Game Governance 3
Runescape
We left off with the introduction of councils as mechanisms to better coordinate an aggregation and filtering funnel. Hypothetically councils allowed devs to gain higher signal feedback and helped ease the bottleneck of community manager capacity. Scalability through select decentralization.
In this iteration of game governance, I want to introduce what I believe has additional efficiency gains in the decentralization complexity curve from the council model.
After EOC (an extremely unpopular update) community member So Wrecked starts a petition on change.org to bring back the old-school servers.
We the players are petitioning Jagex to restore a few Old Game servers to the game. By doing so, Runescape will see the return of a community that was once thriving.
In response, Jagex the studio behind Runescape posts a vote. Depending on its outcome, Jagex will allocate different levels of development resources to the game and give it additional perks.
As I said at the start of the year, we’re all very focused on making this year fun, memorable and special to you, and a significant part of realising this mission is giving you a big say in what we focus on.
So, just like the poll for the return of the Wildy & Free Trade, which saw a jaw dropping 1.4 million votes , we will be running a similar poll and letting you - our valued members - decide the fate of ‘Old School RuneScape', given that you directly fund the game's ongoing development and supporting services. This decision - along with the level of service, investment and potentially any additional fee for the service - is truly up to you to determine.
Level 1 - 50,000 or more votes:
Servers will come back with no new content + additional membership cost
Level 2 - 250,000 or more votes:
Servers will come back with small dev team + lower additional membership cost
Basic maintenance for bug fixes and antibot technology
Level 3 - 500,000 or more votes:
Servers will come back with bigger dev team, no extra fee
Regular maintenance, content updates
Level 4 - 750,000 or more votes:
Dedicated and large dev team
Consistent additional content
“crucially - regular members' polls to determine which updates you want to see prioritized”
See the original post here.
Today any member who has a total level above 300 and more than 25 hours of game-time can vote on poll items sourced from player forums - these include new quests, cosmetics, and items.
As one player describes:
When one bad change can ruin the game (eoc, trade limit, ect) I have no problem with missing out on a few potentially good updates to stop any chance of something really bad passing.
Hypothesis: player voting on proposals organically sourced from forums, AMAs further pushed the decentralization, complexity frontier.
Pros
Reduced complexity overhead of council members and council maintenance
Pure quantitative signal on what players want
Decentralized in voting, less centralized in what is voted on through sourcing from forums, community managers…etc
Cons
Low voter participation (5-10% of eligible voters) - generally suffers from all the problems democracy has
Chance of Sybil voting (though unlikely to be observed in practice in OSRS as stakes are low)
Still centralized in what is voted on resulting in stealth updates without voting, angering some players (though most have been in fixing bugs and cheats)
75% plurality requirement draws criticism that game is too conservative in new content (vocal minority can sway votes)
Content creator and bug finder Rendi finds that Jagex is monitoring his account and updates the game without polls.
The strongest criticism against broadly applying the OSRS voting model would be the sheer prevalence of bots. At the moment, bots have little incentive to vote, but if what was polled was more high stakes (as is in crypto gaming), then one might imagine that those with little soul at stake could overpower decisions desired by actual players. At the moment there is no evidence that bots are voting, or have the power to sway decisions by the playing majority.
Summary
Runescape had a history of player exodus from bad updates - in response there was already a culture of voting for updates/server rollbacks (free trade and wildy)
After another was not well received community members voted to rollback to an older version of the game
Jagex responded by providing perks and resources to the new game contingent on voter turnout. One was the promise that all future updates will go through player polls and be sourced from player forums.
This passed. Today only members that meet certain criteria (to prevent voter fraud) can vote on updates.
Poll-driven Runescape quickly overtook developer-driven Runescape in terms of interest.
