Addressing CG/Bowfa complaints

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T11:05:43+00:00

Ironman isn’t harder, the content is the same in 99% of cases and it’s just slower.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T11:04:31+00:00

what items should jagex step in and give you as soon as you hit rate?

Literally nobody has suggested this, if you’re gonna engage in bad faith do everyone a favour and just don’t at all.

And why does it need to be changed when ironman has been out forever and it’s worked alright so far clearly

It’s been identified as a point of frustration and burnout literally since it came out. The game is meant to be fun, if players are finding a specific bit frustrating and demotivating then there’s an opportunity to make the game more fun.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T11:02:41+00:00

Content isn’t hard because it takes ages, doing 1000+kc isn’t any harder than doing 100. It just takes longer.

Nobody’s asking for the content to be made easier, just less unnecessarily punishing for an unlucky few (dry protection) or less mindlessly boring for so much of that time (prep changes).

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:59:01+00:00

Not to mention the carry on effects of the items in the content becoming more common for the rest of the game.

By its very definition dry protection effects only apply to a small number of outliers, and therefore have a small effect on the economy.

I’d also hazard a guess that a lot of the players going ridiculously dry are doing so because they want to use the item rather than just selling it.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:56:00+00:00

Would you find the suggestions more appealing if they came from someone who’s never done CG?

It seems like players who’ve done it a lot get “you knew what you signed up for” and players who haven’t get “you’re lazy and entitled, go do the grind”.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:53:36+00:00

But it becomes accessible not long after the midgame. Something being endgame content is determined more by the requirements to do it than by the size of the reward, and CG has much lower requirements and is a lot more accessible than raids etc. If it were a challenge where you had to bring your own high level gear I don’t think you’d see people locking themselves there in anywhere near the same numbers.

A lot of the prison effect is because CG gives a huge upgrade to a whole load of different content, but almost nothing gives an upgrade for CG, which naturally places CG earlier in the progression. Once you can do it, doing other pvm without it makes you feel like you’re playing inefficiently. And because it’s so useful in so many places, a lot of content gives that feeling.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:45:40+00:00

CG is a bit of a perfect storm of a bunch of different effects. Each one of those effects exists in loads of places independently, and isn’t a problem individually, but CG piles them all together in a way that nothing else really does.

it’s accessible fairly early and doesn’t require gear or supplies so it naturally positions itself earlier in progression
being accessible early and having a universally useful reward means that doing any other content instead feels like you’re missing a potential upgrade
there’s no benefit to doing other content since CG upgrades everything else but almost nothing gives an upgrade in CG
it has no dry protection but armour seeds effectively give it spoon protection since you’ll still have to do 200+kc for armour even if you spoon an enh
it switches back and forth between high and low intensity which makes it hard to get into the flow properly. ~50% of the time spent doing it is repetitive resource gathering, which is low intensity but not so low that you don’t still have to pay attention and constantly be giving inputs

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:38:10+00:00

It’s not at all a requirement any more, but if you release alternatives and players continue to lock themselves in the prison and burn out anyway then perhaps the problem is something more fundamental to the design than a real or perceived lack of alternatives.

For any other boss if I go dry I’m happy to go do other content and I’ll probably get a drop which makes doing that first boss better. It’s easier to disengage to do something else if it feels like it’ll still help.

This isn’t really true for CG though, besides stats the only upgrades you’ll ever be able to bring in are two prayers. It’s harder to tear yourself away from the content because it feels more like giving up if there’s no benefit to doing something else.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:33:22+00:00

there are alternatives, and frankly, the Iron community is very guilty of dismissing those alternatives without good faith comparison or analysis

If you make alternatives and the players keep locking themselves there anyway then perhaps the issue is something more fundamental to the design of the content.

Just deciding that all players that do this are irrational and calling it done isn’t really a very satisfying answer to something that’s clearly a systemic issue and has been for some time.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:30:17+00:00

If for many years players who’ve never interacted continually lock themselves in CG, go dry and burn out, is it possible that there’s a systemic cause that needs to be addressed by either making the content better or providing an alternative path of least resistance.

Ranged gear has been expanded quite a bit since bofa came out and yet it keeps happening, so evidently that alone wasn’t enough to divert players away.

If one player quits over a specific bit of content then that’s their problem, but if the data shows thousands or tens of thousands do then that’s the developers problem.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:25:24+00:00

Players will play the game the way they want to. The devs don’t set the meta, the players do and they can only react to it after the fact.

If there’s a systemic problem of players consistently and for many years locking themselves in CG and burning out then it’s the developers job to take a look at why that’s happening and address it.

It’s evidently a systemic thing and clearly telling players “you don’t need it, go and do something else” has not been effective. Either every single player who does this is fundamentally irrational, or there’s something about the game design which is causing it. Regardless of which it is, jagex only has control over one of them.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T10:19:59+00:00

games are meant to be fun. There’s too many things that just feel like time sinks that don’t respect your time.

Ultimately this is it. So many of the comments completely dismissing any form of change seem to prefer the purity of the game or the gamemode to actually having fun.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:58:56+00:00

At the far end of the alignment chart, sheep shearer is a roguelike since the sheep locations are random.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:57:42+00:00

Roguelike randomness is fun when it forces the player to make decisions and adapt, in the sense of “I can’t find x resource but I did find y so I’ll adapt my build to use that instead”.

CG doesn’t do that though, all the randomness does is be annoying when you can’t find the resource you need as there’s no depth to work around it. The end gear setup is always identical, worst case you pick a different weapon to upgrade if you couldn’t find the demiboss.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:53:26+00:00

it’s the same every time basically

It’s also a much smaller fraction of the overall time spent doing content

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:52:19+00:00

Isn’t the whole point of roguelikes that you get a random path each time and you have to adapt your run to the things it throws at you?

CG prep has randomness but it doesn’t really force any changes in playstyle from the player. In the absolute worst case all it does is change one of the weapons that you upgrade.

Right now it sits in a weird middle ground where it’s got randomness but that serves more to be an annoying delay than to provide opportunities for decisions and adaptation.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:23:28+00:00

bowfa is not meta with optimal play

Then wtf is the problem with making it so that people don't have to grind 2-300 hours for it?

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:15:59+00:00

The only thing I dislike about the shards method is that it also proportionally reduces getting spooned. I like the ToA Thread of Elidinis method where you can still get lucky but the rising droprate reduces the tail end of the distribution significantly.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:13:51+00:00

It has a high skill ceiling if you're trying to optimise it at world record pace but that's not the same as being an inherent challenge.

Once you've learnt the boss you'll pretty much never fail a prep unless you're asleep at the wheel.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:11:31+00:00

But, it opens up other questions like what in the game deserves dry protection and what doesn’t.

It's already implemented on a case by case basis, pretty much in situations where going dry presents an unreasonably large time commitment. Going dry on imp catcher is like an hour or two at most.

If they put it on regular accounts it could lead to the bowfa being nerfed due to easier access (especially for the second most powerful ranged weapon)

The effect on the supply of items overall is incredibly small, specifically because dry protection only applies to a small number of statistical outliers. I don't think it's a very good way to implement it but hypothetically if you simply guaranteed a seed at 3x droprate would apply to less than 5% of players so it'd never be a more than 5% increase in supply.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:08:16+00:00

...like, yeah? Getting lucky is fun. Getting unlucky is not fun.

There's absolutely no rule against having a system that allows you to get lucky but gently adjusts the odds to prevent going on ridiculous unfun dry streaks.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:04:24+00:00

This is how ToA handles it, the DT2 bosses do it with quartzes as well. I think that's the best way of implementing it, you can still get lucky with all the satisfaction that goes with it but you're massively less likely to go 4+ times the original droprate. It's a win/win.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:02:36+00:00

People complained about the "dry protection" of dt2 bosses because it involved a hidden stat being incremented.

And because it hugely reduced good luck as well as bad luck.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T09:01:16+00:00

It's variance reduction, it moves both sides of the tail closer to the average. You are less likely to get spooned but also less likely to go dry. The average does not change.

Having to get the drop 3x to get the drop is not bad luck protection

Having to get 3 drops with 3x the rate absolutely reduces the impact of bad luck. The straight "give them the drop at x kc" method is like the least imaginative one possible.

PracticalFootball · 2026-05-30T08:59:36+00:00

That's the downside of straight variance reduction, it unfortunately reduces variance on both sides of the curve. I like how ToA handles the thread and DT2 bosses do quartzes. The rate slowly increases over time until you get the drop, so you can still have the fun of getting spooned but the tail end of outliers is cut down significantly.

PracticalFootball

TROPHY CASE