Q&A Summary 03/02/2022 OSRS

I know this has been asked a lot but are there any current plans to address Wintertodt hp scaling? Ideas for warmth gauges/bandages etc., have been thrown around for many years, yet to this day, it is still a pain to kill this boss without being early or late into your account. It would be nice to shake up the early game of most accounts and know that postponing Firemaking training isn’t going to bite you in the ass if you come back later.

To that second point, I still think people will do Wintertodt early just because the crate value is absolutely insane.

To the first part, it probably needs doing, but it needs more of an idea than ‘oh yeah, just adds warmth gauges to it’, it needs to have a proper sit-down and think about it, and it’s definitely something we should spend time on.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, I know, especially with Leagues, my first goal was straight to Wintertodt just because it was the easiest thing to go for, so I imagine that was the same for a lot of other players, so yeah, nice to vary that in the future.

Now that we have a G.E. tax for gold sinking, can we finally change the pet insurance system to be free and automatic, and for pets to go to your bank if your inventory is full and there’s already a pet out? (Excluding the Wildy). Many people never use their cosmetic pets because constantly losing 1m isn’t fun.

I’m surprised to hear one’s constantly dying quite so much in the game, but I’m sympathetic. The thing is, we do have a Grand Exchange tax, it’s not huge, we agreed on one percent for the launch, and it’s obviously got the scope to increase, at least for some kinds of items, even if we leave others alone.

The game could probably do with more gold sinking rather than less, so even with this in there, I’m not in a massive rush to get rid of other gold sinks. Those million coins, well, you’re kind of helping a little when you do that; I do, however, support anything we can do that will make it more reliable that you receive a pet rather than being unexpectedly blocked by having a full inventory, especially when you didn’t realize it was going to be full. I’d be very keen for us to address that, even if we might keep some gold sinking going on for the rest.

I’d also be up for the suggestions we’ve had involving pre-emptive insurance or probing into just having a big coffer so that if you’ve got enough in there, pets are automatically insured when you receive them so that if you die on the way out with them, you don’t lose the pet in the most cutting way of all.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, I think you’re completely right, Ash; there are some elements of pet insurance and pet gaining that probably need some tweaking. But, if you are dying that much with your pets out, then maybe, for now, don’t get your pets out; keep them safe. If that’s your biggest problem, there’s easy navigation around that, for now.

Mod Zuko had a proposal to rework teleport items with charges. The gist of the post, from my understanding, would be to make all teleport charges be tracked via a player variable, like the Dodgy Necklace, instead of an object variable (e.g. Xeric’s Talisman) or having one type of item per charge (e.g. Amulet of glory). Would it be possible to implement this change? If so, would the devs be interested in polling it?

Oddly enough, there was a brief discussion amongst the team about it earlier today, so I’ve got a couple of quotes here, one from Mod Zuko:

Mod Zuko (off-stream)

It would be very possible. I personally would love to see it polled as a future update where we have an NPC at the grand exchange that can convert your items into the new charge systems and untradeable; that way, we don’t affect any of the game at all, not the grand exchange, not monster drops, not anything but the option is still there.

Mod Kieren (off-stream)

Supportive of the change, they’re smart, and I’m confident we can nail any finer details. However, it’s about our time to develop these things, so one for the future, possibly for one of our teams when a poll can accommodate such a bigger task. Other teams don’t really have the space to handle it at the moment.

Mod Sarnie

So hopefully, that answers your question, YoshiFan; I don’t know if anyone else has anything for that.

Mod Ash

I’d be personally interested in what the behaviour change would be for taking a load of Amulets of Glory to recharge them because that is quite a change from each one of them having the number of charges on it to the number of charges being stored on you. I’m not quite sure how this would affect the recharging process. On the other hand, it sounds like Zuko’s thought this one through, so there’s probably an answer out there I just haven’t seen in the slack thread.

Mod Bruno

I’d also want to know what that would do to things like the Eternal Glory. If you only need one glory, then that item’s kind of useless even if it does have infinite charges compared to a certain amount of charges, so that’s one thing we should figure out.

Mod Sarnie

I feel like that’s definitely some kinks, but yeah, I think Zuko’s done a lot of thinking about it, so there’s probably not too many kinks that I’m imagining.

Mod Ash

Next time you have a quote from one of our colleagues, can you do the voice?

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, I will try my best.

Mod Bruno

We also have a quote from Kieren so.

Mod Sarnie

I’m not going to try Kieren’s now; give me like a week, and I will perfect his voice.

Mod Kirby

I foresee no repercussions from this at all.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, I’ll make sure he has a quote in next week’s Q&A, and I will do it then, alright? You can hold me to that.

Are there any plans for new POH styles? There is a lot of potential for new ones based on examples like Priff, Morytania, and Shayzien.

I think they’d be very cool. Yeah, it’ll be very cool. As far as I know, they do take quite a lot of time from the artists, so I think that’ll be the main thing blocking us from doing it.

Mod Sarnie

I’m gonna sort of divert the question a bit, but if there’s one theme you guys would like to see would it be.

Mod Bruno

Maybe an elven one for me.

Mod Ash

The Morytania idea pips that one for me but only just. The reason being we don’t have a lot of dark options out there, and I think Morytania could be a very atmospheric one.

Mod Kirby

I was gonna go for Lovakengj.

Mod Sarnie

Kirby coming in with a rogue option; okay, I like it, I like it.

Mod Ash

That one’s all yours

Mod Kirby

I will use it proudly.

Are there any plans to address the Nex Drop Rates? Hype dying down after the first week is normal, but the nerf killed the boss’s popularity. Can we revert the nerf or even buff it further?

I think it was felt to be bringing stuff into the game a bit too fast before the nerf, and sure a more rewarding boss will be even more popular, but that’s not a good thing for the long term, especially if it floods the game with its own uniques and makes them lose value faster. So I’m very sorry, I don’t think we’re gonna get to do that.

Mod Kirby

Yeah, I was looking at the wiki earlier today… Yeah, I was right; killing Nex is listed on the wiki as twice the profit per hour over the next best thing. I don’t think we want to be like playing with drop rates when we’re risking that much money into the game.

Could Barbarian Training be reworked as a mini-quest? The current layout is clunky, and it’s difficult to know what step you’re on or what you need to do to progress/finish the training.

Oh totally. See, when it was agreed we’d do the mini-quest journals at all and declare those other things to be mini-quests, the two things I ran into and decided I was just leaving the damn thing alone were this and the rogue trader activities around Ali Morrisane.

In the case of Barbarian Training, it’s partly because the thing actually already had a journal of what you’ve learned, I forget what it’s called, Things I’ve Learned from Otto Godblessed or something, so it has a sort of journal already and didn’t seem urgent. Also, it didn’t really have a definable endpoint I could get my hands on because it just had a few things, each of which you might get some progress on. It didn’t really feel like it ended to me, but we could define an end, just as we could probably define an end for the stuff with Ali Morrisane, but at the time, I had another 11 to do; I think I spent an entire blinking weekend doing them, and looking at these two I just left it at that point. Future developers are most welcome to jump on the job!

Any plans for additions to the Clan Hall? I feel like there could be a gold/item sink potential there with upgrades that add more things to do—for example, donating X amount of ores/saplings to add some higher tier skilling nodes or donating enough money as a clan to unlock alternate colour palettes/themes for the clan hall itself like house themes.

The original design actually had some of that already, especially the themes. Unfortunately, we ran short of dev time, so it’s a question of do we postpone the whole launch and build more of these things in and then launch it, or do we give the players a clan hall to call their own but accept it doesn’t have customization. We went for that option because we also had to get on with group iron man, which players have been waiting for a very long time as well, and there was a deadman, and you couldn’t spend forever on one project, but I am very keen that we get to go back and build in more when time permits.

Additional colour palettes should be entirely manageable. One thing we did spend a while experimenting with that didn’t work out was recolouring the contents of the clan hall to match your clan’s colour. At the moment, it’s always blue in there. All the furniture is blue, and the carpet’s blue and ‘da ba dee da ba daa’ you get the drift.

Mod Elena actually wanted to make a version of it where almost everything in there changed colour to suit your clan’s chosen colour, which looked somewhat UwU if it was one of the pink ones, I think, and it worked for everything except the carpet. The carpet was a bit of a sticking point because there’s so much of it, and it was always going to be the same darn colour whatever else we did with the rest of it, so the artists recommended that we not go ahead with that feature at all if we couldn’t do it fully. If we can expand what she was doing to, I’m gonna say literally make the carpet match the upholstery; I think it would be a very good thing to have for making it feel more like your own place.

As for training facilities in there, I’ll be up for that. It’s unlikely that we end up with anything that’s completely best in slot, but given that a lot of these things already have a version near a bank, I don’t really see a problem with that. One of the suggestions I saw floating around was that we let you pay to hire the services of Bob Barter, the potion decanting dude and maybe Murky Matt, the jewellery decanting dude, so that you get one of those parked in your clan hall bank for a little while in exchange for a fee so you can get decanting done in there without having to go back outside again, just as a thing that the clan might like to do in there.

Mod Kirby

You said that, and I’m thinking how hard would that be to implement.

Mod Ash

Not very. The clan hall already has a data slot set up for it, so there’s data in focus while the hall is in use; therefore, one can access that data to decide what the hall can have in it, and there’s already a variable tracking clan’s small coffer. Speaking of which, what I’d really like to do possibly more than what Kaneland asked for is rework that clan coffer into something like what Group Ironman’s got for the group storage. We didn’t have tech at the time to do something on that scale, and we do now, and it would get rid of the small cap it’s got on it.

Mod Sarnie

Awesome, thank you very much, Ash. I now want an UwU colour theme. I don’t care what it is; I just want it now that Ash has mentioned it, so I’m gonna push some of the artists on that, maybe.

Some Skilling boosting items seem to be tradeable, but not others; any chance this will be changed? (IE: Spirit Flakes vs Blood Essence) is the example they’ve given.

I agree in principle; however, with the example you’ve given there, spirit flakes are also, unfortunately, a currency that you can acquire for upgrading your spirit anglers. I don’t know whether that’s the thing that should be buyable, the design would indicate that it shouldn’t be, but in general, I’m more than fine with making skilling stuff tradable.

Mod Bruno

I kind of agree. I think it should be a case-by-case basis where if something’s like those flakes do give you an actually good bonus, maybe not, so you don’t just buy and make Tempoross a lot easier for yourself, so you just carry around a rope, but there are things like the blood essence that definitely makes sense.

Can we get a skill cape teleport for the Woodcutting Guild? Maybe waive the favour needed for the guild if someone has 99, or make the teleport go outside if the favour has not been obtained yet.

I support this. It seems popular. I don’t see a pressing reason not to. There are other ways to get there, of course, but it’s not like some of those skill capes give a lot of bonus for themselves, so I’m cool with it.

Mod Kirby

What does the Woodcutting cape even give you?

Mod Bruno

Increased birds nests. Yeah, it doesn’t really have a very good one, but it apparently gives you some more birds nests.

Mod Kirby

You can tell it’s an important power-up because I couldn’t even remember what it does.

Mod Sarnie

I was gonna say I think Ash is correct. There are probably a lot of capes in the game that don’t lack that functionality that others do which is a shame.

Mod Bruno

I think the excuse of well, this item already does that so we shouldn’t do it, doesn’t really hold up because the skills necklace also teleports you to the crafting guild and the farming guild, and both of those capes teleport you to their guilds as well so I don’t see why not really. It does make the max cape a bit stronger, but that’s already a very strong item.

Mod Kirby

It’s the woodcutting guild.

Mod Bruno

Yeah, I personally wouldn’t mind it either.

Mod Ash

If we want to be really generous, then we could get picky about where we put them in the guild, so having this cape is better than having a skills necklace.

Can mobile get a toggle that switches Chin traps default click from “check” to “reset”? It would make Hunter on mobile better.

I don’t think it should be a toggle; I think it should just be a thing. Having done some Chinchompa hunting this week, the reset option was very nice compared to how it was back when I did it, and I also like that you can’t three tick whilst making it easy for yourself, which balances it out, so I personally wouldn’t mind it being a left-click reset.

Mod Ash

If the things got a reset visible to you, I mean even as a right-click option, doesn’t that tell you full well what check will do if you were to click that, as in it’s the state where you need to reset it mate.

Mod Bruno

I think check only opens the box, whereas reset slowly queues you up to check the box and then plant another one down, so you should still be able to three tick even if it is left-click reset.

Can we please get a system to safely transfer names without having to resort to going to the black market? This sort of system has been going on for way too long, and so many people are getting names sniped. The name selling market is probably one of the shadiest markets there is; please put a stop to it.

We had that looked into last year already actually because the team’s already very supportive of this one. Unfortunately, the engine and back-end system work required to make it work is quite large. It’s totally worth it in most people’s opinions as far as I’ve heard, but not something we’ve been able to undertake yet. There is quite a queue for those teams of other things that are very important to players, so I think we all want this, but we can’t have it yet, sorry.

Clue boxes have been one of my favourite QoL in the Shattered Relics league. I love taking a break from slayer to do clues between tasks rather than during them. Would it be possible to poll them again for the main game? My only concern would be letting people stack clues from impling jars, but I think that would be a simple compromise to bring clue boxes to the main game. My only concern would be letting people stack clues from implement jars, but I think that would be a simple compromise to bring clue boxes to the main game.

So I had some discussions with players about this one because it got reasonable support last time even though it didn’t quite pass, so maybe asking the question again, we’ll get a different answer.

Here is the reason that people brought up for not wanting it. At the moment you go on a trip, you get a clue, that’s your clue, and unless you end your trip there and then go do that clue, any further kills on that trip won’t give you a clue because you’ve already got one. Now we change it so that things can be stackable via clue boxes or whatever, and somebody could pick up their clue and then continue the trip with more chances of getting more clues. Even if we cap it very low, like five or even three, they’re still potentially gonna come back from that trip with more clues than they would have before. Now that is, of course, what they’re quite keen on, I suspect. Still, some of the players said they don’t want this change because if it becomes easier to gather the things without interrupting your training, you probably will get more of the things; therefore, you’ll do more of the things and bring the rewards into the game more, and to the players who were voting against this last time that’s just undesirable. It was undesirable then, and it remained undesirable.

I think if we were to re-poll this, we would run into a perfectly legitimate objection that is just still there. So while I don’t have a problem in principle with asking again whether people changed their minds having seen another league that does it differently and got their hopes up, we do have strong reasons to think that people may not have changed their minds.

Has there been any more thought given to increasing the Grand Exchange tax value and whether additional items will be added to the list?

Now there’s a lot more stuff we’d like to be able to sink from it; unfortunately, it only sinks X much cash at the moment, and the more items we take out, the more that cash is being brought back in again by buying those items off you.

So since we’d like it to keep working as a gold sink as well as an item sink, that limits how many items we’re going to get to sink from it. We don’t have any objection in principle; we would just have to raise the tax a very long way up to afford all that stuff and that’s something that we’d be cautious about doing. Players have been very understanding about having tax in the game, but it was a big deal to some, understandable really. If you’re not really interested in the game’s economy, from your point of view you’re getting less money, so we are very grateful to all the players who’ve understood why we thought this was necessary at all and we hope that the effect on item prices being more stable has been of some help for the items we have been sinking.

So in terms of raising it, there’s a lot of basic training materials I prefer not to tax further, but cosmetic things, luxury items, if we were to increase, maybe those would be more appropriate targets. The system can be flexible; at the moment, it’s one percent for everything, but it would be able to handle 0.9 for really basic stuff, 1.2 for a different category of things, 1.9 for luxury goods, whatever the heck one of those would be. Probably something trimmed. It’s flexible enough to be able to handle that if you guys are cool with it and if it seems like a good way to go. For the moment, we’re just playing cautious with how much more we soak from you because a lot of you may not like it.

Mod Sarnie

I imagine especially if we changed the clue boxes from the last question, it would definitely be on our minds to add them to the list.

Are there plans to change some of the KC requirement combat tasks? Please don’t lock CAs behind time sinks and instead focus on more skill-testing challenges. If I can kill a boss 100 times, I can kill it 250 times.

This is something we’ve discussed within the team, and we do kind of agree that maybe for some of the tasks, we went pretty overboard. For example, 250 Theatre of Bloods.

We discussed lowering it so that if you complete all the tasks, you should reasonably complete the kill count tasks by the time you’ve done that as well, so instead of completing all the tasks in less than 100 and then having to grind out another 150 raids for that task then you are just able to have it done by then which seems fair. I do agree if you’ve done Theatre of Blood 100 times, there’s probably not that much more you can learn in the next 150 that would make you better at the game, so yeah.

Can we get an Elemental Workshop 3 quest in the future with new rewards? Currently, if you look at elemental/mind armour, it is kind of weak compared to the effort needed to make it; it would be nice if they get an update.

Considering we’ve hired Mod Dylan back into the team who wrote Elemental Workshops One, Two, and Three for RS3, I think persuading him to write another one for Old School with whatever differences it may or may not have from RS3’s version but he might jump on it.

Mod Kirby

Give him a bottle of gin, and I think you will have it in QA by next Tuesday.

Mod Ash

We’ll give him a bottle of gin, he’ll take the bottle of gin, I think it will be a fun project for him. I also know that at least one other person in the team has given some thought to what Elemental Workshop Three could be so it doesn’t have to be him, but given what a great job he did on the first two, it really is very tempting.

Mod Bruno

Yeah, I mean, there’s a goblin defending the mind section of the dungeon, then I’d be down for that.

Mod Ash

Is this the mind goblin joke?

Mod Bruno

It would be the mind goblin, yeah.

Mod Sarnie

Honestly, I was waiting for someone to make that reference.

Mod Ash

Given that the mind altar is basically around the corner from the goblin village…

Mod Sarnie

Technically we might already have plenty of mind goblins, so you know.

Will we ever get a solo only version of Nex, similar to Phosani Nightmare?

Y’all like hard modes? Alright, unironically I do love Phosani’s Nightmare. Convincing Arcane to do it again might not be too hard, but finding the time to do it and do it justice is gonna be the harder part.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah yeah, especially what he’s currently working on, I think he’s probably got quite enough on his plate at the moment to try and slot in a solo Nex version.

Can you change Puro-Puro dragon implings spawn time to random? Wiki says it’s random, but it’s not, and some farmers/bots use timers to be on that world when they spawn. They don’t know the corner where the impling will spawn, but they know the time. If someone is lucky to get it before them, they just reset the timer.

I’d guess that was what the wiki was told about it being random related to the corner then. Apologies if we misinformed the wiki people, making it more random sounds like a great idea under the circumstances.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, I’m actually gonna have a look at the wiki in a second to see if that’s true.

Can the Slayer Cape be purchased from an additional slayer master instead of just Duradel? If you wonder why it is because I have a max combat 99 slayer ironman, and I want to buy a slayer cape but can’t do Shilo Village. Besides Herblore, it is the only 99 cape locked behind a quest since you need to do a quest before unlocking the skill.

In my opinion, no, I don’t think we should be adding ways to get different items just because two or three people with a really random snowflake ironman or snowflake account can’t access those things. Maybe don’t make those sorts of accounts.

I also like that there is only one skill master per skill, and it’d be kind of weird if there are random skill masters about in-game. Also, who would we make the second Slayer skill master? Kind of just adds questions that we don’t really need to answer.

Mod Kirby

If you want the rewards, do the content.

Mod Ash

For what it’s worth, if we did have to put that cape on someone else I’d vote for Eve, the guardian of the blue dragons Asgarnian Area, on the grounds that she looks cold.

Can we get some more things for the PoH? Simple stuff like a Square Mahogany Dining Table, Kitchen Table, Mahogany Larders, and maybe a Butter Churn for the kitchen? (Also, Redwood furniture).

I would be very glad to see a series of redwood furniture just for the prestige of having built it. I don’t think it’s going to make a huge difference to the use for redwood across the game, but if you had to be pretty high level to build the stuff, then it would be a nice flex if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

As for the butter churn, seems rare to run into people who want a lot of butter churning, but I mean, let’s face it, if we devalue butter churning across the game, I suspect the world will forgive us. The other stuff does indeed seem simple, I assume that’s aiming for more training methods that are hoping to affect the XP rates, and that’s not something we’d be quite so easy about offering. But maybe a butter churn.

Mod Sarnie

Might be good for the butter churn only ironman. He’s going for 99 cooking just using the butter churn.

Mod Ash

Next thing they’ll be wanting to bring in a dairy cow. Which we could allow.

Mod Sarnie

I mean, I’d actually be more up for bringing the dairy cow to the PoH than the butter churn.

Mod Kirby

Hi, I’m Mod Kirby, and I don’t support animal cruelty.

Mod Sarnie

Yeah, that’s one market we don’t wanna mess with, so maybe not for the meantime, I don’t wanna get taxed on my cheese, thank you very much.

Can we buff Demonbane spells? Here are some thoughts:

– Reduce the magic defence of demon bosses

– Add a way to save runes (perhaps with the drawback of reduced XP)

-Make Mark of Darkness cast on yourself and last 7x as long (like the charge -spell)

-Make Kodai wand cast one tick faster with them

We’d be able to make the spells unusually accurate against demons without having to change the magic defence for the demon bosses if we didn’t want to risk undesired consequences while still achieving what players are looking for.

Mod Kirby

This entire livestream is just an advert for the OSRS wiki because it’s good. Okay, it’s level 82 for the max one. Well yeah, it could do with some minor buffs, maybe. It’s one of those things we take it to the team and run some numbers and go through several different ideas of what we could do with it.

Mod Ash

We’ve got fairly good code support for things to save runes for what it’s worth so that one could be a relatively quick win if agreed.