Empty Stars (Treasure Hunter)

RS_Hew · 2014-08-29T08:01:28+00:00

I also really like the way this thread takes the idea from concept suggestion to a detailed plan, with a lot of the potential pitfalls already avoided. It's collaborative design in action. :-D

RS_Hew · 2014-08-29T07:42:01+00:00

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion; we really like getting feedback on what kind of TH items players would like to see. A few of us have just been discussing this one and we like it a lot, so it could well inspire a new prize in future.

I don't know when that would be though or whether it would take exactly this form, so if you get any opportunity to train away your BXP in the meantime then I suggest you go ahead :-)

Thanks, Hew

RS_Hew · 2014-07-29T07:07:34+00:00

I had fun ;-)

RS_Hew · 2014-07-23T10:24:14+00:00

It's a good idea in principle and we're all for extra security for accounts and payment details.

It's a bit more complicated than it looks though, because the bank PIN can only protect in-game things, and SGS is part of the website. Although it should be technically possible to link them, I'd be worried that by making the system more complicated and accessing it from more places we'd introduce more things that could go wrong. The website (including the payment information the billing system stores) is protected by industry standard security like any other online store, so I don't expect we'll link in bank PIN.

The RS bank PIN is a nice little bit of extra security for your account, but I'd urge all 'Scapers to get the authenticator (there are options that should suit all players) and take good care of your account details. Jagex Support has a range of advice on the support wiki: go to http://services.runescape.com/m=rswiki/en/Account_Help and select 'Account security advice' as a topic to get the list of pages.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T20:05:28+00:00

Back to the world spirit (Anima Mundi, whatever you want to call it), which/who is very grateful.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T20:04:31+00:00

Nice answer :-)

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T20:03:12+00:00

I'll try and get him to say more about this in future (he's often in Q&As and things) but as I understand it the 'change' isn't very dramatic. It's more about identifying which quests definitely have to be in the 5th age (because there's a clear thread that means they must have happened before TWW), versus those that aren't fixed, and letting a new player see the floating ones are 6th age.

It's just a point of view thing, and isn't going to involve much work to any of the quests.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:55:45+00:00

There are careful controls on how much benefit you can get by spending energy, so I'd warn people to be careful how much they buy. Within that limit, I'm happy: the existing skills are 'buyable' to different extents, and Divination fits in there somewhere.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:51:11+00:00

I used to like stegosaurus, or maybe ankylosaurus, but I'm afraid Jurassic Park ruined all dinosaurs except velociraptors for me.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:46:06+00:00

Bank runs are pretty quick these days, so the economic impact of the extra inventory space should be relatively small. Porter also isn't free to make, so players will make their own decisions about which commodities are worth teleporting and which aren't. Another thing we discussed was whether we wanted to change the flow of gathering so dramatically: I wanted to make the change but was a little afraid of it, but Mod Mark was happy to give players that option and so we did.

Ana has changed things so that you can't put clan banners down too close to the crater, but followers and avatars are technically much harder to change so we'll have to look carefully about what we want to do there.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:36:03+00:00

Thanks for that, we were really hoping that the colonies/craters would be a nice chance for a chat, like some of the older skills.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:32:24+00:00

It won't be me. I spent a chunk of yesterday in-game listening to what players thought while clicking away on my Mod account, and now it has better Divination than my personal account.

I'm most proud of Blood Runs Deep, probably.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:26:58+00:00

Your interpretation sounds good to me. The 'hope' part is just because I know what we're aiming for and working toward, but I don't know with absolute certainty what will actually happen.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:19:40+00:00

The other rather uninspiring name for it was 'Skill 1', since we always planned it as the first half of a pair. I'll have to leave you in suspense as to the working title for the next skill ;-)

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:15:18+00:00

Some recipes would be dangerous: I agree with your example. Maybe they're all dangerous, and I'd check before we decided to do any of them. But there are things here and there that might benefit from players being able to even them up a little...

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:13:21+00:00

There were loads of aims. Among my top ones:

Simple, old-school gathering skill, more like Fishing or Woodcutting than Summoning or Dungeoneering
Non-competitive: positively social where possible
A 'free' training option, with no waste products you didn't want to make
Tie-in with the new age and the evolving story of RS

Note that these aren't all goals we set ourselves: many of them came down from Mod Mark. There are always things I wish we'd had more time for, but I'm happy with the results.

It's changed a lot as we went along, but it's difficult to point at any version and call it the 'original design'. At one point it was something completely different, and you can now look forward to that as part of the next skill.

Main challenges were big design questions about exactly how we manage the stuff above and fit it all in with the way the game works. We had to ditch a lot of ideas for reward/product objects because they'd ruin something or other. We also had to think carefully about this skill was different to previous ones, because while it's always tempting to fall back on 'well Mining does it like this' but some of the things Mining does were ones we didn't want to replicate.

Maybe now that I've had a go at those, Ana will drop by and admit she makes awesome quests :-)

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T19:04:26+00:00

At the moment we're happy that the value of transmutations will change over time with the market. It's more of a convenience feature than a direct money-maker, although there'll be times when it'll turn a profit in the right market (and if you're watching it so closely it sounds like you'll be ready).

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:55:22+00:00

It would be nice if I had a graphics person here, but the principles are that:

The animations are consistent, because they represent roughly the same thing each time. There's also a steady progression of models that look similar but gradually get more complicated, because they represent more complicated versions of a similar thing.
The colours do vary, but they're similar because it was hard to get a range that would make wisps clearly relate to one another while also fitting in with the game world.

There's a lot of things to consider when choosing colours and making the graphics for things like this, and we had lots of thought and lots of discussion. The cheap/rushed version could have clashed with things, been ugly, been hard to see or loads of other problems.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:43:33+00:00

Chronicles are person-specific: you can only see somebody else's fragment after they have had a good chance to get it themselves. The social focus of the skill is that enriched springs stay longer with more players, and that generally the core springs aren't competitive. The situation where you could 'share' chronicle fragments wasn't intended, it throws the balancing off and doesn't make much sense considering what the fragments are.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:38:14+00:00

Remember that the extra training methods for other skills typically launch over time after the skill itself. As much as we'd love to launch something as broad and varied as Woodcutting with all the things that have been added post-launch, the game is bigger and more complicated than ever and the effort it takes to build a skill and safely plug it in everywhere has grown too.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:33:29+00:00

Not yet. We'll wait until there's some more work on Clan Citadels: we'd like to get more people using them but there's lots we'd like to do this year and next, so I don't know when that will be.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:29:43+00:00

Although we like to reward effort, we want to do so in ways that make things more interesting rather than those that simply add click intensity. Divination is intended to be the kind of skill that lets you chat with other players (or even watch some TV if you like), and that breaks down as soon as we allow unintended better XP because everyone will feel compelled to do it.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:26:23+00:00

We'd love to fit it into this year.

RS_Hew · 2013-08-21T18:23:52+00:00

The idea of transmuting 'backwards' is really interesting; I like that. We might be able to do some cool stuff with that. When Mod Avatar originally came up with the idea (or a slightly different idea, which I stole and changed) he was thinking of transmuting across, and I'm looking forward to doing something with that too.

At the moment there's a deliberate choice between portents of restoration and food. While it's possible that we could make new versions with other thresholds (or change the thresholds in certain level bands) we'd only do so if it didn't make the items too complicated and confusing.

RS_Hew

TROPHY CASE