VOD | Portable Vic the Trader Newspost | Player Support Blog
Portable Vic the Trader
We've wanted to do more things with bonds for a while now, last year we spent a lot of time talking to players about the monetisation in the game particularly off the back of some of the things that happened with Treasure Hunter. We wanted to explore alternatives and we tried various experiments. But this year we want to have a focus on things that players are comfortable with, service level use for bonds. If they're successful we will introduce them as permanent options. We've become very dependent on Treasure Hunter and players have had concerns about that and we want to deal with it, this is one of the first steps we're taking. We're going to look at new ways of getting SGS content into the game especially with how to access that stuff with mobile - there'll be some changes we'll be making later in the year. Some exciting stuff gonna happen there. We're going to try new stuff this year, so please tell us what works and what doesn't.
- 4-week trial (23 April to 26 May).
- Redeem a bond to buy a Summoning stone which is used to summon Vic for an hour
- Timer pauses when logged.
- Re-use the Summoning stone to resummon Vic (provided you have time left).
- Buff bar icon to show time remaining.
- Summoning stones will not be removed after 26 May for those have purchased them.
- Slightly boosted rates for your first use - a bonus for using the service.
- F2P can use it but only for F2P-specific items.
- Regular free cycle of Vic remains unchanged.
May Weekends
We like the idea of taking the Voice of Seren effects and expanding it to the game world. That idea of having certain skills or categories of skills in focus in a given time (increased XP, or winter weekend styled bonuses) but during certain hours or time periods and then it moves onto another. Hopefully we get people Jack of all trading, moving from one skill to another over the course of the day.
- Similar overlay to Elf city.
- Trial, keeping things fresh.
- Winter weekends are not being replaced by this.
Aura Sale
- Questions were being asked if the Jan sale was the aura/loyalty rework.
- Pretty popular so we decided to run it again.
- Aura/loyalty rework is still being discussed regularly by us, but in the meantime aura sales are just something we can do in the meantime.
- Nice way of trying to even the burden of auras before we have a permanent solution.
Player Support
- 4 Blogs to be released:
- Upgrading our systems
- Account security, recovery and lost items
- Challenging myths about Customer Support
- Toxicity in game
- We are going to use this as a chance to get feedback from surveys.
- What do we mean by toxicity? In the early days of RS you could say the most basic things and get muted. Now it's more open in that sense but at the same we want to find out what players consider to be toxic to help us address it.
Mobile
- Some mobile updates have affected desktop gameplay, is there more of a plan to stop this happening as much? We've been talking about that a lot today. There will be things that we are trying to tackle that will have an impact on desktop, but we are trying to be really careful with that with things that change the way people play the game. If there's anything that's going to impact systems and the way people are used to doing things then we'll be very careful to get that infront of people to have a look at first and we'll talk about it rather than dropping it into the game (where we have done that we hold our hands up and say sorry that was unintentional).
- If there any mobile changes that you do want for desktop, please do tell us.
- The intention is to have both iOS and Android versions on launch, so iOS will happen. Can't give a date on iOS beta but it's in development and is coming along really well.
- What's next for Android?
- User interface refining and talking the challenges of that.
- So much of the game that needs to be looked at to work well on mobile.
- Make the whole thing look more live and modern in a respectful way.
General
- Stone spirits design is in the works.
- New player experience
- We're doing a lot for the rest of this year.
- You'll see a lot of changes throughout the year on the first user experience, especially leading up to full commercial launch of mobile.
- Post-tutorial is really important to look at, so we'll be focussing on that. If that goes well we may look back at the tutorial.\
- What if mobile doesn't bring in as many players as hoped? We're pretty confident because if you look at the launch of OSRS mobile and how well that's done, we've got really good data on how that's performed; and all the indicators are that we will see a good number of new players incoming. We're hoping with RS it'll do even better [than OSRS].
- Summer update: we will pick the right time to release more info. 'I'm sure there'll be all the kind of Road to X hype to get you excited about it.'
- Kerapac and Jas quest: We haven't got anything in the works for them yet but we have got core series stories to tell in the near future.
- If players are expecting us to rewrite the tick system that is not going to happen. However, we would like to improve the responsiveness because there are things that can be done with the game engine to improve that (but not messing with any timings of ticks). This is still a massive project and it's something we'd like to do but don't expect it.
- Reworks are always in consideration when we make plans. Currently no big plans to do big ones like another skills rework, maybe some other smaller reworks like Comp Cape. We have more skill improvements like incense burners. We didn't expect the huge positive response we got from M&S rework, 'I love what it's done to the community.'
- We like to where possible create community experiences. We have some smaller stuff coming out in the near future for clans (April's Month Ahead will address this).
- When we speak about ideas and they gain traction they then become expectations. Even projects that are in the works we haven't said anything about until we are confident that they will be released. There have been instances in the past where we've worked on a project, got excited about it and started talking about it like bank rework.
- There are certain things we wanna show design documents etc to get player feedback on it, so we need to find the sweet spot.
- Any plans to increase the player save file so we can get more action bars, bank space etc? Not all of those are related to the player save file limit. We did do it last year and there were some extra bank boosters. A lot of the technical issues is actually on the amount of time it takes to open the bank - loading each item - it's not as efficient as it should or could be.
- We are talking a little about how to resolve the Wilderness (there are those that want to reclaim the 'unused' space of the Wilderness and a minority that want us to finally get PvP done right).
- Osbourne is a big fan of safe-PVP ('it suits Runescape'), opt-in PVP like World Event II. It might be that we play around with rulesets.
- Mod Hunter has been pitching a Wilderness death-rework. Instead of dropping your items, you drop the amount of gold it would take to reclaim your items from death. You have to have that amount of coins on your person or you can't engage in PVP (players who die would effectively pay their death cost twice). Would love player feedback on it. A post will be made. There will be nuances and exceptions.
- OSRS updates in RS3?
- No to fossil island.
- Moving rooms is easier in OSRS than RS3. If it happened it's a huge amount of work and would likely come with a full Construction rework (which is not off the cards).
- Placeholders have be taken a different route because the OSRS way of doing it is impossible.
- Any plans to remove more minigames? Mobilising armies was a clear 'this needs to go'. Are there any other minigames that players feel absolutely need to be removed. Certainly an option, we'll be braver, especially with new players coming in, to remove content that just doesn't work. There is a perfectly valid argument that 'it's not hurting anyone, just leave it in'.
- Woodcutting and Hunter elite outfits will be released with appropriate content. Hunter outfit is in the works.
- 120 Summoning? Still on the backlog. We'd love for it not to be the pouch-making skill. Maybe 99-120 is trained a different way ('using your familiars for XP seems the most sensible, too bad it isn't like that right now').
- Combat diversity update is going to happen. Time-frame wise it isn't going to be the next couple of months. We would want to beta it.
- No beta scheduled for any content at the moment.
- Comp cape rework core design has two things that need to be resolved:
- A lot of players feel it is too complex.
- A lot of players feel like it isn't solving the problems it needs to solve.
- We will strip the design down to its simplest elements.
- Release a VBlog on the core things we want to do.
- In-game survey on the core design.
- Then it's make or break. If there are core elements that players don't want, if we can salvage the rework etc. If there is a fundamental turn against it then we'll ditch the rework.
- The next boss we want to release will be solo.
- We're quite a way off T99 gear. Combat diversity will help horizontally. T99 is off a couple of years at least. '120 combat skills boggles my mind because we need to fill in the gaps with gear as well as enough combat encounters to use that level of power.'
- Why the hesitation to re-release Mahj aura? Because we said we weren't going to. It was a bit overpowered and unbalancing the game. We might re-open it during an aura rework, that might be a conversation we have, it could even come back in a different form.
- A lot of familiarity between future content surveys/things we've promised and the upcoming release schedule. We could do with refreshing the backlog so we may be talking to you about it soon.
- Skilling intensity; anything more interesting than Safecracking, Mining, Fishing Frenzy? 'Yes I can think of a particular update in the works that really does nail this.'
- Fishing frenzy is flawed, it's the least played deep sea fishing content, it hits the bitter spot between intensity and boredom, and grinding. Effort vs. Reward was not worth it.
- Hall of memories half got it right, but still elements that sit in that spot.
- Rockertunities and a lot of what Mining and Smithing does, a little bit of strategy, we feel like we're getting it right.
- We're pushing the boat out and there's going to be something truly innovative in this space in the next 3-4 months.
- We don't have a date for Java client being discontinued. We want to make Java users to move over to NXT in a nice way (find out why etc). Very small % use Java. Engine updates coming fairly soon to NXT will help the transition. We're definitely in the closing stages.
- Companion app was discontinued because it's in HTML5. Everytime we make an update that affects chat etc, we have to make sure it works on companion which is a pain in the ass.
- Removal of Java and Companion speeds up development.
- DTD not be able to be used at Telos is in QA. Sign refreshes only being usable at banks is in the works, but not as imminent as DTD. Communication will go out ahead of time of when these will be released (we acknowledge that the div-o-matic change came out of the blue).
- No player name cleanup planned. There were issues with the last one, it may still happen in the future, but there's an orientation towards a lot of people coming back to their old accounts.
- Not for definite, but we've been talking about a rare item store refresh.
- Group Ironman: not a no, it's not on the shelf. It's one of those updates where we're not about to release it so we don't want to say too much. OSRS also want it, and they're looking for engine changes that will help precipitate that and that benefits us too. Probably going to release it on both games at the same time.
- Text scaling and font sizes is something on our backlog. We had to look at it for mobile, 'I don't know the current status of it but I was asked fairly recently if we still want it and I said yes.' Unsure where the priority lies for it.
- Skilling boss: nothing in the works.
- Our asset mangement and spoken about previously has slowed down graphical reworks for now but will greatly benefit from it in the future.
- There is an area being graphically reworked at the moment.
- No plan for a virtual 120 all cape. Could be a consideration, our main concern is by making a cape is that the goalpost we are setting for people to achieve. Legendsarts's cape looks fantastic.
- No spring fayre this year. Easter content is coming. No april fools content.
Submitted March 26, 2019 at 09:06PM by imsuity https://ift.tt/2urt9df
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