Legacy Mode

[RU_Insane]

Too little, too late. The player base evaporated when EOC was released. RuneScape was never meant to be anything outside a point and click game; this is obvious from the failiure of the current combat mechanics. So I'm afraid those telling 2007Scapers to "adapt" don't understand the problem. Even those familiar with LoL-like mechanics admit EOC is poorly implemented. There are plenty of competing games that have the mechanics the EOC-elitists harp on about...go play those if you want to brag about your button-pressing skills. I don't see why non-EOCers should have to adapt. They make up a considerable portion of current base, so they certainly have a say. Jagex realizes this, that's why they've offered a poll. But it's unsalvageable now.

[999134]

Was semi-interested when I saw this, but read the details and still don't care.

 

To get me to start playing again they would have to get rid of everything to do with eoc, it was a rushed cluster[bleep] that completely killed the game for loads of people, they are not even looking into things like bringing back 'pure' accounts/diversity of any kind and just screams desperate gesture. 

 

It is fine to like the game as it is now, it just not the same game, and I maintain that the best the game has ever been at was the day before the EOC update, maybe closely followed by the day before free trade returned, they were different but had their own appeals.

[God Of Lego]

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

[muggiwhplar]

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

 

It seems that more people chose the latter than the former, which is unfortunate for Jagex and the players who chose to keep playing.

[kamil1210]

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

with this attitude it is hard to make things better.

[ilovecuttingyews]

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

Or stay and complain until they change it back.

[muggiwhplar]

 

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

Or stay and complain until they change it back.

 

 

Money talks

[999134]

 

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

 

It seems that more people chose the latter than the former, which is unfortunate for Jagex and the players who chose to keep playing.

 

Unlike pretty much every other change to rs in history this is the case it seems, this sort of sarcastic comment kind of falls flat now.

 

I hate to say never, but with the game so vastly different from the one I loved, I don't ever see myself playing runescape again, real life quickly fills in the time gaps and it really would take a perfect game to get me to consider the time commitment playing takes. A lot of ex-players I stay in contact with feel the same way, I don't think pvp or staking is ever going to recover properly for example.  

[God Of Lego]

 

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

with this attitude it is hard to make things better.

 

I was not serious. Thats why the winks there. I was kind of taking the mick of when I said that saying Adapt or Quit is a bad thing to say, yet the tides turned and now they cannot swallow their own words. Its suddenly an attitude or "not a good reason to say that"

 

The RS community are full of hypocrites

[muggiwhplar]

 

 

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

 

It seems that more people chose the latter than the former, which is unfortunate for Jagex and the players who chose to keep playing.

 

Unlike pretty much every other change to rs in history this is the case it seems, this sort of sarcastic comment kind of falls flat now.

 

I hate to say never, but with the game so vastly different from the one I loved, I don't ever see myself playing runescape again, real life quickly fills in the time gaps and it really would take a perfect game to get me to consider the time commitment playing takes. A lot of ex-players I stay in contact with feel the same way, I don't think pvp or staking is ever going to recover properly for example.  

 

 

I wasn't being sarcastic >_>

[999134]

 

 

 

Adapt or quit, eat up. ;]

 

It seems that more people chose the latter than the former, which is unfortunate for Jagex and the players who chose to keep playing.

 

Unlike pretty much every other change to rs in history this is the case it seems, this sort of sarcastic comment kind of falls flat now.

 

I hate to say never, but with the game so vastly different from the one I loved, I don't ever see myself playing runescape again, real life quickly fills in the time gaps and it really would take a perfect game to get me to consider the time commitment playing takes. A lot of ex-players I stay in contact with feel the same way, I don't think pvp or staking is ever going to recover properly for example.  

 

 

I wasn't being sarcastic >_>

 

meant the one you quoted sorry

[@Dan3HitU]

I personally would like to know why they're even offering "Legacy Mode" when they were so confident with EoC, it seems like they regret the decision entirely.

[God Of Lego]

I personally would like to know why they're even offering "Legacy Mode" when they were so confident with EoC, it seems like they regret the decision entirely.

I dont think they've ever been confident, more like stuborn and ignorant.

[Yoko Kurama]

I personally would like to know why they're even offering "Legacy Mode" when they were so confident with EoC, it seems like they regret the decision entirely.

 

They have definitely been very neglectful of all the people who didn't like EoC (if they had accommodated them from the start, this wouldn't have been happening). Over all, though, it's not necessarily them regretting, as evidenced by how many RS3 players are against this, likely because they have grown to like EoC and don't want to see it undone -- so it's not regret. Rather, they are just trying to accommodate and reintegrate all the players they pissed off into the game. EoC did change the game, in some ways (particularly high level PVM) for the better, and I doubt Jagex regrets that (nor should they). 

[Hedgehog]

As far as I'm concerned, EOC was a pretty successful update from an objective point of view. It's just that RS has catered to the least talented mmo players out there for so long, which led to a lot of the playerbase being alienated.

[Yoko Kurama]

As far as I'm concerned, EOC was a pretty successful update from an objective point of view. It's just that RS has catered to the least talented mmo players out there for so long, which led to a lot of the playerbase being alienated.

 

Calling it 'pretty successful' from an 'objective point of view' is a pretty suspect thing to do. I like it, and it has made quite a few improvements, but financially it has not been successful, it has failed to generate a new player base or increase RS's popularity, it was criminally neglected by Jagex for quite a while (and a lot of suggestions were delayed or ignored), and several of its core aims (the primary one being to balance the triangle) were not achieved or were dramatic failures. Far from a 'success'.

[Quyneax]

Successful? Objective? "Catering to the least talented MMO players"? That's quite the thing to say, without any sort of argumentation, isn't it?

 

I don't think any game designer would call (the combat system after) EoC a 'good' thing, that is, they wouldn't call it imaginative, interesting, smooth/fluent, simple, complex, sensible or any of the other adjectives you like to see in a review. That doesn't mean that the system can't have its moments, but it's not nearly as good as it ought to be and completely different conceptually from the old system.

 

The problem isn't that the product isn't sold/used, the problem is that the product is a) low quality and b) not what the subscribers were receiving/happy with for the past ten-odd years. It's like ordering sautéed aubergine and receiving some microwaved black pudding instead - no reason you can't like both, but it makes no sense at all, and it really isn't like you're being given the fancier dish.

[strilmus]

if they had fully committed to the concept instead of breaking it up with concessions that don't actually make sense and not actually bothering to tweak damage values and mechanics to make all the abilities useful for months as if it were just another update they could leave unoptimized

 

also, because they refuse to make their own game client outside of a browser, we're always going to have input lag issues

[Yoko Kurama]

if they had fully committed to the concept instead of breaking it up with concessions that don't actually make sense and not actually bothering to tweak damage values and mechanics to make all the abilities useful for months as if it were just another update they could leave unoptimized

 

also, because they refuse to make their own game client outside of a browser, we're always going to have input lag issues

 

Except they never made any concessions at the start (and not any of the numerous ones that were reasonable). In the start, they just went "Nah, not listening, my way or the highway" and ignored dozens of suggestions and obvious things that could have greatly improved it and made it a lot more enjoyable and coherent. They did that for a whole year, and when the numbers didn't go as they expected, they went into the other extreme direction, which is "we will give all the people who didn't like EoC whatever they want", which is where we are now. If they have just listened from the start, we wouldn't be at this step, plenty of people wouldn't be alienated, and we would be much better off. I mean the whole point of EoC was to balance the triangle, and how long did we have drygore-scape for? Seismic-scape? Concentrated blast OP? Range being completely overwhelming. No Meta (then Sunshine) for Rangers.

 

All perfectly obvious things which they waited MONTHS on before even acknowledging there was a problem -- some of them were only fixed quite literally a few weeks ago. Basically they were far too lazy, and incompetent and stubborn and it led to completely unbalanced combat, a lot less fun combat, and the markets being completely haywire as they would break things, let them stay broken for months, then fix them way after they had already conditioned the players to accept the broken state of gameplay (the best example of this is what happened to Seismics -- they were OP and 3B for how long? Something like 7 months, during which all the J Mods were basically in unison with th HLF and accused anyone who asked for a reasonable or balanced triangle that they were lazy Marxists who didn't want to "earn" their stuff. Then, BAM!, they decide in 2014 that they would completely flip the script, fix up range, nerf Mage, nerf Conc blast, and the markets are still recovering from this). Just complete sillyness and lazyness. It was a decent concept (not the best, but decent) that was ruined by sheering ineptitude. 

[helring]

if they had fully committed to the concept instead of breaking it up with concessions that don't actually make sense and not actually bothering to tweak damage values and mechanics to make all the abilities useful for months as if it were just another update they could leave unoptimized

 

also, because they refuse to make their own game client outside of a browser, we're always going to have input lag issues

 

A major part of the game is it can be played pretty much anywhere with no downloads. I just see a seperate game client annoying more people.

[Urza285]

As far as I'm concerned, EOC was a pretty successful update from an objective point of view. It's just that RS has catered to the least talented mmo players out there for so long, which led to a lot of the playerbase being alienated.

I agree.

 

I think I'm fine with legacy. In the face of the rift between OSRS and RS I think legacy would have been a better option. I feel a lot of great ideas and implementations in OSRS could have made it to the regular game as well. Also because of how old the game is OSRS isn't totally without merit even with legacy coming. I welcome back the old school pking.

[Alg]

Successful? Objective? "Catering to the least talented MMO players"? That's quite the thing to say, without any sort of argumentation, isn't it?

...Well, the game has had a reputation as a 'gateway' MMO for (probably) most of its life, now... That's not a bad thing: it was so successful in the past because it was the simple, cheap MMO that you could be good at even if you didn't play any other video games.

[muggiwhplar]

As far as I'm concerned, EOC was a pretty successful update from an objective point of view. It's just that RS has catered to the least talented mmo players out there for so long, which led to a lot of the playerbase being alienated.

 

Old combat was simple to learn, difficult to master.

New combat is difficult to learn, difficult to master.

[Ginger_Warrior]

What exactly is difficult to master about RS combat?

 

If you look at most combat guides for RuneScape, the vast, vast majority of them should be easily replicable to a gamer of average talent. They're all very prescriptive and very didactic. Follow the guidelines and you cannot [bleep] up, literally.

 

My experience of RuneScape over the past seven years is a fairly healthy-sized proportion of people who do follow those guides very successfully, undermined by people who are unable or (more likely) unwilling to follow such guides and would rather whine about it, and blame their own incompetence on Jagex and faulty gameplay mechanics.

 

Which isn't exactly surprising. In general life, people are amazingly talented at blaming others for their failures and themselves for successes, even when those successes have nothing to do with them.

[Sy_Accursed]

I think EoC's issues stem from 3 facts:

 

1) The way they flailed around like fish outta water in the first few months after release making reactionary changes that did not really make sense within the system they had built (eg power armour and tank armour) and their continued insistence of breaking their own system (all tiers are balanced to be equal so lets split the t90 weapons up in a way that one lot is pretty easy to get, one lot is theoretically easy it just takes several months of grinding keys to kill 1 boss at a time and one thats off a super deluxe strongest monster ever because thath'll make them nice and equal in standing)

2) The fact the system was meant to promote diversity in gear choices but monsters and nuances weren't built in to make it useful eg nothing strong enough to warrant shields, no real specific differences between 2h and dw making it simply a case of 'which is best dps', weaknesses (particularly in the high end) being underplayed - we should not have a point where our gear is so good it surpasses weakness mechanics on the top end monsters.

3) They did too much too fast - Trying to test it all as an entire new system and spot all that is wrong with it and garner all player feedback was just too much. Sure to evolve combat they had to make some big changes but they could've split those changes down into lots of smaller ones and make sure each one was really superbly done and that players had a chance to adapt to the smaller change and then they get another smaller change.

 

Like they could have road-mapped with like 3-6 months between each for bugfixing/iron out kinks once live and maybe even beta-testing of each before launch:

Update 1) Rebalance all weapons within a tier to give comparable DPS and introduce off-hand weaponry.

Update 2) Introduce monster weaknesses across the board and update melee weapons to the 1 attack type model.

Update 3) Introduce the idea of higher hp, some of which comes from armour and crit stat/mechanics

Update 4) Bring in the actionbar for food and prayers and potions

And so on and so forth.

 

Woulda given them a buttload more time to focus in on the minute details of each change and get it done right instead of having a wall of chaos and trying to tidy it up. Plus it'd of given even the most stubborn of players much more time to adapt and learn the new system without feeling entirely alienated.

 

Also think theres more they coulda done in the low end to make it a smoother learning curve like:

Adrenaline and abilities (eg perma momentum) are not unlocked at all until you hit say lvl 10 in the combat stats.

Abilities (kinda works atm) then unlock basics then thres then ults and each time you unlock one for the first time you get like a mini tutorial on tht segment on things (kinda like the pathfinder thingy they have atm, just to avoid overwhelming people with information) and maybe have an academy thing with 'trials' or w/e that are optional but teach you about more indepth details (like dot, area etc)

Make the weaknesses thing a bit more generous in the bottom end - eg very bottom monsters just have melee/range/magic and its not strongly enforced, then next tier up it is strongly enforced, then next tier up start to divide into stab slash crush fire water air earth bolt thrown arrow. Would give newbies a chance to get to grips with things bit by bit instead of landing and it being like you need lvl x magic, a bow,  a crossbow, a thrown wep, a sword, a mace and an axe right now to be any good at all!

 

 

Objectively it certainly met the goal set of allowing combat to do new things to expand the limits at the top, but that objectivity has to glaze over a whole mess of issues.