Hey everyone! It's been over six months since the completion of our first Player Advocacy Group (PAG), so we wanted to give you a deeper look at the fantastic work done by our first PAG and the changes that they have inspired, plus also talk about the future of the program.
For those of you who haven't heard about PAGs, you can read all about them here.
In short, our development team is making even better use of the deep knowledge, insights and perspective offered by our most committed adventurers by forming expert Player Advocacy Groups.
Ninja: Recon PAG
Our first PAG's mission was to help Jagex root out all the little ways in which our Ninja Team could make life in Gielinor that little bit better. We called on well-known player 'The RS Guy' to be our PAG Champion and lead the group - you can read all about him and his team here.
Over the course of a month, this PAG made 336 submissions for possible changes – 328 of which were accepted. These were either taken on by the Ninja Team directly or forwarded on to other internal dev teams for review.
In total, the PAG members put in an incredible 400+ man-hours of work, all of which was split across five meetings with developers (on top of the numerous PAG team meetings) and countless time gathering community feedback. You can check out the redacted meeting minutes from the Jagex meetings here.
We were tremendously impressed with The RS Guy's professionalism and management skills. His team's deep knowledge and willingness to devote their time and energy to the project simply blew us away. Thank you all so much!
What changes did they inspire?
Several of the most achievable ideas were picked up immediately for development in Ninja Strike 8 , but they were only a small fraction of the PAG driven changes that have made it into game over the course of six months. The PAG suggested or inspired a whole host of changes including:
- Combat Achievements
- Combat Tooltips
- Anachronia Remototem
- Grace Tab in Achievements Interface
- Root Teleports/Improvements
- Adrenaline/Powerburst Potion Cooldowns
- Warpriest Armour Drop Rates
- Friend and World Broadcast Preferences
- Personal Slayer Dungeon Improvements
- T92 Armour Patches
- Search Function in Titles/Pets
- Spiritualise Food Improvements
- Fire Urn Spell
- Many Clue Scrolls Improvements
- And Many More Small Changes Cooked into our Monthly Releases!
Many of the PAG's other suggested improvements will arrive via future Strikes. The Ninjas were delighted with both the quality and quantity of the PAG's submissions, which will be one of the primary Ninja Team resources for what we predict to be the next 18 months.
What's next for PAG?
As you can see, we were thrilled with the work done by the first PAG, and we've already identified a number of ways in which we can make the process work even better in response to our new faster development cycle.
PAG is an amazing tool, but requires time to setup, from recruiting a team to gathering feedback for developers - and that means it can only be used on long-term projects. As we move into 2021, we want the next evolution of deep player-expert feedback to match the agility of our development teams, so stay tuned for more info in the new year!
- The RuneScape Team