Feedback about the deep wilderness changes

[SnowDragon]

This is quite a touchy topic at the moment, isn't it? I don't want to add fuel to the fire, and as such will not be proposing any changes on how the deep wilderness should be handled - I know balancing is a delicate issue, and only want to provide some input based on my perspective.

In order to counter farming for gloves/PvP gear, measures like the deep wilderness threat system were introduced. Since it was insufficient at preventing camping, the threats keep being made more dangerous and aggressive. My worry is that the extreme focus on preventing camping may lead to extreme measures that make the deep wilderness unusable for other purposes, such as clue hunting. The enormous packs of 15+ revenants that now roam the deep wilderness already feel a step removed from the authentic game, but at least they are manageable. However, the recent temporary addition of inauthentic KBDs to the deep wilderness has dissuaded me from doing hard clue steps in the deep wilderness entirely, despite the fact that I was not farming gloves/PvP gear at all.

I just hope that the deep wilderness threat system does not get overtuned to the point where it dissuades casual players and only encourages dedicated campers from entering the deep wilderness, ironically exacerbating the very issue it was meant to solve. Again, I understand this is a delicate and contentious issue, and that not everyone will be happy with the changes that are ultimately made. Developing and testing such changes is an exhausting process, and I'm genuinely grateful to everyone whose work makes this fantastic game possible.

Thanks and regards,
Snowdragon.

[ryannathans]

I agree with your concerns, but you don't need to fear, proper fixes are in progress

[SnowDragon]

Good to have that reassurance, thanks Ryan!

[Ceikry]

As I stated ingame when I made all these changes ingame: they are purely temporary to prevent mass farming until we get the proper rebalance in.

The alternative at the moment would quite frankly be disabling the deep wilderness entirely and deleting every brawler glove from every account.

[SnowDragon]

I'd respectfully say we're at a point where deleting every brawler in the game right now does not feel unreasonable. As a less extreme alternative, restricting drops from NPCs other than revenants and the Chaos Elemental would already go a long way towards resolving the farming issue without requiring further temporary measures.

For the record, I do not seriously believe deleting all brawlers is a good solution. However, I've heard of an incident about where a large number of revenants were spawned in response to someone using brawlers. If utilizing brawlers for their intended purpose was not seen as game-breaking (or at least abnormal), such an action would not have been necessary.

[Ceikry]

I'd respectfully say we're at a point where deleting every brawler in the game right now does not feel unreasonable. As a less extreme alternative, restricting drops from NPCs other than revenants and the Chaos Elemental would already go a long way towards resolving the farming issue without requiring further temporary measures.

For the record, I do not seriously believe deleting all brawlers is a good solution. However, I've heard of an incident about where a large number of revenants were spawned in response to someone using brawlers. If utilizing brawlers for their intended purpose was not seen as game-breaking (or at least abnormal), such an action would not have been necessary.

To someone using brawlers? no. The revenants are there to prevent obtaining them. As for your first question, disabling them from everything but revs/chaos ele doesn't actually help, because chaos ele being safely farmable was the reason for this entire change to begin with, and even if that weren't the case, deploying a change to fix that requires an exactly equivalent amount of work to deploying the other fix we already have for rebalancing the drop rates. There is nothing stopping both options from happening other than the update cycle.

That said, I'm strongly considering the removal of the bulk of the brawlers currently in the game on top of the changes already going into production soon.

[aweinstock]

https://gitlab.com/2009scape/2009scape/ ... uests/1517 has been merged to master, so it should be applied whenever the next update is.

It decreases the drop rate of brawlers to make them only slightly more common than ancient warrior's equipment (which incidentally makes them rarer at lower combat levels), and introduces a risk requirement to be able to receive drops from deep wild NPCs other than revenants or the chaos elemental.

The admin command that increases the number of patrolling revenants that's being used as a stopgap prior to this patch being deployed doesn't differentiate between revenants patrolling deep wild vs shallow wild, so it's an unfortunate consequence that it also affects smithing at the forgotten ruins.