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The Future of RuneScape

Hey everyone!
Here's the transcript for the fourth live Q&A in which Mod MMG and Mod Mark discussed what the future holds for RuneScape! Once again, pass your thanks to Mod Anon for typing the transcript up!
You can watch the video stream here .
1. If the Evolution of Combat is not RS3, what are the major marks or distinctions of RS3?
MMG: The project name is RS3 but what we end up calling it is yet to be seen. We’re trying to bundle together our most formidable update that we’ve ever done both technically, be that graphics or audio, controller input, the full works as well as also some really compelling content. Clearly, the Evolution of Combat (EoC) is a big step forward towards what we’re trying to do but we’re also hoping to have some really interesting and innovative content too that we haven’t spoken about yet and we think that our players will really appreciate.
Mark: We’re really looking for an improved experience for the players, so we’re talking about updated audio, full tunes. I listened to an absolutely amazing few tracks the other day. New tunes for the website, new tunes for the opening experience of the game. We’re also looking at a new top level interface, so new ways for players to interact with the product and also things like an improved world map. It’s really improving those things that you experience and take for granted every day when you’re playing RuneScape. As Mark says, we’re also looking for some really cool pieces of content to put alongside that. I’m keeping my cards a bit close to my chest, really, in terms of what we’ve got planned. 2013 is going to be a massive year for RuneScape. There’s going to be some really, really big things happening from a storytelling perspective and also the game play of RuneScape. From all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never been so excited about a year’s worth of content. RuneScape 3 is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what we’re going to start with and then you’ll see all the cool stuff that we’ve got planned for the rest of the year.
2. I’d love to see the lag fixed. My computer is no slouch on graphics but crowded areas are still problematic. Would HTML5 mean smoother game play?
MMG: In short, yes. Lag is always a tough one for us because what does lag mean? Is it network loading time, is it a low frame rate, or is it the loading between map squares? But in short, we’re trying to tackle all of those and the expectation is that if your computer can run HTML5 adequately, it’ll be a significantly elevated experience.
Paul: So what do you call lag? I appreciate that different people have different ideas about it.
Mark: Yeah. It’s interesting that different people will shout about lag in the game, and sometimes it is things that we can do something about like where it could be graphics that are running in the area, the amount of players that they’ve got running about but sometimes it is their network and there’s not a lot that we can do about that. So that’s why sometimes it is frustrating when we hear people complaining about lag but actually the issues that they describe or the setups that they’re running or the networks that they’re part of aren’t necessarily anything to do with us. The reason why we want to provide lower settings so you can turn all your settings right down, so if you don’t have a very good connection you can still enjoy RuneScape. One of the key things about HTML5, fingers crossed, is that the game looks better, sounds better, feels better and runs faster. That is really what the bottom line is of what we’re trying to achieve.
MMG: And hopefully in time, play on more devices.
3. Will you do something similar to what you did with classic and leave a few servers that are strictly RS2 while there are new servers for RS3?
Mark: Back when we did RuneScape 2 it was such a huge leap; it was so different from the version of the game that we were running it was impossible for us to migrate everyone over so we gave the players the choice about what they wanted to do, whether they were going to play the old RuneScape which was quite different in the way that a lot of the key functionalities that you performed in the game or you could move over to RuneScape 2.
This time, it’s an upgrade to the entire game and an upgrade to the experience, it’s really not a huge shift in terms of the little bits of game play that the players are interacting with, so that isn’t the plan. Everything will be upgraded to the new game and it won’t need to have that choice because we’re confident that everything that we’re doing are things that players will want to experience.
MMG: We’re not changing the underlying mechanics or systems within the game so it’s going to be played the way it was played before but you can choose whether you still want to use point and click or the keyboard. We’ll give you more variety and choice in terms of how you can enjoy the content rather than having changed the content, per se. It’s the next generation.
4. What can we expect lore-wise in 2013?
Mark: It’s a massive year next year. We’re looking at moving the game forward in terms of the key players that are involved in terms of the NPCs. The relationship between the player and the gods is a really big thing that we’re doing next year and we’re going to be doing a lot more events; a lot more things that are happening now that are relevant to the players right there and then in the game. So, events that they can get involved with which are run over a period of months where the actions that the players have taken dictate how the environment evolves, how the game evolves. That’s really cool and the gods are very central to that storyline.
One of the things that I’ve been talking to the team about this year is the way that the narrative works with the rest of the game. In the past we’ve sort of kept the narrative to just the quests but actually, I think you can make the narrative work for everything and if there’s a little bit of storytelling or narrative involved with a minigame or a dungeon, I think it enriches the experience for everyone. Expect to find lore everywhere and not just tied to the quests.
Paul: Will that be tailored to the player to a point? So everyone’s game will be slightly different, almost?
Mark: Well, kind of. The key thing is almost to allow the players to choose sides and decide what they’re doing and how that’s going to contribute to the game. Let’s say you’re mining, and every time you’re mining you get some additional thing, I don’t want to say too much, and you choose where that thing goes; what god it goes to, what actions it’s supporting and then they’re using that thing to get bigger and then after a certain amount of months you can count up how many things have been given out. This is deliberately cryptic! You can then decide who gets these things and then whoever gets the most things gets to do cool things in the game. I am aware of how many times I’ve said things and to be honest with you, I’m talking about what we’re planning to do next year and we’re not even in October yet.
A lot of these ideas are really fresh in my mind; they’re things that I have discussed with my team in the last week or two. Even though I’m lucky enough to be the lead designer, I don’t want to come up with all the ideas. What I’d rather do is create a really cool framework and say this is the kind of outcomes that I would like and then let my team decide what gets filled. I’m just giving them the pot; they decide how that pot gets filled. I don’t want to tell you too many of my ideas because I know that the team are going to come up with better ones. As always, it’s a case of choosing which ideas we like the most and then deciding which ones we’re adding to the game, but don’t worry, I have a couple of reveals for later on.
5. Any updates for the wilderness to revitalise the art of PKing?
Mark: Yes. We’ve got a big project planned for early next year, specifically involving the wilderness and it will be some of the activities that really start this whole thing rolling for next year. Some of the cool ideas we’ve had are kind of like war bands walking across the wilderness where you’ve got generals and their rank and file. They’re sort of fighting each other and you can choose how you get involved. We’re also looking at putting some more unique resources in the wilderness to encourage non-PKers to go in there. We’ve been looking at all sorts of really cool ideas to do with the way that we can encourage more types of people to go into the wilderness. A lot of the EoC was planned around making PvP combat more interesting and therefore more engaging for more players.
So, big update planned for the early parts of the year, specifically with the wilderness then towards the end of the year we’ve got some other crazy ideas and things that we could do to encourage more people to be there. All sorts of things to do with swapping XP around and things like that. Well, again, these are really early ideas. It’s one of Chris L’s ideas, actually, who was sat here with me last week. It’s just to do with the way that you could go into the wilderness and build up XP resources and when you leave you cash them all in but if you die you can steal not only those resources but the potential earned XP off of people at the same time. It’s a really cool idea, it’s exciting, whether or not we choose to do it next year I don’t really know but it’s some of the ideas that we’ve got on the table right now.
I’d like to do things like improve the agility return from the agility course that’s there, and make it more viable for players to go there and train their agility but obviously then you’re encouraging more people to come and risk their loot. We’re also looking at things like player-jacking, specifically EoC for example will fix the issue where when you eat food, you can suddenly drop out of combat with your opponent and someone else can come in and get involved; that’s going to get fixed. We’ve also had a lot of interesting conversations on pile jumping and player jumping so there are lots of small things that we are planning to do along with a big update at the beginning of the year. We are checking the forums on this topic every day.
6. You re-released Classic. Will you ever re-release other versions such as the 2004-2006 period?
MMG: No.
Mark: There we go. We’re interested in the future. We’re interested in making cool content for the future, not looking back at the past. I also think, quite often people look at these things with rose-tinted glasses. They believe the past to be more exciting than the now because they think fondly of those memories. I love cartoons, I’ve loved cartoons all my life and it is interesting when you look at satellite TV when suddenly they’ll run a whole load of old cartoons, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, for example. I watched a couple of episodes of that the other day and I was very, very disappointed. I remember how much I loved it when I was a kid.
Paul: The theme song’s still got to be great though. That was my favourite bit.
Mark: That was the main reason for watching it, and him chopping up the apple, I seem to remember very clearly. But the memory I had for it was so much better than actually watching it again. I was kind of disappointed. I often think that that’s how people think about RuneScape sometimes. They think about the experiences they had then in their life, especially when people were still at school and they were very relaxed and having fun and now they’re a bit more grown up, a bit more adult and they think about those days quite fondly. I’m not saying that there weren’t some really cool bits of game play there but I love the way that the game has evolved and I want to carry on evolving the game. It’s really strange that one of the things we’re most famous for is the frequency of updates that we do. If all you wanted to do was play one game that never changed, I’m not quite sure why you’d choose to play RuneScape.
Paul: Are there elements from the game that you do fondly recall and may want to bring back?
Mark: Yeah. Rangers often talk fondly about the old days because there were things like the magic shortbow special attack that was overpowered. You could really dominate in combat with something like that and we changed it and they often think quite nostalgically about the time when certain things were balanced in a different way. Although that’s probably not such a great example because I feel like I’m short-changing rangers at the moment although EoC will really bring them back up. I expect to see a lot more rangers and mages running around. Usually, actually all the time we change these things for very good reasons. Sometimes it is difficult for people to understand those reasons as much as we try to explain ourselves. I still miss classic in many ways. I loved my PKing in classic. I like the fact that combat was based around a three-hit exchange that was going on. I loved that kind of content. I try and do a bit of PKing in the classic these days and I hardly ever see anyone which is the right thing because we were focusing on the way the game evolved and now we’ve got a so much better game than we ever thought we could possibly have than eight, nine years ago. I’m going to keep looking forward.
7. When will RuneScape be playable on different devices?
MMG: There’s no date as yet but it is something the team are looking at and actively working on as we speak, so hopefully early next year.
Mark: A lot of the tech that we’re working on now allows us to think about those kind of things in the future.
8. Have you ever considered making RuneScape a console game with online game play supporting systems like PS3 and Xbox?
MMG: Some of you guys may remember four years back when we had a project where we wrote software that would actually output our code onto the Wii and we got very excited about that. Then, the more we explored the possibility with the various platform holders we very quickly realised we couldn’t update our content weekly in those days, which for us would be terminal.
In those days, F2P was not acceptable at all, and one or two have changed their stance on that now. The thing that was an absolute no for me at the time was when every one of them said that you couldn’t play with another platform’s community. They all wanted their own little walled gardens and we did not want to fragment our community for the sake of a device. If that changes in time then I think it is something we will look at but we’re probably more excited about tablets and the other upcoming devices be it smart TVs or anything else like that, where we think the future is going. Perhaps at some point we’ll go full circle and sweep up the consoles too. Technically speaking, there’s no reason why we couldn’t or wouldn’t but it’s just not a priority right now, given all the other things we’re working on.
Mark: It’s also worthwhile saying that RuneScape is an incredibly rich world. There’s so much content there; so many different ideas, so many groups, clans, stories, environments. It’s what we call a really strong I.P in that you could take the RuneScape logo and you could come up with a beat-em-up game, you know, streetfighter style, combat, gods fighting gods, come up with crazy little minigames to do with chinchompas; you could do all sorts of different things. It would be really nice to see other products out there that use the RuneScape Logo and use our ideas but which aren’t necessarily RuneScape, like spin-off titles.
MMG: Well we were going to do that on mobile. We are working on a project for RuneScape which does exactly that. As you play this content offline it helps you support your character online.
Mark: Again, these are some really early discussions right now. It’s a really cool idea. Imagine that you’ve been playing on your PC at home and then you’re on the way to work; you’re on the train. Wouldn’t it be really cool if you could carry on interacting with the game that would be really cool and fun to play? Who knows? You could earn some stuff in the game that you could then use in RuneScape whether that was gold or XP or anything like that. IT would just be a really cool thing to do. We would love for our players to be able to interact with the game and also interact with the community no matter where they were. What if you had a little app on your iPhone where you could still log in to RuneScape, still talk to your friends, look at the prices on the Grand Exchange, those kinds of things? It would be other ways for people to still be connected to their avatar even though they’re not sat in front of their PC at home, and that would be really cool stuff to do.
9. Has development for the new skill started yet?
Mark: Yes! So, first proper reveal of the day. We are currently working on two skills. We’re working on a gathering skill. When I say gathering skill I mean things like mining, woodcutting or things like runecrafting where you actually are gathering the materials, and then another skill which is more like a finishing skill or a production skill as we call them where you’re doing cool things, making new things to use in the game. Those two skills might not necessarily be linked together. I’m not thinking about a new mining and smithing but it’s that kind of thing. We’re looking at a new gathering skill and a new production skill and both of those are in development right now, and they are also linked to the whole change in lore that we have got planned for next year.
No sailing at this time, but don’t forget that we are doing Player-Owned Ports and that is going to be you, building a port, attracting captains, changing your ships, building a crew, sending your ships off to look for certain things and certain adventures. Whilst you yourself aren’t actually on the ship doing things, you’ll get to wave to them and they’ll send you cool little messages as they go along. We’ve been having quite a lot of fun recently, creatively coming up with cool names for ships or coming up with technology to allow players to build their own ship names and those kinds of things. I’m not intending to do anything like sailing just now but player-owned ports is sort of the first step in that direction.
Paul: Will people be able to customise their ships or anything?
Mark: Yup. So, how much do I want to say about this? Yes, you will be able to upgrade your ships, change your masts and do various different things with all the different parts of your ship like cannons or rigging or crew, changing hull size, different kinds of cargo, you know all that. It will be very tweakable. There will be no SvS combat to start with. As always, with every update we ever do, we’ve had say; a thousand ideas and a hundred of those will be put in to player-owned ports. We’ve got all sorts of ideas that we would like to do in the future and more expansions to the idea. It’s incredibly high-level content. We need to look after our high-level players but not forget about everybody else.
10. Can you please stop delaying the elf series? Seriously, can Mod Chris L move onto it as soon as he is done? Quests are more important than bosses as quests usually contain bosses anyway.
Mark: I don’t quite understand the logic there but I love the elf storyline. The problem with that is that we know that the next quest we produce for the elves are going to be a huge amount of effort for us. Not that they aren’t worth the effort but if you decide to put your effort on that it means you’re not doing something else. The elf storyline, the next part of that, we’re talking about a huge elf crystal city. It’s a massive, massive job not only for graphics but for game play, testing, design, audio, everything. We’ll probably ask for more engine support as well if we were going to do something cool like that.
The HTML5 type stuff that we’ll be working on, all the really cool new things that you can do with upgraded graphics, shading, lighting, and textures, all of those kinds of things would be really good for us to have so that we can make a crystal city properly shine. It’s not something that we’re working on right now. I’ll be honest with you and say I’d be very surprised if we did anything with the elf storyline in 2013 although I’d be very surprised if we didn’t at least start working on it for 2014. We’ve thought about if for ages. It’s been on my top ten list for five years. It’s not that we don’t want to do it we just think that there are bigger things, more exciting things that we can be doing.
I know that a lot of people love the elf storyline. It is one of my favourite storylines but we’ve been doing other things like the cool Morytania content that we’ve had recently, and doing things with that storyline, the effort that we have to invest to do those kinds of things makes it impossible for us to also do something like the elves. I’ve got a lot of favourite storylines, elemental workshop’s one of my favourite storylines in the game. I love the puzzles and I really enjoy that kind of content as a player but again, it’s huge effort to produce content like that and at the beginning of every year, like now, we say from our wish list, which are the ones we actually want to do and then what do we want to do that wasn’t even on the wish list in the first place? Things like EoC, for example has been on my list for longer than the elf one.
11. Why did you take down Falador Party Room?
Mark: I don’t understand this question. I was surprised. You know what, I said I’d better go take a look in Falador to make sure it is still there and make sure that Party Pete has not gone off on some sort of long sabbatical or gone off on a bender.
Paul: Or shut down by the local authorities!
Mark: Yeah. For wearing an offensive afro in a built-up area. It’s still there, it’s still working. I went to world 2 the other day and had a cool party. The balloons were still dropping. It’s still there in Falador in the north-east corner.
Paul: Elizabeth, you might just be lost.
Mark: We did move it, it has moved around a few times over the years. But if she says where the Falador party room is, I would assume she knows that it is in Falador. Please tweet in and tell us why you can’t find it or what’s wrong with it, because I’m not sure.
Paul: Maybe it’s like a secret invite-only underground scene, now.
Mark: Party Pete is too much of a party animal to do invite only stuff. He believes that everyone should party equally. Word.
12. People have now been waiting for more than two years to even see a single update in Construction, let alone a large one. Because of this, Construction is one of the least-trained skills. The skill has been in dire need of a large revamp. Looking at the graphics of player-owned houses, when will Construction finally see these updates?
Mark: We have got a construction update planned for next year which is specifically to encourage people to train their own construction levels. Benefits that you can have in your house that only you could use, because a lot of construction you could go to anybody’s house to do it and actually, prayer training is still pretty good to do via altars in your player-owned house. I’ve got a graphics team that are absolutely chomping at the bit to rework the houses. They would love to do that and I intend fully to allow them to do that as soon as we’ve done all the stuff that we’re trying to do now such as reworking the surface areas, upgrading player armour and all of those kinds of things in the short term. Long-term, there are some really cool things we’d like to do with player-owned houses. I was chatting to Mark this week about ideas like player-owned villages, player-owned towns, player-owned cities and the idea of actually taking these cool houses that are player-built and building a street out of it. So you’ve got neighbours, you’ve got people who live near you, your friends, building a little village out of you and your friends’ houses, those kinds of things.
Paul: So maybe instead of having your own home world you might have your village which could be on a set world, or instanced?
Mark: I’m not sure. Again, with the cool technologies that we’re playing around with at the moment the world is our oyster, really. So you’ve got your clans, you’ve got your citadels and you’ve almost got streets of houses for you and your friends. Again, the technology we’ve been looking at recently would mean that maybe it could be instanced; maybe it could exist on a world. Years and years ago, we posted all sorts of crazy ideas around 2002, 2003 to do with the idea of actually being able to buy land on the main game-world and being able to tweak it and make it your own. Whilst at the time that was pie-in-the-sky thinking, we are closer to being able to achieve something like that. I’m not about to say that we’d be able to do that straight away in 2013 but it’s the kind of cool thing that we are really excited about.
MMG: Specifically the user-generated content aspect about it.
13. The forums! When are we getting a full-scale update like text effects, hyperlink QFC’s, better-organised profiles, F2P avatars and more? There is a whole list of great updates for the forums that has been stickied for some time in the website and forums forum and seems to have been ignored. Can we get an ETA on when you’re planning to help out the forums?
MMG: I don’t have an ETA but I can tell you it’s in our top ten of things to do. It’s not the content team that work on that, it’s a separate team called the web systems team. They’ve been flat out doing things like JAG and other updates for us, but it’s way up there on the list of things we want to do.
Paul: Why is it we have the sort of forums that we do?
Mark: Because we’ve got a really cool community! I couldn’t begin to tell you.
MMG: I think part of it is just evolution. It’s just been how the tech has grown up, if you will.
Mark: I think it’s just that we as a company have grown and our forums and game have grown. We have to update those things and the forums are one of the things we really want to work on. You mentioned the thread, the idea of video links, all of that kind of stuff. Being able to embed videos, being able to do more cool things with your avatar, being able to customise the way that you post, they are all things we’d love to do, we just need the people to do it and we’re just not working on it right now.
MMG: Having said that, we are doubling the size of the team. There are 13 vacancies so far. If people have keen interest in Java and other languages and enjoy working on web systems, we’re looking to grow the team ASAP.
14. Are you going to re-introduce tutorial island, and if so, when and what would it be used for?
Mark: There are no plans to reintroduce Tutorial Island. In fact, we are intending to move/delete Tutorial Island in the very near future. The Ariane quests that we are working on at the moment heavily feature the wizards’ tower. The wizards’ tower has always been a bit small and pokey for us and we’ve wanted to do some cooler things with it. If you think about the land-mass of RuneScape, we’re extending the size of the wizard’s tower so we can get more wizards in there and do some really cool stuff. The graphics team have excelled themselves and it looks absolutely amazing. We’ve got Ariane content planned for November this year, similar to the Ozan quests where we released two quests at the same time, that’s the sort of thing we’re planning to do. So in order to make room for the wizards’ tower, we need to move or delete Tutorial Island. Players haven’t been there for a very long time so we’re intending just to get rid of it.
Now, I’ve read a lot of ideas on the forums over the years and a load of ideas from our own members of staff to do with the idea of the return to tutorial island where you go back to an island which is all overgrown and the NPCs there have gone a bit mad and the training rats that you used to fight when you were a low level have all grown up, and the whole place is now overrun with these big rats. It’s a really cool idea. The problem is that that tutorial has not existed in the game for some time. We’ve had all sorts of different attempts at tutorials over the years and the one that we’ve got running at the moment in Taverley/Burthorpe I think is the best one we’ve ever done. It is very much a nostalgia thing.
The idea of having this crazy island where everyone that goes there is on this nostalgia trip about what they used to do, there would be more players that had no idea what it was, that never went there, that only ever read about it so they’d just get really confused. So I think I would confuse more people than make happy if I were to do a return to tutorial island style update. However the idea of going to a place that’s all overgrown and you have to chop stuff away and creatures have mutated, those are cool ideas we could use for other content but I don’t think that it would be right for it to be on Tutorial Island because so many people haven’t been there or experienced it.
Take the classic cape for example. You’ve got an emote where you get a little think bubble that comes out of your head. Most people had absolutely no idea what that was and were saying that it was awful, why we did that and that it was really cheap. Why did you do a thought bubble when you could’ve done a really cool emote? But that was the whole joke because we couldn’t do animations in classic, or at least they were just kind of frames so you’d be fighting like that (one frame at a time). Ah, the memories. So, a load of people were looking at it, wanted to get this cape because it was a new item in the game but had no concept of what it was or what it represented. I think you’d have as many people getting confused about Tutorial Island so that’s why I wouldn’t do it.
15. What and when can we expect at the return of Zaros? It’s been a year since Ritual of the Mahjarrat and the storyline is one of the most intriguing in the game.
Mark: So, big things with Gods next year, as I’ve said earlier. I’m really changing the relationship between the gods and the world and there’ll be all sorts of really cool stuff going on next year. Some of it will be involving the forces of Zaros.

02-Oct-2012 14:26:39 - Last edited on 02-Oct-2012 16:45:16 by Mod Mike

16. More Grand Exchanges. Every time I go to the GE, it lags because so many players are there at once so maybe putting a GE in Falador or Seers Village would be a good thing, or even Al Kharid.
Mark: That is something we’ve thought about. If you go to Keldagrim you’ll notice on top of the big Castle-y thing in the middle there’s a trading floor. We thought about putting a minigame there for a while, putting a different version of the grand exchange there, and even come up with new minigame mechanics to do with stocks and shares and future exchanges. There’s no reason why we couldn’t put more GEs around the game world. Personally there is something to be said for this idea where everybody is trading in the same place. It’s got the whole image of Wall Street or big places where everybody is buying or selling at the same time. I know that there are downsides to that; I know that people can experience lag due to the concentration of individuals with different outfits and different emotes and animations going on at the same time. We have tried to do something about that by spreading the GE out a bit more, so they should be experiencing less lag than they would have done beforehand. The basic answer is yes, there’s no reason as to why we can’t do it and we’d love to do some cool stuff to do with trading and minigames about trading.
17. Do you have any plans in the future for releasing new continents and far-off lands such as the notorious Eastern Lands?
Mark: It’s a bit of a reveal. The players will be exploring elements of the Eastern Lands via the Player-Owned Ports update. So, their ships and the captains that they send out would be doing things to do with the eastern lands and bringing you the spoils. I personally am much more interested in finishing the existing continents right now and making that world map complete than introducing new continents but it’s not something that I don’t want to do and I’d love to have a time where the players could set foot on the eastern lands themselves or even look back at some of the really cool ideas that we had almost ten years ago now to do with islands run by lizard men or things like that. Right now I’m committed to finishing what we’re doing on the standard surface world, if you like. Don’t think that for a second it’s going to stay the same as it is. We have some massive changes planned for things on the surface world.
18. What is the future going to be like for Player Moderators?
MMG: Player moderators are a huge part of the community. They help us do so much and give us a terrific channel back into the community. There are about 2000 in the community at the moment and I think the team want to grow that to about 10,000, so we’ll be actively recruiting ambassadors in the game. In the old days you became a player moderator for reporting which was the biggest achievement. I was always conscious that I didn’t want RuneScape to be a nanny state or anything like that. What I’d love to do is have players that help grow the community however that might be, be it socially, mentoring, whatever else. It kind of showcases them as ambassadors or equally players who have achieved really phenomenal stuff.
I think there are a number of categories we could look at. I want to take it beyond just “this kid said ass”, reported. People who really help grow the game would be what I’d be thinking of. It’s more about advocates, ambassadors, mentors. It kind of feels like there’s a whole lot of opportunity there. A lot of this goes on in-game anyway and we haven’t historically recognised it and given it a voice, and we want to use the player moderator system for that.
Mark: Sometimes it’s just about individuals that choose to spend their game time helping others, people that choose to organise events. I think for me the real badge of honour for a PMod is someone who sometimes in-game puts other people before themselves and that’s what we really are looking for; people who are prepared to do that, not people who are just like “well, what’s in it for me?”. As soon as you say what’s in it for me, you’re not a PMod. The really quality PMods we have now don’t care about the crown and don’t believe they have a better connection to Jagex. I think a lot of people think that if they become a PMod they’ll be listened to more. It’s not how it is and these people who are interested in making the game a better place are not doing it for themselves, they’re doing it for the game and that’s what we want.
19. As new quests and features now include more and more voice acting, will you be looking to redo all the quest dialogues with voice-acting in the future to bring everything up-to-date?
Mark: Yeah, we are. Audio is really important for me. We’re storytellers and we want to have the players involved in this really cool immersive game world. One of the tools we have to make people feel truly immersed in the game world is making sure that the audio is up-to-date. That’s not just voices, that’s the background sounds that they have, the little tunes, the ambience, the experience that they have while going through the game world. Think Ozan, One Piercing Note, Song from the Depths...they’re really important to us and you can see the difference that the audio makes to those kinds of experiences. We’ve listened to some really cool stuff recently, some full orchestral pieces to do with RuneScape which I think have some videos coming out about that. When we go back to the old parts of the game, when we rework the content whether it is from a graphical or story perspective, we want to do it from the audio perspective as well and make these places sing.
MMG: It is one of the things I’d really like to see accelerated and it’s going to need more resources to do, and also which we all feel really strongly as a big win for us.
Mark: We would like to invest more of our team in reworking those old areas and bringing that up-to-scratch. It’s all well and good doing all this cool new content but as soon as a player stumbles into something that’s old, sometimes we’re like “Oh no, we don’t want you to play that because it’s like, eight years old”. Not that it is awful, which it’s not, but it just isn’t as good. It doesn’t have, to use some business talk, the production values that we have now. The benchmarks that we set ourselves when we say this is quality, we can now launch it is so much higher than it used to be.
I think its worthwhile spending the time revamping old quests. It’s tricky because for your existing players, they’ve already experienced that existing content. Sometimes we can change it and allow them to replay it. For example, the Ozan quest elements of it are a replacement for the old quest that we had called Prince Ali Rescue, but we’re not saying to people that if they’ve not completed Prince Ali Rescue they can’t do this. So sometimes there are key elements of stories that we really like but we want to change it so much that we’ll just keep those key elements and not try and keep the rest of it in there. Ariane for example, there is stuff in there which is introduced in the concept of the wizards and the Ozan quests, we’re intending to do things with the Black Knights, the old Black Knights Fortress quest which again is a little bit old and a little bit dated. We’d like to rewrite that content. Sometimes you just have to take the harsh step of just saying “this stuff isn’t working for us”, and it would be better for us to remove it from the game totally and invest the development time in doing something better. Its things that people may get sad about, they look at these things with rose-tinted glasses. I still see people on the forums saying “Oh, where’s Romeo and Juliet? It was my favourite quest” but really, it wasn’t right for RuneScape although we have thought about giving them a bit of a cameo appearance perhaps later on in the year. We’ve got some pretty cool things planned for Christmas and maybe a little bit of Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t hurt.
20. With the 200 ^th quest coming up do you have anything special planned, and if so, what?
Mark: I’ll be honest with you and say we’re not thinking about it at all right now. It would be some time away so I’m not investing a lot of development time, a lot of thought time into the 200 ^th quest. Obviously for the 100 ^th quest we did Recipe for Disaster which was awesome with six-seven different parts all at the same time. For the 150 ^th quest we did the chosen commander which was the big ending to an existing storyline. It will be at least that big.
21. Do you have plans in the long term to increase skill limits to level 120? You may have said otherwise in the past but the game changes by the day and we will seriously need that change in the future.
Mark: No. I don’t want to raise it beyond 99. I think 99 is enough to ask of people. I think going to 120 with dungeoneering was the right thing to do because we wanted to generate this feeling of the end-game in RuneScape. Also, the XP potential at the high levels of dungeoneering are crazy compared to the other skills. The progression curve in RuneScape, particularly the XP curve is particularly steep and I’m not interested in taking it any higher, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.
MMG: We really want to go wider, rather than deeper in terms of new skills.
Mark: Certainly. That’s the best way to keep the skillers or keep those people interested in their levels is to keep releasing new skills. Obviously, if we get to a point where we think the game is already too full of skills then we’ll think about different things. I think a good example of that is what we were kind of giving lots of spoilers on last week, which was the idea of equipment you can level, weapons you can level, pets that you can level, allies that you can level up. If you look at something like temple trekking, you can level up your little friends as you go through those things. I really like that idea. I love the idea of saying “Here is my pickaxe, I have levelled up this pickaxe. It can do things your pickaxe can’t do.” You can add mechanics that can get skillers really excited and those kind of people that are really interested in getting their levels up really high but you don’t actually need to generate a new skill in order to do that.
22. Will we ever see a day-night transition in terms of lighting, similar to what you did in the clan citadels, within the entire game?
Mark: It sounds cool, but I’m not sure that the development effort would be worthwhile, personally. I think that there could be better things that we could do with our time. Having said that, I know that it is something that is cool and exciting and the new graphical tech that we’re playing with at the moment would allow us to do better things with our lighting. It’s really quite cool, some of the things that we’ve been looking at. Dynamic lighting, the way that it affects the environments that you’re in, flickering lights etc. We have elements of that in RuneScape right now; we could do more with it.
There are also bigger questions such as “When is day and night? Is day and night predetermined by us? Does it run on UK time? Do we have different day-night cycles running for different servers? Do we mimic the day-night cycle for where you’re logging in from in the game world? It asks a big question. If you say that it is just going to run on UK time, then those players who play at the same time every day are only going to ever see day or night. There are lots of complications there. We do use light a lot in the game. Whether it’s like, no light at all if you’ve got your candle extinguished down in the goblin mines or in Morytania where if you go in different areas we change the lighting or change the relationship between light in the game. I quite like those effects and I would really like to do more with that. The concept of having a day-night cycle would upset that kind of stuff. It sounds cool; I’m just not sure if it would be worthwhile.
I have played a lot of games over the years where when it gets darker, it gets more dangerous. So the idea of creatures coming out at night and preying on the weak and innocent is quite a cool idea. But like I said, I’d rather have an environment where that kind of happened naturally. For example, you could have somewhere in the fairy kingdom where there were mushrooms that grew at certain times of the day and they would emit a certain kind of light that would attract other creatures. You could do a really cool hunter update where you could be lighting fires, attracting creatures to the flames out of the darkness. That kind of stuff would be a lot cooler. In fact, some of the stuff that we did with Firemaker’s Curse, that kind of idea would be something quite cool to do where you’re actually, your light sequences are actually part of the game play. I think I’d rather do that.
MMG: In terms of increasing ambience and stuff as Mark said, I think we’ve got all the tools and graphically we’ll be able to do that even better. I think introducing weather systems and things like that might mean more as it gives us more tools to set an environment rather than just day and night switches in the over-world.
23. Can the in-game user interface be player-customizable? Like moving and dropping interface tabs in the interface slots?
Mark: That is something we would love to do. We’re working on a new top-level interface right now for RS3 or whatever we call it for next year. Those are the kinds of things that we’re looking at right now.
MMG: Way, way down the line with the new architecture. We’re also hoping to make it more pluggable so that players can actually hook into it and customize it but that’s quite far down the road.
24. Would it be possible to focus more on the small changes to RuneScape? The Patch Notes and In Other News often excite me more than the main update of the week. These changes are almost always popular amongst players, especially the more experienced ones. These small updates don’t take long to sort out and therefore are really worth it! (very high return for time invested).
Mark: That’s always a good thing, obviously. I think its worthwhile pointing out that on average, the smallest pieces of game content that we work on when that’s the update for the week is a minimum of eight weeks and sometimes there’ll be small little jobs that we can identify and can fix and can do something about. Generally, each one of those could take a week of time. So there’s no such thing as a small fix, really. It’s not like one developer that’s spent an hour on something that’s not graphically supported audio testing, etc.
I love those small updates and sometimes, a few years ago, we had these weeks which were just a collection of these tiny little updates and different tweaks to different things. They’re really important to us. Help us to identify them. The forums are absolutely great for suggestions but they tend to be absolutely massive, huge ideas. It’d be really cool if we could have those tiny little ideas as well, which would be really good for us. I believe you’re planning to do something with Patch Notes as well in the near future?
Paul: Well, the Behind the Scenes videos that we do and shout about are exciting, with the big updates that are coming and the really big exciting things, but there are lots of other tweaks and changes that go on which are reported each week. They do tend to go under the radar a bit and we wanted to make a weekly video that highlights those points, because it can be quite dry to just read a big wall of text about a tweak here and a tweak there. We’re going to be putting some videos together, probably coming out in the middle of the next month; I think is when we start. So yeah, it’s a work in progress.
25. Can Jagex do anything to increase the quality of feedback response? Whilst the Q&As are a nice start, it seems that with every update our feedback is passed on, never to be heard of again. Could you perhaps follow through on feedback better, especially when it’s a big issue such as Solomon’s General Store or Squeal of Fortune?
Mark: The feedback that we get is entirely up to the players, the quality of the feedback that they give us. One of the things that we kept going on about in last week’s live stream was that it’s no good giving us a one word answer on something. We need to have decent feedback. We need people to tell us how they feel about something, why they feel about it that way and what they would suggest to change.
It is a shame that we can’t personally reply to every one of those pieces of feedback. It’s the same sort of thing with the suggestions forums where people are like “Well, I want you to recognise that you’ve listened to my suggestion because it’s my idea and when it goes into the game I want you to credit me for my idea”. Every day, I go into the forums and someone says that we should have horses in the game, and this is what horses should do. Every day, thousands of people do that for the first time. People have talked about horses for at least eleven years in RuneScape, even people in this building. We can’t individually reply to each and every one of those people and say “well done, you came up with the idea of horses”. It would be great to do that but it would be a huge amount of man-hours to do something like that. We have one of the busiest forums of the world. We would have to have ten times as many staff right now, a much bigger building in order to answer even a quarter of those. It would be impossible for us to do that. I would love to, but it is just not feasible.
Trust me when I say that the feedback is listened to and is passed on. We just don’t always have the time to reply. Those people that we do reply to, that reply doesn’t get copied and sent to everybody who’s ever come up with that suggestion or come up with that feedback. It is listened to, I absolutely promise you, but it is difficult for us to personally reply to everything. More feedback please, and keep it coming.
Paul: I know that one of the things we want to do with the next season of RuneCast is to do a bit of a follow-up or follow the process through the chain so that people can see how their feedback is taken and then put into the game. We do want to be following that feedback process a bit more and we want to do a lot more of these Q&A sessions in the future and I know that at the end of these sessions there’s always going to be questions that have been left unanswered. We want to be able to use RuneCast as an opportunity to follow-up on these sessions and get more questions answered if we can and see where the thoughts and ideas which come up in these sessions end up.
Mark: Yeah. That’s one of the really cool things about RuneFest because someone can give you an idea and you can say “Okay, here are some of the elements of that idea that won’t work. What would you do? How would you reconsider it?” The ideas that we have come in, the feedback that we have come in are really small things, but the work that it takes for us to turn that into an actual change for the game is absolutely massive. Everybody always underestimates the effort that it takes to produce content. It’s impossible to engage in extended dialogue with someone in order to dissect their feedback which is why it is so much better for us when we have something that is really well-laid out, well-thought about because we can just take it and go “Oh, all right, that makes sense”. It’s so much easier for us to do anything with that kind of feedback.
26. Do you think that RS will ever go completely free-to-play and will we also see multiple characters per account?
MMG: Multiple characters per accounts, yes as part of RS3 or shortly after. As for completely F2p, we don’t know. Certainly no firm plans to do so and I think we want to continue to offer a VIP experience to our members. They’ve helped us achieve pretty much everything we’ve done to date. We want to keep that and respect that. At the same time, we’ll have to see what the future holds. There are certainly no fixed plans at the moment but
Mark: Right now our focus is on membership and about giving a good experience for our subscribers. That has never changed.
27. Could the gods be more involved in the game in the future? Could you align yourself to a god and would you increase combat levels to allow for stronger enemies?
Mark: I will encourage people to align to Gods. Right now they can do some cosmetic stuff to show which ones they like. I would like to do some more of that. Imagine gods trying to take over the world, Imagine gods wanting cities and creating big fights, changing the shape of the city itself and watching the city evolve as these gods start duking it out. Something like that would be really cool.
28. When can we expect a major update to Kandarin? The whole area seems sort of bland and under-used.
Mark: It is one of the areas that we’ve neglected too much, places like Ardougne for example. I’ve been working with my graphics team quite recently on reworking those environments. The same goes for Seers Village. There are big spaces in Kandarin which we haven’t touched for a long time and I would like to do something about that.
29. Will RuneScape be released in other languages like Dutch? I know that the Dutch community is very large.
MMG: The current plan is only Spanish for Q1 next year and we’ll be looking at other languages beyond that.
Mark: Very soon. We’re working on it right now. There are no plans for Dutch at the moment.
30. I understand that Optimus is coming out in bits and pieces. Can you tell us by when this will be implemented completely? Most of the community thought that Botany Bay was the end of bots; however they are still around, especially at dragons and chinchompas. What kind of information can you tell us about the release of Optimus? Are we looking forward to another year of continuous botting or is it a matter of a month or so?
MMG: When we launched Botany Bay, we wanted to be very careful. It is a very powerful system unlike the previous system which just broke bots, and then once they worked around the system they were back in, so it was very binary as to whether we had a plague or not. As we indicated in the previous Q&A, this looks at behaviours. It is significantly more sophisticated than anything we’ve produced before and with that, it’s also incredibly powerful. We’ve eradicated bots from a number of areas very effectively and that also includes gold farming spam. We also, accidently, banned some 40,000 innocent players last week just because of a minor tweak on the algorithm. With that comes great responsibility. I’d rather have a handful of bots than ban an innocent player any time of the week. We’re being very careful and measured. We’re continuing to expand the surveillance of it and we will be targeting areas in series over the next few weeks and months. This all starts on the basis of safety and the last thing we want to do is ban legitimate players. We’ll keep moving it out and we’ll keep stamping this problem out. I’m confident that this is not something that can be worked around and we’re comfortable to take our time and deal with it properly once and for all rather than just what we had the last time with the big bang, no bots for a few months and then basically an epidemic afterwards.
Mark: They should really think about Botany Bay as the beginning of us solving the problem rather than a be-all-end-all solution. We’ve got to be careful with the way that we introduce these things.
MMG: Oh, we unbanned and fixed all of those 40,000 accounts!
Mark: It’s not dangerous to log in to RuneScape or anything like that. We fixed the problem incredibly quickly so no one has lost out. All the accounts were back in action within minutes.
31. What are the plans for the Dragonkin in the future? I love them and I would love to see more of them soon.
Mark: I love the Dragonkin. They were partly my creation I guess. I’m a big fan of that and the whole idea of this force defending the Stone of Jas would definitely come into things in the near future. It’s one of my storylines so it is stuff that I am very interested in doing.
32. Will we ever see a use for Firemaking? I’ve seen plenty of uses on the forums for the skill but all that’s been added are different ways to train.
Mark: I’d very much like to do that. I always talk about the fact that I’d like to see multiple ways of players training their different skills whether it’s high effort, low effort, community orientated or via quests, those kinds of ideas. At the moment there are a very small amount of things that you can do with Firemaking, although actually things like lighting the Beacon Network is something I quite like. Perhaps we didn’t get it quite right and I’d like to see more of that kind of stuff. With Firemakers Curse we introduced some other ways of training Firemaking as well, other benefits you’d get from making patterns of fires on the floors. I’d definitely like to see more of that. We did do quite a lot to Firemaking this year with a quest orientated around Firemaking and a significant other way of training your Firemaking so I don’t think that Firemaking has done badly this year. I would expect us to work on different skills next year, particularly skills like Summoning and Agility.
33. Are there any plans to either remove player-hosted gambling from the game or make a casino for them to operate in?
Mark: It’s a good question and it is things that Mark and I have talked about a lot. Previously I’ve always believed that gambling wasn’t right in RuneScape, but actually when I thought about the activities that they were involved with, it wasn’t too far away from the kinds of things that you do in the Wilderness. RuneScape players are looking for high-risk, high-reward game play. The idea of putting some GP on the result of a flip of a coin is high-risk game play. The downside with what’s currently going on in the game is that the way the players are gambling; there are no rules to support them. They are at the mercy of being scammed which is a real shame and I’ve had some good meetings this week with some of the customer support team on how we can do more to help people who have been scammed and to stop scamming.
Also, we know and we’ve proved that a lot of the GP which has gone through different hands ends up going to gold farmers and being sold which is something illegal and which we don’t tolerate in any way at all. I’m committed to removing the problem we currently have in the game and giving the players an alternative; something which is similar to the kind of gambling that they’re doing at the moment but something that we’re more comfortable with in terms of the way that it works in the game world and also something where we think we can give them the support that they need to not get scammed. There are a lot of better and safer ways where we can provide that kind of high-risk game play without all of the downsides we currently have and I’m definitely 100% committed to doing that next year.
34. You mentioned having a mobile app, how soon?!?!?!?
MMG: We have a few high priority projects on and lots of strong content from a tech perspective. The team is completely slammed. At the same time, this is something we really want to do so exactly when depends on when we can find time to do it. We have already made some progress and spoken to some other people who can help us do this so it is not just going to burden the team here but something that we can do in parallel. It is going to require a lot of other things such as integration with our engine as well which would take time. I’d love to see it in Q1 or Q2 next year, but in reality I just don’t know.
Mark: We’ve never done this before. Quite a lot of the time we can learn as we go along, but the idea of an external product communicating with RuneScape in some way or another is something we’ve never done before. We just don’t know, and it’s new lands for us. You can’t say how long it will take you to explore a place when you can’t even define its size. That’s pretty much the situation that we’re in now.
35. In response to new skills, will they be released together or will they be separate releases with like, a two-month interval?
Mark: Definitely separate releases. I’m hopefully looking at one to be released at the beginning of next year and one towards the end of next year.
36. Any information on the Evolution of Summoning you’ve announced?
Mark: So right now we’re focusing on combat. We’re trying to get combat sorted and then dealing with summoning afterwards. In the short term there are going to be some tweaks to the pet system that we’ve had for a while. In the long term we’ll looking towards a more fundamental change as to the way summoning works. We’ll be changing the amount of time that you have to spend making pouches, dealing with charms, and those kinds of things. Changing the effective strength of the monsters you fight with as well and making them more useful to you. As a player I’m always running around with summoning creatures no matter what I do. I’ve always got a granite lobster with me if I’m fishing or a beaver if I’m chopping down my trees and I don’t see enough of them out there because for a lot of players the effort in order to generate those pouches aren’t worth the return that they give. So really we’ll be looking at increasing the return, making it more justified for you to say that it’s worthwhile you spending your time doing this.
I’d love to get to a point where a player could have a follower behind them. They could have their summoned creature, a pet, a mercenary or whatever so actually you’re not just your avatar running around the game but you’ve almost got a personal army behind you. I’d love to do something like that and getting summoning reworked would be the first step into that journey but as we said from the beginning, think about all the ideas that we’ve discussed so far. The development effort it would take to do all of those things would be impossible if we wanted to achieve everything that we had discussed already, let alone all of the other cool ideas that haven’t come up at all.
37. Will there be a way to revert back to the old ways of how the armour looked?
Mark: No.

02-Oct-2012 14:28:06 - Last edited on 03-Oct-2012 15:29:50 by Mod Mike

38. We love these streams. Getting a chance to talk to and hear back from the team has been quite an experience. Will these streams be continued for other topics?
Paul: I can say yes, they definitely will. We think we’re probably going to do one a month and the subject that will come up is whatever you guys are discussing most on the forums or whatever seems to be the big topic of the day. We want to address those because we’ve got a huge amount doing these streams for ourselves as well and it’s been really good fun.
Mark: Yeah. After every one I’m straight back to my desk writing down a few thoughts and a few results and discussions. I send a few emails out and get people to think about stuff.
39. Where does Jagex see RuneScape being in 2-5 years time?
Mark: In an even more awesome place than it currently is. We want to be the biggest and best online adventure which we believe that we already are, but we just want to keep going and leave people in no doubt.
MMG: The world’s number one online adventure. Going to new countries, new devices and with amazing new content.
Mark: Think about how much the game has evolved since 2001. I’d like to see it evolve as much again.
40. I’ve been wondering for a while but is there going some s upper-crazy-long quest that will let us questers trim our quest cape?
Mark: Maybe. We have got an epically huge, seriously awesome quest for the beginning of next year. I can’t tell you what it is about because it will be too big of a spoiler. It is shaping up to be one of the best and I’m sure the developers will get very upset with me for saying these things. From a design perspective, the things that they wanted to do were brilliant and from a perspective of a player, I was really excited. It’s going to be epic and it is going to be massive. The idea of trimming your quest cape is a bit dated almost, to me. I think the whole fuss about trimming capes is kind of gone. I’m sure people will be very upset if I say that but we’ll see. To me, that could be something you could do for a 200 ^th quest.
41. Rumours about the Agility skill being removed. Is there a possibility that Agility or another skill will be taken away?
Mark: There are a couple of skills, and I’ve already mentioned Agility and Summoning. I don’t particularly like the way that run energy is related to the Agility skill and I would like to change the relationship between run energy and Agility. I would like to add more ways for a player to train Agility and not just ask them to run around courses. Summoning I have already mentioned.
The fundamental problem with summoning is the amount of time you spend making pouches as opposed to the amount of time you spend using summoning creatures. I’ve also got some fundamental problems with Runecrafting.
The principle of ammunition is something which used to be important in game a while ago. I don’t feel like they are as important anymore. The basis of Runecrafting and the idea of making runes is something I would really like to change.
The same goes for fletching. It’s very one-dimensional and a lot of the time people just train their fletching level by making bows and stringing bows. A ranger would rarely be using the fletching skill to actually make their ammunition. They are much more likely to buy it from the grand exchange. There’s a weird mismatch there, the same which goes for a magician. I don’t think many mages make all of their own runes, although I try to, myself. Those are the skills that I would like to do the most to. Agility, Summoning, Runecrafting and Fletching, but there are fundamental ways where I’d like to rework things like Mining and Smithing. The concepts of encouraging people to make their own equipment, level up my X. They are all things that I would like to add to skills. For the short term, Agility and Summoning are our top two. I’ve heard some really interesting ideas recently from my team about changing some of the skills and changing the relationship between how long you spend running back to a bank and running back to a site; changing those kinds of things. It’s interesting that most of the times when you’re mining you’re not actually mining at all; you spend more time running between mining sites. That is an interesting one for me. Again, it’s something that is very unique and very RuneScape-y, but whether or not we want to carry on with that kind of thing I’m not really sure. This is all very long term thinking and fundamentally rewriting the way that skills work is as big or a bigger job than the EoC that we’ve just done. You can’t do all these things at the same time and you’ve got to pick the right moments.
42. How about RuneFest?
Mark: We’re definitely doing RuneFest next year. We don’t know where yet, but we do have all sorts of exciting ideas with places like New York. It was as hard for us to say that we couldn’t do it this year as anyone, because we love going and meeting the players and pulling some balloons. We look forward to doing some cool RuneFest-y stuff next year.
MMG: And to continue doing these, as well.

02-Oct-2012 14:28:39