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One of the major reveals for the future of RuneScape is the overhaul to death costs. Now, Jagex is giving details on their thought process behind the upcoming changes, their goals, and the details of how these will work in practice.
Why are they making these changes? The answers require looking back to when this system was designed back in 2014 and 2015.
“ Gravestones were the main death mechanism – failing to reach your gravestone meant all dropped items were lost,” begins the response. Some of the things this caused was an uptick in item loss, which had some positives, especially on prices in the economy. Now, they realized they don’t necessarily need four players to sacrifice items as much as they did back in 2015. So essentially, with additional gold sinks , they’re trying something new.
Now any item range of 1 + will be charged a death cost of 0.1 %. There’s a minimum reclaim cost of 100 coins per item stack, but the reduction is huge. The team estimates that every item will have it to reclaim cost cut by at least 80%. With up to a 96.7% decrease for items up to 1 million. There will be a tariff to help offset the death cost decrease. The release will have a 2% tariff, with potential changes over time and it won’t apply to items traded below 50 coins.
Other changes to the system and quality-of-life improvements include a change to the Ring of Death, Which will now give you a full health revival and three minutes of time to finish what you started before you died. They’re also scaling back the number of destroy on death items to make some of them so horrible and reclaimable. Items will cost 1 per cent of their Grand Exchange cost to replace. With all of these changes they’re also reworking the death interface.
The devblog is a long one and you can read it in full over at RuneScape. There’s also information on what’s coming in the future, including a planned eventual update to the Grand Exchange. Consider this death costs overhaul part one of those two related changes. The death cost overhaul will be arriving sometime this month.
