Q&A Summary 30/03/23
The New Skill Pitch Poll is now live! Vote now to have your say on which should go through for refinement!
Have more than one favourite? You have the option to vote for more than one!
This week's livestream focused on the New Skills Pitches! Topics included:
Thanks to Mod Light (Senior Community Manager), Mod Ayiza (Lead Community Manager), Mod Kieren (Associate Design Director), and Mod Elena (Content Developer)for their insights!
DISCLAIMER: Livestreams are a glimpse into the ongoing creative process at Jagex. JMods are speaking off-the-cuff and their comments are not intended to be read in the same way as prepared updates from the company. Please keep this in mind when discussing the Q&A!
Missed the live stream? Check out the transcript below!
General New Skill Questions
Question #1
What happens if a player doesn’t like any of the skills proposed? Or if they like all of them? Can they vote for more than one Skill?
Mod Ayiza
If you don’t like any of the skills we’ve pitched, the best thing you can do is vote no on them. The way that we’re looking at polling for this is that we’ll offer two questions; one of them will be multiple choice. In that question - let’s say that you like more than one skill - you can select all three of them.
Basically, this question will ask, “Which ones are you happy to see go through to refinement?”. It’s a very general question. There’s also an option to say, “I don’t like any of them”. If you’re really not that interested in the skill at all and you want the rest of the community to decide, you can choose to vote to skip it.
The second question is when we’ll ask for your specific favourite. If you had to choose just one, which would it be? That’s pretty much it! If you don’t like them, vote no. We can always go back if we need to and look over the pitches that we’ve put forward. We can then put new pitches forward.
It seems at the moment that we’ve given enough information and some good pitches that players like enough to be able to vote on them at least.
Mod Light
It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a whole stage of refinement, where we can tweak and amend pitches. You’re mainly voting on the concept and the direction at that stage. We can always tweak and amend, so keep that in mind - you’re not looking at a fully finished product yet.
Mod Ayiza
Just to add onto that - we’re still not at the stage where we’re actually adding a new skill into the game. The poll going live next week that asks you those two questions is simply asking you if you’re comfortable with us spending some extra time designing the actual skill details; those extra bits of information that you would expect to see from a more fleshed-out design. Then it will be ready for the stage after that where we ask if it should be added.
There will be another opportunity after we get into the refinement stage - should a skill pitch go through - for you to have that “yes or no” vote that you’re used to with a 70% majority requiring for it to be added. If that fails, we’ll go back and revisit all of this again.
If it passes, then great! We’ll start development, and we can look to get the skill added.
Question #2
Is there a chance we’ll bring out new concepts for brand-new Skill Pitches?
Mod Ayiza
Repeating what I said before: yes, there is a chance that we’ll bring out new concepts. There are different situations for this - the ideal is that we don’t need to because you’re happy with at least one of the current pitches, and there’s a clear, high-level amount of support to justify us putting one into refinement.
If that’s not the case, then we may go back to look over the pitches that we’ve already put together and refine them a little bit more to give that level of information to give you the confidence you want to put them into refinement.
If that isn’t going to prove successful - or it’s just not a viable option because you really detest them all, then we would look to go back to having entirely new pitches to put forward to you, and then ask if you want to send those into refinement instead.
Question #3
Why are some of the Skills missing details?
Mod Kieren
I think that’s fairly straightforward - we’re not done yet. This is the start, and the next stage is going to be us working with the community in what we’re calling “refinement” to help work out what a lot of those details will be. We want to do this with the community, rather than us telling you ahead of time. That’s the key thing.
We didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves and go into a lot of detail about things that you’re going to dislike. This could cause you to think less of the skill as a whole based on one small detail that’s easily tweaked and dropped down the line.
The next stage is to work out the details; we couldn’t flesh out three full skill designs because that would take a lot longer and be so much harder to communicate. We’re starting with the core concepts of themes, and that’s enough to make this choice about where we go next.
Mod Ayiza
We also shouldn’t be in a position right now where we’re providing three fully fleshed-out designs. I know that’s what players have become used to, but last year we did reform the way that we looked at polling content that we felt was more in line with community expectations.
Part of that change was that we look to provide you with a concept; a top-level idea that you then give us approval on before we start spending the time further designing something that you really didn’t want. This means we avoid spending countless hours on something you don’t want, and can then spend the time elsewhere on something that you thought was much more valuable.
I know it’s a bit different. It’s a skill, and it’s such a huge thing, but we’re trying to stick to the new polling system as well as we can so that when we get to the point of actually developing it, we can bring you on that journey with us. We can incorporate your feedback and your design decisions, and then really have something that has been built for you, and by you!
Taming Questions
Question #1
Let’s talk about Taming! Can we talk about why it’s awesome and why should you vote for it?! What kind of content would be available for players and what does the skill offer? We’ve seen some creators talk about the fact that Sailing and Shamanism have the edge by offering more ‘new areas to explore’ but let’s talk about what new areas could come with Taming as a Skill and why they would want it!
Question #2
How are we focusing on making this fun to train?
Mod Elena
It’s so important that caring for your companion isn’t tedious. It shouldn’t feel like a chore; it should feel like something where when you put in the work, you get rewarded for it. With kittens specifically, it just feels really annoying, and I think part of the reason for that is how passive it is.
You take out your kitten and it follows you around while doing other stuff. You don’t really care about the kitten, it’s just there while you focus on Smithing or whatever it is that you’re doing. Then when the kitten is needy, it disrupts what you’re doing because you’re not focused on the kitten.
The way I would go about fixing this in Taming would be to make it active gameplay. It shouldn’t be needy if you’re not paying attention or not actively using it. If it’s not with you, it shouldn’t feel like a chore or impact your gameplay.
That’s the biggest thing for me; it should be really closely tied to what you’re doing. For example, say I have a bear that can help me catch a new type of fish. Every time that procs - maybe not every time, but sometimes - the bear can only do that 100 times before it needs rest or food. So I feed it, and then it can keep going.
An alternative would be, say it was possible to use the bear in combat. When it’s used, it could take damage and would need to heal up again. A comparison I used before was that when you’re in combat and take damage, you have to eat - is that a chore? Why should it be different if your companion needs to heal? That’s the way I see it.
Mod Light
That’s a really interesting take on the skill itself! I completely agree with the examples that you gave - it really opens your mind to the potentials of how we could make it fun, interesting and engaging to train. Obviously, the way that players currently experience it with Gertrude’s Cat is a completely different story from how we’re imagining Taming to be.
Question #3
Do companions need to follow a player? We’ve seen concerns about the map potentially looking overpopulated with the amount of Companions involved.
Mod Kieren
I love the idea of these companions not simply following you like pets. Before we explore any of the technical questions - we don’t know exactly, but we liked the idea that pets are a completely separate system. The pets you get from bosses still exist; they just follow you separately to the Taming system.
Maybe you could have a Companion out as well as a pet as a separate thing depending on clutter and how we’d handle all that. If you’ve got a wolf, it wouldn’t just sit behind you and follow you around. It would probably be a bit more defensive. It would guard you and help to defend you. It would sit in front of you or by your side.
To me, that has got to be the case for it to be more believable and make sense. That means we’d need to add different behaviours to different types of Companions. It might be entirely different for a monkey versus a wolf, for instance. Let’s look into that to give them a bit of a personality that they represent.
There’s legitimate feedback about how many Companions I’m going to see on screen. Will I go to the Grand Exchange and find it’s like a zoo? We absolutely have to look at that and make sure it’s not the case because we don’t want to clutter the screen up with stuff that’s not that important for you to see. It might be in some places that you maybe only see your own companion. We’ll have to look at solutions for that, but I’m not worried about it myself.
Mod Ayiza
I also saw some suggestions around clutter management as well - there could potentially be areas that your companions are exclusive to, and it’s only in those areas that they appear. I do love the thought of being able to have your Companion out alongside you, just generally adventuring across Gielinor, but I’m also quite conscious of the general clutter as well. As Kieren said, we all are - it’s not just me.
There are some ways we could look at addressing it if they seem fitting or if it was going to be a cause of concern, but I did like an example that Elena had suggested that there’s a course that your Companions can complete, similar to agility, but it’s a Companion exclusive event. Maybe that’s just where that Companion stays; that could be where its home is that you have to build for it and you only get that Companion out when you go to do that activity.
Mod Elena
Something that Kieren mentioned about the personalities of companions - I think that’s such a cool part of Taming. The wolf could behave entirely differently from a monkey or a crocodile. I think that’s really where the excitement of many different companions can come in, especially if they have quite niche but nice abilities for you.
That creates a lot of diversity; I don’t want to see everyone has to have a wolf out because that’s the best at everything. That’s not cool. The cool thing is when you see someone with a bird following him, another has a crocodile waddling after him, and someone else has something you’ve never seen and have no idea how to get! That’s the cool part for me.
Mod Kieren
I’d also love for it to be based on how you’ve trained them, so everyone’s crocodile is different. Maybe there’s some underlying seed, but beyond that, if you train them largely on their loyalty to you or their aggression, are they for combat or something else? You can take them in different directions so that it’s not just a case of everyone having Roger the Crocodile. Maybe your crocodile is different.
Question #4
Can you give some top-level examples of the type of QoL opportunities here? I think players may have felt we were too vague with details.
Mod Elena
This is in terms of the abilities that Companions can have, right? One thing we’ve brought up was the potential for a monkey, for example, to be able to pick up your Marks of grace. This isn’t something that’s particularly meta-impacting; it’s hardly going to affect your XP, it’s just nice. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing and pick up the marks. You’re not missing anything, your little buddy has got you.
I’ve seen plenty of suggestions about if Companions could replace something that you normally do. Could they dig for you instead of you having to use a spade? Could you skip an agility obstacle? Maybe in some places, there are Taming obstacles instead of agility, and you need the right Companion to cross them.
Mod Light
It’s important to remember that during refinement, we can speak with the players to work that out. Players don’t need to be worried about the animal Companions’ abilities being too strong, because ultimately they get a say. I find that really reassuring in terms of making sure that the Companion abilities are fairly balanced in terms of what the player base wants.
Question #5
How will players’ existing pets work? Would they become skins for tamed creatures?
Mod Elena
This is something that has come up a lot, and it’s something that, before pitching, we thought about internally. We weren’t sure which direction to go in, so we decided to leave it open and focus on it in refinement so that we can go with what the community wants.
The way I see it is that there are two main options with slight variations. A big one is that you could have both out; you could have your pet, which is a huge achievement, even though pets currently don’t do anything. They’re still cosmetic, they’re cool following you around, they’re cute, etc.
I love pets and pet hunting myself, so that’s quite important to me on a personal level that they don’t go away, and I don’t feel like I have to choose between my pet and Companion. That’s one possibility; having the pet and Companion out at the same time.
Another is the potential of having similar-looking pets override certain Companions. The example I’ve been using so far is; imagine you can tame a bear cub. Then the bear cub could then be overridden by Callisto, who is a bear pet. Then you avoid the clutter because you only have one NPC out instead of two, but at the same time you get to show off the badass achievement of, “Yeah, I do have the pet!”.
Question #6
Were mounts an option for us in Taming?
Mod Elena
We talked about this a bit, quite early on. Could this be a skill? We talked about mounts in RuneScape, and if it could potentially work. It would take a lot of testing and failure, and at this point we’re not 100% sure if we could do a traditional mount system. It’s something that we would have to try ourselves before we can really promise to do that.
The alternative is to do something similar to how we do travel in-game currently. If you’re flying with giant eagles, for example, technically that’s a mount. It’s an animal that carries you from one place to another.
You also have magic carpets; we could do pre-made routes like that, but whether you could have a mount that you could control? Probably not, but I wouldn’t exclude it. We would just have to try before we can promise it.
Mod Light
You gave an example before of a rare bird that could take you to the top of a mountain. That’s a premade thing that introduces a new area and a new way of travel. I think that was a really cool idea for Taming that we could do with animal companions.
Mod Ayiza
Just to clarify - keep in mind that us discussing it internally doesn’t mean that it’s something that we would want to necessarily see happen. It was more so that if it comes up from the community and they really ask us to do it, would it be possible for us, instead of us thinking if it would be a really good addition to Taming.
We’re going to explore it as a possibility. I think the general consensus that we got was that mounts don’t really feel like an Old School thing, which is why it would take so much time, effort and development to be able to make them feel as if they could work. It was more of a, “If we had to”, as Elena said, would we be open to it?
I don’t want everyone to come out of this and think that down the line Taming means that we’ll be looking at adding mounts into Old School. It was literally just a case of if there’s a huge demand that comes of it. We tried to think of so many possibilities that the community might ask us when we come out with the pitches, and we just wanted to be prepared enough.
It’s not an indication of something that we necessarily feel we would want to add or feel that should be added. That’s the whole point of consultation; the whole point of going into refinement.
At the end of the day, if there’s overwhelming support for something, it’s in our best interests to at least explore that for you, if that’s what you wanted. I just wanted to make sure that no one came out of this thinking, “That’s it, I’m sold against Taming! I’m anti-Taming because I don’t want mounts!”. That’s absolutely not it, and if something like that was to happen, we can assure you that’s something during refinement.
Question #7
Was Taming in any way inspired by Ranching - like is there a possibility of breeding them and getting resources from them?
Mod Elena
I quite liked that pitch! I would say that part of it was inspired by it, and I think the big thing for me is that when I think of breeding pets, I think of farming or animal husbandry. That feels very farming to me.
What I didn’t want us to run into was feeling like the skill couldn’t stand on its own, or didn’t have its own training methods. It’s just part of farming, so that’s why we adapted it to not go heavily in that way, but I could easily see there being a crossover between farming and Taming that does introduce ranching or animal husbandry down the line.
Sailing Questions
Question #1
Let’s talk about Sailing! Can we talk about why is it awesome and why should you vote for it?
Mod Kieren
Imagine all the things you can do on Gielinor on land. Imagine what you haven’t discovered in the ocean and at sea! To me, that is the essence of this pitch. There’s a huge amount of the world that you’ve not been able to discover.
A Sailing skill will mean that we need to go and spend a lot of time on the ocean and sea, and pack it full of interesting things to discover. That to me is where the dream of Sailing comes from. We could discover all this stuff; that’s the exciting bit.
What are those random islands that you’ve never been to before? What’s this sunken treasure in the middle of the ocean? What if you could sail off to Fremennik and fight down a fearsome beast on an island?
There are all sorts! It’s not just about piracy-like Sailing; it could be big rowing boats or a load of Fremenniks in a ship! There’s so much we can explore, and honestly, it could be really, really cool.
There’s still a lot to work out, and I think Sailing is certainly the biggest technical challenge for us, but we know that the skill would get the right commitment and the right resourcing. We’ve already had some exploratory conversations with our tech teams about how we can make the ocean look better and feel more like it’s real.
From a gameplay perspective, we know we’ve got to do something far better than what’s in Bone Voyage and the fishing trawler. We can, there’s no doubt about it, and that will be a big part of the topic of refinement if we go through with Sailing.
To my point about the world, it’s essentially a world expansion with a skill as one of the core tenants. That’s why it doesn’t feel like a mini-game. It’s more world; it’s more RuneScape and it’s not instanced. You’re in the real game world, you could see people fishing at Catherby.
I think that the potential of Sailing is so massive, and that’s both exciting and terrifying.
Question #2
Is this going to be instanced content? Are islands permanent locations, procedurally generated, or a mix?
Mod Elena
It’s permanent. The idea is to have the sea be similar to the regular land that you can see right now in the game. You’ll be able to take off from a port and sail to an island, and the next time you go, you can sail to the same island or try to find a new one. It’s not procedurally generated.
I know that this is something that a lot of players are thinking and it excites them. I get the appeal of ever-changing content, and it’s something that we talked about internally. Could we do procedurally generated stuff? It wasn’t something that we wanted to be part of the skill initially because we think the sea has so much potential on its own.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t do it down the line. It would be an update to the skill, for example. I’m a big fan of roguelite dungeons and I was wondering how that could work with Sailing. It would be interesting to explore.
Mod Ayiza
Around the point of instanced content, we’ve said already that the intention is for it to be just the same as the open world. It wouldn’t be instanced; you would see other people out at sea.
The dream is that you’d be fishing at Catherby and see someone on the sea in a boat, and be able to interact with them in the same way you would as if they were sitting next to you fishing at the same time.
Mod Elena
One thing that Husky mentioned in the pre-recorded video was, “What if you could customise your ship and the sails on your ship to display your clan logo?” I think that’d be such a cool thing. Imagine your entire clan just sailing away. That’d be awesome, you could have an armada of ships!
Question #3
How is this NOT a mini-game?
Mod Kieren
Straight up - it’s just not. I’ll say it as a matter of fact; it’s not a mini-game. What is a mini-game? To me, a mini-game is something that is probably instanced, it’s localised to one area of the map and generally, it’s got a point system depending on how it’s gamified.
Sailing is nothing like that. This is going to be part of the world. Sailing could take you to - for the sake of cliché - Deadman’s Cove and maybe Varrock at the sea. It’s just getting around in that sense, but what can you do with boats? That’s what we’re imagining; all the different things you could do with boats! You can travel the world with other people, you don’t enter a zone and get a 20-minute timer on your screen where at the end you get points based on how you performed.
It doesn’t feel like a mini-game to me. I get the criticism, and I do know where it comes from, with how we’ve talked about Sailing back in 2015 and the old pitch. A lot of the ideas have floated around in the years between as there are a lot of people who have talked about Sailing for a long time. There is a bit of a preconception about how Sailing would work, and it’s so far different to that, that we don’t feel like it’s a mini-game.
You’ll get a chance to tell us that as we move forward anyway as we go into refinement - if Sailing is the one we take forward then we’ll be talking in much more detail about how the skill would work. The community will help us guide us on certain details, and we’ll make sure that we shape it to not be a mini-game.
That’s the key thing; it’ll interact with the real game world. That is the number one thing, whether you’re doing work at a port to help set it up so that you can dock your ship there and move off from there, or whether it’s getting crew members from Varrock or Edgeville, whoever you want to recruit to your crew. The key thing being it’s not just a mini-game, it’s not a joke; it’s something that’s properly integrated with the game.
Mod Ayiza
Runecraft has Guardians of the Rift, which you could perceive as a mini-game. There are various other things out there; you could almost look at Volcanic Mine being a smaller mini-game that’s an extension of mining. Sailing is very similar in that I can imagine a world where there are Sailing mini-games that you enact in - you can’t have a mini-game in a mini-game.
The idea is that it’s open world and an extension of the current game with so many activities and training methods alongside it, rather than just one localised activity. The fact that there could be mini-games within it, just like there are currently in-game, is really what sets it apart for me in the sense of it not being a mini-game.
Question #4
There's a concern about whether we can actually pull the dream off of Sailing on the sea. How much development time is involved in making this fun content at sea? Players might be tempted to opt for a safer skill in case they feel let down.
Shamanism Questions
Question #1
Let’s talk about Shamanism! Can we talk about why is it awesome and why should you vote for it?!
Mod Light
For me, it’s our wildest pitch. It’s something different; it’s the Spirit Realm. We’re not looking to make you guys go 420-blazing it across Gielinor having hallucinations or anything like that. We’re looking to bring you something different; something unique. There’s a desire in the community for something brand new, and we’ve seen skills that are from other games like RuneScape 3, but Shamanism? Nobody was expecting it!
There was one comment on Reddit with the word “Shamanism” before we published the blog, and this is something brand new and unique. It offers something that no other skill currently does; at present, it’s offering you the ability to augment your gear, which we know is a big deal.
Knowing that refinement is a thing, we think that we could strike a really good balance in terms of making it rewarding while also making it balanced at the same time. It’s something that came out of community consultation; we put it to the devs and asked if they could make a skill that is natural, and potentially has an item that enhances gear utility. This is what they came up with, and the Spirit Realm as well is something really, really cool.
It’s inspired the art team so much with what we could do, and I’m really excited to see people loving it so far. That’s why I think you should give it a shot. It’s cool and has a familiar gameplay loop - I’ve seen a lot of people reassured about the gameplay loop of Shamanism in terms of it feeling familiar to people in Old School.
Question #2
Let’s quickly touch on the name - why Shamanism, are we open to changing it?
(Mod Elena had to leave the stream as we hit 18:00 BST)
Question #3
Are item augments going to cause a lot of power-creep and how are we managing that? How can we avoid FOMO with the skill?
Question #4
We’ve said we want it to be largely a non-buyable skill. We’ve seen lots of interest to make resources from Hunter/Slayer useful for Shamanism. Are resources from the real world something we can incorporate and instead make the untradeable parts of the skill come from the Spirit Realm?
Mod Kieren
I think that there is a lot of potential for tying it in. As I’ve said; the best skills should be interwoven with existing systems in the game. It’s not just by itself, it should tie in and help other skills, and have other skills work with Shamanism as well.
Hunter is a great shout because there are so many things in Hunter that feel completely useless! We can look at using some of the redundant resources in the game and add new ones of all sorts.
That said, something that players have told us unequivocally in response to the survey is that they don’t want the New Skill to be buyable. On day one of the skill, the person who gets to 99 first in that exciting race is the person who has got the most money to fund it. I don’t think that’s fun either; I’d much prefer for it to be a fair competition.
We need to be careful about what resources are tradeable and what aren’t, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any tradeable aspects. We could feed those into the reward aspects rather than the training things for instance.
Obviously, we don’t have all the details. We don’t have a whole level-up guide written down already! This is the sort of process that we’ll be thinking about, but it’s a huge chance to tie in other skills.
Mod Ayiza
As Kieren said, there’s a huge potential to integrate existing skills, especially something like Hunter, one of the points we made is that we’re very mindful of is that we wouldn’t want Hunter to feel like a requirement for you to train Shamanism. Most likely, if we were to do stuff with that huge amount of potential, it would be more for that reward space as opposed to the general core training loop.
You wouldn’t have to go and spend the next 15 hours hunting Chinchompas. In order to get the next five or eight levels or so of Shamanism, it would be more like side benefits that you’d be able to get for reward space, I imagine.
Again, those are things that we can definitely firm up with you, with the emphasis being that it should integrate into other skills. All of them, as Kieren said, should really integrate, but other skills shouldn’t be a hard requirement for you to train any of the new skills, Shamanism especially because we wouldn’t find it super enjoyable for someone to just get 99 because they’ve got the most money in their bank.
We also think it wouldn’t be all that enjoyable if you have to go and revisit skills that you’ve already levelled up and maybe had no intention of ever really touching again, at least not for a considerable portion of your time spent in-game.
Mod Light
It would really suck if the way that you train the skill is through another skill, because then you’re not actively training the new skill just released.
Mod Kieren
When Summoning came out in 2008, the first thing you had to do was go to Slayer. We’re aware of that, and for what it’s worth, we don’t want it to suddenly be, “if you want to train an account, it’s far better to get 99 Taming, Sailing or Shamanism before you go and do fishing because of the other perks you’ll get from these skills. We want it to be sandbox-y - you can choose what your goals are and do things in any order you want.
Question #5
Is the Spirit Realm going to be instanced, and what are your goals with the scope of the spirit realm right now? Are you going to access it anywhere or only at hotspots that are basically “dungeons”, that are separate areas accessed at specific locations?
Chat Questions
Question #1
Will there be PvP with Sailing potentially?
Mod Ayiza
There has been a discussion internally in terms of, “Could we make PvP work in Sailing?”. If it were ever going to happen, it wouldn't just be that you're out at the sea, and PvP is enabled everywhere.
You can imagine that there is a dangerous area out in the sea that has new rules and it is similar to the Wilderness, just out at sea and without all of the current restrictions in terms of the Wilderness lore. I think that'd be really cool and it’s something to explore.
Question #2
Will there be quests on release for the new skill?
Mod Ayiza
I think we imagined that for each new skill that we introduced, there would probably be an introductory quest to explain the basics to you - especially as they wouldn't be incorporated into something like Tutorial Island.
Outside of that, the possibilities really are endless in the future and beyond. We could have skills where quests require you to have that skill. Maybe the quest is focused entirely on the skill itself, like some examples I gave about Shamanism. They could be a Taming-specific quest, or even a quest that's out at sea, for example.
At least, to begin with, it would just be a case of adding them to explain it. I don't believe we would be looking to retroactively change existing quests to incorporate the new skill - it'd be more about new skill additions if anything.
Mod Kieren
There’s no chance we would suddenly go back and decide that a quest suddenly has a sailing requirement.
Question #3
Can we get all 3 skills?
Mod Ayiza
Not right away, but it’s something I’d like to do over a long period of time.
Mod Light
Something I want to say is that we’re very aware that the first new skill has to be something really special. We’ve seen that in the feedback, we’ve seen that in the survey - you guys have such high expectations and we want to match those expectations. So whatever skill it is, we want to make it as good as it can be.
Mod Kieren
Whichever one goes forward; the team is so passionate and good at designing this stuff. We are going to deliver whichever one goes forward! If not, this is not the end of the road - we have been talking about how this is the first skill.
If everyone likes it and it goes well, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t be talking about another one down the line. If the community wants another one, we’ll explore that. That’s getting years ahead of us, next time around, maybe it’s your second favourite that goes forward. There’s no reason your favourite wouldn’t be up for discussion in the future, particularly if it’s popular.
We’re gonna see the results of the votes next week - which is mildly terrifying, but also so exciting to see what people will vote for! If you’re happy with all three of them, vote yes to all three! If you’re happy with two of them, vote yes to both of them. Ultimately, we’re keen on moving forward with the one that best represents what the community wants to see.
We don’t like the idea of people being overly tribalistic about their favourite, saying “If I can’t get my favourite, you’re not having one!”. That’s not what we want to see!
Mod Ayiza
That’s a really good point! At the end of the day, there’s no real benefit to being super angry about other people preferring a different skill over you. Have a constructive conversation about it!
Talk about what it is that you like more without making someone else feel bad about it because at the end of the day, it won’t get you anywhere and it doesn’t change anything. What will change is giving constructive criticism, good feedback and being a little open-minded towards things going ahead.
As Kieren said, there’s a really solid team behind it! Hopefully, all of the effort we’ve gone to so far has shown you how passionate we are and how much we care about getting this right. So if you had any instance in your time of playing Old School to just have some faith, now is the time! We absolutely want to do this right!
