Q&A Summary 10/03/2022

Q&A Summary 10/03/2022

This week’s livestream was a general Q&A! Topics included:



Thanks to Mod Ayiza (Lead Community Manager), Mod Kirby (Junior Content Developer), Mod Kieren (Associate Design Director) and Mod Bruno (QA Analyst) for their insights!


Missed the livestream? Check out the full transcript below!





Question #1


What's the situation with the rest of the Kourend City reworks? Is it likely that we'll see the next one come this year?




Mod Kieren


I don't think it'll be something we get time to look at this year. Zeah, as an entirety, not just Kourend, isn't finished. This is still an area we're going to be adding new content to. There's a storyline that's really just heated up, for lack of a better term, Kingdom Divided, so there's more to do. There are many more improvements we could do with Kourend that are not related to just the layout of the map as well; it takes a long time to get around, there's a lack of accessibility - even with the quest rewards and stuff that's still a bit of a problem, so there's stuff to do but probably not anytime in the immediate future.


Mod Bruno


And, of course, there's already the Kingdom of Varlamore to come, so we're definitely not done there; it's just one of those things that we'll get around to someday.



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Question #2


What do you think about the ability for players to speak to ghosts without using items at level 90 or 99 Prayer? This could be added as part of Morytania Elite Diaries.




Mod Kirby


This doesn't sound like a diary reward at all; this sounds like a quest reward; what I'm hearing is we need another ghost quest.


Mod Bruno


I think it already is a diary reward, isn't it?


Mod Kieren


It's attached to the pants - so the Morytania legs, you use those, and that can act as a Ghostspeak, I think. I don't think Morytania Legs 4 unlocks it completely.


Mod Ayiza


I just love RuneScape things like "okay, you either wear an amulet, or you put on this pair of trousers", and suddenly you can speak to ghosts.


Mod Kieren


I get it, it's a small quality of life thing, but I think it's probably a quest reward more than just directly on the diary.



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Question #3


I have a question for Bruno. Has the team had any further discussion about allocating resources to making new early/mid-game bosses and bosses that require the use of Mage? Potentially reusing and adapting existing boss fights.




Mod Bruno


That's not something I've worked on specifically. I know we'd eventually also like to work on something like the expansion of the giant bosses, we've got the Moss Giant boss and the Hill Giant boss, and I know there have been talks of like a Fire Giant boss or something like that. Maybe that would be cool to use a water spell something like that, but yeah, not much as far as I know.


Mod Kieren


I think there's a big gaping gap for something that could be added here; it's clearly a missing part in the game. I spoke a little bit about this in the past; obviously, the giants are a prime sort of direction you could go with, but, in general, there are not many mid-game bosses, and, to be fair, we've got Sarachnis slightly earlier than some of the other stuff we've got.


Still, the problem with it is that the stuff's tradable; it gets farmed by high-level players, and we saw a lot of that feedback when we released it. I think there's room for mid-game upwards untradable gear that people have to earn by fighting these bosses; this lets us tailor them and aim them at the middle game.


If you think about your journey as a player from the start to the later game, there's a huge gulf from the point when you get your Dragon Scim, and your Rune Set, or maybe your Dmed, or that kind of gear. The next upgrades are so far away in terms of your progression that either the money you've got to get, and even worse on an Ironman, in terms of earning them, so I'd love to add some middle game untradable gear that's attached to these kinds of bosses that means we can have it at reasonable drop rates and it's something to earn, we don't have too much in this game, so it's a topic in and of itself, untradeable equipment, but, most of the tradable equipment doesn't come from encounters it comes from mini-games.


Mod Ayiza


I really like that, though; I've always been a fan of the idea of having like a mid-tier raid that can be a nice introduction into a later game PVM especially, and to help bridge that gap, as you've mentioned with gear as well, but, I think it would be pretty welcome because there isn't anything that you can do with your friends at that lower level. I know we've now got the story mode version of the Theatre of Blood, and I imagine with Tombs of Amascut it will be more accessible, and even though Chambers is masseable, it's not really the kind of place that you would just go and take mid-levels in for the first time because it's going to be really hard for them to figure out what they need to do and actually be able to complete the content at the same time so I'd be well up for seeing something like that.


Mod Kieren


Something that could work quite well is a boss, or raid, or some sort of encounter that works well with that kind of DScim gear, Iban staff, or your Magic Short Bows, that kind of tier and work well with that or be targeted specifically at that. The problem is that if you give them tradable loot, especially with a pet, is at a high-level people just go and farm it will crash the price of that tradable loot, or it has to be so rare, which means it doesn't work very well for a mid-game player.



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Question #4


For Mod Kieren: In addition to League to League rewards, can music unlocked in a League stay permanently unlocked/carry over to subsequent Leagues?




Mod Kieren


I see no reason why we couldn't include that - that's not a promise that we can change that for the next League. I think everything doesn't get wiped until the next League actually releases, though, so like when you log into the next League for the first time, that's the point where we do the reset, so I think we should be able to, and I almost regret that we didn't do that last time. It might be because there have never been any tasks about unlocking music; I don't think so, so I think it's probably fair game.


Mod Ayiza


It could make for an interesting strategy shift, where you have the music cape unlocked for the next League, and you've got that teleport now to Falo the Bard if you want to use that, for example, to get around, it could be a cool little touch.


Mod Kieren


That's a good point, something to think about, though. It seems reasonable.



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Question #5


Could we ever see an update on Skillcape utility? I'm specifically thinking of agility cape perks, but I'm sure there are other capes that are near useless too!




Mod Kieren


It's been a long time since we did them.


Mod Bruno


I see this topic come up quite a lot. I do agree that it would be nice for every skill cape to be useful and have a good use, but at the same time, it also buffs max cape quite a lot because obviously, the max cape has all the skill buffs. So, if we were to make every skill cape very good, maybe we might also consider nerfing the max cape a little bit, something along the lines of making you choose between a certain amount of the skill cape buffs, so instead of having 23 skill cape buffs you have maybe 5, which, to be fair, for a lot of players would be enough because they don't tend to use more than 2 or 3.


Mod Kieren


Yeah, it depends on how powerful you go, right? To warrant making that change, I think you'd have to be making considerable buffs to the perks. I think there's room on some of the perks that are just essentially useless that we can maybe make small tweaks, but they were always intended to be little benefits, right, just the word perk, right? It's a small perk. Maybe it warrants us just giving a quick look over them all and thinking if we got any better ideas nowadays.


Mod Kirby


Some just end up being bigger perks than the others, capes like the crafting cape, the PoH cape, the construction cape.


Mod Kieren


So, sort of related to skill capes and max capes, and so on, something we've seen come up time and time again, and there are mixed opinions on it, is the topic of the Completionist Cape. "What is it?", "How do we do it?", "What are the rules around getting it, if we do?". A lot of max players burn out and want something else to go for. Equally, some people don't want it.


Everyone's got a preconception of what it is as well because obviously, it exists in RuneScape so it's something I'm fairly keen to at least have the conversation about. I would love to have something that can actually be there for max players to go and achieve and represent the achievements that they've got beyond just merely maxing. I just want to present my opinion on how I think the comp cape could be done. This is reflective of just myself, not necessarily the whole Old School team, but the idea that you essentially have a huge laundry list of requirements, things like "get all the skills to the max", "get all your quests done", "do this and this and this" - I like the idea that all of those requirements essentially have points associated with them so you can weigh the tasks and make them more important than others represented based on like how hard they are to do and so on and then the way you structure it is that you unlock the competition escape at around 85% of all of the task points.


Mod Ayiza


It was 80% at the start of the call.


Mod Kieren


The point is that it's not a hundred, and the reason why I say that is because the definition of the word "completion" is you complete everything; it's very much in the direction of completion, which is why I think it's still appropriate. The reason why I'd want to do that is that there's a big problem with completion content if it's everything, that means you've got to get all of the pets, you've got to do several thousand Theater of Bloods and Chambers of Xeric, anywhere where we do engagement capes, and you'd get to a point very quickly where you're gonna have two people with the cape, or even zero.


What about the collection log? The collection logs are a great shout; realistically, no one will complete all of the clue scroll items on the collection log and get all the pets and get all these other things.


However, if you try to write a rule that says extreme stuff isn't required, that's a very hard rule to define, and we've got the benefit of hindsight. RuneScape had some issues with this; a lot of people argued and debated what should be a requirement and what shouldn't be a requirement. I don't want any debate. If it's completable, it has task points associated with it. We avoid you having to do absolutely every element by lowering the requirement to like 85 or 90%. The cape itself, I would see as purely a cosmetic upgrade to the max cape and the variants, so you could have like a fire comp cape, you could have an infernal comp cape, you could have the skill perks cape as well, so it wouldn't be anything other than a cosmetic like "oh look at you, you've really pulled your finger out, and you've got a stellar cape to show off", it wouldn't be the best in slot cape, because I don't want it to be there. I think that would be the wrong thing to do, and put a lot of pressure on completing all these things, either way, that's my opinion on it, and I just want to put that out there and get a gauge of what people thought.


Mod Ayiza


It's always interesting seeing discussions that come out from bringing the topic of the comp cape up. There's always a crowd that is well in favour of it, but there's also the other side that realises just how much is involved in that. You even touched on a few points yourself there, Kieren, like the case of pets, or thousands of kill counts for specific PvM instances like the Theatre of Blood and Chambers of Xeric. Then it's the consideration of future content, too, everything that gets added into the game that's subject to a poll. Would people be more inclined to vote no to content because they don't want to have to complete it to re-obtain their comp cape?


It's not so much of a problem if the comp cape was considered cosmetic, but if it had extra features or enhancements, it's more of a problem. To add to that, I think we all know that inevitably if the comp cape was to be added as a cosmetic only, it would only be a matter of time until the requests for additions to that start coming in, and then those additions to continue coming in, before it's a point where we're answering the same question every single week on the Q&A, and how do we prevent that from being a case with hindsight in mind but players also wanting it at the same time.


It's a difficult one, and those are part of the reasons why I personally have always felt against the comp cape in particular, but, with the premise of it being cosmetic only, I wouldn't really have an argument in that case then because it wouldn't matter if you didn't have it it wouldn't impact your gameplay, it's just more just about your fashion.


Mod Kieren


To be honest, most of the stuff we see with the max cape is "add more variants", essentially, add more cosmetic variants for like the champions cape and stuff. The comp cape would probably be in the same place, and that's almost what I'm trying to combat by saying 80, 85%, whatever threshold we choose for unlocking it, is to get away from the kind of "oh god, I'm going to need to complete this content to keep my cape" You could make a personal choice to say "actually I can't grind out 3rd Age, it's just too much, I'm gonna leave that task", but, if you do, there's probably some decent points available for you either way.


Mod Bruno


I do feel that the threshold way of doing it would probably be the lesser of two evils because people do tend to dislike being forced to do a certain piece of content if they don't want to, so if they can ignore that piece of content and do something else they might want to then that's not as bad. It's always going to be a bit contentious when it's not really a Completionist Cape because you didn't complete everything.


Mod Kirby


What you do is you have the 80%, 85% number for your completion cape, you then have the completion cape trimmed, 100%, no exceptions, and then someone's gonna go get that!


Mod Kieren


I genuinely think zero people would have it right now.


Mod Kirby


Oh yeah, absolutely, but it's there. Just to say, if you somehow managed to get all the RNG in the universe to complete 3rd Age, and all of the rest, the pet log, and everything else, have a trimmed cape, just have it!



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Question #6


What are your thoughts on if you receive a piece of 3rd Age during leagues, at the start of next league, you get a "3rd Age ornament kit" which allows you to cosmetically change a piece of gear?




Mod Kirby


Cosmetically how?


Mod Bruno


That's very vague.


Mod Kirby


I'm not giving you a piece of the 3rd Age at the start of the league; I'm sorry.


Mod Ayiza


What if you could change it to look like a piece of 3rd Age, but it's still a normal item? I think that's probably most realistic in terms of what they're suggesting.


Mod Bruno


Can we just give them the 3rd Age ring, and they can be whatever they want, but just as a metamorph type, I'm not a huge fan of this, to be honest.


Mod Ayiza


I assume it would be very difficult


Mod Kieren


I don't want to spend dev time on arbitrary things being held over these leagues. I'd rather spend the time on making an interesting league rather than allowing you to sort of keep a cosmetic thing because you got a really rare thing and don't want to lose it.


Mod Bruno


Pets I'm all for because they're pretty cool, and it doesn't really impact anyone in any way. Items themselves are a bit more of a contentious thing to do because then if someone has a 3rd Age sword, that's pretty cool, and it might actually work as a 3rd age sword, which gives them a good advantage when they get to that point, they won't have to complete Monkey Madness to get their Dragon Scimitar, they can just use the sword, but maybe there's something else we could look at and when it comes to rewards.


Mod Ayiza


Well, you heard it there; it sounds like a unanimous no, unfortunately.



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Question #7


Now that you're adding a PJ timer this week, many think you're going to kill off team PK'ing. Are you planning on giving a multi-hotspot for teams to PK at?




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Question #8


I heard rumours about making all pets run to keep up with players, like the Nexling. Is this true, and is there an expected release date?




Mod Kirby


I think the players know something I don't, which wouldn't be the first time actually, to be fair.


Mod Bruno


I don't think there are rumours, but if one pet can do it, all pets can do it. It's just a case of "do we want to?". We thought it made sense, and it was a cool little thing for Nex; since Nex does do it, the boss itself, maybe the Nightmare can do it - she yeets about as well. I personally wouldn't mind it.


Mod Kirby


Most of the NPCs aren't designed to move at that speed; they are going to look very silly going at run speed!


Mod Kieren


Most don't have running animations; that's where there's a cost. You could make them walk at 2x speed, but it'll like the steps they take. Imagine the Graardor pet, and how loud it is as it stomps around and it's just running across the room at two tiles a tick. You would need the animations, and that means it's a little bit more expensive sadly.


Mod Bruno


Yeah could end up doing double the sound and sound effects whilst it's walking around, and that will hurt everyone's ears.


Mod Kirby


Please, no.


Mod Kieren


What is this debate between tick and cycles? I saw it come up.


Mod Bruno


We reference cycles in blogs, but we also call them ticks, and some people are just a little bit upset.


Mod Ayiza


At the end of the day, the entire player base says 'tick', but I can tell you when I used to write a lot of blogs where I'd refer to it as a tick, and someone in the development team would say 'actually, it's a game cycle'. So I'd agree to change it to a game cycle but know that players are going to turn around and tell me that it's a tick, so we just kind of now say they're game cycles, also known as ticks, or just 0.6 seconds. Whichever you want to go with.


Mod Kirby


Just pick one; as long as you're consistent with yourself, everyone will know what you're talking about. No one really cares.


Mod Ayiza


Well, I don't think the whole internal code is going to be changed to refer to them as ticks instead of game cycles. So we'll keep saying game cycles, you keep calling us out on it, and we can keep this going for as long as we can.



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Question #9


With talk about reworking some skills, I was wondering what skills are considered on the table and which skills are considered off the table. Also, considering that the only knowledge we have about the rework is additional content presumably (i.e. the new Smithing content that was mentioned in a recent post), what form will these reworks come in?




Mod Kieren


Well, there are certain skills that need work more than others, that doesn't mean any of them are off the table, but it does mean certain skills need more attention. I'm sure a lot of you have opinions on which skill you'd like to see worked on. We've done surveys; in fact, we did a big survey not too long ago, and we've got the results, and they indicated skills that people want to see being worked on. I'm sure it comes as no surprise to know that Runecrafting was at the top, or at least it was very near the top, of those you want to see change. We are very close to the launch day for Guardians of the Rift, that's something we're working on, in that case, it takes that form - it's a new skilling method to try and give you some variety of how you train the skill, make it more fun, a bit more engaging, a bit more social, and offer something that fits nicely alongside other Runecrafting methods.


For Smithing, obviously, we already talked about that we are working on the Smithing rework, and I'm sure we'll be talking about it in the near future. It's taking the form of a new piece of skilling content again; similarly, it's an alternative way to train the skill that would be, you know, good at certain levels, better at others, and so on. But not every skill is the same; some skills might need fixing, actually making changes to the existing content rather than adding something new, but there are other skilling updates planned for later in the year that we haven't really spoken about yet or haven't necessarily fleshed out the designs as much as we'd like before we talk about them, but it's something I think we probably haven't put enough investment into.


Last year where we did mahogany homes, we had Tempoross, but skilling hasn't had a ton of content. We're doing a little bit more this year to try and address some of the skills that people feel warrant it, but there's no point spending a lot of time reworking fixing up, skills that people kind of already love; you might want new content. There can have this vicious cycle thing, and people talked about this before; people love Slayer, so there's a tendency to try and add more Slayer content, but you're just reinforcing an already popular skill, and that's good, you still want to feed that, but you also need to look at the skills that people don't like so much and try and fix them up.



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Question #10


Given the overwhelmingly positive feedback to backporting select quests, when might we see more backported quests?




Mod Kirby


"When Ed feels like it" is the honest answer. If there's time on the schedule for him to get to one, and he particularly wants to do one. I think that is actually how Land of the Goblins came about; he's the one most proficient at backporting.


Mod Kieren


Well, we wanted your opinions because it gives us food for thought. It lets us think about it, and obviously, it's still fresh when it comes to sort of planning out our schedule going forward; it gives us an option. If people are really keen on seeing backported quests, that's something we can think about.


At the same time, I think there is still a genuine excitement for something new as well, and so, we've got to get the balance right. Other things might come about in a shorter time frame. We are doing a Game Jam very soon, where we're gonna spend basically a week not doing our usual work but spending time ideating, creating new little pieces of gameplay, whatever it is. That might be the sort of time where we experiment with new backported quests and stuff like that, so who knows! It's a very interesting topic because it does open the doors to some of the more expensive questlines, which have follow-up quests in RuneScape that we could say, "yeah, we could bring that over".



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Question #11


Can you buff some of the daily achievement diary rewards? For example, wilderness elite diary lets you claim 50 free runes per day from Lundail. It's so bad; you can get 50 air runes.




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Question #12


When are the changes from Poll 76 coming? I'm particularly excited to know when the combat achievement changes from Poll 76 are being implemented (Reducing kc tasks, overall reworking). I would like to know if I should hold back on doing them or start grinding if they're not being changed in the near future.




Mod Bruno


I can take this one since Poll 76 is something both Kirby and I have been working on recently. They'll be coming soon. Looking at our backlog of stuff that's completed, while a lot of stuff has been completed with Poll 76, it's just a case of where and when do we want to slot these updates in. In the case of combat achievements, kill count reduction, that's something where we're waiting for the league to end and then we might think about doing that as for all the other stuff they will come at some point, whenever we have space in the schedule.


Mod Kirby


I will say specifically for the combat achievements one, you can start grinding now, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but they will retroactively complete.


Mod Bruno


If a task will be to kill five Skotizos, and you have nine Skotizos, it's still going to be complete even if right now it is to kill ten Skotizo, for example.



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Question #13


It takes 20 hours to get a BCP, and 250 hours to get a Torva platebody; Nex and Nightmare provide hugely different gaming experiences to the rest of OSRS. The experience differs enough that it risks alienating those who prefer a less extreme grind/reward. Is this something you consider during the design process, and will we ever see the return of GWD/Slayer boss unique rates? i.e.: bosses whose level/gear reqs and difficulty keep prices high instead of extreme rarity.




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Question #14


You keep mentioning Corp damage cap being removed. Is this for spears only, or Is it true for all weapons such as Rapier, Twisted Bow and Scythe etc.?




Mod Bruno


It will still have the weakness to spears as that's the thing with Corp; it is weak to spears. It still might not be weak to a Twisted Bow, but if a Twisted Bow could hit that much, then it would, although I haven't heard anything about this, so I'm not too sure.


Mod Kieren


The damage cap is applied to everything that can hit Corp, although it's only really relevant to very specific things like the Crystal Halberd. Ruby Bolts are still capped at 100 innately, though, because that's the cap on the Ruby Bolts, not the monster itself.


Mod Ayiza


From what I gather from the information is that the cap is removed in the essence of the current damage cap with other non-spear-like weapons, but any existing damage caps that are innately built into the items will exist.



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