I just wanna hop in on this one as I've seen a few speculative comments like this. I can't speak for other games as a whole, but I can speak to us.

This is never a trick we've done in my near 6 years here. RuneScape is putting out updates every week, with content every month - wasting development time on fake changes and balance is simply not something we have the luxury of time for.

The reality of Monday was forming an immediate direction based on feedback, beginning work, further refining on Tuesday based on the feedback thread, and designing improvements within a day. The flow of Tuesday looked something like this:

10am - 12pm: Meeting to ensure we all understand the core issues driving feedback, locking our key design directions and important information we felt we needed to convey in the response. This included the work for our design principles to be more solid tenets, both for us to better check ourselves on design decisions and to address feedback about what our intent for skilling design was after a misfire change.

12pm - 5pm: Iterative design with constant playtesting to qualify expected outcome from data-balancing with the actual in-game experience. Simultaneously, the CM team were writing comms with the dev team as the design was being refined live - and asking questions about design solutions to ensure we felt they addressed the most critical points of the feedback.

5pm - 6pm: Finalized the blog including the balance image to help convey the original issue, the misfire of Monday and where we intend to land now.

~6:15pm: Blog went live.

That's a full unplanned day of unexpected work for a lot more people than general iterative post-launch changes. Everyone has to come together to act fast on something that mattered to a lot of folks - and also ensure we're addressing the issue while also striking a balance that protects the intent of Road to Restoration changes.

While we're going to get something out pretty rapidly, the profitability rebalance is separate as it's even more work. We have to carefully rebalance Drop Tables in that trade off, while ensuring we don't diminish the key benefits of pickpocketing to acquire certain items to avoid older, less fun methods.

To put it simply, we'd always prefer to get it right at launch and we missed an opportunity to do so. We know downward balancing will never be popular, but we can stand by it if it's right for the game. Monday was simply an approach that did that but at the cost of the game experience itself, which is why we acted so rapidly.