First off let me introduce myself.👋
My name is Matt, I have been in the RSPS scene for just over 10 years now. During my time I have Administrated, Moderated, and also been in the atmosphere for developing scripts that the game runs off of, on top of Owning/Managing 2 Minecraft servers. Both of which run off of my independent code and the foundations that I laid out which lead to both of them being extremely successful with a combined player base of over 150 and growing.
This is not a 100% foolproof list, but it is jam packed with ideas that I've had for years, things I have personally seen work, and even strategies I use on my own servers.
So lets get into this extensive list. Starting with 2 key points that I see as a big issue, followed by qol/hotfixes that might have been missed. 💬 1. Macroing/botting
We all know it happens, we see it, we report it, and some of us may even partake in it. Without going into extensive details about how it is done, we know it happens.
The highest extent I have seen of prevention in this subject would be someone like Nicole doing "bot checks". It's not bad but there could be more done to prevent this.
1) Make the teleports around the game not land you on the exact same tile every time, this rejects the ability to use constant repetition and disrupts mouse recorders. Which would ultimately take out most if not all botable aspects of Runecrafting, Construction, Agility and others ever so slightly.
2) Give Moderators the remote access to scout a player without teleporting to them. It gives a discrete appearance, the player doesn't get annoyed, and the list could be checked much quicker and more efficiently. I would recommend a gui popup such as the one you get when you click features on the Max cape.
3) Use the OSRS mechanic, where the camera on your screen ever so slightly rotates, over time this would screw up any mouse recorder or AHK script, leaving the user to be running circles around edge bank who is currently taking a shower while doing herblore. Leaving them right out in the open to be spotted and taken care of.
2. Economic Stabilization.
We are all aware that on every single RSPS out there, that money becomes redundant, obtaining it becomes pointless as there is a massive load of items in the game over time, this is extremely hard to prevent and there isn't a whole lot you can do to flush out the eco without a reset. Especially with previous dupes.
1) Make a well of goodwill. A well that players throw items/coins in, for a chance at a reward at the end of the week. Obviously broadcasted and ran like a lottery. For every 1m put into the well, you get a lottery ticket which you would trade to an npc. There is a lot that goes into this but would be worth in aiding the longevity of the server.
2) Recyclable items. Think of invention on RS3, instead of being able to alch a Rune platebody for 40k gp, why not have the option to throw it into a grinder/furnace and get the raw materials back so people can use them for experience? This would help in extreme ways because of the amount of gp that the server would be negative, whether it be through the general store or high alchs, it really adds up and slows down the process. This is not limited to Rune, it could be applied to all smithable items of their tier.
3) Slayer caskets. People are going to hate me for this but they are far too powerful for gp. One week of slaying on a Maxed account and I am at a 50m stack, with a whole loot tab, all from slayer caskets. I am most definitely going to buy token scrolls instead of buying with my real life cash. You multiply that by probably 100+ people doing that every week. That's A LOT of unnecessary GP that is not only flooding the eco, but taking money from the server because it is used to buy a hefty amount of scrolls which could otherwise be bought with real life $$$.
4) Why is getting resources in-game harder than getting money? I can sit here and fish sharks for an hour, at 225-300p/hr. But I could also go slay for an hour and wind up with enough money to buy double the amount of sharks. I'm not all that experienced in the prices of resources that normies can buy on here, but it might not hurt to double up the shop price of sharks/anglers/scb's/ppots etc.
(I could write more on this but I only want the best of my ideas to be heard before it gets too boring.)
Time for the Qol fixes/small bugs that I have noticed.
1. For presets, enable them to set your wand/staff to your specific autocast. Allow your blowpipe to save the darts in that loadout you had. If you are at edge bank/dzone where the rejuvenation box is, just have it heal you like it does while loading a preset, there is little to no reason as to why this shouldn't be allowed.
2. Dk rings have an INSANE drop rate of what seems to be 1/1k or 1/5k, this is probably known but I made sure to include that in here.
3. Ironman rune shops don't hold enough runes, buffing the amounts of certain base runes up to chaos wouldn't do much harm.
4. Yell timer: when you try and yell it doesn't show your CURRENT cooldown, it tells you the base cooldown you start with. (should be an easy fix)
4a. Users who repeatedly get yell muted, should have it removed based on a system. For example if you get yell muted 5 times, your ability to yell is revoked for X amount of time. having this increase more over the amount of times you get muted. Its literally every single day I log in and see all the wildy pkers (and some others) having a pissing contest over yell, flooding the ingame chat and creating an extremely toxic environment for the rest of the community and newcomers to see.
5. Inferno/zuk should have the ability to be unlocked as a slayer task, I recommend either with coins, vote tokens, slayer points, and or donation rank.
6. Recolor the 25 claimed votes text, it pops up and everyone has the same complaint that they think its a drop, wouldn't hurt to take that away and return it with a different color. It's a good reminder, but would be better off as a different color in the chat.
6a. Instead of useless events like "molch pearls" do a weekend long event where you get double vote tokens or a chance at scrolls/slayer points.
7. Make your lives easier by setting up a way to make events automatic, where it would make your work as a developer/global moderator a lot more easier since you don't have to be the one to stay on for that time and manually turn it on/off.
8. An option for the catacombs to have a teleport to any monster within the catacombs at a certain donation rank by clicking on the altar.
9. At a certain donation rank, give a % chance to autocomplete a clues upon doing a step.
10. Seren is still broke, you can leave the last healer alone and afk the rest of the kill.
11. Vorkath's spawn can walk to all 7 continents before crumble undead actually kills him, the delay is FAR too long.
12. Not all clues for the Runelite plugin auto solve. Mainly mediums/hard clues.
13. Zulrah on Pattern 2 always spawns a weird jad phase which is completely out of place, not sure if this was intentional.
14. Adding amulet of the amulet of damned to barrows drop table instead of shades.
14a. Adding barrows pets, i.e Ahrim/torags?
14b. As far as pets go, you could always add more then just the current custom pets. Copying and pasting code with tweaks here and there is pretty simple.
15. Logged in rewards. For every 24 hours logged in hand out a simple reward. Chance of slayer points, a small amount of coins, an xp book, a clue, anything that would keep the player count high even if its just people afking. Keeping the numbers up is always a good thing.
15a. Kind of cheeky, but player boosting. Enough said on that.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, I am jam packed full of ideas whether you agree they're good or not. But I think this is a decent starting point. Depending on the feedback if any I will be making more of these posts.
Anyways, hope you found this helpful. I would love to see feedback in the comments of this post as it took some time to write up. It's not the most organized post, but it gets the point across.
🏃♂️