you thought about how MTX has an impact on the economy? For example all of the proteans created that trivializes drops from bosses as they grant insanely high exp. Or maybe a protean processor giving out 5m xp at once instead of them needing to buy 30k uncut dragonstones they can just use 1 protean processor. Pretty crazy huh
It's definitely on my mind, but it's really a separate topic and one that largely has to be discussed internally rather than externally if you see what I mean.
Reading over the feedback, a key error I made in the livestream yesterday has been pointed out to me. The question was asked and answered at the time, iirc, but I didn't appreciate how misleading that specific point was and I didn't emphasise it heavily enough.
If you're not sure what I'm talking about, yesterday I did a livestream about common drops and their impact on the game. Most of the stream was explaining the problem, but at the end I posited a possible solution. You can find the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1752649536
If you're wondering why I'm proposing anything, or you think it's obvious that the solution is something different, I wou...
Read more External link →u/jagexJack look at my response please. I metion what you say with regards to just shortening the cycle before it repeats. These ideas of weight and have been independently mentioned by other players too.
Which response?
Mod Fowl has been making some small changes to the layout of mobs in the wilderness. She tells me she's fixed this issue in particular. I don't have an ETA on the launch, but it shouldn't be too far away.
Would it be possible to make the VODs of streams available on youtube? The last one is from 7 months ago.
I really appreciate all the streams you've been doing
They don't show up on the official channel for some reason, but they're all listed on the wiki: https://runescape.wiki/w/Livestream
"ignore PVM and just handle inflation via cutting a few alchables and adding some more gold sinks"
there are suggestions in there to fix the drop table for streakable bosses, in particular the money printer that is arch glacor.
there are also mentions of relics being made 1gp alch value while zamorak having some of it's alchs changed to wines of zammy, which currently the best source of them is minions from a boss so old you actually mentioned it's counterpart in the stream having a 15 second kill time or less.
specifically the post is to point out the alternative cannot be to remove the enjoyment from the playerbase, and i would hope that some of these suggestions won't be dead in the water as they are actually pretty good ones to note.
I definitely think we need to reign in the worst cases, but that doesn't in and of itself fix the problem. Enrage and streak is unusually profitable for the effort and time taken, but it's really a subset of the overall PVM problem rather than a unique problem in its own right. That was the point of my regression - we "fix" Zamorak, we fix AG, we fix Telos, now we're just rinsing whatever the next boss down is.
I'm not saying your suggestions are bad, or that we shouldn't implement some of them (although some of the gold sinks are very minor) but more that it isn't dealing with the underlying issue. I'm also not saying that kill restrictions are the only possible solution, but solutions that don't deal with the same set of issues aren't alternatives to it, just potential additions.
I always forget to let the people know who put the notifications in the newspost and for the ingame popup. I have to commit to the final details on Friday for that to happen, and often I'm unable to commit to the slot on wednesday because of some work or home situation.
I'm not averse to this as an approach, but I feel it runs into the same issues I went through in the previous stream about rare drops.
We went down this path of excessive common drops due to rares being too infrequent. Let's imagine some numbers for your system and say that I can choose to not get commons on a kill in exchange for 2x the drop rate of getting a rare. Depending on the boss that might be a good deal or a bad deal you can calculate on paper, but in terms of the very thing that common drops are trying to fix (losing money feels bad), it wouldn't feel good.
I would suggest that removing all common drops from all bosses and doubling the rare drop rate wouldn't be super well received by players (except the ones who only care about completing their log). If you pick a multiplier higher than 2x until everyone thinks it's great, now we're back to "rares are common and the boss has no longevity" which is where we started.
Obviously you...
Read moreAFAICS everything listed here I covered in the stream, not as a specific suggestion but under the option "ignore PVM and just handle inflation via cutting a few alchables and adding some more gold sinks".
The reason I didn't focus on it for long on the stream is that that approach, while something we do need to look at anyway, doesn't actually resolve any of the underlying structural issues I went through in detail. All the factors I mentioned would still be true, and even if we went through and made huge changes to the game and got the economy in order via methods like you've described, it would be out of control again the next year when the next boss launched.
I don't mind this, but it seems significantly more difficult to design, implement and maintain and the long-term effect would be essentially the same as just nerfing the boss.
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