I've been keeping an eye on a fascinating microcosm of MMO economics for a while now, and it's officially hit a boiling point over in the Old School RuneScape community. The recent release of two new enemies, one spitting out millions of gold despite being easy to kill, and the other locked behind an endgame quest yet struggling to drop anything worthwhile, has confused and rankled the OSRS faithful, to the point that developer Jagex recently delayed a planned Q&A session so it could instead focus on ironing out some loot tables.
In April, zombie pirates were added to Old School RuneScape. These are weak mobs averaging level 28 with just 35 hitpoints, found en masse in the PvP-enabled Wilderness, albeit not too deep into the Wilderness. They're easy to reach, easy to kill, and – based on player reports and according to the reputable OSRS wiki – can net you upwards of 2 million gold an hour, with the bulk of that profit coming from weapons and materials which, while small payouts individually, add up very quickly. They're such easy money, in fact, that the countless bots that infest OSRS like termites in an oak tree very quickly descended on pirate zombies in droves.
Fast forward to this week and we have the release of While Guthix Sleeps, a new Grandmaster-tier quest. I say new, but this is actually the re-release of a quest that first came to plain-old RuneScape in 2008, newly revived for Old School RuneScape with a few changes. While Guthix Sleeps carries fairly hefty skill and quest requisites, and your primary reward for completing it is the ability to craft some new weapons and hunt level 450 Tormented Demons which drop materials needed for those weapons.
Corrected information on Tormented Demon hourly profit based on stabilized methods and prices. The standard drops for Tormented Demons were also noticeably improved since this story was written, boosting average profit.
Although the main draw of the original Tormented Demons, hotly coveted dragon claws, had already been introduced to OSRS through a previous raid, many players were excited to see these demons make a comeback after all this time. However, many of those players were quickly disappointed to find that the new Tormented Demons didn't drop that many valuable items. This is intentionally balanced out by their rarest, most valuable drops – the OSRS wiki puts them at over 6.5 million GP per hour collectively – but the low and not-improbable lows of the drop table rankled some given the requirements attached. This frames a common divide between OSRS bosses: consistent money with few spikes, or extremely good money specifically when the big rares come. Tormented Demons, while lucrative, seemingly fell short of some expectations given the effort it takes to kill them, with some players evidently hoping for a higher loot floor.
This isn't an entirely unique problem. Some OSRS bosses and enemies are notorious for spitting out easy gold, and new challenges are often measured against them. There can only be one best money maker, after all. That said, you can still have plenty of good money makers that are fun in their own ways. But the extreme gap between pirate zombies and Tormented Demons, especially with recency bias after they launched just months apart, raised some eyebrows in the OSRS community. Jagex had adjusted pirate zombies following previous outcry, but Tormented Demons still struck an unfavorable comparison.
The OSRS Reddit community was, in a word, vocal about this wealth gap. With some quick math, one player reasoned that killing men – common, level 2 dudes who appear in normal towns – could match or beat the yield from Tormented Demons, mega-rares excluded. This obviously depends on your luck and how efficiently you can kill the demons, and players will optimize this process over time, but for Grandmaster-exclusive enemies the early numbers weren't pretty.
"Was worried I might have to move my zombie pirate bot farm and didn't fancy getting all those requirements, so I'll just leave it there and make 10x the gp/hr," quipped another player.
One highly upvoted post lays it out bluntly: "A few months ago, we received zombie pirates which shit out millions of gp and were locked behind zero restrictions and super easy content. Today we received a Grandmaster quest, with Tormented Demons which are located very far away, and their loot is worse than regular Greater Demons."
On the heels of a July 10 update which further adjusted pirate zombies by removing one item from their normal loot table, Jagex released a blog post acknowledging the feedback on Tormented Demons.
"As we have with most releases of late, we opted for a more cautious loot table than an overly generous one - this has worked well for us (and the health of the game) and is something we'll continue to do," Jagex says. "That being said, we hear you loud and clear - the Tormented Demon loot tables need some work. We'll be taking the time to get this right and making sure that we're making a decision that's well-informed by data as well as your feedback. We'll be looking to speak in more detail on these next week when we have more data points for factors like kills per hour and/or unique prices."
"Admittedly this doesn't tell you all that much, but to be crystal clear: we will be looking carefully at loot tables and plan to make changes in line with your feedback once we're armed with better data," the developer adds. "We're always open to making changes where necessary, and this is no exception."
Jagex was also quick to make a request of its own, which shouldn't be necessary but sadly too often is with online communities: "Please stop targeting or singling out individual developers while providing your feedback. In many cases, the developers being targeted aren't heavily involved with the content that you're criticizing. In all cases, loot mechanics and tables are passed around the team and reviewed - we succeed as a team and we fail as a team. We're more than happy for you to be critical of our work as a team, but the repeated targeting of individual team members needs to stop."
OSRS players responded in kind, wondering why Tormented Demons were given a "cautious loot table" while pirate zombies were practically handed a golden ticket. Importantly, one of the top posts on the game's subreddit also echoes Jagex's call for normal, decent behavior: "This shouldn't need to be said. Let's be better, people!"
Jagex has had multiple PvE successes lately and OSRS is widely considered to be hitting new highs as one of the biggest MMOs around, so I've little doubt that a reasonable middle ground can be reached here. The devs were quick to respond, seem to agree with players on several points, and pushed back a Q&A not just because they don't yet have "confident answers to many of the questions we've seen from you," but also because "we'd like to protect our team's time to allow them to make necessary fixes and changes."
When those changes will arrive remains to be seen, but this whole ordeal has thus far been an intriguing demonstration of MMO player expectations, as well as risk and reward in loot economies. I haven't played RuneScape in years and don't have any skin in the game, but I've faced similar loot quandaries in MMOs like Destiny 2, so I can't wait to see how this ends.
