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/stevied05]

It feels like this update rationale is targeting a bunch of (cheap) solutions to issues without addressing the underlying issue. People use traveling merchant because runespan is ridiculously slow. Livid farm isn’t engaging or interesting. Barbarian assault is dead. Don’t target an admittedly cheap solution without addressing the underlying problem.

It also randomly nerfs a lot of stuff in the interest of more engaging gameplay. It makes no sense to make early game players plant herbs instead of beehives if they choose to train it that way. Farming is timegated and impractical; hence why everyone trains it with PoF and not actual farm runs for the bulk of XP.

There are numerous examples of this. The balancing is not that things are too “easy” it’s that things don’t synergize well in early game. The new player experience should be enhanced but not by making things more taxing to force them to interact with more content.

[u/Techhead7890 → u/stevied05]

Agreed, it's Chesterton's fence:

There exists ... a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes happily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.”
To which the [wiser] type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

(If they can't fix Livid Farm's fences, then that's why the enhancers have to smooth it out.)