Feedback on the recent updates

[Stale fish1]

...unless you're an ironman

... Which cash is not a high priority anyway

At this point, I feel like you are trolling.

Let’s just say that it costs Ironmen 25b in order to get everything required for a Max cape. Before the update, it required you to alch approximately 42B worth of items. If you use the same calculation with this update, Ironmen now have to alchemy over 100b worth of items just to afford a max cape.

Let me out that in context. That is 5 Custom whips. That is over 50 Bandos Tassets. That is 3 Perfect Rings. That is LITERALLY A MAGIC STONE.

tHiS hAs No EfFeCt On LaTe GaMe ItEmS???

My favourite would be 4x scythe of viturs

[Brant]

Heaven forbid they make ironman mode harder. You just enjoy your easy life before and now can't handle nothing that doesn't make the game mode easier.

[Uim elon]

Heaven forbid they make ironman mode harder. You just enjoy your easy life before and now can't handle nothing that doesn't make the game mode easier.

I agree. Ironmen should just go fish for money. I hear if you buy living minerals for 150k each, and alch the Rocktails you fish, you will only lose 100k per Rocktails+ the cost of the nature rune!

[Its flat]

Heaven forbid they make ironman mode harder. You just enjoy your easy life before and now can't handle nothing that doesn't make the game mode easier.

Just stop, Brant. You have done nothing but spam the forums with your troll comments on this topic. You have contributed nothing constructive to the discussion. It's obvious you get a kick out of the chaos currently going on, but for many of us this is something we are taking seriously.

Furthermore, do you even play the ironman gamemode?

[Brant]

Heaven forbid they make ironman mode harder. You just enjoy your easy life before and now can't handle nothing that doesn't make the game mode easier.

Just stop, Brant. You have done nothing but spam the forums with your troll comments on this topic. You have contributed nothing constructive to the discussion. It's obvious you get a kick out of the chaos currently going on, but for many of us this is something we are taking seriously.

Furthermore, do you even play the ironman gamemode?

Oh yes I have been spamming the forums. Trying to prove that the devs were right about there changes. I have been providing reasons to why the devs did what they did on purpose and you just ignore it. Then you try to claim that I am spamming and trolling. I'm not the only one who agrees with this but you ain't trying to cause shit with them. Yes, I play ironman. Not as often as some other people, but enough to know the game mode. If y'all can't accept someone's opinion then you can just not be a dick about it and keep it to yourself. Makes you look like a bitch

[Lykos]

this is something we are taking seriously.

Choked on my coffee a bit when reading this line.
The update was a good wake up call to the entire community and was well deserved in almost all aspects.
Taking your piss out on @Brant wont change anything.

[Rapsey]

So I will address the high alchemy portion of the update, because I view it as the most severe portion in my opinion.

I’m not sure why you guys felt that instead of nerfing the Revenant Caves and their drops directly, you chose to completely break (because it is truly broken) the entire economy for Ironmen, then nurse it back to health with rebalancing. Junk store dumping as you say was 90% of the problem, but you chose to extend this along all aspects of creating currency. Nerfing something little by little until it is perfect is a more effective approach then dropping something to the floor and fixing it on the way back up...

Well no, junk store dumping wasn't 90% of the problem. It only depends if the item is a large quantity stackable or not. If it's a large stack then junk it, otherwise alch it. Doing it for junk store only solves it in half of the cases. The rev caves also weren't the problem, that was just one example.

I'm not sure if I agree that many smaller nerfs are better, then you just get people complaining over a long period and feeling like they are constantly being hit with the nerf stick. While I agree that the impact for irons was greater than it should've been, I don't agree with you calling it "truly broken". It's not broken, it's still totally playable. Making money just takes significantly longer now. It sounds like you're saying that unless irons can make money almost as fast as they could before the whole gamemode is destroyed.

For the record I have also had people tell me that they like the alching changes. Why? Because now the rare drops are actually cause for celebration again. Before this getting rare drops wasn't that special because you were actually making more money alching all the random junk than you were from the rares. In that regard I also think things were kinda out of balance. I don't think it should be like that.

The big difference here is that people buying bulk donator credits for an ultra rare, expect to make a decent profit out of it, whereas buying bank space literally gives nothing, besides a few bank space.

I've come to the same conclusion. It seems that people are very reluctant to actually spend money to get something they want. They only want to convert money into something of equal or higher value. Actually spending money and having your bank value decrease seems to be unacceptable. Which is a bit bizarre because I thought the whole point of having wealth was so you could exchange some of it to get the things you want.

So unfortunately that's kind of the point. The game needs some money sinks, or more accurately wealth sinks. Without them people keep getting richer at an alarming rate (average bank value doubles every 12-18 months) which makes things difficult. Our donator store prices come from a time when the richest players only had 300B so back then donating €64 for 30B was substantial. Today it's peanuts. We can do what most other RSPS do and just give more and more wealth per euro so real money stays competitive with the ingame eco (and ruin the eco in a few years time and do an eco reset). Or we can try to keep it in check by taking wealth out of the game in exchange for useful benefits. Maybe there's other ways, feel free to let me know if you can think of any.

This is the number one problem faced by all digital economies: value never disappears. Second-hand items aren't worth any less than brand new ones. Your clothes don't get worn out, your devices don't break down and your phone doesn't become useless after a few years because it can't run the latest apps anymore (which is like the real life equivalent of power creep I suppose). Everything just holds its value forever and all you're doing is perpetually pumping more value into the economy, making it impossible to keep things in balance long-term.

With that in mind maybe removing the ticket tax was not a good idea after all, but strangely no one is saying a word about that...

Bankslots
I do agree that if the bankslots were scaled in 100's it'd be a more worthwile purchase than every 50.

We did it per 50 because when your bank is full actually 50 extra spaces is a big deal. I don't think it really matters if it's per 50 or per 100, it's more about the pricing. Assuming 100 slots would cost twice as much as 50 slots it would probably be the exact same thing. So I think what you mean to say is: 50 slots should've been half the price (or we should've done 100 for the same price as 50).

Giving Ironmen another way to obtain Custom whips is a great addition in my book. My only problem comes with the simplicity of the way. I wasn’t really in to the idea of having them come from Raids 1 or 2, and if they were, I would want them to be like 1/800 drop rate each.

What I would have loved to see (and it isn’t too late to implement) would be to instead of letting Ironmen pick the custom they want by sacrificing a custom and 6,000 donator points, make it so that they can reroll on the table. This would still leave room for RNG to play its roll, but also include the money sink that you guys are craving. This will still result in a satisfying feeling of getting “lucky” instead of Ironmen feeling dirty by obtaining it the “easy” way (pay to win way).

Is there any particular reason why you think obtaining custom whips should be sooo much harder for irons than it is for everyone else? Other than "because that's how it's been until now", which I don't find a very compelling argument tbh.

As for the RNG re-roll, if you ask me that's kinda filthy as a moneymaking practice. I'm not a big fan of such gambling mechanics (just keep donating until you get lucky) and anyway, the goal was to try to reduce the randomness and make it more consistent for all irons.

Bank slots:

I feel that the bank slots were done in a way that yes is good to provide a donator credit sink, but feel that maybe to encourage people to opt for this by giving them a free "sample".

Coulda given the first 50 bank space free for everyone.

I don't really see why the first 50 should've been free tbh. The first 800 are free, I don't see why it should be the first 850 instead. Though perhaps we should've made the first step cheaper to make it almost free. Idk, we thought that putting it at 20-25B was actually quite cheap. I don't think anyone who needs more than 800 bank slots is gonna lose any sleep over spending that amount. 5000 credits is (less than) the price of a custom whip now, and used to be a fair bit less since they were 7000 until this update (or 7500 without status). It's not exactly a super expensive thing to buy is it.

Personally I think the starting point is good, but perhaps the increase each step is too much. Maybe it should've been +2.5K per step instead of +5K. Or maybe both should be halved. It's worth considering.

My suggestion was to just put custom whips in ironman shop for like 50k crerdits each and not allow a swap. Keeps the endgame content and hunt but if you really get rng sacked you could then pay in credits or collect like 250b and buy credits. While you also get money to fund the server that costs 'thousands' per month...

Now everything feels like a small cashgrab that affects everyone, where it used to be just the rich paying the donator credits for some useless cosmetics. Players don't really get much value or even lose out with this update because the intended alternative is not yet implemented that's the big problem with the release of this update.

I guess we could've done it that way. We thought it would be more disliked if we did it in a way that doesn't even require you to do any elites anymore.

Ok, I don't have much of value to contribute, but I'm just gonna say this, I have like 1b coins (brawlers are 500m each and people always forget that) on my ironman and like endless dupe loot items which I was planning to alch for the 200m cons grind (BCP's alch for like 400m, lol), that is now looking impossible with no legitimate method of gaining that 24.5b or whatever it is, which I'm not gonna lie is extremely frustrating. Dupe drops for ironmen were previously a method of making cash and now they aren't. Dunno how to fix it besides raising the alch price of literally every rare drop so yeah.

The fact that irons who were saving up their items get punished harder is something I also don't like. Although I don't really understand why you say that getting the 24.5B for 200m construction is now "impossible". Even with the current values it takes like what, 30 hours to earn that much money if you do ToB? Maybe it is too long now but it's definitely still doable.

However, I think a bit more of a "warning" or heads up that the massive alch prices where changing as I along with many others that I've seen where currently hoarding their alch items to save for cash for other goals.. this is needed now more than ever and I hope that we can recover in some way or another atleast 60-75% of the cash that we previously had...

I was actually thinking maybe we should revert the changes for a week and maintain the current alch values until the end of 2020, then have the new values go into effect starting with 2021. That would also give us some more time to adjust the alch values where needed. Not sure if it's a good idea though... Now that the prices have been lowered everyone is highly motivated to point out which prices need adjusting.

You said in your topic that only rich players should feel incentive to purchase the 2k bank spaces but even purchasing an additional 200 spaces is "200-250b" which would be very useful on an iron but at the same time is stupid expensive on an iron. I suppose it is hard to figure out the middle ground here as a lot of irons have mains and rich ones at that, but it definitely hurts the ones that don't have rich mains. Even with my 2k+ hours, I still only have 50b(ish) in my refund. Sure I could probably liquidate my bank or other items but even then it would be pretty damn hard to even get close to +200 slots.

Hmm, you must not have done much moneymaking activities then. I was under the impression that ToB is (/was) like 2B/h so if you only have 50B of disposable funds... I'd think you can make that much in 25 hours, a mere fraction of your 2k+ hours timeplayed.

I do think you hit on a good point there: a lot of people have multiple accounts. Maybe in our bank slot pricing we should've taken into account more that people would want to do it on multiple accounts, since as it is that would be quite expensive. We assumed it would only be used for people's main bank accounts and as for irons we thought it would just be something they could spend their unused cash on (since there's not much else).

A few of the meta money makers for new players or even vets who want to make spare GP by afking is dramatically effected by the alching. I think there is a lot of work to still be done in regards to getting prices fixed for alching.

We can tweak those to restore the moneymaking potential of those main methods. Although in the case of AFK moneymaking I think a nerf is actually a good thing. I'm not sure if it should be possible to make that much money while AFK'ing.

I think changing alch values based off revs being so profitable by that sense is a mistake, I think the economy for valued items like runite ore and raw rocktails is completely destroyed and takes away potential money making methods for skillers and or new people/afkers. Now raw rocktails are a slim % of the value that they previously were. Even with keeping them able to sell to junk store for 150K ea was much better IMO.

Rev caves weren't the problem, that was just one example. Supplies that should be alch/junkable for a lot of money can be buffed.

I also seen a thread about having donor credits tradeable both ways which I agree should be a thing, if you transfer donor credits to your iron/HC\UIM you should have the option to transfer them back.

Ehh I don't think so.

- Buy donator credits on iron using iron's GP
- Transfer credits to main

It's basically a 1:1 way to offload the wealth of your ironman to your main which is not something we want to make possible. If buying credits on an iron wasn't possible (only obtainable through donating or giving them from your main) then yes, I would agree.

The last issue is being able to xfer wealth from your iron to your main is now scuffed. You could previously xfer from your iron to your main by dying to yourself and obtaining high alch value for the items lost, I would recommend putting the prices back to 60% of the min trade value for items lost on deaths by irons or changing it entirely to obtain the actual items dropped on death with the exception of custom whips.

This is not an issue, it's a major improvement. Death trading your wealth from your iron to your main wasn't an intended gameplay mechanic and some people have actually been punished for doing it. The only reason it's possible is because PK'ers need some reward for killing irons. It's not meant to be used as a way to transfer your wealth off of your ironman. If we wanted that we would've just given irons the option to one-way trade to regular accounts.

I would even consider making irons drop nothing to put a stop to it, but I doubt PK'ers would enjoy that very much.

alch values
Decoupling alch prices from trading prices is fair enough. Although, the rev cave example given seems to be the only case where this was really an issue. Would it have not been better to make changes to just the rev caves rather than across the entire game?

There are many other items which have the same issue. But I guess what it really comes down to is balancing what should be the price floor for an item. Until now there were a lot of items that did not get traded very often but when they did get traded the buyer would pay a significant amount for them, because it's hard to find someone selling it and with uncommonly traded items people tend to just follow ::prices (thereis no supply and demand competiveness on the market). Meanwhile the vast majority is just alching and junking these items because there's such low demand for them. That's fair enough, but they're still getting a lot of money for it solely because those occasional trades happen at high prices. And the only reason those trades happen at high prices is because everyone just alchs them so you rarely find them for sale. It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.

Of course every item should have a pricing floor for which it can be alched. Some of these often-alched items were probably already at a good value for them, others not so much. I think we should look at how hard they are to obtain to determine what that price should be, instead of deriving it from their unusual market situation (which really just follows whatever ::prices say for the most part).

Something I don't think has been explained yet is the reason for the difference between high alch prices and junk store prices? If they are both decoupled from street prices, why are they not the same as eachother? With the current junk store prices being 60% of high alch prices, what actually is the purpose of the junk store? What incentive to people have to use it and therefore why does it exist?

If junk store prices and high alch prices were made to be the same, here are the pros and cons:

pros
•can sell all your unwanted items quickly
•large stacks of items such as pure essence can be sold quickly

cons
•large stacks of items such as pure essence can be sold quickly??

I'd think that would be obvious. High alching takes more time/effort and it also costs runes. If high alch and junk store prices were the same then alching would be useless except for doing it in PvM where you might run out of inventory space, so you don't need to bank as often. Beyond that you could just be lazy junk everything, it would always be the better option.

I don't think it's really an issue though, because the junk store is really only needed for stackable items. You can just set the alch value for those items in such a way that the junk store profitability is just right. If someone feels like alching a large stack of dark crabs, then it only seems logical to me that they should get significantly more money out of it to compensate for the time and effort it takes and the runes it costs.

custom whips
While I don't agree with your opinion that custom whips being RNG based is not a good game mechanic, I can understand your point of view. However, you haven't just changed custom whips from being RNG based, you have made them significantly easier to obtain. I liked how custom whips were RNG based but I wouldn't have minded if they were simply changed to be less RNG based, but this isn't what has happened. Obtaining the best item for ironman (chaos whip) has changed from being 1/400 chance in elites to 1/50 chance in elites. It is now significantly easier to obtain this item. How can this be justified?

Easy solution: decrease the chance of getting a custom whip from an elite. Problem solved (though I'm not sure if we want that).

Also, that's a fairly specific example (chance to get that particular whip. If your goal was to get all custom whips the difference would likely be a lot smaller than 1/50 vs 1/400.

So now, after obtaining their first whip, all lategame ironman players will be faced with the decision of either trying their luck with a 1/400 chance, or paying the credits for their chaos whip. Is this really fair to make ironman decide this? Is this not literally p2w?

By definition, ironman mode requires players to be entirely self sufficient. But now, players can use their main account to fund their ironman to buy the best item in game (chaos whip). How can we still call it ironman mode?

This is not a new problem. Even before this people were using wealth from their main to pay someone else to donate for them. We've simply streamlined the process and made it possible for irons to do that with their own money instead (which is arguably more self-sufficient).

Of course with the custom whip swap it has more of an impact. I don't really have an excuse for this. We just decided that after all these years the competitive aspect of ironman had been played out (no one racing to be first to top the highscores anymore) so it doesn't matter that much anymore. On the other hand, almost completely excluding a third of your playerbase from generating any revenue is a pretty big deal.

I wouldn't call it p2w. Just like with regular accounts it's pay 2 avoid having to spend your own in-game resources on it, which slows down your progress overall.

I'm glad you chose pure essence as an example, I think that's a perfect example. So let's say you have 400k pure essence, you're exactly right, there is no logical reason to try and alch these. So why should they have a higher alch value? No one is going to alch them anyway... So instead, what should happen is to set both the junk store value and the high alch value to an appropriate price which "pushes the more profitable way to sell it on the GE to people actually adds resources into the economy, which will probably lower the cost of the items in the long run, but will increase the accessibility to said items."

This may be somewhat unrelated but I feel like the importance of junking huge stacks of pure essence for profit may indicate that perhaps far too much pure essence is being dropped and should be toned down, with other drops taking their place to maintain profitability. Doesn't solve the problem for people who already have a huge stack of pure essence of course, but I wouldn't be opposed to increasing their high alch value so they junk for 2.5K each again. Even though I do think it is a bit weird to get so much wealth from common pure essence drops.

Only decent way to do this now would be to alch rare tier drops even then the rates are abysmal

Would not recommend, I'm not trying to alch 250b in wealth for 50b to pay for cons

Why not? ::wealth is just a number literally saying "this is how much you could get for selling this stuff to players". It means nothing to an ironman. Are you really telling me you wouldn't turn items that are useless to you into something useful because ohz noez my number is gonna go down?

If that is the case then I vote we make ::wealth on irons based on alch values. It simply makes no sense to calculate ironman wealth using player trading prices.

As for alching rare tier drops, we may actually buff the alch value on those so that irons can return to profitability by alching those duplicates, rather than just alching all the useless junk. It would be better for the yay-factor of getting a rare drop.

Heaven forbid they make ironman mode harder. You just enjoy your easy life before and now can't handle nothing that doesn't make the game mode easier.

I hate to say it but I think there is truth in this... Yes OSRS ironman mode I am looking at you. Can't help but wonder what would've happened if we had released our ironman mode with the same difficult moneymaking as OSRS had from the start. Would people have lost their minds like they do now or have said: holy shit, a real challenge!

[E l y]

I'm confused why alch prices were lowered. If you want ironmen to purchase donator credits and use them to create a donator sink, then you'd think you want them to have more money. Now it's going to take 5x the amount of time to get money to buy donator credits meaning you're sinking donator credits at a 1/5 the rate or whatever the alch reduction was. Not sure I understand this part of the update.

[Rapsey]

I'm confused why alch prices were lowered. If you want ironmen to purchase donator credits and use them to create a donator sink, then you'd think you want them to have more money. Now it's going to take 5x the amount of time to get money to buy donator credits meaning you're sinking donator credits at a 1/5 the rate or whatever the alch reduction was. Not sure I understand this part of the update.

It wasn't intended as a big nerf for irons. We will buff it again.

[E l y]

I'm confused why alch prices were lowered. If you want ironmen to purchase donator credits and use them to create a donator sink, then you'd think you want them to have more money. Now it's going to take 5x the amount of time to get money to buy donator credits meaning you're sinking donator credits at a 1/5 the rate or whatever the alch reduction was. Not sure I understand this part of the update.

It wasn't intended as a big nerf for irons. We will buff it again.

Would it be unfair to have different alch prices for irons compared to normal accounts?
Not sure if that would be even possible to implement.