Forums

"The intention of FSW is to appeal specifically to lapsed players. Right now it is our company policy that our best bet for increasing the health and longevity of RS is to specifically try to appeal to lapsed players (as opposed to new players). As Kalaya mentioned on the livestream, we talk to lapsed players about why they're lapsed and what would interest them in coming back.

FSW is an example of us trying to deliver to lapsed players something that would interest them. The people who are on reddit and in livestreams are not (for the most part) part of the lapsed audience we're trying to reach here - they're either existing players, or players who quit for some specific reason and are hanging around the community waiting for it to be changed (like all the stone spirit boycotters).

The specific thing I'm responding to here are various twitch and twitter polls being run for currently playing players which show overwhelmingly that they don't plan to play FSW, with the implication that this makes FSW a failure - but if no current players played FSW, and a lot of lapsed players returned to RS to play FSW, that would be a huge success!

I get that there is feedback on aspects of this and we'll be discussing that feedback, but in general I think it's good and healthy for us (Jagex and the community) to specifically create projects aimed at increasing the playerbase - it's the only way to ensure the long-term health of the game.

None of this is to say that current players don't matter - of course you do - but by definition we can't grow the game with existing players, and we need to do both."

"EDIT: To the question "why require a new account if it's for lapsed players?" - this is one of the things we've learned talking to lapsed players (especially long lapsed ones) - over 20 years people lose accounts, lose emails, get banned for something they did as a child, get hacked etc. Even if they do still have the account, a lot of players also have kind of mid-level accounts which beyond a vet cape don't really have much on them and wouldn't mind restarting. There's a potentially large audience of ex-players who would love to get back into RS, but don't want to start entirely from scratch - FSW is designed to work well for them."