How are things in Old School?

[Sharkbrew Helper Bot]

We wanted to update you about some of the more pressing issues that the community are facing as it has been a few months since we last spoke about some of them. We feel it is important that you know we are aware of these issues and that we are working towards resolutions for all them. These solutions will take time and your support and patience during this process is really important.

Obviously, the biggest issue you are facing is the ddos attacks that are happening. This came about as we started to ban the accounts which have been ddossing the servers. In retaliation these people started to attack the servers once more. We have continued with this approach and banned these accounts as we believe it is the right thing to do for the long term health of the game.

Our SysAdmin team have put a lot of effort into making our network more resilient which makes it harder for them to be ddossed. There is still some way to go and work has been continuing to improve the network further and give you the service you want.

Bearing in mind all this, you should expect the attacks to continue in the short term. We have left our kinder death mechanics in game so should you die during one of these attacks, you have a good chance of retrieving any lost items. In the meantime, if you have any information regarding the attacks you can contact us anonymously at [email protected].

The next big issue is Nightmare Zone and Splashing. We know that the community is divided on this issue which means that whatever happens, it is unlikely any change will pass a poll. This means we have to dig further into who is doing this, why and what they do after doing it. To get all the information we need to understand this we need Ian to allow the game to export all the data into our data warehouse so it can be analysed properly. However, this is a considerable job and at the moment Ian’s priority is resizeable mode which we believe is more important to you.

We do have some information though on who is using Nightmare Zone which the Analytics Team have been able to put together and it shows that about 5% of players use it (although whether they all AFK in it is something we do not know yet), which is much lower than we first though. Once we have all the information we need, we will share it with you and discuss the next steps.

Another issue that is regularly near the top of the list is botting and cheating in general. With the increase in players we have seen an increase in cheating. Mod Weath does a fantastic job with the bots and although we see an increase in bots over the weekend, their impact is minimal. However, we want to put some more effort into general cheating and negative behaviours that impact the game. As such we will be looking at bringing someone in to do this. It is likely that this person will work behind the scenes and you may not know who they are, but that remains to be seen.

The final issue we want to cover is Zulrah and the skeletal wyverns. We have seen that some of you think these two pieces of content are too generous with their drop tables. Our studies tell us that these are about right from a balancing perspective, however we are more than happy to question ourselves. So, once the work outputting the game data to the data warehouse has been done by Ian (as mentioned earlier on in the post) we’ll be asking the Analytics Team to see how many items are coming into the game from Zulrah and the skeletal wyverns compared to other areas and make any changes based on that.

So, there we have it. There are many issues that every game faces however despite these issues Old School is in a fantastic place. We are a growing and healthy game with a fantastic community and working together we have a long and great future ahead of us.

Join us on the forums if you want to discuss this newspost.

Mods Archie, Ash, Ghost, Ian, John C, Mat K, Ronan and Weath
The Old School Team

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