JagexJack

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.

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

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...

AFAICS 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.

https://i.imgflip.com/3kwb7g.png?a465696

Probably (probably I haven't seen the code) a simple fix, but doesn't this kill SW?

Ultimately the issue with this is that the mutators and training methods don't really fit well together as mechanics. The whole idea of mutators is that within a closed environment, you can do whatever wacky thing you like and the balance isn't that important, but if you can gain XP then it's not a closed environment. Honestly this has been a bit of a sword of damocles hanging over SW since the beginning.

"A good priest? No. I know A priest though."

Doesn't really work. We can use asterisks and this has crept in a lot recently (including this thread in fact) but really we shouldn't be doing that.

Gah, your phrasing is better. We can't do italics in game though.

This is probably the most common topic we discuss on the lore section of the RS discord. I'm pretty sure I did a livestream about the topic in general as well.

The TLDR is pretty similar to the first half of this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1129gl8/king_roald_seems_to_be_sufferring_from_amnesia/j8j13ym/

I would also highlight this comment: ...

Because that was implemented about three months ago before the discussion to clear it up.

We had a long discussion about this last week, and currently this isn't fixable. Because of the technical infrastructure around quests and the adventurer's log, quest points can't change after launch. As a low priority issue, I'd like to remove this blocker so that we are free to change quest points if we need to, but it's not that big a deal, certainly in the short term.

I like it. Definitely worth considering.

I'd also like to compliment the format of the suggestion - it's fun, short and clear. It asks for exploits which is basically doing my job for me since our primary concern is always going to be "that sounds broken, what exploits does it allow?"

Yeah my plan is to do exactly this next weds.

I completely agree, and that's the exact point I was making.

In a game where ability to grind is uncapped, and items are freely tradeable (both of which appear to be considered sacred runescape design pillars), the value of any item is set by the players who are grinding the most. If we don't balance around those players, then that item floods the market in tremendous quantities and there essentially is no drop table. What are you even killing the boss for if everything on its loot table is at alch value?

The connotation of what you're talking about though is time gating. The only way to push some degree of parity between uncapped grinding and players who are playing even slightly casually is to cap the ability to grind in some way. That's certainly something I'm prepared to countenance, and Raptor's Rampage was a gentle experiment in that direction, but it would be incredibly controversial and isn't something we can just do.

Although I don't completely agree, you've argued your point well. The target values you've given are short term from the point of view of balancing the game, but I think we (Jagex) also need to question to what extent this content needs to remain relevant.

There are a bunch of reasons why it's almost certainly not a good idea to buff the drop rate by 10x to achieve your target value. That said, this (and similar feedback from elsewhere) has definitely convinced me to go back to the devs and talk it through again.

This wasn't "no we're not doing it for this reason". I specifically said this was something that we should do, and that I'm actively working on making happen, but because the content would be redundant for a majority of currently active players it's not something that necessarily justifies a big update in its own right.

Like with Garden of Kharid, my strategy is to try to find ways to bundle midgame health improvements along with enough content to make it feel like a meaty update. That's still something we're experimenting with, but so far I'm optimistic we can achieve a lot this way.