After Jagex released their most recent boss, Kerapac, the Bound, as the first front of Elder God Wars Dungeon, players have been vocal about the nature of RuneScape Death costs in the game. The discussions became a hot topic when a “free death week” was released alongside Kerapac, when players enjoyed the new content without worrying about repercussions.
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Death costs in RuneScape
In RuneScape, if a player dies, they get sent to Death’s Office, where Death will hold onto the items you would normally lose. By paying Death back, you can reclaim your items.
If a player is wearing a Ring of Death when they die, they will instead avoid Death and respawn in the last respawn hub they visited. All their items will remain intact, but the Ring of Death will lose significant amount of charges.
Using a Ring of Death tends to be cheaper, since recharging it with Onyx gems is much cheaper than paying Death to reclaim your high tier equipment.
The problem
At first glance, it seems that players who want a less punishing death mechanic are just entitled and want an easier game without risks. But when looking at a Reddit post made on behalf of PvME (Player versus Monsters Encyclopedia, a community of players focusing around data on PvM), the issue becomes clear.
Disproportional risk vs. reward
Death costs are proportional to the Grand Exchange value of the item, which is one of the biggest source of the problem.
This means that the Death costs can fluctuate frequently when updates come out or when players discover tricks or new usage to existing gear.
Furthermore, higher tier items are exponentially more expensive than the damage increase they provide. And this also means that Death costs are largely arbitrary, with two different gear of the same tier having drastically different Death costs.
This means incredibly expensive items that grant around a 2% increase in DPM (damage per minute) will result in an exponentially higher risk. This discourages people from upgrading their gear, which goes against the nature of MMOs like RuneScape.
“Switchscape” (a term used to describe item switches in high levelled bossing for optimal kill times) is also affected by this. This is due to Switchscape requiring multiple high levelled equipment that the player swaps between throughout the course of the boss fight.
This, in turn, further increases the RuneScape Death costs, due to the higher number of equipment that needs to be reclaimed from death.
Discourages PvM
Similar to how it discourages upgrading gear, the disproportional risk vs. reward for doing high levelled bossing disincentivizes players from trying out new content. JMods (Jagex Moderators) have stated that they are constantly re-assessing Death costs because they dissuades players from engaging in content they create.
Essentially, as developers, they want players to try out the new content they release, and Death costs actively pushes players away.
Effect on learners
At first, it may seem that Death costs affect top PvMers. However, they affect learners the most, since dying is inevitable when learning bosses, and players can quickly lose their entire bank before making any profit.
With the amount of group bosses in the game, PvMers are less likely to take learners because in several cases, if one person messes up, the entire kill could be lost, resulting in huge costs for the entire team. This creates an even larger barrier entry for people who wish to get into PvM.
Lack of ring diversity
As mentioned before, Ring of Death can drastically reduce the costs of dying. But this means that Ring of Death is essentially a must wear in most scenarios, as the extra utility and damage boosts from other useful rings are outweighed by the risk of higher Death costs in RuneScape.
Solutions to RuneScape Death Costs
Many solutions have been proposed, such as capping the Death costs, a way to make the Ring of Death active while not wearing it, or changing how Death costs are calculated in RuneScape.
OSRS [Old School RuneScape] introduced a new death system recently, where death costs are hard-capped at a price depending on the boss encounter. Their system avoids double graving, has a system in place for sacrificing items and storing value in death’s coffer, and still remains punishing for dying. Something like that could be very easily implemented in RS3, given we already have an improved item retrieval service in Death’s Office.
u/PvM_Encyclopedia
Jagex is apparently discussing solutions to the problem internally, but for now, they have allowed teleporting out of (most) bosses in today’s update. Several bosses could not be teleported out of, and many of them are group bosses.
This meant that if a player dies and the kill is lost, everyone else had no choice but to die and equip the Ring of Death they hopefully brought.
Being able to teleport out of bosses (except Telos due to the kill streak mechanic) is a small step to fixing the issue. We can hope that a proper solution can be implemented soon.
