News

Mod Light

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's round table-type discussion! We have no player questions this week, but we have a bunch of topics that we know you guys are interested in, so stay tuned for that. We also have some really special ToA sneak-peeks, if you want to see them....

For this week we're just going to have a discussion amongst ourselves with some community topics. We're trying something different this week. So let us know your feedback on it.

I'll go through some announcements, and then we'll get to some content. This week's update had changes to Unranked GIM Mode, as well as updates and improvements for our newest skilling activity Giants' Foundry, find that with !Game Update. We also have the transcript of last week's stream where we talked about Player Suggestions, and things like that. So !Transcript for that. Also, just as we went live, we published the Gielinor Gazette, which has updates for you guys, !Gazette will take you to that.

Right, so we just talked about Tombs of Amascut, which is our third raid. It's coming in mid-August, that's the date that we've given you in the Gazette. And we thought it was time that we show you some sneak peeks of the raid to add to the build-up to the release!

Mod Light

First of all, we couldn't miss Volcaban’s “Where's Wise Old Man?” piece of content that they've just released!

We saw it on Twitter, and it sparked a huge discussion amongst the team because of the amount of references, so we thought we'd put it in this stream today. I just want to ask you guys, what did you think when you first saw it?

Mod Mack

I spent most of my lunch just really examining each little thing. It's so cool!

Mod Elena

It's so insanely detailed, I went into this at first going, “Okay, I'm just gonna find the wise old man”, and I ended up probably spending 20-30 minutes just looking at all the fine details, and I still haven't found the flour, so I don't know where that is!

Mod Kieren

It's incredible, isn't it?

Mod Bruno

Yeah, I felt nostalgic, because I used to have a Where's Wally book. It honestly just felt exactly like that. I found it really quickly because it just happened to start in [REDACTED].

Mod Kieren

Don't spoil it!

Mod Elena

You've spoiled it for everyone now!

Mod Light

I just know that we were sending out screenshots of the little things that we can see in our various Slack channels, and it was just really awesome. Very, very cool piece of content this week!

Mod Light

Outside of that, we have some ToA sneak peeks, which you can I think find in the Gazette, but we'll show them here on stream for you guys. The first one is the concept for the Kephri Room.

I believe this is the "bug room", as we described it on Slack. So here you can see, I'll just give some of the text that I've been given from our wonderful team:

“The Scholars say that the great Scarab, Kephri, can be found in her lecture theatre, sat atop her lovely ball of dung. Once a place of great knowledge, has since been sullied by a corruption that knows no bounds. Many of Kephri’s hatchlings rush to satiate her thirst for knowledge, but her mind has been twisted and she understands them no longer.”

And then the next one is an in-game screenshot of that same room, which just looks amazing.

It’s pretty awesome! Just let you guys take that all in. No details yet on the mechanics of the raid, we just want to show off some artwork for you guys and really up the build up to the release.

The next room we have to share with you is Zebak’s! This is our Croccy boi.

This is the concept that I believe was done by Mod Jerv; all of her work is brilliant. So I’ll read out what we have for that:

“Legend has it, the lair of the great crocodile Zebak, lays in ruin after many years of housing the ferocious reptilian nightmare. The room was initially much smaller, but as Zebak’s hunger grew, so did he. Eventually the room could no longer hold him, and the walls and floor gave way to make a vast open cavern. Zebak is waiting patiently for a worthy group of adventurers to devour.”

Wow, he’s big! Again, no mechanics yet, we're not going to spoil anything. But the artwork just, to me, looks brilliant.

I don't know if Mack, or Kieren, or anyone else wants to share any more on that. I don't know necessarily how much we can say about it, but I thought it was important to share some of the artwork, to give you guys a sneak peek at what you can expect in mid-August!

Mod Kieren

Yeah, it's awesome. There's nothing too much to add at the minute, I can't wait to say more, but I would just like to commend the team and everybody involved. This is a step up from what we've seen before, like artistically design-wise, it really does look phenomenal, and it's like, “Oh, gosh, we could do this in Old School?”.

It's genuinely impressive and it's nice to see something that's quite a different style from our previous raids, a bit more dark, a bit more gruesome. There is a lot more colour in this, and it's really enabled us to do some really interesting things. I really loved the whole pyramid theme, and everything going on related to that in this raid as well. Can't wait for you all to see more.

Mod Elena

Art has really been pushing the boundaries here with what they can do. So really impressive.

Mod Light

You've had the chance to try it out yourself in playtests, right? So you've actually experienced it, and I'm sure that it's even better in-game as well.

One last thing that we have to share with you is a concept and in-game render of the Shadow of Tumeken, which is the staff that you get from the raid.

So for the Shadow of Tumeken, Mod Jerv wanted to communicate the iconography of Tumeken, being sun and falcon symbology. The "Shadow" element of it would then make sense to hint at eclipses, with a little bird to hold up with. I just think it looks beautiful, and I can't wait to see what players think about it. What do you guys think?

Mod Roq

Looks like we need a red and black ancestral outfit doesn't it?

Mod Elena

It looks really amazing, I can't wait to see what animation it does! I’m really excited to see that. The first time I saw it, I was imagining something like an eclipse, almost, when it animates. I think that would be really cool.

Mod Light

The art team has certainly just pulled out all the stops for this, it's incredible. I can't wait to see players enjoying it, and loving it in-game…and I can't wait to see how expensive it's going to be! Or how long it's going to take for someone to get one of these.

Mod Light

So, Mod Mack, you're working on ToA. I just thought I’d ask how are you finding it? Any interesting bugs or issues that you come across, and do you feel like it's kicking in yet? Are you nervous?

Mod Mack

I'm extremely nervous, but hyped at the same time! ToA has been the biggest project I've been a part of since I've been at Jagex, and it's been a big part of my life for the last year. So, I think seeing people get their hands on it, and finally getting to experience it is going to be really rewarding. I'm just looking forward to seeing everyone slowly work out each mechanic, and die over and over again to bosses. it'll be great.

Mod Light

Oh my gosh, yes! What's it like on release days of raids? I've never experienced one, but I'm sure that there's going be no guides yet. So what is it like for you guys, as developers?

Mod Kieren

They're my favourite days in the office! It's gonna be weird now; obviously, we’re at home, and the last time we released a big raid we were all in the office. I think we've got some pictures of it somewhere, all of us gathered around one monitor, watching somebody trying to beat the final boss. Those release days where you’re just seeing everybody trying to get the first proper completion is really entertaining. It's a euphoric feeling of knowing it's finally out the door, players are loving it, and there are tons of Twitch streamers trying to get it done at the same time. it's really exciting.

Mod Light

So I put out a bit of a feeler post on Twitter to ask, what topics are you interested in? What do you want? I've also been looking at Reddit and other platforms in terms of game updates, so I have a good idea of what you guys want to know from us.

There are things about third-party clients, DMM, PvP, polling, the various events that we run, our release schedule and a potential new skill, and what are our thoughts on these. We'll try and get through as many topics as possible!

I thought we'd start with the big elephant in the room, which is what the community was talking about the whole week; the third-party client post that we put out on the 17th of June, reiterating that the only permitted clients outside of official ones are RuneLite, HDOS and OSBuddy.

We gave you guys a week-long grace period to transition off of any other third-party clients, and recently we took action against players who were still using unapproved clients.

So generally players are curious, roughly how many bans did we issue? We talked about this in the Gazette, and the answer to this is we've banned players in the thousands, and we're not specifying the exact amount of bans at this stage.

I noticed a lot of players asking about whether we are going to be removing combat achievements or Infernal Capes from those players who were using those unapproved clients. At this stage, we might be looking to reset speed records, but that is undecided at this stage.

Are we looking to do more of these bans, moving forwards? Yes, this is not a one-off approach. This will be something that we do again, moving forwards. I just thought we'd get that out of the way. Thoughts on this, guys? Do you have any thoughts on the third-party clients, and are you excited about hearing it now specifically, knowing that obviously Raids 3 is coming up and will hopefully mean fewer people using dodgy clients with Raids 3?

Mod Roq

Is it finally the case that ToB hardmode is now ToB hardmode?

Mod Bruno

ToB entry mode is now just ToB!

Mod Light

Hopefully it gets more people into the competitive aspect of ToA, if people know that we're serious about this, and that we will take action against people using illegitimate means of getting raid kills. That's my take on it.

Mod Elena

It's certainly a relief, as a designer, not to have to worry about third party clients as much when designing content. We thought about that a lot with ToA, where a couple of the rooms when we were in the design stages, that we just instantly looked at and went, "well, some clients will solve that in two seconds for you". It doesn't really matter what we put in, but that's no longer the case. It makes things a bit easier to design, and we can now actually make something that's challenging to players and fun to play, without a client just solving it automatically for you.

Mod Light

As someone who has never used one of these clients, what kinds of things could they do for you? I'm not aware of it, personally.

Mod Roq

So when we're referencing Theatre of Blood, and the things that were done by particular clients, they were essentially making bosses easier where you don't really have to pay as much attention as to what's going on.

The client will tell you when things are going to happen, tell you the best places to stand, tell you when to move. In the case of the Sotetseg, it would tell you what path was available, even if you weren't the one that was given the path.

It's things like these, where it just completely negates the point of the gameplay to the point where it was overpowered. If you’re having to consider redesigning content based on something that you have no control over like that, you then have to immediately try and take control of it as much as you can, and that is where this stance has come in, where we are now looking at all those different clients and custom clients and everything else as well.

Mod Light

I'm just curious, when designing something like a raid like ToA, did you guys have that in the back of your mind? Could players cheese this with some kind of third-party client? Was that something you legitimately thought about, and did it affect anything for you?

Mod Mack

100%, there are some rooms in Tombs of Amascut which contain their own puzzle, so having something that would solve that for you would just completely ruin the room. It was something that came up quite a lot. Now that it's getting phased out, it's a good feeling!

Mod Light

Hopefully that answers some questions about third party clients. I always get a bit jittery when talking about it! It’s definitely not taken lightly by the community, but I'm really pleased to see such a positive response from the majority of people. I've seen a lot of creators praising us for taking action, and actually putting our money where our mouth is kind of deal with regards to this.

Mod Light

Next up, the players wanted us to talk about DMM.

We put a little bit of a statement in the Gazette, so make sure to check that out for the full statement. It's fair to say that the finale didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked, and I thought it was important to share some insight from the team on the reasons why this happened, to just go into a little bit more of our experiences on that end.

The event wasn't streamed live; players were wondering why it wasn't streamed live, and why we didn't hype it up as much as other events. So I'm curious to know what you guys think. First of all, why didn't we hype it up as much as players think we could have?

Mod Kieren

The key thing is that we wanted to put the focus on executing the rerun, doing it properly, and not having to worry about putting on a live show at the same time. We don't want the rerun to also be seen as a marketing stunt, because that's really not what we're trying to achieve with it.

We're trying to achieve putting it right for what happened last time. Although not everything went perfectly as mentioned, it was obviously a darn sight improved from what we did last year when we ran the original finale. We wanted to put the focus on solving as many of the DDoS risks that we had, and then run the finale as smoothly as possible.

That meant not worrying about getting in casters, getting a host sorted, running a live stream, or every delay having to mean that Ayiza has to awkwardly try and hold up the stream for the next 40 minutes and while we try behind the scenes to fix any issues!

All of this gives us something else to think about. It gives us additional pressure, and at the same time we also knew that players playing it would stream it as well, so there was plenty of stuff online to watch, and indeed, we were all watching the streams at the same time as well!

The entertainment still got out there. I thought when it was running smoothly, it was a thoroughly entertaining watch, to watch the players involved, and seeing Faux cast it as well from the stream, he was watching, too. So I think that hopefully gives you some insight into why we chose to go this way. I think it wasn't the most important aspect of this deadman finale.

Mod Light

Absolutely. So what happened, from our point of view, that caused the rerun to not go as smoothly? Obviously, I think this was an improvement on the previous DMM finale, but there was a little blip and that affected many players participating. So could you go into a bit more detail about what that was and what happened really, for those who maybe weren't watching?

Mod Kieren

The big thing is, we've got to be slightly careful with what we say when it comes to this. As many of you probably well know, DDoSing is a major issue, not just for Runescape, not just for Old School, but gaming in general. Anything on the internet is always at that risk, and it is a cat and mouse game, it's very hard to protect against.

Now, since we ran the finale last year, we've spent time analysing what sort of attack vectors the bad actors used, we assessed: how could we better protect against them? What are other weak points? What ways can we try and safeguard it to the best of our ability?

It took a while. We weren’t sat down twiddling our thumbs in between the last finale and this one. We did do a lot of work to try and give ourselves the best chance, but unfortunately players still managed to find a method of DDoSing that they used. It caused lag issues for some of the players on the server, but it didn't affect everybody. That meant a handful of people unfairly lost some of their fights. Then we ensued into quite a long delay, as we tried to really understand what happened, and try and put new protections in place.

So that caused disruption in the evening, and it was quite a lengthy delay. I'm sure people remember Oda having to juggle his sharks for half an hour straight. That's a learning point as well; it shouldn't be necessary for a player to have to do that!

What we wanted to do was make sure we did everything we could in that timeframe to try and solve those issues, and the rest of it went smoothly after that point.

Mod Light

Is this something that will always happen? Do you think with Deadman, is this something that has always happened?

Mod Kieren

DDoSing isn't the only issue that affected Deadman in the past. There's been a combination of bugs that came from ourselves as well. It's not all just the DDoSing, but any online tournament, particularly when there's money involved as prizes as well, that incentive will be there - that risk will be there. It's just about how we handle the risk. It's about what do we do if it goes wrong?

I can't say anything other than, well, it sucks! It really does suck, because we really do want to do these Deadman finales. They're brilliant, they're super entertaining. But we are beholden to this risk every time we do it. That's what we need to look at. We need to assess what can we do in the case that a DDoS happens.

The current format of Deadman is pretty difficult to handle that with. There's no easy way to say "let's replay this one match" because it's very programmatic. Everything progresses, and players get logged out once they've lost. Everything progresses, and players get logged out once they've lost. It's very hard to undo it and take you back to the same setup from they were the start of that fight.

So what we want to look at is other ways to run PvP events in general. LAN - doing things in person, where it's not going to be liable to DDoS at all, is one great way to do it. Having the ability to just replay a match and such will be a vast help anyway, but the key thing is, we don't want to deliver a tournament that's just going to be subject to problems because it's not good for anybody! Not good for us, not good for the players who are getting a subpar experience as members inside of it as well.

The other issue with a Deadman finale is that it's 2000 people. So a LAN isn't really a viable solution for Deadman in that format either, so there are a lot of conversations for us to have. There's more said in the Gazette as well, where we talked about this, so you can give that a read too.

We want to put this sort of money like prize money towards doing PvP events and tournaments, but ideally, let's try and do them in a way that isn't beholden to these kinds of risks.

Mod Roq

If I could add a little bit - I'm sure everyone in the chat are fully qualified network admins, as they all claim to be! It really is one of those things that you can throw a lot of money at it here and there, and do everything you can to try and mitigate it, and spend thousands of man-hours to try and do a lot of this.

Ultimately, when it comes to DDoSing you're forever going to be chasing anything. It's unfortunate, and I'm not saying it's an excuse for what has happened or the issues that we've had in the past as a result of it. But it's not just as simple as throwing money at it, buying new servers, and everything else stated by people, it's a lot more complex than that!

Like I said, it's not an excuse, and the issues have happened, but I do think there is a little bit of player-learning on the other side as well in order to understand how these things work, and it's not as straightforward or as cut and paste as it should be.

Mod Light

I think it just sucks to know that PvP feels like it's an underserved part of the community, but how do we best serve that part of the community, when it feels like certain parts within the PvP community want to go at it and potentially ruin it for other members of the PvP community?

We want to make sure that the PvP community is served, and we're still figuring out the best way to do that.

Mod Light

We'll talk about Game Modes just because I feel like it's a hot topic. I have an image to share of some of the Game Modes that we pitched in a survey.

I'll just talk about it briefly. We ran a survey to get more insights into what you guys thought about Game Modes. Should they be temporary? Should they be permanent? How long should they run for? What types of Game Modes did you like, out of Leagues, Deadman, things like that.

We wanted a temperature reading on how you felt about this. So this is not us promising that it will come into the game, this is by no means suggesting that it will happen, or it won't. We wanted to know what you thought about it.

You can see things like Fresh Start Servers, Vanilla OSRS, Merchantman Mode, Seasonal Madness Combined Easy or Hard Mode Old School servers, and Leagues and Deadman, which you're probably already familiar with.

We ran a survey and Kieren, you were involved a bit with that. What game modes' count came out on top from the survey, and what did you learn from it?

Mod Kieren

The results overall were super interesting, in how polarising there were! A lot of people for, and a lot of people against, across all of them. There's certainly some context as well, like Deadman has fewer people for it than the others. But we know that; it’s not a surprise.

So you've got to look at these results in context and understand that Deadman is not trying to target everybody, while something like Easy and Hard Mode, it has sort of a much broader casual audience that it interests.

It’s really interesting, for it's not as simple as just ranking them that this one did better than that one and that one. You have to look at them in terms of who they're for, what they tried to do, and so on. We also looked at how active people were so, we posted the survey to people who were playing the game, people who weren't playing the game, and people who played it recently.

I think generally, one of the more popular ideas was Easy and Hard Mode. People seemed to really hook on to the idea. With Easy and Hard Mode, a load of interesting ideas spawned off that, such as how interesting the game could be with a difficulty setting, is kind of how I imagined it in my head. So that one came up pretty popular.

Even Modes like Merchant Mode, which was a big community suggestion multiple years ago, it's come up every now and then. It didn't seem that popular, and it didn't do as well in the survey as I thought it might do.

While something like Fresh Start Servers was pretty popular amongst players who weren't currently playing, but not very popular for people who are currently playing Old School. So each of them has a different flavour to how they're received. Permanent leagues had some interest, but, again, quite polarizing; some people think it shouldn't be a permanent mode at all.

It was fascinating, and of course, these are just a selection of different ideas. It's not every idea that we've got for Game Modes, there are plenty of other ideas we've discussed as well. We just wanted to sort of throw some out there, ask some questions, see what people thought, and try and just get a reading on how people are looking at different kinds of ideas.

Mod Light

The one piece of community sentiment that I've seen a lot of, and I'm not sure if we can talk about it today, is do temporary Game Modes come at the cost of dev time on the main game?

Mod Kieren

Well, they shouldn't! That's not to say they don't affect it, because this does obviously have knock-on effects - like the code base gets a little bit more complicated, all these aspects. What we want to do is try to serve a good balance between making sure that we're delivering great content, new raids, Bounty Hunter updates, new questlines, additions to questlines, new skilling features, etc.

That is absolutely core to what Old School is. So, we've got to keep doing that, that's absolutely going to be the core of what we do. I see that as sort of the minimum, that is our bread and butter. That's what, for the most part, what people are subscribing for. You subscribe so that you can get good game content coming out and updates coming out. So we got to do that.

I realise, the last couple of years, we haven't been as consistent and as predictable as maybe a lot of the players would like us to be. That's something we want to get better at. But in addition to that, I want to be ambitious and look at how else we can serve awesome Old School experiences. Leagues was quite experimental when we first did it. And it's now turned into this thing that we do once every year, year and a half. It really gives you a different spin on Old School.

Same as Ironman modes, they were very experimental and driven by the community originally. Even things like Deadman back when we first did that; a completely out-there idea that we wanted to bring and give you a different way to play the game.

To add to that, a lot of players in this chat, type in the chat when you first started playing Runescape. I'm expecting a lot of like, 2005s, 2007s, you've all been playing a long time! So many of you played for a long, long time.

You've all played the game a ton, and I think it's really interesting to be able to give you a way to play that game you love - and have played for the last decade and a half, in some cases - a fresh lick of paint. I think a game mode gives you a really good way to do that.

Playing the game as an Ironman instantly feels so much different from how you play as a Main, versus how you play when you're playing Deadman, or a League. It changes it up even more radically. So I think it's a good thing to do, but what we've got to do is get the balance right, and make sure that that minimum offering, as I say, of getting your quest, you're getting your bread and butter, getting your new skilling features, you're getting your new PvP updates.

That's core to what Old School is. Game Modes should be in addition to that, which means also that internally, it's not as simple as we have one dev team for X and one dev team for Y. Essentially, we just have a bunch of different developers, and the teams flex all the time based on the projects. We've got to also have the right amount of staff to be able to handle all these so that one isn't at the detriment of another.

Mod Light

I really like the way that Game Modes allow you to experiment as devs, to flex your creativity and try out different things. I love the idea that, potentially, you could do something in a League that players might get to try out and then love it, then get it into the main game potentially if they really like it!

So, I'm curious about the panel. What do you all think about the Leagues that have happened? Which is your favourite one, and which would you personally rerun, if you could?

Mod Mack

I'd love to rerun Trailblazer, that was like a peak for me. As much as I'd love Shattered Relics, I think Trailblazer was just the King. From what I understand, it would be really easy to do as well, it's kind of ready to go. We could just take what we learned from the first run. Maybe there were some balance issues there, like with the last recall room, but we can make some changes, and I think that'd be really good to rerun.

Mod Bruno

I think Twisted League was great, but if we were to replay it, I think it would have lost a lot of what made it great, because I think part of what made it great was that not everyone had been in Zeah or Kourend that much. It was a new experience for a lot of people.

As a rerun, I think Trailblazer would definitely be the one because even if you re-ran it, there are still so many things you can do to change the way that you play it. Whilst you might have taken one path the first time around, you could take a different path this time. I didn’t go to Prifddinas last time, so next time I could go there and check out the content there. That’d be good.

Mod Elena

I think Trailblazer definitely had the most replayability, in that sense. It would probably be the best one to rerun. I think Twisted League has this special spot in my heart just because it was the first one, and it felt so unique and special jumping into it the first time never having seen anything like this in Old School.

It’s hard to say which one’s the best. Shattered Relics had all those learnings from the previous Leagues as well, and it was a really interesting concept to explore. I really just love them all, and I can’t wait to see what the next one is going to be!

Mod Light

Roq, what about you? What League would you redo?

Mod Roq

So out of the three Leagues, I only played the most recent one; Shattered Relics, so I don’t have much experience. I’m not someone who is necessarily enamoured by temporary Game Modes; for me, I’d rather spend the time playing on my main, because it’s a permanent upgrade where I’m getting the XP in, as opposed to something over six months.

I do completely get the whole idea behind it, and the fact that they are awesome. People enjoy them, but there are people who don’t as well. For me, I do question whether we’ve done too many Game Modes recently, but I think one a year is about right, whether that’s one League or one Deadman, or something to at least give us variety, but they aren’t my type of playing, I’m afraid!

Mod Light

I wanted to touch on Pride because this happened recently. From my point of view, personally, I can’t speak on behalf of others, but this was long overdue, and it’s one of my favourite community highlights so far. It’s something I’m proudest of since I’ve been at Jagex. So just discussing, why did we decide to do it? What do you guys think?

Mod Roq

I think in previous years between 2017 and 2022, we were always a little bit cautious about approaching this topic. For those of us that were in the team at the time, and shoutout to Mod Wolf as well, because he got the brunt of it and didn’t deserve what happened.

It did scar quite a few people that were around at the time, just the amount of vitriol, hate, and undeserved bigotry that occurred as a result. Now, it was a case of where we’ve turned around and gone “no, okay, there is going to be some backlash about it because there are people that think that way”, however, this is something that we believe as a team, that we believe as a company, that we feel as invested in, and our players do too.

It really is a case of the people that are making the most noise are the smallest group of people that are surrounding it. It was time that we grit our teeth; we’re doing this, this is something we feel adamant about. And that’s what we did!

The Pride event was a small holiday event, almost the same as any of the others, with references and wit thrown in from the developers and all the people that worked on it. The Pride March as well, we’ve not done something like that before, and even in the case of organising it amongst yourself, Mod Light, and Mod Sarnie as well who did a lot of the work in preparation.

We were also a bit unnerved about trying to do this because we hadn’t done it before. It came out and was completely fantastic; everyone showed their support. Yes, there were people on the other side as well, but the less said about those, the better.

I think it has completely reinvigorated how this time thinks about this kind of content, and how this behaves. I would definitely like us to sign up and be able to do an event every year, along with a Pride March every single year, where people can get involved, hopefully, done across more worlds.

We filled up more worlds than we expected - we filled up three worlds - due to the amount of people that wanted to participate and take part in the Pride March in a good manner, and just all-round show our support for these people that deserve it! The hindered group of our current generation like there has been in the past eventually somewhat became normalised, and that’s what we want to do by creating these events, by having these marches and doing these things.

This is something that should be considered normal and part of society, and we are wanting to do our part in order to continue with that.

Mod Light

Well said!

Mod Elena

Really well said. I saw some people thinking that this was some sort of PR stunt or something, and that’s just so far from the truth of it. The truth is that this was something that the team really, really wanted to do, and it was absolutely driven by the team and taken to production, basically asking - begging - for us to be able to find a little spot in the roadmap for us to be able to do it this year.

I’m so happy that we were able to do that. To me, all those people protesting against it, just show how much we really need it. They are exactly the reason why these people feel like they need to show off who they are. So absolutely, I want to keep doing pride.

Mod Kieren

100%, you guys both spoke amazingly on this! I just want to add as well, we have a large LGBT community in Old School RuneScape. I want that community to feel that this is a place they are welcome in. I would rather make the haters, bigots, or whatever you want to call them, less welcome. I’d rather welcome the love and say goodbye to the hate!

This event can make sure that this is clear to the LGBT community. We do welcome them. We want them to be a part of the entire Old School community. They’re just as welcome as anybody else. Simply put, the LGBT community has been oppressed. They’re still oppressed across the whole world! This is why this needs saying. This is why it needs to be included in our game, and my god did the positivity and love the community showed outweigh any of the negative crap that we also saw.

It was absolutely worth it, and expect us to be doing Pride events in the future. Certainly, there will be Pride Marches in the future, because it was an absolutely wonderful thing to witness, a wonderful thing to see everybody get involved as well, because man, we filled multiple worlds. Multiple worlds had marches going on, and that to me is pretty incredible!

Normally Old School players don’t do anything unless there’s a reward for it. The reward here was the love to show to the LGBT community, and that was enough.

Mod Roq

Just to add a little bit more onto that, there have been some discussions internally about how the Pride event went, and that we’re all happy with it. The one thing we did discuss that we actively want to do in the future, whilst we unfortunately didn’t get time to do it because we wanted to launch it in Pride Month this year, is that in the future, we will look at existing rewards that have been given, and future rewards that we look to give as well.

We will also look to include subsections within the LGBT community, to not only display the Pride colours, but also look to display the trans colours; the non-binary colours, and all the other sections that we can deal with as well, and make them feel included in bringing them into our community.

Mod Light

That's awesome. I was just gonna add a little story time from my end.

I am a bit of a noob. I've never been to like huge events in-game before. I had no idea that at a certain point, the game will stop rendering players if you reach a certain amount.

When we were doing the Pride March, and you know, we had a group of players that was like, “great, this is our group of players, awesome. Let's go marching.” I had no idea how many people there were. It was incredible. They just wouldn't render, which was just crazy.

It blew me away how many people there were. When I was told that the worlds were full and that people were trying to get into a third? Well, I just couldn't believe it! It was a really lovely event is probably the highlight of my year, so far. Just seeing how much support there was, how much love there was.

I'm so glad that we did it. I'm so glad that you guys came to support us. We love you so much.