Revenant Caves: Hotfix

02/22/2018

Following the changes made to the Revenant caves as detailed, there has been a very vocal concern about the amount of wealth/resources entering the game. We haven't been ignoring you, and we've spent the past few weeks assessing data before concluding whether a change is needed. Before we announce the changes, we'd like to offer some insight into the process we've followed.

When looking at the Revenant caves post-release, as part of our usual retrospective meetings with larger updates, we detailed the main issues we had identified and wanted to resolve. One of these was addressing the drops within the Revenant Cave to better align with the polled GP rates, as they were under what we had hoped to achieve.

On February 8th, we updated the Revenant caves , which led to the aforementioned concerns.

Since the update went live, we have been closely monitoring the data alongside our analytics team, to ensure any decision we made post-update was well-informed and could be validated. A top-level analysis suggested GP rates were as expected, and caused us no concern to make immediate changes. However, to ensure we weren't making the wrong decision, and to alleviate any concern, we opted to add additional tracking methods to the Revenants, allowing a more refined and granular approach to our analysis. We've had the opportunity to delve into the data, and we can share the following information:

On average, we estimate a typical player would have been earning any 1.40m to 2.04m per hour whilst at the Revenant caves. This is based on data the average number of Revenant kills every hour between the 15th February to the 19th February.

However, there were players getting higher than that value, and many players getting much lower than that value. Due to the huge number of players killing Revenants, more than we'd ever anticipated (over twice the amount of players killing them than on their initial release), there are typically any between 2-5 players attacking the same one. This is making the kills extremely fast. Whilst this does mean only one of the players is getting the loot, they're consistently getting more gold per hour than others. In addition to this, because of the inflated number of kills per hour, there are more resources being introduced to the game than we ideally would like.

We want the Revenant caves to remain profitable, but we must also ensure the reward matches the effort involved, and that other methods continue to remain viable. As such, we are making the following changes:
All of the below changes have been hotfixed and are now live in-game, unless marked otherwise.

  • Dwarf multicannons can no longer be placed within the Revenant area of the caves.
    • They can still be used else throughout the cave for those doing Wilderness Slayer.
  • Each Revenant NPC has a certain percentage chance of rolling on the normal loot table. We are changing the formula for this percentage chance so that the lower level Revenant NPCs have a substantially reduced chance of hitting it.
    • Higher level Revenants aren't exempt, and have also had their chances of rolling the normal loot table slightly reduced.
  • The value of the normal loot table has been slightly reduced, focusing more towards reducing the number of resources being dropped.
    • For example, the quantity of items such as Onyx bolt tips have been lowered more so than others.

  • W345 Permanent Deadman ONLY - Revenant NPCs have had most of their s removed. The only drops available them now are the Bracelet of ethereum, Revenant ether and Ancient crystals.
    • Players holding on to any of the following items will find they have automatically been converted to their corresponding trade-in value in tomorrow's game update: Ancient emblem, Ancient totem, Ancient statuette, Ancient medallion, Ancient effigy and Ancient relic. If you have a max cash stack, the coins will have dropped to the floor upon login.
    • We want to leave the Revenant caves for players to utilise it for Wilderness Slayer, but the Revenant NPC s simply can't be effectively balanced with the game mode (it's one of the reasons we removed them in Seasonal Deadman). As such, we opted to remove all items the Revenant NPC s but keep the Bracelet of ethereum and Revenant ether, which also prevents discontinued items existing within the game mode.

As always, we'll be monitoring the changes we've made today very closely and further changes may be made necessary. We encourage you to provide any feedback in this forum post. We'll also be discussing the Revenant caves in today's Old School Q&A stream, which you can watch live 5pm GMT on twitch.tv/RuneScape.
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