Hi ‘Scapers,
Since the release of Hero Pass on Monday, we’ve been listening to and discussing your feedback on improvements you want to see for the Hero Pass experience.
Our aim of ensuring this is a player-positive, rewarding system for the game is critical, as is our promise to working to improve the system with you. We're looking to work towards areas where we can make this system better for everyone, and we wanted to let you know some key areas we’re already investigating as a team to respond to your feedback as soon as possible.
Daily Missions
Daily Missions were balanced with the intention of being below the average daily playtime of a moderately engaged player, with the total Tiers taking around 20-40 minutes to complete. With Lamps tied to the Tier rewards, this meant that the associated XP rewards take longer than our previous Daily Challenge system.
Based on feedback, it’s clear quickly attainable XP rewards you can target every day are something many of you value. While completing Daily Missions using the +100% bonus reward for using a specific skill does significantly reduces the time taken to complete the Challenges, we appreciate that the quickly-attainable rewards are something you want us to keep.
With Missions allowing any kind of gameplay to progress them, our goal will be to get them to a place where you can quickly hop on, play the game for a very short period of time any way you want, and walk away with your XP. With that in mind, we'll be changing how Daily Mission rewards are structured.
We're going to be upping the XP gained from Daily Missions. We'll now give two Large Lamps' worth of XP instead of the previous Small, Medium and Large Lamp (a slight increase in overall XP awarded by around 25% of a Large XP lamp). Completing Daily Mission Tier I and II will grant Hero Points and a Large XP Lamp each, while Tier III will simply give you additional Hero Points. This means earning all Daily XP from Hero Pass will now take ~15 minutes, half of that if you focus on the bonus progression skill shown on the mission.
As an additional note, we've designed the Hero Pass mission system to allow us to add more Special Missions to supplement content releases and updates, to ensure that you can be rewarded with significant bursts of Hero Points for exploring new updates as and when new missions arrive. We'll continue to bring additional Special Missions throughout Hero Pass: Underworld and will continue to provide helpful boosts to your progress as you encounter them.
Visibility
We know that some players find Hero Pass is full-on with notifications, chat messages and audio effects right now.
We’re working to add filters for these systems so you can have control over what notifications you want as you play, so players can control how much Hero Pass is an active part of your experience. We have already been working on updates lined up to address your feedback:
We've heard requests for a single-click button to open the Hero Pass interface faster, and we're looking into adding that functionality in the future. In the meantime, it's worth noting chat notifications that show when you have completed a Mission or unlocked a reward can be clicked to open the interface and claim the rewards immediately.
Content Buffs
Our intention with Content Buffs is to add additional gameplay focused rewards that feel great to have and incentivise you to check out certain content due to their benefits (ie. Chase Imcando Axe pieces in Woodcutters' Grove with the additional perk activations).
In regards to Combat Buffs, we intentionally leant into existing expectations of similar systems such as Death-Touched Darts. These Buffs give a gameplay benefit with the caveat that Kill Count, Kill Times, Hiscores and records are not updated when in use.
This design was intended to create a buffer system allowing for players to explore and practice with a reduction to incoming damage but without the ability to record times or kills.
We’ve heard your concerns around Content Buffs – both with some of our initial selections, and fears of where this system could go - so we want to help reassure players. We want to help shape Hero Pass to be rewarding and fulfilling, and buffs are a part of that system.
We'll be looking at where on the Hero Pass track Content Buffs are generally placed, with the aim to make buffs easier to acquire through organic play.
Building on from that, we want to open up a dialogue with you, the community, on what form buffs should take - we want to know what kinds of buffs you'd enjoy using during your adventures in Gielinor, and which kinds you don't. This is crucial to us, and we want to make sure that buffs are a rewarding and accessible addition to your Hero Pass experience which still feel fun to use.
Ironman Accounts
Since our announcement last week, our team have been looking at future options to make Hero Pass more valuable for Ironman accounts.
Building from your feedback, we are looking to discuss the topic of Ironman players being able to claim XP rewards from Daily Missions, but we want to make sure that we approach this subject correctly.
With that in mind, we will be looking to ask the Ironman player community directly for their guidance on whether or not they should be able to claim XP rewards from Daily Missions in the near future.
Our long-term focus is on the rewards from Hero Pass for Ironman accounts in general. We will be looking to engage with the Ironman Community on our proposals once they are ready, and make sure they align with the expectations of what an Ironman should be able to claim.
Progression
We’ve seen some early calculations and discussions around the time it takes to progress Hero Pass.
As we mentioned when we announced Hero Pass, we’ve balanced Hero Pass against particular groups of players, with game data guiding us on how much and how often those players play. Hero Pass is designed to be achievable for these different groups playing exactly the same amount they did before its inclusion. To recap, this is:
With only two days into Hero Pass’ runtime, we need to allow time for the data to flow in on how this is performing in the wild to get a full picture – but we did want to acknowledge those early discussions. We’ll be combining that data with your continued feedback to keep a close eye on how Hero Pass is matching the goals of the balancing, and we'll follow up on this in a future Feedback Update post.
As we mentioned in the Daily Missions section, a sizeable chunk of Hero Points are balanced around Special Missions which release alongside updates and events. These updates aren't visible to players right now, so we understand where some concerns come from, but they offer a significant amount of levels' worth of Hero Points on their own. We'll continue to look at how players interact with Special Missions and how they earn progress, to guide what shape future Special Missions will take.
Finally, while it’s not relative to Hero Pass feature feedback, we did want to drop a quick note on how we introduced the messaging around presenting Hero Pass to the community and apologise for clearly getting that wrong. We’ve heard what you felt was wrong about the way we approached it, and we’re taking it forward as a learning for how we communicate updates like this in the future.
For now, we’ll be focusing on keeping you updated on how we’re looking to refine Hero Pass based on your feedback and make sure its living up to its intentions. We also want to say a big thank you to anyone who’s provided feedback in a constructive manner that we can act on – this is the best way to drive change and it’s been incredibly helpful for us to focus in on making meaningful improvements.
We’ll keep you updated on Hero Pass changes and information through additional Feedback Update posts in the future.
- The RuneScape Team