Chdata - OSRS PvP Design Work

This page is under construction. I am currently in the process of proofreading and refining a lot of the pages on this site.

If you like my ideas and would like to know more about them, you can find me in the official OSRS Discord - my username is Chdata.

PvP in OSRS is Dying.

You've already heard this headline before. You've heard it this year, and the year before that, and you probably even remember people saying similar since before OSRS even existed.

I've read the discussions throughout all these years and I think the biggest problems are obviously known to everyone.

Main-game PvP is not in a state of overall growth, despite OSRS's playerbase itself growing.

This page serves as my design portfolio for proposed solutions to improve the state of PvP.

If you like my ideas and would like to know more about them, you can find me in the official OSRS Discord - my username is Chdata.

What Have Players Been Saying For The Past 10 Years?

Click the image to visit the source.

Chdata's OSRS PvP Problems & Solutions Video

I am currently working on a longform video essay to voice my thoughts and insights about OSRS PvP.

When it's done, I'll place it in this section. This is currently just a placeholder.

I've been working on it since February. It turns out this is a lot of work.

I have most of the script already finished. If you are willing to give it a read, I really appreciate it!

If you are from the OSRS dev team or an OSRS content creator, PLEASE give it a read and contact me!

This entire set of webpages is pretty much just paraphrasing stuff from my video script.

READ THE SCRIPT ►

Chdata's Solutions for OSRS PvP

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zWqkrAddDkBImHOLrsZ6Hoy9ShUFaMnZN_4GF59BM7s/edit?usp=sharing

The Core Problems of PvP (Summary)

Here's my take on the discussions everyone's been having. I've played Runescape since 2004. I have over a decade of experience in designing and coding multiplayer PvP game balance.

There isn't any singular "one problem of PvP" where if we fix that, PvP will be fixed. The truth is that PvP is a huge, complex, intertwined system with many many many major problems.

There is no simple magic band-aid solution that requires minimal dev time to fix PvP. PvP is a complex intertwined system that requires iterative work over time. Problems have been neglected for years and years to the point that now it will require a sufficient effort to undo the neglect.

In order to fix the Wilderness, we have to acknowledge ALL of the problems and focus on changes that cover all of them. It's not easy.

Every problem below is a separate limiting factor on the same thing: the growth of the PvP playerbase. The three biggest problems are listed first.

PvP is like a Fishing Trawler, and it's full of holes. Fixing just one or two problems while leaving the others means the ship is still sinking. For example even if we fix the skill gap, players not liking risk is still a problem. Even if we fix both of those, the polling system is still a problem. Even if we fix all of that, that doesn't guarantee that the actual design of specific activities is any good.

The good news about that is that we generally know what's not working for everyone. That's massively important, because it means there is still hope.

I am confident that the work required to "fix PvP" is largely "one and done" work. We just have to patch all of the holes one-by-one.

First, let's start by acknowledging the problems.

Risk is Not Worth the Reward

This is one of the largest single barriers to entry. Most players will never engage with the Wilderness because they don't want to risk losing their items. And those who might engage are turned away because the risk-to-reward ratio is simply not competitive with the rest of the game. Even safe PvP minigames are not rewarding enough for your time spent.

► Show related problems

►Wilderness rewards have to compete with the rest of the game, including 18m/h from bosses like the Doom of Mokhaiotl - a value that no Wilderness activity can realistically match without creating other integrity problems
►PKing is a negative-sum game due to the cost of supplies (food, potions, runes, ammo) and degrading equipment charges lost by both players every fight.
►The risk of being killed after farming for an hour means a player can end a session with less GP than they started with, while a non-Wildy player in the same time would always profit
►Content like the Wildy Altar fills your inventory with bones, leaving you at an inherent gear and supply disadvantage even if you wanted to PvP while doing that
►Anti-PKing while doing Wilderness bosses means your gear is optimized for the boss, not for player combat - a commonly debated gear disadvantage. You have to bring 3-way tribridding switches to be competitive, which means you have to risk more, which brings us back to the problem of players not wanting to risk
►A large majority of the playerbase is genuinely risk-averse in a way that can't be solved by just raising the rewards - plenty of players will never take any level of GP risk in PvP
►Ironmen lose too much on death in the Wilderness but also gain absolutely nothing from killing other players, making most Wilderness content feel like dead content for a growing share of the votable playerbase
►Safe PvP minigames share the same reward-competition problem - even with zero risk, their rewards don't compete with normal PvM content, so players don't engage
►Arbitrary costs gatekeep basic PKing infrastructure: 1m to unlock loot keys, 5m for nearby respawn points at Edgeville or Ferox Enclave, years of Trouver parchment problems
►Many players, specifically ironmen, are forced into the Wilderness if they wish to obtain items usable outside it (Voidwaker, Mage Arena II capes, previously Dragon Pickaxes), generating hostility between PvP and non-PvP players that is not mutual interest

The Skill Gap is Too Large

New players are fighting veterans the moment they step foot into the Wilderness, and pretty much any PvP activity for that matter. The skill floor is too high, the skill ceiling is even higher with NH bridding, and there is no understood progression ladder. Unlike PvM - which has content for every skill level - PvP has almost nothing literally designed for casual or new players.

► Show related problems

►It costs too much to even try out Wilderness PvP due to risk - the financial entry cost alone discourages experimentation before the skill gap is even a factor, especially more so for newer players who don't have a steady way to earn gold yet
►There is no obvious skill ladder, no understood progression system, and no clear path for bridging the gap between a new player and a competent PKer
►There is an unwillingness for new players to learn PvP. Perhaps because it's also just not very fun?
►LMS gives players free gear but the skill gap problem persists inside LMS itself - equalized levels and gear just makes the mechanical skill gap more visible, not less
►The PvP Arena's meta quickly devolved into players instantly forfeiting for the reward points, bypassing any meaningful competitive play where one could potentially learn
►Casual PvP is essentially dead - low-stakes PvP venues that once kept the skill pipeline healthy (Castle Wars, Soul Wars) are no longer active enough to actually train in
►The Wilderness functions differently from LMS and the PvP Arena, meaning those activities only partially teach transferable skills. Multi combat, world dynamics, chasing and escape gameplay, good gear setups for the Wilderness, are all untouched
►There is no safe PvP minigame venue for "honor PvP" - aka what Bounty Hunter does where it has rules that promote Edge-style Venge PvP with no protection prayers and no magical freezes
►Gear disparity compounds the skill gap - players in max gear fighting players in budget gear creates a compounding disadvantage that is hard to distinguish from being outplayed. This is especially prominent in Castle Wars and Soul Wars.
►The PvP population is declining, not growing alongside the OSRS population - new players are not being converted into PvPers at any meaningful rate. We should be expecting PvP to grow as OSRS itself gets more players, not diminish. This is a LARGELY alarming sign to me about the state of PvP as a whole
►The OSRS PvP wiki could probably do with better information and findable pages about PvP, especially because it's probably most player's biggest resources for learning about the game

The Self-Defeating PvP Polls

PvP needs updates to improve. But because PvP has a terrible reputation, most players vote no on PvP updates. So they don't pass. So PvP never improves. So the reputation stays bad. Jagex, seeing the pattern, reduces development resources on PvP. The cycle feeds itself.

► Show related problems

►PvP updates have consistently failed to pass 70% polls, so Jagex deprioritizes development resources for PvP, making future updates even less likely
►The 70% poll threshold is often antithetical to PvP game balance - 90% of players not engaging in PvP voting on PvP balance changes is a self-fulfilling prophecy that says PvP polls will rarely ever pass because it's not in the interests of 90% of the community
►Likewise, if only PKers are asked to design the Wilderness, they will create a Wilderness that is great for them, but extremely adverse to PvMers, thus also limiting potential growth of PvP as a whole. What is truly needed are compromises between both sides
►It's almost a given that any update that is meant to be a 50/50 fair split in how it affects PvPers and PvMers, is something that can only appeal to 50% of players rather than 70%. Likewise if any update favors PvPers 100% more, well it's not going to pass a 70% threshold from the FULL community
►The negative reputation of PvP is self-perpetuating - if everyone tells new players the Wilderness sucks, new players never try it, so the community stays small and stagnates
►An "us vs them" mentality between PvMers and PvPers means both sides treat polls as a fight to win rather than a system for finding compromise that works for the whole community
►PvPers rarely ask "what would make non-PvPers or "fence sitters" actually enjoy PvP?" - instead defaulting to "just try it" or "you don't get it", which does not bring new players in
►PvMers who say "just remove PvP" are offering an amputation, not a cure - and they underestimate how much of OSRS's identity is tied to the Wilderness existing
►Jagex has proposed the same category of solutions (new content, new rewards, new bosses) for 10+ years without addressing actual core problems - so the community has learned to distrust PvP updates before they even launch
►Ironmen represent a large and growing share of the playerbase. If PvP updates are universally seen as dead content for ironmen, that's a near-automatic roster of no votes against anything PvP-related. And Jagex has stated that ironmen are over 30% of the voting population, which means almost automatic poll failures for PvP. They also mentioned Ironmen are near 30% of voters in this blog post.
►The only way Jagex seriously considers a PvP update is when there's a major community outcry - meaning reactive development rather than proactive design is the default mode

Predator-Prey Design Problems

The core loop of the Wilderness - PKers hunting players doing content - creates structural frustration for both sides, and the food chain that's supposed to generate healthy activity isn't producing the population flow it needs to function.

► Show problems

►Simultaneously, PvMers are too hard to kill, yet also PvMers die too easily. This is a perception gap between how PvPers and PvMers understand the Wilderness. The Wilderness is the safest it ever has been, yet it's too risky for anyone to engage with it.
►PvMers feel constantly interrupted and hunted even when just trying to complete content - world-hopping scouts and clans mean there's no quiet moment
►PKers simultaneously feel the Wilderness is empty - they hop 50 to 300 worlds to find one player risking almost nothing
►PKers killing clue scroll hunters for minimal GP reward is anti-fun for both parties - it wastes everyone's time and resources without meaningful interaction
►The predator-prey model has not been rejuvenating the Wilderness for 13+ years - luring PvMers in with better rewards has never converted them into PvPers
►There are no PvM bosses, monsters, dungeons, or skilling resources that can by themselves revive the Wilderness - that approach has been tried repeatedly and has not worked
►Multi Rev Caves brought significant activity but also brought serious integrity problems (botting, scouting, clans monopolizing, rwt, gold inflation) that are difficult to manage at scale. PKers will forgive these problems, but potential new PvPers are not sold that these are not problems
►World-hopping and logging out is mandatory optimal gameplay rather than actually roaming through the Wilderness. Freeze logging is the most prominent escape strategy instead of actually gearing up to survive running away. Plugins like Wilderness Player Alarm bring frustrations about making it too easy for players to escape without even having to pay attention.
►As OSRS adds more game worlds to handle general population growth, the Wilderness spreads thinner - more worlds, same (declining) PvP players, less activity per world
►The Wilderness has no stated design goal - players, PKers, and Jagex all assign different implicit labels to it, making it impossible to evaluate whether it's succeeding at anything

Integrity & Cheating

The PvP environment has a serious fairness problem. Cheating tools are widespread and Jagex's response has been inconsistent. When a bot ban wave cleared the Wilderness, it revealed just how little legitimate PvP was actually happening. I think the biggest problem here is lack of communication that Jagex actually cares to take a stance on some of these problems and say they are taking action, such as when Wildy CCTV existed for around a year.

► Show problems

►Cheat clients that auto-pray and auto-eat remove a large part of the mechanical skill from PvP, giving a significant competitive advantage over legitimate players
►AHK and similar scripts that perform instant weapon switches automatically reduce a high-skill-ceiling mechanic to a zero-effort action
►Bots farming GP in the Wilderness suppress organic activity and distort the population numbers Jagex uses to evaluate PvP health. To be honest, it's a little goofy that PKers often recommend people use "killing bots" as an introductory way to engage with the Wilderness
►World-hop scouting bots and tools like WildyCCTV (when it existed) let players see Wilderness activity across all worlds, giving a systematic information advantage to those willing to use them
►Alt account scouting is abused by pretty much everyone, and I think it's a symptom of how empty the Wilderness is. People couldn't be doing that if there were so much activity, their alts were regularly being killed. The emptiness of the Wilderness allows for these kinds of loopholes that both PvMers and PvPers detest more than if they were just organically running into each other
►The wilderness player alarm Runelite plugin allows PvMers to instantly log out when another player appears, while barely having to pay attention at all to the game, make it that much more impossible for a PKer to actually catch them. Most importantly, it's just inorganic gameplay that wasn't always in the game, was not polled for acceptance, and was created by a third party.
►Ragging - repeatedly attacking a player with low-risk gear to waste their supplies or get a lucky kill on them - has no good systemic counter in the current game
►Boxing - repeatedly attacking a player with weak equipment to prevent anyone else from attacking - is an exploit-adjacent loophole in combat mechanics
►Many Wilderness reward sources have low combat requirements but high GP yields, making them attractive botting targets and an ongoing source of economy problems. Even singles revs was just full of bots before the ban waves. Even PKers were making tutorials about how to farm killing the BOTS

PvM vs PvP Mechanical Inconsistencies

A significant number of items, staves, and mechanics work differently in PvP versus PvM, or in the Wilderness versus the rest of the game. This creates a hidden layer of knowledge new players don't know to look for that even confuses some veteran players.

► Show problems

Other Problems

I could go on all day listing different problems. Here's just a few more.

► Show problems

Chdata's Main Proposed Solutions For The Wilderness

Given all of this information, I've come up with 4 major systems to help improve the Wilderness and turn a dying activity into a growing activity.

I think there are two major possible routes for revitalizing PvP.

Route 1: Fix the Wilderness, and then later, safe PvP minigames could get a touch-up too.
Route 2: Ignore the Wilderness (for now) and make safe PvP minigames really good.

I used to believe in focusing on improving safe PvP minigames because I used to believe the Wilderness was inherently unfixable, and I care about safe PvP minigames more. I think they are more fun.

However, when players talk about PvP, the majority of discussions are about the Wilderness. Most of the gripes about PvP are about the Wilderness. Most of what PKers actually want is to see the Wilderness do well again.

So I've come to realize, the fastest route to seeing safe PvP minigames improved, is probably actually to see the Wilderness get improved first, and then afterwards other forms of PvP can be focused on later maybe after PvP has grown in popularity.

After all, the Wilderness is kind of just like a big open-world minigame. It has its own enclosed system with specific rules that only apply within its area.

I know what I like about minigame PvP and what I dislike about Wilderness PKing. I've studied the community's discussions about the topic for literal years and I know the wishes and pain points of both sides. I come from a background of over a decade of experience in balancing multiplayer PvP for contrasting "groups" of a playerbase.

So I came up with designs that bridge the gap and make reasonable compromises between PvPers and PvMers that don't favor one side or the other too much.

That is what led me to come up with the major Wilderness solution ideas I'm sharing on this page.

These ideas all aim to tackle the three biggest problems.

What's the tl;dr for how these ideas help?

The three game mechanic ideas here all help rebalance Risk vs Reward in some way, and they also help with Skill Gap by leveling the playing field in certain ways. The new polling system will help everyone identify what the community cares about the most for PvP.

You will have to read more about them to get the specifics, or watch my video which explains each in detail.

Core Proposal

Blessed Status

An opt-in overhead status for the Wilderness. It's an alternative option to Skulling. This is the single most impactful possible update Jagex could make to the Wilderness.