To the RuneScape community,
We're setting out on a journey to make Hero Pass a better experience - one that is better aligned to the intents that we laid out in our initial announcement and your own desires for what the system should be.
To do this, we're going to approach these improvements with an openness to re-evaluating many parts of the design, while taking the time to have a fully-fledged approach that brings player feedback into the heart of our efforts. With that in mind, we wanted to share our plans for a community consultation process for Hero Pass.
Hero Pass Community Consultation
Community Consultation is a process focused on gathering detailed feedback, sharing our thoughts and ideas with you by openly exploring different options. Throughout this process, there will be a number of ways we work with the community to improve Hero Pass - combining development integrated player panels with regular feedback opportunities accessible to the whole community.
First, let's outline the process as a whole.
Phase 1: Preparation & Interim Fixes
We have already disabled some of the paid options and Content Buffs in Hero Pass: Underworld as part of our interim fixes.
Balancing changes are up next, with more details on our proposed changes available in this consultation post.
As a reminder, we are also intending to reinstate Daily Challenges as part of these interim fixes. The latest updates on Daily Challenges are:
- The team is still working hard to bring this feature back, with the prior mechanics and rewards.
- Current estimates from the team are to have this back in place by early October.
- Last week, we added 3 Treasure Hunter Keys and 3 Large Prismatic Lamps to the Daily Mission rewards while this is being worked on.
Phase 2: Community Consultation
The consultation period will begin on Monday 2nd October and take approximately 6 weeks to complete.
- We will start by sending out a Hero Pass player survey to ask about the various aspects of the current design
- We will run Player Panels to bring player feedback into our design iteration
- We will share plans on design changes to the wider community to gather further feedback
Phase 3: Review & Next Steps
We will share our plans to improve Hero Pass built from your feedback in the community consultation and outline next steps.
Feedback Coverage
While every aspect of Hero Pass will be on the table, there's a few areas we know are particularly important to you that we're ensuring to include in the consultation process:
- Mission balancing and time to complete Hero Pass
- The level to which Hero Pass is visible or integrated into the core RuneScape experience
- Ironman reward availability
- We will have deeper conversations on the concerns with Content Buffs - both within Hero Pass and beyond it
Hero Pass Player Panel
It's important we take a moment to explain what a player panel is and why it's a crucial aspect of making sure we can bring player voice into the core of Hero Pass development.
A player panel is a collective group of players who will be invited to work closely with development as part of the design iteration process.
While the entire community will help us shape Hero Pass - primarily through feedback on proposals and surveys - we also need to be working closely with players throughout our design iteration to make sure we're headed in the right direction. Design iteration is fluid, and this group will enable us to gather more immediate player perspectives on our design ideas and proposals.
To make sure this is a truly representative group, we'll be inviting players from across our community spaces to the table - from community leaders of our Reddit and Discord, to content creators who represent communities in the tens (or hundreds) of thousands, some survey contributors, and our dedicated P-Mod community. Our goal is to make sure this group is as much of a cross-section of the RuneScape player base as possible.
We want to stress the player panel's role is to help us shape our Hero Pass design proposals to bring to the wider community - not a select few who will decide the overall future of Hero Pass. Your feedback from the survey will inform our initial direction, and your feedback to our designs when shared publicly will be crucial to informing the updates we bring to Hero Pass.
Next Steps
Alongside this post, we've launched our preliminary proposals around balancing and time requirements to complete Hero Pass: Underworld as an interim solution. Check it out here.
Also, as with last week's update, the team will continue working through your feedback to make tweaks and fixes - but any substantial design changes will be shared with you as part of the consultation process.
Thank you all again for your continued feedback on Hero Pass - and for your patience as we seek to approach improving Hero Pass the right way. Look out for a survey coming in in early October as we kick off the Community Consultation period in earnest.