An Update On the Sailing XP Review

Well, yesterday wasn't as smooth sailing as we'd hoped! We've been thoroughly reviewing your feedback, and as we said last night, we're now feeling more confident in what specific changes we'd like to make. To be clear, we're aiming for these changes go live in-game tomorrow (Friday, December 5th) as early as possible, but we may need additional time depending on your feedback and how our internal testing goes.

Before we get into the specifics, an apology is in order. Over the last week we’ve spent a great deal of time reviewing XP rates, and how players have been interacting with Sailing. Truthfully, we went into this week’s update with good intentions – the changes seemed fair on paper, and while we knew they weren’t going to be popular, they made sense to us based on the data we have available. It’s fair to say we missed the mark on a number of fronts which left many happy sailors adrift. We don’t always get it right, and we’re happy to admit when that is the case.

We're hoping that the changes announced here today will help correct course, while still allowing us the ability to finetune some of the areas we believe are over or under-performing relative to other parts of the skill.

Let's kick things off with what we feel your biggest issues are so that we can make sure that we're all on the same page, or you can let us know if we're missing something major. In no particular order, here are the problems we're looking to solve:

• •The nerf to sorting XP was too severe. While this was initially intended to weaken the output of extremely AFK methods, it also punishes players who were salvaging somewhat actively (meaning jumping on the hook themselves, sorting through their salvage etc.). Additionally, the rarity of the Dragon cannon barrel is a contributing factor to players wanting to sort, with Irons in particular feeling as though they have to sort, but now get considerably lower outputs despite putting in the same effort.
• •Salvaging 'feels' worse. The salvaging cycle got slower, crewmates got slower, the changes to hotspots resulted in reduced uptime for actively salvaging - all of these compound to change the feel of salvaging considerably.
• •Players putting in maximum effort at the Gwenith Glide received no conciliatory XP. These players were putting in the same level of effort, at the highest effort possible for the skill, and receiving significantly reduced XP.
• •The Crystal Extractor still feels mandatory, but just gives less for mandatory engagement. While harvesting from the Extractor gives less XP than before, it's still a high enough XP drop that it's always worth doing. Adding to this, many players felt even more obligated to engage with it to try and bolster XP rates closer to what they were getting before.

Here's what we're planning on doing:

• •Increase the number of active shipwrecks by 1 at each hotspot. This should improve uptime for players salvaging, meaning players feel less compelled to hop worlds or feel less like they're sitting around waiting for a wreck to spawn for their AFK gains. This was an unintended side effect of yesterday's change, our intent here was to help with AFK time rather than reduce it further.
• •Restore Sorting XP to pre-nerf levels.
• •Barracuda salvage from 13 XP to 15.5 XP.
• •Large salvage from 20 XP to 24 XP.
• •Pirate salvage from 26 XP to 31.5 XP.
• •Mercenary salvage from 30 XP to 63.5 XP.
• •Fremennik salvage from 32 XP to 75 XP.
• •Merchant salvage from 34 XP to 95 XP.
• •Retain the increased salvaging success chance from this week's game update.
• •Restore the player's salvaging rate back to 4 ticks from 5 ticks. This means you'll be salvaging 20% faster than before, so long as you're on the hook yourself. As we're also keeping the increased success chance added with this week's update, this should result in a nice increase to XP gained when self-salvaging.
• •Reduce the Crew's XP modifier for salvaging. This was a very common suggestion from players on how we move the more extreme AFK methods into a healthier spot without harming the experience of players salvaging for themselves, so we're looking to explore this further.
• •Level 4 Deckhandiness XP modifier reduced from 70% to 40%.
• •Level 3 Deckhandiness XP modifier reduced from 60% to 30%.
• •Add a bonus 1,250 XP upon completing a lap of the Marlin Gwenith Glide. The intent here is to keep top-end XP rates roughly stable and in line with what they were before, since many players felt they were appropriately rewarding for the effort required.

Notably absent from this list is the Crystal Extractor. We feel as though one of the biggest problems with our changes yesterday is that we were pulling too many levers at once, which lead to some changes adding up to more than the sum of their parts, and having a much higher impact than if we'd taken a more gradual approach. With that in mind, we want to see where the dust settles and make sure the base XP offered by various methods (with or without using the Crystal Extractor) is in a healthier place before we considering any further changes.

We've had some targets in mind for XP rates for the various methods impacted by yesterday's changes, but it's worth noting that no matter how many spreadsheets we've got modelling Sailing's training methods, there are always aspects that we can't properly capture. There's always a chance that our theoretical values don't reflect what players obtain in game, nor do they reflect how the game feels to play even if the numbers look good on paper.

Spreadsheet balancing is never an exact science , but to try and give you some idea of what to expect, the table below compares our predicted XP outputs from pre-nerf, yesterday's update, and where we expect they'll wind up after this batch. Note that these numbers do take into account the changes to the Crystal Extractor.

Before we sign off, we'd just like to thank you for all the feedback so far. Please continue to let us know what you think! Also, it's important we mention that we're aware there are other aspects of Sailing that we need to address (some of which are mentioned below in this blog and will be seen in an upcoming opinion poll), with particular attention being drawn the the recently shared drop rates and whether or not they feel fair from a character progression perspective. While we're yet to have these conversations, as our focus has primarily been on XP rates, we have investigated reports from players that some in-game drop rates appear to be drastically more common than the figures we presented in the blog.

We can confirm that a variety of items are bugged, causing them to drop more frequently than intended. After discussing internally, we have opted to not make any changes, and we'll be updating the blog with rates that are more representative of the crowdsourced data you'll find on the OSRS Wiki.

Let us know what you think of the above!

We're back with a late-in-the-day update!

Understandably, today's update has spawned a lot of chatter. We apologise for the radio silence up until now, but we've needed time to chat back and forth as a team while keeping all of your feedback and valid frustration in mind so that we can best figure out our next steps while delivering on our goal of finetuning Sailing's balance. While we don't have specifics right now, we have a rough direction of what we'd like to explore, which we'll be sharing with you now and providing more specifics on in a blogpost tomorrow. Let's not beat around the bush and get straight into where our heads are at.

We love AFK gameplay and we know that you do too. There was never any intent for extreme 20-30 minute AFK gameplay patterns to become a part of training Sailing, but it's clearly something that's popular with many of you so isn't something we're looking to entirely remove. That said, allowing methods with this level of effort to have a good XP output isn't something that we believe is a healthy precedent to set, so we're not looking to significantly increase the strength of the 'two crewmates salvaging, player sorting' method. Despite that, there's a chance that changes we'd like to make elsewhere will marginally improve XP output here, though we're not specifically making changes to improve the output of this method.

It's clear that the change to sorting XP is a major pain point and that many of you feel sorting is no longer worth it whatsoever, which has lead to players who were salvaging somewhat actively taking a bigger hit to their XP/hr than feels fair. We'll be looking at ways to improve the XP output of this more active 'self-salvage, self-sort' approach so that it feels more worthwhile to do and you don't feel as though you need to drop out of your salvage and miss out on gaining resources.

Additionally, we're planning to give the Gwennith Glide some extra XP to compensate for today's Crystal Extractor nerf, to reduce the feeling that you're putting in just as much effort as before but getting noticeably less out of it.

We currently don't have any specific plans for Port Task tweaks and are keen to see how these develop, but remain open to the possibility of giving them a further boost as needed.

Tomorrow, we'll be releasing a post diving into more detail on all of the above and where we expect them to sit in terms of rates, then if those sound like something that you're on-board with we'll get to work on getting Sailing back into a happier place. While it's been heated today, we genuinely appreciate your passion, all of the discussion, and all of the feedback that you've provided on today's update.

We'll check back in with you tomorrow for more specifics!

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