Q&A Summary 10/03/2022 (2024)

Question #1

What's the situation with the rest of the Kourend City reworks? Is it likely that we'll see the nextone 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 justKourend, isn't finished. This is still an area we're going tobe 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 manymore 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 ofaccessibility - even with the quest rewards and stuff that's still a bit of a problem, so there'sstuff 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 tosomeday.

Question #2

What do you think about the ability for players to speak to ghosts without using items at level 90 or99 Prayer? This could be added as part of Morytania EliteDiaries.

Mod Kirby

This doesn't sound like a diary reward at all; this sounds like a quest reward; what I'm hearing iswe 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, Ithink. I don't think Morytania Legs 4 unlocks itcompletely.

Mod Ayiza

I just love RuneScape things like "okay, you either wear an amulet, or you put on this pair oftrousers", 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 justdirectly on the diary.

Question #3

I have a question for Bruno. Has the team had any further discussion about allocating resources tomaking new early/mid-game bosses and bosses that require theuse 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 onsomething like the expansion of the giant bosses, we've got theMoss Giant boss and the Hill Giant boss, and I know there have been talks of like a Fire Giant boss orsomething like that. Maybe that would be cool to use awater 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 partin 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 notmany mid-game bosses, and, to be fair, we've got Sarachnisslightly earlier than some of the other stuff we've got.

Still, the problem with it is that thestuff's tradable; it gets farmed by high-level players, and wesaw a lot of that feedback when we released it. I think there's room for mid-game upwards untradablegear 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 playerfrom the start to the later game, there's a huge gulf fromthe 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 yourprogression that either the money you've got to get, and even worse on an Ironman, in terms of earningthem, so I'd love to add some middle game untradable gearthat's attached to these kinds of bosses that means we can have it at reasonable drop rates and it'ssomething to earn, we don't have too much in this game, soit's a topic in and of itself, untradeable equipment, but, most of the tradable equipment doesn't comefrom 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 canbe 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 prettywelcome because there isn't anything that you can do withyour 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 moreaccessible, and even though Chambers is masseable, it's not really the kind of place that you wouldjust go and take mid-levels in for the first time becauseit's going to be really hard for them to figure out what they need to do and actually be able tocomplete the content at the same time so I'd be well up forseeing something like that.

Mod Kieren

Something that could work quite well is a boss, or raid, or some sort of encounter that works wellwith that kind of DScim gear, Iban staff, or your Magic ShortBows, that kind of tier and work well with that or be targeted specifically at that. The problem isthat 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 tobe so rare, which means it doesn't work very well for amid-game player.

Question #4

For Mod Kieren: In addition to League to League rewards, can music unlocked in a League staypermanently 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 thenext League. I think everything doesn't get wiped until thenext 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 weshould be able to, and I almost regret that we didn't do that last time. It might be because therehave never been any tasks about unlocking music; I don'tthink 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 nextLeague, and you've got that teleport now to Falo the Bardif 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.

Question #5

Could we ever see an update on Skillcape utility? I'm specifically thinking of agility cape perks, butI'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 beuseful and have a good use, but at the same time, it alsobuffs max cape quite a lot because obviously, the max cape has all the skill buffs. So, if we were tomake every skill cape very good, maybe we might alsoconsider nerfing the max cape a little bit, something along the lines of making you choose between acertain amount of the skill cape buffs, so instead ofhaving 23 skill cape buffs you have maybe 5, which, to be fair, for a lot of players would be enoughbecause 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 tobe making considerable buffs to the perks. I think there'sroom on some of the perks that are just essentially useless that we can maybe make small tweaks, butthey 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 themall 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, theconstruction cape.

Mod Kieren

So, sort of related to skill capes and max capes, and so on, something we've seen come up time andtime again, and there are mixed opinions on it, is the topicof 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 wantsomething else to go for. Equally, some people don't want it.

Everyone's got a preconception of whatit is as well because obviously, it exists in RuneScape soit's something I'm fairly keen to at least have the conversation about. I would love to have somethingthat can actually be there for max players to go andachieve and represent the achievements that they've got beyond just merely maxing. I just want topresent 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 youessentially have a huge laundry list of requirements, thingslike "get all the skills to the max", "get all your quests done", "do this and this and this" - I likethe idea that all of those requirements essentially havepoints associated with them so you can weigh the tasks and make them more important than othersrepresented based on like how hard they are to do and so on andthen the way you structure it is that you unlock the competition escape at around 85% of all of thetask 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 theword "completion" is you complete everything; it's verymuch in the direction of completion, which is why I think it's still appropriate. The reason why I'dwant to do that is that there's a big problem withcompletion content if it's everything, that means you've got to get all of the pets, you've got to doseveral 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 havetwo 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 theclue scroll items on the collection log and get all thepets 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 todefine, and we've got the benefit of hindsight. RuneScapehad some issues with this; a lot of people argued and debated what should be a requirement and whatshouldn't be a requirement. I don't want any debate. If it'scompletable, it has task points associated with it. We avoid you having to do absolutely every elementby lowering the requirement to like 85 or 90%. The capeitself, I would see as purely a cosmetic upgrade to the max cape and the variants, so you could havelike a fire comp cape, you could have an infernal compcape, you could have the skill perks cape as well, so it wouldn't be anything other than a cosmeticlike "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 wantit to be there. I think that would be the wrong thing todo, and put a lot of pressure on completing all these things, either way, that's my opinion on it, andI just want to put that out there and get a gauge of whatpeople 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, butthere's also the other side that realises just how much is involved in that. You even touched on a fewpoints yourself there, Kieren, like the case of pets, orthousands 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 tovote no to content because they don't want to have tocomplete it to re-obtain their comp cape?

It's not so much of a problem if the comp cape wasconsidered 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 beadded as a cosmetic only, it would only be a matter oftime until the requests for additions to that start coming in, and then those additions to continuecoming in, before it's a point where we're answering thesame question every single week on the Q&A, and how do we prevent that from being a case withhindsight 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 thecomp cape in particular, but, with the premise of it beingcosmetic only, I wouldn't really have an argument in that case then because it wouldn't matter if youdidn't have it it wouldn't impact your gameplay, it's justmore 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 morecosmetic 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 bysaying 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'tgrind out 3rd Age, it's just too much, I'm gonna leave that task", but, if you do, there's probablysome 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 peopledo tend to dislike being forced to do a certain piece ofcontent if they don't want to, so if they can ignore that piece of content and do something else theymight want to then that's not as bad. It's always going tobe 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 completioncape trimmed, 100%, no exceptions, and then someone's gonnago 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 theuniverse to complete 3rd Age, and all of the rest, the petlog, and everything else, have a trimmed cape, just have it!

Question #6

What are your thoughts on if you receive a piece of 3rd Age during leagues, at the start of nextleague, you get a "3rd Age ornament kit" which allows you tocosmetically 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 thinkthat's probably most realistic in terms of what they'resuggesting.

Mod Bruno

Can we just give them the 3rd Age ring, and they can be whatever they want, but just as a metamorphtype, 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 thetime on making an interesting league rather than allowingyou 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. Itemsthemselves are a bit more of a contentious thing to dobecause then if someone has a 3rd Age sword, that's pretty cool, and it might actually work as a 3rdage sword, which gives them a good advantage when they getto that point, they won't have to complete Monkey Madness to get their Dragon Scimitar, they can justuse the sword, but maybe there's something else we couldlook at and when it comes to rewards.

Mod Ayiza

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

Question #7

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

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 "dowe want to?". We thought it made sense, and it was a coollittle thing for Nex; since Nex does do it, the boss itself, maybe the Nightmare can do it - she yeetsabout 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 atrun 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 Graardorpet, 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 alittle bit more expensive sadly.

Mod Bruno

Yeah could end up doing double the sound and sound effects whilst it's walking around, and that willhurt 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 bitupset.

Mod Ayiza

At the end of the day, the entire player base says 'tick', but I can tell you when I used to write alot of blogs where I'd refer to it as a tick, and someonein the development team would say 'actually, it's a game cycle'. So I'd agree to change it to a gamecycle but know that players are going to turn around andtell me that it's a tick, so we just kind of now say they're game cycles, also known as ticks, or just0.6 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 talkingabout. 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 insteadof game cycles. So we'll keep saying game cycles, you keepcalling us out on it, and we can keep this going for as long as we can.

Question #9

With talk about reworking some skills, I was wondering what skills are considered on the table andwhich skills are considered off the table. Also, consideringthat the only knowledge we have about the rework is additional content presumably (i.e. the newSmithing content that was mentioned in a recent post), what formwill 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 offthe table, but it does mean certain skills need moreattention. I'm sure a lot of you have opinions on which skill you'd like to see worked on. We've donesurveys; 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 sureit comes as no surprise to know that Runecrafting was atthe top, or at least it was very near the top, of those you want to see change. We are very close tothe launch day for Guardians of the Rift, that's somethingwe're working on, in that case, it takes that form - it's a new skilling method to try and give yousome variety of how you train the skill, make it more fun, abit more engaging, a bit more social, and offer something that fits nicely alongside otherRunecrafting methods.

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

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

Question #10

Given the overwhelmingly positive feedback to backporting select quests, when might we see morebackported 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 isactually 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, andobviously, it's still fresh when it comes to sort of planningout our schedule going forward; it gives us an option. If people are really keen on seeing backportedquests, that's something we can think about.

At the sametime, I think there is still a genuine excitement for something new as well, and so, we've got to getthe balance right. Other things might come about in ashorter time frame. We are doing a Game Jam very soon, where we're gonna spend basically a week notdoing our usual work but spending time ideating, creatingnew little pieces of gameplay, whatever it is. That might be the sort of time where we experiment withnew 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 couldsay, "yeah, we could bring that over".

Question #11

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

Question #12

When are the changes from Poll 76 coming? I'm particularly excited to know when the combat achievementchanges from Poll 76 are being implemented (Reducing kctasks, overall reworking). I would like to know if I should hold back on doing them or start grindingif 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'llbe coming soon. Looking at our backlog of stuff that'scompleted, while a lot of stuff has been completed with Poll 76, it's just a case of where and when dowe want to slot these updates in. In the case of combatachievements, kill count reduction, that's something where we're waiting for the league to end andthen we might think about doing that as for all the otherstuff 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 thenumbers off the top of my head, but they willretroactively complete.

Mod Bruno

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

Question #13

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

Question #14

You keep mentioning Corp damage cap being removed. Is this for spears only, or Is it true for allweapons 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. Itstill might not be weak to a Twisted Bow, but if a Twisted Bowcould 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 veryspecific things like the Crystal Halberd. Ruby Bolts arestill capped at 100 innately, though, because that's the cap on the Ruby Bolts, not the monsteritself.

Mod Ayiza

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