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We do not need to imitate competitors.
What was EoC then?
I talk about this exact point on the stream.
We do not need to imitate competitors.
What was EoC then?
I talk about this exact point on the stream.
I livestreamed a presentation about my design vision for Runescape. You can find the full VOD here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1647927837
The summary misses a lot of nuance, so I would recommend watching the full thing.
Vision
Be Proud
What is RS?
Sorry you had that experience. Elvarg is not a trivial fight if you're not already an expert at the combat system.
That may be the case if you own the blacksmith gloves, I can’t attest to that as I do not currently own them. But, the smelting gloves did used to give the xp boost of blacksmith gloves without the ownership of blacksmith gloves. I thought maybe I was just misremembering cause it had been a few months since I was doing any smithing, but the wiki does state they “grant the wearer the same 1% experience boost as the blacksmith’s gloves, and also count towards the set bonus even if the blacksmith’s gloves are not owned”, so I was unsure if this had changed in a recent update.
AFAIK no changes have been made to this since the M&S rework.
Isn't it the other way around? Wearing the set gloves gives the smelting boost if you own them? I may be misremembering.
I just want some quests where we get different choices with different endings yakno?
Like the one where we chose the zaros light or dark body but in the end it doesnt matter and it made me sad
Have I got a link for you:
I'm having a hard time remembering but are there really any quests with alternate endings? The only one I can think of that sort of does that is Temple of Ikov, but again storywise that makes no difference.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, in fact i prefer it, but doesn't the fact that you don't really control what your character does stop him from being a blank slate character?
Hazeel Cult would be the biggest one, but ultimately there are no choices in RS which have an impact on the world or story. I did a talk about this recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cx3vleHMDw
In terms of being a blank slate I wouldn't say so no. "Extreme choice" is my category for where the player has a lot of freedom to define who they are through their actions and moral choices. By blank slate I more mean it literally doesn't matter who you are, the identity of the character has no bearing on the story at all. This is the default for e.g. an out of the box D&D adven...
Read moreIn a way, you don't even have to make the dialogue lines have impact on the actual end goal. Whether you are stoic or goofy can be just your role play without it impacting the quest. This way you can have many options for roleplaying without increasing dev time because now you have to have 5 quest endings or whatever.
Yeah absolutely. That said it's not quite as easy as just writing three lines of player dialogue instead of one - this is the problem Fallout 4 has. Because the conversation has to proceed the same way regardless, you're choosing between four choices that basically all have to say the same thing. You end up with the meme options like:
"Hero will you go on this quest?"
Honestly this is a difficult problem in game writing. I did a talk about this a while back... I arbitrarily divided game protagonists into a bunch of categories along an axis from "less strongly characterised" to "more strongly characterised":
The reason I say it's difficult is just that different players have different preferences. Some players much prefer something like Bayonetta where you have a strongly defined character who makes decisions and who you watch...
Read moreThe year is 2040, Jagex has been doing live reddit Q&A non-stop 24/7 for the last 10 weeks. Reports are coming in of a mountain of pizza boxes piling up around Jagex HQ.
The only question being asked is plastered across every monitor, line after line of text mockingly demanding: "Why isn't Jagex doing more to communicate?" Blood dribbles from their eyes.
The subreddit mods have been working hard to try remove the really toxic stuff that we've seen in the past. Toxicity induces low communication which induces further toxicity which induces even lower communication. Hopefully we can turn that negative spiral into a positive spiral instead.
As a fellow developer I do get that stance towards "just being a dev who shares things" but if you use the account that identifies you as an official developer instead of a private account, you are publicly seen as someone representing the company, whether you're meant to or not. It's the difference between Jagex Jack, the Jack who works at Jagex and has the name to show it, and someuser_named_Jack_420 who seems to know what's up on the developer side of things. JMOD may be an archaic name that doesn't properly reflect what you do, but it does bear the company's signature.
Maybe I'm comparing things to my own company too much but if I had the name of the company in my name online I'm sure I'd get PR all over me making sure I'd be representing the company correctly.
I'm not denying that we're representatives of the company. You won't (or shouldn't) find us out here posting spicy hot takes or insulting players. However there's a difference between behaving in an appropriately professional manner while representing the company, and being harassed by customers for not providing the specific service that they wanted. It's essentially analogous to fixing people's account support issues.
The point I'm trying to get across is that if you expect everyone you interact with to be a trained customer rep, all that's really going to happen is that people won't put themselves in situations where that can happen. That's how most game companies work.
This. The reason people find Jagex tonedeaf is because we often get these kinds of posts about issues, small though they may be, and then seeing a "J-mod replied" message that communicates nothing about the issue itself can be frustrating. Moderation 101: acknowledge the issue and make sure the parties involved feel like they aren't being ignored.
I think this might be the root of the issue here - despite the archaic name, "jmods" aren't really moderators. We're not PR people out here trying to make the company look good, we're developers sharing info available to us in our spare time. If the baseline requirement for being allowed to do that without harassment is a different job entirely, they just won't do it which is exactly what Luma is saying.
I do agree the above user was unnecessarily rude, but he does have a valid point.
My advice is a mod should first acknowledge the actual bug and then make comments making jokes or answering questions afterwards. Otherwise it gives the appearance of ignoring whatever problem is posted.
This isn’t the first time a Jagex mod has walked into a thread with nothing about the actual topic answered (or even random jokes in comment chains). It’s happened in threads with severe bugs and I can see why people would get frustrated.
What you're asking for here is less interaction. You're gatekeeping the ability of a mod to comment on what they can say behind some issue that they either can't comment on or don't feel comfortable commenting on.
I understand the difficulties behind it Jack. Wasn’t saying other games work like this. Just hoping RS strives to be better than those other games if possible
Let me give a similar example in a different context - open world games are pretty normal now, but back in the days before GTA3 there was a player perspective that the whole world should be interactable. This was a pretty common design ideology and a lot of games were built in accordance with it - for example Elder Scrolls RPGs have worlds in which every building can be entered, which adheres to this design philosophy.
However this isn't "correct design", it's just a way of making games. Skyrim has completely accessible "cities", but one of the costs of that is that the cities are all absurdly tiny. "Capitals" have populations in the dozens. "Villages" have less than ten people living in them. They've traded off the interactibility of the world against the realistic scale of the world, which is a perfectly fine design choice for the game they wanted to make.
By comparison any of the myriad open world games set in Manhattan don't depict the world in anywhere...
Read moreIn a game that is jam packed with old things that need reworking and considering jagex seems to be making plenty of money with it’s many revenue streams. It is both demoralizing as a paying customer and sad to see a developer reply that it shouldn’t be expected of them to fix older parts of the game because the game is old.
I'm not saying "we shouldn't fix things". Right now my highest priorities are all fixes (PVM, economy, skills, the way we tell stories, the world building of the game, etc etc). There's an enormous amount to work on and I'm trying to find production solutions to make sure this happens at the same time as shipping new content for people to play.
However, that doesn't mean that I agree that any given thing is actually a problem that needs fixing. To pick a non-lore example, some players believe that it's a fundamental error on our part that some (most) minigames have lapsed into redundancy and there's no reason to play them.
Your original comment was that this "problem" indicates a lack of competence or ability on our part, but that's entirely predicated on the assumption that this is something we should be fixing, which is exactly what I was addressing.
I was more referring to the general attitude
Could you expand on this?
I mean I feel like all dialogue should update with completion of quests for the player’s account it makes the game more immersive
Reading through the dialogue transcript for TotG, Fiara doesn't say much of consequence that couldn't have been said by the other guardians or omitted entirely if she had perished. The only thing I can imagine that would make this difficult is that Twilight of the Gods doesn't require The World Wakes and might lead to weirdness in the niche scenario where TotG initiated to the point where Fiara appears, and then Fiara dies in TWW before the player completes TotG.
I get that it's probably a lot of work for little clear benefit but I think lore players appreciate such attention to detail.
I talked about this in some detail in one of my runescape youtube videos but I'm not entirely sure which one - I think it might have been Icthlarin's Little Helper but I'm not entirely confident.
TLDR you kind of summarised it yourself - a lot of work for little clear benefit. One of the core things that separates a professional developer from a hobbyist (which is for example what I was earlier in my life, and still am in my side projects) is the ability to prioritise what is most impactful, because time is limited. When I'm making something in my spare time I can ignore this if I want, because if the thing I'm working on never actually ships that only really affects me. In a professional capacity, I have a responsibility to my players and my company to devote my efforts to what creates the most benefit to both.