OSRS Dev Team is running an interview at reddit now

Link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ex98n/we_are_the_team_who_brought_back_old_school/

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ex98n/we_are_the_team_who_brought_back_old_school/d243tz8

So it looks like the purchase of Jagex won't change OSRS much.

 

The OSRS team has always been very community-oriented, and it's nice to see the thread get so much attention (it hit the front page earlier, and is still there). Hopefully this brought some new players to the game.

 

Frequently. I had to work on some of that, after all, and it wasn't the most fun period in my career. Thing is, the internet wasn't the same then as it is now - while Jagex has all manner of measures to protect against fraudulent card payments now, there were fewer options in 2006-7. (When did 'Verified by VISA' even get invented?!) So the fraudulent payments made by bot-operators were giving Jagex such critical problems that we might have been truly sunk if we hadn't done something drastic. At a time when 70% of members paid by card, if we'd lost the ability to take card payments, we'd have lost a lot more players than we actually did when we removed free trade.
Now, that's not to say it was well done, though. The manager directing RS content in those days hoped that Bounty Hunter would replace 1v1 PKing and Clan Wars would replace multiplayer PvP. However, no formal minigame - least of all one with no rewards! - could reasonably replace the emergent gameplay of the Wilderness. If we had instead gone with features that let players play in their own way, and given what rewards we could within the trade limits, it might have helped a lot.
Plus the communications were poor too. We never told players why we'd done it. There's reasons for that, but it certainly didn't help.


Quite an interesting post, now we know why.

 

That was a terrible day in I guess what would have been grade 5 or 6 when they removed wildy. I wasn't allowed on runescape before school but my friend came to school and told me what had happened.

 

Going to be interesting how they reply to non runescape players comments. Gonna be looking through the ama for a while now.

 

Honestly, it was so obvious that the Evolution of Combat wasn't going to be successful. It's good that now they admitted that EOC was a mistake and to have a good albeit small team working on OSRS, the future of the game is looking bright.