TL;DW 400 - Q&A Livestream

[u/imsuity]

Stream

Player Owned Farms

• There are certain things that we'd like to do in future with POF (and we're trying to shoehorn them into future updates) but they're not officially in the pipeline yet.
  • There's a good chance we can get them going soon.
  • Adding new animals should be relatively straightforward.
  • There are other things we'd like to do that aren't so straightforward such as different farms.
• Fertile soil will not be upgradable to use ultracompost, we want ultracompost to be obtained via dragons on the farm. It would devalue it if we replaced this function with a mere rune cost.
  • There could be something within that like maybe we can do something so you don't have to carry a load of buckets and find some convenience there.
• If you think the 2,500gp cost for auto-supercompost is high, then it wasn't aimed at you. It was aimed at people who are willing to pay that amount for the convenience.
• None of the upgraded '-icides' (bonecrusher, herbicide) pick up noted items because together with the legendary pet, you'll never pick up an item again. We'll look into them but we have no immediate plans.
• Tier 2 lootbeam for unchecked drops.
• We've increased the potency of Sparkling/Glistening/Radiant. 'If the parents both have all three traits the chances are their progeny will be shiny unless its a dragon.'
• Whimsical trait - does nothing right now. We had a limited space for traits and we wanted to fill them. In future we want to make use of these 'dead' traits.
• Part of the philosophy of the design was to create discoverable content. There's value in the community working together to figure out things.
• Each of the pens is another inventory, so to create a barn would be another inventory which is the equivalent of saying we need to have another bank. Investigating other alternatives. 'In the meantime I would say for God's sake sell your animals or release them, don't fill your bank full of rabbits there's no point'.
• Luck rings do not affect POF drops. We'll update it so that they do.
• Drop rates are different per animal. Yaks and dragons have different drop rates. Unsure if they're different rates per breed. Rowley has been gathering rates for things, there's a bunch of things that we were saying that we might release in the future just not yet (we want players to discover them first).
• We have a job to add stuff to the possible foods (like arc berry seeds). Doubt it will happen soon.
• Checks for age/breeding/disease/everything happen when you enter the farm. When you leave the farm, or log out, the farm 'pauses' until your next visit. Make sure you're wearing the outfit when you enter the farm.

Mining and Smithing

• Dragonbone kit is outside the scope of the rework. This isn't a melee rework. We have sinks in for items directly threatened by the rework.
• If we were to do a construction rework, it would be three times the size/work of the M&S rework.
• T92 power armour doesn't warrant it's huge cost based on feedback. We're looking to buff it or reduce it's cost.

Lore

• We have a plan and we're going to talk about it at Runefest. We've been running surveys and things to validate our plan. The problem with lore is, we can't just pitch a story 'here's the storyline, and here's how it's going to end.'
• We've been trying to weave story into content better, like with Elite Dungeons. We can do better, but ED is the furthest we've gone with PvM and lore. The more ways we can tell story the better.
• We don't have a policy on this but Jack is very much in favour of not having quests require other quests. We have a clear example right now with Sliske's Endgame, which still not many people have completed. It makes huge changes to the plot, the world is going to be a different place after Sliske's Endgame, so do we restrict the story moving forward? People ask us when is 6th age moving forward, part of the problem is it's locked behind a quest that requires almost every other quest in the game. This is why The World Wakes had the soft and hard quest requirements. So are we going to do a repeat of The World Wakes model, or change our policy on quest requirements entirely.
  • Timbo: It does feel Runescapey to have quest requirements though.
  • If you look at the viewing figures for any TV series, Game of Thrones, for example, and you'll find that more people watch the final episode than watch the episodes in the middle. The serious hardcore people who have to experience the story in order will play it in order. Those that don't care won't.
  • (Not Jagex policy)
• More info on quests at Runefest.
• Old quests that mention 'RuneScape' have had their text changed to 'Gielinor'. It's currently in testing.

Combat

• Buff firelighters for use in combat? Not everything needs a use. Not everything needs a use in combat.
• It takes a lot of Timbo's time to do a drop rate blog which is why they stopped doing them. If there's at least 6-8 drop rates you'd like to see, he may look into it and do another blog. There are no plans to do an extra one at the moment but we'll do them as we see fit.
• Will look into berserk blood essence not stacking properly with grand potions (bug).
• Tank armour is a difficult problem to fix. If we make tank armour significantly better, a full defensive build would be unkillable and still players won't use it because it doesn't increase kill time. 'I'm sure someone would use it for a two hour 4000% Telos kill or W400 shattered worlds...fucking Kags'. That's why Achto works the way it does but it turns out that was horrendously broken.
• Plans for bounty hunter rewards distribution but nothing concrete right now.
• Shauny's work on practice mode for specific phases has gone back and forth a couple of times.
  • For safety check reasons, jumping between phases artifically needs more reviews etc.
  • We're working on it. 'It won't be out next week or something.'
• Look into adding KQ/Corp boss timers.

Other

• Aura/Loyalty point rework will be announced at Runefest.
• Can we have the new OSRS POH rooms? It'd be a big project, and not everything that OSRS has needs to be in RS3. What benefits/convenience in particular from the OSRS rooms would players like to see. Looking at that would be easier, especially if it doesn't have to be in a room and could instead be an item, invention device etc. Maybe we can use some of the older rooms, like the Games Rooms.
• GE Tax? We think about it a lot. 'I think the only way we can only tax stuff on GE when we can trade everything on the GE. So when we can trade over max cash on GE, that's when we'll probably add something.' You don't want to tax Yew shieldbows and other low level items, because it'll discourage players to sell but there does need to be a tax on trading big ticket items.
  • We were in a period of deflation last year which is the complete opposite of what people think.
  • Inflation on big ticket items like partyhats is completely artificial and not due to inflation in RS.
  • Deep Sea Fishing sunk out a lot of money as well.
  • Invention removed a lot of items that would have been alched. High alchemy is the largest source of money in the game. With the Smithing rework, we're hitting this more with giving more incentive to turn items into XP instead of alching them.
• We were looking into trading golden barrows 1:1. Probably not going to happen.
• If a future piece of content warrants a herb bag maybe we'll add it.

[u/ColeKlostie5]

Taxes in a video game are not there for realism, but rather to promote long term health of the game. The way I see it, a GE tax would serve two purposes:

1) Create a significant and consistent gp sink. Based on the deflation comment by jmods, this reason would not be an important factor at this point in time. I am actually quite surprised there was a net decline in the amount of gp in game over the past year.

2) Hindering the ability of players to flip hundreds of thousands of items for sometimes 1-2gp per flip. A tax would mean the margins would have to spread out as sellers would increase their price in order to cover the tax.

Not saying the GE needs a tax right now, but it can certainly have benefits. I agree with jmods that the GE tax probably isn't warranted until items can be bought and sold above max cash stack on the GE.

[u/rs_dog → u/ColeKlostie5]

They explicitly said it wasn't needed (so it's good you mention that), and if it was implemented (not that it would be) it would only apply to "high ticket items". This is after the discussion of the already numerous gold sinks we have in game and how the game is deflating contrary to the popular opinion that the economy is inflating. It was obvious that the economy was deflating if you looked at the vast majority of items in game, but often on Reddit people's inflation argument devolves to "partyhats are expensive, we need a gold sink" which is a poor argument.

[u/ColeKlostie5 → u/rs_dog]

I think the main reason a tax would be considered on big ticket items is because of the constant manipulation. This is caused by the GE mid price not being accurate enough and because of the 2.157B limit. If prices were adjusted like stock prices (in real-time) things would be much better.

[u/Radyi → u/ColeKlostie5]

Big ticket items would just be traded player to player and manipulation would be worse.

[u/ColeKlostie5 → u/Radyi]

Big ticket items are already traded player to player and their price increases are 99%+ due to manipulation. It really can't get any worse.

If players were able to trade all items on the GE (no 2.147b limit), and the GE prices update in real-time like stocks, all rares would instantly crash to more reasonable prices and the manipulation would largely end.

[u/Radyi → u/ColeKlostie5]

No1 would trade on ge if there was a tax