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EoC Q&A Transcript

Hey everyone!
Once again we have the transcript from last week's Q&A in which we talked about and answered your questions on the Evolution of Combat! Many thanks to Mod Anon for her hard work typing the transcript up!
1. What made you feel that RuneScape needed the 'EoC Update'?
Mark: I think really the question that should be asked is how come it’s taken so long to do the evolution of combat? The combat system is adorable in its current state but it’s really reached the end of its life. It was becoming increasingly difficult for us to do anything with combat and we’ve had the most awesome ideas in the last few years. The old combat system just didn’t allow us to achieve the full potential for those ideas. For a long time, I’ve really wanted to improve the combat system; make it more fun, make it more engaging and allow players to really personalise the combat options that they have available to them. The old system just didn’t allow those things. It’s fun in a lot of ways but in other ways it wasn’t so engaging. For a lot of people combat was just clicking a monster and you’d sit back and wait for it to die. You might drink a potion; you might eat some food and then in the really high levels of combat you find that you’re manipulating between loads of different interfaces and you actually spend more time playing around with different interfaces than you actually do in combat. The new combat system really gives you loads more cool things that you can do. It looks great, it sounds great and it’s much more fun and engaging. It’s exactly the kind of thing that we wanted to do and we’ve wanted to do it for a long, long time. The new system will allow us to do really cool things in the future as well, particularly towards the top end of the game. For a long time the equipment that players have had to use has sort of ended around level 75, level 80 and it was just getting impossible for us to do anything really cool to the top end of the game and that is what the new system is going to allow us to do. It’s going to allow us to make some awesome content for the hundreds of thousands of players that have achieved really high levels in the game.
2. Is there another update that is of a similar gravity to the EoC that we can relate to?
Mark: I would say that it is definitely as big as the change we made from RS Classic to RS2. In terms of development effort it’s certainly as big as the RuneScape HD project that we did back in 2008. It’s really been a massive thing.
3. And how did that work out? What was the sentiment of the community when you went from RS Classic to RS2?
Mark: It was quite similar actually to how it is now. A lot of people really enjoyed the kind of things that were trying to do. A lot of people were just obsessed with the old game, really. There was a lot of three-hit combat and a lot of the old names that you used to see in RuneScape had things to do with three and hits and things like that. You’d be bound in three rounds of combat with your opponent that you could run away. There were all sorts of tactics in the wilderness in trying to get the first hit on other people. We changed a lot and we wanted to change a lot more but we didn’t really have the ability to do it then and we certainly do now.
4. How was combat back in the day in RS Classic? Do you remember it?
Mark: Yeah. I used to be quite a PKer in classic but it was a very different kind of space. It was very dominated by certain types of equipment and I would say it was very melee-focused as well.
Pi: I was a tank mage so I can argue with that.
Mark: There you go. It was a very different game. We’re very pleased that we made the change back then. It was very important to us and we needed to modernise the game. We needed to make it more accessible to a player that was playing the game then, really. Games change so much; RuneScape is an 11-year old game now. We’ve been going for a very long time and we have to keep refreshing the product. We’ve had weekly updates for a hell of a long time and it’s really important to always come up with new ideas, new features, new abilities, new game play and this is no different.
5. Will the EoC be what changes RS2 into RS3 which was leaked either intentionally or unintentionally in the CEO and VP live stream? And if so then will the transition between RS2 and RS3 be like the transition between Classic and RS2 way back when?
Mark: We’ve been planning the EoC longer than we’ve been thinking about anything like RS3. We were always intending to make those changes to the game. It’s nothing to do with RuneScape 3 whatsoever and certainly there won’t be any dual servers running at the same time; that’s not the plan.
6. Can you tell us anything about RS3?
Mark: No, I can’t. We’re still thinking about it. We’re still looking at different technologies and it’s very exciting. I’m not surprised that MMG mentioned it at all because everybody’s really excited about it and I’m sure we’ll have more information on that for you in the future. I’m not spilling any beans.
7. Would you consider making non EoC system worlds?
Mark: It’s not actually possible for us to do that. The fundamental changes to the combat systems are game-wide so we can’t maintain the old version of the game and the new EoC at the same time. It’s just not possible to have two worlds running with different systems and even if it was, we’d have to double all the development work we did. It’s just not the right thing to do.
8. If the evolution of combat doesn't satisfy the community would you consider removing it?
Mark: The reason why we’ve released it as a beta is so that we can make sure the community is satisfied with the update that we’ve done. It’s an absolutely massive change to the game. We have made loads of changes since we launched the beta worlds. As I’ve said in the past; we’re not going to launch it until we feel that the community is satisfied with what we’ve done. That’s why we’re not rushing to launch it now. We’ll keep changing it; we’ll keep reading the feedback. We want to be comfortable with it and we want our players to be comfortable with it as well.
9. What do you say to those members who claim they will quit once EoC is released because it’s too big of a change?
Mark: I think one of the key things at the moment is that we don’t have a tutorial. Everyone went into the beta very excited when we first launched it and they had problems trying to understand exactly how to use the system. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who don’t understand things aren’t going to enjoy what we’ve tried to do. They’ve gone in there, they’ve got confused; they’ve died to a few boss monsters that they haven’t died to before and they immediately reject the system. We keep changing it, we keep building, and we keep working on the feedback that we’re given. We’re going to be introducing a tutorial quite soon so we need to hear your feedback. Whilst I appreciate that people get angry and they just say they want to quit or that they don’t like the system, what I really need is their quality feedback. It’s so rewarding for us when we talk to passionate players who’ve got real ideas about things that we can do to improve things and that’s why we’ve launched it as a beta. RuneScape is a game that updates all the time. We’re always reading posts on the forums to do with people that don’t like certain things and who say they’re going to quit. Some people do, most people don’t. I remember someone saying they were going to quit just because we changed the smiley faces for the friends list. I loved those old smiley faces but it was certainly not a reason to quit the game.
10. Since September has come and the Evolution of Combat has not been released yet, when will it eventually exit the Beta stage and enter the live game? And what is the hold up?
Chris L: I’d say the holdup is you lot (laugh) but actually, the holdup is because we are taking the beta seriously and we’re taking your feedback seriously. A lot of other games and products say that a beta is a bug test for us. We don’t view you as our QA team although that’s useful. Like Mark just touched on, we really are scouring those forums and I’m making myself present in the beta game and I know that Pi is as well. It’s not being released in September and it won’t be released until we’re happy that you guys are happy and we’re going to keep communicating that. We really listen to an incredible amount of feedback on this. I think 80% of our changes have been since release. It’s not really the same system it was a month ago. It’s changed a lot. I could reel off updates right here but just check my last post on the forum and you’ll see that all of that stuff is player driven and that’s not the first thing we’ve done. It’s something we take seriously and passionately.
Pi: I spend my first hour of every day, every morning scouring through all the feedback that you leave on the forums. It’s really important for us, and at the end of the day we’re making this for you and we want you to be happy. Give us your feedback; be as harsh as you like, I’ve got thick skin!
11. Will (EoC) it be available for free players?
Mark: It certainly will. Just as the relationship between the free and the members game is, there will be some abilities, some features that will only be available to members and some features that are only available to the free players, but certainly they (F2P) will get the evolution of combat.
Chris L: They’ll be getting plenty of stuff with it as well. A new range of armour and gear that’s previously locked or not even existing in the live game at the moment just to make sure that everyone at the top of the free game is on par with each other.
Pi: We’ve even unlocked some members’ content for F2P because we found that there were holes. A lot of the holes in the lower levels were specifically to do with mage heavily, and in some places, range. We’ve given you new stuff.
Mark: So there’ll be a whole load of new equipment for the free game that they didn’t have before.
12. Do you really think the EoC will attract new players?
Mark: It definitely will and I’m very confident of that. We have been doing focus tests, feedback sessions, idea generation and discussions with new players for some time. Quite often, the feedback that we get from them is that the combat system just isn’t fun enough for them. It’s not engaging and like I said earlier, it’s just about clicking on the monster and waiting for it to die. With a modern day audience they want something which is much more visceral, a bit more adrenaline-pumping and a bit more exciting. We just want to make sure that we’re making a modern game for a modern day player.
13. Weapons are no longer unique due to loss of specials e.g. Korasi Special, Excalibur, Dragon Battleaxe, Spear Stuns and D Claws. What do you have to say about this?
Mark: One of the key objectives which I gave these guys (the developers) early on in the project was to make every character more unique. Whilst I would agree that those weapons have lost some of their uniqueness in that they don’t have their own special attacks tied to them, what we’ve done is made a system which allows players to build a character which is different from others. We’re allowing players to be unique with their characters. It’s strange that you consider those weapons to be unique but actually, because of the abilities that were associated with them (the special attacks) everyone was using them. You’d walk around, you’d be in combat situations, be in the wilderness, fighting monsters or anything. Just walking around in Varrock, you’d see people wearing the same gear. You’d see them wearing exactly the same equipment and for me that doesn’t make things unique at all. The new system really allows players to be unique and effectively, we do have those abilities in the game.
Pi: Yeah, we do. We have the special attacks. For instance, Korasi’s is an ability called Chain in mage. We’ve taken a mage attack off of a melee weapon to help the triangle. You’ve got Frenzy, which is just like the D-Claws special attack. You’ve got Rejuvenation which is your enchanted Excalibur special attack. Recently we added the D-Spear special attack to Kick, so you can kick people back now for a tactical challenge. But you know, these current in-game specs had heavy emphasis on what we were going to do with our abilities.
14. I heard some mention about evolving weapons? Could you elaborate?
Chris L: That was one of the things Mark first approached us about when we were looking to rework combat. He called it ‘Level up my X’ where X is the weapon. It wasn’t something the old combat system could do for a few reasons. That now should be possible and the idea is basically that you would start the game with a level one weapon and instead of trading it for an iron, steel, mithril, addy, rune and dragon weapon all the way up, it would be one of those things that would level with you. The design is on the table, but you could channel XP into it off kills etc, but there’s a load of things we could do but the idea would be that the weapon would grow with you. Maybe even do crazy things like decisions you make might make it an evil weapon and cause graphical changes like catching fire or whatever. We were banging our heads together when Mark came up with it. We were saying “this is not possible!” and now it should be and that’s quite an interesting idea we can explore.
Mark: That could be anything as well. It could be level up my sword, it could be level up my shield, level up my boots, level up my summoning creature, level up my mining axe...it could be all sorts of different things.
15. So if you could level up a weapon, would that go 1-99 again or...?
Mark: Possibly, yeah. You don’t have to think about it like levels with a player. It could be different tiers. There are lots of different things that we could do and as Chris says, the old system just didn’t allow us to do those things. While we can take those ideas and make them work with little bits of the old system, it’s wouldn’t be everything we wanted to do. Not only does the new combat system allow us to do these things but it gives us a good five to ten years of systems that we can actually use which unfortunately wasn’t the case with the old system.
Chris L: Just touching upon that, what we’re going to do is release the base version so when we’re all happy with it, that’s stage one and there’s lots of stages to come afterwards.
16. Will computers be able to handle the EOC?
Mark: If you can play RuneScape now, you can definitely play with the new combat system, 100%. We haven’t needed to raise any of the minimum specs for the computers and we’ve built it with our current user base in mind.
17. Dungeoneering won’t last after EOC due to binds, damage output vs. Damage taken. Players now have to complete a dungeon exhausting resources to survive. This creates a disparity between the many accounts with high level dungeoneering who got there in half the time it would take in the EOC.
Chris L: Well, the short answer is that we agree with you. That was definitely the first state dungeoneering was in. We’ve since made a load of changes to it which I’ll list. We’ve got magic changes where staves are super-effective now. Being a mage is much easier and more accessible which was a big problem we had before. The combat triangle is quite harsh so being a solo guy if you didn’t have a bow you couldn’t kill a ranger. We made it so doing the wrong thing combat triangle-wise is not as punishing now in dungeoneering. The bind system is something that I’ve never really been happy with anyway. It’s something me and Mark have talked about and we’re going to look into changing that entirely because people aren’t happy with it and neither are we. This is another good reason to take a second look at that system. As far as XP and time goes it depends on how effective you are. Personally I’ve done some dungeons faster than I have done in the live game, and XP is going to get a second look at as well.
Mark: Yeah, we’re looking at an update next year specifically looking at the rate of XP you get as a solo player. These boys are very keen on that. We’re looking at changing the way that binds work. For example, at the moment you only have a limited amount of binds. What we’d quite like to do, because we’re encouraging people to use multiple combat styles in dungeoneering as well, you might be able to allow them to bind certain pieces of melee equipment and ranging equipment and mage equipment rather than asking them to share slots as they do at the moment. All sorts of things that we’d like to do for next year.
18. How extensive is the tutorial going to be for players to learn how to use the new combat system? Will they learn the Combat and Skilling side of the hot bar? Also for players like me who go on the beta often can we opt out of the tutorial since we already know the mechanics?
Pi: Firstly, there’s actually going to be two tutorials. The tutorial that I’m making is actually the one for you guys. There’s going to be a separate tutorial for the Burthorpe area. The one that I’m making for you guys, you’ll be happy to know that I won’t be forcing you to do it. I hate tutorials which force me to play and what I’m actually going to do is when it goes into the live game, I’m going to give you XP for doing it. It’s going to teach you something and you’re going to do a fun challenge for it. Depending on how well you do on the challenge, you’ll get more XP. With regards to what actually is going to be in there, I’m not going to go through the nitty gritty. What I’m going to do is I’m going to give you the tools for you to learn. Quite often, you’ll read the tool tips and you’ll go “oh, what does that mean?” I’m going to teach you that. I’m going to teach you what it means and I’m going to help you build yourself. Also, for the first time, helping us in the Beta will give you XP on your live account. We really want to get this down for you guys so when it goes into the beta, you’re also going to get a chunk of XP on your live account if you take part and go through the tutorial. You don’t even have to give us feedback; you just have to use it. We would prefer if you would give us feedback, though! The final point I’m going to make is that we’ve got a limited amount of time to do feedback. What would be absolutely amazing and help me right now is if you could go into the beta. Even if you haven’t gone into the beta yet, try it and tell me what is confusing so that I can help you and address those things which are confusing. Just litter the forums with “I don’t understand this, this is too confusing” and I’ll address it.
19. Will XP rates be comparable to XP rates in the live game at the moment, or will they be different?
Mark: We’re aiming for the new combat system to be at least as effective as the old combat system. In some situations you’ll be getting more XP than you were before. The minimum benchmark is what we had before. As Pi has said, we’re really looking to reward people for coming back into the beta. That won’t be something we’ll be able to put in for tomorrow but certainly we want to encourage more people to come into the beta before we go live. We need to make sure the community is satisfied with what we’ve done before we push it out to the live game. A lot of the questions we’ve had through are questions that are from people who clearly haven’t tried out the beta or tried out the beta once in the really early stages and haven’t looked at it again since. We’ve done huge amounts of feedback and it’s honestly well worth the effort to go in there, look at the changes that we’ve made and give us more feedback.
20. How different is the beta now to when you first launched it?
Mark: Completely different.
Chris L: You’ve got an old-school mode as well if they don’t like the new system and never will. Well, I could show you how to use the old system in three clicks. If you minimise the action bar so chat is back to typing without having to press enter. Auto-attack is still there. We’ve got all the cool stuff like dual-wielding and stuff. If you think your damage rate isn’t as high we’ve got a new ability, all from player feedback called momentum. This ups your damage and makes it more comparable to the live rate. So, it’s about three clicks. We dropped a lot of people on day one and there was no formal tutorial. We admit it was a big change to the game because it is. When you drop someone in the deep end like we did, it was really overwhelming. Hopefully the super-awesome tutorial will break you in easy and then you can take it where you want it to go.
21. Why were most prayers nerfed? For example, why were protection prayers nerfed to only 40% protection?
Mark: Some of the things from the old system we would regard as designers as overpowered. One of the problems with the old prayer system was once you’d reached level 43 prayer you’d get your protection from melee and you didn’t really need to bother about levelling your defence skill because most of the bosses you would fight would be melee-orientated. So you’d go into an area, switch your prayers on and you wouldn’t have to worry about food or potions or anything. I’m not convinced that that’s great design. Players are going to do that because that’s what the system encourages them to do but it would also lead to other problems. The old combat system calculator would use quite a lot of defence in a heavy way to calculate your combat level, but defence didn’t actually contribute to your ability to fight in-game in the same way, so you’d find a lot of players, everyone knows the players as pures. They minimise their defence levels to gain advantage in the wilderness. I’m not saying that that’s bad game play at all. I’ve never been against pures because at the end of the day they are using the system to the best of their ability. What we’re trying to do now is to encourage you to level your defence skill. We’re not going to penalise you for having too high stats, which ultimately the old system kind of did. We’re now going to encourage you to level your lower stats so that they’re high. The defence skill now significantly contributes to your ability to be a good fighter in RuneScape. The old prayer skill for me was unbalanced and overpowered and encouraged people not to access content. There’s nothing worse from a design perspective than someone saying “I really like the sound of your new content but I’m not going to access it because it might give me defence XP”. Giving people a reason not to play content is not good design. That’s really why we’ve changed it.
Pi: For the high level prayers they made making bosses really hard. Prayer is supposed to be a buff and not part of your main combat. When you have to start designing bosses around always having a buff, that’s when you know it’s overpowered and that it needs to be changed.
Chris L: We’re already at that stage. For most of the new bosses we have to make, I get people coming over to me asking what the hell to do with prayer and it generally results in a lot of the new bosses maybe in the last one to two years we’ve had to have them hit through prayer or having the prayer on reduces the damage by half, funnily enough, that’s what we’ve done in the combat system now. It’s just part of the thing that makes it a hairy thing to design around. Creatively speaking though, it actually allows us to do really cool things in the future because it’s 50% protection at the moment but on stuff like Jad we still have it as 100% protection. That number is variable and we can change that. Even better, we can let you change that so in the future, I’m thinking an ability or maybe a potion that gives you 100% prayer protection for a certain amount of time so that in a boss fight you’ll have to think about that tactically. If that massive attack is coming up you need to defend it, drink that potion, take the hit or not take the hit and as a result it gives us much more flexibility and it makes it much more tactical and puts the power in your hands rather than us saying “sorry, we have to hit you now even though you’re praying”.
Mark: If you think about the amount of monsters which exist in the game right now which have got special exceptions so that your prayers won’t work or they’ll switch your prayers off or muck around with you in some way or they’ll drain your prayer rates...We’ve been designing around it for a very long time.
Chris L: It’s a bit cheap as well. I think I saw one boss where when you attack it your prayer’s gone. This is making prayer useful, keeping it on and reducing the damage but we’re not being harsh to you about it.
22. Are you going to be changing the stats of every piece of armour and Weapons in game? If so how is this going to affect PVP, bossing, dungeoneering?
Mark: Get on the beta and have a look! We have already changed all the stats for the weapons and the equipment twice in the new system. Everything’s changed, as has the relative stats of the boss monsters that you’re going to fight. Lots of things have changed for the better.
23. Will there be finishing moves introduced in PvP combat? Specifically in the duel arena?
Pi: We already have them. They’re called ultimates and they’re designed around basically what special attacks used to be, you’ve just got to work for them now.
Chris L: It’s not the end of it. What we’ve released is not all you’re going to see of the abilities. You’ll see things like execution where you can only use it if your opponent has less than 25% of health and it’s graphically cool. A lot of games do this and it’s pretty cool-looking.
24. Is there any plan on changing the effect that defence plays on the combat level?
Mark: I kind of touched on that earlier (Q21). As I said earlier, it’s really disappointing that we’ve designed a system that encourages some players not to level up their defence. That was one of the early challenges on the combat system, which was to make a system that would encourage people to level up all their stats and not have a game that encouraged people to keep their stats low. Defence will play a much bigger contribution to your effectiveness in combat.
25. Will there be better thrown and arrow ammunition?
Mark: The short answer is yes. We’re aware that there is a lack of decent thrown and projectile weapons particularly towards the top end of the game. Those are things that we’re looking at addressing. We’ve got slightly bigger projects in mind for what we do with ammunition in general, including runes. At the moment we’re just building a system that was right for all of the equipment that we had in game. We’re also introducing more monsters which have got specific weaknesses to range as well.
Chris L: And those ones won’t be weak to thrown at the high end because we know there’s not that ranged equipment there.
26. How will we be able to obtain the offhanded weapons? Specialty Shops? Monster Drops? Smithing? Will these be available to sell on the GE and how do you imagine this will affect the economy?
Mark: This is one of the exciting things from me about the system. I felt for a while that smiths and crafters haven’t really had much to add. Back from classic days the main ways to achieve rune equipment and things like that was to actually buy it from player smiths. That has kind of changed over the years. We’ve added those things to drop tables but we haven’t added things for those smiths to actually make. When the system goes live, crafters and smiths will find that they’ll have a whole shed load of things that they can do now. We would expect the majority of offhand equipment to come into the game via crafters and player smiths. Some of the really high-level stuff will come in specifically from boss monster drops as well. We’re doing that to refresh the drop tables of monsters, particularly with monsters that people feel they can’t be bothered to go and fight because they just don’t get enough return from them. For me it’s really exciting because we’re giving more things for player smiths and player crafters to do and we’re refreshing some of the drop tables of some of the older boss monsters.
In case anyone doesn’t know, offhand weapons are specifically for dual-wielders because the new combat system will give the ability to wield a weapon in your offhand. The current system would only allow you to hold a shield or a defender, something like that, in that hand, or there are a few sort of jokey things that you can put there. The new system, if you don’t want to go two-handed mode then you can do really cool things with your offhand. You can go in with dual scimitars or one of my own personal favourites is a long sword and a crossbow. There are all sorts of cool stuff you can do with the new system. So the answer to the question is that they’ll mostly come in from player crafters and player smiths with some top end stuff coming from boss monsters, really refreshing the old game.
27. Pertaining to old Quests and activities in general that contain combat in them, will the development team at Jagex eventually be re-working such fights within Quests and combat moments within certain activities?
Chris L: Yeah. Most of the stuff should be live in the beta so check it out. It’s a bit of a curse at the moment because most of the people like myself, when I import my save, I’ve already done all the quests so I can’t fight it and I can’t test it. So if you haven’t done the quest and you’ve got beta access, please get in there and check out some of those quests because whilst we’re happy with them internally, we need you to tell us if it’s too easy or too hard, impossible or bugged. We need that feedback. The short answer is yes, we’ve updated everything in the quests, minigames. Even the temple trekking rework I did a year or two ago I’ve updated again so that the followers now animate and use the new combat moves already.

25-Sep-2012 18:30:21 - Last edited on 25-Sep-2012 18:38:24 by Mod Mike

28. How will the use of Runes be incorporated into the EOC? Currently there is little to no use for runes because the new abilities have no rune requirement, and are more powerful than auto casting attacks.
Chris L: That’s right. We didn’t want to be unfair with range needing arrows and runes not being provided for the ability so we took them out of both. But in regards to that, you can now dual-cast mage which is pretty cool. It tears through runes. I was doing a slayer task on Gargoyles that are weak to water, I think? I just burned through a thousand runes in no time. The main point of this is that I think runes will probably go out of the game a lot more because at the moment you’ve got your high-alchers training to 99 or 94 for ice barrage and what-not. People don’t usually use mage for combat which is the obvious flaw. Hopefully now they’ll see that it is potent and very good in combat against stuff we’ve designed. Another big problem with magic at the moment is people always crying out for more mage bosses because not a lot of stuff boss-wise is actually weak, and I’ve made Glacors and Ice Strykwyrms personally because I know that there’s a really big gap where everything is good for ranging or melee but there’s nothing really to use mage combat against. Hopefully that’s going to change; well, it has and hopefully runes will go out because of it.
Mark: Lots of the things that we’ve done to the new system really encourage people to use ranged or magic to fight monsters as well. It gives you a lot more reason to try all three combat disciplines.
29. With the new combat system can we expect any kind of end game PvM raiding?
Mark: The reason why we’re changing the system is to allow us to do the really cool stuff that we want to do in the future. Whilst raiding is quite often associated with other games specifically, there are some really cool things we’d like to do. RuneScape combat dungeons involving a kind of big boss-monster at the end, for example. Even something that kind of supports skillers as well along the way because we’ve got lots of different types of players in the game.
Chris L: You’re describing dungeoneering.
Mark: I am! But think about it, with dungeoneering we had to create completely new environments, new combats, and new things to do in dungeoneering. But even with dungeoneering, there was only so far that we could go because we were still using the old combat system. This allows us to do some really cool stuff in the future and things like raiding are the kinds of things that we would like to do.
30. Why did you make the whole world multi-combat?
Chris L: My answer earlier to this was, if I punched Pi, Mark’s not allowed.
Mark: Like there’s some sort of magical barrier that’s stopping me punching Pi in the face, which was no good at all. That is something we’re still looking at. We’ve had a lot of feedback regarding multi-way combat in the wilderness. We’ve had feedback from solo PKers, Clan PKers regarding the way that PKing and the wilderness have changed with the new combat system. It’s something that we are still looking at. There are all sorts of issues in the game. The live game right now has issues with multi-way combat e.g. the way that cannons affect that kind of thing. We want more feedback to do with multi-way combat. I personally wanted a system where if you wanted your mate to come along and help you kill a monster, you should be able to do that. The idea that there’s magical protection which stops other people from getting involved is kind of odd. There are some good game play reasons for something like that to exist but we’ve tried to keep those reasons with the new system. You’ll still be in an environment where the person who’s done the lion’s share of damage to a monster will get the drop but we’ve made other changes to do with the way you have focus on certain monsters. You wouldn’t be able to run around and hit everything once and then get them all fighting you at the same time. There’s other decent game play that we’ve added there so really, the new system allows multi-way combat nearly everywhere but I personally don’t see the downside of that. I would like to get feedback from the players just to see what they think. Specifically to the wilderness is still something that we are talking about.
Chris L: We do know that it’s an area of concern and we’ve got a few ideas to work with and are mulling over.
Mark: We like solo PKing. We like what that brings to the game and we’re just thinking about the way that should work in the wilderness. We’ve had lots of conversations about the wilderness recently; lots of things that we’re looking into specifically and I know that there’s a question later on regarding this from one of our true, hardcore PKers.
31. Are there any plans to add skilling features to the Action Bar? Also why did you make it so that our total shows beside our names?
Pi: You already can skill with the action bar. For instance, if you put a whole inventory of herbs in your bank, put it on your action bar and hold 1, you can put it on one and it cleans all of them in seconds and it’s brilliant. If you did want to delete something, say, iron ore whilst you’re drop mining, you can put the iron ore on there. You can also pick it up from the people who are doing this, who are spamming 1 to drop all their ores whilst they’re mining. There already are certain things there however we won’t be expanding it immediately. This is the evolution of combat. Skilling, maybe later.
Mark: We’re focusing on combat right now. We’re aware that there are some benefits that you can use the action bar for when you’re skilling and next year we’ll intend to add more. Certainly the action bar isn’t making skilling more difficult. We’re also adding a whole load more things quite soon to do as part of our make X project which we started a few years ago. We certainly haven’t forgotten about skillers and we’re looking forward to making the action bar better for them as well.
Chris L: Just to say, if you are a skiller, do what you’re doing and put it on the action bar and see what happens. The chances are it’ll do the same faster or do something interesting. And then let us know whether the result was good or bad!
Mark : The other part of the question was about the total level. That was something that I asked for and something that we discussed for a while. There’s been a lot of feedback on the forums to do with the change to the combat level and a lot of people saying it’s easier to achieve a maximum combat level. We kind of agree with that. There are various reasons as to why we’ve changed the combat level which I’ve talked about in posts and some of my Og Blogs. We realised that for a lot of people, what was really important was their total level. At the end of the day RuneScape is not just about your combat level, a lot of people aren’t orientated around combat. For a lot of people, it’s their total level which is important. While we were thinking about the combat level, suddenly we said why not we allow them to display something else? Why not allow them to display some sort of other level? We thought about it for a bit longer and about what’s really important to non-combatants. It turns out, it’s their total level. They’ve got skill capes that they can use to show off their 99 in a skill but they’ve not got a lot to show off their total level unless they’re maxed and they’ve got completionist capes and things like that. So, in a non-combat situation you’ll now be able to see your total level next to your name, and in combat situations you’ll be able to see your combat level next to your name. I personally thought that it was a good change to the game.
32. Are you planning to improve 'Momentum' in EoC?
Mark: Momentum has come from the players. It was specifically a request from people who said ‘Look, sometimes I just want to have a break. I like the system but I’m pressing a few buttons, sometimes it’s nice particularly in a PvE situation where you just want to be a bit lazy, fight a few monsters and not really worry about it’. We added that ability for them, really. It’s an ultimate ability so you can trigger it. If you trigger it and you don’t touch the ability bar or don’t activate any abilities for fifteen minutes you’ll be able to have extra damage added to your auto attacks. It’s what we’re calling an old school mode, really. It’s specifically for players who are fighting lower level monsters. They know they are in a situation where they cannot really be hurt and they want to have an easier way of fighting and that’s exactly what they’re going to do. It only takes a minute maximum to build up your adrenaline bar to 100% so you’re interacting with the system, trigger off a few thresholds maybe if you want to have a bit of fun and then if you want a breather, activate your basics, get up to 100%, hit your momentum ultimate and there you go. If you’ve got feedback get on the forums, try it out on the beta and let us know. We’ve added it for you so let us know if it is working well.
Pi: It’s worth saying that we’ve already done a buff to momentum once. We’ve raised the floor so that your minimum hit will be higher.
Chris L: It’s exactly the same ability damage now. So the answer to the question is we have changed it and we’ll change it again if needs be.
33. How long did it take for the beta to be made? And will there be betas for future content?
Mark: It’ll be ready when it’s ready. We built the beta technology for EoC. When we have big changes to the game in future when we’ve got brand new pieces of content that we want more player feedback on, where it benefits us and them to put it in the beta world then that’s certainly what we intend to do.
34. Will the update happen all at once or in stages? For example, will we possibly see the action bar; followed by the interface updates, then the abilities or will we see all of it at once?
Chris L: Each bit needs the other bits to function so doing it in bits at a time will not be the greatest idea. Other than that we’ve got the graphical update which is a change to the players we had recently in the live game. Unfortunately the females had a bit of a gorilla problem going on. If you go on the beta, we can have gender-specific animation which is why the females are a lot nicer-looking on the beta. That technology will roll out, but we mainly did that to save graphics a lot of time because at the moment they function on two different systems. Take the God Wars rework. So you’ve had all that Pernix armour, for example. All of it had to be modelled twice; one for the old one and one for the new one. Now they can use the same so it saves a lot of graphics time across the board which is good.
Mark: We as developers have had to wrestle with the combat system for years now. I personally think, and I’m sure these guys will back me up that it will be easier to make content in the future. It won’t take us as long to come up with really cool combat updates because we’ve got a brand new system and we understand how it works. We’ve built it so that we can add more things to it. The old system was as big as it was ever going to get. The new system allows us to be efficient with our development time, which gives the players better updates more frequently.
Pi: I think part of the problem; part of the will for us to do it iteratively is because we released it without a tutorial. We didn’t teach you how to do this so it is quite a punch in the face when you first log in and everything is different. With the tutorial easing you into it and actually teaching you it bit by bit, you will ease into it and it won’t feel so harsh. A whole new system can be intimidating.
Mark: If I’d had my time again, I would have said let’s start with a tutorial or launch with a tutorial. Certainly I wish we’d done that now and it was always the intention to have a tutorial out for the live game, I just didn’t realise how important it would be for the beta.
35. Will something be done about the ability mashing for PvM? There is no rotation or priority system of any sort. You just use whatever ability is off cool down.
Mark: I appreciate that a lot of people just look at the system and think that the best way to interact with it is to mash buttons. That’s simply not the case. There are several abilities which actually reward you for sitting back and waiting for them to finish. Various types of flurry abilities which are kind of linking abilities together, if you like. And also, tactically, you’re much better off choosing the abilities that you want to use rather than just mashing the keyboard. Certainly, it’s much more efficient to do that and you get a lot more reward for it in terms of your experience playing the game.
Pi: Certainly if you took someone who puts abilities on their toolbar without thinking about it and mashed abilities when they were off cool down against someone who has thought about what they wanted to use, put it on their bar, thought about when they were going to use it; the guy who is thinking about that will do way more damage than the guy who is pressing them off cool down.
Chris L: On a similar vein, in PvM it is a bit more spammy because NPCs are dumb, for lack of a better word. This is something we can address with the new system. Those guys who have been with me on the beta around me at the duel arena have probably seen an NPC called Max, the guy who sells the max cape. I actually did a prototype mock up of him and he can actually use abilities against you so if you spam against him he is going to kill you. This update gives us the chance to make intelligent NPCs which is not something we’re going to do en masse because then slaying 150 of them will be a nightmare but when we want to make specialist stuff we can really make them take it to you and AFKing isn’t going to cut it.
Pi: Certainly if you look at PvP then you’ll notice that people who do think about the system will destroy people. SoWr3cked said to us, he’s got a video of him killing twenty people in a row because he is combat minded; he did think about what he was going to do and he was able to use it really efficiently.
36. Two separate initiatives were put forth pleading for the re-instatement of a PJ/PVP timer for the wilderness. Due to the overwhelming evidence for the support for this timer from ""Project Revival"" and ""Final Push"" to be reinstated before The Evolution of Combat, can we expect this to be reinstated to the wilderness and then carry over with the release of the Evolution of Combat? PJing/Ragging in the wilderness has gotten so out of hand that thousands of RuneScape players old and new have drifted away from RuneScape as a result of this timer NOT being in the game.
Mark: First of all, I’d like to say that the wilderness has never had a PJ timer. Ever since classic, all the combat in the wilderness has always involved this idea of PJing, which for people who don’t understand it, is if I were fighting you and let’s say you’d killed me, you’re on slightly lower hitpoints. You run in to try and pick up my stuff and immediately Pi comes in and starts attacking you straight away. He’s got an advantage over you because you’ve just been in combat, you’re looking at what’s going on, what’s on the floor and he’s got the first hit in and that has always existed. When we brought the changes in from 2008, the changes to the way that PKing worked, when we changed the wilderness and when we changed free trading, we introduced this idea of the PJ timers. Players liked it. It changed the way that certain things worked. And then we had the big vote and we asked ‘do you want us to bring back the wilderness and free trade?’ Yes, the players were overwhelmingly positive about bringing it back so we brought it back. The old system never had those timers in so we didn’t introduce them. Since then, we’re very aware that those people that enjoyed the combat we had in 2008 wanted to have that kind of experience in specific situations so we introduced The Crucible this year, which incorporates a PJing timer, effectively. It allows you to pick up the loot from your kill and get the hell out before someone else decides to start hitting you. For a lot of people the Crucible wasn’t the environment they wanted to do that in and I can understand that, but we’ve introduced that game play for you to enjoy and it’s much more similar to the craters we introduced back in 2008. I’m sure some people are going to go well, the craters were in the wilderness, I’m not counting that because it’s kind of like a minigame on its own, and this is a change to the entire wilderness. The other thing that I wanted to say, whilst there are a lot of people saying they want the timers back, there are people saying that they wouldn’t want the timers. I know that they’re in much smaller numbers but they’ve got no reason to shout about it because that is the system that currently exists. The nature of a lot of PKing in the wilderness means that you’re going to prey on the weak, and sometimes the weak are the people who have just come out of a fight, and I totally understand that. I’d like to give the opportunity for people to say no, I don’t want to change the timer. A result of this is that I would very much like to do a poll in the very near future about timers in the wilderness. I’d like to give the players the opportunity to vote one way or another and depending on what the players tell us, we’ll make a change. From a design perspective, it makes no difference to me whatsoever if there is a timer there or not. It is a simple difference between old school wilderness versus new school play styles, so let’s see what the players say. I do want to say for me, it is a separate issue to the evolution of combat. This is something that I would like to treat separately. I’m not going to promise for a second that if we bring evolution of combat in, we will run a poll and we will make the changes straight away. I would like to run a poll separately and we just need to find a right time to do that. We’ll do some things on the forums but I’m not going to say that I’m going to post these things tomorrow. I will talk to the community team and see what is the best way for us to do it. The poll module, the way that the poll currently works in the game isn’t particularly robust. It doesn’t require you to log in and things like that so it can be easily manipulated. I’d need to change it to make sure it’s a fair vote. It’s really important for people to understand the history here.
37. Will the EoC have any effect on tracking and taking down combat bots? By the sheer randomness of combat now and the abilities added compared to the simple AFK system we currently have, will that help or hinder the soon-to-come bot nuke?
Mark: The new bot watch system is to coin a phrase, super mega awesome. It really doesn’t matter what systems we build into RuneScape. It will spot bots. It won’t affect it in any way at all.
38. Can the beta be opened up every day and for everyone from now on? This will allow you to get a better sample of opinions and more constructive feedback.
Mark: We are intending to open up the beta to everyone quite soon; certainly when the new tutorial goes in. We want to get more feedback and we’re basically looking at inviting more people in the short term. In the long term we’ll be inviting everybody there including free players.
39. What was the reason for not inviting everyone in the first place?
Mark: It was a stress test but a combination of different forces, really.
Pi: It also allowed us to invite more people later on. We have actually been inviting more people slowly so that we get fresh opinions. If we’d have invited everyone really early on we wouldn’t have got any new and fresh opinions and feedback would have just died off.
40. How do you respond to the pures who are quitting because of the EoC update and the way it ruins the entire ‘pure for life’ thing?
Chris L: I’d say take a second look at it because we identified that as a problem and we knew pures were going to suffer because of the defence, armour and life points link. In the last update I made recently I went through all of the armour, everything with a life point bonus on it. Previously it was 90% of your lifepoints would come from armour and 10% would come from your constitution. Now, it’s 60/40 so those pures with a high constitution are going to have more life points if they check it out again. Before they would’ve gone down very quickly, now if you’re good you’re going to find room to breathe there. Stuff like zerker pures, I think they’re probably going to find a nice sweet spot in the system where the armour gives you a decent chunk of life points and your constitution is carrying you the rest of the way.
Mark: I’d just like to find a good way of encouraging people to level their defence and that’s what the new system does. We’re not penalising pures because we’re not stopping them levelling their defence.
41. Will it ever be possible to sync damage splats with the animations? I’m doing damage after combos have clearly ended.
Chris L: I think that’s a problem specifically with combos. I am trying to iron it out. I won’t go into technicalities but it’s because the animations are so long so it’s a lot to marry up. If you look at everything that isn’t a combo attack hopefully it should be married up quite nicely because we worked very closely with the graphics guys and we got a whole new animation system. Their way of making animations is much more streamlined now. They can put the information on an animation and the combat system just listens to it rather than doing it all manually and having stuff not marrying up. It has a better idea of the graphics artist saying no, it’s going to hit on this frame and the combat system then goes okay, and puts a mark there.
42. Why can’t you simply right-click a normal weapon and change it to an off-hand? There’s no reason that a whip can be held in your right hand and magically can’t be held in your left. This would also help price spikes at the beginning of the EoC.
Mark: This was one of the things we were conflicted on quite early on. Some of the team really wanted you to have the ability to just switch between hands. The reason why I wanted to keep it in there is exactly the reason I said earlier; give something decent for player smiths and player crafters to do, use it to refresh some old drop tables. I know it was a little bit weird, but it was a design decision to enhance game play in other areas. There is a reason why some weapons can’t be used in the right hand, because we can’t do that graphically.
Chris L: Unfortunately one of the first things I was told was no left-hand whips because there’s not enough animation translation in the whip. In the future, maybe. I know they’re constantly looking at the player rig and I’ve heard it might be changing again so there are more possibilities in the future but not at the moment.
43. Is the new blank tab going to be used in the EoC?
Mark: No. We’ll use it for something else in the future and we’re discussing it at the moment. In the short term we might use it to launch the challenge system interface but I’m not really sure.
44. The action bar negates the need to have F keys manage old menus. Can you please repurpose F keys to work with the action bar so you don’t have to press enter to converse?
Mark: Whilst we think the need to use interfaces will be significantly reduced to need to navigate between all your tabs, there will be some requirement for it still so we’ve decided to leave the F keys as they were.
Chris L: I think he’s brought it up because he wants to use twelve F keys for the twelve slots on the bar. If we did that I think he’s saying we would take away the binding so at the moment you can pick what keys you can bind all those slots to. If we were to hard-bind them to the F keys people might not want their hands that high on the keyboard. At the moment we give you the flexibility to bind them wherever you want.
Mark: It will take a bit of getting used to, the idea of hitting enter before you chat but I think after a while people will get used to it. We’ve changed a lot of things to do with the way that you talk in the last few years. I’ve got every confidence that the player base will get used to that.
Chris L: Where we change something, we are aware that it is a fundamental change. Pressing enter is not something you’re familiar with at the moment. We’ve tried to include a way around that or a way to go back to old school so all you need to do is minimise the action bar, and boom, back to business as usual.
Mark: So if you’re not in combat and just chilling out in the grand exchange, you can just minimise that and you won’t need to hit enter.
45. How will EoC change clans, in your opinion?
Pi: Hopefully it will buff them because actually I’m hearing an awful lot of people who didn’t do PvP before saying they really like the new system. A lot of PvM players and some skillers are enjoying jumping in on the beta, going in to the duel arena and playing. So hopefully, clans will grow, especially PvP clans because they need it. And they really, really need it. PvP clans, look out for people just getting into PvP ‘cause it’s happening and its awesome.
Mark: With more multi-way combat areas there’s more reason for you to be fighting in a group.
46. Would it be possible to make the barrows equipment give abilities instead of making them work only on normal attacks?
Mark: One of the things that we wanted to do was remove the connection between special attacks and weapons. We liked a lot of the special attacks and we wanted to give people the ability to use them but we didn’t like the fact that they were tied to specific weapons because then it forced people to wield certain weapons and removed a lot of the unique builds that you could make in the game. There are some pieces of equipment that act slightly differently from others. We’re looking at giving more personalisation for the god swords for example, and of course you still get the set benefits.
Chris L: I think the question may be related to do they only work on auto attacks and I think that’s something that we can expand to abilities but maybe just cap the effects. I’m thinking Guthan’s healing off of the ultimates is probably not the best idea. In the same vein, I think set effects are probably the way forward. I can see Torva having a set effect or Pernix or stuff like that because it encourages you to get a set. There’s still possibilities there.
47. Will red chinchompas be useless in the EoC or are you thinking of them as a fast, expensive way to train range?
Mark: They’re certainly not useless.
Pi: No. We’ve had someone getting 2mil XP an hour in the beta using chinchompas. So no, they are definitely not useless.
48. Will we see the ability to enchant melee/mage weapons similar to bolts for ranged?
Mark: Possibly. As I said earlier, the new system gives us a lot of opportunities to do cool things in the future. The kind of thing that we were talking about earlier with level up my X will allow you to make certain choices, imbue your weapon with certain effects, those kinds of things. There’s no reason why we couldn’t do enchant weapons. With the new combat system we certainly have got some creatures which have specific weaknesses to certain elemental styles so at the moment if a creature is weak to fire the best way to kill it is with fire surge or whatever, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t allow a player to imbue a weapon with fiery effects if we wanted to.
49. Don’t forget us high-level players!
Mark: Don’t forget that this whole new system is allowing us to build new cool things towards the top end of the game. Lots of the new monsters we’ve released recently, we’ve wanted to do a lot of other cool things but not had the system to allow us to do it. A lot of what we’re doing is specifically for our high-level players.
Chris L: We never forget you. The second we finish this I intend to make bosses back to back.

25-Sep-2012 18:34:17 - Last edited on 25-Sep-2012 18:37:43 by Mod Mike

50. Are you saying to those who don’t like it to just leave?
Mark: We definitely didn’t say that if you don’t like it, you should just leave. The reason why we’ve done the beta is to give people the opportunity to play through it and give us feedback. We need decent feedback to make the system. We consider ourselves pretty good designers and developers, but we are nothing without a decent player base giving us feedback all the time. We want to improve the system and make it more suitable for all of our players. We don’t want you to leave, we don’t want you to quit, we love the player base that we’ve got and please help us to make a decent system. If we didn’t care what the players said we would have launched it months ago. We wouldn’t have bothered with a beta, we would’ve said here you go, like it or lump it. We have not done that. We’ve made a beta system to allow people to give us feedback so we could have a good chunk of time to make the system decent for everybody. I don’t want people to quit, that’s the last thing I want, and I’m certainly not saying you should just accept it or go, that’s not what I want at all. Give us your feedback.
Chris L: This is one of the few opportunities in the industry where you’ll really get listened to. I don’t know how other companies do it but we listen to you and if you’re ever sitting behind a screen and thinking you can’t do anything and you’re looking at it thinking you don’t like it, we will listen to you. Just let us know what you think, give us a suggestion, what you don’t like, how we could improve it, how you would improve it, what would you change, would you scrap bits completely? Tell us your feedback and we will listen. We are working with Mod Emilee to increase our forum presence because we are aware that we have a shed load of work going. Pi’s got to make a super awesome tutorial of awesomeness but we’re still working behind the scenes and I don’t want people to think that we’re not reading the forums. We do have a communication chain going on and we try and get a specific thread pinned every week which we read all of. If you want to get on that one, that will get read by one of us four guys.
Pi: It’s worth adding that when we don’t reply it’s probably because we have to take it to another level of feedback and before we can reply to you, we can’t promise anything until say, I speak to Mark and say “Hey Mark, this guy said this and I think it’s really cool. Can we do it?”
Mark: Yeah. And we have meetings about this every week about feedback we’ve had on the forums so we can discuss those points. But we need clarity, we need people to say that they’ve tried something, I didn’t like this, I liked this etc. Tell us what you like; tell us what you don’t like. We need constructive feedback. Saying you don’t like something isn’t enough. Tell us why. Don’t forget that we had to change the system. The combat system had got to a point where we couldn’t add anything more to it. It was incredibly difficult for us to keep adding more content to the old system. We had to change it if we wanted to get another 11 years of an awesome game like RuneScape; we had to change the system. It wasn’t an optional thing.
51. What if we didn’t change it?
Mark: Then we wouldn’t be able to add any decent combat updates to the game at all and people would have already noticed that some of the ones that we’ve released in the last year or two fell a little bit short of their expectations. That’s not something we’re going to allow to happen with the new system. We love the game and are incredibly passionate about the game. We don’t want to let people down and we have invested thousands upon thousands of hours into it. We love RuneScape. We’re lucky to be developers for a game that we absolutely fundamentally love. We don’t want to ruin the game and that’s not what we are trying to do. We’re trying to build a system that will make sure we’re still here in ten years’ time. That’s got to be the goal and it’s got to be the right thing for everybody.
52. Will we ever be able to unlock abilities as quest/task rewards, etc? Also, can Mod Mark be added as a super boss? He’s too epic not to be one.
Mark: Do you mean like a super boss in RuneScape? I have appeared in RuneScape a couple of times.
Pi: I seem to remember a guard killing you.
Mark: There are a few things where I’ve appeared in the game under various different guises. I did the voice of Father Christmas a few years ago. That was fun. There’s an ogre named after me, not very cunningly at all. He’s just called Og. Actually, technically speaking I am a boss monster in the game. If you start a new account and if you watch the cut scene there’s a troll talking at the beginning; that’s me. That’s my voice, and he is the first boss monster you ever kill. What was the first part of the question? (laughter)
Paul: Will we ever be able to unlock abilities as quest/task rewards, etc?
Pi: Definitely.
Mark: Yes. We wanted to make a system that is more accessible to everyone and we wanted to have more rewards for you unlocking certain levels e.g. reaching certain attack or strength levels, range levels, magic levels, whatever. Defence levels, constitution levels, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t add abilities or cosmetic changes to abilities as rewards for quests.
53. Will there be another bind in dungeoneering? Right now there are four. Can there be five to accommodate dual-wielding? That would be nice.
Mark: We are planning a significant rework to binds, as we were talking about earlier. At the moment the main idea that we’re considering is the idea of being able to bind...so let’s say you’ve got five slots, right? You’d be able to bind five melee bits of gear, five bits of magic gear, an ammo slot for magic, five bits of range gear and an ammo slot for range. I don’t know if it’ll be exactly those numbers. I don’t know if we’ll add dungeoneering token costs to unlock them. There are various different things that we can do. Chris was one of the key developers when we made the dungeoneering system so he’s got a good understanding of what we’ve got and it’s something that we will be looking at in the future.
54. What do you like most about EoC versus the current version of Combat?
Pi: It’s got to be the PvP. There’s a lot more tactics involved. There’s so much extra flavour. It’s not just about who can (1.32.13) the fastest. You have to use your head, you have to react quickly. You have to think ahead about what your opponents going to do a few steps ahead. There is so much more in PvP. It’s brilliant.
Mark: There are a lot of pre-emptive things that you have to do as well.
55. When’s the tutorial for EoC coming out?
Mark: I don’t know. It could be a while.
Pi: There’s no ETA yet.
Mark: But we have been putting some very long hours in with the EoC.
Pi: I think our current record for going home is about half four in the morning.
Chris L: The sun was coming up when I was driving back home in the morning...
Pi: And then back again for 8 o clock!
Mark: As long as you’re safely driving home that is the main thing. So yeah, get on there, try the EoC out again. We’ve changed so much since the first time we launched it so it’s worthwhile going on there and giving it another look. Please give us feedback!

25-Sep-2012 18:35:32 - Last edited on 25-Sep-2012 18:36:58 by Mod Mike