For a long time I have been trying to put a finger on why agility feels so bad to me. So I want to go over some data, and then some suggestions I have before opening the topic up to the rest of you to share your ideas.
Here is a point chart roughly outlining the xp rates at different levels between skills. (See Image)
This data is still rather hard to understand as the bands all still look really close together even though the difference between Agility and most of the rest of these is in reality a rather large amount of time.
It wasn't till I looked at the data from a perspective of Attention:XP that I started to understand why it feels like such an absolute chore. (See Image)
I calculated attention by the number of clicks per minute roughly
The data is roughly drawn from the wiki I only spent a few minutes looking for each skill but this chart shows the best xp/hr to attention ratio for each skill as it currently stands. I'm human this may be imperfect but its as close as I could reasonably get.
Other lower skills also don't have nearly as big an impact on the gameplay as agility does either while also rewarding large amounts of resources
So Agility feels like a requirement, It affects mining time, it affects how fast you can get around the game world via shortcuts, affects thieving, hunter, and for us Ironmen, it gates things like double surge. ect.
So the above highlights my feelings about why agility feels bad, how do we fix it?
Ultimately I don't feel qualified to provide a single solution, I know for a fact that while it might seem simple to me and while I do have a lot of experience designing systems as a game developer myself there are often underlying things I miss so the following is my best effort approximation of good and bad ideas alike.
1. We could follow a similar route as OSRS and add more agility courses that fill the missing bands.
2. Create a much wider range of xp rates from beginner to endgame courses so that the rate scales at closer rates to even the worst of the other skills.
3. Honestly not sure about this one but the AFK methods could be improved slightly, right now you can afk heffin stones but this comes alongside a steep unlock (Priff) and there are the unicycles but those cap out after you earn 800k (?) xp. And both of the afformentioned methods have sub 30k rates when completely afk.
3.5 Could add some new afk methods, something like lava hopping, jump between a couple of stones over lava for afk xp, post standing around various places in runescape
4. Move silverhawk boots/feathers to invention and lower their xp (Don't get me wrong this one doesn't feel like a proper solution to me either, but if we arent going to solve it as a problem it would be good enough maybe?)
5. Another lazy way is to just massively rebalance the xp rates, instead of Linear increases between 25 and 150k xp there could be an exponential curve between 20K and 300-400K across all the courses.
Don't get me wrong this is a harder problem to solve than I am equipped to deal with.
Thoughts?
Edit: u/Royal-Ear4803 has a lot of good stuff to say in their comment