this is about to be a long 1 so strap in.
2015: here is the first time it was polled, after this they would continuously mention it in streams at runefests and a couple of more and it was seemingly only ever a meme suggestion
2022: fast forward to after the new skill passed in your ss. after this they got hard at work developing… Sailing! even though still at this point a large portion did not want sailing, but were open to a new skill.
2022 as well: BIG NOTE: right before the new skill was polled they added the option to skip questions (historically they found that people didnt care and there was no skip button so they would press no) and they reduced the approval % to 70 from 75, they did this because they knew they would be pushing this question out among other ones that the community was historically against. See the VLS, wilderness rework and some other things that jagex wanted to cram down.
early 2023 Sailing is STILL not been voted on however they begin to develop it anyways because they want to force it through which bring us to:
this showing us that they will be bringing a new skill into the game and it WILL be one of these options, once again sailing doesnt meet not just the 75 or 70% quota that Jagex said was required, but it didnt even hit 60% even the throwaway skill which in the summit they had admitted to not even beginning on any kind of development in and would take many more years, and have wasted a lot of time that in the previous months they had already dedicated to sailing. Still shamanism almost beat it, and were not talking it was a few thousands, were saying it was within 500 votes.. 500, which their response was “welp sailing was in fact the highest we can revisit anything else in 5+ years when we have fledged out sailing” they didn’t even bother polling just these 2 which is insane.
1 more fast forward and I promise we will be done:
the big “it only passed because reduced approval vote to 70%” in a poll where this was the 6th question (summer summit 2023) at the summit they had announced that for almost 2 years they had been working and developing this skill taking a whole dedicated team and THOUSANDS of hours away from any other kind of development and BEGGING at the summit to push this through, and I 100% remember (this was before they hid polling results) that this was sitting around the 68-69% mark and then jagex used their most trusty tool, content creators. They reached out to a couple of creators to have them beg their users to log in and vote yes to push it through, I remember watching Solomissions video where pretty much he said if this doesnt go through, then we will never get a new skill and thousands of hours of dev time will be wasted, in the span of days, it jumped from 68 to 70.1 just enough to go through “conviently for jagex”
Thus the osrs gets it wish, sailing force fed to us. The crazy thing about it is that they literally put 2 throw away skills in for sailing to go against which they many times stated would take way longer and waste so much time already spent on sailing, just for it to be so close at the end lol. I think they 100% knew if it was sailing vs shamanism that shamanism would have won, because taming as a skill was a literal joke lol, majority of people who voted for it likely would have gone against sailing.
Thank you to Pazaz for making this server once again, I would be so far away from runescape if not for lost city! Once again sorry about the long post, if you skipped it, no hard feelings its a lot of hate typing lol.
(same with making bowstring or cooking individually I think, assuming you can turn-off the Make-X menu prompt?)