Runescape has had a very interesting time of it. A project engineered by two brothers in relatively early days of the internetz, it acquired a unique flavour, culture and economy, and was extremely player driven.
Then at some point it got sold to an apparently soulless corporation, who started doing microtransactions and created a daily slot machine plugin and embarked on a grand quest to blandify the lore and story (which hitherto had been extremely cobbled together, with wild variations in tone and writing quality making something inimitable).
I don’t know what happened to the net player count, but many pined for the old days and pirate retro servers kept getting planned and not delivered. There were several outright scams. Eventually Jagex cottoned on to this, and Runescape is now split: there is “Runescape”, and there is Oldschool Runescape, with its own splinter dev team.
OSRS is a reboot of the 2007 code, which was the oldest Jagex had in the attic. Since its inception, it’s been updated more or less democratically, with additions to the game requiring a 50% majority to pass. This obviously has not been without controversy, and has also led to OSRS basically taking the same development path that Runescape took (no doubt largely due to the fact that replicating old updates requires about 5% of the work original content would need, so these updates were quite pushed by the dev team).
Something that became apparent after a while, however, was that 2007 Runescape could never be reborn. The vast majority of people interested in playing it had got older and smarter and today have less spare time than they did. OSRS went on to be coloured by rampant efficiency, and the rate at which players maxed out (a colossal achievement in Runescape – perhaps the grindiest game of all time, with skill ceilings that the original developers did not expect anyone to reach in the game’s LIFETIME) far surpassed that of old Runescape. The old social groups and fun clans were not reborn, and minigames that were not time efficient to play languished, deserted.
In fact, many people “play” OSRS these days entirely for the income they can earn from it. In the duel arena, in its own little pocket of the game world, is a warpzone where people gamble maximum cash stacks – multiple times what average players dream of accumulating – plus exorbitantly expensive items to bump up the value of the bet. In fact, the highest level gear has been subsumed by this economy, its gold value inflated well out of the means’ of normal, legitimate players. Of course, cash stacks of this size and items of this value can carry substantial real world price tags as well.
I myself have had no vice more empty than Runescape, and have thankfully quit. I did get sucked in to OSRS, though, and lost more adult hours than I care to admit (though they were played for fun, not for profit; I cannot figure out if this makes them more or less wasted). Ultimately it was the reintroduction of the old trading house which made me reject the game again – the ability to rapidly trade commodities in huge bulk warped the aforementioned player driven economy, transferring the vast majority of wealth to a minority of merchant players and manipulative clans and pyramid schemes, making an organic and unhurried playstyle much less profitable, much slower, and much more like the labour Marx abhorred. Just like in real life, really. It was very bizarre to witness this evolution of the game’s soul twice: first as an unwitting child, then in high speed as an adult as the matured playerbase raced to capitalise on the foreknown consequences. It killed my fun again, faster.
Yeah, it’s given me a lot to mull over, that there Runescape. Don’t get me started on what it has to tell us about “coolness”, shame, nostalgia, Asperger’s tendencies, addiction vs compulsion, or corporate cynicism.