RuneScape’s Thomas “Mod Balance” Sweeney has a post on the official forums today showing how apologies ought to go. This one’s in regard to the ongoing community discussion about the poor quality of microtransactions in the game.
“Our lack of response has made us seem distant and uncollaborative, making frustrations worse, and for that we are truly sorry. We’d like to reassure you that the time has been spent deciding on the right changes,” Sweeney writes on behalf of the community team, thanking players for even their complaints. “You’ve seen content quality and quantity start to slide, seen MTX promotions march on regardless and Jagex going quiet on the matter. You’re worried that this will just get worse and are concerned for what it means in the long term. We hear you, and we shouldn’t have let it get to this point.”
In a nutshell, Jagex says that “MTX is a major part of the game’s income” and funding for development, but it accepts that this year’s releases weren’t consistently strong, that it demonstrated weak ambition at RuneFest, and that it shifted too many resources to mobile development in prep for the mobile client.
Consequently, the studio has vowed a remade roadmap, upcoming community survey, regular updates and communication, a content rating system, new dev team members, and the treasure hunter rework. Jagex also says the “prize pool promo” that caused such an uproar last month “won’t ever be seen again” as it doesn’t “intend to revisit similar mechanics any time soon,” although it will be “experimenting” with other types of promotions.
“Our overall goal is to deliver you frequent, high-quality content updates, bring the game onto more platforms, and tune MTX to be less abrasive. We think this is the right approach to ensure RuneScape remains healthy. And overall the game is still robust: In the last year membership has remained stable; RuneFest 2017 was the biggest and most popular yet; and our marketing efforts are ramping up to bring in new players. With strong content and mobile coming next year, 2018 is shaping up to be a great year for RuneScape!”
The first comment under the apology is a troll, so hey, video games.
