This week sees even more improvements from Poll #72.
Poll #72 Updates
Agility Courses
A lap counter like the one in Ape Atoll has been added to all Agility courses.
In addition, Grace in the Rogue’s Den now has an option that lets you view all the rooftop laps you’ve done, just to let you keep track. She can also help you toggle the course counter message for all Agility courses on and off, which will prevent them from showing up after every lap.
As before, the counter will begin ticking from this update, and will not work retroactively.
Gu'Tanoth Short Cut
There is now an Agility short cut in Gu-Tanoth which will make it a bit easier to complete a particular Clue step. To unlock it, you’ll need to have completed the Watchtower Quest and have 71 Agility.
Coal Bag
An empty Coal Bag can now be filled directly from the Bank. ‘Empty’ will remain the default option when the Bag already contains coal.
Seaweed Spores
Seaweed Spores can now be pickpocketed from Master Farmers.
There's still a few of the Poll #72 changes left to come, they're being developed and tested as we speak, so be sure to check back in the next couple of weeks to hear about those!
Revenant Caves
We wanted to offer some insight into what we're doing with the Revenant Caves and why there haven't been any changes since early August (when we reduced the Bracelet's damage reduction effect and lowered the value of loot). Before we get into the specifics, we just want to reiterate that we'll make content changes necessary to ensure the game's integrity. It'll take more time to get to the perfect solution, which we'll touch on a bit later, but content changes will be made without a poll - as an unpolled integrity change - if that's what needs to be done.
Firstly we want to just hark back to 2017 when the content was added. It was part of an attempt at rejuvenating the Wilderness, and our goal was to recreate the Multi PvP hotspot of 2011's Forinthry Dungeon in RuneScape. We know there are some players who legitimately engage with the content in a way that's true to this goal, and we'd prefer that any content change doesn't mean the loss of this area of activity.
At the moment we're still in the data gathering stage. In order to fully assess the situation we need to verify what the exact problem is. The types of things we're looking at are the number of unique players engaging with the content, the number of unique deaths associated with the content, items and loot coming directly from the content, the amount of gold-farming activity associated with the content (including things like bans - whilst the Support team works hard to ban RWTers where they can, if we can implement content changes to disincentivise the activity then we should).
There's a bit more data we're still waiting on. In the meantime we'd like to briefly discuss some of the content changes we've seen you suggest. Whilst at some points it might sound like we're being critical of your ideas, it's not for any negative reason. The intention is to generate more discussion to help ideate more solutions and workaround the problems with you involved. It's likely the end approach will be informed by one or more (there's no reason we couldn't combine a few) of your ideas.
Roaming Revenants. There's a lot of public support for a lot of different variations of the game content. Some have suggested that the Revenants might roam in hotspots on rotation (perhaps similar to the Tackle organised crime activity). We're open to this approach, though we do want to point out that if a team is able to hold a cave across multiple worlds then it's not out of the question to patrol various hotspots, particularly as experienced PKers are able to traverse the Wilderness quite quickly. Others have suggested that Revenants might roam in smaller packs, as they did in their initial 2007 release. Again, we're open to this approach but we feel that it would go against our initial goal of creating a hotspot(s) for PvP content. There's also the consideration for how other players in the Wilderness would be affected by encountering Revenants.
Remapping the caves. Some of you have pointed to the cave structure as a source of issues. It's true that the confined area with few entry points might contribute to the camping and locking down of the caves, whereas something more akin to the 2011 design might make it more viable to try to compete by providing more hiding spots and escape routes.
Changing the Bracelet. This could mean changes its effect, removing the item, or replacing its effect with another type of item. It'd mean that camping the content for long single sessions would be less feasible, and if that's the approach the data suggests we should pursue then we'll explore it further.
Changing the loot. Generally we've seen a lot of support for adjusting the loot so that its value is based on rarer drops rather than consistent reward in its current state. Beyond usual rebalancing there are other things we could explore, like removing the Skull bonus to rates and adding new rarer unique equipment to replace the resources and alchables.
Task-only Revs/Rev Caves. Whilst we're not definitively ruling this out, we don't believe that this would best solve the real issues at hand in the way that the other suggestions here have done.
Deleting Rev Caves. Naturally there'd be intricacies to consider, like what to do items that are dropped and their new-found discontinued status, but those would be solvable. That said, we aren't fans of this approach. Rather than remove the content we want to deliver on the content we polled and address its issues.
Banning clans and teams from locking down areas. This is one that we're undecided on, and one we see a lot of you disagree on. To clarify, we're referring to clans and teams who are engaging legitimately with the content rather than for rule-breaking reasons. Other MMOs like EVE or Albion would celebrate this sort of emergent open-world PvP gameplay. Internally we're trying to reach a consensus on how we feel about this.
That's a look at what we're up to behind the scenes, and why our the content has gone unchanged. We expect to get the last bits of information this week, with decision-making to follow soon after, and player-facing communication to follow as soon as we're able to share news.
Golden Gnomes
As you all know by now, the Golden Gnomes are going to be a little different this year. We're not letting social distancing stop us from having a great time, and the finalist announcements are no exception!
The votes have been counted and the Golden Gnomes panel will reveal the final list of nominees during the 10th Annual Golden Gnomes Nomination Shortlist Livestream at 16:00 BST on September 18th. That's this Friday!
Jump in the Livestream on the Old School Twitch here. You can also check out the next steps on our Golden Gnome Awards news-post here for more information.
Prime Gaming
Prime Gaming is back! From 17:00 BST today, you'll be able to grab 7 days of membership when you link your Prime Gaming and RuneScape accounts.
From 17:00 BST onward you'll be able to follow the instructions on this page to claim your reward! Note: the page will be made live at 17:00 BST and will give you an error message if you attempt to access it before then.
In Other News
The PvP world rota has moved to Period A. On the east of the Atlantic, the host for the High Risk PvP world will be W343, Germany. On the west of the Atlantic, the host for the Standard PvP world will be W324, USA, and for the F2P PvP world, W117, USA. The members-only LMS world will be W333, UK, and the F2P LMS world will be W469, US.
- 3rd Age Sets have now been split in the Player Owned House Costume Room.
- Lovakengj Bank is no longer missing blocking.
- The Fragment of Seren cutscene replay option now works as intended.
- You are no longer able to purchase Reinforced Goggles without meeting any requirements.
- You may now upgrade your Cape Racks using Cape Rack flatpacks.
- The new herb cleaning feature will now work correctly for players with the Skill Cape perk.
Discuss this update on our official forums, the community-led 2007Scape Reddit, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For reference on the above content, check out the official Wiki.
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