‘RuneScape’ “urgently” walks back controversial update

Jagex, the developer of the classic massively multiplayer online role-playing game RuneScape, has admitted that the inclusion of its Hero Pass was “controversial” and a “significant misjudgement”.

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“We messed up,” conceded the company in a post to the game’s official website. It continued to confirm that it had heard the criticism of the battle pass from fans and that the Hero Pass missteps arose from an accidental lack of acknowledgement for what the players wanted out of their RuneScape experience.

“We need a do-over. So, we will urgently patch the game to back-out the controversial features you’ve told us are your main pain-points. This then will give us the time to digest your feedback in detail and engage in a community consultation to drive a thorough re-design and re-development of Hero Pass,” explained Jagex.

One of the issues with the Hero Pass were that the majority of its in-game rewards were locked behind a paid Premier RuneScape membership or pass. Specifically speaking, 61 of the 101 Premier rewards asked for players to shell out to unlock them.

Hero Pass also incurred the loss of Daily Challenges in RuneScape that generated experience points and Treasure Hunter keys for both paid and free-to-play players.

Now, the pay-to-win parts of the Hero Pass will be removed as soon as the developer is able to address these and the Daily Challenges will be “reinstated in full”. Jagex clarified that the latter change will likely “take a couple of weeks” to return and that its plan is to resolve the “most immediate pain-points”.

Then a “a longer period of community consultation and re-development” will forge the Hero Pass into a form that is more in line with the community’s expectations.

In other gaming news, the servers for dungeon crawler Dark And Darker were subjected to a significant attack straight after one of the game’s updates.

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