Massively interviews Jagex on RuneScape's clan citadels, page 2

Massively: Do you find players are motivated to work the plots in their clan's citadel despite the reduced XP gains compared to normal gameplay?

Chihiro Yamada: It is a bit of a balancing act that we have to make. One thing that we didn't want to do was to pull all of our main players off the surface world into the citadels to spend all their time skilling there. We felt obliged to make sure the XP rates inside the citadel were lower than you'd get elsewhere.

We're aware that some players are very focused on efficiency and getting the most XP in the time available, so we gave them the clan ring as a way of compensating for lower XP gains. Whether we've got that balance exactly right or not remains to be seen; I think we've got the balance about right, but we'll keep looking at it and we'll see how the clan players react and how involved they're getting with the citadels. If we need to tweak it, we'll tweak it.

Resources spoil after a while, making it infeasible for a small group of people to grind their way to a better citadel. Can you tell me a little about how this works and why it was introduced?

We were very conscious of the fact that, as we said before, we didn't want players to spend their whole time in the citadel grinding away and staying out of the rest of the game. That was one of the motivations for having those resource caps. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we're going to balance it for any size of clan. That's one of the reasons we felt we had to put in limits on the number of players who are in the clan in order to go up the tiers.

We were concerned that the smaller clans would just spend their whole time skilling away in the citadel, and although there are some clans that want to do that, we felt that would be a very negative thing. We're trying to make the game a very social place, not a place where you just lock yourself away and keep grinding until you get to the top.

The minions summoned at the summoning plot are currently used in place of any other material. Are there any plans to use minions for something else in the future?

I think we're open to that idea, but probably not. At the moment, what I'm thinking about is how to fill in the holes and to round out the whole in-game clan experience. We're not just looking inside the citadel but outside too, and I think things like the summoning plot are ways that we can provide rewards. Maybe we'll come up with other ways.

I don't think we have a good answer for that at the moment because how we can round out the whole game experience for clans is something we're thinking about right now. Although I'm very happy with the way things have gone so far, I would like to give clans more reasons to do things outside the citadel. We need extra ways that a clan can get achievements for doing things both inside and outside the citadel. The best way of doing that is something I'm still thinking about.

Are there any major updates planned for the clan citadels themselves in the future?

We want to keep adding things to the citadels, but I don't see us radically changing the way we expect them to be used. It'll be somewhere where you and your clan will meet up regularly at least once a week for social reasons, in order to work on your upkeep, or to get involved in clan activities like the battlefields.

Players will then spend the rest of their time doing what clans already do in the rest of the game. Being in a clan doesn't mean you're in a citadel; it means the citadel is a place where you go sometimes. But what you normally do is hang around in the main game world and interact with other players and other clans that way.

We don't want to replace all of the activities that clans have already motivated themselves to do in the past; the citadels are meant to support those activities. I don't think there is enough content in the surface world game for clans. They can do what they already do, but they don't get any reward for it, they don't get anything back for it. If we add those kinds of elements, then I think we'll see clans as something people do as part of the normal gameplay.

Can we expect any more clan content to be added to RuneScape?

RuneScape is made up of several different streams of content. You have your quests, and you have your minigames. I think clan content is now one of those streams. We will be looking at creating more content in an ongoing fashion for clans, though not in the huge way that we have done this year because obviously this year is all about creating the infrastructure for clans. From now on, I see clan content as being one of the areas that we'll be making updates for. We want to find ways to use the clan's activities on the surface world as well as the clan citadel is something that we'll be working on.

We certainly want to add more clan vs. clan content, and we'll be looking at ways to do that. Maybe we'll try to adapt existing minigames, or maybe the battlefield project will give us ideas on the best ways to do that. I have a plan with a set of aims I want to achieve, but ultimately it's the clans that are going to decide what they do with the content, and it'd be foolish to ignore that. We've got a good basis for the clan game, but as with any part of our game, we'll continually add stuff as we come up with new ideas and players come up with new ideas.

Thanks for your time!

Thanks a lot mate!