in retrospect Squeal of Fortune indicated how intact Jagex's creative vision was back then. theming your MTX around a sleazy goblin bilking you at a rigged carnival game is spot on, and presumably there weren't any suits warning them how unappealing that'd be from a marketing perspective. then it got replaced by treasure chests+hot girl. wonder why.
I've not seen that girl for years. Its still rubbish dont get me wrong, but the girl has not been on the TH screen for years now at this point. Its always some TH event though, so idk what the 'normal' TH screen looks like these days.
@@blondbraid7986 Nobody implied it sounds more professional - but it sounds more effective, and that's what matters to the investors. You think they give a fuck about integrity or legitimacy? Nah, what gets them more money, more quickly - that's the important factor.
Step 1: Sell battle pass. Step 2: Make battle pass nearly impossible to complete. Step 3: Make players spend additional money so they can get what they already paid for. Sad to see RS3 is going down like this, not that I play it but I'm sure plenty of people used to enjoy it.
@MrDjBigZOW2 BP Is extremely easy to complete. I play casually a few hours a week and im already half of it (i didn't purchased it,and i have no intention to) What you are thinking is the Dota2 battlepass,thats was impossible to complete without throwing money
The battlepass isn't nearly impossie to complete though... I can do my dailies in 30 minutes, and after that I get extra points Also just to the other missions, complete a quest, chop some wood, you have 3 months, it's easy
This wasn't an oopsie. This was a few business meetings. They know there are people so committed to RuneScape that they will buy these passes, and max them out on the first day. Callum goes over the history of MTX implementation. A nice timeline of the metrics being gathered, and the conditioning of their players for more to come. They have been pushing and pushing ridiculous MTX models, facing outcry and yet, making money. Making further questionable MTX decisions, met with further outcry and yet. . . . making money. This isn't them spiraling down the drain. This is just their end game. Every single one of you RuneScape players that are upset about this, were barely even factored into this decision. Free to play games live off the backs of around 10% of the players. Whaling is good business.
Yup absolutely. The CEO was brought before the house of commons when they were investigating loot boxes and such stuff. He blatently told them that a very small number of whales spending vast (to any normal person) amounts of money keep the company going. The 'normal' players really represent a loss=making part of the business, a crowd of people for the 'whales' to impress.
@@mostmelon8243 whales don’t have unending amount of money, and if there isn’t non-whales, game loses every addictive aspect, so they go somewhere else.
Remember when the worst monetization you would expect from an MMO as a sub and/or an expansion every so often and that was it? I really miss those days.
@@kinryuten While I love FFXIV, they have an ingame cash shop and other MTs on top of a monthly sub as well, so they are part of the problem too, even if they aren't the biggest part.
Guild Wars 2 is my main MMO now. Just buy an expansion once in awhile and gtg. No worries about having to keep up with gear it has a horizontal progression system, play at your own pace with no FOMO. They just did add a battle pass type system but it is actually not too bad. You just gain points which you cannot purchase with money by doing daily or weekly quests and then buy cosmetics or trade goods,laurels, so just free stuff based on how much you play. I have played Runescape since it first came out but i only play it as an afk clicker essentially now. So much time invested it sucks having to drop it but i dropped Warcraft as well after Legion and I was an OG Vanilla WoW veteran. I miss my spectral tiger, poor guy just gathering dust now lol.
Editing tip for an already great video. If you introduce a couch in act 1, please bring it back for act 3. Bookending helps ground the visual narrative. Have the couch be your cut-to after your last use of b-roll for your conclusion. Or you do whatever, I'm not your producer!
The one thing about this is that the runescape community was able to bully them into removing the problem. The ability to buy skips was removed yesterday. As for what caused this, there is news the owners of jagex selling off jagex.
Carlyle Group is looking to sell it yes probably because they know it is starting to die, get it gone before they don't make anything off it. They bought it for 530 mill and are asking 1 bill now so they just sat in the grand exchange waiting to double their money.
@@aetherfox4404I hope they get nothing. We should all personally email the companies interested in buying jagex and let them know all of this quarter's revenue is completely cooked to make it look like a billion dollar company.
I jumped ship after being a long time player when their Fresh Start servers were expecting you to pay for a second subscription. Amazing that they found a way to sink to new lows.
Forget getting them to pay for membership, convincing them to cover the cost of dial up just to play the free areas while taking turns with your brothers because one PC.
I kinda wish I'd spent more time outside playing with other kids instead of friggin Runescape which felt like a literal desk job, except more repetitive. Mining the same friggin rock for hours (I didn't use macros, I was hardcore...). Glad I tapped out of it 15+ years ago though. No more online games for me since then. Ever.
Lol you didn't call in the phone memship? Phone from school and charge the schools phone bill? I thaught everyone did that lmfao, we all used to in my school
When you mentioned the way they did their battlepass, I was surprised that you thought it was new. This is exactly how the War Thunder battlepass has been for years. You have daily quests, they expire within 24 hours and you have to restart them, most are locked to higher tier vehicles, and they would take hours of gameplay every day in order to complete. And even then, your chances of finishing the battlepass are near zero, so you need to buy the 50 tier skip upgrade to help you along.
Yeah, I've played multiple games with daily or weekly quests for BP points (WT included), it was weird for me to see someone surprised by it And it seems like they always offer buyable tier skips to tell you "hey, we know we made this game feel like even more of a chore, why not pay us to make it easier?"
It's a real shame, because the very first battle pass they did was actually fair, the missions were much easier and could be completed in lower level vehicles. After the first one though, the devs (probably after seeing the vehicle prizes sell for a pittance on the market because of how easy it was to complete) ruined everything for following battle passes. Missions were restricted to higher level vehicles, they were made much harder and only 2 of the 4 vehicles rewarded being tradeable, meaning that people who completed the battle pass but didn't want those vehicles couldn't exchange them for something they actually wanted and people who wanted the vehicles needed to buy the battle pass or else. To add insult to injury, they later cut down the number of vehicle rewards in the pass from 4 to 3.
Conan Exiles has something akin to it except you can stack up to 10 and you get bonus exp for the missions or challenges you do so long as you have that bonus. You can also reroll 3 times a day if you don't like the missions you got.
Casual reminder that corporations are never your friend and that the best way to compete under a free market is abusing your customers as much as you can get away with before they stop buying your product/service.
That's missing the point. Every company has to make money, there are just more abusive/manipulative and companies that are fairer. If what you were saying were correct, every company would be the same. Exept that isn't the case. Plus you can't stop interacting with cooperations, the only control the customer has is picking the cooperation they want to engange in. "Cooperation bad" isn't helpful. To be more precise it also can change on product basis. Jagex publishes both OSRS (which is seen as very fair by most people) and RS3 (which is seen as a micotransaction hell).
@@renzuki5830 They are systemically designed to make money for their shareholders. They never care about the customer because they just buy a share and expect it to go up. Don't be naive. You can dress it up as something else or accept them as the only option but denying their very real problems will do you no good.
There are worse and better corporations. But there is no truly ethical way to consume products under our current system. All corporations (except worker cooperatives) operate off a small number of bosses/investors who unilaterally make decisions as an elite and profit unfairly off those actually doing most of the work. CEO salaries are ridiculously overinflated and don't remotely reflect the actual labor they're putting into the product. And our choices AREN'T just confined to which company we give our money to. We can support people trying to unionize their workplaces--demanding better hours, more pay, less crunch time, better conditions and less scummy business strategies. We can demand our nation's governments step in to regulate gambling in games, curtail predatory monetization, and demand real ownership rights for video games. All corporations are bad. We can differentiate between how bad they are. We should focus on upending the whole rotten structure.
What they did to Runescape destroyed what it was irreversably, which is why still today OSRS is the most popular version by a significant margin - and it nearly didn't happen at all! It's sad, because it was great until the company went public. A trend you should note is pretty much universal across the gaming industry, if not every other industry!
@@randompersonontheinternet8790 the golden age for osrs ended years ago I think personally. It may not be popular for some to hear but I think the way they handled pride last year says alot about how corporate the decisions are becoming within that team. Anyone who reads all their news posts can tell no developer wrote those posts, least not whoever usually writes them. Another telling sign is how the team has grown substantially. The more resources they put in, the more they will want out of it.
@@randompersonontheinternet8790the company was sold multiple times since OSRS launched and we still don't have MTX in OSRS, beside bonds, but that was the deal the community made to have OSRS F2P. They'll probably increase the price for membership and bonds.
The sad thing is that as RS3 got less and less popular, Jagex spent more of the their time milking the remaining playerbase, rather than trying to grow the game.
The problem with something like this is that while 90% of the player base will be overwhelmingly against something like this, 10% will engage with it, and make the company enough money that they'd be willing to let the cheaper players leave because it'll still be more profitable than not implementing it. It was funny to hear bonds explained and see how a year or so after they were implemented, WoW released the WoW token. Here I thought they were pioneers on screwing their player base, but they were just following the Jagex model all along.
It's pretty much the way of all these MMOs that are gradually dying out. Cater specifically to the few whales who are desperate to stay on top, and try to keep them from noticing that the playerbase is slowly dwindling to zero.
@@NorthStarBlue1 The whales aren’t desperate, they can spend hundreds per day and it is pocket change to them. That’s how dire the situation for the rest of us is. This business model will never not work.
The problem, in the long run, is that whales just have fun in games when there are people they can whale over. So whales need casuals to have fun. But for the casuals the whales kill the fun in games... Wich leads to two options for them: either also start paying up or quiting the game. Most will just quit. So in the long run whales kill games. Short time such practices make a lot of money. But long time it's just not healthy
Bonds are great but I wish they could only be used for membership. The price of bonds is insane for any normal player to upkeep. When I started playing rs3 again after many years away I could sustain 7m per week. Now it's like 50m+ every week lol.
I think the skill specific experience boosting equipment is a good way to see the difference in how they treat the players of both games. In both OSRS and RS3 they have clothes that provide around 2.5% experience boost to some skills and in OSRS these are usually obtained via doing the skill, like the fishing set is a reward from a fishing minigame with no way to RMT skip it, but in RS3 the shark set was in the Treasure Hunter MXT thing which had nothing to do with fishing which makes it no longer a reward and just "give us more money". OSRS doesn't respect players time, but RS3 is outright hostile.
"nowadays"? Honey unless you missed it...they're doing it more and more. And the reason is called money, and they keep making bad decisions over you because YOU allow it. You the humans are sheep that will put up with any bs they throw at you - same goes for politics.
The loyalty system was the precursor of MTX. It was added to discourage voting with your wallet. It punished players for cancelling membership when they were displeased. It was masked as rewarding loyal players when it was designed to make people not cancel in fear of getting their reward multiplier reset.
This sort of stuff is why I was worried when WoW interduced the Trading Post. My girlfriend kept optimistic, saying I was paranoid. I kept saying I worried it's a slipperly slope. Then came "Buy cosmetic packs for real money and get Trading Post coins as a bonus!", now letting you pay real money to increase your TP coins a bit... Already slipping down a bit on that slope... I pray that I am wrong about this, but looking at other MMO's like Runescape or SWTOR, I can safely say I have no real hope.
I unsubbed and turned away from runescape completely. I even dropped osrs because i just don't want jamflex to get the engagement of my login, Its very clear they're cashing in. All they had to do was add in cosmetics. They didn't need to add any power behind the pass and that was just too difficult to do. Its like they wanted to cash in on the good will they got from necromancy to now upcharge everyone playing.
Makes me glad the last time I played RS was JUUUST after Membership was a thing. Like...Im from the 2D sprite era of the game (I left shortly after it became what is now known as OSRS) and it hurts to see my childhood be so utterly destroyed by greed...
As a RuneScape 3 player, when I saw the announcement it made me physically ill. I've invested well over 10k hours into just one of my accounts and seeing the game I've loved be treated like this was nothing less than heartbreaking.
If a game can make you physically ill then it sounds like you have much bigger mental health problems. I suggest fixing that before returning to the game
Being invested in something isn't mental illness, it's human nature. Feeling ill when something bad happens to something you care about is about as healthy of a reaction as I've ever heard of.@@jamesd5767
The killer word is "investing". I know it's hard, I was addicted to it as well for years. Runescape could all be switched off at a touch of a button and all your "investment" gone. May I humbly suggest investing in real life instead - invest in your own health and wellbeing, invest in spending time with your family and friends (they won't be around forever!). If you don't have any friends go out and make some, join some clubs. If you're shy around people, don't worry lots of people are. Forget the 10k hours spent on Runescape, I want you to spend 10k hours learning a language, or an instrument or some other kind of skill that will be useful in your life. That is a real good investment. Wish someone had told ME what I'm telling you right now!
Too bad. I don’t play MMO’s anymore but if I was going to play one it would have been RuneScape. It’s a damn shame. (Currently playing Starfield and it is so over hyped- it’s dull, and furthermore Bethesda still can’t make a vehicle for traversing an area that you’d otherwise have to walk). Hope you’re well, Cal!
I think you forgot that one time they completely changed the way the summoning skill worked when they introduced summoning gems. They backpedaled on that pretty quick, but it goes to show how MTX content was taking precedent over actual game content. Even though daily challenges were a part of the MTX pipeline and used for daily spins/keys, it was used by players to get a healthy chunk of xp and reduce the grind. While I don't think daily challenges were good for the game, players were accustomed to it, enjoyed it. Replacing the daily challenges with something more time-sensitive and less generous was Jagex's fatal misstep in this cashgrab. RS3 players are numb to the rampant MTX in the game, but take away one of the things they enjoy and they'll remember how much they dislike MTX real quick.
This is pretty spot on with the exception of: 1. Bonds are generally seen as a good thing. They don't add gold to the game and allow people that play the game on a semi consistent basis to play for free. 2. When I quit, rune metrics didn't track DPS and clans would use DPS crystals (purchasable only from the solomon store, but could be sold on the in game market) to see DPS at bosses
I've been playing since the first year of rs, on the same account, had a few alts etc, infact current one was a pure. Had membership on this account since a few months after it came out with membership, mum paid for it back then ofc. But after this bs I'm done, I quit, I lost my hcim due to the lockout bug, lost trillions over the years due to their bs security, then the lost item bug recently lost hundreds of billions. Now they want to scam us for money.
My favourite is "mental health week" which is basically just a "hey lets release a shitty event and let players p2w to skip it so we make more profit while pretending to care about mental health...
I played RS since last days of classic. RS2 awesome. Sadly, RS3 died to me when new combat system was introduced. Made a break. Went back to OSRS in 2013 - best decision of my life. RIP RS3 since 2012 for me.
I play RS3 more casually, like I was getting my dailies done at least, citadel capping and keeping up with DXP and Yak Track, and those alone proved exhausting. Hero Pass might be the thing that pushes me to re-quitting.
"The most tonedeaf decision" had me laughing more than I care to admit 😁 what a great phrase No idea who you are as the algorithm just recommended me this, but this was brilliant
It's not only happening in runescape. Remember when mobile games started to grow? In the beginnings, you could just purchase a game and that was it. Nowadays, they're all more or less like diablo immoral. Now the same is happening to the MMOs. It's getting more and more difficult to find one that values your time and rewards you for just playing properly instead of paying heftily.
I do at some point want to go back to RS3 (soooooo much freaking content) but it's INSANE that they tier'ed out more Premium/Platinum positions that are ultimately just paying on top of already paying. You already get special treatment for paying by the YEAR.
Aren't there RS3 private servers? Because I sure as hell would prefer playing on them rather than sink my feet into this money draining swamp Jagex has created...
@@ClawthorneMate I left RS3 during the "squeal of fortune" days because the writing seemed on the wall. RS3 private servers is a NEW concept ive never heard of, I'm not sure Jagex would like that in any fashion.
@@dylanherron3963 Yeah they definitely wouldn't like it, but if ActiBlizz with all their money and power cannot take down private servers, neither can Jagex. And losing players and money to that is precisely what they deserve for pulling this kind of egregious crap.
another detail u missed out was that when the Hero Pass released Jagex removed all daily challenges, so you could not just "ignore the update" because it fucked all previous metas. As of now, they re-added the daily challenges, but funnily enough, the Hero Pass point was to reduce the amount of dailies, so now we have essentially 2x more dailies. EDIT: The daily challenges are to be added on the following weeks and are not on the live game.
They've added the daily challenges back? I hadn't noticed, will have to log in and have a look after the video. Back, nope daily challenges aren't there. Do you mean daily missions in hero pass?
@@pelinoregeryon6593 mb, they are to be re-added on the following weeks. It's on their newspost: "We are working on this [The Daily Challenge system] urgently and may take a couple of weeks to go live."
Yup same thing happened to wow classic. They said they would keep it like classic was, then they brought in the dark portal pass for tbc. They said that wow wotlk would be true to classic, then they brought in the wow token to wow classic
The only surety is that if they bring anything resembling MTX beyond Bonds to OSRS, it would be the equivalent of commiting suicide. It is so easy to create a private server of OSRS that I expect the majority of players to immediately change to private servers just like how it was after EOC.
This just reminds me of how absolutely predatory the MMO genre has become. They’re basically setting up infinite treadmills extract as much as possible from people who are stuck in it. I love what MMOs could be, like in EverQuest or Vanilla WoW, but so many are poison now.
My only experience with Runescape is not RS3 or OSRS, but a simple idle game called Melvor that uses runescape's mechanics to lay out the progression. I paid less than $15 for the game and its two expansions and have been enjoying it knowing full well this game goes at my pace and I don't have to worry about getting nickeled and dimed
Hate to break it to players, but there is no-one at that boardroom table who sees Runescape as a game or even as an entertainment product. There's no-one there who plays the game, most have probably never touched an MMO in their life... and when the people running your company don't use or have any experience with your product, they only view it as a profit & loss spreadsheet. "Customer experience" are nice words to include in their annual shareholder reports, but I guarantee they neither understand _nor care_ what the player experience is. And unfortunately, once a company makes decisions as egregious & blatant as this (like expecting players to not only waste their precious spare time _each day_ on arbitrary tasks, but to _pay_ for the privilege), then they're a lost cause... _entertainment should not be a chore._ Best to walk away with your good memories and leave Jagex with the whales, bot farms & scammers they are making their devs build the game to milk for every last cent.
That makes sense. Micropayments in games wouldn't become common until...pretty much, 2013 with Mass Effect 3 and Dead Space 3. I didn't realize the RS3 micropayments started off so early. Huh.
Very unfortunate. Knowing how Runescape got its start to what its turned into.. is just unfortunate tbh. I loved runescape, hell im a 15 year vet at this point cape nd all. but i simply grew out of the game at one point. Shame to see it fall so terribly low. It was one of the greatest mmo's. Name one person who hasnt played Runescape at one point or the other like. The game is actually legendary.
Runescape lost me when they closed Runescape Classic (shout out Open RSC for existing, thank goodness) -- but Jagex have long been totally asleep at the wheel. I haven't played RS3/OSRS seriously in years and never would again, specifically because of how Jagex manages their game and treats the player base.
Yes. also if I understood correctly you need to complete a daily quest every day to get it or you can use a credit card to skip that step. It's like making Dragonslayer a reputation reward, resetting that reputation every few months and selling reputation boosts for money. It's amazing how evil it is.
If you turned RS3 on right now you wouldn't recognise the game at all. And the game is caked in various different mtx and events... whenever I tried to play it was extremely overwhelming. I wouldn't recommend bothering, unless you decided to do it ironman.
Not to mention they directly lied to us by saying they wouldnt make any pvm buffs or other direct gameplay buffs p2w. I think that when they sell the company, the next owners are going to full send all that bs and actually kill the game. Well all be waiting to see... i sense some dark days ahead.
I've seen the same shit happen in other games. For example World of Warships. It's a full-on cynical exploitation of whales and their tendency to obsess over games they've sunk time and money into. Boiling the proverbial frog, as it were.
So I'm listening to this while crafting a bunch of stuff in FFXIV. And the horrible thought of locking quick synthesis (basically automatically crafting up to 99 items in a row) behind a paywall shook me.
I am a NEW player to Runescape 3.... like 3 days ago new. Playing for free btw and never, ever played before. I am bombarded daily for buying keys for chests, Hero path stuff and general store merchandise and its goes on and on, and I am still just on the tutorial island learning the basics and all of this is SO completely overwhelming. I don't think I am going to keep playing, even for free.
So the enshittification of RuneScape, eh? Yeah it's been going on ever since the start of the Squeal of Fortune. I quit as a dual mod in 2012 because I didn't believe the company was really listening, and it's no real surprise that they're up to their old antics. I came back for a bit after Priffnidas was released but not long after Menaphos was released I gave up. I couldn't keep up and the Linux support I had worked to get moving didn't really seem that great. Anyway, to explain enshittification, paraphrased from Cory Doctorow: - First you're good to your customers - Then you abuse your customers to get value for your investors - Then you abuse your investors to get value for yourselves - Then you die. So it's no surprise that we're in the third step here. OSRS may be keeping the fans pleased but it's obvious who the cash cow is. What's just as obvious is that the cow is running dry.
I'm a current rs3 player and I 100% agree with this. From my point of view, mtx is just the way of the world for large and live games but this was just a truly malicious showing. And it really bugged me cause the cosmetic rewards on it are really nice imo and took creative talent to make, only to be marred by insanely slow progression and paywalls that literally costed twice or more in bonds than the price of the highest tier of membership. Not to mention "discounted" prices if you played on mobile. Thankfully enough people took action against jagex to get them to back off (we'll see what they actually end up doing), but it does set a foreboding precedent and I can't help but wonder how long before they try again.
It's seeming like the only MMO that isn't getting predatory with MTX is Final Fantasy XIV. Sure, it has the monthly sub you are *_required_* to pay for to play it, but that and the current expansion (as buying the current expansion comes with all past ones at no increased fee) are the only real things you need to pay for, as there is absolutely no pay-to-win MTX in it. The cash shop has stayed untouched since the early days of Stormblood (2nd expansion, we're now on the 4th, soon to be the 5th) in terms of what is sold there, which is cosmetics, mounts, level skips and story skips (you can never skip the current expansion, you always have to do the current one), with the playerbase agreeing that the latter two are intended for people who use alts, as the game is not alt friendly. Even then, a vast majority of FFXIV's good cosmetics and mounts can be acquired via natural play and not locked behind super-hard high end content. Not to mention the closest thing FFXIV has to a "battle pass" is the "Series Malmstones" for PvP, as it functions like the typical battle pass with one massive difference, it is *_100% free_* to everyone, even free trial players. I never understood the point of most MMOs putting stat and EXP boosts behind paywalls. To be fair, what Runescape has done is not the worst I've seen, that would go to DC Universe Online, it masquerades as a "free-to-play" game, but it truly isn't, free players get a very bare-bones experience. You will find that even some of the most basic features that most MMOs have as standard are locked behind paywalls that a player can unlock with either one-time payments (the more expensive way, but avoids content you don't want) or by paying their premium subscription fee. Sad to see these kinds of practices becoming so widespread in the MMO space, but people have whales to blame for it, if as many people who are against these kind of predatory MTX voted with their wallets as the whales who vote with their wallets *_for_* this kind of content, it might start to become at least less prevalent. To Jagex's credit though, they seem to have walked back a lot of the pay-to-win aspects of this Hero Pass, so it's at least a step in the right direction, so it shows they at least listen to players. Hopefully they don't try sneak them back in, although looking at what they've done in the past, it is a possibility, but not a certainty.
Chinese company invests in game......... Next update game is ruined. "We've added a casino to the game! And to make it convenient you don't have to worry about approving purchases every single time because it will just automatically take money out of your bank for every spin!"
Its that thing where you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain. I did not mind the treasure hunter all that much since you could get a lot of keys for free, and I am a lazy person so it kind of helped me with some skills I really hated lvling up. But now I feel they entered head on in the shady deals and subversion practices, I was thinking on playing the new update but this has gone to far for me, I had already bent a lot of my principals when I accepted and "liked" treasure hunting, but I think accepting this is taking a step to far. I do not want to stimulate that kind of thing more than I have already done, so I'll do what I think is my part, I'll stay clear of the game even thought I really want to test out necromancy.
They state the goal of the content buffs was to encourage ppl to try variety of content, but isn't that what challenges already do? The 20% dmg reduction to the most endgame dungeon in the game, isn't trying something new, that's just advantage to anyone that can do it. Yak Track had rewards for everyone at every level, the "improved" Heropass most lvls just rewards premier members. They were the ones that made Yak Track more grindy each season. Heropass release took away non-battlepass dailies that could be completed near instantly like bury 10 bones, or clean 6 herbs.
Battle Passes are a pox on the industry. Even games like Conan Exiles have them now, BP are supposed to boost "engagement", but now that even single player RPGs are getting them, and with time being finite, it's been my challenge to find enjoyable games that *don't* use this system, or failing that, ones that are less egregious.
They already got the resounding "No" in the livestream where they showed the Hero Pass, coincidentally i saw the dev livestream and the Chat mood was incredibly overly negative everyone was mad, then even reacted to it and said something like, "players will at the end love it, you will see", guess this wasn't what they expected.
Dont forget when SoF first came out it didnt have buyable spins. They called it a log in bonus. Later they sakd "we heard you guys wanted more ways to get spins! So now you can buy them! You asked!"
The dungeon damage reduction sounds a lot more egregious than it actually is - this is only for full runs of the dungeon, while after 25 full clears you can skip to the final boss which makes full runs completely redundant. This just really helps noobs be able to clear it - still an awful precedent to set but this buff itself is not actually very useful.
I guess I'm still hesitant towards their sudden backup on the worst of its features (the end result actually being less MTX and less intrusive than the yak track by the looks) because they've said "we went too far we'll do better going forward" after almost every one of those previous updates. We simply have no reason to think they won't find something more egregious and more intrusive than this battlepass within a year's time. That overwhelmingly negative response existed for the Squeal of Fortune when it came out as well. Biggest thread in the game's history, every single post on the forums negative. *They did it anyway.*
The thing about battlepasses is that they are 100% COSMETIC. There are 0 gameplay changes to them. Yes you could get more ingame currency (Eternal Return for example) or special skins or items (hearthstone), but when you start making it effect gameplay, thats when people get pissed. Blizzard had their new hero tied to the battlepass, where you would have to spend 20$ to buy outright, or grind up to lvl 40 on the pass to get the new hero for the season. People were PISSED because not only was there a premium track, they did the bullshit daily / weekly mission thing as well. Runescape doing this is doing the exact same thing, but for a more vocal and passionate fanbase. If they just stopped at cosmetics or currency it would be fine, especially if they gave enough currency to buy the next pass and then some, in the current pass. But adding in genuine gameplay changes to the pass??? Not only will they crash the market for the content that they have those buffs for, whether it makes content easier, or gives more supplies when youre gathering, the market will get fucked up beyond what it is now
Having pay-to-win stuff in the battle pass is bad, but having hours of daily quests required to do a battlepass (unless you pay to skip levels) is incredibly common for mobile games.
I'm an osrs player and was thinking about hopping over to RS3 once I'm done with Old School, but seeing the company not really care at all about the players has made me realise I'll never want to be done with Old School
It's annoying to me as I brought the memebership bundle from humble bundle and I just started the game I was going to save the bundle after doing as much free stuff as I can. But with this I just feel like I wasted my money so I have a bundle for a game that I wanted to get into and I can't even be bothered to load it up now.
green santa hat was the nail in the coffin of my account that i had played and owned before any other account that i made in 2005. glad i got out before the hell that i knew was coming came.
I play Runescape in its current form on Ironman, completely solo, and I do honestly love the game. I choose to play the game how it should be played, just like I would have in 2008 or so as a kid with no money and I had to actually do the work in game. Fuck all this Pay to Win bullshit, it should be illegal. The sad part is how many people actually utilize it, just play the damn game and have pride with your progress. We live in time where instant gratification is a plague.
Whenever a game introduces its own “in game currency” then they have already fallen to the dark side. If a company is trying to obfuscate pricing and make you forget youre using real money they are the finger puppet of a sith lord, probably one who used to work at EA.
I had started a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and I finally quit once the battle/yak passes came out. I'm sorry, but it got to be way too much, and I'm glad I did. I went on to play GW:2 and as jank as it might be, I really enjoyed my time there, and the money I spent; to this day I can still go back and play the content I bought and enjoy some pretty incredible storylines and dungeons. I don't know why Runescape went this route, other than piss all over their baby and rake in some cash while they do it. I miss what it used to be.
So I'm a long time RS player, and a majority of this is accurate, but there are some inaccurate parts. Like just factually inaccurate. You dont play anymore by your own admission, which is totally fine, but there's just some things painted in a light that's not actually the way they are and it seems due to ignorance of the game from your lack of play. Keep in mind I loathe this pass and almost everything about it, but I'd rather things be accurate than exaggerated or misrepresented. 1. Premier is a lump sum for a year of membership and is actually cheaper than regular membership along with extra benefits. The only downside to Premier is that you commit to a year of the game. Otherwise, if you will play for the year, it's a no brainer. It's less money for more shit. 2. Yak track wasn't mandatory at all. I did the first couple, but then I stopped doing them all together. They changed them so just playing would unlock levels, so I would end up completing levels just by playing, but they weren't mandatory in any sense of the word. They were really efficient for training, but forced a gameplay style. I didn't want to play that way, and I didn't. I and many others entirely ignored this and it's a large part of why it failed. Nobody took part in it anymore. 3. The new dailies are egregious, but there's no reason to paint them worse than they are. You complete them with standard daily play. About 45-60 min, which as i said is still egregious. They really want those daily logins and push that fomo with it. You don't need to do anything different than you would have either. Ive completed most rhe fislies just playing how i wpuld if the pass didnt exist. There are I believe weekly additions that will require a specific task, but there's really quick and you have the whole pass to complete them. I did 1 just to see how long it took and it took me about 30 minutes. I'm general, they really fucked up with this selling combat buffs and making how long it takes to unlock ridiculous. I also think they broke the communities back with this. They will continue to receive hate until they backtrack this and more. I haven't spent $ on anything but membership for years because I didn't want to support the increasingly predatory systems. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to join me now. It's also worth noting that they've agreed to remove the egregious rewards and dial back the time required to complete it, sounds like a lot. Plus they reinstated a system that thile new pass had removed. They've offered refunds to anyone who had spent money on it as well. They are doing some things right, but it's still telling that they put this out in its current state. I imagine they knew it would get some backlash and need to be dialed back, which is a level of manipulation many companies take part in, but I don't think they knew it would be this bad. They fucked up, big time. I don't think the community will let it go till more mtx is removed than existed before.
I quit before this. I remember RS as buying a membership which gave you access to the whole game, and that's it. I wish it remained that way. It was cheap too.
At this point I don't understand why the people who want to play RS3 don't just band together and make a private server out of it where they strip out all that MTX crap. That way everyone who wants to play "official" can just play oldschool, and the people who don't care about "official" and want RS3 can play the private server, both without MTX nonsense. Just... tell Jagex to go to hell and enjoy the game without giving them a single cent. That's the proper response to them spitting in everyone's face like this.
The problem with this idea, as nice as it is, is that Jagex would never, ever, ever let it happen. You can bet that they'd be sending legal threats the second they smelled an RS3 Privy. Not to mention- if RS3 dies, OSRS' shield against horrible MTX is gone.
@@noonie6872 That depends on where you host it really. There are several WoW servers out there that blizzard has been able to do nothing about simply because they host in a country that just laugh at large corporations sending them legal threats. There was even one that took out physical ads for their private server in their country and blizzard could do nothing. That's even more true if the private server software is easy to use. Then they'd have no recourse against the tens of servers popping up every single day by random people around the globe. By the time they'd sent legal threats to 10 of them, there'd be 30 more opening. They'd bankrupt themselves on lawyer fees.
While a big positive, Halo's move wasn't exactly revolutionary: Super Animal Royale has had the same system for years, and Inkbound implemented it months ago as well.
Yo Callum I like what you're doing with the greenscreen and the editing format you're going for. It's definitely got a bit of jank for you to figure out but imo it's much more engaging and entertaining than the typical box in the corner style of commentary that is much more prevalent. Please keep it up!!
@@SomeRandomDevOpsGuy because as someone who actually does create shit, I appreciate when folks notice changes in direction... it's called critique and people use that to improve their craft.
Runescape saw the players doing their armor-trimming and/or gold-doubling scams and are now like "hey, we gotta get in on that action".
Trimming battlepass 100k
runescape should move to fortnite and become another world in fortnite at this point
in retrospect Squeal of Fortune indicated how intact Jagex's creative vision was back then. theming your MTX around a sleazy goblin bilking you at a rigged carnival game is spot on, and presumably there weren't any suits warning them how unappealing that'd be from a marketing perspective.
then it got replaced by treasure chests+hot girl. wonder why.
I've not seen that girl for years. Its still rubbish dont get me wrong, but the girl has not been on the TH screen for years now at this point. Its always some TH event though, so idk what the 'normal' TH screen looks like these days.
Because using a random hot girl and images of endless money to sell stuff sounds soooo more professional and legit.
@@blondbraid7986 Nobody implied it sounds more professional - but it sounds more effective, and that's what matters to the investors. You think they give a fuck about integrity or legitimacy? Nah, what gets them more money, more quickly - that's the important factor.
@blondbraid7986 someone's never heard the very very popular saying "Sex sells" simple as
found the feminist@@blondbraid7986
Step 1: Sell battle pass.
Step 2: Make battle pass nearly impossible to complete.
Step 3: Make players spend additional money so they can get what they already paid for.
Sad to see RS3 is going down like this, not that I play it but I'm sure plenty of people used to enjoy it.
@MrDjBigZoverwatch 2's BP is pretty easy even without playing like crazy
@MrDjBigZOW2 BP Is extremely easy to complete. I play casually a few hours a week and im already half of it (i didn't purchased it,and i have no intention to)
What you are thinking is the Dota2 battlepass,thats was impossible to complete without throwing money
Ive only bought a battlepass after completing the free route completely. Its kind of a like a reward to myself depending on the game
The battlepass isn't nearly impossie to complete though... I can do my dailies in 30 minutes, and after that I get extra points
Also just to the other missions, complete a quest, chop some wood, you have 3 months, it's easy
I beat it day 2, get max combat scrub
This wasn't an oopsie. This was a few business meetings. They know there are people so committed to RuneScape that they will buy these passes, and max them out on the first day. Callum goes over the history of MTX implementation. A nice timeline of the metrics being gathered, and the conditioning of their players for more to come. They have been pushing and pushing ridiculous MTX models, facing outcry and yet, making money. Making further questionable MTX decisions, met with further outcry and yet. . . . making money. This isn't them spiraling down the drain. This is just their end game.
Every single one of you RuneScape players that are upset about this, were barely even factored into this decision. Free to play games live off the backs of around 10% of the players.
Whaling is good business.
Yup absolutely. The CEO was brought before the house of commons when they were investigating loot boxes and such stuff. He blatently told them that a very small number of whales spending vast (to any normal person) amounts of money keep the company going. The 'normal' players really represent a loss=making part of the business, a crowd of people for the 'whales' to impress.
Until whales are so financially ruined that they can’t buy anymore, or non-whales leave game thus whales leave too.
How can they not? If whales are just going to give them free money.
@@valivali8104 Whales never leave. They’re addicted and will do literally anything to keep playing.
@@mostmelon8243 whales don’t have unending amount of money, and if there isn’t non-whales, game loses every addictive aspect, so they go somewhere else.
Remember when the worst monetization you would expect from an MMO as a sub and/or an expansion every so often and that was it? I really miss those days.
Hence why I main FFXIV
Hence why i gave up mmo's and every game with a cash shop.
@@kinryuten While I love FFXIV, they have an ingame cash shop and other MTs on top of a monthly sub as well, so they are part of the problem too, even if they aren't the biggest part.
Guild Wars 2 is my main MMO now. Just buy an expansion once in awhile and gtg. No worries about having to keep up with gear it has a horizontal progression system, play at your own pace with no FOMO. They just did add a battle pass type system but it is actually not too bad. You just gain points which you cannot purchase with money by doing daily or weekly quests and then buy cosmetics or trade goods,laurels, so just free stuff based on how much you play.
I have played Runescape since it first came out but i only play it as an afk clicker essentially now. So much time invested it sucks having to drop it but i dropped Warcraft as well after Legion and I was an OG Vanilla WoW veteran. I miss my spectral tiger, poor guy just gathering dust now lol.
@@EarthboundX There is no in-game cash shop, only the online store. There's Dreamfitting but, only allows you to preview outfits.
Editing tip for an already great video. If you introduce a couch in act 1, please bring it back for act 3. Bookending helps ground the visual narrative. Have the couch be your cut-to after your last use of b-roll for your conclusion.
Or you do whatever, I'm not your producer!
you spoiled the ending for me now!
Video is unwatchable now because of couch spoiler. Ban please!
I didn't even notice the couch! *gasp*
HOW COULD YOU!
good advice
I was waiting for the couch to return and it didn't!
The one thing about this is that the runescape community was able to bully them into removing the problem.
The ability to buy skips was removed yesterday.
As for what caused this, there is news the owners of jagex selling off jagex.
Carlyle Group is looking to sell it yes probably because they know it is starting to die, get it gone before they don't make anything off it. They bought it for 530 mill and are asking 1 bill now so they just sat in the grand exchange waiting to double their money.
@@aetherfox4404I hope they get nothing. We should all personally email the companies interested in buying jagex and let them know all of this quarter's revenue is completely cooked to make it look like a billion dollar company.
@@aetherfox4404 Bro was flipping RuneScape itself
I jumped ship after being a long time player when their Fresh Start servers were expecting you to pay for a second subscription. Amazing that they found a way to sink to new lows.
There are always new lows to sink to.
Ah the memories of booting up Runescape after a "stressful" school day and begging your parents to pay for the membership
Runescape was the game we played in school because it was the only ftp mmo not blocked by the firewall.
Forget getting them to pay for membership, convincing them to cover the cost of dial up just to play the free areas while taking turns with your brothers because one PC.
Yeah remember sending in cash to their mail and logging in for 2 weeks with your fingers crossed to see if you had your 30 days applied
I kinda wish I'd spent more time outside playing with other kids instead of friggin Runescape which felt like a literal desk job, except more repetitive. Mining the same friggin rock for hours (I didn't use macros, I was hardcore...). Glad I tapped out of it 15+ years ago though. No more online games for me since then. Ever.
Lol you didn't call in the phone memship? Phone from school and charge the schools phone bill? I thaught everyone did that lmfao, we all used to in my school
When you mentioned the way they did their battlepass, I was surprised that you thought it was new. This is exactly how the War Thunder battlepass has been for years. You have daily quests, they expire within 24 hours and you have to restart them, most are locked to higher tier vehicles, and they would take hours of gameplay every day in order to complete. And even then, your chances of finishing the battlepass are near zero, so you need to buy the 50 tier skip upgrade to help you along.
Yeah, I've played multiple games with daily or weekly quests for BP points (WT included), it was weird for me to see someone surprised by it
And it seems like they always offer buyable tier skips to tell you "hey, we know we made this game feel like even more of a chore, why not pay us to make it easier?"
Meanwhile all the gacha games I play have easy to complete battle passes. I think this is a cancer only affecting western live service games.
It's a real shame, because the very first battle pass they did was actually fair, the missions were much easier and could be completed in lower level vehicles.
After the first one though, the devs (probably after seeing the vehicle prizes sell for a pittance on the market because of how easy it was to complete) ruined everything for following battle passes. Missions were restricted to higher level vehicles, they were made much harder and only 2 of the 4 vehicles rewarded being tradeable, meaning that people who completed the battle pass but didn't want those vehicles couldn't exchange them for something they actually wanted and people who wanted the vehicles needed to buy the battle pass or else. To add insult to injury, they later cut down the number of vehicle rewards in the pass from 4 to 3.
war thunder is a f2p game, where battlepasses are a bit more accepted vs a game where you already pay for the privilege to spent more money
Conan Exiles has something akin to it except you can stack up to 10 and you get bonus exp for the missions or challenges you do so long as you have that bonus. You can also reroll 3 times a day if you don't like the missions you got.
The way Callum's soul slowly exits his body as he describes the logic behind this monstrosity 😂
Fortunately he’s on his casting couch 🎉
Casual reminder that corporations are never your friend and that the best way to compete under a free market is abusing your customers as much as you can get away with before they stop buying your product/service.
That's missing the point. Every company has to make money, there are just more abusive/manipulative and companies that are fairer. If what you were saying were correct, every company would be the same. Exept that isn't the case. Plus you can't stop interacting with cooperations, the only control the customer has is picking the cooperation they want to engange in. "Cooperation bad" isn't helpful. To be more precise it also can change on product basis. Jagex publishes both OSRS (which is seen as very fair by most people) and RS3 (which is seen as a micotransaction hell).
@@renzuki5830 OSRS probably only exists in this purer form thanks to how much money RS3 makes, I'm guessing it would be unsustainable on it's own
@@renzuki5830 They are systemically designed to make money for their shareholders. They never care about the customer because they just buy a share and expect it to go up. Don't be naive. You can dress it up as something else or accept them as the only option but denying their very real problems will do you no good.
There are worse and better corporations. But there is no truly ethical way to consume products under our current system. All corporations (except worker cooperatives) operate off a small number of bosses/investors who unilaterally make decisions as an elite and profit unfairly off those actually doing most of the work. CEO salaries are ridiculously overinflated and don't remotely reflect the actual labor they're putting into the product.
And our choices AREN'T just confined to which company we give our money to. We can support people trying to unionize their workplaces--demanding better hours, more pay, less crunch time, better conditions and less scummy business strategies. We can demand our nation's governments step in to regulate gambling in games, curtail predatory monetization, and demand real ownership rights for video games.
All corporations are bad. We can differentiate between how bad they are. We should focus on upending the whole rotten structure.
Corporations and government are basically the same thing and both the enemy
What they did to Runescape destroyed what it was irreversably, which is why still today OSRS is the most popular version by a significant margin - and it nearly didn't happen at all! It's sad, because it was great until the company went public. A trend you should note is pretty much universal across the gaming industry, if not every other industry!
@@randompersonontheinternet8790 the golden age for osrs ended years ago I think personally. It may not be popular for some to hear but I think the way they handled pride last year says alot about how corporate the decisions are becoming within that team. Anyone who reads all their news posts can tell no developer wrote those posts, least not whoever usually writes them.
Another telling sign is how the team has grown substantially. The more resources they put in, the more they will want out of it.
@@randompersonontheinternet8790the company was sold multiple times since OSRS launched and we still don't have MTX in OSRS, beside bonds, but that was the deal the community made to have OSRS F2P. They'll probably increase the price for membership and bonds.
Yup. Once they go public, they work for the investors. Not the players
Popular with bots, yes. %50+ of the active playerbase of OSRS is bots.
@@IHateUA-cam25 Even if we assume that's correct, thats still alot more real people playing OSRS instead of RS3.
The sad thing is that as RS3 got less and less popular, Jagex spent more of the their time milking the remaining playerbase, rather than trying to grow the game.
In the words of Jim Sterling, they don't just want money, they want ALL of the money.
The problem with something like this is that while 90% of the player base will be overwhelmingly against something like this, 10% will engage with it, and make the company enough money that they'd be willing to let the cheaper players leave because it'll still be more profitable than not implementing it. It was funny to hear bonds explained and see how a year or so after they were implemented, WoW released the WoW token. Here I thought they were pioneers on screwing their player base, but they were just following the Jagex model all along.
At this rate, mmo gamers should unionize.
It's pretty much the way of all these MMOs that are gradually dying out. Cater specifically to the few whales who are desperate to stay on top, and try to keep them from noticing that the playerbase is slowly dwindling to zero.
@@NorthStarBlue1 The whales aren’t desperate, they can spend hundreds per day and it is pocket change to them. That’s how dire the situation for the rest of us is. This business model will never not work.
The problem, in the long run, is that whales just have fun in games when there are people they can whale over.
So whales need casuals to have fun. But for the casuals the whales kill the fun in games... Wich leads to two options for them: either also start paying up or quiting the game.
Most will just quit.
So in the long run whales kill games. Short time such practices make a lot of money. But long time it's just not healthy
Bonds are great but I wish they could only be used for membership. The price of bonds is insane for any normal player to upkeep. When I started playing rs3 again after many years away I could sustain 7m per week. Now it's like 50m+ every week lol.
"Hero Pass," even sounds like a scam.
Raid: Shadow Heroes.
Pay to not play the game.
It's a hard pass for me
Today they have walked it back.
They'll be back at it as soon as they figure it out how to apply more lube.
Don't worry, they'll find something else to beat your pinata with.
Tomorrow, they'll reskin it. Can't waste those under-the-hood assets.
I think the skill specific experience boosting equipment is a good way to see the difference in how they treat the players of both games. In both OSRS and RS3 they have clothes that provide around 2.5% experience boost to some skills and in OSRS these are usually obtained via doing the skill, like the fishing set is a reward from a fishing minigame with no way to RMT skip it, but in RS3 the shark set was in the Treasure Hunter MXT thing which had nothing to do with fishing which makes it no longer a reward and just "give us more money".
OSRS doesn't respect players time, but RS3 is outright hostile.
Shark set and other xp sets were obtainable from TH, but due to backlash, all those can be obtained via training the skill as well now.
It's almost inevitable that companies do this crap nowadays eh?
"nowadays"? Honey unless you missed it...they're doing it more and more.
And the reason is called money, and they keep making bad decisions over you because YOU allow it.
You the humans are sheep that will put up with any bs they throw at you - same goes for politics.
ALMOST!
... Just play Baldurs Gate 3!
A bunch of idiots in the 70s and 80s started preaching greed is good.
The loyalty system was the precursor of MTX.
It was added to discourage voting with your wallet.
It punished players for cancelling membership when they were displeased.
It was masked as rewarding loyal players when it was designed to make people not cancel in fear of getting their reward multiplier reset.
This sort of stuff is why I was worried when WoW interduced the Trading Post. My girlfriend kept optimistic, saying I was paranoid. I kept saying I worried it's a slipperly slope.
Then came "Buy cosmetic packs for real money and get Trading Post coins as a bonus!", now letting you pay real money to increase your TP coins a bit... Already slipping down a bit on that slope... I pray that I am wrong about this, but looking at other MMO's like Runescape or SWTOR, I can safely say I have no real hope.
I unsubbed and turned away from runescape completely. I even dropped osrs because i just don't want jamflex to get the engagement of my login,
Its very clear they're cashing in. All they had to do was add in cosmetics. They didn't need to add any power behind the pass and that was just too difficult to do. Its like they wanted to cash in on the good will they got from necromancy to now upcharge everyone playing.
Makes me glad the last time I played RS was JUUUST after Membership was a thing.
Like...Im from the 2D sprite era of the game (I left shortly after it became what is now known as OSRS) and it hurts to see my childhood be so utterly destroyed by greed...
As a RuneScape 3 player, when I saw the announcement it made me physically ill. I've invested well over 10k hours into just one of my accounts and seeing the game I've loved be treated like this was nothing less than heartbreaking.
RIP. I feel ya.
I'm so sorry.
If a game can make you physically ill then it sounds like you have much bigger mental health problems. I suggest fixing that before returning to the game
Being invested in something isn't mental illness, it's human nature. Feeling ill when something bad happens to something you care about is about as healthy of a reaction as I've ever heard of.@@jamesd5767
The killer word is "investing". I know it's hard, I was addicted to it as well for years. Runescape could all be switched off at a touch of a button and all your "investment" gone. May I humbly suggest investing in real life instead - invest in your own health and wellbeing, invest in spending time with your family and friends (they won't be around forever!). If you don't have any friends go out and make some, join some clubs. If you're shy around people, don't worry lots of people are. Forget the 10k hours spent on Runescape, I want you to spend 10k hours learning a language, or an instrument or some other kind of skill that will be useful in your life. That is a real good investment. Wish someone had told ME what I'm telling you right now!
This must of broken Josh's heart. And he had just stolen a mug from Jagex head office.
Too bad. I don’t play MMO’s anymore but if I was going to play one it would have been RuneScape. It’s a damn shame. (Currently playing Starfield and it is so over hyped- it’s dull, and furthermore Bethesda still can’t make a vehicle for traversing an area that you’d otherwise have to walk).
Hope you’re well, Cal!
if you ever do play, pick and play osrs only over rs3 id say.
I think you forgot that one time they completely changed the way the summoning skill worked when they introduced summoning gems. They backpedaled on that pretty quick, but it goes to show how MTX content was taking precedent over actual game content.
Even though daily challenges were a part of the MTX pipeline and used for daily spins/keys, it was used by players to get a healthy chunk of xp and reduce the grind.
While I don't think daily challenges were good for the game, players were accustomed to it, enjoyed it. Replacing the daily challenges with something more time-sensitive and less generous was Jagex's fatal misstep in this cashgrab. RS3 players are numb to the rampant MTX in the game, but take away one of the things they enjoy and they'll remember how much they dislike MTX real quick.
This is pretty spot on with the exception of:
1. Bonds are generally seen as a good thing. They don't add gold to the game and allow people that play the game on a semi consistent basis to play for free.
2. When I quit, rune metrics didn't track DPS and clans would use DPS crystals (purchasable only from the solomon store, but could be sold on the in game market) to see DPS at bosses
I've been playing since the first year of rs, on the same account, had a few alts etc, infact current one was a pure. Had membership on this account since a few months after it came out with membership, mum paid for it back then ofc.
But after this bs I'm done, I quit, I lost my hcim due to the lockout bug, lost trillions over the years due to their bs security, then the lost item bug recently lost hundreds of billions.
Now they want to scam us for money.
What really astonished me is how people can still want to PLAY THE GAME, wich obviously encourages even more greed, OBVIOUSLY !!!
My favourite is "mental health week" which is basically just a "hey lets release a shitty event and let players p2w to skip it so we make more profit while pretending to care about mental health...
I played RS since last days of classic. RS2 awesome. Sadly, RS3 died to me when new combat system was introduced. Made a break. Went back to OSRS in 2013 - best decision of my life.
RIP RS3 since 2012 for me.
I play RS3 more casually, like I was getting my dailies done at least, citadel capping and keeping up with DXP and Yak Track, and those alone proved exhausting. Hero Pass might be the thing that pushes me to re-quitting.
"The most tonedeaf decision" had me laughing more than I care to admit 😁 what a great phrase
No idea who you are as the algorithm just recommended me this, but this was brilliant
Rune pass and Yak track never ran at the same time. Runepass came out in 2018 and lasted 2 weeks, the first Yak track came out in 2019.
It's not only happening in runescape. Remember when mobile games started to grow? In the beginnings, you could just purchase a game and that was it. Nowadays, they're all more or less like diablo immoral. Now the same is happening to the MMOs. It's getting more and more difficult to find one that values your time and rewards you for just playing properly instead of paying heftily.
Runescape 3 is basically a mobile game at this point. I play OSRS and was contemplating starting up RS3 for something different, definitely not now.
I do at some point want to go back to RS3 (soooooo much freaking content) but it's INSANE that they tier'ed out more Premium/Platinum positions that are ultimately just paying on top of already paying. You already get special treatment for paying by the YEAR.
Aren't there RS3 private servers? Because I sure as hell would prefer playing on them rather than sink my feet into this money draining swamp Jagex has created...
@@ClawthorneMate I left RS3 during the "squeal of fortune" days because the writing seemed on the wall.
RS3 private servers is a NEW concept ive never heard of, I'm not sure Jagex would like that in any fashion.
@@dylanherron3963 Yeah they definitely wouldn't like it, but if ActiBlizz with all their money and power cannot take down private servers, neither can Jagex. And losing players and money to that is precisely what they deserve for pulling this kind of egregious crap.
another detail u missed out was that when the Hero Pass released Jagex removed all daily challenges, so you could not just "ignore the update" because it fucked all previous metas. As of now, they re-added the daily challenges, but funnily enough, the Hero Pass point was to reduce the amount of dailies, so now we have essentially 2x more dailies.
EDIT: The daily challenges are to be added on the following weeks and are not on the live game.
They've added the daily challenges back? I hadn't noticed, will have to log in and have a look after the video.
Back, nope daily challenges aren't there.
Do you mean daily missions in hero pass?
@@pelinoregeryon6593 mb, they are to be re-added on the following weeks. It's on their newspost: "We are working on this [The Daily Challenge system] urgently and may take a couple of weeks to go live."
@@pelinoregeryon6593they will be added back on next week's update
I'd like to think that nothing like this will happen to OSRS, but greed can be very powerful
Yup same thing happened to wow classic. They said they would keep it like classic was, then they brought in the dark portal pass for tbc. They said that wow wotlk would be true to classic, then they brought in the wow token to wow classic
The only surety is that if they bring anything resembling MTX beyond Bonds to OSRS, it would be the equivalent of commiting suicide. It is so easy to create a private server of OSRS that I expect the majority of players to immediately change to private servers just like how it was after EOC.
Sounds like Runescape saw what Activision did with Diablo Immortal and said, "yes please, that"
As someone who plays Eve Online, Bonds sound like PLEX. I'm okay with Eve's implementation, sounds like Jagex borked things getting overly greedy.
Reporter: "Why did you do this?"
Mr. Krabs: "Money."
This just reminds me of how absolutely predatory the MMO genre has become. They’re basically setting up infinite treadmills extract as much as possible from people who are stuck in it. I love what MMOs could be, like in EverQuest or Vanilla WoW, but so many are poison now.
My only experience with Runescape is not RS3 or OSRS, but a simple idle game called Melvor that uses runescape's mechanics to lay out the progression. I paid less than $15 for the game and its two expansions and have been enjoying it knowing full well this game goes at my pace and I don't have to worry about getting nickeled and dimed
Players: this damage boost is pay-to-win
Game: how about if you pay you can just skip ahead
Hate to break it to players, but there is no-one at that boardroom table who sees Runescape as a game or even as an entertainment product. There's no-one there who plays the game, most have probably never touched an MMO in their life... and when the people running your company don't use or have any experience with your product, they only view it as a profit & loss spreadsheet. "Customer experience" are nice words to include in their annual shareholder reports, but I guarantee they neither understand _nor care_ what the player experience is.
And unfortunately, once a company makes decisions as egregious & blatant as this (like expecting players to not only waste their precious spare time _each day_ on arbitrary tasks, but to _pay_ for the privilege), then they're a lost cause... _entertainment should not be a chore._ Best to walk away with your good memories and leave Jagex with the whales, bot farms & scammers they are making their devs build the game to milk for every last cent.
Callum mate your editing and scenes are getting sick man!! I'm loving the aesthetic changes and lightings/intros/outros you got going on!
That makes sense. Micropayments in games wouldn't become common until...pretty much, 2013 with Mass Effect 3 and Dead Space 3. I didn't realize the RS3 micropayments started off so early. Huh.
Very unfortunate. Knowing how Runescape got its start to what its turned into.. is just unfortunate tbh. I loved runescape, hell im a 15 year vet at this point cape nd all. but i simply grew out of the game at one point. Shame to see it fall so terribly low. It was one of the greatest mmo's. Name one person who hasnt played Runescape at one point or the other like. The game is actually legendary.
Brilliant video. You encompass everything I’ve been thinking for years. Subbed 👍🏻
love the improvements to production quality man, keep up the good work
Runescape lost me when they closed Runescape Classic (shout out Open RSC for existing, thank goodness) -- but Jagex have long been totally asleep at the wheel. I haven't played RS3/OSRS seriously in years and never would again, specifically because of how Jagex manages their game and treats the player base.
Imagine if world buffs were a purchasable option in classic wow...
Yes.
also if I understood correctly you need to complete a daily quest every day to get it or you can use a credit card to skip that step.
It's like making Dragonslayer a reputation reward, resetting that reputation every few months and selling reputation boosts for money.
It's amazing how evil it is.
Yak tracks where already super annoying.
The last time I played Runescape was when EOC and squeal of fortune was released. I'm curious - just how bad has it gotten?
If you turned RS3 on right now you wouldn't recognise the game at all. And the game is caked in various different mtx and events... whenever I tried to play it was extremely overwhelming. I wouldn't recommend bothering, unless you decided to do it ironman.
Not to mention they directly lied to us by saying they wouldnt make any pvm buffs or other direct gameplay buffs p2w. I think that when they sell the company, the next owners are going to full send all that bs and actually kill the game. Well all be waiting to see... i sense some dark days ahead.
The game's name is *incredibly* accurate - everyone NEEDS to Run and Escape from RunEscape, er, RuneScape.
The idea behind that was to make more money at the expense of the playerbase.
the new studio looks great! And i love the editing too it looks great! :D
I've seen the same shit happen in other games. For example World of Warships. It's a full-on cynical exploitation of whales and their tendency to obsess over games they've sunk time and money into. Boiling the proverbial frog, as it were.
So I'm listening to this while crafting a bunch of stuff in FFXIV. And the horrible thought of locking quick synthesis (basically automatically crafting up to 99 items in a row) behind a paywall shook me.
I am a NEW player to Runescape 3.... like 3 days ago new. Playing for free btw and never, ever played before. I am bombarded daily for buying keys for chests, Hero path stuff and general store merchandise and its goes on and on, and I am still just on the tutorial island learning the basics and all of this is SO completely overwhelming. I don't think I am going to keep playing, even for free.
So the enshittification of RuneScape, eh? Yeah it's been going on ever since the start of the Squeal of Fortune.
I quit as a dual mod in 2012 because I didn't believe the company was really listening, and it's no real surprise that they're up to their old antics. I came back for a bit after Priffnidas was released but not long after Menaphos was released I gave up. I couldn't keep up and the Linux support I had worked to get moving didn't really seem that great.
Anyway, to explain enshittification, paraphrased from Cory Doctorow:
- First you're good to your customers
- Then you abuse your customers to get value for your investors
- Then you abuse your investors to get value for yourselves
- Then you die.
So it's no surprise that we're in the third step here. OSRS may be keeping the fans pleased but it's obvious who the cash cow is. What's just as obvious is that the cow is running dry.
Moral of the story. Give them an inch and they will take it a mile
The pay to unlock chance scheme seems to be working well with mobile games. Let's see if it works out for them.
I'm a current rs3 player and I 100% agree with this. From my point of view, mtx is just the way of the world for large and live games but this was just a truly malicious showing. And it really bugged me cause the cosmetic rewards on it are really nice imo and took creative talent to make, only to be marred by insanely slow progression and paywalls that literally costed twice or more in bonds than the price of the highest tier of membership. Not to mention "discounted" prices if you played on mobile. Thankfully enough people took action against jagex to get them to back off (we'll see what they actually end up doing), but it does set a foreboding precedent and I can't help but wonder how long before they try again.
MTX hopefully will cripple the games industry. We just have to teach our children to not fall for this crap.
It's seeming like the only MMO that isn't getting predatory with MTX is Final Fantasy XIV. Sure, it has the monthly sub you are *_required_* to pay for to play it, but that and the current expansion (as buying the current expansion comes with all past ones at no increased fee) are the only real things you need to pay for, as there is absolutely no pay-to-win MTX in it. The cash shop has stayed untouched since the early days of Stormblood (2nd expansion, we're now on the 4th, soon to be the 5th) in terms of what is sold there, which is cosmetics, mounts, level skips and story skips (you can never skip the current expansion, you always have to do the current one), with the playerbase agreeing that the latter two are intended for people who use alts, as the game is not alt friendly.
Even then, a vast majority of FFXIV's good cosmetics and mounts can be acquired via natural play and not locked behind super-hard high end content. Not to mention the closest thing FFXIV has to a "battle pass" is the "Series Malmstones" for PvP, as it functions like the typical battle pass with one massive difference, it is *_100% free_* to everyone, even free trial players.
I never understood the point of most MMOs putting stat and EXP boosts behind paywalls. To be fair, what Runescape has done is not the worst I've seen, that would go to DC Universe Online, it masquerades as a "free-to-play" game, but it truly isn't, free players get a very bare-bones experience. You will find that even some of the most basic features that most MMOs have as standard are locked behind paywalls that a player can unlock with either one-time payments (the more expensive way, but avoids content you don't want) or by paying their premium subscription fee.
Sad to see these kinds of practices becoming so widespread in the MMO space, but people have whales to blame for it, if as many people who are against these kind of predatory MTX voted with their wallets as the whales who vote with their wallets *_for_* this kind of content, it might start to become at least less prevalent.
To Jagex's credit though, they seem to have walked back a lot of the pay-to-win aspects of this Hero Pass, so it's at least a step in the right direction, so it shows they at least listen to players. Hopefully they don't try sneak them back in, although looking at what they've done in the past, it is a possibility, but not a certainty.
Chinese company invests in game......... Next update game is ruined.
"We've added a casino to the game! And to make it convenient you don't have to worry about approving purchases every single time because it will just automatically take money out of your bank for every spin!"
Imagine that board meeting
they all just come walking in dressed as Mr crabs screeching money
Hey Callum, you should rotate that camera just a couple degrees to screen left. Unless you're just going for the dutch avant garde look.
Its that thing where you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.
I did not mind the treasure hunter all that much since you could get a lot of keys for free, and I am a lazy person so it kind of helped me with some skills I really hated lvling up.
But now I feel they entered head on in the shady deals and subversion practices, I was thinking on playing the new update but this has gone to far for me, I had already bent a lot of my principals when I accepted and "liked" treasure hunting, but I think accepting this is taking a step to far.
I do not want to stimulate that kind of thing more than I have already done, so I'll do what I think is my part, I'll stay clear of the game even thought I really want to test out necromancy.
They state the goal of the content buffs was to encourage ppl to try variety of content, but isn't that what challenges already do? The 20% dmg reduction to the most endgame dungeon in the game, isn't trying something new, that's just advantage to anyone that can do it.
Yak Track had rewards for everyone at every level, the "improved" Heropass most lvls just rewards premier members. They were the ones that made Yak Track more grindy each season. Heropass release took away non-battlepass dailies that could be completed near instantly like bury 10 bones, or clean 6 herbs.
Battle Passes are a pox on the industry. Even games like Conan Exiles have them now, BP are supposed to boost "engagement", but now that even single player RPGs are getting them, and with time being finite, it's been my challenge to find enjoyable games that *don't* use this system, or failing that, ones that are less egregious.
They already got the resounding "No" in the livestream where they showed the Hero Pass, coincidentally i saw the dev livestream and the Chat mood was incredibly overly negative everyone was mad, then even reacted to it and said something like, "players will at the end love it, you will see", guess this wasn't what they expected.
Dont forget when SoF first came out it didnt have buyable spins. They called it a log in bonus.
Later they sakd "we heard you guys wanted more ways to get spins! So now you can buy them! You asked!"
Jagex didn't slide down a slippery slope, they took a running start and jumped down the mountain.
The dungeon damage reduction sounds a lot more egregious than it actually is - this is only for full runs of the dungeon, while after 25 full clears you can skip to the final boss which makes full runs completely redundant. This just really helps noobs be able to clear it - still an awful precedent to set but this buff itself is not actually very useful.
Irrelevant, it's selling an advantage which is completely messed up.
I guess I'm still hesitant towards their sudden backup on the worst of its features (the end result actually being less MTX and less intrusive than the yak track by the looks) because they've said "we went too far we'll do better going forward" after almost every one of those previous updates. We simply have no reason to think they won't find something more egregious and more intrusive than this battlepass within a year's time. That overwhelmingly negative response existed for the Squeal of Fortune when it came out as well. Biggest thread in the game's history, every single post on the forums negative. *They did it anyway.*
The annoying thing is that once RS3 is killed, they'll go for RS classic
But classic is already dead
The new set-up/video style is looking really good!
The thing about battlepasses is that they are 100% COSMETIC. There are 0 gameplay changes to them. Yes you could get more ingame currency (Eternal Return for example) or special skins or items (hearthstone), but when you start making it effect gameplay, thats when people get pissed. Blizzard had their new hero tied to the battlepass, where you would have to spend 20$ to buy outright, or grind up to lvl 40 on the pass to get the new hero for the season. People were PISSED because not only was there a premium track, they did the bullshit daily / weekly mission thing as well. Runescape doing this is doing the exact same thing, but for a more vocal and passionate fanbase. If they just stopped at cosmetics or currency it would be fine, especially if they gave enough currency to buy the next pass and then some, in the current pass. But adding in genuine gameplay changes to the pass??? Not only will they crash the market for the content that they have those buffs for, whether it makes content easier, or gives more supplies when youre gathering, the market will get fucked up beyond what it is now
Like Joshua says, "The only winning move is not to play."
Having pay-to-win stuff in the battle pass is bad, but having hours of daily quests required to do a battlepass (unless you pay to skip levels) is incredibly common for mobile games.
I'm an osrs player and was thinking about hopping over to RS3 once I'm done with Old School, but seeing the company not really care at all about the players has made me realise I'll never want to be done with Old School
Please do not say "OG RuneScape" unless you are going to be talking about billboarded sprites and a time period before 2005 .
It's annoying to me as I brought the memebership bundle from humble bundle and I just started the game I was going to save the bundle after doing as much free stuff as I can. But with this I just feel like I wasted my money so I have a bundle for a game that I wanted to get into and I can't even be bothered to load it up now.
green santa hat was the nail in the coffin of my account that i had played and owned before any other account that i made in 2005.
glad i got out before the hell that i knew was coming came.
I play Runescape in its current form on Ironman, completely solo, and I do honestly love the game. I choose to play the game how it should be played, just like I would have in 2008 or so as a kid with no money and I had to actually do the work in game. Fuck all this Pay to Win bullshit, it should be illegal. The sad part is how many people actually utilize it, just play the damn game and have pride with your progress. We live in time where instant gratification is a plague.
Whenever a game introduces its own “in game currency” then they have already fallen to the dark side. If a company is trying to obfuscate pricing and make you forget youre using real money they are the finger puppet of a sith lord, probably one who used to work at EA.
Of course RuneScape tries to jump in the crazypool too.
I had started a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and I finally quit once the battle/yak passes came out. I'm sorry, but it got to be way too much, and I'm glad I did. I went on to play GW:2 and as jank as it might be, I really enjoyed my time there, and the money I spent; to this day I can still go back and play the content I bought and enjoy some pretty incredible storylines and dungeons.
I don't know why Runescape went this route, other than piss all over their baby and rake in some cash while they do it. I miss what it used to be.
Bloating a game with MTX is pretty well established MMO killer. But people like Diablo Immortal so maybe itll still be popular idk.
So I'm a long time RS player, and a majority of this is accurate, but there are some inaccurate parts. Like just factually inaccurate. You dont play anymore by your own admission, which is totally fine, but there's just some things painted in a light that's not actually the way they are and it seems due to ignorance of the game from your lack of play. Keep in mind I loathe this pass and almost everything about it, but I'd rather things be accurate than exaggerated or misrepresented.
1. Premier is a lump sum for a year of membership and is actually cheaper than regular membership along with extra benefits. The only downside to Premier is that you commit to a year of the game. Otherwise, if you will play for the year, it's a no brainer. It's less money for more shit.
2. Yak track wasn't mandatory at all. I did the first couple, but then I stopped doing them all together. They changed them so just playing would unlock levels, so I would end up completing levels just by playing, but they weren't mandatory in any sense of the word. They were really efficient for training, but forced a gameplay style. I didn't want to play that way, and I didn't. I and many others entirely ignored this and it's a large part of why it failed. Nobody took part in it anymore.
3. The new dailies are egregious, but there's no reason to paint them worse than they are. You complete them with standard daily play. About 45-60 min, which as i said is still egregious. They really want those daily logins and push that fomo with it. You don't need to do anything different than you would have either. Ive completed most rhe fislies just playing how i wpuld if the pass didnt exist. There are I believe weekly additions that will require a specific task, but there's really quick and you have the whole pass to complete them. I did 1 just to see how long it took and it took me about 30 minutes.
I'm general, they really fucked up with this selling combat buffs and making how long it takes to unlock ridiculous. I also think they broke the communities back with this. They will continue to receive hate until they backtrack this and more. I haven't spent $ on anything but membership for years because I didn't want to support the increasingly predatory systems. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to join me now.
It's also worth noting that they've agreed to remove the egregious rewards and dial back the time required to complete it, sounds like a lot. Plus they reinstated a system that thile new pass had removed. They've offered refunds to anyone who had spent money on it as well. They are doing some things right, but it's still telling that they put this out in its current state. I imagine they knew it would get some backlash and need to be dialed back, which is a level of manipulation many companies take part in, but I don't think they knew it would be this bad. They fucked up, big time. I don't think the community will let it go till more mtx is removed than existed before.
I quit before this. I remember RS as buying a membership which gave you access to the whole game, and that's it. I wish it remained that way. It was cheap too.
At this point I don't understand why the people who want to play RS3 don't just band together and make a private server out of it where they strip out all that MTX crap.
That way everyone who wants to play "official" can just play oldschool, and the people who don't care about "official" and want RS3 can play the private server, both without MTX nonsense.
Just... tell Jagex to go to hell and enjoy the game without giving them a single cent. That's the proper response to them spitting in everyone's face like this.
The problem with this idea, as nice as it is, is that Jagex would never, ever, ever let it happen. You can bet that they'd be sending legal threats the second they smelled an RS3 Privy. Not to mention- if RS3 dies, OSRS' shield against horrible MTX is gone.
@@noonie6872 That depends on where you host it really. There are several WoW servers out there that blizzard has been able to do nothing about simply because they host in a country that just laugh at large corporations sending them legal threats. There was even one that took out physical ads for their private server in their country and blizzard could do nothing.
That's even more true if the private server software is easy to use. Then they'd have no recourse against the tens of servers popping up every single day by random people around the globe. By the time they'd sent legal threats to 10 of them, there'd be 30 more opening. They'd bankrupt themselves on lawyer fees.
While a big positive, Halo's move wasn't exactly revolutionary: Super Animal Royale has had the same system for years, and Inkbound implemented it months ago as well.
I'm getting Pleasant Greens energy from last the new set. One can only expose scams from a two-person couch.
Yo Callum I like what you're doing with the greenscreen and the editing format you're going for. It's definitely got a bit of jank for you to figure out but imo it's much more engaging and entertaining than the typical box in the corner style of commentary that is much more prevalent. Please keep it up!!
Everyone's an armchair producer now. How about just enjoy what you get?
@@SomeRandomDevOpsGuy because as someone who actually does create shit, I appreciate when folks notice changes in direction... it's called critique and people use that to improve their craft.