RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I’d play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with bots. It’s honestly so bad. I tried to play it and it feels so… good, but also low effort. The worst part, however, is the corporate greed. Jagex, the company that developes Runescape, has been sold numerous times. This time, it’s owned by some Venture Capital or investment firm, the kind that kills games off to gain their IP and then sell them for huge amounts of money (CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments). The first thing they’ve done is raise the subscription of Runescape to nearly $15, which is truly nuts. This game used to be like $8 a month previously, some are still paying that much…
It’s sad to see corporate greed kill such a great game. Idk what to even play now…
I’m not sure what you mean by “low effort”? OSRS is an incredibly good game and keeps getting new content all the time. I’m happy to pay 15$ a month since we get a free update every wednesday. Sometimes it’s just some hotfix , other times it’s a whole new boss or continent. We had an new part of the map just last week.
Yes there is bot, but I never felt like it impacted my gameplay other than lowering the price of some items. The team is also doing a lot to ban them, it’s getting much better.
The community is booming. If you look around on YouTube, there’s a lot of content creators doing awesome thing on OSRS: custom game mode, weird twist on existing challenges, documentary, etc.
Honestly, I think we are currently in the golden age of Old school RuneScape, and if you feel like the game is bad or low effort, it might not be for you, which is fine, but the game itself is not the issue.
I hope you find some other game to give you what you had with RuneScape back in the days !
For the last bit hoping they’ll find something like what RS used to be, they won’t. That type of game can’t really exist anymore. (It obviously could make money, looking at OSRS’s player base, but it would never get the funding it needs.) The best options are OSRS (or RS3, which has pros and cons with OSRS and doesn’t deserve all the hate), potentially Brighter Shores in the future (developed by one of the brothers who created RS), or playing a modern MMO.
BS comes out next month btw!
Waiting on Brighter Shores to come out!
Perhaps Albion Online for a similar kind of game?
Never tried that. What is it?
At low levels, a free-to-play isometric fantasy MMO.
At higher levels, a grindy gankfest.
Bit of an interesting game, when I tried it a long time ago, but it was too much of a grindfest for me. Then again, I never got into Runescape either for similar reasons.
RS was a grind but it was relaxing. That’s what I loved. Come home, chill, chop some trees, level some skills, be a mage and kill some bad guys for slayer. Now it’s just min maxing for end game. The grind is unreal for some people, they kill the same bosses 20000 times for a pet to drop
Come home, chill, chop some trees, level some skills, be a mage and kill some bad guys
Well, that sounds a lot like what I found in Albion Online, though I can’t speak for how it’s changed. From what I understand, it has some extensive guild/clan systems too, where you can work together to build larger projects and wage war with rivals.
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does them adding new content somehow detract from your ability to do whatever it was you liked to do before said content was added?
“I hate that expansions are provided at no additional cost, and also it costs too much” is kinda one of the wildest takes on the game I’ve ever heard ngl
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I don’t understand your last paragraph unless there’s some weird regional pricing going on. It’s $13.99 USD for a month of Runescape membership vs $14.99 USD for a month of WoW membership
You could stand by and hope for great things with Brighter Shores, from one of the original makers of RuneScape. I’m hoping it gives me that seem feel rs did decades ago.
I’m done bro. I have no hope left in me after Back 4 Blood. The original creators of Left 4 Dead, totally failed to deliver a fun and interesting game. I can’t believe the whole “original creator” bait anymore
There are fan projects like 2009scape that you can play for free.
I agree. 2009scape scratches the itch that RuneScape provides and it’s playable offline. The game doesn’t have every single quest, but the addictive part is still there.
Final Fantasy XIV may lack the point and click tick based combat and semi AFK gameplay but it’s a solid MMORPG.
Try Wakfu. There are a lot of chill trades to grind casually and the economy is completely player driven. There are no NPCs to buy or sell your loot to.
The PvE gameplay loop is really fun. The game has an adjustable level system that encourages players to replay lower level dungeons. Battles are turn based and have a surprising amount of strategy.
The only real problem with the game is that the devs seem to not care about player growth at all. They do zero marketing and sometimes the registration system is broken and won’t get fixed for awhile. It’s like the opposite problem to RuneScape.
How’s the bot situation?
Minimal. There’s a unique captcha system in harvesting that makes it difficult to bot. The closest thing to bad bots are people running multiple accounts on single account servers to run dungeons. It’s a bannable offense and people do get banned for doing it.
$8 in 2001 is about $14 now. Kinda seems like the same value is there, it’s just adjusted for inflation.
OSRS was in the $4 per month range for me when I played it when it wasn’t OS. I never got it.
No, it’s adjusted for corporate greed. World of Warcraft has never once raised their subscription. Also, they shouldn’t have had to raise their subscription because they introduced microtransactions in both RS3 and OSRS which further boosted revenue. You’re comparing two very different times in the game. There’s no excuse whatsoever.
The only microtransaction in OSRS is the ability to buy membership with in game gold. As someone who is normally staunchly against all MTX it’s a very reasonable tradeoff
It has unequivocally ruined old school RS. Not only do people still buy gold for real life money. They also real world trade, too. some very popular streamers have RWT permanent bans. So the bond has solved literally no problem it claimed it would. It really just allowed people to buy gear for money in real life which is really sad. I get you can buy membership with gold. But that was never a thing back in 2007 and shouldn’t be allowed now. That sort of insane feature is directly fueling the bot industry
People buying gold for real life money has literally always been happening behind the scenes (yes in 2007 as well), so again I have no issues with this. With membership bonds it even removes gold from an inflated economy. It seems to me though that you want a version of the game exactly how it was in 2007, in which case you’re SoL
they’ve done a really good job culling the bots in osrs, imo the biggest hurdle in it is the long boring grinds it takes to get to midgame pvm where it starts getting really really fun.
I’d also say that if you think rs3 is the default game you are very mistaken
osrs has been the more popular game by far for almost a decade now.
There is also iron mode which helps to ignore bots. Yes they can still steal your ore deposit but there are enough worlds to go to.
they’ve done a really good job culling the bots in osrs
You’re badly misinformed. Their official subreddit is rife with complaints constantly about how bad the bot problem is. Some top ranked players on high scores are bots too.
Example one where top fishing skill players are bots.
Example 2 The top 25 Bandos highscore ranks are dominated by ranged-only tick-perfect bots, with a combined kill count of 1.7 million, generating approximately 225 billion gold from Bandos sets and 50 billion gold from hilts, and similar botting issues persist across other high-level bosses and activities.
Example 3 where CVC admits they have no fucking idea how many bots there even are but that they’re important to OSRS and part of the game.
The bot problem is out of control and they obviously profit from it massively, banning them takes away subscribers
In addition to what the other commenter said, it’s more likely as someone newer and thus engaging in lower level activities to encounter bots since it takes less time to set them up and get going than mid to late game content. I find it rare to encounter an obvious bot as someone doing high level pvm/skilling
example 1 is from a year ago, 2 is new so it may still be a thing but likely something they’ve already dealt with and 3 is from “someone close to CVC” how on earth are you gonna take that as fact?
from mod ayiza’s response to that 3rd one:
"To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats:
Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.
So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.
Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.
Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy. "
they’re playing wack-a-mole because there’s no possible way to preemptively ban bots, but they’ve done a good job of it and will continue to.
I’ve never played Runescape so my answer is I play literally any other games.
My comment is unhelpful but I’m posting it anyway.
Honestly it sounds like you might like some of the aspects of EVE Online
Corporate greed has killed all of my favorite mmos, and every new mmo that comes out is further down the spiral.
So I decided to make my own damn game, a mashup of my top 5 favorite defunct mmos. Base gameplay/progression/dynamic events from Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies crafting/building, Firefall jumping/gliding/thumping, the mechs from Exteel, and the territory control map from Planetside 1.
It’s 100% a shameless asset flip, and currently jank af, but pretty fun at the moment.
Am down for that. Anything public yet?
Not yet, there are a few bugs i need to squash before I’m ready for the next round of testing.
This for real?
sorta ^^
Check out walkscape beta
I second this! The game has really interesting idea and I have talked with developers and they are really awesome people.
I quit RuneScape in 2011ish after squeal of fortune introduced legacy loot. I’m sorry, but for a game that was all about 100% completion, making loot legacy and unobtainable if you didn’t gamble for it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
