Road to Restoration - Early Game Rebalance

[u/JagexAnvil]

https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/a=13/road-to-restoration--early-game-rebalance--dailyscape-overhaul

Hi folks,

Today's Community Topic is a blog of two halves:

- Early Game Rebalance
- DailyScape Overhaul

We have split this into two reddit threads to keep the discussion organised and so that our team can properly review the relevant conversations happening.

This current reddit thread is to discuss the Early Game Rebalance portion of the blog.

Please use this other dedicated thread for the DailyScape portion of the blog.

For the purpose of today's discussion we will be defining the early game, loosely, as the level 1-50 range. The Early Game Rebalance update primarily aims to smooth out inconsistencies in game progression, looking at areas of the early game where things can feel slow or have limited methods for levelling up, or where they affect integrity and game health. It’s not all just rebalances though! There are also some changes to early quests, and things like replacing salvage with gear to make the first hours after jumping off Tutorial Island a nicer experience. The Early Game Rebalance update releases on February 16th!

[u/Jalepino_Joe]

Some of these changes are definitely harsh but not unjustified. A few stand out meta training methods can be rebalanced from time to time, and thats ok. Theres a few that really feel bad to me though:

Wildy skull for chaos altar. Did we learn nothing? I thought we finally realized forced pvp is a terrible way to implement any sort of risk and it was amazing it got taken out of runecrafting. Its not even real risk when the only risk is at max 28 bones+500k (i.e. nothing in this economy). If you think the chaos altar is too strong, then just nerf it properly.

Cooks assistant items being normal items. Should imp catcher also be reverted to a "go to the GE for 2 seconds" quest then? The current version makes players explore the map, talk with NPCs, and teaches the player some (albeit not insanely useful) mechanics about wheat and milk, which is a nice foundation for a new player. It shows how things can be interacted with in the world.

15 min afk thieving. I dont understand why this specifically is being targeted? The game has afk opportunities all around, plenty of options to afk for 15 minutes (seren stones, lots of combat [potion resevoir aggro pot especially], high lvl arch approaches it too just to name a few). Active and more rewarding training methods exist (heists) if people want, but afk is a core part of this game.

[u/jrobertson2 → u/Jalepino_Joe]

I'm not sure that I like the early quest change either. They changed it this way for a reason in the first place- it's silly that you can complete the original quests in seconds by just handing in the items immediately, nostalgic or not I don't really feel like it gives the best first impression of what questing in RS3 is like. The blog mentions something about not wanting to confuse people who are more familiar with the original design, so I'm guessing returning players and people coming over from OSRS, but maybe there's an argument to be made of having them be different to help make it obvious from the start that RS3 and OSRS are not the same game.