Classically, the development focus of Old School RuneScape has been steered by polls, and those poll results have always been visible. That will be changing come Friday, April 12th, when the devs will try hiding upcoming poll results until polling concludes, at which point the results will be shown.
According to the dev blog that announced the move, hiding poll results is being done in the interest of seeing how it actually affects the polling process instead of operating on educated assumptions:
“To put it candidly: we don’t know what will happen when poll results are hidden. We’ve tried to adopt a scientific approach to testing and predicting the impact, but ultimately we have concluded that the only way we can test this is by actually hiding poll results in the live game.”
The move to hide poll results is part of a wider initiative to improve the polling process overall. The devs admit that there are a number of inherent problems with using poll results as a means to drive development, chief among them being that a small number of active players are actively voting, which leads to a small portion of the playerbase defining content for the vast majority of players.
In addition to the polling changes, this week in OSRS will see the expansion of Treasure Trails and the start of in-game Easter. All of those details can be read here.
