The Summer Summit Poll has now closed, and everything passed! That means that you can look forward to Varlamore, Chambers of Xeric improvements, PvM updates and more. Today though, we’d like to talk about one particular item of the poll – Old School RuneScape’s first-ever new skill, Sailing!
Sailing is an open-world utility skill which lets you experience exciting new content that can only be found at sea. As you progress through the skill, you’ll become captain of your very own ship, explore new islands filled with new content, and command a crew of loyal NPCs. You can customise and upgrade your ship and fill it with useful Facilities. Eventually, you’ll be able to explore the deepest and most dangerous parts of the ocean.
Sailing is set to be one of Old School’s biggest content updates ever, and with a variety of training methods to try, we’re certain that it will have something for every kind of player.
We’d like to thank all 161,381 players who took the time to vote on this poll. We’d also like to take a moment to appreciate all of you who’ve contributed your time and ideas along the way, from taking part in our surveys and reading the blogs to attending our streams and Discord Stages sessions. Your feedback has helped shape Sailing into the skill it is today – and we’re just getting started!
While Sailing has passed with a significant majority of the votes, we understand that those of you who didn’t vote ‘Yes’ may be disappointed with the result. We know that all of you want the game to be the best it can be, and so we’d like to emphasize that community consultation on our new skill will continue throughout development. We especially want to hear from those of you who voted ‘No’ – we’re eager to hear how we can improve Sailing for you.
With the help of our Data Team, we’ve identified specific cohorts of players that we’d like to work closely with to understand their concerns. We'll be inviting these players to share their thoughts with us and tell us what they'd like to improve about Sailing. The 44,153 of you who voted 'no' are the most important voices of all - plenty of people can tell us why Sailing is great, but only you can tell us what needs to change. So speak up - let's work together to make Sailing work for everyone.
In the near future, you can expect a mini roadmap outlining our development process and ways you can get involved. In the meanwhile, though, let’s answer some of your burning questions…
Summits are an exciting time, packed with cool upcoming content. Naturally, Summit polls have a lot more visibility, and this lets us get a more representative result from the community.
Our new polling system lets us greenlight multiple projects at once, so that our development teams can get to work much earlier. This also gives them plenty of time to get players involved in the design process, which makes a big difference.
As for why Sailing appeared in the middle of the poll – we’d already talked a lot about Sailing in the run-up to the Summer Summit, so we wanted to give Varlamore, our surprise reveal, the spotlight. Varlamore also had a few separate components to poll, so we felt it was better to group them all together.
We’re already discussing ways we can improve our polls even further, so in the future you can look forward to a number of technical improvements, including categories, descriptions, ranked choice voting, and more.
We understand that some players would have preferred to see Sailing polled individually as it may not have been immediately obvious to voters at a quick glance. In the future, we'll be asking players to voice their opinions on our style of polling via a survey so that we can make more informed decisions moving forwards.
As we mentioned above, we’re currently planning the Sailing development roadmap. This means we’re also thinking about which additional topics need to be blogged, polled, and discussed with the community.
As you know, we've committed to running multiple betas that will let you get hands-on with Sailing before launch. The first of these betas will arrive alongside our first Sailing milestone later this year, so you won't have to wait long to get involved!
We’re aiming to release in late 2024, although we’re still early in the development process and depending on your feedback we may need more time. Undoubtedly, we’ll encounter technical dependencies too. As with any major content release, we'll be taking lots of time to adjust Sailing in line with your feedback and ensure that it's in-line with our community's high expectations.
Now, let's have a look at the poll itself!
Below, you can see four graphs which show the voting trends related to Question #6 on the Summer Summit poll.
A graph showing the cumulative vote percentage over the course of the poll.
A graph showing the numbers of yes vs. no votes by hour.
A graph showing the numbers of yes vs. no votes split by skill total.
A graph showing the account status (Ironman or not) of voting players.
As you can see from the above graphs, the vote percentage was generally consistent, starting at 76% and remaining around 71-2% for the rest of the poll. There were no major spikes in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ votes following the Summer Summit.
Across all skill total cohorts, the majority of players voted ‘Yes’ for Sailing – including those who are currently maxed, debunking all our favourite memes. We did, however, notice a trend where those with higher skill totals tended to vote ‘No’ more frequently than those with lower skill totals. Those above 2101 total levels were generally sitting at around 62% ‘Yes’ votes.
It’s clear we have more work to do to ensure that these dedicated players feel listened to and accommodated. In the future, we plan to work closely with players from this cohort to understand their reasons for voting ‘No’. As some of our most dedicated players, we’re keen to hear your feedback!
The majority of votes came from ‘Main’ accounts, and the largest cohort were those sitting between 1800-2100 total skill levels. Sailing really seemed to resonate with you! We’ll be sure to keep working closely alongside you to make sure we’re on the right track.
Ironmen made up 30% of the total votes in this poll. During refinement, we mentioned how your feedback changed our minds when it came to letting Iron players sail with friends, and as we move forward with the skill, we’ll be ensuring that the design lets Iron players enjoy the content as much as anyone else.
Looking all the way back to the New Skill Poll from December, we’re delighted to see that out of all the players who voted ‘No’ to a new skill, 26% of them changed their minds and voted ‘Yes’ to Sailing. We’re absolutely overjoyed with this result – it shows that the refinement process has been a roaring success, and we’re excited to continue working alongside the community throughout the development phase.
That’s all from us today – but before we go, we’d like to thank all 161,381 voters again. Thanks to you, we’re embarking on the next phase of our first new skill! It’s great to start this voyage with you at our side.
Did you enjoy this poll summary? Would you like to see more in future? What other questions do you have about the polling process? Let us know!
You can also discuss this update on our official forums, on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.
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