RuneScape 3 launched two days ago and it’s been really rewarding for us to see so many players of all types getting involved. In this post I’ll discuss how we’re responding to your comments and feedback, and let you know what we’ve got planned next.
Firstly, though, please accept our heartfelt appreciation for the amazing response so far. There’s already been over 20 million votes cast in the Battle of Lumbridge, a mind-boggling amount of interface layouts being swapped across the forums & social media, and some intense competition on the new seasonal hiscores. And that’s just for starters…!
Launch Day
Monday saw a massive surge of people logging in - current, new and returning players. With such a big update and large volumes of players involved there were a few technical hitches, such as instance shards becoming overloaded and loading issues in the first hours of release. The team worked around the clock to get these things sorted, so thanks for bearing with us.
Battle of Lumbridge
As the cornerstone content of the RS3 launch, the Battle of Lumbridge has been the focal point of much conversation – deliberations over which side to choose, discussions of god lore and speculation for what will happen next. Here’s our responses to your main comments:
Battlefield balancing – the world event has been hugely popular and the main area is often full of players, so we’re going to make some balancing changes to further improve spawn rates and fix bottlenecking. We’re also going to re-introduce an improved instancing system to manage the population and resources better if it gets very busy.
XP Rates - Some people have questioned the XP rates from the world event activities – remember that the majority of the XP you can earn is from the XP Lamps from the event Quartermasters. Overall these are balanced to be very competitive compared with rates of other activities.
What about [other god]? – The Battle of Lumbridge is the first world event of the Sixth Age, and others will follow later in the year. The first world event was designed to be an intense and focused scenario, but we’ve got broader and quite different plans for those in the future.
Event outcome – There’s a clear favourite at the moment, so it is a foregone conclusion? Absolutely not! There’s still a long way to go, with many evolutions for the battle to be unveiled, and we’ve yet to see how many players will switch sides to collect both sets of rewards. It’s worth noting that the final outcome only affects story, so being on the winning side won’t affect your rewards rewards – so follow your heart :)
Seasonal HiScores
More! More! – We’ve seen tons of really great suggestions for more seasonal hiscores, and we’ll definitely be taking the best ideas and implementing them for future updates.
Skills – There have been lots of requests for the main skill hiscores to also have seasonal versions. This is definitely something we intend to do later in the year.
New Interface System
Overall, the NIS has been received really well, although it’s fair to say there have been some teething issues, and for some players the lack of familiarity was disconcerting. We’re very happy with the fundamentals of the NIS, but that’s not to say it cannot be further improved, and we’ll continue to listen and evolve the system with your feedback.
In the future we’ve got plans for major improvements for things like the quest log, bank and GE interfaces, and we’ll be listening to your suggestions every step of the way. Right now, we’re focusing on ironing out the kinks, then we’ll shift our attention to making improvements based on your feedback – I’ll list some of these below:
Small screens – Your feedback has highlighted that those with smaller screen resolutions aren’t getting as much out of the NIS as you want. We’ve got some ideas for improving this and will start working on them shortly.
Familiarity – Although there are presets which mimic the RS2 layout, there are still some differences in exactly how it work. While we’re not going to make any radical changes to the NIS, we think we can find ways to make it feel more familiar to those who liked the previous system.
F keys – There were technical limitations which meant we weren’t able to implement rebinding of F keys for launch, but it will be something we can add longer term.
What’s next?
For the next couple of weeks we’re going to focus on feedback, improvements and fixing any snagging issues that remain from launch. August is going to be another epic month for RuneScape. Mod Mark will reveal all in next week’s Behind the Scenes newspost, but it’s going to involve the next Sixth Age quest, a new skill and fantastic new rewards in an upgraded loyalty program!
Thanks,
Mod Pips
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