RuneScape fans chalk up 'a small victory for the players' as developer chucks new and hated battle pass in the trash
RuneScape has announced that it's ditching its new battle pass system barely a month after it debuted, calling it «not reflective of a direction we're taking RuneScape in» following widespread player uproar.
The battle pass—called a Hero Pass in RuneScape terminology—arrived on September 4, promising players a gamut of buffs, cosmetics, and special missions. It was immediately despised by the game's wider community, so much so that RuneScape developer Jagex had to walk huge swathes of it back only four days after launch, announcing that it would patch out some of the system's most loathed pay-to-win elements in advance of «a longer period of community consultation and re-development».
That consultation took the form of a survey sent out to players, and the results are in: The Hero Pass isn't long for this world. On October 6, two days before the survey was due to actually reach its conclusion, Jagex decided it had seen enough. «We will not be releasing another Hero Pass after [the first and current one] Underworld ends on December 3rd,» the company wrote in an update to players. «We have done this to recognise questions it raised that do not reflect our direction for the game.»
Jagex identified three key areas of complaint from the results of its survey: The disparity between paid and free players when it came to the Hero Pass' myriad reward buffs, which many players lambasted as «pay-to-win»; the fact that players felt obliged to engage with it; and that it just doesn't feel «RuneScapey,» which I have to imagine is more fatal than it sounds for a game that's been around since 2001, with all the player nostalgia and emotional attachment that implies.
The studio said that, though there are «clear ways» to improve the
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