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I was out of office the past few days but the team has made a plan of how we're going to handle refinement and I'm back now just catching up! We'll be releasing a blog soon (aiming for this week) that explains what general topics we'll be discussing each week, and a rough timeline of how it will look like over the next 1-2 months. It is largely dependent on so many factors including the community so it's very ballpark for now but we'll share more news ASAP.

Hey there, sorry to hear this! Can I check if you're using the latest version of the App - 212.3? If so we'll ensure this is looked into!

Hey there, can you ensure you're using version 212.3? You may need to update the App as the fix should be released. Let me know if not and I'll report back to the team!

It’s not something we can avoid unfortunately as we aren’t there with you when you vote! All we can do is be transparent and communicate with the community. I see the community as partners in this and so hopefully no matter what the outcome we can work together to make the best skill. We have taken steps to say in our comms that this doesn’t have to be OSRS’s only skill if more than one is popular. Our current approach will ask you what you think about all three pitches so that we can make a better decision on which is the concept which is widely accepted/liked

It needs to not be confined in one area of the game, have an integration with existing skills and areas and offer a reason to train it. I’d love to know what aspects of the updated sailing pitch felt mini game-y and hear more from the community about this topic. We tried our best to avoid this with all 3 pitches

Love some aspects of it, in general I think the community said one of the main draws of a new skill should be to unlock or to explore new areas of the game which I don’t think the inscription pitch necessarily had.

Early designs did consider this but it’s difficult to make a skill non buyable and also a good item sink, instead we might consider putting the item sink into the reward space of the skill. Elena talked about this on the pre-recorded Q&A a bit!

Generally speaking, a day one release where you’re training a different skill in order to train a new one just feels bad. On the other hand, we also see the community wants the new skill to integrate well with existing skills. For example hunter with Shamanism. So we have a task to make under-utilised skills feel more rewarding whilst also making it so you can enjoy levelling the skill on release. Difficult to know at this stage but our preference is for everyone to be able to train the skill

I’m not a developer so I can’t really answer it from a design perspective. But knowing that Elena and Husky are working on the project should be reassuring in a sense. They both created Guardians of the Rift which is really well liked in the community. Husky in particular created the Hallowed Sepulchre. These devs truly know what they’re doing and how to make a skill fun and rewarding. The dream with Sailing is to make the entire ocean into playable fun content which will just provide more areas to explore. We don’t mind comparisons to Slayer because it’s one of the most liked skills but it won’t just be about sea monster hunting as there will be tons of activities to do at sea and areas to explore

It’s possible but we would rather add something than take something away. Meaning if we ever changed old content we likely wouldn’t add a new requirement or make it more difficult to do, instead adding Qol. An example was given during a Q&A where Kieren/Ayiza mentioned tapping into the spirit realm to unlock a door etc which might progress your quest faster.

Reward space discussed at 49:20 in our Pre-Record here for Sailing. I’ve seen a lot of players say that the reward space for Sailing is perhaps less scary than say augmenting fear from Shamanism which may be a good thing depending on what kind of player you are. At the end of the day we know that Rewards need to feel worthwhile. During refinement we can figure this out more if it’s the pitch most players like

It’s really open ended right now. With our new polling approach we want to figure this out during refinement and even beyond. It’s promising to see such a desire for Shamanism to expand on lore I’ve seen lots of people mention Guthrie which is cool. The great thing about skills is they can grow indefinitely and can have content for years to come after release.

If it doesn’t get enough support as a skill, we wouldn’t proceed with it further. Players don’t want us to continue pushing something that they haven’t voted for (which is clear from the Account Builds stuff earlier in the year). I don’t personally see it fitting into Hunter or Farming either so not sure on that

I think that’s one area where we admit Taming has suffered because we haven’t given enough for players to imagine about. It’s definitely a learning process. I wasn’t around when we polled skills in the past but a huge issue with previous skill proposals was that players weren’t bought in enough and didn’t get to influence the skills early on. Hoping we can change that by getting the community involved right from the start now.

If it does not pass a 70/30 lock in poll it won’t be added to the game. We hope that we can work with players to come up with an idea that excites you and genuinely creates an expansion to OSRS which players love

We used the community consultation survey for the basis of a lot of our design but when we looked at how to explain concepts we found the AI art tool quite useful, especially when we made early presentations for NDA Players etc. We also tried using it to come up with alternative names for our wildcard Shamanism pitch

Up to community to decide (refinement)