IVP and other Investment Firms are Holding Back OSRS

[Guest]

whats your thoughts guys? IMO i think he's 100% right.

reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/3c3eqf/ivp_and_other_investment_firms_are_holding_back/

 

 

Note: I’ve edited this down to as short as possible while still making my message clear. I feel that this is a very important discussion so I hope you stick with me.

This won’t make any sense unless you are aware of who Insight Venture Partners (and other investment firms) are and what they do. Paul and Andrew Gower (the creators of Runescape) stepped down from the board of directors as IVP grew to a 55% share in Jagex, and other investment firms Raine Group and Spectrum Equity Investors replaced the Gower brother’s seats. This was a huge change in the management of Runescape, which showed in the direction Runescape went shortly thereafter with the introduction of micro transactions, EOC, RS3 and so on.

There is a general consensus among the OSRS community that the quality of updates and management of our game is extremely poor. Many people flame and blame the OSRS development team for this. I think that the real answer is that upper management is intentionally holding back OSRS.

OSRS generates a huge amount of income, our player count rivals and occasionally even surpasses the main game of RS3. Yet if you look into the miniscule amount of resources that OSRS is given, the numbers simply don’t add up. I’ve come to two conclusions from this:

ONE Upper management is milking OSRS for what we’re worth by inputting as few resources as possible

OR

TWO Upper management is terrified that OSRS will strongly surpass RS3 in player count. This would make it seem that all of their decisions up to that point have been in error, which means they are terrible management. They don't want to be out of a job. A 7 year old legacy build of the game becoming more popular than the newest version would call into question all of their management decisions.

Whether Jagex’s incompetent management are intentionally gimping OSRS (by this I mean completely understaffing us, it would be a ridiculous theory that they are giving us poor quality updates on purpose. Our poor quality updates are because of the rushed and small development team) or just being cheap, our game suffers tremendously. From here I’m going to breakdown many of the issues that I and many other players have had with OSRS. This will be a long list but its necessary to support my above claims. I might have a unique perspective on some issues so maybe read the ones you feel strongly about.

A) We are severely understaffed.

The Dev team has become very creative in ways of saying no during the Q&A sessions. “No, that isn’t possible now but maybe in the future.” “If you want us to work on that then we would have to drop whatever we’re working on at the moment” “Ask us again in the future”. These answers would be for possibly good content ideas but due to how backed up they are, they can’t think about making it. Obviously its not possible to say yes to everything but barely anything bigger than a quality of life update is ever considered.

Ian Gower is currently our only engine developer. Without him, there wouldn’t be new features such as resizable, coinshare etc. From my understanding he is backed up months, during the Q&A they have even said that he is hard at work even during his personal time.

For a long while we didn’t have any graphical artists. We had to make due with reskins such as Vetion, which is a skeleton from Legends Quest blown up 4x the size and recolored a putrid orange during the 2nd phase.

We don’t have any web developers. A month ago we were shown a makeover of the OSRS website which were done by 2 people working in their free time. “In their free time” keeps on repeating too often, it’s the clearest sign of overworked/understaffed there is.

Some of the larger updates such as Achievement Diaries take months to develop, and in this case diaries were delayed. Yet there were still an immense amount of bugs that are still being fixed to this day. Last week they realized that some of the hidden, bonus rewards didn’t actually exist such as the Motherlode Mine paydirt boost and Catherby herb patch boost.

OSRS is so understaffed that a third party client has been outsourced to do a lot of client features where you must pay to access many of those features. Want to know how ridiculously “unoldschool” this is? Back in the real life 2007, there was something called the Rule 7 Riots. Jagex completely banned all 3rd party clients. Yet here in OSRS tens of thousands of players are paying real money to access exclusive client features. We really should not have to pay this fee, no matter how small it is, to access features we ought to have by default if we had a larger dev team. I don’t have an issue with Osbuddy for paying for a service which they obviously spend a lot of time developing and up keeping, its simply the fact that they have to exist at all.

B) Type of Content

Due to having extremely limited amount of developers, we end up getting only a few types of content. This has led to some people calling OSRS “PvMscape”. They’ve added far more bosses and PvM content than anything else. They even “rejuvenate” or boosted drop tables of many monsters as a cheap and quick way to add more content to the game with little work. What this ends up doing is screwing up the balance of the economy and devaluing skilling content.

Pretty much the only skilling content we’ve gotten are the yearly Player Designed Content; Motherlode Mine and rooftop agility. Skilling is such a huge piece of this game its really disappointing to see two pieces of content in two years.

No quests to speak of. Quests are often underlooked for their ability to introduce new places, new gear and content into the game. That’s sadly not possible with the small development team we have.

C) Quality of Content

There are huge balancing issues with the game right now as well as poor quality in general. I have a theory that because of the limited developers, they accidentally end up going overboard with rewards because they need people to actually use what little new stuff we get. That’s no excuse though for how overpowered much of the content is.

Wyverns for one. Sadly enough this has become a meme due to how extremely unbalanced it is. I’m going to breakdown every drop to show you exactly how OP they are because the Dev Team just won’t listen.

Wyverns are relatively easy to kill, monkfish or lobsters can be enough to fill your inventory with loot when meleeing. While they have a range attack it is very short, so they are safespotable with crossbows. Because they drop 8 doses of prayer in one drop, I’ve actually been able to use eagle eye the entire time for hours on end. They exclusively drop alchables and notables, so you never have to bank when ranging. Will freeze you every couple minutes for a few combat turns in melee. They require 72 slayer to kill.

Now that the summary is over here are the drops compared to similar NPC‘s such as mithril dragons and KBD, which are much stronger monsters that hit higher in all three combat styles and have much much more defence as well as unable to be safespotted:

1. 10x battle staff, this single drop is worth more than any common drop from KBD or mith drags (this excludes dragon full helm or dragon pickaxes which are extremely rare)
2. 10x adamant bars (noted), meanwhile KBD drops 3 addy bars unnoted
3. 35 magic logs, worth about the same as KBD’s 150 yew log drop. (btw wyverns drop 5 more magic logs than RUNITE dragons in rs3, obviously they are very different economies and games but that is still something to think about)
4. 1 snapdragon seed, this is an issue because wyverns exclusively drop the 2 best seeds
5. 3 ranarr seeds, 50% more in one drop than some GWD bosses
6. 36 rune arrows, 4 times more than mithril dragons
7. 5-44 runite bolts, up to twice as many as mithril dragons and KBD. 7-99 adamant bolts, up to 10 times more than iron dragons
8. 45 law runes, 50% more law runes than from KBD
9. 25 blood runes, same amount from KBD and mithril dragons
10. 20 soul runes, double the amount that mithril dragons drop
11. 80 chaos runes, 8k in GP basically
12. Three 3-bar rune items and granite legs, while mithril dragons have 1 3-bar item.
13. Rune full helm, while mithril dragons also drop RFH
14. Rune axe, earth battle staff and r’cbow(u) similar to the mace from mithril dragons
15. Dragon plate skirt/legs at the same rate as steel dragons
16. 250 pure essence, the biggest ess dropper apart from corperal beast
17. Air and water runes, one of the few junk drops from wyverns
18. 8 doses of prayer unnoted, this makes it so you could kill them faster and take less DMG
19. 10x uncut ruby and 5x uncut diamond, more than any non-boss NPC that I can think of
20. 200 iron ore, wyverns crashed iron ore considerably devaluing noob content
21. Draconic visage, the ever sought after bank loot

Even though KBD drops black dhides and mith drags drop 3 mithril bars, wyverns still are worth much more per drop and are far easier to kill. Wyverns introduce billions of GP into the game causing inflation at a massive scale, the 10x bstaff drop will end up as 93k for example.

Zulrah is obviously the next huge unbalanced content. I’m not going to bother listing how ridiculously OP most of the drops are but I will explain how Zulrah is the complete opposite of all the other intelligently designed boss content on OSRS.

Bosses typically take a long time to reach. DK’s have the extended maze of three attack style monsters to tank while also requiring a partner. The KQ also has a long winding path leading up to it as well as a desert to traverse beforehand. Godwars of course has 40 kill count which can take more than several minutes to obtain as well as trollheim to navigate.

Zulrah, on the other hand, has a teleport within 5 steps of the boss What this means is that players are always killing it. Players will use very few supplies such as some monkfish and recoils and ammo due to banking every kill. You replenish your hp and prayer for free from clanwars when banking which can take less time than the respawn time for other bosses. There are no such things as a trips, if you screw up then you are instantly back to try again with no penalties. GWD is so much more intense because you have invested time in making it there and you will lose that time if you mess up. Zulrah is boring because screwing up has no meaning, its terrible design.

The drops of Zulrah are the complete opposite of all other bosses in the game as well. Zulruh drops a massive amount of skilling items, vastly devaluing all non-combat skills. Other bosses such as GWD may drop a tiny fraction of skilling items, possibly some yew logs or a couple seeds. Zulrah drops skilling items across the board from dragon bones, grapes, raw sharks in huge amounts. The common drops are so good that the best in slot gear that Zulrah drops have been devalued into the ground, only a couple hundred thousand gold for the best helmet. At GWD its exciting knowing that you might or might not get a boss drop, while at Zulrah you’re just farming a monotony of common drops that end up being 2 million GP per hour at max stats and gear.

The death mechanics of zulrah are the complete opposite of what they should be. It’s by far the most rewarding boss yet there are 0 penalties to dying. Excluding the current DDOS protection death mechanics, if you die at all the other bosses I listed you aren’t getting your stuff back unless your team-mates happen to loot your body. But if you die at Zulrah you lose absolutely nothing.

Speaking of team-mates zulrah is the complete opposite in other bosses that focus on teamwork. At GWD, DK’s and KQ you will probably rely on team-mates to extend your trip much longer. Zulrah makes players increasingly withdrawn and makes OSRS less of an MMORPG, why bother taking the time and effort to interact and rely on other players when you can farm the best money maker alone?

General drop table laziness: magic seeds used to be not dropped by any NPC. But the new buffed tables for Kalphite Queen drop TWO magic seeds, the kraken drops one, and zulrah drops one. This has lead to magic seeds being worth less than yew seeds at times. This applies to many new NPC’s and buffed tables, there’s just little thought put into balancing the tables compared to other NPC’s or considering what the supply of the item is before a drop table buff. 10x battlestaves are dropped from the Kraken, Zulrah, and wyverns despite all of the being very different NPC’s that take different amounts of time, supplies and effort to kill.

Speaking of low quality updates, it seems to be the majority of the time and not the minority that we get unfinished content. Resizable still has no zoom mode, a 3rd party client had to add this. Bounty hunter was untested and crashed the price of dragon scimmies to alch value. Achievement diaries are still being fixed to this day. Zulrah, if you can believe it, had drop tables nerfed a week after release and added more phases to actually make it more difficult.

Literally all 3 wilderness bosses had safespots. A Friend even did a video on 100 Venenatis safespot kills. There is still a melee safespot in the game right now for Vetion. Poor or nonexistent quality control severely crashed the price of the unique ring and dragon pickaxe drops for everybody afterward and people who were killing the boss legit.

I could go on much longer for this section but I feel I’ve made my point already.

D) Lack of Community Input in a “Democracy”

Supposedly, our input has a ton of value because of the polling system we have for the game. The OSRS team is supposed to listen to our feedback on the content they put out because “we are in control of the game”.

They waited over a year to put out the “Game Integrity Poll” asking our opinion on NMZ and splashing. They waited well over half a year to say that they are listening to our feedback on wyverns and zulrah. They have the gall to say that “they don’t actually believe that wyverns and zulrah are overpowered” in the news update herehttp://services.runescape.com/m=forum/a=5/forums.ws?380,381,178,65624994 That type of doubting a huge portion of the community is incompatible with the polling system we have. whatever your opinion on the above issues are, you have to admit that the OSRS team let us down big time by waiting such a long time for issues we brought up over and over. By waiting so long, they have severely skewed the public opinion since people become entitled to these pieces of overpowered content. People don’t want to “miss out” or have a disadvantage to what other people have already gotten, if the dev team were on the ball then this wouldn’t have happened.

As far as my personal opinion on the AFK methods above, I’ll give you something to think about at least. You don’t have to agree with me but there are some factors to consider that are exclusive to OSRS:

AFK guthans has existed since barrows came out. What never existed was a way to profitably AFK guthans. NMZ is in a completely safe area that will reward you with skilling resources, AFK guthaner’s drive down the price of those resources for those who choose to actively play the minigame. You’ll end up spending millions of gold repairing your guthans at bandits, my guess is far less people would participate in AFK guthans at NMZ if you didn’t profit or at least cover most of the cost.

As for splashing, there are new factors to consider. One of the being the smoke staff, which decreased the cost of splashing by quite a bit. Another are rune packs, which also reduced the cost to barely anything. Yet another new factor to consider is that splashing has become huge, visit any bank that has low level NPC’s or clan wars to see that there are thousands of people participating in it. Splashing may have technically been in the game but I had never heard of 6 hour afk splashing before OSRS, so you could consider it an exploit that wasn’t known before. To me, this is incompatible with the mentality of OSRS. Not my mentality, if you look at the front page of OSRS the first sentence description includes “relive the challenging leveling system…”. Leaving your computer for 6 hours is literally the opposite of what was advertised.

E) Polling Balance Changes

Right near the beginning of OSRS, one of the first pieces of custom content was released: Nightmarezone. The minigame gave you an infinite amount of runes no matter what bosses you had enabled. This led to people making barrage boosters, where you could cast multi-spells for completely free and get hundreds of thousands of magic xp per hour. Except it wasn’t even free, it was profitable because you could trade in the points for resources. The point of this being that a poll to nerf this failed. A profitable exploit where you gained the fastest possible magic and hit points xp in the game failed in the polling system. Right near the beginning of OSRS it was clearly shown that the community cannot be trusted in nerfing overpowered content. Well maybe you’re wondering why this exploit still isn’t in the game despite failing the poll. The dev team fixed it despite failing the polling system because clearly it was unhealthy for the game.

F) Rampant Cheating

Mod Weath is currently our only bot buster. One man can only do so much, I have the utmost respect for him and everybody else on the OSRS team but this one person simply isn’t enough. What would happen in the past is that the anti-botting team would develop anti-cheating measures which would lead to a purge of many bots. When there was a resurgence of bots new measures would be developed. But from what I can see on OSRS there’s not many advances in the bot detection software, and Mod Weath ends up playing Whack-a-bot with the endless supply of them. I’m sick of seeing bots in every aspect of the game, thousands of them are at chaos druids, flesh crawlers, green and blue dragons, rune crafting, hunter or even staking etc etc. We need more people working on the bot detection software.

G) Jagex let the DDOSers Win

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the quality of servers are the worst they have ever been. Jagex has actually compromised and let the DDOSers win by drastically changing the death mechanics of the game for a year now. To me, that feels like they have completely given up or simply don’t want to put resources toward DDOS protection and they think that we’re just going to take this lying down. The hour long gravestones we get while keeping all untradables make all dangerous PvM content completely safe. More people are bossing and using best in slot gear, killing bosses quicker because there is no chance at all to lose anything. There is no such thing as item sinks, no items are ever lost to dying anymore. This feels like the exact opposite of what OSRS means to me, gravestones make the game completely risk-free and therefore boring. You can’t even reliably log-out anymore, this is infuriating in the wilderness when you click logout and you stay in the game while DC’ing.

I'm aware that there are super-entities that can take down huge networks such as PSN, Xbox live etc. But when there were clans who stood outside GWD and took down worlds just to loot some gear, that's inexcusably bad server protection.

They have said that they are working on DDOS protection for well over a year now and the user experience has not changed at all. Jagex lost my trust, you can only string us along for so long before we realize that nothing is being done.

H) The Idea of Developing Zeah

Zeah sounds like an amazing piece of content. In fact, the idea is to be one of the biggest updates in Runescape’s history. Huge amounts of new land, never-before-seen features such as procedurally generated raids. But if you look at the track record of OSRS, this idea is laughably impossible to develop. We are getting the barest minimum of content, relatively small updates (compared to Zeah) such as achievement diaries took months and was delayed. The idea that we are getting extremely sparse and small updates now, but sometime in the future we’re going to get the biggest update in RS history is incredibly stupid. It seems to me as if they are stringing us along with a promise they don’t intend to keep.

Wanna know what I think the dev time could instead be used for? How about polling most of the content from 2008 and see what the community reaction is. Most of the content won’t fit the design philosophy of Oldschool but there’s certainly some that will fit. People ask about content from that year all the time. This would be far safer and much easier to implement than the huge gamble of Zeah because you wouldn’t have to release it all at once, just poll week by week and selectively include what would fit in our game.

------------------------------Conclusion------------------------------

When I had first heard that OSRS would be released I was unbelievably excited that Runescape was getting a second chance. This slowly turned to disappointment. I feel that the same management that ruined RS3 is running OSRS into the ground with neglect. I can’t stand to see our only second chance at Runescape wasted which is why I made this post. We so plainly need more resources distributed towards OSRS. I respect all of the hard-working members of the OSRS dev team, but these few can only do so much.

Jagex might defend their actions by pointing to the referendum that took place before OSRS started. They might say that “well look at the results, you’re lucky we’re giving you this much”. Look at the root word, “refer”. If they are actually basing their management decisions on a viral marketing campaign 2 years ago, they need to get their head out of the sand.

Jagex will accuse us of being cynical, as if our attitude is the problem. How do you even defend this month’s Behind the Scenes? All we’re getting are a change to an interface and a PvP tournament? Runescape isn’t an esport or MOBA, this is just yet another example of the people running our game just hopping on whatever is trending or big at the moment, with no understanding of what made RS popular in the first place. Look at EOC and see how that turned out. Runescape is based on simple game mechanics which means that it depends on regular, intelligently designed content to keep it afloat.

Jagex will accuse us of being greedy, of asking more than our share. They have hiked the price of our membership to $10 per month and included micro-transactions (bonds) yet we still get so little in return for the massive amount of OSRS players. I’m not asking for OSRS to get the same amount of developers as RS3, because OSRS is a much simpler game. We need as many developers as it takes to get content out on time, actually finished, more than just a PvM reskin, and at an acceptable quality.

Jagex will accuse us of being a loud minority. A huge part of the community are jaded, critical posts of the game repeatedly make it to the top and end up with no response. Clearly, if we want change we’re going to have to be much more aggressive.

While there have been some steps in the right direction with the new staff hires, this is not nearly enough. It’s time to let them know that we will no longer tolerate their false promises, mismanagement and neglect.

[zl8l]

god dam tldr

 

sounds like you have things figured out though

[Henrik]

Saw this on reddit earlier, extremely good read for anyone interested in what's happening behind the scenes and what problems this game currently has.

Edited July 4, 2015 by Liv

[Thanos]

It's nothing new tbh, it's been like this for a while. He severely overrates the amount of knowledge IVP has about the game though - it's just pure numbers and profit for them. And that's what they do - and that's what the Gower brothers knew when they sold it to them. It's a shame - but also reality.

[Colin]

A lot of this barely impacts us as pures besides the dc's lol. 

[Dazzled]

It's a company, companies do what is best to bring in more money. If they include more staff for osrs, they lose more money on something that wouldn't bring new comers to the game.

[vans]

Very good read

[Amusing]

Saw this on reddit earlier, extremely good read for anyone interested in what's happening behind the scenes and what problems this game currently has.

[Pixel Pigeon]

tldr ez drops ez money im not poor anymore

[Pick n mix]

i agree

[Flav0ur]

It's a company, companies do what is best to bring in more money. If they include more staff for osrs, they lose more money on something that wouldn't bring new comers to the game.

[Rites]

sad times

[Astro]

thanks for info

[Milo]

d3d game

[Ricebola]

i agree zulrah is retarded, because its easy to kill once u get it down and u can tele there/replenish ur shit at clan wars. and even when u dont get a good drop u still get at least 100k+

[`Ben]

Read it later, but saw IVP and thought it referred to In Vas Por :(

[Brenden]

[Guest]

jheeeze fam, jheeze.

Edited July 5, 2015 by Guest

[C H I L Z]

gl selling