All week, we’ve been covering the chaos brewing over in the RuneScape community as players have put up a strong protest against Jagex’s new seasonal battlepass, which vocal players believe is a monetization bridge too far in a game that already has multiple tiers of subs, a cash shop, lockboxes, tokens, and a fee hike just last year. To top it off, some players have argued the battlepass itself poses pay-to-win problems for the game.
Earlier this week, a Jagex rep told players it’s listening to the feedback – that is, all feedback other than requests to remove the battlepass, which the company boldly declared it would ignore – and in contrast to Wednesday’s reply from the devs, today’s the missive appears to be a genuine mea culpa from the company, at least on the P2W issue.
“We messed up. The launch of Hero Pass alienated and frustrated many in the community. You’ve told us, amongst other things, that it was too pay-to-win and you’d lost important aspects of Daily Challenges. We made a significant misjudgement and we are sorry. We need to reflect on that and learn from it. That also means we need to take more time to listen and work with the community. How and why that happened is for another time, what’s most important right now is what we’re doing about it. We need a do-over. So, we will urgently patch the game to back-out the controversial features you’ve told us are your main pain-points. This then will give us the time to digest your feedback in detail and engage in a community consultation to drive a thorough re-design and re-development of Hero Pass.”
The studio has listed a range of planned changes to the hero pass, most notably a complete removal of all pay-to-win elements; players won’t be able to buy emblems or hero pass levels, content buffs will go away, XP buffs will move to the free pass, and the premier pass rewards will be limited purely to cosmetics and consumables. Jagex also promises to return daily challenges as they were and rebalance hero pass rewards, with a first “assessment” next week. The company characterizes these as “interim fixes […] to tackle the most immediate pain-points” until the team has time for long-term solutions and a “re-think of the design.”
Finally, Jagex addressed those players asking for the removal of the pass.
“The first reason is speed; the quickest solution is to patch-out specific problematic mechanics rather than remove a whole interlinked game system. The second reason is to minimize disruption to players; we have hundreds of thousands of players who have been completing hero pass missions, earning rewards and using the new cosmetics. Deleting progress and rewards for those players creates a different set of problems and would not be equitable for those players. The third reason is optimism; we believe we can deal with the problems players have, and a revamped ‘Yak Track’-type feature could ultimately be a positive addition to the game – but with a redesign that the community can support.”
As we noted yesterday, Jagex’s parent company is reportedly exploring a sale of the company, seeking an eyepopping (and perhaps unsupported) billion pounds in what would be the studio’s fourth sale in eight years.
An Update on Hero Pass from Mod Keeper and the RuneScape Leadership Team: https://t.co/vomGjJ0G9d
The following changes will be made to Hero Pass (among others):
• Removal of content buffs entirely
• XP Buffs only earnable via gameplay for all players
• Daily Challenges to…— RuneScape (@RuneScape) September 8, 2023
