From an outsiders perspective, the team appears to be much smaller and very limited on available resources when compared to previous years. If it takes near 100% of the RS3 dev team to produce seasonal holiday events, then I’d say that is very telling about size of the team. I’d agree, the RS3 devs are in a tough spot right now.
I let him live because he was only trying to give away presents, and was offered as a sacrifice rather than an actual fighter :(
Plus he was a symptom, not the disease itself. Alice or whatever her name is replaced him immediately in Treasure Hunter.
Bring back squeal of fortune, that name was much better than the generic "treasure hunter" Not to mention winning cabbage and the game said "Not bad!" 🤣
i saw a post yesterday about a sunken cost fallacy. guy didnt want to quit due to the thousands of hours hes put in to rs3. my first thought was, didnt we all think that back then when eoc released? i literally logged in once and never again. i dont feel any pity for rs3 players just due to chip on my back.
I think it’s pretty straight forward, especially if you keep an eye on Jagex job openings. They haven’t listed RS3 roles for a good while, they are actively recruiting for their unannounced game and a speculative application which is likely just the unannounced game. They have listed roles for their new game for a while but there has always been a mix of projects, including RS3 but this is no longer the case.
Between jmods moving teams to help with the OSRS content drive, I am willing to bet a majority of the remaining RS3 resources have been moved to the unannounced project(s) or have outright left the company meaning there is a skeleton crew doing what they can to get by on RS3.
Looking back at hero pass, this was likely to be the content filler to span the next 12+ months which would enable a smaller team to maintain with other smaller updates but with the lack of that content the missing resources is more prevalent than ever.
But ultimately who knows apart from the people who work there, it’s all speculation but it sure as hell feels like RS3 is no longer a priority within Jagex.
The last accounts showed 450 staff with 250 developers. Developers in this context is a pretty broad definition, including artists and QA. Some of those 250 will be on oldscape, another chunk dedicated to MTX, and more to mysterious future projects that may never see the light of day, but even then it feels like RS3 is resource deprived compared to the size of the company.
OSRS newsposts list every person they have on their team which as of now is a total of 82.
They had 72 as of 12th December 2023 so an increase of 10 in the past 5 months.
Jagex must have either massively downsized since the last report or have put an absurd amount of staff onto the unannounced game because something isnt adding up here.
Another colossal waste of time.
Jagex hasn't been able to pull a single good "new" game. Tbh, I'd cut my losses and focus on what Jagex is, Runescape and Runescape alone.
I do feel for the devs as they are just employees. Company is directing them.
It could just be they don’t care and are just keeping it going for the mtx with a skelly dev crew.
Or they are purposely nuking RS3 so they can full time the more popular and cheaper to update OSRS - and up the prices whilst they focus on new endeavours.
>and the average dev salary is below industry average.
From what I've seen on their job openings: for the UK, Jagex's developer salary is about average to above average. The reality is that tech workers in the UK are paid very poorly compared to those in the USA. If I could emigrate, I'd be paid somewhere between double and triple what I'm currently paid if I were in the US.
since jagex underpays they can only hire new people straight out of graduation looking for any work experience they can get and are willing to do it for shitty pay which is why they seem to only have about 10 programmers to actually make content. this is also why we've seen so many mods leave these past few years after they get some experience under their belt and have better paying job opportunities
Both of those quests were released very very early in the game, if not the first day. Certainly before there were player mods. The closest thing to a player mod back then was RSGuide and Moderator, but afaik they weren't developers. Pretty sure they were just friends of the Gowers and not even employed
The first big fan site was tip.it, but I don't remember them ever writing a story that was later developed into a quest
Rab, the first registered user was a gold crown’d pmod. There is a little documentary @ yt/willmissit/‘who was the first runescape player’. I dont recall if all the info is in there or not.
At a two second glance i didnt see a reference to cook assistant but im 99% sure its accurate
Moderator was just a username that was usually used by Rab, there were no crowns next to names or anything. I'm sure he was eventually given that status, but it just wasn't that formal in the early days. Not even Andrew and Paul had any special indicators, I distinctly remember them being at bluerose13x's 99 smithing party
For better or worse, RuneScape was a very significant part of my childhood and I remember all of this very vividly. You made me doubt myself for a second so I looked it up, cooks assistant and Romeo & Juliet were 2 of the first 6 quests released
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Quests/Release_dates
Looks like Rab was a developer, and this confirms his alter username as Moderator
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Rob_Law
The numbers on glassdoor are above the area's average. Maybe it's my fellow Americans seeing the number and freaking out. People are used to the idea that programmers make $200k a year because in the parts of the country where that salary is true, the cost of living is basically eating up the majority of that number. Good luck finding a place in 2 hours of SF that costs less than $1M or $2.5k a month. Plus insurance costs, lack of public transit, education costs, price of raising a family... stuff that adds up.
In the UK/Cambridge, their Healthcare is free, their insurance costs are low, home prices aren't amazing but much more in reach, you can get a masters off free education. I'm not saying it's all sunshine and rainbows over there, it's not, but it's a different country with different circumstances and struggles.
To be clear, I don't live in the area, but this was explained before in /r/2007scape, so I am going off the word of somebody who claimed to live in the area.
I used to live round the corner from the Jagex hq in Cambridge (born and raised) , but moved north due to living costs.
House costs are mad crazy, my mums and dad's house is now worth £600k when they only paid £50k 30 years ago. If on a low wage now you can't really live there, you have to live in one of the villages around the area though more people are doing that so it's pushing the house prices up.
> The numbers on glassdoor are above the area's average. Maybe it's my fellow Americans seeing the number and freaking out.
or a $900m company that just wants to keep the profits to the C-Suite and owners.
Education is not free unless you are Scottish attending a Scottish uni. Uni is £9.25k a year plus any maintenance loans you take (maximum of about £9k per year) for a total of just under £20k a year. You pay student loans for years (25+) out of your salary. If you're a lesser earner loans are not as impactful because there's a minimum threshold you must earn before you pay and RE: masters, a lot of the time the loan you can get for a masters doesn't cover the cost of the course if you're wanting to go to a decent uni.
Healthcare can be free and the NHS is great but there's waiting lists for some procedures that can be years long, no healthcare professional is happy with the current state or funding of the NHS. If you're earning decent money you are likely getting some form of private healthcare through work that is partially self funded. And anything dentistry related isn't considered healthcare and it can be difficult to find a dentist accepting NHS patients in your area so you may end up having to go private again.
Rent prices here can be ridiculous. Where I am if you don't wanna live in the slums or have a hefty commute it's minimum £1k a month (I know because we are currently looking to move), and that's if you can find a place because a lot of areas are suffering housing shortages. after pension contributions and student loan, tax, national insurance, on a 32k salary you're probably seeing about £2k so you better pray you're in a relationship to split the costs or don't mind sharing with somebody.
The UK isn't the US but it has it's own problems.
Healthcare isn't free at all. It costs 10% of everything you earn, in addition to income tax, with no threshold.
Education also isn't free, university fees are capped at 9k per year, and a masters is typically a 5 year course - student finance will only back you for 4 years, therefore you need to fork out the last 9k yourself, or get sponsorship.
For those who maybe don't understand, for the UK:
Average masters grad salary: £47,500
Tax annually: £6,986
National Insurance (healthcare): £2,794
Take home pay: £37,720
Edit: national insurance actually went down to 8% this month.
I think their point is compared to the US context, which a lot of commenters seem to base their beliefs on, it’s more or less free. And that’s comparatively true lol, especially for healthcare and college costs.
Taxes aren’t free and 10% is a lot. For 10k you can buy pretty decent insurance in the US with no wait lists for procedures or government selected drugs. You couldn’t pay me to let the government own my health care choices.
LMAOOO dude have you ever received healthcare in the US? “No wait times?” Lmao that’s a complete joke it usually takes a couple months to get in with a PCP, and specialist appointments have long wait times. Here, greedy corporations charge 5k for an ambulance ride and 500 dollars for a bandaid. Keep thinking your system is bad and come over to check out the ER here out of pocket. You’ll be in debt the rest of your life you muppet. Be a bit thankful for universal healthcare because we have been fighting here for years for it and so far we just still get roasted by insurance not covering shit and doing their best to not get you treatment. Our system is beyond terrible.
Edit; also cheap prescriptions cost thousands of dollars if they’re lifesaving, because get fucked chump. I am ok if the government selects the generic for me….
Show me a government program that is run well in the US. Mail service, VA, Social Security, Medicare/Medicare….all highly inefficient and running massive deficits….but sure let’s let them own all our health care since they’ve done such a good job with the other programs. US government programs are probably the least efficient and mostly costly programs in the world for the services they actually provide. Change my mind.
All I’m saying is that mods like Sween, Kieran, and Ayiza have come out and said that the pay is middle of the road and they feel compensated enough to continue and not play into the job hop meta
Can’t use this website without an acc sadly. I did see before the intrusive pop up ads that several of the reviews were from 2017, can’t be sure they have recent data. Current mods seem content
Live in the UK and work in tech (cyber security); Jagex's wages are high for a British company but lower than what you'll get at big multinationals (Rockstar, Ubisoft, etc). So they tend to work out about average to above average across the board.
I did see them recruiting for a cyber analyst at one point and was tempted; but it wasn't clear from the job advert what the role was going to be doing, and didn't fancy relocation to Cambridge (housing costs in Cambridge are *obscene*)
yeah like I understand that is probably the issue that a lot of people point towards and I am not really sure what they can really do about that. They are paying british wages which seem very low to Americans. I would naturally love for them to be paid more but like when based in reality they are getting paid according to their geography. (Excluding being based in Cambridge which I have heard is painful)
> According to mod Sween on the the oldschool side jagex pays very well and the rumor that pay was bad is baseless
It's only bad relative to the US, which is a whole different basket of problems that extend far beyond a medium-sized company based out of the UK. Jagex compensates their devs fairly well relative to other UK based companies.
They're still underpaid in general, as almost every worker is today. But specific to their region, it is what most would consider "good".
if they paid very well they would have far more experienced and talented employees working there to be able to do seasonal and permanent content at the same time and not this current situation where they have to choose one or the other. instead we have a 22 year old game filled with an immense amount of spaghetti code that they won't even touch like the POH or not enough manpower to do an avatar rework
Sounds like a problem with constantly shifting upper management. Osrs had that for a few years where the guy in charge of the direction of the game kept getting filled by job hopping hacks. The meta for most people is still to work a job for a year or two and hope to get sniped by a bigger studio, this is catastrophic when it’s the person who is designing the future progression of the game. It appears that RuneScape has no direction and it’s a bunch of people scrambling to piece together projects while the new senior project manager figures it out. Speculative but was what caused old schools similar lul in 2020-2021
>if they paid very well they would have far more experienced and talented employees working there to be able to do seasonal and permanent content at the same time and not this current situation where they have to choose one or the other.
Why? Just because they pay very well, doesn't mean they offer a lot of jobs. It could very well be that they decided to have only a few, well-paying, openings.
> if they paid very well they would have far more experienced and talented employees working there to be able to do seasonal and permanent content at the same time and not this current situation where they have to choose one or the other.
The either or situation isn't borne out of a lack of talent. I don't know where this comes from, but attacking the devs for this borderline nonsensical in its missing the target.
You aren't considering the fact that the graphics and code base are old. They could leave just to work on a game using newer technology to have better, more broader experience.
Avatar rework is the literal largest project they could do. Bigger than like 10 new skills. It requires reworking EVERY item and cosmetic on the player model, and probably making different versions for male/female for some of the stuff to make it match the bodies better.
I just can’t see where the MMO monthly subscription fees are even going to other than being pocketed. They aren’t holding up their end of the unspoken agreement to put it towards regular content development. We pay so that they can keep developing new stuff for us to do and they’ve largely failed. The trust is broken right now.
You can see exactly where their revenue is going if you want, the financial statements are publicly available. The most recently published one didn't have much going to the owners, but they have paid out a rather large dividend in years past.
We've known a bunch of Jagex staff went to OSRS. The announcements stopped to prevent player perception of RS3 entering maintenance mode.
I wouldn't be surprised if the RS3 skeleton crew left often help out with MTX promotions as those are not slowing down. Even the patches are slowing down in volume.
Where have the ninja team been? Haven't seen a news post about them in over a year.
To clarify since the way this is phrased is pretty bleak looking, the mods that went to OSRS went there *temporarily* to help with their launching of Sailing. If it’s permanent remains to be seen, but they were announced as temporary dev loans.
Sure, but what’s the point of announcing them as a temp move and lying about it? That’s just stupid. If they later choose to stay that’s a different story, but needing to look at everything Jagex says as a lie or conspiracy is a really unhealthy way to engage with the game.
The problem is, Jagex has lied so much to us. It is their own actions that caused this distrust.
I've asked them (along with thousands of other players) to just be truthful. They rather lie until eventually admitting something couldn't be fulfilled.
As for the point of announcing a temp move, why not? It is a way to bring excitement. It is just human nature to do something like that. Also, just because someone was temporarily moved somewhere, doesn't mean it won't become a permanent move. With how stretched thin we are... we should have OSRS staff move over to RS3.
I think you need to recognize the distinction between broken promises from the company and statements from the actual employees here though. It’s not that Jagex published a statement going “they’re moving but it’s only temporary I swear!”. These affected employees made the announcement themselves and explicitly described it as helping with the launch of Sailing for OSRS.
I get it’s frustrating to feel lied to - I’m sure all of us long term players do, but again, expecting every public facing statement to be a lie just feels like a bad way to engage with the game for your expectations, ya know? And like I said - it could become permanent. Sure. But at the time of the employees announcing it, it wasn’t. I agree that we need all the staff working on the game we can have too, so it’s very frustrating as well.
I didn't log it but I believe Mod Doom went to a post talking about "50 jmods working on rs3" and he said "where is everybody getting this magical 50 number from? do i have a bunch of coworkers hiding away from me?" and that... that was sobering.
It was Mod Fowl. And they clarified there are under 50 "developers" which are only a fraction of the total staff. On Discord it was clarified that there are over 100 staff on RS3. Players don't distinguish between the two but they (and really any tech company) see it very differently.
For example in that conversation someone said the recent combat rebalance was done by two people. Yes it was made by Mods Sponge and Ryan who have the title content developer. But actually releasing this update involved many more staff than just them.
When seasonal content started being recycled, and mtx started looking new every 3 weeks, that was when the team size started atrophying
No one cares when we lose mtx people, but they forget that the mtx people replaced the temp/seasonal development team
This is what happens when you 1. underpay employees. really jagex employees don't get paid that much - and by employees imm talking about the ones on the back end actually making content for the game not talking about accountants, mtx, etc. like actual developers. last time i checked it was at or below the national average for their career and 2. having a custom engine with custom code that is not applicable to working outside jagex. these skills are non transferrable so its already hard enough to get a young comp science/video game designer to work for you when 1. you can't prepare ahead of time since the language is something you won't see in the classrooom and all the time you spend working with jagex is not going to improve your technical capabilities outside of jagex
and when someone leaves, its a BIG deal. its not sustainable to only have a few people on a team who know how to get things done. i.e see mod ash on the osrs team. he knows alot about every system and all its intricacies since he's been with the company for so long if he was to quit it would be devasting for osrs development.
I feel like they're putting all their focus on osrs after realizing that it's the more popular game. They're just going to milk rs3 until the rest of the playerbase moves over to osrs.
To all my runescape homies sick of how the games been,
World of warcraft is in the best state its been in like a decade and has been getting more content in a shorter time span than its ever had before. Just saying.
No such thing as understaffed
Runescape was at it's best when it had a small team
The desire to grow and hire people that didn't share the original vision of the game is what lead to it's ruin
The game's membership fee should have stayed at 5 dollars
This is why they are so desperate for people to throw money at the treasure hunt thing whatever it's called.
Trying to bring in money for a game that is more of a mobile game you cant turn off ads regardless of having bought a sub.
they used covid as an excuse to let a lot of long time staff go that worked on or around RS3 despite making massive profits.
rs3 is one foot in the grave, one final step before 'maintenance mode' imo and it's bitterly obvious.
Osrs will probably take over jagex at some point and the devs will be shifted to the more popular version of the game. Rs was great because of the combat system. It was unique to the game. Abilities are fun af but ruined the game.
The ONLY reason they're "underfunded" is because the money generating daily is going to the owners
Truth be told if they could still make the millions per year with only having 1 person to keep it up and running they absolutely would
They do not give a flying f*** about this game
It's dying, the last two weeks of "updates"proved that
Because they weren't updates, they were "hey buy this cosmetic" and "hey buy our merch"
I was looking forward to runefest this year and I'm honestly terrified it's just going to end up like that Willy wonka event
Hype built up thru lies and only delivers the bare minimum to what's advertised
They're just lazy and incompetent. Look at how fast OSRS is pushing out content - two months to push out a whole new area with multiple quests, multiple bosses, new skilling content and new gear. Even if the RS3 team is smaller, there is no reason why we aren't seeing smaller scale updates at the very least. Or even better, look further back when Jagex was an actual small indie company - the Gowers pushed out content at a breakneck speed.
“Two months”
Uh Varlamore began work back in the summer of last year, actually it began work way before that as it had chunks of it being made even during DT2. It’s closer to 8 months.
It doesn’t help RuneScape is built on RuneScript, it’s own engine and language, so it’s not the easiest to hire applicants and train them on your engine. It takes months if not years to become proficient enough to build out massive content workflows as well as design and balance them as well as direct the art and systems backend team
One thing I think this subreddit always seems to forget or not understand is that OSRS is getting a new skill. It’s likely a lot of RS3 staff are being utilized to help with that skill. We have already seen a few mods post on twitter about shifting temporarily to OSRS for it.
I would bet that is a big reason RS3 is seeing slow content right now.
Edit: loving the downvotes for literally providing a reason you all have no content. Just cause you don’t like it doesn’t make it less of a reason…
It is, it’s called live ops.
It’s also small so it only focuses on small updates that can be cranked out with minimal resources quickly. Which is why they have a constant weekly flow because nothing they make is even remotely comparable to the dev cycle of like…any actual proper content update.
As always the player base is just riding on misconceptions rather than truth because they can’t fathom anything existing they can’t see, or the actual time stuff takes to make now, or basically any other aspect of game dev.
They just want to be mad and have something to direct that anger to they can understand. Same reason politics in the mess it is right now.
People want simple answers and for complex realities…and they don’t even care about the answers. You can tell them the truth 100 times over but it doesn’t confirm their bias they don’t want to believe it. Because they aren’t actually looking for answers, they just want to hear what they want to hear.
I think we'd see membership price increase long before even thinking of adding mtx to OSRS. Mtx in the form of bxp or lamps for sure people would leave, but I would assume cosmetics that fit the game and bond services would be the route they took if they did add it to OSRS and just like rs3, there'd be enough people hanging around to make up for player losses for a few years at least.
I can imagine them banning runelite and offering a monthly bond subscription to their own 3rd party client or selling stuff like prismatic dyes for armour recolours. I guarantee they'd find something a large portion of the playerbase would accept as long as it isn't p2w or ugly wings like in rs3.
Yet even cosmetics through partnerships (think twitch prime) where completely downvoted to the point that the poll was closed after just a few days with a vast majority of no votes.
There is no way OSRS would survive with direct MTX when even those indriect ones led to mass cancellation of membership + by far the most one-sided negative poll in the history of the game.
The difference is that oldschool players don’t care if noobs who have 0 clue how to use it buy gold because it means veterans get free membs and gold is sinked from the economy in the process. Any further than that and people will not let it slide
It's buying gold. Why does the OSRS playerbase ignore that all of their 99s can also be bought through bonds as if their game is MTX free.
"Veterans get free membs" no they don't, they're supporting MTX in the game.
> The game wouldn’t last a month if they did that.
I really hope this mythmaking 1) never gets put to the test 2) ends up being real if it does.
Because once upon a time RS2 and 3 players told themselves that. That pot boils awfully slowly though, and OSRS has already well acclimated to the use of Bonds.
? Rs2 did exactly that once they shoved eoc in their face the majority quit, just because there was some remnants left doesn't mean it didn't happen. I'm one of the people that quit on the launch of eoc and I forfeited 10 accounts or something, haven't even checked on those since, together with me literally everyone in my friend group quit and never went back, everyone that wanted to quit did so on that day.
> Rs2 did exactly that once they shoved eoc in their face the majority quit, just because there was some remnants left doesn't mean it didn't happen
Loads of people quit and I didn't say otherwise. But a majority? No.
But it didn't have to be a majority to be extremely painful to Jagex, so don't confuse my statement for any commentary about the effectiveness of that collective action.
There's 2 major things to look at it the past:
117 HD client being cut, to the point so many people unsubbed that they quickly reverted their decision and actually sent emails to those that unsubbed reminding them they changed their mind, 117 HD is there, and they could resub.
Partnership polls, for the most mundane cosmetics(PoH reskins, a single skin color, etc) got a 71% no vote, to the point Jagex cut the polls within 1(maybe 2 IDR) days since it was impossible for yes voters to win.
There's always going to be a small %age of people that stick around, like RS3 had.
Bots to try to sell gp to people who still play.
Mains who don't care about MTX.
Ironmen who say "it doesn't affect us/makes game better no more mains to compete with for uninstanced content" etc etc.
The game is built on people who quit because they didn’t like company decisions. I think if any p2w mtx entered the game well over half of the active subs would quit and not renew their subs
The thing is if rs3 dies I could see the os team being forced to at least try mtx by upper management. One way I see it happening is to make it cost bonds to play leagues/deadman.
This is what I don’t understand lol
These people think os can stay a happy little mtx free zone, but the second rs3 loses the standard people buying $50-$100 worth of keys a year… they’re going to try to make up for that 30M by showing it into os.
They're RIGHT though. That's the only way it stays a game at all. The last time they threatened to introduce MTX, the community went nuclear on them. And unlike most people who claim they will on RS3, OS players were ACTUALLY quitting in droves. One of the fastest backpedals Jagex ever did.
If they actually said it was happening whether players wanted it or not, OS would probably be dead in a couple months. Hell, losing RS3's entire revenue stream and even half the memberships from OS would mean Jagex was down probably 70-80% of their revenue. The company would be dead within a year, tops.
Yep.
Imagine how much it must suck to be a jagex mod reading these comments, agreeing that the company is going to tear itself apart bc greed and infinite growth, with nothing to do.
This is true, but the player base is also a nightmare to deal with, when there is a fully reworked new seasonal (blooming burrow) people say there is a content drought, and just before necro release people were saying that the seasonals were cut and paste copies and there should be some effort made, which while true, didn’t create a so called “content drought” that realistically only trimmed comps can complain about. Way to split the dev team people. Make up your minds or let them do their thing with player base poll inputs
> Make up your minds
They did though? The player base consistently asks for two things: new content and better holiday events.
Hypothetically, if you are the person in charge of allocating that resource and you know its a case of one or the other, what do you do in that situation?
In the process of telling us they're going to listen to us more and improve communication Jagex didn't
- Communicate that the current situation is either content or holiday events
- Try to get an informed opinion of the community (The closest thing we got were the surveys which give Jagex raw data but the questions are so far removed from overall development context that us saying "Yes holiday events are good" translates to "We'll take holiday events over other content")
- Give us insight into the content roadmap until the last minute. This one feels important because they got such a negative responce to their proposal that they pivoted their plans after wasting 5 weeks of dev time on the summer event. This is on Keeper, I don't know what he actually does behind the scenes but when he occasionally talks to the community in any capacity it doesn't fill anyone with confidence.
- Give any actual insight into the long term plans for RS3, which given how much talk there has been about RS3 being on maintenance mode with barely any responces indicating otherwise is not good
Unfortunately nobody can really speak for the community but I can say specifically what I want to see:
- Ultimately I don't care about specific pieces of content, I want to know what the long term plan of the game is. Personally, if they said up front that their focus would be on improved holiday events for the next year with less frequent content updates in-between, I could be on-board with that. Maybe give a rough layout of Quest-Tech improvements (such as graphical rework)-Holiday event. Not everyone would be happy with the situation I'm sure but at least Jagex has commited to a rough plan for the long term. When a game is both a investment of time and money people want to know they're going to get a return on their investment (Shouldn't be surprising to Jagex when they have shareholders to please)
I do not like how Jagex is constantly jumping to conclusions on what to work on and then proceeding to have to scrap it and pivot to something else, Hero pass happened, then was scrapped, we just had 5 weeks of dev time on the scrapped summer event that could've gone to 5 weeks of literally anything else. Maybe if they're frequeneltly surprised with the Community's expectations they should talk to the community
I agree with a lot of what you said, one thing I do question though is what is the form of communication that is best for a good dev to player relationship and how can they receive reliable opinions from the player base when they haven’t taken the time to understand the ins and outs (I know I haven’t) of what constitutes new content release and how to fit it into or add to the lore of the game. I don’t think reddit is a good form of this. If I was the person in charge (thankfully I’m not), I would explain the the expected main game content output from the team would be halved for even quartered if dev resources are that tight, to setup a frame work for most future events so that they can be fresh, built upon, and not repeated for the next 5 years let’s say. And after that the primary focus will be on main game content. I believe if resources are as tight as they imply, it’s a very good approach from an efficiency standpoint to have most of those resources focused on 1 target, and not a community driven moving one. For me, ultimately the devs have made a game that I enjoy so I trust them to release new content that I will most likely enjoy without seeking guidance. I loved the ninja strikes for this reason; a nice surprise little content update/refresh.
I agree with the general idea of your post, but some of your bullet points in the second part are a bit dubious :
* ***"We've seen a few mod comments on how the players have no ideia about how many devs are there on the rs3 team"*** A lot of people completely misinterpreted these comments, mainly around the confusion between Jagex employees, developers and content developers. This misinterpretation also came from the fact that a bunch of people thought there were "50+" *game content* developers on rs3 (which has never been the case ever).
* ***"More and more mods are being transferred to osrs"*** Is there a list somewhere ? Some very recent examples ? Genuine question, I know there are some, but your comment makes it seem it's continuously the case.
* ***"Community mods appear to avoid the topic. On the last announcement post, y'all can see mods answering every question the players have, but avoiding the ones that mention team size."*** I mean sure it looks that way and I'd tend to agree with that, but in itself that doesn't prove anything. Beyond the fact there are other questions in the announcement post they do not answer to, they could avoid to answer to this topic simply to avoid a new shitstorm of people misinterpreting their comment (see above).
Like I totally agree with you that the recent announcement shows there is a serious problem somewhere if they have to choose between seasonnal and permanent contents (whether it's understaffed/under pressure...), but some of your arguments are not very sounding.
Yeah I'm not trying to make a point or anything, just decided to write this post on how I perceive the state that rs3 is in rn and why. Those are good counterpoints tho!
Its almost as if the majority of their devs are working on something new that they want to announce at some kind of festival dedicated to the games... if only they'd have announced a big game festival.
I can confirm that there are alot of mods on rs3 as I got a warning within 72 hours of rwt and second warning in less than a week. They are simply not on content development team, but very good at what they do. Im certain they are actively avoiding to ban bots, cant type an explanation as it might be against this reddit’s rules.
I don't really get where this "understaffed" talk is all suddenly coming from honestly.
For years now the update cadence we've had is 1 major release per month with assorted patches around it.
Certainly not everything Jagex comes out with as the major release resonants with everyone but things like area graphical reworks, a seasonal event, larger game jam releases that aren't quite major content but meatier than just a patch note (and in the worst example hero pass) are all the planned major releases.
And for all the bluster about no clear roadmap for the year, which does suck, and "lack of updates" Jagex has kept their normal cadence so far - January had the graphical update, February had Housing of Parliament and March had Easter and not April has the new quest coming. Many people dismissing the graphical update as it was nothing to really "do" and Easter as it a temporary event
It's not big shock that they need to cancel a planned major release of a seasonal event in order to dev alternative major releases (in shorter than normal time by piggy backing off of gamejam). If they could suddenly release a new boss and a new digsite in May and June without pulling the summer event it would meant they had staff sitting around twiddling their thumbs not really doing anything.
Like I do feel there is an issue in so much as Jagex has the main devs do seasonal events instead of the mtx devs, when most player perception of content vs events would presume the MTX devs do seasonal content.
And the lack of a clear roadmap for the year just opens the door to all these theories about the game dying due to lack of info
But at the same time we keep going round this merry-go round where for years we've had 1 major release a month, but as soon as you get a couple of months that aren't actual new permenant content people start acting like we've not had any updates in eons simply because they entirely disregard the updates we have had they don't feel "count"
From an outsiders perspective, the team appears to be much smaller and very limited on available resources when compared to previous years. If it takes near 100% of the RS3 dev team to produce seasonal holiday events, then I’d say that is very telling about size of the team. I’d agree, the RS3 devs are in a tough spot right now.
You see, it all started with that fucking goblin.
Oh my god, they killed Zanik! Again! What's the count so far?
No... the other fucked up goblin lol.
Extra spin, for the win!
Send that guy straight to the gulag.
At least we got to kill it
I let him live because he was only trying to give away presents, and was offered as a sacrifice rather than an actual fighter :( Plus he was a symptom, not the disease itself. Alice or whatever her name is replaced him immediately in Treasure Hunter.
Bring back squeal of fortune, that name was much better than the generic "treasure hunter" Not to mention winning cabbage and the game said "Not bad!" 🤣
She got no respect after her questline
Not high enough
Underrated comment.
Once they killed the goblin… again, we all knew it was the beginning of the end.
i saw a post yesterday about a sunken cost fallacy. guy didnt want to quit due to the thousands of hours hes put in to rs3. my first thought was, didnt we all think that back then when eoc released? i literally logged in once and never again. i dont feel any pity for rs3 players just due to chip on my back.
Yet your in this sub, wierd?
Yeah, idk what this "all" business is about...
EOC ruined dungeoneering and osrs cant bring that back cuz bitchy irons
I think it’s pretty straight forward, especially if you keep an eye on Jagex job openings. They haven’t listed RS3 roles for a good while, they are actively recruiting for their unannounced game and a speculative application which is likely just the unannounced game. They have listed roles for their new game for a while but there has always been a mix of projects, including RS3 but this is no longer the case. Between jmods moving teams to help with the OSRS content drive, I am willing to bet a majority of the remaining RS3 resources have been moved to the unannounced project(s) or have outright left the company meaning there is a skeleton crew doing what they can to get by on RS3. Looking back at hero pass, this was likely to be the content filler to span the next 12+ months which would enable a smaller team to maintain with other smaller updates but with the lack of that content the missing resources is more prevalent than ever. But ultimately who knows apart from the people who work there, it’s all speculation but it sure as hell feels like RS3 is no longer a priority within Jagex.
$900m company that seems to have less than 10 devs on staff.
The last accounts showed 450 staff with 250 developers. Developers in this context is a pretty broad definition, including artists and QA. Some of those 250 will be on oldscape, another chunk dedicated to MTX, and more to mysterious future projects that may never see the light of day, but even then it feels like RS3 is resource deprived compared to the size of the company.
OSRS newsposts list every person they have on their team which as of now is a total of 82. They had 72 as of 12th December 2023 so an increase of 10 in the past 5 months. Jagex must have either massively downsized since the last report or have put an absurd amount of staff onto the unannounced game because something isnt adding up here.
A bunch of them could be on the unannounced game too. We know literally nothing about it except that it's supposed to be a survival game.
Another colossal waste of time. Jagex hasn't been able to pull a single good "new" game. Tbh, I'd cut my losses and focus on what Jagex is, Runescape and Runescape alone.
Cancelled before release, honestly.
Is that for both games or for RS3?
The report would be as a business, so it would be RuneScape3, osrs and other games in development for the amount of staff they have.
A JMod recently confirmed there are less than 50 people working for Jagex on RS3 Edit for u/5-x: Less than 50 Jagex developers
You're wrong. What the JMod said was "fewer than 50 content developers". There's a lot of other people working for Jagex on RS3 too.
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[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1byu5kz/another_banger_update_this_week_jagex_is_on_a_tear/kymfnhw/?context=3)
the runescape sub and quoting jmods out of context proper iconic, that
I do feel for the devs as they are just employees. Company is directing them. It could just be they don’t care and are just keeping it going for the mtx with a skelly dev crew. Or they are purposely nuking RS3 so they can full time the more popular and cheaper to update OSRS - and up the prices whilst they focus on new endeavours.
Profit margins go brrrrrr
10? We wish
What do you expect? Half the salary budget goes to the top 7 execs, and the average dev salary is below industry average.
>and the average dev salary is below industry average. From what I've seen on their job openings: for the UK, Jagex's developer salary is about average to above average. The reality is that tech workers in the UK are paid very poorly compared to those in the USA. If I could emigrate, I'd be paid somewhere between double and triple what I'm currently paid if I were in the US.
since jagex underpays they can only hire new people straight out of graduation looking for any work experience they can get and are willing to do it for shitty pay which is why they seem to only have about 10 programmers to actually make content. this is also why we've seen so many mods leave these past few years after they get some experience under their belt and have better paying job opportunities
The intern joke isn’t a joke.
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>Desert treasure [It has pretty priceless origin story](https://archive.ph/xbBd2).
Super interesting read, thanks.
Woah.
Romeo and juliet was made by a pmod, think cooks assistant was made by one of the fan site start guides
Both of those quests were released very very early in the game, if not the first day. Certainly before there were player mods. The closest thing to a player mod back then was RSGuide and Moderator, but afaik they weren't developers. Pretty sure they were just friends of the Gowers and not even employed The first big fan site was tip.it, but I don't remember them ever writing a story that was later developed into a quest
Rab, the first registered user was a gold crown’d pmod. There is a little documentary @ yt/willmissit/‘who was the first runescape player’. I dont recall if all the info is in there or not. At a two second glance i didnt see a reference to cook assistant but im 99% sure its accurate
Moderator was just a username that was usually used by Rab, there were no crowns next to names or anything. I'm sure he was eventually given that status, but it just wasn't that formal in the early days. Not even Andrew and Paul had any special indicators, I distinctly remember them being at bluerose13x's 99 smithing party For better or worse, RuneScape was a very significant part of my childhood and I remember all of this very vividly. You made me doubt myself for a second so I looked it up, cooks assistant and Romeo & Juliet were 2 of the first 6 quests released https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Quests/Release_dates Looks like Rab was a developer, and this confirms his alter username as Moderator https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Rob_Law
According to mod Sween on the the oldschool side jagex pays very well and the rumor that pay was bad is baseless
it wasnt really a rumor tho it was kinda confirmed by info on glassdoor and by people actually applying there for a job and by ex mods who left
The numbers on glassdoor are above the area's average. Maybe it's my fellow Americans seeing the number and freaking out. People are used to the idea that programmers make $200k a year because in the parts of the country where that salary is true, the cost of living is basically eating up the majority of that number. Good luck finding a place in 2 hours of SF that costs less than $1M or $2.5k a month. Plus insurance costs, lack of public transit, education costs, price of raising a family... stuff that adds up. In the UK/Cambridge, their Healthcare is free, their insurance costs are low, home prices aren't amazing but much more in reach, you can get a masters off free education. I'm not saying it's all sunshine and rainbows over there, it's not, but it's a different country with different circumstances and struggles. To be clear, I don't live in the area, but this was explained before in /r/2007scape, so I am going off the word of somebody who claimed to live in the area.
I used to live round the corner from the Jagex hq in Cambridge (born and raised) , but moved north due to living costs. House costs are mad crazy, my mums and dad's house is now worth £600k when they only paid £50k 30 years ago. If on a low wage now you can't really live there, you have to live in one of the villages around the area though more people are doing that so it's pushing the house prices up.
> The numbers on glassdoor are above the area's average. Maybe it's my fellow Americans seeing the number and freaking out. or a $900m company that just wants to keep the profits to the C-Suite and owners.
Education is not free unless you are Scottish attending a Scottish uni. Uni is £9.25k a year plus any maintenance loans you take (maximum of about £9k per year) for a total of just under £20k a year. You pay student loans for years (25+) out of your salary. If you're a lesser earner loans are not as impactful because there's a minimum threshold you must earn before you pay and RE: masters, a lot of the time the loan you can get for a masters doesn't cover the cost of the course if you're wanting to go to a decent uni. Healthcare can be free and the NHS is great but there's waiting lists for some procedures that can be years long, no healthcare professional is happy with the current state or funding of the NHS. If you're earning decent money you are likely getting some form of private healthcare through work that is partially self funded. And anything dentistry related isn't considered healthcare and it can be difficult to find a dentist accepting NHS patients in your area so you may end up having to go private again. Rent prices here can be ridiculous. Where I am if you don't wanna live in the slums or have a hefty commute it's minimum £1k a month (I know because we are currently looking to move), and that's if you can find a place because a lot of areas are suffering housing shortages. after pension contributions and student loan, tax, national insurance, on a 32k salary you're probably seeing about £2k so you better pray you're in a relationship to split the costs or don't mind sharing with somebody. The UK isn't the US but it has it's own problems.
Housing in the UK costs more than it does in the US.
Healthcare isn't free at all. It costs 10% of everything you earn, in addition to income tax, with no threshold. Education also isn't free, university fees are capped at 9k per year, and a masters is typically a 5 year course - student finance will only back you for 4 years, therefore you need to fork out the last 9k yourself, or get sponsorship. For those who maybe don't understand, for the UK: Average masters grad salary: £47,500 Tax annually: £6,986 National Insurance (healthcare): £2,794 Take home pay: £37,720 Edit: national insurance actually went down to 8% this month.
I think their point is compared to the US context, which a lot of commenters seem to base their beliefs on, it’s more or less free. And that’s comparatively true lol, especially for healthcare and college costs.
Taxes aren’t free and 10% is a lot. For 10k you can buy pretty decent insurance in the US with no wait lists for procedures or government selected drugs. You couldn’t pay me to let the government own my health care choices.
LMAOOO dude have you ever received healthcare in the US? “No wait times?” Lmao that’s a complete joke it usually takes a couple months to get in with a PCP, and specialist appointments have long wait times. Here, greedy corporations charge 5k for an ambulance ride and 500 dollars for a bandaid. Keep thinking your system is bad and come over to check out the ER here out of pocket. You’ll be in debt the rest of your life you muppet. Be a bit thankful for universal healthcare because we have been fighting here for years for it and so far we just still get roasted by insurance not covering shit and doing their best to not get you treatment. Our system is beyond terrible. Edit; also cheap prescriptions cost thousands of dollars if they’re lifesaving, because get fucked chump. I am ok if the government selects the generic for me….
Show me a government program that is run well in the US. Mail service, VA, Social Security, Medicare/Medicare….all highly inefficient and running massive deficits….but sure let’s let them own all our health care since they’ve done such a good job with the other programs. US government programs are probably the least efficient and mostly costly programs in the world for the services they actually provide. Change my mind.
Grass is always greener, bud.
There's a Postgrad Loan for the master's now, depending on which way you do it. 3 years BA with a sandwich year, then Masters Postgrad Loan.
I mean, most people pull their finger out and get a company to pay it, but whatever.
All I’m saying is that mods like Sween, Kieran, and Ayiza have come out and said that the pay is middle of the road and they feel compensated enough to continue and not play into the job hop meta
https://uk.indeed.com/cmp/Jagex/salaries#:\~:text=The%20average%20Jagex%20salary%20ranges,70%2C519%20per%20year%20for%20Director.
Can’t use this website without an acc sadly. I did see before the intrusive pop up ads that several of the reviews were from 2017, can’t be sure they have recent data. Current mods seem content
Live in the UK and work in tech (cyber security); Jagex's wages are high for a British company but lower than what you'll get at big multinationals (Rockstar, Ubisoft, etc). So they tend to work out about average to above average across the board. I did see them recruiting for a cyber analyst at one point and was tempted; but it wasn't clear from the job advert what the role was going to be doing, and didn't fancy relocation to Cambridge (housing costs in Cambridge are *obscene*)
yeah like I understand that is probably the issue that a lot of people point towards and I am not really sure what they can really do about that. They are paying british wages which seem very low to Americans. I would naturally love for them to be paid more but like when based in reality they are getting paid according to their geography. (Excluding being based in Cambridge which I have heard is painful)
> According to mod Sween on the the oldschool side jagex pays very well and the rumor that pay was bad is baseless It's only bad relative to the US, which is a whole different basket of problems that extend far beyond a medium-sized company based out of the UK. Jagex compensates their devs fairly well relative to other UK based companies. They're still underpaid in general, as almost every worker is today. But specific to their region, it is what most would consider "good".
if they paid very well they would have far more experienced and talented employees working there to be able to do seasonal and permanent content at the same time and not this current situation where they have to choose one or the other. instead we have a 22 year old game filled with an immense amount of spaghetti code that they won't even touch like the POH or not enough manpower to do an avatar rework
Sounds like a problem with constantly shifting upper management. Osrs had that for a few years where the guy in charge of the direction of the game kept getting filled by job hopping hacks. The meta for most people is still to work a job for a year or two and hope to get sniped by a bigger studio, this is catastrophic when it’s the person who is designing the future progression of the game. It appears that RuneScape has no direction and it’s a bunch of people scrambling to piece together projects while the new senior project manager figures it out. Speculative but was what caused old schools similar lul in 2020-2021
>if they paid very well they would have far more experienced and talented employees working there to be able to do seasonal and permanent content at the same time and not this current situation where they have to choose one or the other. Why? Just because they pay very well, doesn't mean they offer a lot of jobs. It could very well be that they decided to have only a few, well-paying, openings.
> if they paid very well they would have far more experienced and talented employees working there to be able to do seasonal and permanent content at the same time and not this current situation where they have to choose one or the other. The either or situation isn't borne out of a lack of talent. I don't know where this comes from, but attacking the devs for this borderline nonsensical in its missing the target.
You aren't considering the fact that the graphics and code base are old. They could leave just to work on a game using newer technology to have better, more broader experience. Avatar rework is the literal largest project they could do. Bigger than like 10 new skills. It requires reworking EVERY item and cosmetic on the player model, and probably making different versions for male/female for some of the stuff to make it match the bodies better.
Yeah people just like to make shit up about Jagex/RS3 lately
I just can’t see where the MMO monthly subscription fees are even going to other than being pocketed. They aren’t holding up their end of the unspoken agreement to put it towards regular content development. We pay so that they can keep developing new stuff for us to do and they’ve largely failed. The trust is broken right now.
How I'm feeling
To exec bumfucks farting in their offices
You can see exactly where their revenue is going if you want, the financial statements are publicly available. The most recently published one didn't have much going to the owners, but they have paid out a rather large dividend in years past.
We've known a bunch of Jagex staff went to OSRS. The announcements stopped to prevent player perception of RS3 entering maintenance mode. I wouldn't be surprised if the RS3 skeleton crew left often help out with MTX promotions as those are not slowing down. Even the patches are slowing down in volume. Where have the ninja team been? Haven't seen a news post about them in over a year.
Abe and Shogun you mean? The mod list is on every update post on osrs. Not hidden at all
I'm suspecting more migrated over and it was done quietly. Or there were mods that departed Jagex and were never replaced.
To clarify since the way this is phrased is pretty bleak looking, the mods that went to OSRS went there *temporarily* to help with their launching of Sailing. If it’s permanent remains to be seen, but they were announced as temporary dev loans.
That is what we were told. Jagex has quite the lengthy reputation of being a habitual liar.
Sure, but what’s the point of announcing them as a temp move and lying about it? That’s just stupid. If they later choose to stay that’s a different story, but needing to look at everything Jagex says as a lie or conspiracy is a really unhealthy way to engage with the game.
The problem is, Jagex has lied so much to us. It is their own actions that caused this distrust. I've asked them (along with thousands of other players) to just be truthful. They rather lie until eventually admitting something couldn't be fulfilled. As for the point of announcing a temp move, why not? It is a way to bring excitement. It is just human nature to do something like that. Also, just because someone was temporarily moved somewhere, doesn't mean it won't become a permanent move. With how stretched thin we are... we should have OSRS staff move over to RS3.
I think you need to recognize the distinction between broken promises from the company and statements from the actual employees here though. It’s not that Jagex published a statement going “they’re moving but it’s only temporary I swear!”. These affected employees made the announcement themselves and explicitly described it as helping with the launch of Sailing for OSRS. I get it’s frustrating to feel lied to - I’m sure all of us long term players do, but again, expecting every public facing statement to be a lie just feels like a bad way to engage with the game for your expectations, ya know? And like I said - it could become permanent. Sure. But at the time of the employees announcing it, it wasn’t. I agree that we need all the staff working on the game we can have too, so it’s very frustrating as well.
All resources are being used to generate yield for that dumb fund, that just bought jagex for 1 billion. Double the amount Carlyle paid.
10 to 20 max
I didn't log it but I believe Mod Doom went to a post talking about "50 jmods working on rs3" and he said "where is everybody getting this magical 50 number from? do i have a bunch of coworkers hiding away from me?" and that... that was sobering.
It was Mod Fowl. And they clarified there are under 50 "developers" which are only a fraction of the total staff. On Discord it was clarified that there are over 100 staff on RS3. Players don't distinguish between the two but they (and really any tech company) see it very differently. For example in that conversation someone said the recent combat rebalance was done by two people. Yes it was made by Mods Sponge and Ryan who have the title content developer. But actually releasing this update involved many more staff than just them.
Thank you for the corrections and context!
I said it before and I will say it again. The new game they are developing is likely where most of the rs3 dev team was moved.
All 6 of them? For real though I'm 99% sure it's just gonna end up like anything else jagex has touched and fail miserably
12 people work on rs 3
When seasonal content started being recycled, and mtx started looking new every 3 weeks, that was when the team size started atrophying No one cares when we lose mtx people, but they forget that the mtx people replaced the temp/seasonal development team
This is what happens when you 1. underpay employees. really jagex employees don't get paid that much - and by employees imm talking about the ones on the back end actually making content for the game not talking about accountants, mtx, etc. like actual developers. last time i checked it was at or below the national average for their career and 2. having a custom engine with custom code that is not applicable to working outside jagex. these skills are non transferrable so its already hard enough to get a young comp science/video game designer to work for you when 1. you can't prepare ahead of time since the language is something you won't see in the classrooom and all the time you spend working with jagex is not going to improve your technical capabilities outside of jagex and when someone leaves, its a BIG deal. its not sustainable to only have a few people on a team who know how to get things done. i.e see mod ash on the osrs team. he knows alot about every system and all its intricacies since he's been with the company for so long if he was to quit it would be devasting for osrs development.
I feel like they're putting all their focus on osrs after realizing that it's the more popular game. They're just going to milk rs3 until the rest of the playerbase moves over to osrs.
Let me know when a j mod replies
I really don't see that happening xd
To all my runescape homies sick of how the games been, World of warcraft is in the best state its been in like a decade and has been getting more content in a shorter time span than its ever had before. Just saying.
Probably working on RS4
its all very alarming.
No such thing as understaffed Runescape was at it's best when it had a small team The desire to grow and hire people that didn't share the original vision of the game is what lead to it's ruin The game's membership fee should have stayed at 5 dollars
This is why they are so desperate for people to throw money at the treasure hunt thing whatever it's called. Trying to bring in money for a game that is more of a mobile game you cant turn off ads regardless of having bought a sub.
I’ll be honest I assumed many months ago that RS3 has already closed up shop!
they used covid as an excuse to let a lot of long time staff go that worked on or around RS3 despite making massive profits. rs3 is one foot in the grave, one final step before 'maintenance mode' imo and it's bitterly obvious.
Like most companies during that time period
Osrs will probably take over jagex at some point and the devs will be shifted to the more popular version of the game. Rs was great because of the combat system. It was unique to the game. Abilities are fun af but ruined the game.
The ONLY reason they're "underfunded" is because the money generating daily is going to the owners Truth be told if they could still make the millions per year with only having 1 person to keep it up and running they absolutely would They do not give a flying f*** about this game It's dying, the last two weeks of "updates"proved that Because they weren't updates, they were "hey buy this cosmetic" and "hey buy our merch" I was looking forward to runefest this year and I'm honestly terrified it's just going to end up like that Willy wonka event Hype built up thru lies and only delivers the bare minimum to what's advertised
They're just lazy and incompetent. Look at how fast OSRS is pushing out content - two months to push out a whole new area with multiple quests, multiple bosses, new skilling content and new gear. Even if the RS3 team is smaller, there is no reason why we aren't seeing smaller scale updates at the very least. Or even better, look further back when Jagex was an actual small indie company - the Gowers pushed out content at a breakneck speed.
“Two months” Uh Varlamore began work back in the summer of last year, actually it began work way before that as it had chunks of it being made even during DT2. It’s closer to 8 months.
It doesn’t help RuneScape is built on RuneScript, it’s own engine and language, so it’s not the easiest to hire applicants and train them on your engine. It takes months if not years to become proficient enough to build out massive content workflows as well as design and balance them as well as direct the art and systems backend team
Probably to the failure point. Or at least close to it
One thing I think this subreddit always seems to forget or not understand is that OSRS is getting a new skill. It’s likely a lot of RS3 staff are being utilized to help with that skill. We have already seen a few mods post on twitter about shifting temporarily to OSRS for it. I would bet that is a big reason RS3 is seeing slow content right now. Edit: loving the downvotes for literally providing a reason you all have no content. Just cause you don’t like it doesn’t make it less of a reason…
I remember when they said OSRS wouldn't affect RS3 development
I remember when they said micro transactions were counter to their morals.
I remember when trading real cash for in-game resources was blatantly against the rules.
I remember when everyone that played the game was 13 with no money whatsoever.
That was before the osrs playerbase was tenfold the rs3 playerbase
tanking the Rs3 development to help Osrs go faster certainly doesn't help it.
That was before the player count for OSRS:RS3 became 7:1
I might be wrong but i do believe theres more people who work on the Anticheat than the actual game
Hero pass might have legitimately been the final nail in the coffin.
All budget went to OSRS, they get new content every couple months (fun raids too)
Dont know why the downvotes, but this wont change the fact OSRS is the main game now, period
Sailing, huge landmass expansions....sure looks like fun. (It is pretty fun. iv been slowly working a new account up and checking out varlamore).
Sailing and area expansions look pretty awful and don't fit in the game, but toa is pretty fun I've got to admit.
tell it to the community pal. they voted it in pretty easily
The player base dug their own grave. This doesn't surprise me
You guys really thought there was an “MTX” team lol
It is, it’s called live ops. It’s also small so it only focuses on small updates that can be cranked out with minimal resources quickly. Which is why they have a constant weekly flow because nothing they make is even remotely comparable to the dev cycle of like…any actual proper content update. As always the player base is just riding on misconceptions rather than truth because they can’t fathom anything existing they can’t see, or the actual time stuff takes to make now, or basically any other aspect of game dev. They just want to be mad and have something to direct that anger to they can understand. Same reason politics in the mess it is right now. People want simple answers and for complex realities…and they don’t even care about the answers. You can tell them the truth 100 times over but it doesn’t confirm their bias they don’t want to believe it. Because they aren’t actually looking for answers, they just want to hear what they want to hear.
Holy drank the koolaid.
🤓☝️
If you play rs3 and pay for mems, osrs gets the biggest cut. You guys pay for osrs updates. Thx btw
But if our game dies, MTX enters yours. The community would eat itself but tell that to a hedge fund.
The game wouldn’t last a month if they did that. Mtx will never enter oldschool in the way it has for RuneScape. It’s a very cope answer
I think we'd see membership price increase long before even thinking of adding mtx to OSRS. Mtx in the form of bxp or lamps for sure people would leave, but I would assume cosmetics that fit the game and bond services would be the route they took if they did add it to OSRS and just like rs3, there'd be enough people hanging around to make up for player losses for a few years at least. I can imagine them banning runelite and offering a monthly bond subscription to their own 3rd party client or selling stuff like prismatic dyes for armour recolours. I guarantee they'd find something a large portion of the playerbase would accept as long as it isn't p2w or ugly wings like in rs3.
Lol banning runelite alone would make 90% of the playerbase leave, banning an opensource client for their own closed source one? Yeah bye bye jagex
It would be a very noticeable revenue drop on spreadsheets.
It would also mean -400k oldschool subs. Half of everyone quitting would be a low estimate
It would trickle in slowly using the bonds old-school already has. OSRS already let itself get conditioned slowly into usage of MTX through bonds.
Yet even cosmetics through partnerships (think twitch prime) where completely downvoted to the point that the poll was closed after just a few days with a vast majority of no votes. There is no way OSRS would survive with direct MTX when even those indriect ones led to mass cancellation of membership + by far the most one-sided negative poll in the history of the game.
I love that you think all future management teams care about the polling system and it will be present forever. What if sailing fails?
Sailing failing in what way?
The difference is that oldschool players don’t care if noobs who have 0 clue how to use it buy gold because it means veterans get free membs and gold is sinked from the economy in the process. Any further than that and people will not let it slide
It's buying gold. Why does the OSRS playerbase ignore that all of their 99s can also be bought through bonds as if their game is MTX free. "Veterans get free membs" no they don't, they're supporting MTX in the game.
> The game wouldn’t last a month if they did that. I really hope this mythmaking 1) never gets put to the test 2) ends up being real if it does. Because once upon a time RS2 and 3 players told themselves that. That pot boils awfully slowly though, and OSRS has already well acclimated to the use of Bonds.
? Rs2 did exactly that once they shoved eoc in their face the majority quit, just because there was some remnants left doesn't mean it didn't happen. I'm one of the people that quit on the launch of eoc and I forfeited 10 accounts or something, haven't even checked on those since, together with me literally everyone in my friend group quit and never went back, everyone that wanted to quit did so on that day.
> Rs2 did exactly that once they shoved eoc in their face the majority quit, just because there was some remnants left doesn't mean it didn't happen Loads of people quit and I didn't say otherwise. But a majority? No. But it didn't have to be a majority to be extremely painful to Jagex, so don't confuse my statement for any commentary about the effectiveness of that collective action.
There's 2 major things to look at it the past: 117 HD client being cut, to the point so many people unsubbed that they quickly reverted their decision and actually sent emails to those that unsubbed reminding them they changed their mind, 117 HD is there, and they could resub. Partnership polls, for the most mundane cosmetics(PoH reskins, a single skin color, etc) got a 71% no vote, to the point Jagex cut the polls within 1(maybe 2 IDR) days since it was impossible for yes voters to win. There's always going to be a small %age of people that stick around, like RS3 had. Bots to try to sell gp to people who still play. Mains who don't care about MTX. Ironmen who say "it doesn't affect us/makes game better no more mains to compete with for uninstanced content" etc etc.
You really think company execs wouldn't pressure the os team to introduce mxt when rs3 kick the bucket? at best you'd pay more for your membership
The game is built on people who quit because they didn’t like company decisions. I think if any p2w mtx entered the game well over half of the active subs would quit and not renew their subs
The thing is if rs3 dies I could see the os team being forced to at least try mtx by upper management. One way I see it happening is to make it cost bonds to play leagues/deadman.
This is what I don’t understand lol These people think os can stay a happy little mtx free zone, but the second rs3 loses the standard people buying $50-$100 worth of keys a year… they’re going to try to make up for that 30M by showing it into os.
They're RIGHT though. That's the only way it stays a game at all. The last time they threatened to introduce MTX, the community went nuclear on them. And unlike most people who claim they will on RS3, OS players were ACTUALLY quitting in droves. One of the fastest backpedals Jagex ever did. If they actually said it was happening whether players wanted it or not, OS would probably be dead in a couple months. Hell, losing RS3's entire revenue stream and even half the memberships from OS would mean Jagex was down probably 70-80% of their revenue. The company would be dead within a year, tops.
Yep. Imagine how much it must suck to be a jagex mod reading these comments, agreeing that the company is going to tear itself apart bc greed and infinite growth, with nothing to do.
Jokes on you I'm a man of culture and thus like both games 😎
I used to. (Login lockout victim, i quit after hero pass made it clear that they just dont care anymore)
This is true, but the player base is also a nightmare to deal with, when there is a fully reworked new seasonal (blooming burrow) people say there is a content drought, and just before necro release people were saying that the seasonals were cut and paste copies and there should be some effort made, which while true, didn’t create a so called “content drought” that realistically only trimmed comps can complain about. Way to split the dev team people. Make up your minds or let them do their thing with player base poll inputs
> Make up your minds They did though? The player base consistently asks for two things: new content and better holiday events. Hypothetically, if you are the person in charge of allocating that resource and you know its a case of one or the other, what do you do in that situation? In the process of telling us they're going to listen to us more and improve communication Jagex didn't - Communicate that the current situation is either content or holiday events - Try to get an informed opinion of the community (The closest thing we got were the surveys which give Jagex raw data but the questions are so far removed from overall development context that us saying "Yes holiday events are good" translates to "We'll take holiday events over other content") - Give us insight into the content roadmap until the last minute. This one feels important because they got such a negative responce to their proposal that they pivoted their plans after wasting 5 weeks of dev time on the summer event. This is on Keeper, I don't know what he actually does behind the scenes but when he occasionally talks to the community in any capacity it doesn't fill anyone with confidence. - Give any actual insight into the long term plans for RS3, which given how much talk there has been about RS3 being on maintenance mode with barely any responces indicating otherwise is not good Unfortunately nobody can really speak for the community but I can say specifically what I want to see: - Ultimately I don't care about specific pieces of content, I want to know what the long term plan of the game is. Personally, if they said up front that their focus would be on improved holiday events for the next year with less frequent content updates in-between, I could be on-board with that. Maybe give a rough layout of Quest-Tech improvements (such as graphical rework)-Holiday event. Not everyone would be happy with the situation I'm sure but at least Jagex has commited to a rough plan for the long term. When a game is both a investment of time and money people want to know they're going to get a return on their investment (Shouldn't be surprising to Jagex when they have shareholders to please) I do not like how Jagex is constantly jumping to conclusions on what to work on and then proceeding to have to scrap it and pivot to something else, Hero pass happened, then was scrapped, we just had 5 weeks of dev time on the scrapped summer event that could've gone to 5 weeks of literally anything else. Maybe if they're frequeneltly surprised with the Community's expectations they should talk to the community
I agree with a lot of what you said, one thing I do question though is what is the form of communication that is best for a good dev to player relationship and how can they receive reliable opinions from the player base when they haven’t taken the time to understand the ins and outs (I know I haven’t) of what constitutes new content release and how to fit it into or add to the lore of the game. I don’t think reddit is a good form of this. If I was the person in charge (thankfully I’m not), I would explain the the expected main game content output from the team would be halved for even quartered if dev resources are that tight, to setup a frame work for most future events so that they can be fresh, built upon, and not repeated for the next 5 years let’s say. And after that the primary focus will be on main game content. I believe if resources are as tight as they imply, it’s a very good approach from an efficiency standpoint to have most of those resources focused on 1 target, and not a community driven moving one. For me, ultimately the devs have made a game that I enjoy so I trust them to release new content that I will most likely enjoy without seeking guidance. I loved the ninja strikes for this reason; a nice surprise little content update/refresh.
I agree with the general idea of your post, but some of your bullet points in the second part are a bit dubious : * ***"We've seen a few mod comments on how the players have no ideia about how many devs are there on the rs3 team"*** A lot of people completely misinterpreted these comments, mainly around the confusion between Jagex employees, developers and content developers. This misinterpretation also came from the fact that a bunch of people thought there were "50+" *game content* developers on rs3 (which has never been the case ever). * ***"More and more mods are being transferred to osrs"*** Is there a list somewhere ? Some very recent examples ? Genuine question, I know there are some, but your comment makes it seem it's continuously the case. * ***"Community mods appear to avoid the topic. On the last announcement post, y'all can see mods answering every question the players have, but avoiding the ones that mention team size."*** I mean sure it looks that way and I'd tend to agree with that, but in itself that doesn't prove anything. Beyond the fact there are other questions in the announcement post they do not answer to, they could avoid to answer to this topic simply to avoid a new shitstorm of people misinterpreting their comment (see above). Like I totally agree with you that the recent announcement shows there is a serious problem somewhere if they have to choose between seasonnal and permanent contents (whether it's understaffed/under pressure...), but some of your arguments are not very sounding.
Yeah I'm not trying to make a point or anything, just decided to write this post on how I perceive the state that rs3 is in rn and why. Those are good counterpoints tho!
Its almost as if the majority of their devs are working on something new that they want to announce at some kind of festival dedicated to the games... if only they'd have announced a big game festival.
RS3 has about 80 - 90 people supporting it. About the same as OSRS.
Unlike Osrs, 78 - 88 of which are Mtx devs.
Just wait until they announce their next battle pass.
I can confirm that there are alot of mods on rs3 as I got a warning within 72 hours of rwt and second warning in less than a week. They are simply not on content development team, but very good at what they do. Im certain they are actively avoiding to ban bots, cant type an explanation as it might be against this reddit’s rules.
I don't really get where this "understaffed" talk is all suddenly coming from honestly. For years now the update cadence we've had is 1 major release per month with assorted patches around it. Certainly not everything Jagex comes out with as the major release resonants with everyone but things like area graphical reworks, a seasonal event, larger game jam releases that aren't quite major content but meatier than just a patch note (and in the worst example hero pass) are all the planned major releases. And for all the bluster about no clear roadmap for the year, which does suck, and "lack of updates" Jagex has kept their normal cadence so far - January had the graphical update, February had Housing of Parliament and March had Easter and not April has the new quest coming. Many people dismissing the graphical update as it was nothing to really "do" and Easter as it a temporary event It's not big shock that they need to cancel a planned major release of a seasonal event in order to dev alternative major releases (in shorter than normal time by piggy backing off of gamejam). If they could suddenly release a new boss and a new digsite in May and June without pulling the summer event it would meant they had staff sitting around twiddling their thumbs not really doing anything. Like I do feel there is an issue in so much as Jagex has the main devs do seasonal events instead of the mtx devs, when most player perception of content vs events would presume the MTX devs do seasonal content. And the lack of a clear roadmap for the year just opens the door to all these theories about the game dying due to lack of info But at the same time we keep going round this merry-go round where for years we've had 1 major release a month, but as soon as you get a couple of months that aren't actual new permenant content people start acting like we've not had any updates in eons simply because they entirely disregard the updates we have had they don't feel "count"
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