To the RuneScape community,
We messed up. The launch of Hero Pass alienated and frustrated many in the community. You’ve told us, amongst other things, that it was too pay-to-win and you’d lost important aspects of Daily Challenges.
We made a significant misjudgement and we are sorry. We need to reflect on that and learn from it. That also means we need to take more time to listen and work with the community. How and why that happened is for another time, what's most important right now is what we're doing about it.
We need a do-over. So, we will urgently patch the game to back-out the controversial features you’ve told us are your main pain-points. This then will give us the time to digest your feedback in detail and engage in a community consultation to drive a thorough re-design and re-development of Hero Pass.
As such, we will be making the following changes as soon as we can:
Pay-to-win aspects Hero Pass introduced will be removed. Specifically, this includes:
- Disabling the purchase of Hero Pass levels or Underworld Emblems. This has been hot-fixed today.
- Hero Pass Content Buffs will be removed entirely. This will happen as a cold-fix next week.
- Hero Pass XP Buffs will be moved out of the Premier rewards track, to be available to all members and to be earnable only through gameplay. This will happen as a cold-fix next week.
- The Premier Pass rewards will therefore only be cosmetics and consumables.
The Daily Challenge system will be reinstated in full.
- We are working on this urgently and may take a couple of weeks to go live.
- Daily challenges will return as a standalone system with its prior rewards. This means players can resume daily challenges without engaging with Hero Pass should they wish.
Hero Pass rewards will be re-balanced to be easier to obtain.
- A first assessment of re-balancing will take place next week.
These interim fixes are to tackle the most immediate pain-points, so we can then focus on a longer period of community consultation and re-development. Hopefully these urgent changes demonstrate that we're listening and taking action. Whilst these quick-fixes are not necessarily the exact long-term solutions we’ll end up with, they do represent the principles: addressing the pay-to-win, giving back removed features you’re already enjoying, less in-your-face UI, more generous mission/reward balancing.
For the long-term changes, we intend to not rush, to allow for a re-think of the design, and have the space to work closely and iterate the design in consultation with the community. We hope this will rebuild some of the trust we know has been damaged in the last week.
Thank you for your continued understanding, support and passion!
Mod Keeper and the RuneScape Leadership team
FAQ
Why not just remove Hero Pass entirely?- The first reason is speed; the quickest solution is to patch-out specific problematic mechanics rather than remove a whole interlinked game system.
- The second reason is to minimize disruption to players; we have hundreds of thousands of players who have been completing hero pass missions, earning rewards and using the new cosmetics. Deleting progress and rewards for those players creates a different set of problems and would not be equitable for those players.
- The third reason is optimism; we believe we can deal with the problems players have, and a revamped ‘Yak Track’-type feature could ultimately be a positive addition to the game – but with a redesign that the community can support.
- If you purchased Premier Pass prior to this news post and no longer want it, or you are unhappy about any other purchase please contact customer support for a refund.
- Please be aware we will deal with any refund requests as quickly as possible, but we may experience some delays, so please bear with us.
When you reinstate Daily Challenges will Hero Pass be removed?
- No, for the time being we plan to have both running in parallel together whilst we work on our long-term plans with you.