[MrStormy]

Several Admins from RuneHQ got a chance to Chat with several members of Jagex's content team recently. We really enjoyed getting to talk to them one on one and ask some questions about Jagex and RuneScape. Here is a list of questions the staff came up with that we sent them also for answers. We plan to have more interviews with them in the near future. We are also working with them for recommendations on updates to RuneScape!

RuneHQ Questions

Section 1 – Personal Questions

• How long have you worked for Jagex? And what brought you to them?
  
  
  Mod_Chihiro I’ve been here 3 and a bit years now. I came to Jagex, because I knew Mod_mark (we used to play Tabletop RPGs and CCGs together), and I had started playing the game a year or so before joining because I was curious to see what mod_mark was up to? One day I noticed they were looking for content developers, so I asked him about the job and the company. It sounded good, I applied and got the job!
  
  Mod_newmatic I’m coming up to my third year here. After leaving University I had my own, long defunct, games company which I left to get “a sensible job”. When that became too boring to tolerate, I was pointed towards Jagex by a recruitment consultant. They offered me the job which I was happy to take since the interview days were pretty entertaining - It was nice to talk about games to people who were as addicted as I am.
  
  
• What do you enjoy as a content developer with Jagex?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Releasing content, is a lot of fun, seeing players get involved in the work you’ve been doing, enjoying the fruits of your labour, is a big buzz. It’s very satisfying.
  
  I also love working with other developers. We’re all gamers and geeks and it’s great working somewhere where that is the norm, not the exception. For example, the ‘water-cooler’ chat at Jagex is not about Football or Soap Operas, it’s about games. I love that.
  
  Mod_newmatic The work is varied with a great sense of being appreciated when a release goes out. The other developers also really help make it interesting. If you imagine a really good clan chat – then the conversations here can be just as strange but still count as work.
  
  
• Given the complexity of Runescape how difficult is it to create new content?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Increasingly so. Any piece of content has to work with the game as a whole. So many things can get in the way of that. Balancing, creative and technical limitations caused by the current state of the game makes it hard work to ensure a piece of content will not cause problems, and as you know we don’t always get it right first time. This is why content generally takes longer to develop than when I first started, there’s just so much more we have to think about.
  
  Mod_newmatic It is more and more complex as we add new skills, minigames and items – since every bit of content has to be designed so it doesn’t break something that came before. On the other hand the language we write in constantly gains new commands, so there are some opportunities to go back and make code simpler. As an example, when I added the Smoking Kills quest to the game I completely rewrote the Slayer code using new ways of storing the information. As a result the code is now a lot more readable and can be expanded more easily. A few of the projects we are looking at now are hoping to work in this sort of way.
  
  
• What surprises you about the way players play the game?
  Mod_Chihiro These days - not a lot! But before I really got to know the game, it surprised me how players would do things that were not scripted content, but a creative use of content intended for other things. I have a strong memory of going into a bank in Keldagrim one day and watching two male avatars, dressed up in a dwarven top and miniskirt and hitting each other with rubber chickens. For 10 minutes. There was no reason to do this other than fun, and to entertain passers by. But why not? We shouldn’t be telling you how to play the game.
  
  Mod_newmatic I’d like to think I’m not that surprised – because I’m a player myself and have tended to try all kinds of odd things. Having the imagination to try new and odd combinations of skills, animations and the like is a skill perfected by our QA department though – sometimes they do manage to surprise me.
  
  
• Do you have a group of real life users following you around when they realise you work for Runescape?
  Mod_Chihiro Always. It’s fun to feel like a ‘Superstar’ for a while, but it can get a little frustrating if you are online to watch players interact with your content, and the gold crown becomes the event, not the content. We can make ourselves invisible now, so this is less of a problem these days. Oh and please if you ever see a jmod don’t ask him/her to change her levels or put on a party hat. We won’t do it, and it gets tiring to hear those same requests again and again.
  
  Mod_newmatic I usually wander around in monk robes with the classic bald headed man model – so no one really notices me until I speak. I also tend to be around most often when new content is added, so players are distracted by that rather than me. That said, it can be very crowded when I’m online, and if I had a coin for every time I’d been asked to change my level, I’d be able to afford a few dozen extra large barrels of Greenman’s ale.
  
  
• Given a free reign what would you put into Runescape?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Build the City of Arposandra.
  
  Mod_newmatic I pretty much do have a free reign, since the desert and slayer areas I write for have always fitted in with the way the game is evolving.
  
  
• Who is your favourite character in Runescape?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Hazelmere .Although he existed in RS before I started work on the later gnome quests, I felt I gave him a lot of his personality, and I like the cycle of his personal story. Grumpy but noble, I love him.
  
  Mod_newmatic I have a soft spot for Ava, from Animal Magnetism. That was my first quest and I had a lot of fun writing sarcastic comments for her. There are also a load of conversation options for her during the quest that are triggered if you try to give her unusual chicken-related items. I don’t expect anybody has seen some of them but I was pleased I had the time to put them in there. Contrary to popular belief I don’t have an obsession with Scabaras though.
  
  
• Were you a gamer before you worked for Jagex?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Oh Yes. I started playing games on my ZX Spectrum, and buying Fighting Fantasy Books from my School book club. I’ve done other things as a job, but Computer Games, Tabletop and Live Roleplaying Games, Board games, these have been a running theme throughout my life.
  
  Mod_newmatic I started designing games when I was 6 or so, writing board games for my little sister. Since then I’ve played games pretty much every day of my life and still do. I’m rather a competitive gamer though, my first few months at Jagex were spent overtaking other developers in the RS highscores.
  
  
• Where do you get your inspiration and which group developes the ideas? The content developer or a group of people who write storylines?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Everywhere. I like to think it’s my job to grab ideas from all parts of my life and mould them into a piece of content. Storylines are generally written by individual developers, though some of the more central storylines tend to be worked on by Mod_mark and Paul (Gower), as well, to make sure it all fits together, and respects canon, and fits in with what’s needed for the game.
  
  Mod_newmatic The desert area is nice in that there’s a mass of historical and mythological material to draw from. I also had a skeleton of background from Paul (Gower) to work with so I’ve never been lacking in ideas. It’s more a problem deciding which heroic plots have to be rejected because we don’t have an infinite number of hours to work in.
  
  As for the ideas involved, I’ve had a lot of freedom, with the plots being very much my own work. We do have an overall view and make sure we don’t interfere with other developers though. That makes sure we don’t end up having one quest kill off Hans while another has him take over the world. I have a feeling players might notice if our storylines clashed like that.
  
  
• What are your suggestions for players to do in order to optimize their RuneScape experience?
  
  Mod_Chihiro Play the game the way you enjoy it. We give you enormous flexibility to do this, and I don’t think there is a single optimal way to play the game.
  
  Mod_newmatic It all depends what you want from the game, as I said I’m the competitive type so I tend to set myself the goal of “overtake player X.” With a target in mind it then gives me a much more purposeful game since every time I log in I know that I have something to aim for. If you play to just hang around with friends, make money or any of the other reasons to play, however, this might not be good advice for you.
  
  
• What is your proudest personal accomplishment?
  
  Mod_Chihiro IRL? My daughter.
  In RS? Fremennik Isles. It was a hard project to develop, as it was passed to me mid-development and I underestimated how much work I needed to do to it. It got close to getting canned on more than one occasion. So just getting it out, was quite an achievement for me. And then to find that it was popular with many different types of players, and was viewed as a well designed piece of content made all the hard work and late nights worthwhile.
  
  Mod_newmatic In a convoluted sort of way I’m proudest of actually having a selection of potential proudest achievements. A strong contender is ravelling the silk route from Korea to India via China, overland, with only a month of self-taught Mandarin to get me by. It also gave me an advantage in being desert curator - the Western Chinese deserts are as harsh as the Runescape version but with far less man-eating wildlife.

Section 2 – Mod_Chihiro’s Questions

• Do you see the game moving toward being skill oriented or quest oriented, and is there a difference in how you approach the programming aspects for one over the other
  
  Neither – giving the player the freedom to choose their path through the game is crucial to Runescape. Do they require different approaches? Yes. Quests tend to me more creatively driven, and more self contained. This is why many developers feel very attached to the quests they have written.
  
  Skill updates require a much wider understanding of how the game works from a technical and gameplay standpoint, so are more of a challenging to design.
  
  
• Because this is the year of improving old features, what major overhauls does this mean to old features? For example, some skills, such as Smithing, are much less important now than they used to be because of the addition of new armor and weapons.
  
  There are a number of the skills that we’d like to update. But these sorts of major overhauls are not to be taken lightly. If designing a new small skill update is hard, then imagine how hard it is to rethink, redesign, rebalance and recode a whole skill. Skills permeate every part of Runescape content, and making sure everything still works is a big, big, challenge. So yes, we do intend to do this sort of overhaul, but if I’m honest we’re a little scared of how much work it will be.
  
  
• Many people complain about bugs with new releases, how much QA and testing goes into new releases and updates?
  
  We have a team of 12 dedicated QAers, but it’s a hard thing to ensure every piece of content is bulletproof given the way we produce and release content. The more content we add the more we need to check, and releasing content weekly means that we can’t do the things that boxed games QAers can do, which is test the whole game before a release.
  
  We don’t always get it right , but remember that on release day every piece of content will we played through hundreds of times more in the first few hours of release than our QAers have had time to do and players will always find more ingenious and obscure ways to break content than a team of QAers could ever do.
  
  
• Has Runescape reached the limits of what can be played using a Java platform? (is this the best way to express this question)
  
  No, I don’t think so. I’m not a java programmer, so I don’t claim to be the last word on this side of things, but I know that Andrew and the engine team continually add more features to the engine, and that the engine can already support some features that we don’t use yet – the limitation is the amount of content and graphics that have to be reworked to make use of these features, not the engine itself.
  
  Also, Andrew has big ideas on how the engine will develop in the future so the limits that we have are more to do with what we can implement and keep the game fully functional, not java itself.
  
  
• What continuations or finalizations in the works for some of the current unfinished story lines regarding quests?
  
  Well, you already know about the dwarf quests, mod_john_A has started discussing this in his development diary. Mod _mark is well aware that plotlines need to be completed, and if we’ve made a mistake in the past it is that we’ve allowed a large number of plotlines to be started without clear plans about when we would complete them. I can’t tell you which other plotlines will be finished first, since that depends on which developers are available – and we have learned that it is a mistake to talk about projects until we have a developer actively working on them since things change very quickly round here, and we don’t want to promise anything we can’t deliver.
  
  
• Quests seem to be a huge attraction to the game, but sometimes it seems they come out to fast. Is there a reason or a standard for quest releases?
  
  I’m not sure I agree they come out too quickly. Some players are big quest players, and complain if we *don’t* release a quest every few weeks. Quests have always been a big part of Runescape, we believe we can create interesting and complex quests in a way no other MMO can, and we intend to continue to do so. So as always, it’s a question of balancing the content we release to make sure all types of Runescape players have something new to play, and something to look forward to.

Section 2 – Mod_newmatic’s Questions

• For years people been suggesting updates to skills that have a lack of content at higher levels such as Prayer, Firemaking, Mining, and Farming. This is the year of improvements, so is there going to be any improvement to these skills that would actually motivate players to achieve higher levels instead of just going for the skillcape?
  
  There’s certainly a greater number of developers looking at the older skills now with a view to doing behind the scenes changes to the way they are programmed. Whether individual developers will have the time available to expand their skills as part of this review, isn’t something I can either predict or make any promises for however.
  
  In my dual role as Slayer master and desert lord there’s a lot of time juggling going on to balance how much of my time is spent on each. I certainly have ideas for higher level Slayer content but as skill changes are very time consuming it might be that I could write one and a half quests in the time it takes to add and fully balance three or four new slayer monsters. Ultimately the decisions as to which of these I do is one taken at the top, unless I am cloned in which case I can do both.
  
  
  
• Are there times after reading the forums that you (content team member) become discouraged because players really don't appreciate an update and the time and effort it took to get it to the point of release?
  
  
• What do you do when you work yourself crazy on some update and then start getting loads of negative feedback? Get drunk and bash your head against the wall? Curse the users and go back to drawing table? All of the above?
  
  None of the above – It’s a lot more dull since I break out my mathematical skills at times like that. Thinking of 100,000 players going through an update it is a fair guess that 1% might really hate it and 1% might really love it regardless of whether it is good bad or indifferent - people are complex and can’t all be pleased all the time. That 1% amounts to 1,000 enraged or really happy players – and the unhappy ones are usually noisier, since the happy ones are busy playing. 1,000 unhappy players can make quite a noise even if they are a tiny minority – so I shrug and read the comments thinking of that statistic.
  
  Obviously I also look at whether any rants are justified, and learn from it, though this is something to be done over days rather than hours. To use a real example, when Smoking Kills was released there were quite a few early rants but many of these were people who hadn’t yet played the content and were missing the fact that Duradel had been changed quite a lot in his assignments. There were also the leaf-bladed sword drops which were initially a hidden part of the update and made some other unhappy people change their views after a day or so. There are a few ideas I’ve saved up for future updates from people who still had feedback after playing the content and seeing the effect on the Slayer skill.

Section 3 – Business Questions (Mod_Tuckwell)

• Was it really necessary to remove the "Behind The Scenes" articles? And why did it seem like a good idea to remove them?
  
  Yes, we found that the “Behind the Scenes” articles were a creative constraint on our developers as the promised content has to come out as communicated in order to avoid disappointment. The articles also prevented us from surprising you with content. We found that the Behind the Scenes articles sometimes led to compromises in quality that we've not been happy with and, most importantly, pieces of content being released which our players did not enjoyed as much as you should.
  
  
• Is there ever going to be another "State of Play" article to sort of also replace Behind The Scenes?
  
  No, we are going to be using the Developer Diaries to give you a more in-depth guide to what we are doing.
  
  
• In the past, you have seemed to have small in-game and main site updates that almost look like they try to limit peoples dependence on fansites. Do you plan to have any more updates like this in the future? Or do you plan to utilize fansites to share this type of information?
  
  We have never tried to limit players dependence on fansites. We have made a number of improvements to help players find information and advice on RuneScape.com as not all players are aware of the fansites such as RuneHQ.
  
  
• Do you believe that eliminating the wild benefited or hurt the game?
  
  Removing the Wilderness was really the only solution. We genuinely believe that if we hadn’t acted when we did that RuneScape wouldn’t exist anymore. The botting, RWT and credit card fraud problem was growing rapidly. If we hadn’t taken action, then it would have gone beyond any possible remedy.
  
  As Andrew said in his newspost in February, “If I could go back in time a year, I would make the same decision again.”
  
  
• Do you have any plans to open other locations for offices other than in the UK, such as in the US?
  
• Have you considered having workers telecommuting from home?
  
  We currently have no plans to open offices outside of the UK….sorry!

[Maon_zhi]

I appreciate reading their honest responses.

[King_Dancing]

Thanks Next time ask about Mobilizing Armies

[March1392]

Wow, so they are really becoming more friendly...thats good news =).

[UnrealEgg]

Its nice to see Jagex are being more friendly to fan sites. Also a very interesting read. Thanks to all that took part.

[Aximillio]

Very interesting. These interviews would greatly replace those behind the scenes!!!

[KingOfSentinels]

Am I the only one gonna be looking for Mod Newmatic at every single new Minigame or quest released? Keep a close look for those Bald-headed Monks!

Those Interviews were very interesting and a good read; I look forward to more

[Shade_Vizard]

I was wondering how long it would take them to get around checking Runehq. I know they have probably looked at the site before, But this kind of direct interaction is promising.

[johnieb95]

Interesting interview, I hope JaGeX can do more in the future.

[Jimmygotjive]

MrStormy, on Apr 24 2009, 11:18 PM, said:

[*]Do you have any plans to open other locations for offices other than in the UK, such as in the US?
[*]Have you considered having workers telecommuting from home?

We currently have no plans to open offices outside of the UK….sorry!
[/list]

So...... DO they have any plans to open other locations for offices other than in the UK? Such as in the US?



We may never know....

[Jasper]

Quote

Mod_Chihiro We can make ourselves invisible now, so this is less of a problem these days. Oh and please if you ever see a jmod don’t ask him/her to change her levels or put on a party hat. We won’t do it, and it gets tiring to hear those same requests again and again.

That rocks *jealous*

I think this is very, very nice from Jagex. To let the Admins from RuneHQ interview some Jagex staff

[Skilly]

I think it's cool that they are finally realizing how much of an effect RuneHQ as a whole on Runescape.

And I think it's uber cool how they can be invisible and such... luckiez

[DarkBlitz]

Very nice interview, thanks for sharing

[Eric]

I swear. There's probably some underground mod in RuneHQ right now...

IT'S EDD.

My favorite part was the invisibility. I'd feel like Harry Potter, yo'.

[Junni16]

Great interview, but not interested in reading every question cuz it's too long.

[Archaen]

I'm scared now, I didn't know they could go invisible. =O My privacy, invaded...

Quote

We have never tried to limit players dependence on fansites. We have made a number of improvements to help players find information and advice on RuneScape.com as not all players are aware of the fansites such as RuneHQ.

Many MMORPG's have a 'fan site' program, surely this is something they could induldge into? For example, don't kill me for this WoW has one where, the fan site has to oblige to certain parameters, such as don't have adverts that infringe RS rules etc. Then, if they abide with this and have a good member/page view base they get there link on a page within the offical site, this case would be runescape.com/fansites for example. Then the fan site can go, look wooo we are an offical help site, which gains traffic from RS and runescape know that people won't click dodgy sites on google and gain the traffic back from the fansite.

Anyway, thats just a general suggestion apart from that, a great read! Nice to seem them getting involved.

[Heavens_Vibe]

Very good read.

Hope to see more of this. *Traces RuneHQ Phone Calls*

Mwahahahaha!

[Fuller_871]

I never really read extremely big posts like these fully but this one really pulled me in. I read everything single word of it, it was very interesting.

[Final_Claim]

It's awesome that they do appreciate the fan sites, and that they acknowledge them. It's a sad truth, but there are a large number of players that either don't know or don't utilize the fan sites. I wouldn't mind seeing a RuneHQ link on a Jagex page though, that would be some nice bragging rights.


When will we be getting another interview with them? And did they only do an interview with us(RuneHQ) or the popular fan sites?

[Ralkal]

Interesting and informative in some way.
I can't wait for another phone interview
Thanks for posting it.

[war]

thats a really kool interview at least they are honest

[Olette]

Very interesting indeed.

[pf22222244]

=D
i thought runescape was made by aliens!!

[Coke]

:wacko:
This was very interesting. Never thought JaGex would be this involved in fan sites.

[OnlyEternity]

Wow that's great , I'm really happy Jagex is getting involved with fan sites.

I read the entire thing

This post has been edited by Sidespin: 27 April 2009 - 04:32 PM

[Mario_Freak4]

Nice to see that Jagex are speaking to us. I'm interested in what overhauls they have planned to skills. I'm assuming they have some planned, despite the admission that the idea scares them.

[CaptainPwn]

Skimmed, seems interesting.

I`m fairly sure that Jagex Moderators just tail troublemakers like me.

[Bolleno]

nice interview, also nice they are talking to runehq