I’ve been keeping an eye on a fascinating microcosm of the MMO economy for a while now, and it’s officially reached a boiling point in the Old School RuneScape community. The recent release of two new enemies, one spitting out millions of gold despite being easy to kill, and the other locked after an endgame quest but struggling to give anything up valuable, it has confused and rankled the OSRS faithful, to the point that developer Jagex recently delayed a planned Q&A session so it could focus on ironing out some loot tables.
In April, zombie pirates were added to Old School RuneScape. These are weak mobs averaging level 28 with only 35 hits, found en masse in the PvP enabled Wilderness, though not very deep in the Wilderness. They are easy to reach, easy to kill and – based on player reports and reputation OSRS wiki – can earn you over 2 million gold per hour, with most of that profit coming from weapons and materials, which, while small payouts individually, add up very quickly. It’s such easy money, in fact, that the countless robots infesting OSRS like termites on an oak tree soon descended upon the pirate zombies in droves.
Fast forward to this week and we have the release of While Guthix Sleeps, a new Grandmaster level quest. I say new, but this is actually the re-appearance of a quest that first came to plain RuneScape in 2008, resurrected for Old School RuneScape with a few tweaks. While Guthix Sleeps carries fairly heavy skill and quest requirements, and your main reward for completing it is the ability to craft some new weapons and hunt the level 450 tortured demons who drop the materials needed for those weapons .
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Although the main draw of Tormented’s original demons, the coveted dragon claws, had already been introduced to OSRS through a previous raid, many players were excited to see these demons return after all this time. However, many of those players were quickly disappointed to find that the new Tormented Demons don’t lose much value, falling woefully behind the much easier pirate zombies in terms of gold per hour, even if you can still grab exclusive items like bones. claws and tortured synapses roughly to the extent of their fall.
This is not an entirely unique problem. Certain OSRS bosses and enemies are known to spawn easy gold, and new challenges are often measured against them. After all, there can only be one better money maker. That said, you can still have plenty good money makers that are fun in their own ways. But the extreme gulf between Pirate Zombies and Tortured Demons, especially with the recent prejudices since they appeared just months apart, raised a few eyebrows in the OSRS community. Jagex had fixed the pirate zombies after the previous outcry, but the Tormented Demons still compared unfavorably.
The OSRS Reddit community was, in a word, vocal about this wealth gap. With a little quick math, a player reasoned that killing men – common, tier 2 types that appear in normal cities – could match or beat the yield from Tortured Demons, barring mega-rare ones. This obviously depends on your luck and how efficiently you can kill demons, and players will optimize this process over time, but for Grandmaster exclusive enemies the early numbers weren’t pretty.
“I was worried I might have to move my zombie pirate bot farm and I didn’t want to meet all those requirements so I’ll just leave it there and make 10x gp/hour,” said me mood. another player.
A highly voted one POST put it bluntly: “A few months ago, we got zombie pirates dishing out millions of gp and shut down behind zero restrictions and super light content. Today we got a Grandmaster quest, with Tortured Demons far away, and their loot is worse than ordinary Great Demons.”
Following an update on July 10, which further fixed pirate zombies by removing an item from their normal loot table, Jagex released a blog post accepting feedback on Tormented Demons.
“As we’ve done with most recent releases, we opted for a more conservative loot table rather than an overly generous one – it’s worked well for us (and the health of the game) and is something we’ll continue to do,” Jagex say. “That being said, we hear you loud and clear – the Tormented Demon loot tables need some work. We’re going to take the time to fix this and make sure we’re making a decision that’s well-informed as well from the data. like your comments. We’ll be looking to talk about these in more detail next week when we have more data points on factors like kills per hour and/or unique prices.”
Admittedly, this doesn’t tell you much, but to be crystal clear: we’ll be watching the loot tables carefully and plan to make changes in line with your feedback once we have better data ,” adds the developer. “We are always open to making changes where necessary, and this is no exception.”
Jagex also made a request of its own, which shouldn’t be necessary, but unfortunately is all too common with online communities: “Please stop targeting or singling out individual developers while providing your feedback. In many cases, the developers being targeted they are not In all cases, the mechanisms and loot tables are passed through the team and reviewed – we succeed as a team and fail as a team Be critical of our work as a team, but the repeated targeting of individual team members must stop.”
OSRS players responded in kind, asking himself Why were the Tortured Demons given a “careful loot table” while the pirate zombies were practically given a golden ticket. Most importantly, one of main posts on the game’s subreddit also echoes Jagex’s call for normal and decent behavior: “That goes without saying. Let’s be better, people!”
Jagex has had numerous PvE successes of late, and OSRS is widely considered to be reaching new heights as one of the greatest MMOs around, so I have no doubt that a reasonable middle ground can be struck here. The developers responded quickly, seem to agree with players on several points, and countered a Q&A not only because they don’t yet have “certain answers to many of the questions we’ve seen from you,” but also because “we want to protect the time of to our team to allow them to make the necessary adjustments and changes.”
It remains to be seen when these changes will arrive, but this whole ordeal so far has been an intriguing demonstration of MMO player expectations, as well as risk and reward in loot economies. I haven’t played RuneScape in years and don’t have any skins in the game, but I’ve run into similar loot issues in MMOs like Destiny 2, so I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
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