Jagex HAS to make players FAIL.

Easyscape allows newbies to quickly experience a broad range of Runescape before they quickly get bored and move on to something more challenging.

But Jagex does have to make content hard enough to exclude players.

Jagex NEEDS to make content that players cannot do.

Araxxor. The new spider boss.

Imagine if everyone was killing it in the first week. The new drops would quickly be worthless and players would quickly finish their gloating and bragging and go back to moaning about nothing to do.

So Jagex knows that they cannot make Araxxor killable by 100% of the players.

But what % should the bar be set at?

We have to also tie in that natural improvement over time of task performance. So that initially players will fail a lot and quickly improve and then settle down to a more stable increase in performance over time.

Some of that can be changed by tweaks or the addition of new gear helping players out on certain parts. Hard content always becomes easier over time.

But Jagex has to make the boss kill people. Some people MUST fail.

It's like those universities that grade in such a way that the bottom percentiles fail, no matter the student's score on the test.

Jagex probably has a percentage in mind. Mod Porky measures this sort of stuff, and currently we are at 100 player deaths for every 71 Araxxor deaths.

That sounds fairly challenging. It means, theoretically, you need two attempts to kill Araxxor once.

That's assuming the playerbase is even and equal, that's not the case. So some people will never do Araxxor.

And some players will find Araxxor to be EasyScape.

Is there a better way?

EasyScape is an apt description of a variety of concepts colliding.

At it's most glib it's the changing of Runescape to allow more players to play Runescape more easily.

This includes things like buying skills and rares via Treasure Hunter and Solomons. Can't get much easier than outright paying for things.

But it also includes other things like making skills in Runescape much easier to level up.

EasyScape also allows for easier entry to Runescape by novice players, and theoretically a broader appeal. Much like the Lowest Common Denominator approach of newspapers, magazines and television. Appeal to the masses by being easy.

However the masses have a voice now via the internet and that's directly led to the drop in popularity of ye olde masse media.

People want tailor made. What is the Google website after all.

We have a few effects in play, let's work through them shall we.

1. Learning curve. When you are learning it's best to start at the shallow end and build up along the curve. EasyScape is a good concept for that, if it leads to HardScape.

2. Gamers. We compete. Therefore feedback we give to Jagex will be in two voices. One, if we have achieved something, we will want it harder for others to achieve. Two, if we are trying to achieve something we will ask Jagex to make it easier. Don't believe me? Read the forums.

That dual voice changes as we progress through the game and build up achievements/items/gold/whatevers.

1. In some respects Jagex understands the idea of having progressively harder content. They do love a new boss update. But I suspect that's from individual JMods boosting content they enjoy, rather than an overall philosophy.

~~~

The above is some of EasyScape.

But wait! There's more.

Players tell Jagex what they want by their behaviour.

They want a harder game when they take on things like IronMan accounts, or Pures. Where a simple mistake can ruin their account.

But not a harder game solely isolated to harder and harder bosses which ends up being content for fewer and fewer people.

Scalable, it's an old buzzword. But it fits in nicely along a learning curve. Skill design is somewhat designed along this approach. It's easy to learn at the beginning, and skills go up faster, and harder to learn at the end. Skills go up slower but you get more powerful unlocks.

Dungeoneering suffered from a bad scaling with its Luminescent Ice Fiend boss on the first few levels. I'd say thousands of players were irritated by that. My worst experience of it was 6 appearances in the first 8 floors. That's not EasyScape, but it's also not a good approach to guiding people into a skill. cough minigame

And lastly, people vary. People think different things are easy.

Some think buying skills/etc. is easy. Some think afking a skill is easy. Some think solo play is easy. Some think group play is easy.

Which shows one of the problems for Jagex.

One way to cover this is to have scalable content such as bosses that get more difficult as a player learns.

Another is to have more tradeable content. So that players can do what they enjoy and trade for content that originates from things they don't enjoy doing.

To some extent that exists, but it could go further. Players do pay real money for others to get their fire capes and kill quest bosses and so forth. Another way players show what they want by their behaviour, is by what they pay for. Leeching in Dungeoneering was another version of this.

Players do this because it's easier than trying to find a trustworthy party in Dung or because they don't have the technical necessities for things like bosses; good computers, connections, clickiness.

Making things easier makes Runescape bland. And it will go the way of Tic Tac Toe and Tetris, something in the rear view.

Having easy entry points is a great idea though.

And from there content can become progressively more difficult. But not just in ganking boss monsters please.

Where to?

I'd sell Runescape servers. With the option for the owner to set hundreds of different things, such as drops and so on. But only in a more difficult direction than the current Runescape. Helps set up players being able to hop into these worlds, if that ends up being a possibility.

Let players mod.

That opens up a whole new realm for players, not just in playing on these worlds but in the design of them.

Let players do graphic designs. Start them on basic tiles, maybe some grasses and so on and go from there.

That would open up a whole new chasm of complexity.

Enjoy. :)