The Runescape Hero Pass is the MMORPG‘s equivalent of a battle pass system, allowing you to grind for cosmetics and loot by completing a series of different missions. Following its official launch on Monday, September 4, Runescape has been review bombed on Steam, currently sitting at ‘mostly negative’ on Valve’s virtual storefront.
While generally the game would sit at ‘very positive,’ over 500 players have reviewed it negatively since the Hero Pass’ announcement on Tuesday, August 29 – and most of them have hundreds of hours in the game.
As you can see on the graph below, around 300 negative reviews came in on September 1, with that number steadily rising to 589 at the time of writing. Players claim developer Jagex “seems intent on only upping the ante with every turn in spite of overwhelming negative feedback,” claiming it is “ruining the game.”
In a follow-up September 6 blog post, Jagex writes “Since the release of Hero Pass on Monday, we’ve been listening to and discussing your feedback on improvements you want to see for the Hero Pass experience.
“Our aim of ensuring this is a player-positive, rewarding system for the game is critical, as is our promise to working to improve the system with you. We’re looking to work towards areas where we can make this system better for everyone, and we wanted to let you know some key areas we’re already investigating as a team to respond to your feedback as soon as possible.”
Following a list of changes to daily missions, content buffs, and more, the team closes out with “Finally, while it’s not relative to Hero Pass feature feedback, we did want to drop a quick note on how we introduced the messaging around presenting Hero Pass to the community and apologise for clearly getting that wrong.
“We’ve heard what you felt was wrong about the way we approached it, and we’re taking it forward as a learning for how we communicate updates like this in the future.”
There are a lot of free MMOs out there if you don’t fancy splashing the cash, and we also have a list of the best free Steam games, too.