News

Question #1:

When can we expect the Android Open Beta?

Mod Sarnie

I know a lot of people have been asking about this, and we are happy to announce that the Android Open Beta will be going live to players on the 28th of February, so not next Monday but the Monday after that. It's actually going into the game during the game update next week but will only be visible to staff for testing purposes during that time. On Monday the 28th, we'll open it up to players so that you can try out all the cool features and let us know your feedback. More details will be in the game update news post next week, including how you can get involved and where you can leave your feedback. Apologies for the delay on this; we expected to start in late January, but things happened and it got pushed back, but it is coming soon.

Question #2:

When can we expect the Raids 3 Rewards Blog?

Mod Sarnie

If things line up, you can expect them next week; that is the goal. I've been working on that behind the scenes, so yeah, next week.

Question #3:

Any timeline for the Group Ironman Post Launch Improvements? These include updates to POH and making specific items tradable within a GIM team?

Mod Ash

The group ironman work was done a bit of a while ago now, but there has been a bit of a queue for things coming out because of so many other projects going out as well, and it is queued, legitimately, behind more of the Wilderness blog stuff that we promised before. I expect you'll be seeing it over the first couple of weeks of March.

I should emphasise that the part about them exchanging untradeable items was not in the poll at the end, and I'm afraid it's not part of the update. It was something we were interested in, and we got some good feedback on what is suitable and what's not suitable, but for the moment, that is not something coming to the game, sorry.

Question #4:

I'm an Ironman, and this week, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to kill Kalphite Queen, and I've found it frustrating that if a main hits it while I am doing it, I don't get the kill credit. This makes it near impossible to do during peak hours. Do you have any news on possible Iron Man instances?

Mod Sarnie

We have discussed this as a team, and it's something we would like to offer, but there's no agreed or dedicated timeframe as of yet. It will be discussed in tomorrow's community feedback session, so hopefully, we can share some more on that soon.

Question #5:

Have you considered a delayed payout of rewards on a weekly basis? For example, reward points are accumulated throughout the week but paid out after the weekly reset.

Mod Ash

The team quite liked that idea, the idea being that since botting has often been a problem in these things, and with the best will in the world, the support teams have not yet been able to catch them in real-time. If you're earning the points but don't get to spend them until next week, and if you're a botter, perhaps you've been removed from the game by then, hopefully. Of course, there is a slight drawback: if you are a legit player and you have a fight and get some points, you might reasonably want your dopamine hit and your rewards right now rather than having to wait until next week to get the good stuff.

We thought of splitting the difference, where you get half the points now, get some of those rewards to you already, and the other half are held back until next week so that it still helps somewhat with the rule enforcement side.

So that's one way it could go. I don't think it's been decided for sure, but we did see the idea, and we did quite like it.

Mod Kirby

I'm just imagining that massive dopamine hit you get on Monday, or whatever the reset day ends up being, where you've fought in a hundred battles during the week and then suddenly you get to get this massive cash-in and get all of the items.

Mod Ash

At the very least, I'd hate to give them something where all of the rewards were not going to be available for a week after it came out; that's the kind of thing where people perhaps don't want to do it very much. The prestige of being the first person out there with the rewards is very real sometimes.

Hopefully, if we split the difference, we can get the effect and still have some immediate sugar rush.

Question #6:

Can you talk a bit about the Amulet of Souls' design philosophy? Why did you decide this type of reward, and are you going to proceed with the Amulet of Souls in V2 of the PvP Arena blog?

Mod Ash

I got the dev to explain this one a bit more to me; it seems to be that the thinking behind this one was that it was meant to give more incentive to take risks and be on low health and make a difference to people with Dharoks, as I understand it. Now clearly, that's not something people are looking for; I've seen it nicely compared to soul-split of all things. I do not expect that will be in the next draft of the blog. I'm not exactly sure when the next draft of the blog is due, staff sickness is a thing, as you've heard, but I don't expect to see the amulet in it next time and probably not that thaw potion either. There's been feedback in all directions on that particular one and while we're interested in things that could modify binding, maybe modify the immunity if not the bind itself, for now, I do not think that will be in the blog.

Question #7:

Why are tradable PvM based ornament kits tied to PvP based content? Does this not promote illegitimate gameplay the same way it was before? Untradable kits purely for prestige seems a better fit imo - or at least kits for items used in PvP situations.

Mod Ash

Some of those items do turn up in PvP builds from time to time, but we'd be able to take other requests if you'd rather have a different item ornamented; Elder Maul was one request. Some other things might get into the list for ornamenting that might feel more suited to PvP. As for them being tradeable, that will probably change. There are the usual concerns about content attracting gold farmers. I understand the hope had been that these purely cosmetic items wouldn't be going for megabucks and therefore wouldn't be all that appealing for a gold farmer, but the player's right, it would be safer not to have those tradeable. It does mean that people using the content won't get anything lucrative at all, but I can see why you'd have that concern, and I think they will likely end up being untradeable.

Mod Kirby

On the other hand, if they are untradeable, there is a certain prestige around having them in the first place.

Mod Ash

There is that, and frankly, even if the items are not solely for use in PvP, say you end up with Armadyl kit and Bandos kit, which you might use in something that isn't PvP. Or maybe someone will come to the arena to get that stuff who isn't a regular PvPer already, or someone who likes doing multiple kinds of things across the game. I don't see that the rewards have to be restricted; it's just a cosmetic.

By the way, there's been some ambiguity. I've had some players asking 'why would only be able to use these cosmetic items in PvP', and that's not actually the case; the cosmetic, redecorated stuff, can be used anywhere. The new armour, that's for use only in PvP.

Mod Sarnie

I'm sure we stated it in the blog as well, if I'm not mistaken, how that ornament kit works on death and stuff, so yeah, you can use it everywhere.

Mod Ash

It's a big blog; I can understand people having the odd question to clarify.

Question #8:

Will the ranking system be an ELO rating system? I noticed nowhere does it say you'll lose ranking by losing, so I'd be afraid the game will confuse players who are really good with players that simply played a lot

Mod Ash

You certainly will lose rank by losing; sorry if the blog didn't mention that bit. I do not think Runescript can currently do a mathematically precise Elo system, but I think you've seen from Burthorpe Games Room where rank changes from a win or a loss depends on who you were against and the difference between you. I would expect something akin to that with the possibility that if you keep having a streak, your rank change will be accelerated so as to get you towards a tier where you ought to be so that you don't keep pwning noobs while being amazing forever.

Mod Kirby

Minor nitpick, it's not the ELO rating system; it's the Elo rating system, it's named after a man. Please don't capitalise on the 'L' and the 'O'. It's a minor nitpick, but it annoys me to no end.

Mod Sarnie

I didn't know that; that's a nice little bit of trivia. Thank you, Kirby!

Question #9:

Will there be Tournaments with entry fees?

Mod Ash

I gather there will not be, due to concerns about how that could be interpreted as a form of gambling.

Mod Kirby

Money sinks!

Question #10:

What kind of PKing are you trying to promote with the PvP Arena? The way it's currently proposed is a weird mix of edge-style (no overheads, no mage) PKing and hybrid PKing. Picking stats is a really weird way to approach this.

Mod Ash

As I understand it, the vision there was to give you some choices that would be reasonably evenly matched against somebody who's got a different selection. If somebody had the choice of fully maxed and somebody else decided to go against them on a low-stats pure build or something, it wouldn't be a particularly even match. By giving some choices for the variety you've got a plausible chance against your opponent, whatever choice they've made. I think that was the intention, I may have misunderstood. It's not like whoever picked those stats was trying to write down how berserkers defined and just got it wrong, I think it was intended to give you variety that matched against all the other choices.

Now, obviously, people seem more interested in fighting on the traditional builds and that's fine. I believe what will be done instead will be to stick to traditional builds, but potentially switch which build is in use at any given time. So perhaps one week, fights will be max-mains, another week will be zerker week, another week will be one def pure week, that could be one way of going about it.

I haven't seen the next draft of the blog yet myself but that would be one way of having the variety, having the traditional builds, and not splitting people between all the choices so that the number of people who want to fight in the arena is further diluted by the ones who want to be on this kind of build at any given time because this works better when there's decent traffic. If it's already split by different types of build as well, I can only assume that's not going to help, so people may need to compromise what sort they want to use at any given time. Maybe via a rota week or something like that.

Question #11:

Are there any plans to restrict polling on the PvP Arena to accounts with a history of engaging in PvP content? Are you worried this poll might run into the same "spite voting" issues other PvP polls have had in the past?

Mod Ash

Seems pretty likely to me. Plans have not been confirmed but I think that's going to need to be addressed.

Mod Sarnie

I think it's definitely something we're going to have a larger conversation about, and then update you once we know. It might be something we can add to version two of the blog, but as Ash said, we're undecided on how we're gonna go forward with this.

Mod Ash

Really that one's a bigger topic than the PVP arena, that one's a topic about how polling is done for Old School Runescape. It's something on which many players have a very strong view.

The annual survey took place a few weeks back, I've not seen much from it, but one of the things that apparently came out was that most respondents agreed that the poll results are better when only people who are familiar with the content are voting. That's a very big departure from the original ethos of all the Old School community together as one unified community, frankly, I don't think that ethos has worked for years and it's not going to do the players any service if we keep pretending it could, so as I say the survey respondents thought it was quite reasonable that we restrict who's voting on different things.

We've done it for iron players before, we even did it first for something PVP worlds where that vote was restricted only to people who'd clocked up some kills on PVP worlds in a certain time period before the poll was announced so that was, of course, to try and avoid people boosting for it as soon as they heard the poll was coming so people have generally accepted it for the PVP worlds thing, for ultimate iron questions, iron questions, and group iron questions. I'd hope that they'd be willing to extend the same courtesy to PVP content.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, I would hope so too. Ash is totally right though. Polling as a general space is a lot bigger of a topic and something we do want to look at but yeah, bigger conversation. Technically, all content is available to everyone, but not necessarily everyone wants to do that content. So how do you balance up between everybody that could potentially do it versus the people who actually do it? It's an interesting conversation to be had.

Mod Ash

Sometimes you might cater to those who don't currently do something on the grounds that you're trying to address what stops them from doing it. However, I think the PvP arena is not that piece of content. It's not like we're tweaking user frustrations about Smithing to get more people to do more Smithing. Speaking of which there's a question in poll 76 about Smithing which I think a lot of people are going to like.

This, on the other hand, the PvP arena, you're probably not going to go there unless you're into that sort of thing already I suspect, so I think leaving the voting open to people who might get into having a try doesn't feel like it would be such a benefit here.

Question #12:

Clan Wars is notably missing from the list of PVP zones that the rewards work in from the PVP arena. Is this an oversight or intentional? If the latter, could this be reconsidered?

Mod Ash

I can't say for sure but I'd guess it was unintentional and it will be added.

Question #13:

How will you deal with smurfing at different ranks?

Mod Ash

I don't think that's confirmed yet but I've covered previously how I believe the ranking will be working as you win and lose and if somebody is trying to keep their rank artificially low but keeps winning all the time I would expect them to find their ranking rising anyway.

Question #15:

Will your F-key presets be carried over from your standard profile in the PvP Arena? If not, can they be remembered after setting them up once so they don't need to be reset every time you enter?

Mod Ash

No, and yes, in that order.

For what it's worth, I think it can apply to your appearance too, given how these separate saves work, which means that you might turn up on the Arena world and find you're suddenly ginger, or something like that. I suppose we have to make sure there's some facility for you to customize that. It again would be remembered once you've done it but do be prepared for the unexpected arrival of a beard or moustache or dreadlocks or other aspects of your appearance that you may not have been expecting.

Mod Sarnie

I feel like that adds to the fun of the arena, to be honest maybe it's just me.

Question #18:

Historically, when the Oldschool team has attempted to propose a new skill, they have handled everything from devising a premise to how to build on it, leaving the community to vote on rewards for the most part. Is it possible that you could try and get the community involved earlier into the making-of process for a new skill, perhaps starting with a blog outlining some brief prompts to see which ones catch players' interest?

Mod Ash

Well, that's very convenient, it's remarkably like what the head of community management was talking about after Warding failed. It's a strategy he thought might go better.

Mod Squid

I'm in agreement as well. I think it's important for us to look at getting that community feedback loop started as early as possible, and do it in stages like present several high-level concepts that we come up with, get feedback from you guys, iterate on them if needed, dive deeper into the design of the popular ones, keep whittling it down like that until we land together on something that both us and the community really like.

Mod Sarnie

If and when we do a new skill it will probably be a very big joint effort between us and you guys.

Mod Ash

For what it's worth that approach could also help a bit with the nature of the feedback. A lot of what I was seeing while Warding was players shouting "no-one wants Warding, no-one cares about Warding, why are you doing another draft in the warding blog, take the message and nobody wants warding" and when we got to the poll it turned out that a majority actually did want it. Even an unofficial survey ran on Twitter had majority support for Warding and Twitter was relatively negative about it compared to other sites like Facebook and Reddit.

So by demonstrating there is interest in the community for a skill, and their support for it being this sort of skill, it would actually prove that the team's time spent doing design blogs about it is time appropriately spent. If of course, the initial stages showed that players didn't want a skill or didn't want that kind of skill then we know at that point we wouldn't need to pursue that matter any further. It would let the feedback focus on the details of the skill a lot more because we've already validated whether we should be talking about a skill at all.

And I think we should because it sure does come up a bit and all the ones we've pitched have had pretty decent support even if it didn't quite get over the threshold. So while 2022 is looking quite busy as it stands I do hope we can see maybe the early stages of a process like the question is proposing.

Mod Sarnie

Agreed. It's always about identifying the difference between a general majority rather than a loud minority. Hopefully with a process like this, if we are to do a new skill that would help to solve that issue.

Question #19:

Despite the addition of the new slayer monsters to the Wilderness, Thammaron's Sceptre remains underwhelming and undesirable to use. With a focus on PvP updates, does Jagex anticipate making any changes to improve the state of the sceptre?

Mod Ash

In discussions I've had, kind of unofficial ones, of course, players seemed generally up for it becoming able to have spells built into it that it can cast itself, in the same way that a trident can. Alternatively making it auto-cast Flames of Zamorak was another player's suggestion. Didn't seem quite as exciting or as unique for it, given that other things can already auto-cast Flames of Zamorak, but I'd be very glad for us to get to do either.

The suggestion of having it auto casting Zaros spells from the ancient spellbook is a bit iffier because Thammaron was allied with Zamorak and probably shouldn't be casting those Zaros spells. Lore does matter somewhat!

Maybe even the wilderness boss rework could be an opportunity to introduce an item that bolts onto your existing sceptre to upgrade it into the more desirable thing, or it could just be a straight buff, although I'd expect a hell of a lot more merching around that approach.

Mod Kirby

I suspect even if you go the upgrade route people are going to speculate on buying Thammaron's anyway so.

Mod Ash

It's no secret that we've wanted to do something about the thing, and I do think that this year comes with projects that can be the moment.

Question #21:

Would it be possible to add Skill cape hoods/capes to be compatible with their respective skilling outfits by using them on each other, like how you can use an Ava's on the Range Cape? An example would be adding the Spirit Angler set effect for Tempoross to the fishing skill cape hood.

Mod Kirby

I believe this is another one for the backlog of good ideas because it fits into existing capes. Agility cape acts as graceful as well, so there is precedent for doing this.

Mod Sarnie

We spoke about this before. Skill capes in general, there's a lot of weird differences between them, how they act and work. I imagine that would be a whole lot of jobs just to go through skill capes.

Mod Kirby

If we could go through the backlog and do a poll to do with the skill capes, that would probably be five or six questions on the blog, or poll even, that seems like a reasonable mini-update for skill capes.

Question #22:

Is there any talk of updating for some of the older Skilling Guilds to be more in line with the standard current players have for Guilds ala Woodcutting/Farming? If so, can this be prioritised over adding new Guilds to the game?

Mod Squid

That's an interesting question. For me, it raises the question of "What is the role of skilling guilds?" I don't have much experience with the Farming Guild, but for the Woodcutting Guild, I'm actually personally not a big fan of it. I think without it, players would be spread around the world at various tree hot spots, intermingled with other players doing unrelated activities. It feels more natural, it feels alive. Theoretically, there's a higher chance of emergent interactions, though that doesn't tend to happen a whole lot in RuneScape. But with the Woodcutting Guild, the entire skill becomes everyone in one place doing the same thing, removed from the rest of the world, and the theme feels somewhat clinical and unnatural with all the trees in neat groups. Overall I'm just not convinced it's the right direction for RuneScape or what we should be aiming to do. I'm not against new guilds or reworking all the guilds, but I think we need to consider what their role is for the skill in the wider game.

Question #24:

Last Man Standing: F2P players can no longer obtain points. This makes the f2p items discontinued for F2P Ironmen. Can you allow F2P Ironmen to earn points in f2p worlds? Requiring a minimum total level, game time, and quests points requirement will make any F2PIM botting impractical, but will benefit the F2PIM community. Note that many people who have F2PIM also have multiple members accounts.

Mod Ash

It's not like the thing has become bot-free even with the high skill total requirements around it for members. The same thing without the paywall is unlikely to be better. I'm very sorry, but I do not think we're going to get to do this - not unless bot detection can become a lot better than it currently is.

Mod Kirby

I have seen free-to-play quests, I'm fairly sure even I could write a bot to do free-to-play quests!

Question #26:

Can we get additional books of the dead? Losing it and having to reclaim it before each Wildy outing is annoying!

Mod Ash:

I don't think it stores data on itself so I don't see a tech hurdle coming up!

Mod Kirby:

I'm trying to think of a reason why you shouldn't be able to have multiple, and I'm struggling... Oh, Kharedst's memoirs! I forgot about that detail.

Mod Ash:

Well, it remembers which pages are in it on the player variable, so I'd hope that wouldn't become a problem for us.

Mod Kirby:

It's doable, it'd just be weird because we're allowing you multiples of an object that theoretically you should only have one of. But it should be "Fine™".

Question #27:

Can task storage be updated/improved? Can it be free to store a task? Currently, if you want to grab a skeleton or lizardman task for CMs but do regular slayer on the side, you need to spend points to store it, then it's free to unstore, but then when you go back to slayer, it's more points to store it again. Kind of difficult to use for that purpose.Same idea for storing Vorkath/Hydra/etc. it'd be much more appealing to do a portion of the tasks, then store it without penalty. It's 1k pts to unlock. It could use a buff.

Mod Kirby

I developed it but I didn't pick the numbers. I was in discussion when we picked the numbers, but I can't remember why we picked them. Theoretically, our numbers could just be changed... One for the list of maybes, unfortunately.

Mod Ash

I'd hope it's still better than what you had before the feature was there, even if it's not as nice as it could be if it were free.

Question #28:

Is there any way we could mute Nex so she doesn't clutter up the chat box?

Mod Arcane (off-stream)

There is no escape! Just kidding. This could be looked at, but it depends if it is a message from Nex or a standard game message. We can potentially filter standard game messages out.

Question #29:

Is the Nex unique drop rate now set in stone? It seems like a lot of people are very unhappy about the time it takes to receive drops from a very resource intensive boss. I know it was briefly brought up in a previous stream but was shot down saying that it would bring too much gp into the game which makes no sense at all. More drops would just decrease the price of the uniques and not bring more gp into the game.

Mod Arcane (off-stream)

The time to get all the uniques, except for the hilt, is not out of line with most other content. We would say it is fair/balanced when comparing it to other content, especially considering the power level of the uniques she offers. However, there is the point of view that even with this being true, group bosses like Nex should not have so many uniques with such low drop rates. In hindsight, Nex should probably have had fewer uniques that were more common, decreasing the uniques per hour but also decreasing the time for completion. This isn't something we can really fix in an ideal way now. To alleviate the issue, decreasing the drop rates marginally could help. We would need to collect more feedback before determining this.

Question #30:

Nex drops loot to all players in the instance as opposed to whoever did the most damage. Will this be the new standard for bosses moving forward?

Mod Arcane (off-stream)

Group bosses do not have an ideal way of dropping loot for all account types. Only dropping loot for the most damage either makes it boostable or completely stops ironmen from doing the content. The current implementation is the fairest and most balanced one we could think of. I agree it's not necessarily the most fun or nice one though. We may need to reevaluate group bosses as a whole when it comes to considering iron game modes.

Question #31:

There's an unavoidable death situation on Phosani's Nightmare where if Nightmare uses husks right when you last hit the last pillar, you won't have enough time to deal with the husks and the sleepwalkers after. This usually means you'll have to teleport or get hit for 99. Would it be possible to change it so that Nightmare cannot summon husks when one tower remains or maybe the husks can despawn during the sleepwalker phase?

Mod Kirby

I'm going to institute a ruling of "Get Good". There are at least some attacks between every special attack - if you're worried about this, you can just wait out until the special attack and go "Okay, this is not a husk attack, I can clear the final pillar". It's a hard boss, deal with it, and it feels a bit rude to say it like that... but it's true! There is obvious counterplay there, just wait for the special attack!

Mod Sarnie

Okay, cool. "Get Good" apparently is the official stance! I'll definitely ask Mod Arcane anyway because I know he's involved in Nightmare.

Question #32:

Can emergency teleport shard functionality be added to Zalcano? Since teammates are there they can save you from disconnect deaths just like TOB.

Mod Ash

That sounds appropriate.

Question #33:

What do you think of being able to spend slayer points to prefer certain slayer tasks in the same way that we can block specific tasks?

Mod Kirby

What you do is you put all of your preferences on everything you can burst, and you just get insane Slayer rates! I see where exactly where this is going and fair play for wanting it... but I will have to decline, I think.

Mod Sarnie

I mean if you don't ask, you don't get, right?

Mod Kirby

Yeah, good try, good try.