I’ve made several comments over the years about how Jagex seems to struggle with conflicting priorities, and nothing really exemplifies that in recent history more than the Yak Track.
For those of you who play RuneScape, the Yak Track ends today (January 5). I liked the idea of the Yak Track in theory; an alternative to the battle pass that was given away for free to those who shelled out additional money for the Premier Pack. It’s pure selfishness, but for people like me who are still grandfathered in at the $5 monthly subscription you kinda have to give us something in the bundle to make that price difference worth it.
The Yak Track was such an exercise in tedium that it made me resent RuneScape. I managed to swallow 25 of the 50 levels and theoretically can’t really “quit” the game because I have 600+ days accumulated in excess membership thanks to various giveaways over the past 15 years. I’ve just spent the last couple of months playing the Twisted League in Old School RuneScape.
Contextually the Yak Track couldn’t come out at a more ridiculous and dare I say stupidly contradictory time in RuneScape history. It represents a mind-numbing tedium that Jagex has gone back and forth on in terms of stamping out in the game.
The Yak Track is a battle pass that presents players with 50 tiers of rewards with each tier having its own option of one of two tasks. Some of the tiers are joke tasks, like collect 28 cabbages or talk to an NPC, something you can do it 5 minutes. The majority of the tasks however are ridiculously tedious. Fletch thousands of bows, make thousands of potions, invest endless hours into slayer, etc. It isn’t fun and it’s a stark reminder of one of Jagex’s worst business practices that the company has admitted it is trying to push away from.
Jagex, like Ubisoft, has a habit of creating a problem and then selling players the solution. Don’t want to slog through 30+ tiers of godawful grind for this time-limited event and cosmetics you’ll never be able to obtain again? Well Jagex will sell you bonds to skip the content that they artificially inflated the tedium for in order to sell you bonds to skip the grind that they artificially inflated to make you pay real cash to skip. Nothing stokes resentment quite like the company that has had numerous apology videos over the past few months about their predatory monetization practices doing exactly what they are apologizing for, while they are apologizing.
It also dampens the fact that two weeks after the Yak Track launched, Jagex overhauled the way daily quests in RuneScape work because they saw players getting indignant about the tedium of taking excessive time away every day for dailies that didn’t really reward them. Yep, Jagex will overhaul a system so you don’t need to talk to an NPC to turn in a daily task while at the same time instituting another system that forces you to mine three thousand coal for 1/50th of a reward tier.
I’d like to believe Jagex’s thousandth apology and promise to do better when it comes to predatory microtransactions, but they could at least wipe the crumbs off of their face before promising that they’ll stop stealing from the cookie jar.
MMO Fallout 