Hey 'Scapers,
We've recently been talking about our desire to put more attention into fixing bugs or making tweaks based on what's top of mind for you in a more timely fashion than we're able to do today.
This is something we're working towards as a week-to-week improvement for RuneScape - but the reality of shifting our development process to be better at this will take time (we like to think of it as learning to Crawl before we Walk and then Run). While we improve our processes to better track and act on your feedback in our regular development, we wanted to take a more immediate step in this direction in the short term with something we're calling the Community Hitlist.
The Community Hitlist
The Community Hitlist is a development project - around the size of a usual Ninja Strike - where we want to address the most burning tweaks and bug fixes in the community to get into the game as soon as possible. We're asking any interested players to submit their suggestions so we can gather up the most popular proposals and address them in a dedicated update in the next few months.
What Kind Of Things Can Go Into The Hitlist
As we mentioned, this Community Hitlist Update will be similar in scale to a Strike - that means there are certain areas we are focusing on that we can develop in a fairly timely fashion alongside all the other content we're making for RuneScape. This means your suggestions should be one of the following:
- Bugs you would most like to see addressed
- Tweaks to existing content in the game today
- Issues that break you out of your game experience
What Can't We Do In The Hitlist
Just to offer a bit of additional guidance, we want to be clear on things we can't achieve in this format - at least for this version of it! - in an effort to get a Strike size update out in the next few months.
- New content or additions to the game
- Graphical updates or reworks (some of these are coming from Game Jam already - yes that means Karamja!)
- Extensive overhauls of elements of the game, such as new training methods or skill reworks
How Can I Submit A Suggestion?
To ensure everyone can get involved without the need to have an account on a specific platform, we've set up an official survey to capture your ideas. This is a quickfire survey that lets you voice your suggestions, along with giving us an understanding of who you are as a player so we can balance the many (many!) suggestions we expect to receive to take all players into account.
Click here to submit your suggestions in our Survey!
What Happens Next?
We'll be closing the survey on Monday at 11:59pm Game Time. In the week following, we'll begin combing through your feedback to find the most popular suggestions and begin discussions at the studio on what's feasible for the dedicated update in the next few months.
Depending on the scale of suggestions, or if we have a lot of competing popular requests, we may post another article with a survey to ask players to stat rank the top suggestions to guide our prioritization. Either way, we'll be following up once this process is fully completed to be open about what we're working on and let you know any popular suggestions that can't make it into this update - whether that's the timeline or the suggestions being something that warrants more discussion.
From there, we'll begin development. While we are focusing on this Strike sized update, we won't necessarily limit addressing things from the Hitlist to one Strike sized update - some bugs or tweaks may come in with a weekly update, others may follow in another Community Hitlist Update if it makes sense to do one. If it's something we feel could benefit from further feedback, we may even spark up a conversation or two to discuss them further while we're still in the development stage.
Other Active Opportunities To Share Your Feedback
In case you haven't caught them, we've also got another couple of active discussions that we'd love your feedback on.
- Mod Sponge is working on proposed FSOA / Animate Dead changes. Head here for a full rundown of the proposal, why we feel the changes need to be made and then drop your perspective in the Reddit thread.
- Mod Abe has been working on community feedback around future Comp Cape changes. Head here for all the details and let us know your feedback in the Reddit thread comments.
Thank you everyone for the constructive, well thought through opinions we know you'll bring to this. We're looking forward to coming back to you in April with the results of your submissions and show how we're putting your feedback into action.