Approximately a month ago, Jagex released their 38^th Treasure Hunter update of the year, which was Prize Pool.

Prize Pool:
With every Key you use, you have a chance to earn a bonus prize on the Prize Pool interface at the top of the screen. Claim that extra prize immediately, or use more Keys to get a chance at more, rarer, prizes.


Annoyed with the constant TH updates RS3 players were receiving and how this TH update felt more like a slot machine, people took to the RS3 Reddit to voice their concerns. Approximately a week into constant complaining about TH, Jagex made a post saying that they were basically going to internally discuss about TH.
(IIRC, they're talking to their investors too about this - I can't find the post to confirm this though)

Despite this, Jagex has continued to release a series of over-powered TH Promotions, including: Genie's Gift, Smouldering Lamps and Mysteria.

After that was announced, the RS3 subreddit continued to dominate with MTX posts, although mostly consisting of memes.

It was announced yesterday that they're going to be released a MTX Statement this coming Monday.

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Now that you're all caught up - What do you think we can expect from the MTX Statement?

• Will we see less TH updates this year? -- Or perhaps less OP TH updates?
• Will nothing be done about MTX at all?
• Will they make generic rewards more over-powered to instinctive people to buy TH keys without having to release a promotion?

Let me know your thoughts on the situation -- Lets not forget that Jagex is a company and at the end of their day, their goal is to make money.

I'm glad the people are letting jagex know they are unhappy.

Mtx has slowly been creeping higher and higher in the last few months.
I'm also worried they will do the same thing last time this happened - Say they're gonna make things better, then after the complaints die down they bring the mtx as strong as ever.
We need to keep telling them we're unhappy before it gets more out of hand.

I've played games with the disgusting full blown out mtx and it's not pretty. Maplestory went down the same road and it's sad to see another game i've put so many hours turn into what it is today and i worry runescape is slowly heading in that direction.

I can only hope they make the right decision but i have no faith in jagex and never will. Too bad the game has become so addicting for me since the start of classic

I'd personally rather them just do away with Mxt all together and do whatever is necessary to fund the game in other methods. If this meant doubling membership costs i'd be happy with that or releasing more soloman cosmetics or whatever.

Updates are threadbare these days at best and most months include recycled content that has been slightly tweaked. Even if it meant putting adverts into membership worlds it would be better than treasure hunter.

I feel its got to the point where there's no going back. We won't be seeing TH go but hopefully, we'll see an increase in cosmetic TH events which aren't just all focused around exp. The Exp ones like lamps etc. cant see them ever going.

Why would Jagex and the people that own them care?  As long as they continue to reap the rewards of all these Treasure Hunt Promotions? 

I lost all respect for Jagex for a number of reasons, treasure hunter promotion being one of them.

People will always want to get easy XP even if it means spending £100s , een more Im sure.

I hope they publish how much are actually spent on these promotions!!

personally speaking ,th has been a blight on this game since its introduction .too much free xp making it far too easy to level up .i favour the cosmetic th option ,wither fewer xp rewards

I personally no longer care about XP, and as such, I don't mind insanely OP promotions either. The value of achievements was eradicated long ago and it's liberating to play the game without caring. Even if they were to remove all XP based MTX now, the highscores would still remain ruined.

this sums rs up now quite good

I really don't care if people choose to spend their money on Treasure Hunter, at the end of the day it's their money and it doesn't really affect me as I don't care about what rank I am on the highscores, I simply play to have fun.

However, the amount of overpowered TH update they have released this year is insane. Jagex are receiving a record number of profits, yet the content we've seen this year have been utterly shit - It seems as if there's no money being spent on actual updates.

Now combine the lack of quality of updates with the amount of MTX being shoved into the game and ask yourself where is Runescape going to be in 5 or 10 years time? People are already leaving the game and RS3 is in decline, it's obvious to see.

Hi everyone,

In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion and concern from parts of the community about the update quality and use of micro-transactions (MTX) in RuneScape. Our lack of response has made us seem distant and uncollaborative, making frustrations worse, and for that we are truly sorry. We’d like to reassure you that the time has been spent deciding on the right changes. In this post we’ll cover the immediate actions being taken and the larger changes we’ll build towards in the longer term.

First, thank you for your comments, ideas and complaints - yes really! Your care for the game shines through. You’ve seen content quality and quantity start to slide, seen MTX promotions march on regardless and Jagex going quiet on the matter. You’re worried that this will just get worse and are concerned for what it means in the long term. We hear you, and we shouldn’t have let it get to this point.

It is incredibly important for us as developers that RuneScape has a long and healthy life. An essential part of that is providing players with new content, improved features and solid overall service. The balance we try to strike is that MTX is a major part of the game’s income and directly relates to the amount we can invest into its continued development. Without that income stream we would have to massively cut back on investment into the game and we feel that would be very damaging for RuneScape and the community. That being said, it's clear that parts of the community feel we’ve neither delivered on the content nor got the balance with micro-transactions right. Therefore, we’ve looked critically at ourselves to understand what happened and how we can do better by you.

Content
On the content side, though there have been some good updates, you’ve not received consistently strong releases throughout this year. There are a few factors: moving toward and then away from the expansions strategy resulted in a lot of wastage; we picked too many long-term development projects at the same time, stifling regular releases; and we moved a few developers to focus on building the mobile client before we’d hired their replacements. Also, our desire to not over-promise in the RuneScape Reveals at RuneFest made it seem like we’d lost our ambition.

We can – and will – do better. The content roadmap has been remade in recent months, directly driven by player requests, and we will be doing a new community survey soon to make sure our content plans are the best they can be. We have also changed our development processes to get more of the updates you want in production and to ensure they're being released more regularly. We will soon be adding a content rating system into the game itself so we can gather feedback from everyone on new content as you play, which in turn helps us respond better.


^{mage showing a potential design of the in-game feedback system. Click to expand.}

We are also bringing in new development team members over the coming months to give us greater capacity to deliver on content quality and make the mobile client a reality for you. These changes will bring a consistently good flow of content and we are going to be showing you our new team structure and progress on new updates in news posts, live streams and videos in the coming weeks. The mobile client will also be transformative for RuneScape, offering a lot of convenience to current players, as well as bringing many lapsed and new players. We’re confident that together these things will make for a strong year ahead for RuneScape.

Monetisation
On the MTX side, we let the balance tip too far and promotions seemed to dominate the game, especially when coupled with underwhelming content updates. The Prize Pool promotion design was misjudged and it crossed the line.

While MTX in RuneScape is essential to maintaining our development teams and the content they produce, we believe it can be refined (and the harsher edges smoothed out) without significant dents to income. Rest assured, we certainly won't be pushing it any harder. The Prize Pool promo won’t ever be seen again and we don’t intend to revisit similar mechanics any time soon. Over the next few months we will be experimenting with promotion configuration, such as duration, start days and marketing levels, to see if there are better trade-offs between visibility and revenue. For one of the first experiments we will not be running second-chance-Tuesday for the rest of the year. We commit to keeping a detailed eye on the game economy and progression rates to ensure promotions aren’t going to cause major impact. And to help in the longer term, we are starting a rework of Treasure Hunter, which will have greater emphasis on cosmetics and conveniences.

It is important that we don’t over-promise; to be clear, this doesn’t mean the end of Treasure Hunter promotions. What we are committing to is better managing their impact, duration and regularity, making some immediate changes in the short term while looking to move to a more balanced approach in the mid to long term.


Communication
In terms of communications, we've not talked to you enough. We'll pot-up defence and communicate more, show you all what we're working on and better explain our decisions.

While we as the game’s developers sometimes seem to have other priorities, we care deeply for the game too. For most of us here RuneScape is at the centre of our lives and careers. We don’t always get it right, but hopefully you can tell we are as passionate about the game as you are.

In closing...
Hopefully you can see we're making some immediate changes and planning long term improvements. You can help us too, by making the RuneScape community the most positive and welcoming place possible. After all, the more players we have the less reliance there is on MTX revenue.

Our overall goal is to deliver you frequent, high-quality content updates, bring the game onto more platforms, and tune MTX to be less abrasive. We think this is the right approach to ensure RuneScape remains healthy. And overall the game is still robust: In the last year membership has remained stable; RuneFest 2017 was the biggest and most popular yet; and our marketing efforts are ramping up to bring in new players. With strong content and mobile coming next year, 2018 is shaping up to be a great year for RuneScape!

Many of your most desired projects are well into development and we're looking forward to the livestream tomorrow where we'll show progress on Pirates Quest, Deep Sea Fishing, Clue Scroll Overhaul, Mining and Smith rework, the all new Solak boss, Combat Pets, the upcoming Halloween Quest, and Evil Dave! Tune in to the extended special from 15:30 UTC!

Thank you all for your support,
Mods Pips, Mac, Conor, Osborne, MIC and the RuneScape team

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My personal summary:
What a load of shit.

My personal summary:
What a load of shit.

Couldn't agree more

A response from Mod Balance on the RS3 Reddit:

• We will be removing our Second-Chance Tuesday promotions for the rest of the year.
• We have started a rework of Treasure Hunter, for release next year, which will have a greater emphasis on cosmetics and conveniences.
• Prize Pool will never be seen again.
• We will be making changes to our promotion calendar with an eye on their duration, start days and marketing levels.
• We have already made some substantial changes to how we make content, so that low-quality, dry months are a thing of the past.

Beyond this, things won't change overnight, this is a huge topic and any changes have a major impact on the future of Jagex and RuneScape. We hope you continue to give us feedback, and help shape the rework and our content calendar moving forward!

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There's basically a huge, informal Q&A going on on the subject at the moment, feel free to read more here.

Standard Business Statement in short: Get fucked we'll keep it going

Standard Business Statement in short: Get fucked we'll keep it going

this

My reasons for playing will always be this clan, my friends and the community. Even if the ship sinks ill go down with it to the bitter end, But it is still sad to see.