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Dev Blog: Content Poll 16


2014 has gotten off to a cracking start for Old School RuneScape, with the new Slayer cave, the new ammo, the Cave Kraken and its trident, the new minigame grouping chat-channels, new Castle Wars rewards, quick-prayers and a more accessible Run button. We're not slowing down, either, with development work for the Wilderness Rejuvenation already underway.

However, while we're working on the Wilderness, we'd still like to address a few feedback points you've raised from recent updates, as well as offering some small quality-of-life tweaks. They'll have to be fairly small, since we shouldn't undertake anything that will delay the Wilderness work. We're also going to offer the rebalancing of Nightmare Zone, as described in previous blogs.

Have a look over the questions. Once you've had a chance to highlight anything that needs to be clarified or removed, we'll start the voting next week.

Questions for Poll 16

Back in Content Poll #2, we offered to make the middle mouse button rotate the camera, and it didn't pass. It turned out that many players were confused about what was being offered - some thought that we were planning to stop the arrow keys from rotating the camera. Also, some players like using the middle mouse button to click on the game.

We've recently got the game engine features required to offer the middle mouse button with a toggle option so that players can turn it on or off freely. This would allow players to continue using it for clicking if that's what they prefer.


So we'd like to offer you this improved version of the feature now, and to make it clear that the arrow keys will continue being able to rotate the camera, exactly like they do now.

Question: Should the middle mouse button become an additional method of rotating the camera? This would have a toggle; if disabled, the button could be used for clicking as before.

The imbued Slayer helm and Black Mask currently give a 15% boost to your accuracy when ranging, maging or using melee, and a 15% damage bonus for ranging and melee, against your assigned Slayer target. However, they don't offer a mage damage bonus. Also, while the imbued Slayer helm doesn't have the negative magic/ranged bonuses of the un-imbued helm, players have suggested that it be given some positive bonuses.

N.B. The Staff of the Dead already offers a 15% mage damage bonus; these bonuses would be additive, giving a 30% mage damage bonus against your assigned Slayer target.

Question: Should the imbued Slayer helm and imbued black mask give a 15% boost to the Magic damage you deal against your assigned Slayer target?

Question: Should the imbued Slayer helm have a +3 mage attack bonus, a +3 range attack bonus and a +10 mage defence bonus?

The Trident of the Seas currently works only against monsters. We initially offered it like that because its spell casting ability is extremely different from conventional spells by allowing players to switch combat style to Magic very quickly. If a player is on the Lunar or Ancients spellbook it would enable some powerful combinations of Trident with Vengeance or Ice Barrage. Nevertheless, some players have indicated that they'd be okay with it being enabled in PvP too.

We don't necessarily have to enable it in the Wilderness and PvP worlds, though. If you'd prefer that it be offered only in safe minigames, we can do that instead.

We'll offer you two questions. The first will ask whether the Trident should work in all PvP areas. The second will ask whether the Trident should work in certain safe minigames. If the first question passes, enabling the Trident in all PvP areas, the second question will be ignored.

There has been some concern about the Trident being used as a griefing weapon in the same way that the crystal bow can be. These days, however, OSRS has some high risk worlds where items are not protected on death, and the Trident can be looted by a PKer who kills its owner, so we hope this will not pose a major problem. It's been suggested that we impose a rule whereby the Trident doesn't work in PvP unless it's got a certain number of charges, but that would risk becoming confusing.

Question: Should the Trident of the Seas be able to attack players in all PvP areas, including the Wilderness, PvP worlds, Castle Wars and the TzHaar Fight Pit?

Question: Should the Trident of the Seas be able to attack players in Castle Wars and the TzHaar Fight Pit?

Ava's devices are great for saving ammo, but they keep filling your inventory with stuff. We could make that optional.

Question: Should Ava's devices have an option for making them stop gathering random items?

The elf crystal currently teleports you to Lletya. After you've completed Mourning's Ends Part 2, we could allow you to pay Eluned a one-off fee of 50,000 coins to make the crystals capable of transporting you to the Temple of Light as well as to Lletya. Players could then then access the dark beasts without needing to bring the mourner outfit, and it wouldn't make the quest any easier.

Question: Should Eluned accept a one-off fee of 50,000 coins to make your elf crystals capable of teleporting to both Lletya and the Temple of Light, once you've completed Mourning's Ends Part 2?

When you die, your stats are restored but your Special Attack energy is not. It takes 5 minutes to fully recharge your energy. We'd rather not make it recharge to 100% immediately after you respawn, since that'd be a bit powerful for running straight back in. However, we could increase the regeneration rate for a while after your death, choosing a rate that would restore 100% of your energy in 1 minute if you didn't consume any more energy in that time. This would not affect minigames that already restore your Special Attack energy.

Question: Should your Special Attack energy restore 5x faster for a minute after you've died?

Player-owned house lecterns currently just make one tablet at a time. Players have often asked for a Make-X option. If we added this option we could ensure the speed of making tablets was not faster than before.

Question: When making spell tablets in a player-owned house, should the lectern offer options for Make-X and Make-All?

The Odd Old Man requires players to get a special rabbit bone. Currently, this is found in the elf area, which is not accessible to some players. However, there are many other rabbits in RuneScape that could drop this bone, but simply don't.

Question: Should the bunny at the swaying tree near Rellekka drop the rabbit bone needed for the Rag and Bone Man list?

When you dig up a tree that you've planted in a Farming patch, you get one root. The roots are currently in limited supply, which makes it difficult to complete certain potions. If you pay a gardener to dig up the tree for you, such as because you don't have a high enough Woodcutting level, you don't get the root at all.

Firstly, we could give more than one root from the patch as a reward for having a high Farming level. If your Farming is 8 levels higher than needed to plant the tree, you'd get two roots. For 16 levels higher, you'd get three roots. For 24 or more levels higher, you'd get four roots, and this would be the maximum. A player with 99 Farming would therefore get four magic roots from their patch.

Secondly, we could let gardeners give you the roots from the patches they dig up for you. We're going to offer these as separate questions; if both of them pass, gardeners will give you however many roots you'd have got for digging up the patch yourself.

Question: When you dig up a stump in a Farming tree patch, should you get extra roots for having a high Farming level? You would get one extra root for every 8 Farming levels above the minimum required to grow the tree, up to a maximum of 4 roots.

Question: When you pay a gardener to chop down a tree for you, should you receive tree roots as if you'd dug up the tree yourself?

Various items would be easier to identify if their names gave more information about them.

Question: Should the Pharaoh's Sceptre have its number of charges appended to its name?

Question: Should clue scrolls have '(easy)', '(medium)' or '(hard)' appended to their names to show their level?

When you die with a Runecrafting pouch, if you drop the pouch it will vanish. We could make the pouch remain on the ground for you to try and come back and retrieve it. They're untradeable, so other players - including PKers - would not be able to take your pouches. However, since the game needs you to be restricted to using one pouch at a time, we would need to tighten up the checks to stop you acquiring multiple pouches.

Question: If you drop a Runecrafting pouch when dying, should it remain on the ground, visible only to you, instead of vanishing?

In Pyramid Plunder, the progress bar has a coarse scale, so it's hard to tell exactly how much time you have remaining. We could improve this.

Question: Should the Pyramid Plunder overlay show your remaining time more accurately?

In our archive of unreleased content from 2007, the godswords use Stab as their accurate combat style, despite having no stab bonus. This was presumably changed pretty quickly in 2007, either before or after launch; our records do not say. For OSRS, once you'd highlighted the issue, we offered to change this in Poll #12.

At the time, some players raised a concern that if we changed it to Slash, the accurate combat style's accuracy bonus would stack with the godswords' huge slash bonus to make the weapon OP. We therefore offered to change it to the less powerful Crush style instead, and the poll passed. Nevertheless, there's still some demand for switching it again to Slash, so that the godswords can become even more accurate than they already are.

Question: Godswords currently have an accurate combat style of Crush. Should we change this to Slash?

And finally, a few simple jobs...

Question: Should the music loop button remember its setting over logout?

Question: Should composite bows be changed to have the same attack speed as a shortbow, with the magic composite bow's special attack becoming the same as the magic shortbow?

Question: When picking fruit you've grown in tree or bush patches, you automatically keep picking fruits until the patch is empty. Should this go faster than it currently does?

Question: Should dark beasts and bloodveld have a chance of dropping hard clue scrolls? This would be dropped in addition to their existing loot, and would not affect the chances of getting other items.

Question: When you left-click on your cannon while it's firing, you automatically reload it. However, if your cannon is empty the left-click does nothing. If you have cannonballs in your inventory, should left clicking your cannon reload it when it is empty?

Question: Should we add a chat-channel to the Minigame Grouping panel for finding POH parties? There would be no teleport associated with this channel.

... plus the Nightmare Zone balancing changes we listed in the last blog:

Question: Being able to train magic effectively in Nightmare Zone without the need to use player created runes is having a severe effect on the runecrafting skill. To allow you to keep getting the current XP and maintain the value of the runecrafting skill should you only get magic XP in Nightmare Zone if you use your own runes?

Question: Should we introduce an activity timer which will log you out of the game whether or not you are in combat if you have not interacted with the client for 5 minutes?

Question: Should the combat XP you get in Nightmare Zone scale up so you get 100% of the XP if all NMZ bosses are available in that dream, and less XP if the dream is restricted to a smaller selection of bosses?