The Old School RuneScape team is once again seeking the community’s thoughts on a change to death pile mechanics, with benefits for Ultimate Ironman players.
The change would include altering how death piles currently work into something a bit more flexible. Right now, when players die and drop items, the clock starts ticking and if they’re unable to get back to their item pile, it will despawn in 60 minutes, without exception. This risk of losing your items has been part of Ultimate Ironman and is something players are used to, but the OSRS team is wondering what it might look like to separate out that 60-minute timer and make it player-dependent and not just a flat timer with no exceptions.
Any veteran of online games knows that sometimes servers go down, or there’s so much lag on your end that your connection just fails or won’t stay connected for too long. Couple that with a timer running down to you losing your items forever. This is part of the thinking on the proposed change and an overall fairer shot for players. It might even encourage more to take the risk.
When a player dies, under the proposed changes, if you log out or are disconnected, the death pile items are attached to a character, so the despair timer will pause. When you log in again, it will start counting down once again. So you still get an hour, but if the server goes down, you wouldn’t be out of luck.
Since this proposed change is just that, and the current way functions, it’s up to the community to decide if they want any change at all. But the team is coming from a place where they’re looking at the risk and also making the experience worth it, while accounting for potential technical issues.
For the full details of the proposed changes, head over to Old School RuneScape.
