We keep seeing this cycle, especially in regards to sailing content, where new stuff is introduced and it’s either preemptively so undertuned as to be dead on arrival (like Belle’s Folly, Horn o’ Plenty, Aquanite Hopper, and the vast majority of skilling and combat stuff on the vast majority of islands), or it’s this. “Oh no, rubium is a just-barely-worth-doing afk smithing method for irons and an easy but incredibly expensive method for mains! And the mining exp is capable of rivaling a 20-year-old method that’s unlocked at level 45 and is notorious for being a completely horrible miserable hand-obliterating activity but we still treat it as the gold standard for some reason! We’d better completely crank the knobs on 500 variables all at once to make sure nobody will ever engage with this content again.” I’m sure there’s already plenty of discussion about the problems with the proposed changes. How removing tick manip and cranking down the exp doesn’t make sense. How incendiary cannonballs are not so massively desirable that they alone can make rubium the “valuable resource” the devs want it to be if the exp reward is demolished. How “also we’re just going to randomly make you get way more splinters for no reason” completely flies in the face of that stated desire to keep splinters “valuable.” But I kinda want to get at something more fundamental here, which is: why is the dev cycle like this? Why the dogged insistence that no new skilling method, no matter how many quest or level requirements it’s locked behind, can ever be allowed to compare to the stuff that’s been in the game since it was being developed by a couple teenagers? Why does every unintended consequence result in a dozen variables all being massively changed instead of one thing tweaked at a time to see how it plays out? Why are there so many unintended consequences when it comes to stuff where relatively simple math could have predicted the outcome, or in cases like this where tick manip on rubium was already identified way back in the sailing beta? And I can’t help but feel like the reasons for this neurotic panicked damage-control dev cycle probably have to do with my other question: Why did I have to make a damn Reddit account to post this? Feedback for this game is decided by the whims of a social media website. If you have an opinion about a change or addition, your only hope of being seen at all is to pray you go viral on Reddit, and at the same time that the right mod happens to be browsing. Or of course you can go to the discord! And try to get a word in edgewise between the loud handful of guys who vocally hate anything that makes the game different from when they were 10. If you want your voice to be heard, you just have to hope your post is snappy enough for the Reddit “hot” algorithm to uplift it, and shout louder over the people who are constantly shouting all the time. And it doesn’t feel like there’s any way that such a random, lopsided way of receiving feedback can possibly be good for the direction and health of updates. The opinions of the loudest people in the room aren’t going to come anywhere close to representing the feelings of the playerbase as a whole. And feedback only being possible in public forums like this, in a community notorious for having some very toxic elements, discourages anyone from saying anything if they’re not up to dealing with flaming and vitriol. So yeah, the proposed rubium changes seem really unnecessary and overreacting, and if tweaks are deemed truly necessary they should really slow down and stick to one change at a time. But even more than this particular fiasco in the current moment, I really would just like to see some kind of feedback form added to the site, instead of the wild west of social media and Discord being the only places to give feedback about new and proposed changes. And I’d also like the devs to just, focus more on adding stuff that is cool and fun and interesting and worth doing, without completely chaining themselves down with this dogmatic view that no new skilling content is allowed to even come close to disrupting metas so old they could register to vote. If this is the dev team’s response to a new skilling method that’s kind of worth engaging in, it really doesn’t get my hopes up that leech fishing or the new island crafting activity will be worth bothering with at all. submitted by /u/lizard_online
Originally posted by u/lizard_online on r/2007scape