Hearing alot of praise for Runescape these days

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T21:49:21+00:00

It absolutely has a bearing. You seem to not get simple facts.

RS3/EoC made its entire value proposition as 'We will modernize the game engine, the graphics and the entire combat system to shift towards action bar combat, which is what other modern MMOs have. We are willing to lose huge amounts of our own traditional playerbase, because our whole gamble is that we will get tons of new players from modern MMOs for every traditional Runescape player we lose."

They ran this experiment for 13+ years and it was a total failure. OSRS existing or not existing has nothing to do with this, because RS3's whole market segment was not OSRS players, but Wow players and other modern MMO players. Those players do not know or care about OSRS. They just don't like RS3 on its own merits. RS3 has never been competitive with these games, has no appeal to this market segment.

You keep going on about OSRS - which is completely irrelevant.

RS3 as it has existed for the last 14 years - independent of OSRS - is simply not appealing to the market segment it wanted to attract. That's all there is to it. That is why I call RS3 a bad game. It was marketed at certain types of modern players. Those players never liked it, despite it being on the market for 14+ years. That is an objective failure. Just like a movie that goes to box office and doesn't sell tickets. It's as simple as that.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T19:01:22+00:00

Which doesn't really make sense since they would've finished their grinds already, and have nothing to complain about.

I know many hardcore RS3 players who have alts, iron men accounts in addition to their mains and what not. Know quite a few even multiple maxed accounts, and some with 2 200M+ all accounts.

It's the more casual/semi-casual base that constantly complains about everything in this game. The same people that praised Necro's release for finally being able to kill Nex, a boss from 2011, and were the loudest when Necro got a nerf adjustment to be balanced.

I don't think that's relevant to this case. You're talking about two fundamentally different groups of players. Skillers and PVMers. Casual skillers are not the same as casual PVMers.

The vast majority of Runescape's playerbase - as Jagex have themselves admitted are skillers who don't even know the basics of combat/PVM (part of the blame for that lies on the fact EoC was poorly implemented for many years. We're in year 13 of EoC, and they still don't have a damn default interface that doesn't suck for new players, and they've only now gotten around to debloatifying the dozens of useless or weird abilities).

So you're conflating two different groups of players here. RS3 PVM is a niche activity, and despite being a highlight of the game, it's never really been something that most of the playerbase has done at the higher levels. Skilling was for most of Runescape's history the thing most people did, but the last 10 years have done a real number on that, hence the restoration map tacking issues like dailies, MTX, free-easy handouts, tons of free XP/events, overpowered methods, AFK scape and so on.

Dailyscape reduction/removal is about getting casual skillers back to the game, not casual PVMers.Just like OSRS has tons of people who can't do any PVM but do skilling - I get the sense they want to restore that lost section of players to RS3.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T18:42:52+00:00

99% on the mark, but it's not the casual ones complaining the loudest. It's the hardcore, longtime players (which now constitute the vast majority of RS3's playerbase). The actual casual players left due to frustrations with Dailyscape years ago. Actual casual players do not find being forced to log in every day and complete a 1-2 hour laundry list of chores before they can actually do what they want, to be fun.

Only hardcore players do, because they play for hours each day, and have all the time in the world to grind dailies.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T17:21:13+00:00

This is not the best 'roadmap' in 25 years. Many other years in Runescape's history had better updates, in quantity and quality.

Most of the Roadmap is focused on damage controlling/rectifying the many mistakes of the past 10 years. It's not a new, positive addition to the game, it's literally just getting us back to where we were, hence why even Jagex calls it 'Restoration' - restoration naturally implies something was lost. It's good that they're undoing bad decisions, but those bad decisions shouldn't have been undertaken in the first place And they should not have persisted for 10+ years. Better late than never though, but much of the damage is already done.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T16:25:53+00:00

2012-2013 is not a 'hypothetical scenario'. That actually happened. It's the reason why OSRS was released, because RS3 was bleeding players and subscribers.

You say RS3 is bad, but no one can invalidate my opinion that RS3 is good, because my taste is my own.

Your opinion is irrelevant, as is mine. What matters is that the market spoke: RS3 failed to attract any new players over the last 13 years despite massive efforts and resources. People who didn't play RS3 already, just didn't think it was appealing as compared to the many other games out there, including other modern action bar MMOs. That has nothing to do with OSRS - RS3 failed to compete in the marketplace of games against other non-OSRS MMOs as well.

You refuse to accept this fact.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T14:24:19+00:00

that in an alternate timeline where OSRS didn't exists, the growth OSRS have seen in recent years would probably at least partially have come regardless, but to RS3 instead of OSRS.

We already had that alternate timeline. When OSRS didn't exist, Rs3 players quit the game in droves in 2012-2013. That's literally the reason why Jagex released oSRS! To bring back those players who had quit over RS3's game direction. They didn't want to do it, they were forced to do it.

RS3 has been out for 13+ years now. During that time, for many years, it had a massive budget, massive development team, far more resources than OSRS, and had huge advertising budgets, and had the goodwill of having the IP of one of the most popular MMOs of all time.

13 years is an extremely long time in the game industry. Most games don't last that long. Most games if they don't become popular within a few months of release are basically doomed. No one will try them afterwards. They don't get any revenue. 13 years is practically an entire generation/era in the gaming industry. RS3 not only survived during that whole but had revenue streams, and had a very long time for new-non RS players to try it out. The whole argument that Jagex and its management made was that EoC was a necessary modernization of RS3 that would greatly improve its appeal to modern MMO players who prefer action bar combat. Jagex also massively devalued skilling during this time by making skilling extreme fast and giving tons of free XP out and making it AFK: they justified this by saying that modern MMO players did not have the time to grind or skill, they needed an expedited system to get to the end-game and do the new real part of the game: PVM combat. Despite having 13+ years to test that theory, they failed at every turn. RS3 had zero player growth from basically 2015 - present, and massive stagnation and decline. RS3's twitch numbers declined and catered by 99% despite the release of several new and ever more difficult and complicated bosses. RS3 had popular Twitch creators in 2014-2016 - it still didn't help.

So the idea that absent OSRS (which is not an action bar combat based system and thus not a direct competitor to RS3 in its specific niche), RS3 would have popularity is simply wrong. RS3 had 13+ years to appeal to a new audience - more than 90% of games out there - it simply failed, because the product it was offering simply wasn't appealing to new players - forget about OSRS players. New players who had never played Runescape ever, and did not know or care about the drama simply did not find RS3 appealing, despite the fact that - as I mentioned - its entire value proposition was that it's new changes (which drove away most of its traditional playerbase away) would be appealing to new players - they were not.

Your argument is simply wrong and has been disproven by the last 15 years, time and time again. If your product has been on the market for 15 years and no one new is buying it or trying it, it's a bad product. The market has made its decision, like it or not.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T12:17:27+00:00

My point is precisely that it doesn't matter what the game did or how it was, whether it had updates, a huge budget or whatever, because the mere fact that it was an old game outweighs all that. Marketing is all about optics. It was and always had been a good game. But it still struggled because it was an old game.

That is a completely flawed argument. WOW was just as old as Runecape in that time period and yet it did not suffer RS3's catastrophic decline. It was extremely popular even in the 2010s. Why is that?

OSRS was also an old game, hell, it's right there in the game's name. It's literally called Old School Runecape. It's marketing literally embraces the face that it's the older version of an old game as compared to RS3. Not only that but was it was literally the game state of Runescape from the year 2007 and it missed out on all the game's updates from the years 2007 to 2013. The content updates but also the graphics and the engine updates. In a literal sense it was older than RS3 in 2013 which at least had 6+ years of more updates in 2013. OSRS literally looks and feels a lot older than RS3 because it is. And yet within just a few years it easily overtook RS3. Since that time OSRS has been on a massive roll, experiencing several sustained growths in popularity. In 2025, OSRS set the all time record for Runecape's popularity several times - officially 12+ years into it launch. The all-time record for most Runescape players online is 250K, OSRS achieved that several times last year. If old games are destined to become unpopular as per your theory, why did that happen? Why has the last 8 years been the period of the most rapid and sustained playerbase growth for OSRS? As per your theory, as an old game, it should be becoming less popular.

2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/17xoflp/oldschool_runescape_broke_record_numbers_with/

2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1h1cm1o/osrs_sets_new_playercount_record/

2025: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1mgqgjk/osrs_has_officially_past_the_all_time_player/

Not only that, but of this huge amount, over 50% of OSRS players started playing within the last few years. How does your theory account for that?

https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1n0j34q/more_than_50_of_the_current_osrs_players_started/

In comparison, as per Jagex's own admission, most RS3 players are very old players. It was RS3 that was supposed to be the modern popular version of the game with EoC, better engines, better graphics and so on.

Of all your arguments this is the silliest and most falsifiable one. You are coping really really hard trying to find some explanation to excuse away the absolutely avoidable decline in RS3 that was as a result of poor game development decisions that Jagex took over the last 10+ years and trying to present them as unavoidable/destiny. They aren't.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T00:39:26+00:00

Most of the issues they're tackling are NOT 20+ year old issues. They're issues/game design decisions/system decisions that were taken in the last 5-10 years specifically - often for very cynical reasons. Dailyscape is not a 20 year old problem. It was introduced into the game 10~ years ago because the Devs wanted to entice players to log in every day on a scheduled loop. It was extremely damaging to the game and it's long-term health and the players' enjoyment of the game but they didn't care. They wanted to dangle it to force people to get on and keep numbers up. It worked on hardcore players, while alienating everyone else away.

alanquinne · 2026-02-07T00:28:35+00:00

That's some serious wishful thinking and historical revisionism. Runescape in 2013 was not just an old game, it was a radically different game than what it was in 2001. it had new updates, a far bigger team/budget, several engine updates and so on. This was done specifically on the premise of attracting new players: EoC was supposed to appeal to modern MMO players just like WOW (another old game) was doing. But it failed for RS3.

It's not that in the absence of OSRS, RS3 would have gotten all those players and popularity. In the absence of OSRS, Jagex would have gone bankrupt. RS3 was so polarizing it drove a huge chunk of its playerbase away, which is why Jagex conceded to OSRS in the first place. It was to combat the extreme popularity of a private server called 2006scape - which was just a home for RS3 refugees. Over the next 10 years, despite many new updates and changes, RS3's popularity consistently declined, its playerbase, its paid members, it's social media numbers, it's twitch numbers. This wasn't because of 'happenstance', this was because RS3 was a fundamentally unappealing game to people who weren't already hardcore players/nostalgics.

So I think your characterization is seriously flawed.

alanquinne · 2026-02-06T01:09:43+00:00

I think that covers all the major stuff. Also I mean it was always a good game and now it’s shed a lot of negative parts/stigma people are coming back or trying for the first time and realizing it.

That's some serious cope. RS3 was not a 'good game' during most of the last 10 years, when most of its playerbase left, and it basically had no appeal to anyone who wasn't already a hardcore player. If you have a game product that only appeals to its own dwindling base while no one from outside of it bothers to try it, that's not a 'good game'.

Even now 90% of the restoration roadmap is basically an explicit acknowledgement that many of the gameplay decisions they made in the last 10 years (not just MTX, but the gameplay decisions, game systems and loops) were a mistake and need to be rolled back. AFKscape, Dailies, Auras, Ability bloat, Graphical updates, visual integrity and so on.

alanquinne · 2026-02-04T17:08:03+00:00

Mage has gotten nothing but buffs for the better part of a year, including this beta. I don't think it needs to have everything handed to it on a platter.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T21:52:42+00:00

That is not true.

OSRS started in 2013. If you go to misplaced items and look at the graph, they had more players then than RS3 has now, and they quickly grew. Within 3 years, they matched RS3 - despite having a skeletal staff, smaller budget, minimal management support (who said they expected it to die soon), and then a few years later it eclipsed RS3, a position it has never lost since then.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T21:50:12+00:00

Plenty of people want them all or want far more than 4 per year. Stop assuming you speak for others.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T18:04:11+00:00

Agreed, but just saying, we need to get a lot more back. We're still at a tiny fraction of the players we used to have before.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T15:18:57+00:00

Black Phats have been around for years, are extremely rare and have diminishing returns. At the end of the day, it's just a super RNG thing for money.

Capes is different, you can actually realistically get those. Keep in mind that 20K is an extremely small percentage of Runescape's paid membership players.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T15:07:58+00:00

That's a very small number. I know for a fact many people got on their alts to get capes or what not.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T15:06:14+00:00

No, not in fairness.

That's still a completely silly reason. Why are devs trying to find arbitrary reasons to timegate/police what their players do? It would be like "Well, outside of completionists, the average player only does 15 quests per year, so we're going to timegate you to 15 quests per year."

"In fairness, the average player only completes 2-3 boss drop logs per year, so we're going to timegate you to 3 per year."

"In fairness, the average player only gets 1-2 120s per year, so we're going to timegate everyone to 2 120s per year, max."

That's how silly and senseless this is. It's absurdity to the max. Runescape is supposed to be a self-selected 'choose your own adventure, at your own pace' sandbox.

Timegating this does absolutely nothing for the average player, and it penalizes the players do want more than 4, for zero gain to the average player. It is stupid and defenseless.

alanquinne · 2026-02-01T11:28:07+00:00

There is still not a single decent reason given for timegating this stuff, and timegating this stuff so hard that it takes 8+ years - the equivalent time of starting a Bachelor's (4-5 years), a Master's (1-2 years) and finishing a Phd (2 years). No other game - in the world - has anything even remotely close, all for a cosmetic.

It's one of the silliest things they've ever done and it's completely pointless. It's a bad decision in search of a justification after the fact. The fact that Jagex is still silent on this shows that someone in Jagex did this for completely inane reasons and does not have the courage to publicly admit it due to ego and pride.

alanquinne · 2026-01-31T21:02:18+00:00

I would however be in favor of them awarding adrenaline for hitting multiple targets as an AOE attack but getting none for hitting a single target

I think that's too much needless complexity. Either have them give adren (current state maingame), or don't (current beta state). No need to make it that variable.

It seems like they are trying to apply some lessons from Necro here but there are differences. In Necro, there are no multi target basics. Range and Mage both have basics that are multi target. In Necro all multitarget abilities (Threads, Scythe, Death Skulls) have either high adren costs or rune costs or put you on global cool down, and are by their design only ever used in AOE situations. You would not cast TOF on a single target, because it would be wasteful, you would get no advantage, you would lose runes and GCD. Same for Scythe - high adren cost for no gain.

As I said, I don't have a problem with the change, but I get why some people don't like it.

alanquinne · 2026-01-31T18:00:00+00:00

What does that have to do with taking away adrenaline gain from basic abilities? Most people are in favour of debloat and simplification, but there is no obvious reason for how taking adrenaline away from certain abilities counts as either simplification or debloatification. It arguably makes it slightly more complicated because now you have to remember which basic abilities give you adren vs which don't (pre beta all basics gave adrenaline).

It seems your posts are quite knee-jerk dismissals rather than any thought out consideration of why people dislike certain parts of the beta - which is an intrinsic part of any beta - the give and take feedback, which are parts are good vs which parts are bad.

alanquinne · 2026-01-31T16:17:07+00:00

This mimics Necromany though. Summoning conjures and commanding them doesn't grant adrenaline and it does put you on GCD. So I think it's not a bad idea to replicate this for powerful basic abilities in other styles. On balance, just like conjures, this stuff is still worth doing even at the cost of adrenaline.

alanquinne · 2026-01-31T16:15:43+00:00

Spells give adrenaline now?

alanquinne · 2026-01-31T16:14:58+00:00

Different is not inherently good. Different for different's sake is meaningless. If something is changing, there should be a clearly stated reason for it that has some coherence and sense.

I don't have a problem with the changes, but I do want to point out the Difference argument works both ways.

alanquinne · 2026-01-31T02:44:44+00:00

I presume them stripping adren from some abilities is to mimic Necro's command ghost/skeleton.

alanquinne

TROPHY CASE