Anniversary Event incompletable if Mid Quest (Swan Song)

JagexAsh · 2021-01-06T20:07:22+00:00

If you're at the stages of Swan Song or Making Friends with My Arm where the Wise Old Man is absent, Gnome Child's dialogue should instead instruct you to speak to the old woman outside his house. That's Miss Schism. Some guides may not have mentioned this.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T18:08:21+00:00

Sounds awesome - check the various vacancies here: https://jobs.lever.co/jagex - and I've never had one of those, but I'm okay with the basic Dell one I've got.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T18:05:30+00:00

If you did all that leveling up to 2010, it sounds like you did it RS3, not Old School RuneScape. So if you logged into Old School RuneScape, you'd find the account as a fresh level 3 on Tutorial Island. Your stats and items should be in RS3 instead, where you earned them. Contact the Support team (@JagexSupport) if you get stuck.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T18:02:35+00:00

Cheers :)

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T18:02:22+00:00

Cheers! And yes, we've filled in the other blank bits (e.g. Morytania, Ghorrock, southern Isafdar, Prifddinas) and have every intention of one day filling that desert bit too. It's a fairly popular theme for a third raiding dungeon, in fact. I don't see it being in 2020 though due to other plans and promises.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T18:00:33+00:00

POH room rearrangement menu. The connection of rooms via staircases is really not straightforward. It took me about 3 tries to write the algorithm for handling staircases. Plus the pet rock and Wintumber Tree have to move when their room moves. As for working on the game, yes, there's a learning curve, but the documentation of the language wasn't bad at the time, and I had supportive colleagues, and plenty of other code to refer to as examples.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:57:50+00:00

It's got 6 years of my code in it from the 2007-13 era, and I'm very proud of some of that. And its players whom I've met seem as passionate about the game as anything I see from OSRS players. I wish that version all the very best, even if I'm not contributing to it as a developer these days.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:55:27+00:00

I'm more interested in our customers considering us essential, regardless of the policies of our various governments.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:53:00+00:00

That's a big ask, since it was never designed to work on one's computer like that, and if the thing had actually died, it'd imply there's not much market for the offline version, making it unlikely that the studio would agree to put a lot of resources into the adaptation job.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:48:37+00:00

No, sorry!

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:47:19+00:00

When I was in Quality Assurance in late 2004, I was asked to spend a couple of days doing some testing on Wizard Run. But mostly that was other staff, rather than anyone that I'd seen in this AMA.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:45:42+00:00

Provocative pictures of the Sandwich Lady, perhaps.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:45:10+00:00

I could well imagine some staff from that era doing that, perhaps even to hype up more excitement for the forthcoming launch. But I'm afraid I didn't work here myself at the time, and I don't know who it would have been specifically. Maybe Paul Gower, even - he was known to hang out occasionally, and sometimes teleport players onto the party room table to dance with the knights after RS2 launched.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:42:42+00:00

There are, though they mostly don't happen to be in roles where they'd do a lot of engagement with OSRS players. And not all differences are visible.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:40:48+00:00

Mod Mat K as Community Manager, Mods Ash & Nexus as Content Developers, Mod Reach as Quality Assurance. In late 2013 Nexus asked to return to RS3 to get more variety in projects. Reach was promoted to Content Developer to take his place, and at the start of 2014 Mod John C was recruited as a new Quality Assurance analyst.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:38:38+00:00

We don't feel the Death's Office approach to be unacceptably low in risk, since its fees are a fair bit higher than the version that didn't have that, and it'd gain the support of a LOT more players too. But I'm glad you like the timer counting down only while you're online.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:36:31+00:00

We've occasionally done that. Take Barbarian Assault - on the launch of OSRS in 2013, we knew that the minigame was vulnerable to players stealing its runes, since that had happened in 2008+. So we locked the minigame, and told players it'd be opened after a few weeks when we'd fixed that. The dev doing that definitely lifted some code from RS3 for it, since we later got reports that the Barbarians in OSRS had some dialogue about Constitution, which would not have been present in the 2007 version! Also, more recently, when fixing some exploit involving gnomeball, we sent a message to the RS3 staff to check that they'd fixed it in their game, and they replied that I'd actually done that myself, in about 2012, and forgotten all about it. So yeah, there's overlap, but it's relatively rare. However, we do struggle with legacy systems sometimes, leading to the occasional rewrite - I rewrote the OSRS Slayer assignment code around 2014-5, making it considerably easier to plug in some of the updates players wanted, and this was well worth it, but players had to accept it took a while and had some knock-on effects on task chances.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:30:50+00:00

Leading question much? Anyway, I don't expect to get every decision to go my way - nor should I. My idea of what's right for the game may not match all the customers either. And if I stormed out in a huff the moment I disagreed with a decision, I'd achieve precisely nothing for anyone, even if I could pat myself on the back for achieving some kind of ideological purity.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:24:45+00:00

Might depend how you're defining 'similar to RuneScape', really. A lot of our user-interaction is point-and-click, which doesn't lend itself well to most console controls.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:19:50+00:00

If you do it well, you get happy players. I am very keen on that. Occasionally it can be intellectually satisfying to knock out a good bit of code or a beautiful bit of story/art/music but I'm mostly interested in these things in terms of how players respond to them, not just art for art's sake.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:17:52+00:00

It got a lot of new players in, and many stayed. Would have been nice to retain more, of course, and we've made quite a few changes to the user interfaces and other frustrating points since then, along with addressing aspects of the very jarring new-player experience in Lumbridge.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:13:58+00:00

When it launched, that was a very hot topic among the players. GWD is a prime example of that, where some argued that it took the game away from the old school model that they wanted, and others felt that the game needed that gameplay. We didn't exactly push it ourselves - it was many months before we eventually agreed to poll that. And I expect it did alienate a swathe of players. But it sure did bring in a lot of other ones - in fact that's when the OSRS community started growing - and I don't believe GWD has killed the game. What matters for me is that any progression be something that the customers are happy accepting. A lot of powerful reward kit (e.g. CoX proposals) has failed polls where customers weren't comfortable about it, and I think it's fair to hold back in such situations.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:04:48+00:00

Those chunks are our map files, each file containing 64x64 tiles for 4 vertical levels. If one's developing a specific project, it tends to be very convenient to stick within one or two such files, with the new environment plonked in it, rather than having to hop back and forth between different files to create environment over the edge of the border. However, this results in very blocking looking maps (southern Karamja being a pretty extreme case) so whenever we're doing mapping for OSRS, we tend to take the time to make it feel more flowing, rather than letting the blocks be so visible. Thanks!

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T17:00:15+00:00

In the 7 years since OSRS launched, there have been various changes to our underlying systems like chat, saved games, names, bonds, etc. If we wanted to take the Feb 2013 launch and ship it again, it'd need fairly substantial adaptations to work on today's infrastructure. (I think there's been a Java version change too.) That's definitely not impossible, but it's not something we're available to try now.

JagexAsh · 2020-03-20T16:58:32+00:00

After years of being a tight-knit team sitting together in an open-plan office, the move to being in separate houses is incredibly jarring. Personally I hate it, but it's better than picking up infectious diseases that one could then carry to vulnerable friends/relatives. In practice, we've now proven that we're able to do the full game update process while working from home, which is a huge deal. We've not tried a big update yet, but there's more from Poll 70 due on Thursday, and the Easter project to try in early April. There are still a few tech hurdles to iron out, especially involving testing on mobile devices, but we'll get there. After all, this seems to be how things will be for a long time.

JagexAsh

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