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Dev blog: PDC & Poll #12

Player Designed Content
We had a fantastic response to the Player Designed Content competition with over 100 ideas sent in. we had ideas from simple updates to whole new skills come in and it was really difficult to decide on the five we have below.

When we looked at these ideas we needed to consider several things including whether we had the technical ability to make the update (such as artists or modellers), the right functionality in the game engine as well as whether the update was something we could deliver in a reasonable amount of time. We received a lot of ideas which were absolutely huge and would take many months for us to make, although fantastic in their own right they were just too big for this update.

Even if your idea wasn't included in these final 5, we had loads of ideas that we can introduce in other forms. For example, we had a suggestion for a necromancy skill where you would raise dead bodies from the bones on the floor. We may not be able to include a skill, but the mechanic of raising skeletons from the bones of the fallen is a something we thought was great. We could perhaps create a special event where you may get the option to raise a skeleton from the bones of your foe and kill them for additional prayer XP. We also had a quest which opened up the Eastern Lands. Again, we may not be able to build in everything in the quest but the ideas can be used to add new areas to the map. Another great idea that nearly made it into the top five was Livestock, being able to raise animals using your farming skills. Unfortunately, this presented some rather challenging technical issues. With a few changes to the idea itself this is something we would like to offer to you in a poll.

Even though we chose 5 to go into a poll, so many of your other ideas may well go into game too. Down to the details we go, here are the five suggestions that you are now able to vote for in the poll.

Storm Atronach
Rat Hunt
Soul Snatcher
The Cat Mystery
Roof-leaping: Agility reborn!

So, please have a read through these ideas, pick your favourite and vote in the poll now.

Content Poll #12
In addition to the player-designed content, we'd like to offer a selection of smaller updates taken from your suggestions. Four of these are adjustments to updates that we've released recently, while another four are older suggestions for making player-owned houses a bit less frustrating for the skillers among you.

A button will be added to your options menu, allowing you to have your POH rendered with its doors already open.

When you are in your own POH, you will see a 'Kick' option on your guests to let you expel them from the house.

POH herb burners will have their smoke changed to green to make it more visible.

POH herb burners will go out immediately if you leave the house unattended.

The Staff of the Dead's special attack will be prevented in the Duel Arena if Magic is forbidden for that duel.
This would allow players to organise duels around the dragon dagger without the SotD's special attack getting involved. In a previous poll, we offered to make the SotD's special attack reduce the melee damage you could deal, as an alternative approach, but that wasn't sufficiently popular.

The Staff of the Dead's autocast menu will have 'Flames of Zamorak' added.
Players had suggested adding the Ancient Magicks to the staff. However, those spells are associated with Zaros, whereas this staff has Zamorakian origins.

Godswords have no stab-attack bonus, yet they have 'Stab' as their Accurate combat mode. Change this to a 'Crush' combat mode.
In previous discussions we'd proposed offering a 'Slash' combat mode. However, the swords have an extremely high slash-attack bonus already, and some players were reluctant to see them given even more slashing capabilities.

Monk robes will be counted as Saradomin items in the God Wars Dungeon.
This change was originally made in 2008 when the Perils of Ice Mountain quest was being developed. The monk robes were given a graphical update at that time, adding a prominent Saradominist logo to the chestpiece, so they were flagged as Saradomin items for that reason. While we are not offering that graphical change, we can nevertheless make the robes work as Saradomin items in the OSRS God Wars Dungeon if you like. This would make Saradomin's army non-aggressive towards you (except in Zilyana's room).

A skill total of 280 will be required to vote in future polls.
We've been asked to raise the requirement to help block trollish players who make "bad" decisions on purpose. In practice, most of the players voting in polls have actually been quite high-levelled, and we've mostly seen high-level and low-level players voting with substantially similar opinions anyway. Nevertheless, we're happy to offer a change.

The poll module wasn't designed to offer more elaborate criteria, so we'll have to stick with skill total for now. The level of 280 was chosen to make the polls reasonably accessible to pures and other players who choose not to focus on their skill totals. Even if pures don't get access to all game features, we would like them to keep their voting rights.

We'll start this poll next week when you've had a chance to choose the piece of player-designed content that will accompany it. If any of these questions are unclear, do let us know so that we can fix it before the poll begins.

Storm Atronach

Design:

The Storm Atronach should be an enlarged version of Slagilith (if enlarging is possible) and should attack with a magic attack capable of hitting ~42 damage, using the animation of one of the Blitz spells from Ancient Magic. It should have a secondary attack, which I believe should be a ranged attack, capable of hitting around 35 and the animation to signify it's a ranged attack could be that of the Kalphite Queen.

At 2/3 health the Atronach could spawn 4 "Atronach defenders", using the model of the Golem from the quests in the desert. These four golems each attack with one ranging, one meleeing and one maging, the last of which heals the boss (in a similar way to Jad gets healed in the fight caves). This would occur again at 1/3 health, meaning it may be beneficial to kill the defenders, but there is to be one major twist - they can only be damaged by pickaxes. This mechanism I believe would allow the boss to be slightly weaker than he otherwise could be, allowing slightly lower players to kill it, but not without killing the minions, slowing them down whereas higher level players may opt to ignore the minions as they are able to soak up the damage and do enough damage to get through without running out of supplies, resulting in quicker kills.

Acessing/requirements:

In order to develop some content that has requirements I am proposing the following:

• Completion of One Small Favour
  
• Completion of Monkey Madness
  
• Partial completion of Desert Treasure - two potential options:
  
  • 1. After killing the Vampire and getting the blood diamond talking to Malak in the Canifis pub - a travelling Nomad from lands further east than humans have gone dropped a scroll there, teaching the reader how to enchant a scroll/key/suitable object to access the Atronach which has awoken according to rumours that have reached them in the east.
    
  • 2. An Elven smuggler from Prifddinas has sold a scroll with the same function to Rasolo for 500k, which he'll sell to you for 650k.
  
  
• Take this scroll to the gnome mage Zoocknock and he'll tell you it's a rock transformation spell and will help them finish with their tunneling job - he'll now ask you to meet him next to the boat that you can take back to Crash Island (where he'll remain permanently) to tell you how to imbue a scroll with the rock transformation spell which will be used to summon the atrnonach. This requires 77 magic and can be done via a right-click option on the Scroll of Redirection from Nightmare Zone.
  
• Finally, go the the cave where the Sagilith was in the quest and read the scroll when in the room he was at first (introduce some way to make the area an instance? perhaps just make the cave instanced after the quest). This will summon the Atronach, the level 315 beast described earlier. Once defeated he turns into a pile of rubble, mining this rubble puts the drop in your inventory.

Rewards:

• CDragon pickaxe - recoloured pickaxe with enhanced mining capabilities (very rare)
  
• Ranging necklace - needs to be more than slightly better than Fury to retain value though. (quite rare)
  
• Untradable herbs (4 per drop, noted) and seeds used to make super antifire potions. (uncommon)
  
• Noted skilling supplies that are in shortage in game such as gems, secondary herblore ingredients, generous amounts of swamp tar, mithril/adamantite/runite bars/ores (noted) (common)
  
• Miscellaneous drops of rune items, particularly rune knives/darts/etc. (common)
  
• Runes - soul runes, nature runes, death runes, blood runes in nice quantities (common)
  
• Anything else Jagex feels is a good idea!

Reasoning:

This design I am proposing I believe has its merit in the fact it's a designed for soloing boss which would be welcomed by many who aren't so keen on the group bossing offered by GWD and want a change. From a design perspective I don't think what I'm proposing to be too hard to design and therefore take too long to be developed. I also think the dragon pick is much needed, and some bossing that really is best done via magic could raise the stagnating prices of runes. The design I have proposed would allow many people access, the requirements aren't too high and the boss itself has a fast but risky/higher requirement method of brute force, but also a slower but less dangers route (by killing the minions).

Rat Hunt

Description:

Felkrash has specialised in training cats. To offer enough of a challenge to the strongest cats of Port Sarim, she has to order 'special rats', brought to Port Sarim by charter ships from far away outside Gielinor. However, every once in a while some extraordinary fast and strong ones manage to escape. Will you help her to catch these rodents before their population starts to grow and they begin to cause problems in Gielinor? Don't forget to take your cat with you, otherwise you will not have a chance!

Requirements:

Ratcatchers quest completed
Must have a wily cat
Must have the catspeak amulet (e) equipped
A week must have passed since you last completed the minigame

Start point:

Spoiler alert: The following will contain details of the minigame

Felkrash tells you that she has no idea where to look for the rats; they are so fast that they could already have spread anywhere in Gielinor. You are on your own, but obviously common knowledge works here - don't look in the deserts or snowed areas. Felkrash will, however, give your cat the scent of the special rats, so it will be able to sniff for them.

Where the rats are:

There are 5 different rats to catch. Each of them has a separate spawn point, but after they have spawned (at system update), they can (slowly) roam anywhere from the spawn point. Spawn points are chosen randomly from the list with 25 spawn points.

Spawn point list:

Rimmington mine
Draynor crossroads
Digsite
West Ardougne
(there are total of 25 spawn points, but at this point I'm not going to spoil all of them)

Some of these spawn points have quest requirements, but don't worry, you will be rewarded even if you miss some rats.

How to find the rats:

Your cat will be able to sniff for the rats. It will tell you how far you are from the closest rat, and whether you are closer to it than when you last sniffed.

More than 200 steps away: "I think we'd better look elsewhere."
100-199 steps: "I can smell something, but we aren't still close to it."
50-99 steps: "I think there is a rodent somewhere close."
25-49: "We are close! Let's keep looking!"
5-24: "I can smell it! Go!"
0-5: "Let me at it!"

In addition, your cat will tell you either "We are getting closer." or "We are getting farther.", depending on your current and previous distance from the rat. Remember that the rats can move also, this will affect the message your cat tells.

When you are close it it, you can just normally 'Interact with cat' and 'chase vermin', and your cat will attempt to catch it. This may take a couple of tries.

OPTIONAL:

To speed the search, find Bob, the Jagex cat, with your enchanted catspeak amulet. We will tell you the spawn points.

Rewards:

5 * 1,000 Slayer experience (1,000 for each rat caught; if you skip some, you'll get less)
5 * rat claws (if the community wants)

OPTIONAL:

If you talked to Bob and return to him after catching all 5 rats, he will reward you with a clue scroll (level 3).

Rat claws:

This reward will be polled separately if the minigame is released. Each rat will drop rat claws. These can be crushed to 'rat claw bits' with pestle and mortar. Each claw will generate X - Y 'rat claw bits' (x and y will be decided by the community - if rat claws passes the poll). These 'rat claw bits' could be used as a herblore secondary (they will be tradeable) in new potions. New potions could be super antifires, for example - this will be decided by the community, too.

OPTIONAL:

If you have the cat training medal, you can talk to Kardia (in Underground Pass) to have it enchanted. With this enchanted cat training medal in inventory you will produce 1.5 times as much 'rat claw bits' while crushing rat claws.

Soul Snatcher

Concept

It's is a PVP + PVM mini game where 2 teams of 5 have to fight monsters and collect their souls.

There would be chambers that the teams enter to fight small minions and then a boss type monster. When you kill the boss type monster each member of the team gains souls. Souls gained would depend on how hard the boss monster is (There will be easy, medium, hard ones) . You can use the souls to purchase weapons while in the mini game or to deposit to increase your team's score. The team with the highest score would win. The mini-game could last 20 minutes long.

The PVP element of the game would be if the two teams find each other then they will fight each other. When a Player kills another Player they gain souls and also gain the souls that the player they killed was holding.

Soul Score:
Easy boss = 25 souls
Medium boss = 50 souls
Hard boss = 100 souls
Player kill = 50 souls

Shops
You start with no Armour, weapons or items. There would be a shop in your team's base for Armour, weapons and items. These would be purchased with the souls you gain while in the mini-game. Each player starts with 50 starting souls. While in this mini-game you are able to wield any type of sword no matter of your level. There would need to be a system where every player's capability is the same and you get stronger by the amount of souls you have collected.

Armour Shop:
( Sets consit of Full helm, Chest plate, Platelegs and shield)
Full bronze set = 20 souls
Full Iron set = 40 souls
Full Steel set = 60 souls
Full Black set = 80 souls
Full Adamant set = 100 souls
Full rune set = 150 souls
Full Dragon set = 200 souls.

Armour shop (ranged)
(sets include chaps, body, vambraces and coif)
Leather set = 20 souls
Snakeskin set = 40 souls
Green d'hide set = 60 souls
Blue d'hide set = 80 souls
Red d'hide set = 120 souls
Black d'hide set = 150 souls
Robin hood hat = 300 souls

Armour shop ( Magic )
(Sets include robe, skirt,boots,hat and gloves)
Normal Wizard Robes = 20 souls
Mystic robes ( all 3 kinds) = 50 souls
Splitbark set = 100 souls
Infinity set = 130 souls

Weapon shop:
Bronze Longsword = 10 souls
Bronze 2H = 20 souls
Iron Longsword = 30 souls
Iron 2H = 40 souls
Steel Longsword = 50 souls
Steel 2H = 60 souls
Black Longsword = 70 souls
Black 2H = 80 souls
Adamant Longsword = 90 souls
Adamant 2H = 100 souls
Rune Longsword = 120 souls
Rune 2H = 140 souls
Dragon Longsword = 200 souls
Dragon 2H = 250 souls
Dragon Scimitar = 250 souls
Whip = 300 souls

Weapon shop ( Ranged )
Shortbow = 10 souls
Longbow = 15 souls
Maple shortbow = 30 souls
Maple longbow = 35 souls
Yew shortbow = 50 souls
Yew longbow = 60 souls
Magic shortbow = 100 souls
Magic longbow = 130 souls
Darkbow = 200 souls

Weapon shop (Magic)
Staff of Air/Earth/water/fire = 20 souls
Zamorak/Saradomin staff = 100 souls
Ancient staff ( Allowed Ancient Magic) = 100 souls

Item shop:
Lobster = 2 souls
Shark = 5 souls
Potions ( Attack, defense, strength) = 5 souls
Runes ( Air, fire, earth, water) = 2 souls
Runes ( others) = 5 souls
Arrows ( Bronze up to rune, scales like this) = 1/2/3/4/5/6 souls

Bosses
These bosses spawn randomly with minions in either the easy/medium/hard chambers. There will be 4-6 minions in each chamber and the minion's levels will be half of the bosses level. The monster's levels will be scaled according to their chamber. The monsters I have specified are ideas on what models could be used. When a boss chamber is defeated it will respawn with a new random boss in 1-3 minutes.

Easy = level 80-100 ( Minions level 40-50)
Medium = level 110-140 ( Minions level 55-80)
Hard = level 160-200 ( Minions level 80-100)

Easy bosses = Green Dragons ( Minions would be baby dragons)
Greater Demon ( Minions would be Skeletons Level 50)
Blue dragon ( Minions are baby dragons)

Medium Bosses =Bronze Dragon ( Minons would be baby dragons)
Klaphite guardian ( Minions would be kalphite soldiers)

Hard bosses = Iron dragon ( Minions would be baby dragons)
Steel Dragon ( Minions baby dragons)

Why I feel it is a good idea
I feel like this would be a good mini-game to add into runescape because it is completely unique from what we have seen before. It also combines the PVP and PVM aspect of the game which means everyone will enjoy it. It also promotes team work and could help to bond players.

Because every player starts with the same ability, the players aren't advantaged or disadvantaged because of what skills they have or how high of a level they are which is something that would allow veterans and new players to play together.

The Cat Mystery

Quest requirements

Able to defeat a level 86 monster.
Completed Itchlarin's little helper.
Completed Merlin's Crystal

Rewards: 10k gp, 5000 attack xp, 5000 strength xp, 2 Quest points.


Quest start

Speak to Gertrude about her cat. She will tell you that her cat has went missing again.

Then head to Itchlarin in Burthorpe and speak to him and you will tell about what happened to Gertrude and he will tell you about that Bob has went missing too.
He suggest you to use the catspeak amulet(e) to find Bob again.

The amulet would point to the Sphinx in the desert.

You would need to bring your kitten/cat for this part.

If you brought your kitten/cat this would happen.

You speak to the Sphinx about cats going missing and then a cutscene starts.. a mysterious man comes out of smoke and steals your kitten/cat and dissapears again.

Then conversation with the Sphinx would carry on and the Sphinx will tell you that he recognises that mysterious man but he cant really remember from where.
Because he has been having issues with remembering stuff lately. He will give you a hint "Maybe a wizard could help me refreshen my memory".

If you not brought your kitten/cat while speaking to the Sphinx.

The Sphinx would say "I'm not interested in speaking, Bring your kitten/cat here and we may speak."

Head to Camelot and speak to Merlin and he will agree to help but he needs you to bring the ingredients for the potion that makes you remember everything that has happened.

He will give you a list of the ingredients

- Ashes
- Spider carcass
- Eye of newt
- Clean Tarromin
- Rotten Apple

Once you bring Merlin all the ingredients he will mix the ingredients in a vial and say some weird words "Horumbih!.." "Nianori!.." "Rememberus!".
Note: Those words doesn't have any meaning but the quest Demon Slayer inspired me .
Once he's finished mixing it he would give you the potion.
The potion would be called "Potion" And have a dark green look and when examined it would say "It doesn't smell that good."

Then you bring the potion to the Sphinx and he would say.. "Eww thats disgusting, Theres no way i would drink that!"

You would have to get raw sardine and pour the potion over it then give the sardine to the Sphinx.

When you give the sardine to the Sphinx he would eat it and say "Mm..thats some nice fish.."
Continue with the conversation and he will suddenly remember it all and tell you that he had seen the mysterious man in a dream at the blue moon inn.

Once you are there speak to the bartender about the mysterious man, He will ask about what he looks like, You would be given multiple options.
(You would have to remember this back from the cutscene in desert.) If you pick right option..
He would tell you that he is usually there and his name is Rikiniam and that he lives in a house between Barbarian village and Draynor village.

Once you enter the house you would go get the key inside the drawers and go inside the room with Rikiniam in.
When you enter the room Rikiniam would say "The cats belong to ME!" and he would turn into level 86 and attack you using meele and has a maxhit of 14.

Rikiniam

Rikiniams hitpoints: 200
Rikiniams clothing: He would wear blue slave robes like the ones you get from Tourist trap but blue.
Rikiniam is unarmed and attacks using Punch.

Rikiniams specialitys:

• Dizzy Punch: Lowers your attack by 5 and strength by 2 Temporarily.
  
• Stun Punch: Stuns you for 3 seconds.
  
• If you put on protection prayer he would perform a magic ritual and drop your prayer to 0.

Once you've defeated Rikiniam he would drop a key that would unlock the door to the cat room.

Then you would have the ability to pick up the cats into your inventory and return them to their owners, Then quest complete.

Roof-leaping: Agility reborn!

Take for example: Meiyerditch.

You could potential make a agility course just like it, and or use the existing content. But, the general idea is: to little by little make houses climbable in major cities, then using the agility jump animation to jump from rooftop to rooftop!

Here is some place you could potentially start remodeling building:

The Varrock slumbs:






Other possible places:
Brimhaven Houses
Varrock Castle
Rimmington


Players should have the ablility to make their own roof-jumping hotspot's in their POH!, by making a climbable wall and or grapple hotspot! -level 10 construction required.