A bit of backstory here: In September of this year, a Parliamentary report on addictive technologies like gaming monetization pointed to the case of one RuneScape player who allegedly dropped $62k on the game, which caused Jagex to begin considering how to monitor RuneScape’s monetization. That conversation continues in the latest Q&A video, which explains some new initiatives that are being put in to place in order to monitor player spending.
Jagex will be trying out a few things in the coming months as part of its “duty of care” for its playerbase, such as messages alerting players when they’ve played for extended periods of time and setting up an automated system that tracks heightened player spending which will in turn allow Jagex to reach out to people and ensure they’re comfortable. Jagex is also continuing to monitor the chat environment and will make continued adjustments to things like almost completely removing lootbox RNG in lieu of letting players select a certain number of rewards. Eventually, all blind chance from Treasure Hunter rewards will be removed by the first quarter. The entire discussion is in the video below or in this TL;DW summary.
In somewhat less heavy news, RuneScape is looking forward to the rest of December with the introduction of smoother character movement, freebies waiting in the ongoing Advent Calendar, and the return of the Christmas Cracker event and some seasonal activities involving finding lost presents, both of which are slated to arrive on Monday, December 16th.
That’s not the only news coming out of Jagex. Old School RuneScape also has a few things to show off in the form of the Nightmare poll results, which readers will recall involved collecting player feedback during the Nightmare of Ashihama beta test. In short, the post explains that the Siren’s tome reward, which would have become the best-in-slot magical offhand item, will not be added to OSRS. You can read the rationale in the dev blog.
