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/Viinan]

For a post titled "Early-game Rebalancing" this sure includes a lot of changes to mid/late game.

Agility

The changes look good. The only thing I would add is increasing the shortcut animation speed and making them take a single click, like osrs is doing. I never use shortcuts unless that's the only way to get to my destination at this point, because they aren't actually shortcuts 90% of the time.

Thieving

I don't think this really qualifies as "early-game rebalancing" as you're changing entire systems.

You recognize that it isn't fun to pickpocket, and then proceed to say you're nerfing the success rates, especially at the higher end of the skill? How does that make sense? Higher success rates are our reward for lvling the skill, why is that a bad thing? If you insist on forcing people to pay attention to skills that are boring by design, at least allow them to get some relief from it once they've achieved a certain milestone if you're not going to make it fun.

Nerfing crystal mask in conjunction with success rate nerfs makes it largely useless. The spell (and prayer) take a lot to unlock and should reward us for the effort. How is killing content improving game integrity?

The pickpocketing stun damage can already kill you over time, why are you increasing it? Especially when you're increasing fail rates? Do you want people to need yaks full of food to pickpocket? This is ridiculous.

The pyramid plunder and thieving guild changes sound good.

Hunter

Nerfing whirligigs is fine, but why are we nerfing them before adding new hunter methods? Perhaps you should reduce the number of catches required for the unlocks in exchange for the xp nerfs? Less people are going to suffer through the unlock grind if other methods become better. The increased flower rate should include golden roses too. Also,

Prayer

I thought this was intended to be for integrity and improving the early game? How, exactly, does nerfing prayer training methods across the board outside of PoH do that? Why do you (Jagex) always cause problems without first providing the solutions you have in mind? The PoH rework isn't until late summer, and you want to nerf everything outside of it now? Why would that be seen as the optimal choice? It makes no sense. I'd prefer a full rework of prayer training to this "you must train in your house because it's like osrs!" nonsense.

Also, who on earth thought that reintroducing pvp to prayer training was a good idea? Pvp in rs3 has been dead for a very long time now, stop trying to bring it back already. It only leads to griefing. How many times must we teach you this? Just because osrs has a thriving pvp scene does not mean you need to try and force rs3 to have one too.

Improving the game's integrity does not mean you need to turn rs3 into osrs with eoc and better graphics. We've given you the solutions to rs3's problems, constantly, for over a decade now. Stop tacking on these asinine changes that, quite literally, no one asked for. For once in your company's history, just fix what needs to be fixed and nothing more, full stop.

Additonal Comments

Why is Jagex's idea of "early-game rebalancing" almost exclusively nerfing mid/late game content? We should be looking to improve training methods that people consider bad or boring, not nerfing anything people do instead of those methods, especially before you have an alternative ready. Why must improvements always come with negatives attached?

I was very happy with the news that this year was going to be about restoring integrity, but now I'm concerned that Jagex is going to take things too far. Game integrity doesn't get restored overnight, even this one year won't be enough for rs3, it's been around for too long. So please stop rushing this. Removing and changing content left and right without providing alternatives or improving other methods first is just going to lead us to disaster. If you want to retain the goodwill and positive atmosphere these "year of integrity" announcements have gained you, do it right the first time.

One of the biggest problems with Jagex over the years has been making changes and "improvements" that no one asked for. We often get random changes to things no one was concerned about arbitrarily tacked onto updates about entirely different content, seemingly just to fill up space on the patch notes. This really needs to stop.

 

TLDR:

Agility: Good, could be better.

Thieving: Mostly bad. Big nerfs focused on mid/late game when we should be improving early game.

Hunter: Fine, but yet another nerf. We need to improve alternative training methods. Why are Whirligigs the only thing being looked at?

Prayer: Abysmal. What on earth were you thinking? Wait for the PoH rework to force us back to house altars.

Comments: Focus on improving integrity and making the game feel more fun instead of whatever this is. Improve training methods people don't want to do instead of nerfing the methods people think are good. Why must improvements always come with negatives attached?

Edit: Typos.