Good morning, we have another update.
This just happened genuinely minutes after I finished my
previous ramble, so we need to talk guys, This is this is
getting crazy. YouTube voice initiated and here
we go an update on the Sailing XP review.
Oh God, what has happened Now? We're spinning up a separate
post for today's update because we've run out of characters on
yesterday, which you can check out here.
Update Thursday December 4th, 17 UTC.
That was, I think this is genuinely 9 minutes ago if I'm
not mistaken. Well, yesterday wasn't as smooth
sailing as we'd hoped. We've been thoroughly reviewing
your feedback, and as we said last night, we're now feeling
more confident in what specific changes we'd like to make.
To be clear, we're aiming for these changes to go live in game
tomorrow, Friday, December 5th, as early as possible, but we may
need additional time depending on your feedback and how our
internal testing goes. Before we get into the
specifics, an apology is in order.
Over the last week, we've spent a great deal of time reviewing
XP rates and how players have been interacting with Sailing.
Truthfully, we went into this week's update with good
intentions. The changes seemed fair on
paper, and while we knew they weren't going to be popular,
they made sense to us. Based on the data we have
available, it's fair to say we missed the mark on a number of
fronts, which left many happy sailors adrift.
We don't always get it right, and we're happy to admit when
that is the case. So we're not changing anything.
No, I'm kidding. We're hoping that the changes
announced here today will help correct course while still
allowing us the ability to fine tune some of the areas we
believe are over or underperforming relative to
other parts of the skill. Let's kick things off with what
we feel your biggest issues are so that we can make sure that
we're all on the same page. Or you can let us know if we're
missing something major. In no particular order, here are
the problems we're looking to solve.
The nerf to sorting XP was too severe.
While this was initially intended to weaken the output of
extremely AFK methods, it also punishes players who were
salvaging somewhat actively, meaning jumping on the hook
themselves, sorting through the salvage, etcetera.
Additionally, the rarity of the Dragon Cannon barrel is a
contributing factor to players wanting to sort with irons in a
particular. In particular, feeling as though
they have to sort, but now get considerably lower outputs
despite putting in the same effort.
Salvaging feels worse. The salvaging cycle got slower,
Crewmates got slower. The changes to hotspots resulted
in reducing uptime for active actively salvaging.
All of these compound to change the feel of salvaging
considerably. Players putting in maximum
effort at the Gwyneth Glide received no conciliatory XP.
These players were putting in the same level of effort at the
highest effort possible for the skill in receiving significantly
reduced XP. The Crystal extractor still
feels mandatory, but just gives less for mandatory engagement.
While harvesting the extractor gives less XP than before, it's
still a high enough XP drop that it's always worth doing.
Adding to this, many players felt even more obligated to
engage with it to try and bolster XP rates closer to what
they were getting before. Here's what we're planning on
doing. Increase the number of active
shipwrecks by one at each hotspot.
Thank God. This should improve up time for
players salvaging, meaning players feel less compelled to
hop world or feel less like they're sitting around waiting
for a wreck to spawn for their AFK gains.
This was an unintended side effect of yesterday's change.
Our intent here was to help with AFK time rather than reduce it
further. Restore sorting XP to pre nerf
levels. Oh thank God, oh thank God.
OK at this point I don't even want to like, or I don't even
want to sort my Salvador and I'll just bank it, you know?
Or I'll just, I'll just kill frost Dragons after this, but
then we'll return retain the increased salvaging success
chance from this week's game update.
Wow. So it's we're we're keeping.
OK, let me see if they're doing the five tick or 4 tick though.
Let let's see what they say. Restore the player's salvaging
rate back to four ticks from 5 ticks.
This means you'll be salvaging 20% faster than before so long
as you're on the hook yourself. As we're also keeping the
increased success chance added with this week's update, this
should result in a nice increased XP gain when self
salvaging. Reduce the Cruise XP modifier
for salvaging. This is a very common suggestion
from players on how we should move the more extreme AFK
methods into a healthier spot without harming the experience
of players salvaging for themselves, so we're looking to
explore this further. This is exactly what we would
just talked about minutes ago. Level 4 Deck Handiness modifier
reduced from 70 to 40% and Deck handiness modifier from 60 to
30. This is exactly what they needed
to do. This is a wonderful change,
genuinely. Like this is exactly how you
make everything nice. And here's the cool thing.
The salvaging success stays. So we still have that 16 to 22%,
whatever that meant. I don't know if that was in
between levels 87 and 99 or whatever, but that is kept plus
the five tick to four tick, plus the salvaging returns and now
just your crew members are dog shit, which is perfect.
That that's perfect. That's exactly what we needed.
Add a bonus 1250 XP upon completing a lap of the Marlin
Gwyneth Glide. The intent here is to keep top
end XP rates roughly stable and in line with what they were
before, since many players felt they were appropriately
rewarding for the effort required.
This is so great right now. Notably absent from this list is
the Crystal Extractor. We feel as though one of the
biggest problems with our changes yesterday is that we
were pulling too many levers at once, which led to some players
adding up to some changes, excuse me, adding up to more
than the sum of their parts and having a much higher impact than
if we'd taken a more gradual approach.
With that in mind, we want to see where the dust settles and
make sure the base XP offered by various methods, with or without
using the Crystal Extractor, is in a healthier place before we
consider any further changes. We've had some targets in mind
for XP rates for the various methods impacted by yesterday's
changes, but it's worth noting that no matter how many
spreadsheets we've got modeling, sailings, training methods,
there are always aspects that we can't properly capture.
There's always a chance that our theoretical values don't reflect
what players obtain in game, nor do they reflect how the game
feels to play, even if the numbers look good on paper.
Spreadsheet balancing is never an act, an exact science.
But to try and give you some idea of what to expect, the
table below compares our predicted XP outputs from pre
nerf, yesterday's update, and where we expect they'll wind up
after dispatch. Note that these numbers do do
take into account the changes to the Crystal Extractor.
So AFK 2, crewmate, salvaging, sorting.
So yeah, so we're looking at basically a 70% nerf or sorry,
not 70 percent, 30% nerf. It's going from 100 what it was
on Tuesday. It's going to be 70% of that for
the Super AFK shit. Self salvaging basically
maintains what it was. It's 95 port tasks are now a
little bit better and Gwyneth glide is pretty much where it's
at, which is this is wonderful. This is this is great.
Before we sign off, we'd like to thank you for all the feedback
so far. Please continue to let us know
what you think. Also, it's important we mention
that we're aware there are other aspects of sailing that we need
to address, some of which are mentioned below in this blog and
will be seen in an upcoming opinion poll with particular
attention being drawn. The the drawn the the recently
shared drop rates and whether or not the whole blog post is
ruined. They said the twice in a row and
whether or not they feel fair from a character per progression
perspective. While we're yet to have these
conversations as our focus has primarily been on XP rates, we
have investigated reports from players that some in game drop
rates appear to be drastically more common than the figures we
presented in the blog. We can confirm that a variety of
items are bugged, causing them to drop more frequently than
intended. After discussing internally, we
have opted to not make any changes.
We'll be updating the blog with rates that are more
representative of the crowd sourced data you'll find on the
OSRS wiki. Let us know what you think
about. Damn well done.
What are your guys thoughts? You guys have all been saying
this. Sorry mega late to make this
point but some people such as myself never want to take
manipulate. What you don't want a knife log
over and over and drop all the salvage.
It's not engaging just feels bad.
Damn you're in the minority man. Like everybody loves that stuff.
I'm kidding but sailing is saved, saving is sailed.
Yeah. Is this live now?
No, this will be live or very, very early tomorrow.
So I'm going to stop salvaging at this point because my guys
gaining 34 XP. This is just this is just bad.
This is just horrible. I should I could be gaining 61
XP more so I'm going to be stopping here until tomorrow,
but well done Jag X. This is exactly what we had been
talking about previous video. Check that out if you haven't
already. We were just kind of showing all
of Reddit's freak out basically. But yeah, thank you all for
listening. Be sure to subscribe.
More sailing news underway. Who knows, maybe they'll even
have another blog post talking about some other stuff.
But as of right now, don't salvage until tomorrow.
Mark my words on that and piss babies win.
What? What's a what's that?
I've been abusing the Super AFK method with the XP nerf.
I'm going to get way more items in alchemy, so I'm chilling as
an iron. Hell yeah.
OK, cool. FF you were you were right on
the money with this is a wonderful change.
Well done Jag X, I'm proud of you guys and we'll catch you
guys in the next video. Peace.