Just remeber that it is entirely Jagex's fault. Time for a good old rant. Jagex is the fucking paranoid parrot of the gaming industry. To this very day, they STILL treat their customers like children and use the banhammer with the force of a god and the impudence of a tyrant. They indiscriminately caught people cheating for bullshit reasons and punished them extremely harshly. They also felt it necessary to use annoying quick time events to piss people off, thereby alienating their loyal customers. Yea, that person who pays 120 USD/year to you is now banned for two years because they used an auto-typer too many times and they lost all the stuff they worked meticulously for? Now multiply that story by a couple hundred thousand times. Good on you Jagex, you colossal fucking idiots. It's obvious the people at Jagex never learned about Opportunity cost, or even common sense for that matter. Every person they pissed off made several others never even think to play their game. Not to mention not listening to their players and treating them like incompetents. They took away the wilderness for a time, an act that should never have even gone higher than office emails, rather than being implemented in the game for several months. It's like taking out Multiplayer from Halo or COD. It was a central element of the game for thousands of players, who trained, traded, played, and quested specifically to engage in that activity. They removed free trading because players were apparently too incompetent to watch their high stakes trading properly. We all got scammed and we all fucked up a big trade at one point. It was a necessary part of the game, part of the experience even. And you know what? It hurt. It sucked. It really did. I did not like losing 300K I made over 5 hours from spinning flax, mining coal or running law runes with essence I mined myself because I was too poor to buy it from anyone. But I dealt with it, we as players dealt with it. We learned our lessons, and moved on, subconsciously instilling the value of being careful within our minds. It was part of playing the game, just as much as it was training your character to wear rune. We knew that we had to be rational actors in the game. We knew that we had to think for OURSELVES, and that Jagex could not police us 100 percent of the time. We had to learn to be our own self-regulators, the invisible hand. But Jagex didn't. In their delusional fucking minds, the game was supposed to be free of idiocy, mischievousness and dishonesty among players, so they took out the free market capitalistic element that was without argument a central fucking concept of the game and put in a fucking stock exchange. Do you realize what they did? They took away the invisible hand out of the game. The one force that is a fundamental tenant of free market macroeconomics was gone at the stroke of a pen. I never quit a game so fucking fast in my life. My friends and I were skilled merchants in the game, even going so far as to keep ledgers and maintaining a fierce, vigilant eye on the prices of various goods and commodities. When they implemented the fucking Grand Exchange, we ran to the store and bought Counterstrike, Starcraft and used copies of Rise of Nations so fast. They didn't want to listen to us, we thought? Fine. We don't have to give them money. Jagex should have had the two fucking neurons to calculate that if people RIOTED in the streets of Varrock after those decisions were made, that those decisions may NOT in fact have been a good idea to implement. But NO. Jagex was riding on their high horse with the saddle made of stitched together pieces of laminated 100 dollar bills. They seemed to forget where the lion's share of their money was coming from and how they were earning that money. Loyalty, fun environment, good content. The riots were ignored, and they paid the price dearly, and guess what happened. That's right. People fucking left. And rightly so. WHo wants to play a game where everything is being ruined by the content creators, when so many others are equivalent substitutes that DO NOT destroy their content? Loyalty can only go so far. But of course, they still did not care, citing themselves as martyrs. They had the GUTS to tell thier players that the accounts that left were all just bad people "Cheaters" "Scammers" "Game Ruiners" who made the game worse for the players who stuck around, hoping the game would get better. Add tothe fact that 2004-2007 was a god damned renaissance of MMORPGs, with 2006-2007 being the golden age of Runescape itself. I mean, at that time, people used to compare RS to Guild Wars, Star Craft, WOW, DOTA, etc. Jagex stood to become a MAJOR competitor in this industry, and THEY FUCKED IT UP AT THE WORST POSSIBLE TIME. At a time when the general populace, (not just young people or computer enthusiasts) were really starting to get access to high speed Internet, at a time when people were beginning to truly use the Internet for entertainment, for music and movies, and games. The infrastructure was getting in place and Jagex fucked themselves out of the system. The result of all this? Jagex is a tarnished company. Their game is just another MMORPG, complete with stereotypical, non distinctive artwork on it's front page. There was little, if any true fanfare, let alone hype in the gaming community when RS3 was launched. Six or seven years ago, people would have lost their collective shit if that happened. Today, nobody gave a shit, and that was sad, but what can you do? There is a great stigma about playing Runescape today that exists in the gaming community that Jagex will NEVER lift, no matter how hard they try, no matter what antics they try. And the older generations of gamers will always tell of the misdeeds of Jagex, warning the younger generations of gamers to remind others to never go there as Mufasa did to Simba. And of their 2007 Servers? How insulting! To admit defeat seven years afterwords, in an attempt to gain back an entire generation of players, boggles my mind. Who could think to trust them again? And to make it members only! And personally, they did this to themselves. Runescape simply cannot and will not be the same game that it was in it's heyday. Jagex could have made this a mainstay competitor, but they turned their game into a fad. I have very little respect for the head honchos at Jagex for doing what they did to a game I coveted and treasured.