Old School has a long tradition of trying new things to see if they work whether this is new piece of content, community events or support initiatives. We are not afraid to try new things, they may not always work but when it does it helps make Old School as popular as it is.
For example, the bot busts have become legendary after they were introduced as a way to show you we were banning bots. The weekly Q&As have come a long way since Ash, Mat and Dan first sat on that red sofa. You also can’t forget killing JMods in the Wilderness to obtain holiday items while they killed all the players surrounding them and of course recreating the Falador Massacre at Gameblast.
This also applies to content, we have delivered a complete clue scroll expansion, Bounty Hunter and the God Wars dungeon; all things which were big and brand new updates to Old School which we were not afraid to get stuck into.
Of course, things have not always gone to plan. For example we are still stuck with the issue of what to do with AFKing in NMZ as well as splashing, and the least said about trying to kill Armadyl 1,000 times the better.
The Runescape Competitive Tournament is no different. The premise of the tournament was to test the waters to see how to deliver a livestreamed tournament as well as whether there was an appetite within the community to see such a thing. The size of the tournament was deliberately small so we could learn from the mistakes that we were bound to make so that future tournaments would be better. If anything was to go wrong, it is best to go wrong in this tournament… and boy did it go wrong.
For those of you that don’t know what happened with the tournament over the weekend, the office network was attacked which made us unable to stream. We were hoping to have additional protection added to the office network prior to the stream but unfortunately we couldn’t quite get it in place in time. So, we were left with the option of postponing the tournament at short notice or carrying on. You know the rest of the story.
Although we were unable to proceed with the tournament, we have learnt a huge amount from it. Most importantly, we have seen that there is a huge appetite for the tournament with over 130k people tuning in and 22k of those tuning in at the same time. Secondly, we need to be better prepared with regards to understanding the teams, who they are and what they are doing. Finally, now we have a better idea of how long the fights are likely to take, we can tweak the schedule to ensure that it is much more slick and you get to see more action. Combining that with more work done on the on screen graphics as well as a few tweaks here and there, we can improve the tournament coverage massively.
So, where do we go from here? The next step is to ensure the network protection goes into place and then have it tested. Once we know it is working we can reschedule the tournament and bring it to your screens once more. With the amount of people who are interested in this tournament, there is a huge possibility that this will get bigger and better of the coming years and you are with us at the very start of the journey.
As a team we are not afraid to try new things and innovate Old School, bringing it to a wider audience and delivering better content.
The Old School Team