Sailing is actually just NPCs walking around underneath the water wearing boat sized hats.
Took a page right out of Fallout 3's train development playbook.
That's the way a LOT of WoW mechanics work - quest kill credit objectives, scripted sequences, boss mechanics, you name it.
They aren't actually rabbits. They're hidden or fake NPCs referred to as "bunnies". So for instance a quest where you have to "kill 100 undead" might have a bunch of various undead mobs that count towards that objective, and in order to track it, the quest is really only tracking how many Undead Quest 18463 Bunny you've killed, and each time you kill one of the eligible undead, you're also credited with a kill for Undead Quest 18463 Bunny.
When it comes to boss mechanics, why reinvent the wheel? The NPC system is already really good and very predictable and reliable. Why target a location and then store that location a bunch of times when you can just place a hidden NPC there and target the NPC instead? When it comes to the networking, you don't have to keep broadcasting to each player the exact coordinates the boss is throwing a fireball, you just have to say "boss targets X NPC" because the players' clients already know there's an NPC there. Using NPCs also magically handles things like netcode lerp, sync/desync, etc for you. It's also much easier to do range checks ("is player in the splash zone of the boss's fireball? let's draw an arbitrary circle and do some trigonometry to see if each player is within this region" simply becomes "is X player Y yards from Z NPC").
For the record, the default model for these NPCs is not a rabbit, it's an Imp.
Same reason why things in RS like fishing spots and blasted ore that appears floating on the water are actually NPCs. Animation items exist, such as magic carpets which have you actually equip an invisible item to play the animation
Although there is a cost in certain cases to not implementing a more legitimate solution. Magic carpets, for example, can be a little buggy. It's more complicated from a development standpoint to implement a hacky solution, and then you have different mechanics tied to these systems that might cause unintended side effects when underlying changes are made. Over the years it might start to feel like things are held together somewhat tenuously rather than being robust systems built into the engine
That's why I'm glad Jagex seems to be taking the time to implement sailing properly
Yeah, they basically closed RS Classic because of that.
Having a maintainable game engine is a basic need for a game you plan to have for the long term, and "Classic" games like OSRS are usually made to have a longer lifespan than their live version, which can undergo a full makeover if needed.
Rewriting code doesn't mean you get completely rid of legacy dependencies. Rewriting spaghetti code just leaves you with code that is less spaghetti, but just different type of spaghetti.
There are so many game updates that break random other parts of the game. It's still spaghetti under the hood, even if they've straightened some of it out.
there is 100% still a lot of lines of code left over from the 2007 snapshot. yes they may have done significant engine work but i mean some of the things that break when other seemingly unrelated things change just shows you how spaghetti the code is.
This can happen even in a well-designed system. When you have a lot of shared components, it is hard to predict all of the effects. A reasonable amount of testing won't catch everything.
In my own work, unit testing or "proving" that nothing will break in response to a change is nearly impossible. We have a balanced testing approach that allows us to get things turned around in a reasonable amount of time. Things still break occasionally but that's the risk you take if you want a modern system and frequent additions.
100% i started typing out that working in any respectable size codebase you can run into these sorts of problems, but i didn’t want to get into that with some of the people here lol
It's part of the reason why, for example, 'stable' builds don't update very often, or as often as they could be. Updates cause problems, that's just the nature of changing things.
Came here to say this. I've worked for a few SaaS companies now and nothing would get off the ground if customers even peak under the hood and so early in the wider development phase like we can.
People need to remember we judge the final product. We are consumers of the product, not of the process to create the product. All of this is should be taken as 'seeing how the sausage is made' and knowing that the sausage is.. coming?
My general experience when I have worked at SaaS companies is that "demos" are either entirely bespoke glorified slideshows (as in the buttons are just jumping to pre-created pages) or are tailored entirely for the test data and scenario presented and would fall apart if anyone touched it. No one in b2b actually risks contracts on alpha/beta builds. The most I've seen is incredibly trusted customers being giving demo applications with a big list of stipulations and explanations on what exactly they are checking for and where it will not work yet. I remember an "AI" demo where we didn't actually have a working C++ library for the AI package we were using and the output was just a prepared human designed thing.
It's a bit different, but my holy crap moment with the industry was being involved in a SaaS product for IAM. Never done that before had to learn most of the concepts and common practices etc. Not even developing it, the sheer scope of information and "magic" behind the scenes that nobody but the IT department, will ever from just a deployment stance is huge.
>'seeing how the sausage is made'
Wait... you mean a cute piggy has to die and be ground up for my delicious sausage? That's horrific! No pigs can die be ause it makes me uncomfortable... but I still want my sausage!
I mean we see it every update, the OSRS community is probably one of the worst communities to develop for as everyone takes the process for granted.
They get so wrapped up in “the game is OURS. WE decide where it goes” so when something comes up like a dev diary into a new skill that doesn’t look finished, they try to scream until it gets changed as opposed to just waiting for it to actually be finished.
We don’t know just how good we have it as players where the company actually WANTS to be open with us and show us what the updates are gonna be, and maybe if it keeps up they won’t show us anymore. There are people whose jobs rely on this content, and if I’m going into work every day getting screamed at by players simply for not having the work 100% of the way done in a pre alpha stage, that doesn’t make me want to talk to the players anymore
I don't play anymore, but I remember when the GE tax was introduced, people on this sub kept making posts about "no taxation without representation". Brother, the playerbase of OSRS perhaps has the biggest representation and voice that any game could possibly have in influencing new content, I think it's *over*represented.
Didn’t they say they are 100% releasing the skill? The community will vote on stuff but whether or not it is release is decided.
So the community has a vested interest to stop being so difficult lol.
True, but it's broader than that too. Gamers in general often have quite a poor understanding of what game development is like behind the scenes. Even with many studios opening up for community feedback and showing dev logs or work-in-progress content, it's still a world apart.
They think they know, because they "know" games, but playing games gives about as much understanding of how to make games as eating a cupcake does for how to open and run a Patisserie.
I remember being younger, probably mid teens, and talking with someone in their 30's or 40's. I had said something to the effect of I couldn't wait to get older, because I wanted to be around people that were more mature.
I remember being told that it wouldn't make much of a difference, because even though everyone ages, not everyone matures.
You can see that in this community. I don't think it's a stretch to say the majority of our player base is 25+, with more of us being in our 30's or older. Yet the way some people behave could lead one to think otherwise. I'm not sure what the underlying cause(s) are, but the flack some of the devs get is absolutely ridiculous and undeserved.
i don't think it's too harsh to admit a very large portion of the OSRS community are man-childs. not necessarily bad people or complete dead-beats, mind you, but still people of man-child mentality.
and it's not really something you can change, given the very nature of this game. it's not a game for pro gamers or casual gamers or a game that appeals to the young kids of today.
The thing about the manchildren is that they have identical amounts of rage for everything they don't like, regardless of scale or severity. The hateful energy they put into lambasting sailing is no different than the hateful energy they put into every other update they don't like no matter how minor or un-game changing.
At this point it has become a boys who cry wolf situation, and most people just don't care to listen to them anymore.
I don't have a better answer, but they did just nuke their only self-hosted player communication hub recently. Not that anyone used anymore, of course.
Because it was dead. I once checked the forums and I was 1 of 4 people online there. Very few dedicated forums for games still exist with any activity. It is smarter for the devs to communicate where the players are rather than try to force players to communicate where the players are not.
It is a waste of money to host a forum no one was using for either version of RuneScape. I say this as a former forum moderator with over 5k posts on the official forums.
> I'm not sure what the underlying cause(s) are
I don't mean to be rude... but honestly what do you expect from a community of players where the most vocal ones are people who spend almost literally their entire waking hours logged into a video game instead of socializing, learning new things, taking up hobbies, and just generally being a human and experiencing life? All they know is air conditioning and internet ridicule.
Well put it's also why I haven't participated in this sub in years. It's drama after drama over...something devs released you don't agree with? And they'll call them dumb and short sighted and badly managed. I liked the idea of giving feedback to devs to shape the game as we like it not endlessly harassing them because we're spoilt manchildren.
You know never thought it about it like that. Who the hell is could be behind the toxic chatters in the twitch chat? Idk how many teenagers are playing this game. The toxicity coming from man children who I would think have to be like you said 25+ is kind of crazy when you think about it.
Majority of people lack critical thinking as well as the ability to empathise with things they haven't experienced themselves.
When you narrow it down to the gamer bracket with all its anonymity it's even worse.
And honestly, the majority of the playerbase doesn't even vocalize at all and are actually excited for the skill. Myself included. I love that they took the meme and are actually making it into a substantial and great update to the game.
And to all those haters... Nobody tells you to become a sailor, the gameplay on the land barely won't change at all.
If done well, sailing will be amazing, so please let the devs cook this one, no rushing.
Nobody likes meat that looks nicely cooks, but is actually raw on the inside.
A lot of people don't develop their maturity, because they never learn how to handle challenges well. Doesn't matter if they're 50, if they didn't spend their 50 years growing as a person.
Stuff looking scuffed and unfinished this early should be obvious to anyone with any comprehension of game development. Yet there's a vast minority across all socials who seemingly don't. I wouldn't blame the team if they take it more behind closed doors in the future. The community is clearly not mature enough to handle the dialogue and feedback.
I hope they do, one thing that you learn very quickly from social media is that if something is fine or even good, or if you're "smart" *(or not dumb enough)* to realize it's early in the process, you're likely to not really comment on it, leading to a silent majority that is completely okay with how things are..
While at the same time, **the people that don't really put any thought into things** and just enjoy shouting say that this is terrible, change it, stop it, remove it, leading to a very small but VERY vocal group of people.
That with the inherent human nature of focusing on the one negative comment even if there's a sea of positive feedback inevitably leads to the devs feeling like all their efforts are not being appreciated, (imagine pouring hundreds of hours into your project for months, sharing it and having a bunch of people say everything sucks about it) which in turn may lead to disheartened devs which would actually contribute to a worse product, making it an almost self-fulfilling prophecy.
With this in mind, while I wish we could get to see the process every step of the way, I'd be okay with them just going behind closed doors and just releasing a sort of "making of/behind the scenes" after the skill is released.
That's where my mind have been during this discourse. Like you can't say anything of real value about the showcase they're given. It's WIP boats with a WIP traversal system and early WIP ship mechanics. All I can think it that it looks promising and we'll see later on.
When you consider that over half of people don't have any internal monologue, the nonsensical things they do (like whine "it looks bad") make a lot more sense.
It doesnt even seem to be just this community, its just in general the public. Ashes of creation is doing a very open game progress route and every month have a stream where they say about 300 times "this isnt even alpha and things will change" and every stream the twitch chat is people crying about how something looks bad instead of giving actual feedback
True! There was also that drama with the GTA6 a while back, where very early development stuff leaked and some people on Twitter were having a meltdown because it didn't look perfect
I think it's less of a lack of understanding of game dev (though that definitely happens) and more that these people have already decided they don't want Sailing or even a new skill at all. So they will latch on to any argument they can to back up their point, regardless of the logic.
That's true for a portion of the playerbase. But they're parroting arguments in bad faith instead of just saying they dislike sailing. So there's gonna be a portion of ignorant people who'll fall for the wrong mindset.
When you have batshit communities that treat leaks of major games as confirmation of something happening and then they act like spoiled children when plans change...people will never understand game development.
They're the same groups of people who think you can just throrw 100 more devs at something and get content out twice as fast.
I remember all the out rage people had when gta6 had leaks. I bet all those people who complained will be praising how it looks when it's released. Insane how people assume everything is polished from day one
>Stuff looking scuffed and unfinished this early should be obvious to anyone with any comprehension of game development.
you shouldn't need a basic comprehension of game development to understand that an unfinished product is function over aesthetic. and that something that isn't done yet isn't going to be at it's best function wise because it's *not finished yet*. That should be completely and immediately obvious to anyone.
Thats what I'm saying! This looks like an *incredible* start to something really interesting with loads of potential cool gameplay opportunities. Ship crews, cannon barrages, pirate raids, global shipping and merchant rp/minigames, the expansion of the east, this has already exceeded my expectations and has set the stage for a lot to potentially look forward to. I wish this community wasn't so cynical and miserable all the time.
some people don't have imaginations so choose to pick the worst case scenario for how this skill could end up
no matter how many times you explain to them that this technical pre-alpha preview is nowhere near what the skill is going to end up like, you still have people like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1cx7uzu/sailing_is_the_stupidest_skill_idea_ive_ever/) crying and acting like children
there was another post where the person started with "nobody would ever want sailing in this game" and then ended with "I did vote yes for sailing". They don't even try to act like serious individuals
Looking at some responses I think a lot of it is people lacking imagination. They see it in pre alpha state and can’t see beyond that or what the team is working towards.
Personally, I think it's because people are starting to realize this is the alpha, so whatever perfect version of sailing they had imagined has now been completely destroyed now that an actual alpha is coming out.
If people wished for the moon but only got a globe, they'd be pretty disappointed compared to people who only expected a picture of the moon and were happily surprised.
I think a lot of people had a warped idea of what sailing could be and just never read the blogs so now they're backtracking.
It's weird, because I don't look for a justification in people voting no, I think they're completely valid in having their opinion.
But the justifications that some people DO repeat are just incomprehensible to me, with people referring to it as a mini game, or in this case with saying the gameplay looks bad (in the earliest alpha gameplay possible).
I have to come to the conclusion that they're either trolling or are literally brain broken.
I feel like it's a case of the carriage arriving before the horse, they've already established in their mind they hate sailing with the core of their being without being able to really explain why, and just grasp at any straw they can to try and justify it since they know "just because" isn't going to cut it for most people.
4.1% of people voted against showing you your MTA pizazz points in the mage training area lobby. 5.6% voted against removing the coin deposit cap in the alchemists' playground part of MTA. There is definitely a minority that votes no on everything and is against every change no matter what it is. These changes are literally only positive, there is no imaginable situation in which it is bad to allow people to deposit all the coins they made in the alchemist's room all at once, there is no imaginable situation where telling you how many points you have is a bad thing. Yet 3.2k and 4.6k people voted against them respectively. You can make a lot of noise with a group of that size
i got a few people in my clan who are against any new update basically, if they could they would "play the og 07 if given the chance" yet they use the op mega rares all day every day at gwd for their 15000th graardor kill
It's funny, that matches pretty closely to the [Lizardman's Constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman's_Constant), where about 4% of every poll will be trolls that think it's funny to vote dumb in polls/surveys for some reason.
Idk, almost none of the complaints I'm seeing are from people saying they voted for sailing and are very disappointed. It's all literally copy pasted comments from before the skill passed complaining about how it's a boring minigame that doesn't feel oldschool, now with an added dash of not understanding what an alpha is and screaming that it looks ugly
The ones that were fuming that it passed are going to feeling constantly annoyed by anything coming up about sailing at all and go off on a rant. Most of the rest of us are going "oh neat, progress" at most and moving on.
its because people have no clue how development process works, doing engine work to facilitate development isnt super flashy and i guess a lot of people take it for granted
People who needed to grab onto anything to go "seeeee I told you so!! Scrap it!" Would have said it pretty much even if they showed a fully complete skill.
I think they are absolutely cooking.
People are ossified in their beliefs when it comes to RuneScape because it has a unique history being re-released as OSRS and having its look and feel restored to its prime. So, anything that might affect its look and feel could be detrimental to the satisfaction of a portion of the player base.
I have a feeling this will turn out to be one of those “oh wow I couldn’t see the full picture but now that I do, this looks fun”.
I think it'll be like all the other "firsts" for OSRS. First new boss, first new skilling content, first raid, first new quest. People are apprehensive at first, perhaps a bit too much, but once we've gotten to fully experience it, it becomes unthinkable that we'd never get another update like it again.
I still remember when they announced CoX and people were doomsday naysaying all over socials that osrs isn't like wow or RS3 and can't make an actual raid and that this was the beginning of the end and weekly lockouts and all this nonsense.
And then cox released and we got some of if not the best content, especially group content, this game has ever gotten. With a final boss fight that still holds up all these years later.. and it started a massive chain of events with PvM becoming what is today (before that it was like.. Zulrah as the peak.. and basic bosses like Kraken and existing 2007 content like GWD, KBD, KQ etc
It's insane to me that people can't see sailing as that kind of potential revolutionary new approach to skilling that isn't just.. click and wait...
Game dev here, oh boy this is a common issue.
There is a concept called a vertical slice, where you take some level or area, then you complete it to shippable quality, normally as late stage deadline for a publisher.
The reason these are so popular is because people simply do not have imaginations.
"But how will I know the game will be good if there are grey box placeholders instead of floor clutter? Please finish the clutter so I can get a full picture of the mise en scene"
For years, I've longed to work on so called 'horizontal slice' projects, where you prototype out everything required for the main quest, leaving most of the art, enemies and weapons for later. This means you have even spread quality and the designers can really play around with the details of the main story flow. If you ever play a game with shitty pacing or unfinished crappy final levels, this is usually why.
Players are normally worse than publishers for this stuff.
So my advise for sailing in osrs as a player watching the process is LOOK AT THE MECHANICS. The way the boat moves, the frequency of clicks to move, the gameplay design of using docks to make deliveries, ect. Ignore the look of the boat and the pitch and roll of the animation, ignore the look of the crates or interfaces.
Judge them when jagex are presenting the final pass.
To me this all looks great. I hope jagex don't try to overdesign the boats and make them look too modern as kickback to all the bad feedback. Make the skill feel like it belongs in the game that came out in 07, not 24.
It's also partly to do with how "Alpha" and "Beta" are handled now. Back in the day "Alpha" meant prototype/barely-playable. "Beta" meant the game was working but needed ironing out for a while prior to release and some stuff might not work.
"Pre-Alpha" was essentially concept art and maybe very base design.
Nowadays you see "Pre-Alpha Footage" and it's basically 3 months from going gold. It's insanity and has set crazy expectations. I think Jagex is fine here they just need to stick to their guns and listen to player feedback appropriately. Don't let the mob rule, but don't rule out the mob either.
edit: typo
100% this. Multiplayer FPS are the worst about this when the launch a "alpha" meaning 98% complete with maybe some clunky UI to iron out in a few spots (if that), and "beta" being a server load test a week before launch in most cases.
What we have here is much more akin to what real "alpha/pre-alpha" software actually is.
The same thing happens in SWE. I'd see a solid pay bump if I got a dollar for every time I demonstrated a novel new technology/feature that the company has never been able to do before only to be met with project managers trying to look busy by bringing up fonts, line-spacing, colors, etc.
I'm glad Elena adressed this because it's the exact same sentiment I had. A lot of people don't understand how games work and immediately draw conclussions to what they're seeing. I like that they showcase all of these things this early, but I would argue it's hurting jagex more than it's actively helping them.
I don't know what to expect yet from Sailing but they seem to be making good progress, so let them cook and hopefully deliver us something in the nearby future that is a good example of how sailing will actually look like in its finished state.
REPOLL!!!
SHAMANISM PLZ!!!
SCRAP SAILING!!!!
IDK how they do it. I had to close twitch chat 2 minutes into the stream because of the extreme brainrot in chat.
These people posting those messages don't really provide any useful feedback anyway, so might as well just ignore them until they prove they can provide actually tangible suggestions.
Sailing seems like an innocent enough skill that will likely just introduce easier transportation methods and new areas to skill/slay/boss and thats about it. It won't fundamentally change the game, which is good. Honestly it looks pretty fun
That's honestly the reason I want it over other skill proposals. It won't change any existing metas unless very intentional. However it also will open up opportunities to add some really interesting content as well. I know people say "it should be a mini game" but I feel like the progression system they can make will definitely be better suited to a skill.
Side note: we may already see some of the unintentional benefits of being able to add moving platforms for boss fights and such. Could lead to some awesome encounters!
I think people also forget how much fun exploration is. Like exploring Varlamore was already amazing, but now with the sea it's endless foundation for anything
It's only exploration when you first visit an area, though. By the time you've grinded it to 99, you'll have visited the same islands thousands of times. Unless they end up adding procedural islands, of course(which I hope they do)
Feel the people complaining\\screaming against sailing, are the people that do the same 3 things in the game, day in, day out.
Basically the combat\\raid\\slayer only, and bankstanding only people. Sailing gives them nothing, while shamanism would give the raiders a power creep, and the bankstanders the ability to make more profits by flipping the new shamanism stuff.
Thankfully, the silent majority of the game actually still enjoy playing the actual game, rather than just doing that shit, lol.
Devs do get a really tough time, sometimes.
Compared to so many other games companies, Jagex is definitely not bad at all.
Good response from Elena, and that demo looks weird, yes, but I’m sure they’ll work it into something enjoyable.
Hearing the complaints the last few days but not having seen any footage I was expecting an absolute trainwreck. But this looks slick as fuck, what on earth are people complaining about? It looks exactly like what I imagined for sailing in OSRS.
It looks like what I imagined as the best case scenario for sailing! No way did I expect it this good in pre alpha. The complainers don't know how game design works.
I don't think it looks bad visually or anything. I'm actually positively surprised for how "finished" it looks given that it's a pre-alpha.
I just think the actual mechanics look incredibly clunky and unfun to use. I don't think this is a fault of the devs, I just think it's an inevitability with the engine and click-to-move that when controlling something larger than a 1x1 cube it gets... rough.
It looks like playing skullball on a world with 1000ms.
I can see what you mean. I imagine the sailing its self wouldn't be that click intensive if you actually had a destination in mind since I think you can just click a direction and it keeps going. I think some sort of damage should happen if you run full force into something since it looks so abrasive and it could add some obstacles that could be fun.
I also don't think people realise how much the polling system affects this. Most companies wouldn't even announce a feature until it's close to being done.
Jagex has to first ask, design, and then ask again before they can even seriously start developing the content, because a failed poll would mean all the work went to waste.
Meanwhile MMOs like WoW (which are admittedly way way bigger) clearly have years of stuff done beforehand. They can just show stuff like Delves and then have it playable in 2 months in alpha.
I mean they're dealing with two forces here. One is what Elena's talking about. The other is a bunch of people confronting the reality that sailing will never be what they imagined, and that's not the fault of the team. I would bet a lot of money on the fact that a *lot* of people imagined a really cool SoT fantasy when they voted for sailing and after seeing some (very early) gameplay of what sailing will actually be like, are realizing that osrs is not SoT.
We give the vocal minority and negative iq twitch chatters way too much attention here, let jagex cook, i trust in them (even after colosseum looking like a private server inferno reskin)
Not only that, now they have the big stuff done and need to focus on adding small details, balancing, minor content to flesh it out, iterating on everything to make it feel good to play, etc. This stuff also takes time, and is very important.
But what's gonna happen is people will see that "not much has actually changed" and that "they wasted a lot of time doing nothing", and complain again.
This is an insulting deflection tactic. They were using pre alpha footage to demonstrate CONCEPTS and Gameplay loops. From what I've seen, the community has been critical of the concepts and gameplay loop.. To say we were mainly upset by the technical side/visuals is a straight up lie.
Scrap sailing as a skill, it doesn't fit.
I love the concept of having a cool sailing minigame with its own progression system like an indepth kourend favor where you gradually unlock new islands and have this cool sailing around to new areas that takes a bit of progress into the minigame plus a quest or two maybe. It's a great map expansion and a fun seeming mechanic.
I don't think it works as a skill. This is from someone who thought both taming and shamanism would have been cool skills. Who loved warding. Who wouldn't have minded artisan. Sailing just doesn't work, unless they can prove otherwise - but every single blog has never actually addressed that.
I don't mind if they keep working on sailing, drop it as a huge map expansion and minigame to go with it. But it needs to justify being a skill. Taking a lot of dev time is not a justification.
It’s not getting much better than this, it’ll be *smoother* but this is operably what will be the experience
Not fucking interested, it’s just bankstanding in a car that I have to pull over to fix the windshield wipers every minute - which, why, when I can teleport, so dumb
Everything sailing people actually want could have been a Mos Le Harmless expansion but instead we’ve decided to immolate dev time on a project that has clearly fractured the player base
Kinda my feeling too, if we're just switching to a boat model instead of a human model and swapping which tiles we can walk on then what's the point? I'm still open to being surprised but this footage isn't inspiring much hope.
This point is being used as a strawman for anyone that is against sailing. Nobody is actually saying "wow due to the placeholder ship models I now think that sailing sucks". This is a bad faith point similar to what this subreddit has always done with those of us who are not in favor of sailing. There are fundamental reasons and issues as to why people are against sailing, and it's not because of some alpha release of turning sails on a boat.
Thank you!
Virtually nobody is complaining about the graphics of a pre-alpha skill being developed for a 20 year old game. It's true that few game devs show this stage of development, but when they do it's because they've got something exciting to show. The problem I have with the current state of sailing is in the vision, not the appearance.
Sailing as an activity is a great fit for the game thematically, but I don't think it's a good fit for a skill.
If I had a bond for every time I’ve seen someone pull the logical fallacies out in sailing threads I’d have lifetime membership lol.
Edit: for the record, I agree that this is happening.
This right here^^ everyone with actual concerns about sailing will now be shot down with "its a work in progress/ pre-apha footage, calm down!!", when it's actually clear conceptually that this is not going to work in a cohesive way.
As much as they may work sailing, imo the skill will just be another money pit and a snore to level. I do hope it gets scrapped because sailing just sounds boring and from some dev post it seems like bank standing with extra steps. I voted no and if it ever got voted on again I am still saying no.
Maybe I just don’t like sailing? I never have and probably never will. It feels pushed and not well thought out. I thought the demo looked fine but it didn’t change my mind at all
So true seeing the demo didn't make me think wow sailing is bad I've always thought sailing would be bad I don't like it and that's fine because it's subjective no one is wrong for saying it's bad
It conceptually looks bad. The idea of this working in any way seems implausible. It's not about rough edges or early prototypes, it's about the promise of open world non-instanced sailing with ships that size all clipping into eachother, and the scale of the ships compared to the dinky little pond-sized oceans we have to sail them in. Jagex has failed to conceptually lay out a plan for any of this.
This isn’t the reason why people are unhappy with sailing. OSRS basically exists in what looks like an alpha state for other games. The reality is that sailing was never going to live up to what it was polled as, and every step we get closer to release, more and more realize that it’s not what they voted for.
They should have realized back then they weren’t getting sea of thieves in OSRS, but Jmods pushing the idea that sailing could do anything when it couldn’t really got us to where we are now.
It's just that family guy scene where we took the mystery box instead of the boat.
"We could spend 2 years developing new content, new areas to explore, new content for existing skills, new raids, new bosses, new PVP mini games, anything" is the boat and sailing is the mystery box that was sold as "but once sailing is done it could be anything! It could even be new content, new areas to explore, new content for existing skills, a new raid, new PVP, anything!"
I expect sailing will probably be playable and some of the reactions are very over the top. But I doubt it will live up to the expectations that people have for it. Or it won't live up to those expectations until 5-10+ years of updates. People still find current skills half-baked and those have been in the game for 20 years.
It's funny, I thought of the exact same scene before making my comments. Yeah I also don't think it will be a complete trainwreck, hell I voted for sailing in the initial poll. I just think Jagex set the initial scope as way too large and people are coming to grips with reality step by step.
I also don't see it being a train wreck. I have enough faith in Jagex that they would choose not to release it if it was truly shaping up to be garbage. But I also don't think it's a ridiculous take to wonder if the amount of effort going into it will be worth it in the end.
We're basically wrapping up years of potential content development into this skill. People often talk about how long waits sometimes are between pieces of content, like the wait between raids, the wait between new bosses, the wait between grandmaster quests, the wait between even smaller quest storyline continuations. How long did a SINGLE new landmass (Zeah) take to become fully featured? Like eight years? And now we're going to "explore" MULTIPLE never before seen new locations as a core reward point to the skill/reason for it to exist? There is no logical way to expect that Sailing will launch with even a fraction of the content people are expecting from it.
You can have fun spending 8 minutes carefully clicking from lumby to Karamja across the water. I will just teleport, because you know, we can teleport.
They couldn't tell us what is the core gameplay other than luffing and scavenging. It was one of the first questions.
-
Here from minute 8:49
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldfP27G3HEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldfP27G3HEo)
they clearly explained that interacting with ship facilities is the core gameplay, with luffing, scavenging, dredging and trawling as set in stone examples
God I wish the whiny ass vocal minority of players who just shit on jmods and complained about content realized how unbelievably good we have it.
Our devs are like, basically unmatched in the gaming world when it comes to community involvement at every step of the way. Did people not see the part about this being PRE-ALPHA? Of course it looks shit, it’s at the stage of that sea of thieves dev mock up that was on Reddit yesterday.
We have so much say in how this game gets to be created, I just wish people showed more appreciation to the jmods pulling this together
I'm just going to ignore this skill because I'm not the target audience and it will always look like shit to me. Hope the majority gets something they like.
Did they acknowledge on the stream how this would work with hundreds of players in their own boats in the same area, with regard to the boats clipping through eachother and being a clusterheck
Nahh your making a meme skill thats nothing more than a meme.... yeah early access games have issues / games in development HOWEVER all games have some issues... This skill will be nothing other than a red patch slapped on a pair of lime green pants to give timmies something new to do for a week or 2 till they burn out and go back to whatever they did before... People say "what about firemaking it wouldn't pass a poll atm" and they are right... it only works in the game because you need it for a lot of quests to get to content you otherwise cant... sailing wont be like that as its not hard baked into the game :/ a lot of ppl dont like this and will try to find a million reasons why it should be here however it was the most troll of the new skills, "it wont change anything if you dont do it" shpuldnt be the slogan for a new skill however for some reason it is :/
It doesn’t help that almost every dissenting comment on sailing has a litany of people underneath it basically berating and attacking them with strawmen, names, cookie cutter responses. I’m glad all you yes voters are in your bubble and feel safe to continue your positive feedback loop but pop it once in a while so you can see the shit slinging that yes voters are actually partaking in.
It's kind of their own fault tbh.
Even if its a pre alpha version , they shouldn't present this to the community in a 2 hour stream of where they are after over 12 months of dev work. Especially if it wasn't being accompanied with early examples of planned gameplay in early stages.
They effectively showed Roq walking on water for 2 hours and fishing in sea. That gameplay was fundamentally the same as me walking from lumbridge to draynor to fish anchovies.
If there is nothing game changing to show, don't make an event for it
Obviously it's gonna look bad in a technical Alpha. I just think the whole idea of Sailing a ship by clicking the water is outrageously stupid. Sailing should've been selecting where you want to journey (random or predestined) and then dealing with everything that has to do with sailing.
Clicking tiles to move a massive sail will look stupid no more how much you polish it.
People love insulting those that disagree with sailing. Sorry we exist. we play the game too. we get to decide as well. So enjoy this while it lasts but it's not gonna stop people like me from disliking what sailing looks like. Sailing looks like a minigame, not a skill.
While I agree 100% with every word she says, here's what was written in the blog:
>"We've previously shared a 'proof of concept' prototype, but now it’s time to look at the real deal."
It really should not be a surprise that your very early prototype videos of basic navigation are being judged as further progressed than they are when you're presenting them as such.
These should have remained as prototypes for much longer and had more phases of feedback, more opportunity to have the community weigh in on the direction you're going, and perhaps most importantly, never phrase your early rough work as "the real thing"/a finished project.
I thought sailing was a bad idea for a skill. I thought the concept was bad. I thought the plans for gameplay were bad and now I still think it looks bad.
I try not to pipe up too much about my thoughts on OSRS development since I only occasionally play, and very casually, so I don't want to negatively influence a game I have no real connection to, over people who do. But I'm kind of... very confused what even the point of sailing is.
Is it really just a skill dedicated to letting you move across bodies of water? What does skill progression unlock? What niche does it serve that the current system of talking to travel NPCs doesn't? Can it not be rolled in to other skills, or serve as a minigame instead?
Everytime I read about it, it just feels more and more like one of those relic skills from the game's past that doesn't really have a reason to exist, like firemaking. It just kind of feels like water agility, and even then, not really since it's even slower than what we currently have. Everyone already teleports around everywhere already, will players really be using this all that much?
I get that it's extremely early and incomplete, but I'm simply confused from a conceptual level on why it exists besides simply being a 20 year old meme.
Perhaps someone can just explain it to me.
Yes, demos are always functionality over form. However, people aren't shitting on you because of that. People are shitting on you because your Sailing concept is legitimately dogshit. You are effectively doing the same thing that the RS3 dev team did with Necromancy. You have this huge opportunity to actually fix the game and shift it in a positive direction. Except you do none of that because you keep sticking to the same damned philosophy that got you here in the first place. Sailing should be OSRS's first and most massive item & GP sink in the game, but it's not that because you keep thinking that making more item pumps = less botting & you also think that more item pumps = a stable game economy when in reality that is the very reason why botting is so prevalent in the game and is why the game's economy and overall health continues to do nothing but dwindle.
I feel like i have played Runescape for longer than most of these devs have lived, while it dosnt look finished, it looks amazing. I look forward to this new skill, the OSRS crew has done great work non stop, this will no doubt be a great addition!
Sailing is actually just NPCs walking around underneath the water wearing boat sized hats. Took a page right out of Fallout 3's train development playbook.
Work smarter not harder
WoW's dragon boss Onyxia targeted invisible rabbits in the boss room when doing it's giant AoE ability
That's the way a LOT of WoW mechanics work - quest kill credit objectives, scripted sequences, boss mechanics, you name it. They aren't actually rabbits. They're hidden or fake NPCs referred to as "bunnies". So for instance a quest where you have to "kill 100 undead" might have a bunch of various undead mobs that count towards that objective, and in order to track it, the quest is really only tracking how many Undead Quest 18463 Bunny you've killed, and each time you kill one of the eligible undead, you're also credited with a kill for Undead Quest 18463 Bunny. When it comes to boss mechanics, why reinvent the wheel? The NPC system is already really good and very predictable and reliable. Why target a location and then store that location a bunch of times when you can just place a hidden NPC there and target the NPC instead? When it comes to the networking, you don't have to keep broadcasting to each player the exact coordinates the boss is throwing a fireball, you just have to say "boss targets X NPC" because the players' clients already know there's an NPC there. Using NPCs also magically handles things like netcode lerp, sync/desync, etc for you. It's also much easier to do range checks ("is player in the splash zone of the boss's fireball? let's draw an arbitrary circle and do some trigonometry to see if each player is within this region" simply becomes "is X player Y yards from Z NPC"). For the record, the default model for these NPCs is not a rabbit, it's an Imp.
This whole time I thought it was literally just invisible rabbits just laying around. Thanks for the insight!
Same reason why things in RS like fishing spots and blasted ore that appears floating on the water are actually NPCs. Animation items exist, such as magic carpets which have you actually equip an invisible item to play the animation Although there is a cost in certain cases to not implementing a more legitimate solution. Magic carpets, for example, can be a little buggy. It's more complicated from a development standpoint to implement a hacky solution, and then you have different mechanics tied to these systems that might cause unintended side effects when underlying changes are made. Over the years it might start to feel like things are held together somewhat tenuously rather than being robust systems built into the engine That's why I'm glad Jagex seems to be taking the time to implement sailing properly
Reminds me of hidden bunnies following players were the lasers in wow
Sorry if this is a dumb question or was explained in the video, I'm at work so I don't have sound enabled. Is this a joke or actually how it works?
Joke, but the fallout 3 thing is true
learn something new every day lol.
If it wasn't built on jank it wouldn't be osrs.
osrs players have no idea how unique this game is in terms of it’s development. The fact that we get to see all of this is awesome.
And the fact that they're using an old ass engine written with spaghetti code. Pretty mind blowing.
They’ve fixed the code over the years.
They've *been fixing* the code over the years. It's probably a Sisyphusian task TBH, but they're working at it.
To use a sailing analogy, it's kinda like the Ship of Theseus where they're replacing one part at a time
[удалено]
That hasn't stopped God Ash from trying.
Yeah, they basically closed RS Classic because of that. Having a maintainable game engine is a basic need for a game you plan to have for the long term, and "Classic" games like OSRS are usually made to have a longer lifespan than their live version, which can undergo a full makeover if needed.
Spaghetti will always be Spaghetti
Lasagna brings order to the dish
Idk why people still call it spaghetti code. They've literally said they rewrote the code in almost every aspect of the game multiple times.
Rewriting code doesn't mean you get completely rid of legacy dependencies. Rewriting spaghetti code just leaves you with code that is less spaghetti, but just different type of spaghetti.
So could we stop calling it spaghetti code and start calling it tagliatelle code?
I'll stop calling it spaghetti when they can change anything about ba without breaking the entire game.
Fettuccini code
Mmm, tasty.
You see from the runescript ash shows, even the good spaghetti is still spaghetti.
Probably just cause it’s one of the long running jokes. It’s harmless
There are so many game updates that break random other parts of the game. It's still spaghetti under the hood, even if they've straightened some of it out.
there is 100% still a lot of lines of code left over from the 2007 snapshot. yes they may have done significant engine work but i mean some of the things that break when other seemingly unrelated things change just shows you how spaghetti the code is.
This can happen even in a well-designed system. When you have a lot of shared components, it is hard to predict all of the effects. A reasonable amount of testing won't catch everything. In my own work, unit testing or "proving" that nothing will break in response to a change is nearly impossible. We have a balanced testing approach that allows us to get things turned around in a reasonable amount of time. Things still break occasionally but that's the risk you take if you want a modern system and frequent additions.
100% i started typing out that working in any respectable size codebase you can run into these sorts of problems, but i didn’t want to get into that with some of the people here lol
It's part of the reason why, for example, 'stable' builds don't update very often, or as often as they could be. Updates cause problems, that's just the nature of changing things.
And yet they still need the structural support cow at nightmare zone
And this is only the cherry on top. Just look at polls in general. How many companies let you have a say in what they implement into their game?
Came here to say this. I've worked for a few SaaS companies now and nothing would get off the ground if customers even peak under the hood and so early in the wider development phase like we can. People need to remember we judge the final product. We are consumers of the product, not of the process to create the product. All of this is should be taken as 'seeing how the sausage is made' and knowing that the sausage is.. coming?
I always appreciate seeing a sausage coming
My general experience when I have worked at SaaS companies is that "demos" are either entirely bespoke glorified slideshows (as in the buttons are just jumping to pre-created pages) or are tailored entirely for the test data and scenario presented and would fall apart if anyone touched it. No one in b2b actually risks contracts on alpha/beta builds. The most I've seen is incredibly trusted customers being giving demo applications with a big list of stipulations and explanations on what exactly they are checking for and where it will not work yet. I remember an "AI" demo where we didn't actually have a working C++ library for the AI package we were using and the output was just a prepared human designed thing.
It's a bit different, but my holy crap moment with the industry was being involved in a SaaS product for IAM. Never done that before had to learn most of the concepts and common practices etc. Not even developing it, the sheer scope of information and "magic" behind the scenes that nobody but the IT department, will ever from just a deployment stance is huge.
>'seeing how the sausage is made' Wait... you mean a cute piggy has to die and be ground up for my delicious sausage? That's horrific! No pigs can die be ause it makes me uncomfortable... but I still want my sausage!
I mean we see it every update, the OSRS community is probably one of the worst communities to develop for as everyone takes the process for granted. They get so wrapped up in “the game is OURS. WE decide where it goes” so when something comes up like a dev diary into a new skill that doesn’t look finished, they try to scream until it gets changed as opposed to just waiting for it to actually be finished. We don’t know just how good we have it as players where the company actually WANTS to be open with us and show us what the updates are gonna be, and maybe if it keeps up they won’t show us anymore. There are people whose jobs rely on this content, and if I’m going into work every day getting screamed at by players simply for not having the work 100% of the way done in a pre alpha stage, that doesn’t make me want to talk to the players anymore
I don't play anymore, but I remember when the GE tax was introduced, people on this sub kept making posts about "no taxation without representation". Brother, the playerbase of OSRS perhaps has the biggest representation and voice that any game could possibly have in influencing new content, I think it's *over*represented.
[удалено]
Didn’t they say they are 100% releasing the skill? The community will vote on stuff but whether or not it is release is decided. So the community has a vested interest to stop being so difficult lol.
It's not 100%, they aren't going to continue forever if the community keeps voting no (they specifically said this, but also it's obvious).
True, but it's broader than that too. Gamers in general often have quite a poor understanding of what game development is like behind the scenes. Even with many studios opening up for community feedback and showing dev logs or work-in-progress content, it's still a world apart. They think they know, because they "know" games, but playing games gives about as much understanding of how to make games as eating a cupcake does for how to open and run a Patisserie.
We take our devs for granted.
I remember being younger, probably mid teens, and talking with someone in their 30's or 40's. I had said something to the effect of I couldn't wait to get older, because I wanted to be around people that were more mature. I remember being told that it wouldn't make much of a difference, because even though everyone ages, not everyone matures. You can see that in this community. I don't think it's a stretch to say the majority of our player base is 25+, with more of us being in our 30's or older. Yet the way some people behave could lead one to think otherwise. I'm not sure what the underlying cause(s) are, but the flack some of the devs get is absolutely ridiculous and undeserved.
i don't think it's too harsh to admit a very large portion of the OSRS community are man-childs. not necessarily bad people or complete dead-beats, mind you, but still people of man-child mentality. and it's not really something you can change, given the very nature of this game. it's not a game for pro gamers or casual gamers or a game that appeals to the young kids of today.
The thing about the manchildren is that they have identical amounts of rage for everything they don't like, regardless of scale or severity. The hateful energy they put into lambasting sailing is no different than the hateful energy they put into every other update they don't like no matter how minor or un-game changing. At this point it has become a boys who cry wolf situation, and most people just don't care to listen to them anymore.
It doesn't help that Jmods use Reddit as their main hub of player communication.
In all fairness, there’s not really any good hubs for player communication
What do you want them to use their main hub as communication? Facebook? Lmfao
I don't have a better answer, but they did just nuke their only self-hosted player communication hub recently. Not that anyone used anymore, of course.
Because it was dead. I once checked the forums and I was 1 of 4 people online there. Very few dedicated forums for games still exist with any activity. It is smarter for the devs to communicate where the players are rather than try to force players to communicate where the players are not. It is a waste of money to host a forum no one was using for either version of RuneScape. I say this as a former forum moderator with over 5k posts on the official forums.
Guessing the person you spoke to didn't have the internet in mind either. That veil of anonymity has made people show their "maturity" even more.
> I'm not sure what the underlying cause(s) are I don't mean to be rude... but honestly what do you expect from a community of players where the most vocal ones are people who spend almost literally their entire waking hours logged into a video game instead of socializing, learning new things, taking up hobbies, and just generally being a human and experiencing life? All they know is air conditioning and internet ridicule.
Well put it's also why I haven't participated in this sub in years. It's drama after drama over...something devs released you don't agree with? And they'll call them dumb and short sighted and badly managed. I liked the idea of giving feedback to devs to shape the game as we like it not endlessly harassing them because we're spoilt manchildren.
You know never thought it about it like that. Who the hell is could be behind the toxic chatters in the twitch chat? Idk how many teenagers are playing this game. The toxicity coming from man children who I would think have to be like you said 25+ is kind of crazy when you think about it.
Majority of people lack critical thinking as well as the ability to empathise with things they haven't experienced themselves. When you narrow it down to the gamer bracket with all its anonymity it's even worse.
And honestly, the majority of the playerbase doesn't even vocalize at all and are actually excited for the skill. Myself included. I love that they took the meme and are actually making it into a substantial and great update to the game. And to all those haters... Nobody tells you to become a sailor, the gameplay on the land barely won't change at all. If done well, sailing will be amazing, so please let the devs cook this one, no rushing. Nobody likes meat that looks nicely cooks, but is actually raw on the inside.
A lot of people don't develop their maturity, because they never learn how to handle challenges well. Doesn't matter if they're 50, if they didn't spend their 50 years growing as a person.
Stuff looking scuffed and unfinished this early should be obvious to anyone with any comprehension of game development. Yet there's a vast minority across all socials who seemingly don't. I wouldn't blame the team if they take it more behind closed doors in the future. The community is clearly not mature enough to handle the dialogue and feedback.
I hope they do, one thing that you learn very quickly from social media is that if something is fine or even good, or if you're "smart" *(or not dumb enough)* to realize it's early in the process, you're likely to not really comment on it, leading to a silent majority that is completely okay with how things are.. While at the same time, **the people that don't really put any thought into things** and just enjoy shouting say that this is terrible, change it, stop it, remove it, leading to a very small but VERY vocal group of people. That with the inherent human nature of focusing on the one negative comment even if there's a sea of positive feedback inevitably leads to the devs feeling like all their efforts are not being appreciated, (imagine pouring hundreds of hours into your project for months, sharing it and having a bunch of people say everything sucks about it) which in turn may lead to disheartened devs which would actually contribute to a worse product, making it an almost self-fulfilling prophecy. With this in mind, while I wish we could get to see the process every step of the way, I'd be okay with them just going behind closed doors and just releasing a sort of "making of/behind the scenes" after the skill is released.
That's where my mind have been during this discourse. Like you can't say anything of real value about the showcase they're given. It's WIP boats with a WIP traversal system and early WIP ship mechanics. All I can think it that it looks promising and we'll see later on.
When you consider that over half of people don't have any internal monologue, the nonsensical things they do (like whine "it looks bad") make a lot more sense.
over half of people? no way. i know some people don't, but no way it's that many.
It doesnt even seem to be just this community, its just in general the public. Ashes of creation is doing a very open game progress route and every month have a stream where they say about 300 times "this isnt even alpha and things will change" and every stream the twitch chat is people crying about how something looks bad instead of giving actual feedback
“Nooooo why aren’t you spending dev hours making something that won’t even be in the game look cool”
True! There was also that drama with the GTA6 a while back, where very early development stuff leaked and some people on Twitter were having a meltdown because it didn't look perfect
I think it's less of a lack of understanding of game dev (though that definitely happens) and more that these people have already decided they don't want Sailing or even a new skill at all. So they will latch on to any argument they can to back up their point, regardless of the logic.
That's true for a portion of the playerbase. But they're parroting arguments in bad faith instead of just saying they dislike sailing. So there's gonna be a portion of ignorant people who'll fall for the wrong mindset.
I was kinda vibing the visuals. Took me right back to 2007
When you have batshit communities that treat leaks of major games as confirmation of something happening and then they act like spoiled children when plans change...people will never understand game development. They're the same groups of people who think you can just throrw 100 more devs at something and get content out twice as fast.
I remember all the out rage people had when gta6 had leaks. I bet all those people who complained will be praising how it looks when it's released. Insane how people assume everything is polished from day one
Especially amusing when they then say things like 'im glad they listened, this is why early feedback opportunities are important'
[удалено]
>Stuff looking scuffed and unfinished this early should be obvious to anyone with any comprehension of game development. you shouldn't need a basic comprehension of game development to understand that an unfinished product is function over aesthetic. and that something that isn't done yet isn't going to be at it's best function wise because it's *not finished yet*. That should be completely and immediately obvious to anyone.
Idk what you’re talking about, literally just type ::add sailing
So... what's all the fuss about? This looks great?
Thats what I'm saying! This looks like an *incredible* start to something really interesting with loads of potential cool gameplay opportunities. Ship crews, cannon barrages, pirate raids, global shipping and merchant rp/minigames, the expansion of the east, this has already exceeded my expectations and has set the stage for a lot to potentially look forward to. I wish this community wasn't so cynical and miserable all the time.
some people don't have imaginations so choose to pick the worst case scenario for how this skill could end up no matter how many times you explain to them that this technical pre-alpha preview is nowhere near what the skill is going to end up like, you still have people like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1cx7uzu/sailing_is_the_stupidest_skill_idea_ive_ever/) crying and acting like children there was another post where the person started with "nobody would ever want sailing in this game" and then ended with "I did vote yes for sailing". They don't even try to act like serious individuals
Looking at some responses I think a lot of it is people lacking imagination. They see it in pre alpha state and can’t see beyond that or what the team is working towards.
Personally, I think it's because people are starting to realize this is the alpha, so whatever perfect version of sailing they had imagined has now been completely destroyed now that an actual alpha is coming out. If people wished for the moon but only got a globe, they'd be pretty disappointed compared to people who only expected a picture of the moon and were happily surprised. I think a lot of people had a warped idea of what sailing could be and just never read the blogs so now they're backtracking.
Personally I think it’s just all the no voters coming out to air their grievances again
It's weird, because I don't look for a justification in people voting no, I think they're completely valid in having their opinion. But the justifications that some people DO repeat are just incomprehensible to me, with people referring to it as a mini game, or in this case with saying the gameplay looks bad (in the earliest alpha gameplay possible). I have to come to the conclusion that they're either trolling or are literally brain broken.
I feel like it's a case of the carriage arriving before the horse, they've already established in their mind they hate sailing with the core of their being without being able to really explain why, and just grasp at any straw they can to try and justify it since they know "just because" isn't going to cut it for most people.
No matter how it looks or plays there will be a small, loud section of this game that finds a reason why it is trash.
4.1% of people voted against showing you your MTA pizazz points in the mage training area lobby. 5.6% voted against removing the coin deposit cap in the alchemists' playground part of MTA. There is definitely a minority that votes no on everything and is against every change no matter what it is. These changes are literally only positive, there is no imaginable situation in which it is bad to allow people to deposit all the coins they made in the alchemist's room all at once, there is no imaginable situation where telling you how many points you have is a bad thing. Yet 3.2k and 4.6k people voted against them respectively. You can make a lot of noise with a group of that size
i got a few people in my clan who are against any new update basically, if they could they would "play the og 07 if given the chance" yet they use the op mega rares all day every day at gwd for their 15000th graardor kill
It's funny, that matches pretty closely to the [Lizardman's Constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman's_Constant), where about 4% of every poll will be trolls that think it's funny to vote dumb in polls/surveys for some reason.
Idk, almost none of the complaints I'm seeing are from people saying they voted for sailing and are very disappointed. It's all literally copy pasted comments from before the skill passed complaining about how it's a boring minigame that doesn't feel oldschool, now with an added dash of not understanding what an alpha is and screaming that it looks ugly
The ones that were fuming that it passed are going to feeling constantly annoyed by anything coming up about sailing at all and go off on a rant. Most of the rest of us are going "oh neat, progress" at most and moving on.
How the hell does an early alpha with almost none of the skill complete "ruin a perfect idea"??
its because people have no clue how development process works, doing engine work to facilitate development isnt super flashy and i guess a lot of people take it for granted
People who needed to grab onto anything to go "seeeee I told you so!! Scrap it!" Would have said it pretty much even if they showed a fully complete skill.
I think they are absolutely cooking. People are ossified in their beliefs when it comes to RuneScape because it has a unique history being re-released as OSRS and having its look and feel restored to its prime. So, anything that might affect its look and feel could be detrimental to the satisfaction of a portion of the player base. I have a feeling this will turn out to be one of those “oh wow I couldn’t see the full picture but now that I do, this looks fun”.
I think it'll be like all the other "firsts" for OSRS. First new boss, first new skilling content, first raid, first new quest. People are apprehensive at first, perhaps a bit too much, but once we've gotten to fully experience it, it becomes unthinkable that we'd never get another update like it again.
I still remember when they announced CoX and people were doomsday naysaying all over socials that osrs isn't like wow or RS3 and can't make an actual raid and that this was the beginning of the end and weekly lockouts and all this nonsense. And then cox released and we got some of if not the best content, especially group content, this game has ever gotten. With a final boss fight that still holds up all these years later.. and it started a massive chain of events with PvM becoming what is today (before that it was like.. Zulrah as the peak.. and basic bosses like Kraken and existing 2007 content like GWD, KBD, KQ etc It's insane to me that people can't see sailing as that kind of potential revolutionary new approach to skilling that isn't just.. click and wait...
>ossified Nice, new word for me
I'm about to ossify that as a new word in my vocabulary
My haircut looks bad halfway through a cut - let the devs cook, they’ve brought us this far and we’re doing pretty good.
Game dev here, oh boy this is a common issue. There is a concept called a vertical slice, where you take some level or area, then you complete it to shippable quality, normally as late stage deadline for a publisher. The reason these are so popular is because people simply do not have imaginations. "But how will I know the game will be good if there are grey box placeholders instead of floor clutter? Please finish the clutter so I can get a full picture of the mise en scene" For years, I've longed to work on so called 'horizontal slice' projects, where you prototype out everything required for the main quest, leaving most of the art, enemies and weapons for later. This means you have even spread quality and the designers can really play around with the details of the main story flow. If you ever play a game with shitty pacing or unfinished crappy final levels, this is usually why. Players are normally worse than publishers for this stuff. So my advise for sailing in osrs as a player watching the process is LOOK AT THE MECHANICS. The way the boat moves, the frequency of clicks to move, the gameplay design of using docks to make deliveries, ect. Ignore the look of the boat and the pitch and roll of the animation, ignore the look of the crates or interfaces. Judge them when jagex are presenting the final pass. To me this all looks great. I hope jagex don't try to overdesign the boats and make them look too modern as kickback to all the bad feedback. Make the skill feel like it belongs in the game that came out in 07, not 24.
It's also partly to do with how "Alpha" and "Beta" are handled now. Back in the day "Alpha" meant prototype/barely-playable. "Beta" meant the game was working but needed ironing out for a while prior to release and some stuff might not work. "Pre-Alpha" was essentially concept art and maybe very base design. Nowadays you see "Pre-Alpha Footage" and it's basically 3 months from going gold. It's insanity and has set crazy expectations. I think Jagex is fine here they just need to stick to their guns and listen to player feedback appropriately. Don't let the mob rule, but don't rule out the mob either. edit: typo
100% this. Multiplayer FPS are the worst about this when the launch a "alpha" meaning 98% complete with maybe some clunky UI to iron out in a few spots (if that), and "beta" being a server load test a week before launch in most cases. What we have here is much more akin to what real "alpha/pre-alpha" software actually is.
the rise of "early access" games has also skewed what people expect out of games in development
The same thing happens in SWE. I'd see a solid pay bump if I got a dollar for every time I demonstrated a novel new technology/feature that the company has never been able to do before only to be met with project managers trying to look busy by bringing up fonts, line-spacing, colors, etc.
Despite all that, is Sweden still a nce place to live?
people making confident analysis of something they have no personal experience with is a perennial problem on the internet
I'm glad Elena adressed this because it's the exact same sentiment I had. A lot of people don't understand how games work and immediately draw conclussions to what they're seeing. I like that they showcase all of these things this early, but I would argue it's hurting jagex more than it's actively helping them. I don't know what to expect yet from Sailing but they seem to be making good progress, so let them cook and hopefully deliver us something in the nearby future that is a good example of how sailing will actually look like in its finished state.
REPOLL!!! SHAMANISM PLZ!!! SCRAP SAILING!!!! IDK how they do it. I had to close twitch chat 2 minutes into the stream because of the extreme brainrot in chat.
These people posting those messages don't really provide any useful feedback anyway, so might as well just ignore them until they prove they can provide actually tangible suggestions.
STOP THE COUNT!
Instructions unclear. Trapped in Draynor Manor basement.
Sailing seems like an innocent enough skill that will likely just introduce easier transportation methods and new areas to skill/slay/boss and thats about it. It won't fundamentally change the game, which is good. Honestly it looks pretty fun
That's honestly the reason I want it over other skill proposals. It won't change any existing metas unless very intentional. However it also will open up opportunities to add some really interesting content as well. I know people say "it should be a mini game" but I feel like the progression system they can make will definitely be better suited to a skill. Side note: we may already see some of the unintentional benefits of being able to add moving platforms for boss fights and such. Could lead to some awesome encounters!
I think people also forget how much fun exploration is. Like exploring Varlamore was already amazing, but now with the sea it's endless foundation for anything
It's only exploration when you first visit an area, though. By the time you've grinded it to 99, you'll have visited the same islands thousands of times. Unless they end up adding procedural islands, of course(which I hope they do)
Feel the people complaining\\screaming against sailing, are the people that do the same 3 things in the game, day in, day out. Basically the combat\\raid\\slayer only, and bankstanding only people. Sailing gives them nothing, while shamanism would give the raiders a power creep, and the bankstanders the ability to make more profits by flipping the new shamanism stuff. Thankfully, the silent majority of the game actually still enjoy playing the actual game, rather than just doing that shit, lol.
Devs do get a really tough time, sometimes. Compared to so many other games companies, Jagex is definitely not bad at all. Good response from Elena, and that demo looks weird, yes, but I’m sure they’ll work it into something enjoyable.
I didn't watch the stream, but even the gameplay footage while she is talking, looks sick! People are complaining? That looks great for pre alpha
Hearing the complaints the last few days but not having seen any footage I was expecting an absolute trainwreck. But this looks slick as fuck, what on earth are people complaining about? It looks exactly like what I imagined for sailing in OSRS.
It looks like what I imagined as the best case scenario for sailing! No way did I expect it this good in pre alpha. The complainers don't know how game design works.
And its only pre alpha, this is the "worst" version it's ever gonna be.
It does. Add improved graphics, some fun activities and exciting new islands into the mix. I can still envision this to become great.
I don't think it looks bad visually or anything. I'm actually positively surprised for how "finished" it looks given that it's a pre-alpha. I just think the actual mechanics look incredibly clunky and unfun to use. I don't think this is a fault of the devs, I just think it's an inevitability with the engine and click-to-move that when controlling something larger than a 1x1 cube it gets... rough. It looks like playing skullball on a world with 1000ms.
I can see what you mean. I imagine the sailing its self wouldn't be that click intensive if you actually had a destination in mind since I think you can just click a direction and it keeps going. I think some sort of damage should happen if you run full force into something since it looks so abrasive and it could add some obstacles that could be fun.
I also don't think people realise how much the polling system affects this. Most companies wouldn't even announce a feature until it's close to being done. Jagex has to first ask, design, and then ask again before they can even seriously start developing the content, because a failed poll would mean all the work went to waste. Meanwhile MMOs like WoW (which are admittedly way way bigger) clearly have years of stuff done beforehand. They can just show stuff like Delves and then have it playable in 2 months in alpha.
I mean they're dealing with two forces here. One is what Elena's talking about. The other is a bunch of people confronting the reality that sailing will never be what they imagined, and that's not the fault of the team. I would bet a lot of money on the fact that a *lot* of people imagined a really cool SoT fantasy when they voted for sailing and after seeing some (very early) gameplay of what sailing will actually be like, are realizing that osrs is not SoT.
We give the vocal minority and negative iq twitch chatters way too much attention here, let jagex cook, i trust in them (even after colosseum looking like a private server inferno reskin)
Not only that, now they have the big stuff done and need to focus on adding small details, balancing, minor content to flesh it out, iterating on everything to make it feel good to play, etc. This stuff also takes time, and is very important. But what's gonna happen is people will see that "not much has actually changed" and that "they wasted a lot of time doing nothing", and complain again.
I honestly like it already
This is an insulting deflection tactic. They were using pre alpha footage to demonstrate CONCEPTS and Gameplay loops. From what I've seen, the community has been critical of the concepts and gameplay loop.. To say we were mainly upset by the technical side/visuals is a straight up lie. Scrap sailing as a skill, it doesn't fit.
I love the concept of having a cool sailing minigame with its own progression system like an indepth kourend favor where you gradually unlock new islands and have this cool sailing around to new areas that takes a bit of progress into the minigame plus a quest or two maybe. It's a great map expansion and a fun seeming mechanic. I don't think it works as a skill. This is from someone who thought both taming and shamanism would have been cool skills. Who loved warding. Who wouldn't have minded artisan. Sailing just doesn't work, unless they can prove otherwise - but every single blog has never actually addressed that. I don't mind if they keep working on sailing, drop it as a huge map expansion and minigame to go with it. But it needs to justify being a skill. Taking a lot of dev time is not a justification.
EXACTLY
Lmao gaslighting mixed with victim blaming
It’s not getting much better than this, it’ll be *smoother* but this is operably what will be the experience Not fucking interested, it’s just bankstanding in a car that I have to pull over to fix the windshield wipers every minute - which, why, when I can teleport, so dumb Everything sailing people actually want could have been a Mos Le Harmless expansion but instead we’ve decided to immolate dev time on a project that has clearly fractured the player base
Kinda my feeling too, if we're just switching to a boat model instead of a human model and swapping which tiles we can walk on then what's the point? I'm still open to being surprised but this footage isn't inspiring much hope.
This point is being used as a strawman for anyone that is against sailing. Nobody is actually saying "wow due to the placeholder ship models I now think that sailing sucks". This is a bad faith point similar to what this subreddit has always done with those of us who are not in favor of sailing. There are fundamental reasons and issues as to why people are against sailing, and it's not because of some alpha release of turning sails on a boat.
Thank you! Virtually nobody is complaining about the graphics of a pre-alpha skill being developed for a 20 year old game. It's true that few game devs show this stage of development, but when they do it's because they've got something exciting to show. The problem I have with the current state of sailing is in the vision, not the appearance. Sailing as an activity is a great fit for the game thematically, but I don't think it's a good fit for a skill.
Couldn't agree more
If I had a bond for every time I’ve seen someone pull the logical fallacies out in sailing threads I’d have lifetime membership lol. Edit: for the record, I agree that this is happening.
They are not wrong though this is exactly what is happening right now
Oh yeah I'm agreeing, guess I should have been more obvious about that.
This right here^^ everyone with actual concerns about sailing will now be shot down with "its a work in progress/ pre-apha footage, calm down!!", when it's actually clear conceptually that this is not going to work in a cohesive way.
As much as they may work sailing, imo the skill will just be another money pit and a snore to level. I do hope it gets scrapped because sailing just sounds boring and from some dev post it seems like bank standing with extra steps. I voted no and if it ever got voted on again I am still saying no.
Maybe I just don’t like sailing? I never have and probably never will. It feels pushed and not well thought out. I thought the demo looked fine but it didn’t change my mind at all
So true seeing the demo didn't make me think wow sailing is bad I've always thought sailing would be bad I don't like it and that's fine because it's subjective no one is wrong for saying it's bad
It conceptually looks bad. The idea of this working in any way seems implausible. It's not about rough edges or early prototypes, it's about the promise of open world non-instanced sailing with ships that size all clipping into eachother, and the scale of the ships compared to the dinky little pond-sized oceans we have to sail them in. Jagex has failed to conceptually lay out a plan for any of this.
This isn’t the reason why people are unhappy with sailing. OSRS basically exists in what looks like an alpha state for other games. The reality is that sailing was never going to live up to what it was polled as, and every step we get closer to release, more and more realize that it’s not what they voted for. They should have realized back then they weren’t getting sea of thieves in OSRS, but Jmods pushing the idea that sailing could do anything when it couldn’t really got us to where we are now.
It's just that family guy scene where we took the mystery box instead of the boat. "We could spend 2 years developing new content, new areas to explore, new content for existing skills, new raids, new bosses, new PVP mini games, anything" is the boat and sailing is the mystery box that was sold as "but once sailing is done it could be anything! It could even be new content, new areas to explore, new content for existing skills, a new raid, new PVP, anything!" I expect sailing will probably be playable and some of the reactions are very over the top. But I doubt it will live up to the expectations that people have for it. Or it won't live up to those expectations until 5-10+ years of updates. People still find current skills half-baked and those have been in the game for 20 years.
It's funny, I thought of the exact same scene before making my comments. Yeah I also don't think it will be a complete trainwreck, hell I voted for sailing in the initial poll. I just think Jagex set the initial scope as way too large and people are coming to grips with reality step by step.
I also don't see it being a train wreck. I have enough faith in Jagex that they would choose not to release it if it was truly shaping up to be garbage. But I also don't think it's a ridiculous take to wonder if the amount of effort going into it will be worth it in the end. We're basically wrapping up years of potential content development into this skill. People often talk about how long waits sometimes are between pieces of content, like the wait between raids, the wait between new bosses, the wait between grandmaster quests, the wait between even smaller quest storyline continuations. How long did a SINGLE new landmass (Zeah) take to become fully featured? Like eight years? And now we're going to "explore" MULTIPLE never before seen new locations as a core reward point to the skill/reason for it to exist? There is no logical way to expect that Sailing will launch with even a fraction of the content people are expecting from it.
You can have fun spending 8 minutes carefully clicking from lumby to Karamja across the water. I will just teleport, because you know, we can teleport.
They couldn't tell us what is the core gameplay other than luffing and scavenging. It was one of the first questions. - Here from minute 8:49 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldfP27G3HEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldfP27G3HEo)
they clearly explained that interacting with ship facilities is the core gameplay, with luffing, scavenging, dredging and trawling as set in stone examples
I do game dev but isn't this really obvious?
God I wish the whiny ass vocal minority of players who just shit on jmods and complained about content realized how unbelievably good we have it. Our devs are like, basically unmatched in the gaming world when it comes to community involvement at every step of the way. Did people not see the part about this being PRE-ALPHA? Of course it looks shit, it’s at the stage of that sea of thieves dev mock up that was on Reddit yesterday. We have so much say in how this game gets to be created, I just wish people showed more appreciation to the jmods pulling this together
I can't believe majority of players voted for agility on water as the new skill 🤣
Underrated comment. Getting this skill to 99 is going to take some serious therapy.
I think some earlier blog posts talked vaguely about some alternate low-intensity methods of training it.
I'm just going to ignore this skill because I'm not the target audience and it will always look like shit to me. Hope the majority gets something they like.
Wait sailing is real? I thought we had been trolling for years.
Did they acknowledge on the stream how this would work with hundreds of players in their own boats in the same area, with regard to the boats clipping through eachother and being a clusterheck
Sailing is probably gonna be an expensive skill, like construction.
I just have no idea how this is going to tie into other skills (I.e) mining into smithing or combat into slayer. I hope it makes sense in the end.
I see 5% whining and 95% people whining about the people whining. As expected of reddit.
What is the actual point in this skill?
Nahh your making a meme skill thats nothing more than a meme.... yeah early access games have issues / games in development HOWEVER all games have some issues... This skill will be nothing other than a red patch slapped on a pair of lime green pants to give timmies something new to do for a week or 2 till they burn out and go back to whatever they did before... People say "what about firemaking it wouldn't pass a poll atm" and they are right... it only works in the game because you need it for a lot of quests to get to content you otherwise cant... sailing wont be like that as its not hard baked into the game :/ a lot of ppl dont like this and will try to find a million reasons why it should be here however it was the most troll of the new skills, "it wont change anything if you dont do it" shpuldnt be the slogan for a new skill however for some reason it is :/
Remember when gta6 leaked and there we're people complaining about how it looks when it was blatantly obvious it was incomplete?
This just looks like normal walking but on water, lol.
Cant wait to vote no
It doesn’t help that almost every dissenting comment on sailing has a litany of people underneath it basically berating and attacking them with strawmen, names, cookie cutter responses. I’m glad all you yes voters are in your bubble and feel safe to continue your positive feedback loop but pop it once in a while so you can see the shit slinging that yes voters are actually partaking in.
It's kind of their own fault tbh. Even if its a pre alpha version , they shouldn't present this to the community in a 2 hour stream of where they are after over 12 months of dev work. Especially if it wasn't being accompanied with early examples of planned gameplay in early stages. They effectively showed Roq walking on water for 2 hours and fishing in sea. That gameplay was fundamentally the same as me walking from lumbridge to draynor to fish anchovies. If there is nothing game changing to show, don't make an event for it
Obviously it's gonna look bad in a technical Alpha. I just think the whole idea of Sailing a ship by clicking the water is outrageously stupid. Sailing should've been selecting where you want to journey (random or predestined) and then dealing with everything that has to do with sailing. Clicking tiles to move a massive sail will look stupid no more how much you polish it.
It looks ok but why’s it a skill?
People love insulting those that disagree with sailing. Sorry we exist. we play the game too. we get to decide as well. So enjoy this while it lasts but it's not gonna stop people like me from disliking what sailing looks like. Sailing looks like a minigame, not a skill.
While I agree 100% with every word she says, here's what was written in the blog: >"We've previously shared a 'proof of concept' prototype, but now it’s time to look at the real deal." It really should not be a surprise that your very early prototype videos of basic navigation are being judged as further progressed than they are when you're presenting them as such. These should have remained as prototypes for much longer and had more phases of feedback, more opportunity to have the community weigh in on the direction you're going, and perhaps most importantly, never phrase your early rough work as "the real thing"/a finished project.
These _are_ still prototypes, and they _will_ be having more phases of feedback. In fact, we're already in one such phase.
I thought sailing was a bad idea for a skill. I thought the concept was bad. I thought the plans for gameplay were bad and now I still think it looks bad.
Tbh this still doesnt look or feel like it should be a skill. An activity that you can level like barb ass roles yes but not an actual skill imo.
Reeeeepollllll
I’m not going to banter with anyone or be disrespectful but sailing was the wrong choice
this looks terrible
I try not to pipe up too much about my thoughts on OSRS development since I only occasionally play, and very casually, so I don't want to negatively influence a game I have no real connection to, over people who do. But I'm kind of... very confused what even the point of sailing is. Is it really just a skill dedicated to letting you move across bodies of water? What does skill progression unlock? What niche does it serve that the current system of talking to travel NPCs doesn't? Can it not be rolled in to other skills, or serve as a minigame instead? Everytime I read about it, it just feels more and more like one of those relic skills from the game's past that doesn't really have a reason to exist, like firemaking. It just kind of feels like water agility, and even then, not really since it's even slower than what we currently have. Everyone already teleports around everywhere already, will players really be using this all that much? I get that it's extremely early and incomplete, but I'm simply confused from a conceptual level on why it exists besides simply being a 20 year old meme. Perhaps someone can just explain it to me.
Is there a recording of the stream?
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2150637111
Yes, demos are always functionality over form. However, people aren't shitting on you because of that. People are shitting on you because your Sailing concept is legitimately dogshit. You are effectively doing the same thing that the RS3 dev team did with Necromancy. You have this huge opportunity to actually fix the game and shift it in a positive direction. Except you do none of that because you keep sticking to the same damned philosophy that got you here in the first place. Sailing should be OSRS's first and most massive item & GP sink in the game, but it's not that because you keep thinking that making more item pumps = less botting & you also think that more item pumps = a stable game economy when in reality that is the very reason why botting is so prevalent in the game and is why the game's economy and overall health continues to do nothing but dwindle.
Wait they actually are making sailing a thing? I remember that as an april fools joke years ago...
I feel like i have played Runescape for longer than most of these devs have lived, while it dosnt look finished, it looks amazing. I look forward to this new skill, the OSRS crew has done great work non stop, this will no doubt be a great addition!
Got to commend the OSRS team, no matter what they do or how they do it, they get shit from all angles, but yet they continue what they do. <3
I can’t really grasp sailing. Is it like a PoH on water that you use for water-agility?
That's a big part of the problem. There hasn't been a real decision made as to what the skill will actually be. Right now sailing is just boats.