Hello and welcome to a rare follow-up blog!
In case you've been living under a rock, Bounty Hunter made its way back to Gielinor with yesterday's Game Update and we're over the moon to see so many of you jumping in to Daimon's Crater and enjoying the bloodshed.
While we're extremely pleased with how things are going, you've shared a lot of feedback with us and we'd like to keep you in the loop with the tweaks we're planning to make following release day.
Look at how many of you there are!
In terms of changes, two in particular are going live tomorrow morning (UK time, Friday, May 26th) as part of a coldfix. We don't often make coldfixes, but with Bounty Hunter's first weekend following release we're working to make sure people can enjoy their hard-earned weapon imbues and flex their fancy new fashionscape over the weekend.
Below, we'll list all of the tweaks we're looking to make as a bullet-point, and expand underneath with any additional context we feel you might like!
- Statius's warhammer no longer has an Attack level requirement.
This is a late addition to this list, but hopefully a welcome one! Statius's warhammer wasn't implemented correctly, since it should only have a Strength requirement. We'll be fixing this as part of the coldfix.
- Players will no longer lose their weapon imbue scrolls on death, you will lose the base item but keep the imbue scroll on respawning.
A good number of you have been getting your hands on some of the new imbued weaponry, in particular the imbues for the Dark Bow and Abyssal dagger. These imbues can take a good chunk of time to unlock, and currently, dying with these items will remove the imbue entirely, even if they're protected. While long-term we'd like to consider the potential for additional components so that your risk is increased somehow when using these weapons, in the short-term we'd like people to feel like they're able to unlock imbues and use them without another potential grind looming.
Even though we've not added a Collection Log entry for Bounty Hunter (more on that in the future), we have been tracking whether or not players have unlocked rewards from the rewards store. This means that if we can see you've unlocked an imbue scroll and no longer have a scroll or any imbued weaponry in your possession, we'll be able to refund you the points for one copy of the imbue scroll. If you've bought more than one copy, unfortunately we're not able to refund points for additional copies, but we hope this refund is welcome for those of you who've unfortunately lost an imbue.
- Players will no longer lose their BH cosmetic kits on death, you will lose the base item but keep the kit on respawning.
The reasoning here is effectively the same as the above, and we'll be able to refund you points for one copy of any kits that you've lost. Meaning if you spent your whole stream chasing a Neitiznot helmet kit and lost it in your very next fight, you should be able to buy it back following tomorrow's coldfix.
While we'd love to be able to make more changes ahead of tomorrow, the act of processing your feedback, prioritising changes, developing changes, testing them and then deploying them to the game can be time-consuming. With the coldfix being on a Friday, we're not able to operate at full capacity in case any issues with our changes crop up, so we try to keep these fixes light where possible.
We hope you enjoy flexing your cosmetics and playing around with some fresh takes on iconic weaponry this weekend! If you're interested in what we're hoping to change with future updates (with next week's update occurring on Thursday, June 1st, owing to a UK bank holiday during the week), then read on!
While we'd like to fit as many of these as possible in next week's game update, it's not likely we'll be able to fit all of these into the update in time. Check out next week's newspost to know exactly what's changing, but this list should give you an idea of what else to expect and help you understand what we're aware of and working on!
- Adjusted the points cost of various rewards in the rewards shop.
We hear your feedback about costs being too high at present and will look to decrement these to a place where they still feel like a fun goal to chase for permanent unlocks and progression, without feeling like an insurmountable grind. We'll share the exact numbers in next week's newspost and remain open to further changes where necessary. On top of the Ancient Warrior armours, we're looking to tweak the costs of Blighted supplies, Target teleport scrolls and the XP lamps to make them a little more enticing for you to spend your change on!
Similar to the refunding of points with weapon imbues and cosmetic kits, we'll be able to refund you the difference in points (for one copy, though you shouldn't need any more than one!) for any reductions in cost we make where we can see that you've unlocked an item.
- Added Perdu to the lobby area.
There's not much to say here other than we'll be removing the walk of shame through Ferox Enclave, meaning you should be able to repair your gear without anybody noticing... our little secret!
- Adjusted the placement and wander range of the Corrupted Warriors in the lobby.
This should reduce the amount of time you spend talking to these NPCs while you're trying to bank. Besides, they've got important 'standing around looking menacing' to be doing.
- Skipping an unskulled target no longer contributes to your 'skip limit' for the purpose of the matchmaking penalty.
These free skips were a feature from older iterations of Bounty Hunter that many of you asked us to re-implement, so we have done! In a similar vein, we're aware of the concerns raised about the minimum coffer fees for these unskulled players and will be keeping a close eye on feedback so that we can adjust these as necessary in a future update.
- Fixed a bug where some people weren't receiving the correct warning/dialogue message on skipping their final target before incurring a penalty.
- Blighted supplies such as Blighted vengeance sacks and Blighted teleport sacks are now useable from inside the lobby.
The aim here is for you to have an easier time with any pre-Venging you'd like to do, as well as make Teleport to target a little nicer to use.
- Upon first spawning into the crater, you'll be granted 6 seconds of immunity from being attacked by any rogues.
While we appreciate it's possible to score some nasty anti-rushes on those pesky spawn-campers, we agree with many of you that getting comboed out on spawn isn't exactly bundles of fun. Your target will still be able to attack you within this time, and you'll lose your immunity if you initiate combat with another player.
- Players will be able to teleport to their target while inside the crater if they have not been in combat within the last 12 seconds.
This change should cut down on the amount of time you spend running to find your target, with a small restriction to prevent you from using your target teleport to escape rogues.
- Players won't be able to leave the crater immediately after using a Special attack, and will be blocked from exiting for 6 seconds - similar to the delay present on PvP worlds.
- Re-entering the crater after banking will add 15 seconds back to your 2 minute timer, up from the current 6 seconds.
Some of you have expressed frustrations when you're fighting a target that you enjoy playing against, but losing them after only a couple of rounds with the current timer. This should make it a little easier to keep sessions going, or give some burstier builds more chances against some high DPS uptime builds like Voiders.
- World 541 will be moved from US West to US East, so that players in this region have a world where they can play on lower ping, since they're currently the only server region without a dedicated world.
- We're working on a fix for targets dying as they leave the crater not providing loot to the killer.
Our intention was for these deaths to count for the killer, so we're investigating what's gone on here and are aiming to rectify it.
- We're working on a fix for players killing a target who has recently been in combat with a rogue and not receiving any loot.
While we love the 'messy' nature of rogue combat, Bounty Hunter should be about exactly that - hunting your bounty. If you kill your assigned target, you should be receiving their loot. We're hoping to deploy a fix for this one soon!
- Adding a chat message upon entering/exiting the crater to remind you how long is left on your matchmaking penalty timer, as well as giving you a reminder every 5 minutes.
That about sums up everything we've been able to talk through so far, we'll have more to share with next week's game update newspost so don't consider this an exhaustive list.
We hope you've found this short follow-up blog useful, make sure to let us know what you think via all the usual channels, and have fun in Bounty Hunter this weekend!
That's everything for this week's game update. We'd love to hear your feedback so please let us know what you think via our official forums, on the 2007Scape Reddit, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel.
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