Hey everyone,

I wanted to put out a message in regards to the DotD finale that took place yesterday.

As mentioned on the stream, the finale didn’t go as smoothly as we had hoped. Whilst we had some initial issues which delayed the start, the further issues regarding miasma dead zones and login problems were surprises to us. I picked up on these whilst on stream, and immediately jumped off the couch to see if there was anything to be done.

We weren’t able to pinpoint the problem until after the stream finished however - from our preliminary findings, it turned out that the finale had actually started on the server world well before we had planned, in the early hours of Saturday morning. As such, the game mode was in a ‘finished’ state, with miasma already spread across the game world.

This also was the cause of the initial log in problems, which occurred because the game wouldn’t let anyone in after the preparation phase was finished. Whilst we did manage to get the apparent problems fixed, the invisible miasma caught us by surprise just as much as everyone else.

After a quick discussion during the beginning of the finale, and not being able to figure out what the issue was immediately, we decided that the show must go on, as stopping to restart and reset may not have fixed the problem at all, which was the case. We agreed to keep to running order and address the issues after it had finished.

Understandably, this meant that a lot of people weren’t able to take part in a capacity they expected. Many of you were either removed from the competition early, or had a very bizarre experience involving no zombies, and suddenly lots of zombies. This was due to the fact that the area around Falador for the first 20 minutes of the finale was a safe zone, to allow some breathing room after leaving the gates.

There are obviously further balancing problems that, because of the limited area to use, were much bigger issues as people didn’t have a chance to venture out to supply crates and resources in the larger world.

I want to apologise for the rough ride that has been Dimension of the Damned. We set out to provide people with a fantastic game mode and a new, interesting RuneScape experience. We knew there would be teething issues, which is why we treated it as a pilot, however we delved into brand new territory with this, and the unknown factors stacked against us.


I would also like to reiterate what I said on stream - we will be supplying everyone who entered the finale with the Pet, which was initially the Top 50 prize (EDIT - the original, invited top 1000). We are also going to honour the prizes for those in the top 5 and Lexa, who came out on top.

After every big project we have a retrospective with all teams involved, where we have frank discussions about what was learned and what to move on with. For this, including all your feedback over the past few weeks, there is a lot that we can discuss - temporary content & how often we provide those types of updates compared to the steady permanent, the execution/delivery of high intensity releases and our involvement of you as a community are to name a few.

Dimension of the Damned was aspirational, and while the execution was definitely flawed, the ideas and ambition behind its development is something we are adamant to continue with in the content we provide. And I hope that, despite the issues, has still shone through.

Thank you,

Mod Sayln