09-04-2018, 11:06 AM
I wrote this up a little while ago and posted it to reddit, but it didn't strike much discussion because of the forum of discussion that reddit is about. It's about RS3 and the incentive to not develop content that Runescape players want, but content that might attract new and returning players, and I think that this is not to their benefit.
Quote:This is an observation that I've had for a while, it may not be very new or original but I figured that I'd write about it anyway. I've been playing RS since about 2005, comped in 2012 and have largely been involved in something Runescape related since I started playing. This write up is coming both as a veteran of the game but also somebody with many many accounts in alts and ironmen over my time, I've achieved trimmed comp on two accounts, maxed on 3.5 plus one account on OSRS and of course have an appreciation for the early game, where I started, as well as the late game, where I spent my favourite years on RS, which were that 2009-2012 sweet spot. I'm writing this post not so much as a criticism, but as an observation, and maybe to inform players like myself of what I think Jagex is up to. This is going to be long, but I think quite insightful, take what I say as a bit of observation and a bit of opinion, enjoy, or don't.
One major video that I have taken most of my observations from (outside of actual game updates and employee sentiment) is a presentation by the current CEO Phil Mansel which details the importance of "Returners" any player that has stopped playing, and has let their membership run out for over a 3 months. It details the importance of these players from a business perspective, as they are able to jump back into the game, are more comfortable with what it is all about and are generally more resilient in retaining membership. Interestingly, reddit is cited as one of the most useful places for returning players to get back into the swing of things, he even posted a few screencaps of those "help me get back into it" posts that you see a fair bit here.
One of my worries with this presentation is some of the strategies that Jagex employ to attract and retain returning players. There is of course the matter of marketing, of emailing, advertising, perhaps most interestingly pushing and supporting Runescape content creators, as they are currently at the top 10ish games on twitch (RS3 obviously no longer sees this representation) but I think what concerned me, was the stressing of live events, of stuff like the beach, the fayre, dimension of the damn that was a shitshow, and of course the bingo cards and currency gathering events. You gotta login to the game, play a considerable amount to earn all the rewards, or of course pay jagex to unlock them with microtransactions. These events are of course a big priority for Jagex, fairly low development time goes into them after the initial development phase, but they bring returning players back to be a part of these events, they are strategically placed during holidays and they generally make more money from people buying runecoins and bonds to pay for extra rewards. Live events are also a good point to attract new players, they allow for free and generally faster progression through the early game (ironmemes getting 1-80 construction, knocking out that big requirement early game, HELLO) but they are obviously highly advertised and what better time to join that game than when something is going on within the community?
So we've established the groundbreaking revelation that new and returning players are important for Jagex, what does that mean for veterans and people that have been around for a while? Not much, really. People have, and will stick around. You can site the sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion, this idea that the more time you invest into something, the less likely you are to give it up or stop investing time into it, because well then you would have wasted your time. Whales, of course, are a valuable asset to Jagex but I think that despite these fallacies and in deed true to them, there becomes a point where you get off this high. Just as likely as it is for you to "burn out" of Runescape or take it a little easier after you obtain a goal (post max blues), the same applies to somebody that spends their expendable (or non expendable) cash on Runescape. What happens with after somebody from a conjunction of buying mtx and putting a fair bit of their time into the game, that they max, get that 120/200m goal, or dear god they achieve 200m all skills? They've skipped the other aspects of the game that we have enjoyed in order to earn money, they likely haven't bossed much, don't have much of an interest in daily shop runs, they aren't going to go back into that because well what's the point? Earn money to achieve a goal they have already achieved? You could make the arguement that they might find a new appreciation for the game in the skill in trying to navigate the tile and tick system of Runescape in its PvM, and some certainly do, but as Psychology tells us, people that are incapable of delayed gratification, are impulsive ect, the people likely to give in and pay for MTX are not very likely to invest time into learning the ropes of other areas of the game, they want to be the best and trying to learn is going to be a roadblock, try teaching somebody that bought their way to one goal that they cannot do so in another, most will give up. So, essentially, those that have played for a while, Jagex expects you to do so almost irrespective of what content they make for you. Whales, old a new, well Jagex are getting their moneys worth out of you, irrespective of whether you crash and burn in game or irl because you've spent your pay check on that new elite outfit.
Now to content being added to the game, retrospective to the time it is being done so. The biggest controversial update that Jagex did, with the intention of modernisation, that made a lot of people very angry and has since widely been considered a bad move, EoC. MMG said they got it wrong, most players would agree that back then it was a shitshow, from the tutorial in beta mode, to the horrible horrible poll that justified (didn't really) the introduction of the EoC update, even our big man mod pips said in this presentation that it its implementation was so horribly done, that if it was done better, even OSRS or the legacy combat mode to RS3 may not have been necessary. Incidentally, he went on to say that the SoF update, while controversial, was a much better update due to the fact that it was done in small, incremental updates "the players were less upset about that one" because it wasn't such a big massive change to gameplay. Yeah, you can see how much of an outstanding guy he is. Anyway, apart from that, these few years to their credit we have had some pretty neat bosses for the best of the best, something for people that aren't quite as good at pvm, new players, and of course the better guys to test their mettle at. Elite Dungeons, while a complete convergence from what Dungeoneering original stood for, are quite good on their own, if you ignore just about everything from the initial updates, the boneheadedness of the scales GE limit, and perhaps, to my point, the graphical update models to t90/t92 models. The artists ability to ignore veterans and people that have spent bills on their armour, that aren't happy with the models, and just let them know that well its better for the game I think is something quite telling.
This year in particular has been quite telling in Jagex's new visions, emphasis on "events" and reforming the game, all the new skilling updates for low to mid level players, deep sea fishing, idols, line firemaking, guthixian memories. The big updates that they are working on, mobile, solely with the intention of bringing back players and gaining new ones, Mining and Smithing, reforming the game old skills in quite a big way, to make them more relevant and easier to train. Solak, of course, to their credit is a great new boss for the better of the best, it does have its criticisms as far as nothing for the top crop of PvMers to shine with, but just getting a kill does show quite some PvM ability. Previous years right, started off with a bang in the Memorial to Guthix secret release, players loved the secrecy and praised Jagex for it, until all other secrets ended up being horrible updates and Jagex went back to being a liiitle more communicative with us. Nex Aod again was a great release, a nice nod back to one of if not the best boss introduced to pre eoc, we had a few nice qol updates, invention got its batch 2, we got skillcape perks, ect. But we also had menaphos, an attempt to force the completionist into hundreds of hours of low level content to retain their capes, the quest line forced out which were widely considered quite poor, and the extension to 120 slayer being one new dungeon and a bunch of new mobs quite generic in their mechanics. We also got the fayre, the beach, and quite a few events qhich Jagex gathered quite a fair bit of criticism for, in being unable to complete these without referring to MTX, Jagex then created their unfinished business action word, which they have since rescinded, with the exception of some of the stuff on that list that they have since done, or are still working on. I'm not going to go back through the years, you can do it yourself but with this point I just wanted to show this parallel between content created to calm down the vets, vs the push for creating content for new and returning players.
So, Jagex are and have started developing and creating content for players that promote game growth, they make a big chunk of their money from these players, so what's the issue? I think to answer that, you have to look towards what updates we are not getting as a consequence. Draw a comparison between the release of NXT and the decreasing release of new quests and environments and new models to the game. Jagex have stated many a time that through various attempts to modernise the game, content takes far longer to create, due to higher graphics standards, to unravelling spaghetti code, you name it. As a consequence for this, quests take much much longer to develop and that is quite evident this year. Last year, of course we had those atrocities that were the menaphos quests, we did have back to the freezer, that silly Runescape humour and story that we love and of course the much anticipated Evil Dave quest. This year we've had YOU ARE IT, and the conclusion to the pirate quests. Compare this with the year 2008, we had dealing with scarabas, the chaos tunnels, as a first resort, catapult construction, kenniths concerns, the easter event, perils of ice mnountain, toktz-ket, dill, smoking kills, rocking out, spirit of summer, all fired up, meeting history, summers end, defender of varrock, and of course While Guthix Sleeps. Pretty big shift right? Now you could say that quests are not that important for Jagex, it takes a few months to develop one, some times even half a year, in rarer cases even over a year, and you might get 1-3 hours content out of it, players play through them, and that's it. That's a fair case, so what about other content then? What other content did they use to make for players that wasn't quests to make up for the players that didn't have much of an interest? Well there was PvP updates, a concept that Jagex has all but given up on. Seasonal events, little miniquests, very seasonal, that brought the community together to save the world from father christmas or the grim reaper, they've been replaced with well our famous live events.
We also had small little incremental additions to our skills, back then we would get a new slayer creature that would fill some new niche, Jadinkos with an upgradeable degradeable whip addon, the bolas ect with smallish little uses here and there. We had minigame updates and new minigames, aside from the thaler system that was the last nail in the coffin to most minigames, not much is really available, they've all pretty much been killed off with the exception of spotlights. Small little here and there's that added to your gameplay, the veteran player looked forward to every week because every update was something that they could likely try out and benefit from. Now you might make the argument that we've hit the roof, all skills and content for them do go up to 99, that there is nothing more to squeeze into them, but I disagree. We've all got niches, people like training in different ways, most skills don't really have high effort high reward methods, largely due to priff being too good for everything, but skilling itself has been largely neglected over the years in favour of trying to make sense to the update that was EoC. EoC still isn't really great mind you, it has its problems with Jagex being racist to melee, and supremist to magic which just about overshadows everything in every situation where magic isn't at direct detriment to the player. So, the question isn't whether Jagex can bring more life to every weeks update, from a design perspective, it's just that doing so isn't really that important or a priority, when they are focusing on getting new players in.
You might even think that that in itself is fine. That vets will stick around, new players bring in the money, focus your time and effort on them and everything will be sweet. But this in itself has its flaws right? What happens when a new player does reach the endgame and works through to max or gets a few 120 stats under their belt? It isn't hard to do, people have achieved it under a couple years, especially when the early game is increasingly made easier, and MTX increasingly becomes more and more overpowered. They are then cast aside too, Osborne will come on reddit quelling their concerns that they are being looked after too, they might get a quest or two every year, and a new boss, and a couple updates to the combat system to make it not stupid, but its a vicious cycle. Bring people in and back, have them play through what is available, then they quit in frustration, then bring them back with a new event, they get through what you've released and then they get to a point where they are so fed up that they write a 15k character essay on reddit.
So in summary, I guess, if anyone does read this and doesn't just look at the wall of text and laughs, older veteran players don't make much money for Jagex, so they are focusing their efforts elsewhere, which speaks to much of the content we have (and haven't seen recently) Runescape is being shaped up to be marketable and enticing for the potential player, but you've stuck around through SoF and TH like a frog in slowly boiling water and you're either gonna stick around to the end or leave, at which point Jagex has made enough money from you. Thank you for reading if you did, I think that I just had a bit of a creative outlet and decided to take it out on Runescape.
Cheers.