Annual Survey is HERE! (OSRS)


Date	2025-10-15
Type	news-opinion
Video	youtu.be/YjYgGFi5878

Summary

Gnomonkey goes through Jagex's 2025 annual OSRS player survey question by question and gives his own answers, covering skill updates, the year's updates, quests, plugins and RuneLite, membership value, Leagues ideas and quality-of-life priorities. His main takeaways are that he wants far more QOL work on recent content such as Colosseum, Doom of Mokhaiotl and Yama, and that he found this year's survey much emptier than last year's.

Outline

0:00 Introduction: Jagex's yearly survey and the botched plugin question
1:03 Quality of life priorities: Slayer QOL, Chambers of Xeric QOL, Colosseum and Doom needing QOL
1:53 Sponsor message (Boot.dev)
2:51 Game values and which skills most need updates (Crafting, Farming, Thieving, Fishing, Slayer)
5:55 Rating the 2025 updates: Varlamore Part 3, run energy, Titans, Castle Wars, stackable clues, Yama, pet insurance
10:43 Questing preferences: why he dislikes questing and how the quest questions were framed
14:25 Plugins and the client: RuneLite versus the official client
18:24 Membership value and game focus: communication, content pace, player support
25:33 Leagues and community: starting region and proposed league mechanics
29:04 Quality of life focus: which themes to address and which recent content to revisit
38:32 Closing thoughts: criticisms of the survey and what he wished was asked

Topics covered

Opinion: 2025 Annual Survey

(0:00) Jagex published a post about its yearly Old School RuneScape player survey, which asks a very large number of questions about many aspects of the game.
(0:27) The 2025 survey had a question about official versus third-party plugins that left out two answer options (including being happy with both), which caused uproar on Reddit; Jagex later fixed it by adding the missing options.
(35:46) Gnomonkey criticises the survey's quest section: after he answers that he dislikes quests it still asks what he values most in a quest, with no option to say he values nothing, and he thinks that section should be skipped or changed to ask what would make him like quests more.
(36:42) Gnomonkey says the 2025 survey asked how players felt about player support a couple of times but never what aspects of support they value, despite the earlier debacle over paid-membership player support.
(37:13) Gnomonkey notes the 2025 survey had no question at all about Sailing or how the game will be after Sailing.
(37:13) Gnomonkey felt the 2025 survey was much emptier than the previous year's, which had more options and more questions hinting at upcoming content, such as the most anticipated upcoming update.
(37:42) Gnomonkey says he suspects Jagex struggles to decide rewards for upcoming content such as raids and Sailing (as with Doom), and that it should ask players what they think would be a cool mega rare, a question his chat discusses for hours.
(37:42) Gnomonkey suggests Essence of Finality, an RS3 amulet that holds a special attack usable on any weapon, would be a cool mega rare in Old School.
(38:13) Gnomonkey wishes the survey had asked what types of updates players value most, as he wanted to tell Jagex that quality of life is by far what he cares about most, ahead of a new boss or a new scaling method.
(38:44) Gnomonkey is surprised the survey did not ask whether players want big updates or lots of little updates, a question he says RS3 asked all the time.
(39:02) Gnomonkey considers the 2025 survey decent and is glad it had a whole section on quality of life, which he thinks is very important.
(39:10) Gnomonkey appreciates that, unlike some past surveys, this one had no sneaky questions about membership costs or paid promotions, and he believes the botched plugin question was a genuine mistake rather than a heinous act.
(39:40) Gnomonkey urges players to fill out the survey and think about it rather than just copy his answers, because Jagex uses it to figure out the direction of the game.

Opinion: Quality of life updates

(1:03) Gnomonkey considers the Slayer QOL update one of the best updates of the year and the Chambers of Xeric QOL update from a couple of years ago one of his favourite updates of all time.
(1:23) Gnomonkey wants Jagex to go back to old content that has a major flaw or missed the mark and do quality-of-life work on it, and as a PvMer says Colosseum and Doom need this most because they had a ton of dev time and passion but have things that suck.
(29:14) Gnomonkey was neutral on previous QOL updates the survey listed as examples (interface uplift, Castle Wars changes, clan broadcasts), calling them poor examples, though he is very satisfied with QOL updates in general.
(29:41) Gnomonkey says it does not matter to him whether QOL updates are delivered as themed groups (interface, transport, Castle Wars) or as individual unrelated updates.
(29:41) Gnomonkey calls the mage rebalance one of the worst updates ever, says it did not fix everything with mage gear, and wishes Jagex would undo it.
(30:12) Gnomonkey ranks team bosses as the QOL theme he most wants addressed, wanting a next-drop system so Ironmen can also kill groupable bosses such as Corporeal Beast, God Wars bosses and anything else killable in groups on a main.
(30:12) Gnomonkey wants Jagex to revisit how Ironmen work in raids: in Chambers of Xeric, items put into shared storage are gone forever, even for a solo player who accidentally does it.
(30:45) Gnomonkey says Ironmen in Chambers of Xeric must get a drop and pick it up before teammates do or they do not get an overload, and he thinks raid supplies should be shareable among Ironmen to make team raiding easier, even if some would use that to boost accounts.
(31:13) Gnomonkey does not care much about reworking Mining and Smithing and thinks they are fine, because as an RS3 player he knows how long such a rework took and how much content players were deprived of because of it.
(31:43) Gnomonkey believes minigames have the most room for QOL, saying Tithe Farm is terrible and there is lots of dead content in minigames.
(31:43) Gnomonkey considers Driftnet fishing actually good but rarely done, especially by Ironmen, because you must make the nets by weaving them on a loom; he wants a way to get nets without weaving them.
(32:14) Gnomonkey notes that underwater Thieving, underwater Agility and a lot of Fossil Island content are unknown to many players, and that old scaling activities could be reworked and bettered.
(32:14) Gnomonkey does not think range gear, magic gear or melee gear need reworks, saying they are quite fleshed out, and ranks those QOL themes at the bottom.
(32:41) Gnomonkey says raid reworks are his favourite updates period and that Jagex should do more work on old, huge content.
(33:12) Gnomonkey does not want old content like Barrows turned into a completely different boss with depth and mechanics (he does not want to be forced to kite Dharok); he says old content is fine, nostalgic and classic.
(33:12) Gnomonkey argues the content most worth reworking is what Jagex made semi-recently, within the past few years, naming Colosseum, Doom and Yama, which did some things well but majorly screwed up others.
(33:43) Gnomonkey reasons that more recent updates have less 'spaghetti' tying them up and so should be easier for Jagex to tweak, though he admits he could be wrong.
(34:12) Gnomonkey says the Colosseum invocation system is horrendous and that if Jagex reworked Colosseum invocations the content could be better than the Inferno, going from a six out of ten to an eleven out of ten.
(34:42) Gnomonkey calls Giants' Foundry, a semi-recent minigame, very bad because the way you interact with it is not satisfying, and says it could be much better with some tweaking.
(35:16) Gnomonkey says very old updates have stood the test of time and are mostly fine, so recent updates are the ones Jagex should look at for QOL.

Opinion: Skills most in need of updates

(3:47) Gnomonkey considers Crafting the skill most in need of an update, calling it so bad after he tried Ironman for the first time about a year and a half earlier, and saying it needs a Tempoross-style or Fletching-activity-style addition.
(4:16) Gnomonkey says Farming is one of his most hated skills and that Tithe Farm is one of the worst minigames in the game; he suggests cleaning it up or making an entirely new fun Farming minigame.
(4:42) Gnomonkey says Thieving lacks variety, being Ardougne Knights, stealing artefacts, Blackjacking and Pyramid Plunder at 91, all medium to high intensity, and he wants a couple of properly AFK options.
(5:13) Gnomonkey says Fishing has never had many methods and he would like a couple of new Fishing methods.
(5:13) Gnomonkey says the Slayer meta is still burst everything and cannon everything; Tormented Demons helped as a mini boss for XP and Araxxor gives about 60k XP an hour, but he wants Slayer tasks that are weak to specific things or have more mechanical variety while still giving good XP.

Update: Varlamore Part 3

(5:43) Gnomonkey rated Varlamore Part 3 neutral overall because he judged it mainly on the high-level boss, Doom of Mokhaiotl, which he says is lacking even though most of the update is good.
(6:11) Gnomonkey says the non-PvM content of Varlamore Part 3 is very good: the Grab boss is really good, the Fletching activity is amazing and the new areas look really nice.

Doom of Mokhaiotl

(6:11) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl had many problems and still does, and that Jagex dropped the ball, effectively saying it was good enough and giving up.
(6:11) Gnomonkey cites the recent issue of removing splinters as an example of Jagex not understanding what the Doom boss needs.
(6:40) Gnomonkey says Doom's loot table is a mess and the way delving works is a mess, and that it was claimed to be an enraged boss before release but is not; he says he made a video on Doom's issues.
(7:09) Gnomonkey says Doom is not a terrible update considering everything, but that it should be a lot better than it is.
(20:11) Gnomonkey says the Doom Delve rewards were another case of vague communication that Jagex eventually fixed by iterating and listening over many blogs, so the rewards ended up decent.
(20:11) Gnomonkey still has major issues with how Doom's rewards are acquired and how easy it is to get them, such as which caves drop what, but says the items themselves are great.
(22:06) Gnomonkey says that if Doom had been given an extra month before release it would have been so much better.

Update: Run energy change

(7:09) Gnomonkey considers the 2025 run energy change one of the best updates, even though he had said there was value in walking to conserve run energy.
(7:09) Gnomonkey says the run energy change greatly reduces stamina use for questing and players run out of energy much less, but energy remains a factor rather than being completely irrelevant like in RS3.

Royal Titans

(7:39) Gnomonkey says he has very few complaints about Titans, calling them a great low-level boss that teaches a lot of important things and gets players into doing bosses.
(9:42) Gnomonkey notes that among the 2025 updates he liked, Titans was a low-level boss, showing that his favourites were not the high-level bosses, which had major glaring flaws.

Update: Castle Wars

(7:39) Gnomonkey says the Castle Wars update was bad: Jagex put out very overpowered crates, nerfed them a little, and they are still really overpowered.

Update: Stackable clues

(8:07) Gnomonkey says stackable clue scrolls are a good idea and concept but the execution was awful.
(8:07) Gnomonkey says the way you gain access to stacking more clues is stupid: doing certain tiers of clues gives you more stack room for that tier, and you start with a pitiful amount, two with a mimic.

Yama

(8:07) Gnomonkey considers base Yama a good, solid boss and says fighting Yama feels good.
(8:40) Gnomonkey says Yama is much easier in duos and a lot harder solo, but solo gives double loot, so it is still worth doing solo.
(8:40) Gnomonkey says the Yama contracts were one of the worst updates in the game's history and one of the worst mistakes of any content launch, because two of the five contracts were literally impossible to complete.
(9:11) Gnomonkey rated the Yama update neutral overall.
(21:39) Gnomonkey says the Yama contracts were clearly not tested at all and were patchworked together up to the day of release.

Oathplate armour

(9:11) Gnomonkey says Oathplate is fairly easy to obtain in the grand scheme and completely devalues Torva, which has dropped a ton in value and is outclassed by Oathplate almost everywhere.
(9:11) Gnomonkey says there is really no reason to get Torva anymore and he would rather Oathplate not be a direct upgrade.

Pet insurance

(9:42) Gnomonkey calls the pet insurance changes amazing, especially that you no longer have to pay for insurance.
(9:42) Gnomonkey also calls the sweep-up updates amazing, and says he did not do the Easter event or Bounty Hunter.
(10:08) Gnomonkey says he liked all the 2025 QOL updates a lot, even without needing to talk about them.

Opinion: Boss quality in recent updates

(10:08) Gnomonkey expects people to be mad that he rated Doom and Yama neutral, saying they were huge bummers because bosses should keep getting more complex, interesting and better designed as Jagex releases more of them.
(10:08) Gnomonkey says drop tables should make more and more sense rather than less, and he feels the recent bosses were maybe even a step back from older bosses rather than a step forward.

Quests

(10:43) Gnomonkey finds quests extremely unenjoyable and says questing in Old School RuneScape is a set of chores he has to get through rather than a draw.
(11:11) Gnomonkey says the only quest he enjoyed going through is the stealth section of Monkey Madness 2, which he loves speedrunning and completes in about 20 minutes.
(11:11) Gnomonkey found the survey's question about satisfaction with the total number of quests released in 2025 confusing, and answered neutral because he did not understand what answering dissatisfied would mean.
(11:44) Gnomonkey says Scrambled was pretty good and he liked the mini bosses in the Doom quest, which were the only two 2025 quests he did.
(12:11) Gnomonkey says the quest questions assume you like quests, and he thinks the survey needs a skip button.
(12:11) Gnomonkey prefers quests that continue storylines, since quests that start new storylines would be low level.
(12:40) Gnomonkey would like to see the Ritual of the Mahjarrat quest come to Old School because it brought Glacors, which he finds really fun to kill; he says he mostly just wants to kill the monsters from a quest rather than follow its storyline.
(13:10) When asked what matters most in new quests, Gnomonkey picked challenging combat, exciting new rewards and new areas to explore, saying he only cares about what the quest gives you.
(13:10) Gnomonkey says the shorter a quest the better, and he would like more quests like RS2's Nomad's Requiem, a half-hour grandmaster quest with a big challenging boss at the end, asking why every grandmaster quest is four to eight hours.
(14:10) Gnomonkey remembers the Sea Slug quest as kind of cool, tying in with Pest Control, and says the Void Waker is something he would be fine seeing added.

RuneLite

(14:10) Gnomonkey says he uses plugins and that his top plugin category is visual helpers, because Jagex is really bad at visual cues, audio cues and clickboxes, which are rough around the edges and not a priority for Jagex.
(14:39) Gnomonkey says plugin support is extremely important to him; plugins were one of the driving factors in him leaving RuneScape 3 in 2017 to come to Old School.
(15:11) Gnomonkey ranks menu entry swapper (helpful in combat too) and quest helper as the most important potential official plugins, putting quest helper at number one even though it only helps once per account, after doing the RS3 Leagues without one.
(15:41) Gnomonkey says the official mobile menu entry swapper does not let you swap certain things in your bank, such as making Empty the left click for the fish barrel, and that rune pouches are similarly annoying on mobile.
(15:41) Gnomonkey says minigame plugins are super important, but that on mobile he never wants to play minigames like Giants' Foundry, Mixology or the Fletching activity, and that only extremely basic minigames like Winter Tod are worth doing on mobile.
(16:10) Gnomonkey answered that he prefers third-party plugins only and is not happy with the current state of the official client, though he is glad Jagex is updating it for the sake of mobile.
(16:10) Gnomonkey says he will never play the official client over RuneLite, and that even compared with RS3's official client it is ten times worse than RuneLite, lacking quest helpers, minigame helpers and tile indicators.
(16:42) Gnomonkey says that if Jagex got rid of RuneLite, as he says they have tried to in the past, he does not know whether he would still play the game.
(17:12) Gnomonkey says RuneLite is key to the game's success and a community-made tool; it has built-in custom game modes such as Prop Hunt and Bronzeman Mode, and players like Alfie have used it for hardcore ultimate Ironman.
(17:41) Gnomonkey wants Jagex to stay out of RuneLite and leave it as it is, noting that every minigame gets a plugin the day it comes out and that plugins fix things the devs break, such as the Rune Pouch update.

Opinion: Old School RuneScape membership value

(18:24) Gnomonkey says depth and complexity of content is maybe the most important factor for him in valuing a game like Old School RuneScape, as he loves thoroughly picking apart PvM and mastering it.
(18:43) Gnomonkey says intuitive gameplay controls matter to him, and that much of that ties into RuneLite.
(19:12) Gnomonkey says gear keeping its value (such as Bandos armour still being Bandos armour years later) is important to him, but it is not world-ending if something becomes devalued.
(19:12) Gnomonkey says clear communication about upcoming game changes is more important than everything else listed in the survey, on par with depth and complexity, especially since he tries to influence making the game as good as possible.
(19:40) Gnomonkey says Forestry was an example of unclear communication: the vague question was effectively whether players wanted a Woodcutting overhaul, he voted yes, and then Forestry arrived with nothing like what he expected.
(19:40) Gnomonkey says some of the worst updates in the game's history came from a lack of communication.
(20:39) Gnomonkey says Jagex communicates well before release but then drops the ball after an update launches, like throwing a ball down the street and giving up.
(21:08) Gnomonkey rates 'loyalty, game time is rewarded' as quite important, saying he takes it for granted since RuneScape is always rewarding and does not have seasonal content where things stop mattering, as even Leagues give rewards in the main game.
(21:08) Gnomonkey rates the amount of new content released each year as not very important, saying he loves new updates but wishes Jagex would delay them and take more time, including more time on content already released.
(21:39) Gnomonkey says he cannot wait for Raids 4, but if it turns out rushed like Tombs of Amascut he will be very upset, and he would not mind it taking two years to get a good raid.
(22:06) Gnomonkey says he does not care about new updates as much as about fixing up the game and making it more solid, and suggests that rating new content as very important may be a veteran-player answer.
(22:34) Gnomonkey wants player support to give back things that were lost through Jagex's fault, such as hardcore Ironmen dying to server disconnects or world shutdowns, and says Jagex does not refund status although it has started refunding items.
(23:03) Gnomonkey says the two most recent updates in a row broke Moons (the Moons of Peril), trapping players who took constant damage and could die if they did not realise what was going on.
(23:30) Gnomonkey rates player support as important but less important than depth and complexity or clear communication, and says Blizzard would refund anything it bugged out, which Jagex does not.
(24:03) Gnomonkey says Old School performs very well on returning after a break, on content not becoming obsolete, on depth and complexity, on multiple characters and on game time being rewarding.
(24:03) Gnomonkey rates Old School one notch down on intuitive controls, saying movement such as true tile is confusing and RuneLite bridges much of the gap, but he does not know how Jagex could improve it without making it not RuneScape.
(24:03) Gnomonkey says the headline price of subscription membership is expensive.
(24:37) Gnomonkey says Old School does well on ease of playing passively AFK, since he always feels he can be doing something.
(24:37) Gnomonkey says that compared with every other game Jagex's devs are the best at communication and talk to the community individually, but they have also dropped the ball many times, so he answered well rather than very well.
(25:10) Gnomonkey says Old School does worse than most other games on effective player support, and does very well on the amount of new content released each year, probably a bit too well for his taste.
(25:10) Gnomonkey says his overall enjoyment of Old School has stayed about the same over the last six months.

Opinion: Leagues ideas

(25:10) Gnomonkey says the only sensible starting zone for a region-locked league is Varlamore because it has a lot of good options early, and having it unlocked by default would be nice since choosing Varlamore previously meant losing other options.
(26:14) Gnomonkey rejects granular chunk-based region locking, with small map squares unlocking adjacent to existing ones, as boring, and prefers Leagues with huge area unlocks that let you do many bosses.
(26:14) Gnomonkey likes the idea of additional content being added to a league during the league, citing Echo bosses.
(26:44) Gnomonkey says drop protection (the longer without a rare, the likelier it drops) should never be added to the main game but sounds amazing in Leagues, where going dry is frustrating.
(26:44) Gnomonkey thinks combo bosses that combine appearance, mechanics and loot of bosses from different regions sound cool, if they actually mix two bosses together like a chimera rather than just putting two in one arena.
(27:11) Gnomonkey does not care for cooperative league challenges where all players must collectively unlock things, saying RS3 has done similar and nobody cares because players play Leagues for themselves.
(27:38) Gnomonkey likes the idea of drop protection that removes a rare drop from the table once received until you get the other rares, saying that trying for a full Dharok set in Echo Leagues was really annoying.
(27:38) Gnomonkey finds a region-locking system where a single square grows as you complete league tasks super unappealing.
(28:09) Gnomonkey dislikes the idea of a league clone of your character that you control the gear and fight style of, saying that if it were passive like a thrall, with a chestplate, legs and weapon, he would find it somewhat appealing, like hiring mercenaries in Diablo 2.
(28:40) Gnomonkey says he hopes the upcoming bingo league is cool and says he will definitely play it from day one and stream it.

Gnomonkey

(0:00) Gnomonkey says he has orange hair in this video and jokes that people always say he has no soul, so he decided to commit to the meme.
(1:23) Gnomonkey describes himself as a PvMer who cares about bosses.
(14:39) Gnomonkey says he left RuneScape 3 in 2017 and came to Old School, and that plugins were one of the driving factors.
(35:46) Gnomonkey says he is pretty involved in the community, so he knew about everything in the game before announcements.
(39:40) Gnomonkey says he hopes the video gave viewers an idea of what kind of player he is: a PvMer who cares about bosses, depth and complexity, clear communication and quality of life.