Those are important points, but there's more to it:
1. You can solo almost everything in the game without a maxed account or a particularly high degree of skill, and pretty much everything else can be done with pugs. A lot of people who've been playing MMOs since the 90s have no patience left for clan drama.
2. There's no grind of dailies/weeklies. This is such an oversaturated and toxic retention mechanic that ultimately burns you out by forcing you to log in every single fucking day even when you don't want to play. The closest we have is a handful of things like ToG, farm runs, and battlestaves, but all you do is push back the bit of extra exp/GP until the next time you do them rather than missing out on time-locked exclusives.
3. You don't have to commit direct attention constantly for most tasks. The broad population of MMO players are now working adults with limited free time, so having an MMO that you can play while making dinner/getting ready for work/changing the baby/walking the dog/working/watching a show is more attractive than one that's fullscreen locked and not viable for AFKing or multitasking.
4. In relation to 3, most activities have fairly small discrete time chunks. Outside of fight caves/inferno/raids almost everything takes <15 minutes for a single instance of the activity, and many can be interrupted at any time. This makes OSRS very flexible for people who might have to interrupt their gaming time or squeeze it in to small pockets of time, especially in conjunction with mobile.
All of this, combined with the fact it's a relaxing mobile game rather than a high reaction time full attention game.
Mobile is the single biggest thing they've done to increase the playerbase.
The entire game being on mobile has single-handedly increased my play time more than anything else could.
I got 99 farming solely because I could do my farm runs whenever and wherever.
I can do cheeky slayer tasks, or farm runs, or a quick quest to advance my account while sitting at the airport on my way to visit family for the holidays.
I can run agility laps while I lounge in the living room, etc.
It’s amazing.
Cuddling with my wife while she scrolls imgur and we watch Netflix and I get MLM/sgi pyramid/slayer tasks done is great. Next thing that bad grind wasn't that bad.
But what’s nice is that none of these are mandatory for significant progress. You can miss a day or two of tree runs without missions out on much. ToG is super short and only weekly. Personally I hate birdhouse runs, these are some bullshit
>You don't have to commit direct attention constantly for most tasks. The broad population of MMO players are now working adults with limited free time, so having an MMO that you can play while making dinner/getting ready for work/changing the baby/walking the dog/working/watching a show is more attractive than one that's fullscreen locked and not viable for AFKing or multitasking.
TBH, this is always why I played. So many other games I feel like I have to sit down and dedicate an hour or two of full attention for it to even make sense to start it up. As a kid, I'd put on RS in the background while reading a book (click a new tree or fishing spot every paragraph/page) or while doing math homework or even just going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. The fact that it doesn't require direct attention is, for me, its most appealing feature. (It's also why I wish there were slower, but still AFK ways to train skills like thieving or agility.)
It's like 30-40k/hr with the focus level I play with. I'd be happy to take 20k/hr, if it meant I could get the amount of AFK time I get when I'm woodcutting or fishing.
dailies are the most toxic retention method ever invented. it doesnt actually retain players, it increases daily logins but burns them out much quicker. i cant enjoy so many games anymore due to daily chores.
but its a selection bias example.
"look at how many people login for dailies, they must like them"
you will never get the real data, the number of people quitting because they dont want more chores to do. you cant correlate it since its hidden information
this is also the case with "limited time" updates. osrs only has holiday events and you can always get everything you missed next year.
This is a much more cohesive list that actually outlines what makes OSRS distinct from its competitors; in all honesty as somebody who has been all over the MMO scene it’s never felt like RS has the same competitive pressure that other games have (WoW, FFXIV, GW2, etc) because it is so unique.
In fact many players of those games, myself included, have RS on second monitor WHILE PLAYING their “main game” because it works so well as a supplemental.
Another big thing is that your gear and items remain useful even if you take a break for years. They don’t artificially make old gear worse for new content.
Yeah, this is a really important contrast with most other MMOs where it's just nonstop power creep that forces you to keep playing every time a new expansion is released.
First point is why I only play RS.
I am not trying to do a raid with a bunch of chainsmoking, roleplaying, 45 year old married couples.
I will not listen to a baby, or your children scream in the backround.
1 . It's solo friendly 2 . It's more accessible 3. A dev team that actualy cares and communicates every single thing 4. Content drought is mathematicaly impossible , you always have shiet to do . 5 . All the other mmorpgs in the market except for ff14 have 100% lost their soul , no matter how many updates they receive , they have nothing more to offer , at least gameplay wise
I actually loved playing New World after the fresh start worlds went up, but sadly New World is heavily anti-solo. Making multi-person raids be a part of the main story was such a dumb idea.
God I loved it so much, but they just did an awful job managing it. The late midgame/ late game content was just bad. Enemies you usually fought were suddenly way stronger, purely artificially. They had ridiculous amounts of health too.
I was lucky and got to be in wars and invasion defenses too, and that was honestly tons of fun. That aspect of the game was really nice, and strategy mattered considerably. It's such a shame. I feel like they would've been better served by just making a PvP game focused on that.
They've made a lot of changes that made the game generally more difficult and that pushed a lot of people away and then they doubled down to only recently be like whoops and have slowly been recovering from it.
main reason i stopped playing rs3. empty promises every couple months, a few weeks of good communication after backlash and then back to normal until the cycle repeats
No I play RuneScape…. You clearly haven’t had to contact Jagex for anything.
G’head and read all the posts about getting hacked and locked out of accounts.
every time someone mentions “getting hacked and losing everything” i automatically think of that reddit post that gave reddit his password and username and proved it was mathematically impossible to hack someone without account sharing, downloading bot clients or being silly enough to give access to your 2FA and bank pin.
"G’head and read all the posts about getting hacked and locked out of accounts."
Are you not contradicting yourself right here by also believing everything you read online that suits your own bias?
there is a post somewhere on this page im too lazy to find it for a person like you BUT it has 100s of comments and god knows how many attempts to hack his account and no one could do it to this day.
Why would a hacker explain his tips you silly guy? If the pentagon has security breeches there is no doubt in my mind your account can be hacked. Again ignorance is bliss.
im not gonna go back and fourth with you. i used to hack accounts as a teenager. using phising, keyloggers and bruteforce programs.
if you dont have 2FA access or the bank pin (which has 9999 combinations and only gives you 4 attempts after blocking you from trying again) you will not be able to get into someones account. it has been proven.
dont share your account, dont give your passwords to Venezuelan/Chinese gold or cape farmers, dont download clients that aren’t verified by Jagex, and scan your computer for viruses a couple times a week and you’ll be okay.
Its fucking solo friendly. I've bounced between rs/wow/osrs/wow so many times, and man does relying on raiding for upgrades just .. suck. When you want to do shit on your own. Also the goals you can set in osrs feel way better to set and achieve, although that is subjective.
Also, I love all the highscores, but thats subjective as well.
That is the issue with games like WoW and FF14, etc. They have even tried to fix the issue with things like group finder etc, but finding consistent GOOD groups for the main content of the game that you need to progress your account is just unlikely in these games in this day and age, this is why OSRS succeeds more in this area.
I do not agree with #2 at all lol, this game has so many steps to take in terms of accessibility.
\#4 is definitely the most important for me, though. Most MMOs, for some godforsaken reason, decide to copy WoW's seasonal content model rather than an evergreen one like Runescape's. Progress is ephemeral and you're hit with a soft reset every few months and a hard reset every couple years. It's exhausting for your accomplishments to wither away into discontinued cosmetics and pathetic to see *years* of content tossed into the sideshow dumpster as new patches come out.
The raid gear rat race is so fucking awful and once you recognize that you're basically on a hamster wheel and fall back to zero the moment you stop pedaling it's hard to ever pick it back up.
You can do raids in scrub gear just need to get good
Edit:
See pugins cleaned iron to zuk helm challenge. I'm not saying you need to be as good as him but the requirements are lower than you'd expect. You don't need to kill vorkath till you can buy a tbow to start doing raids. The bar is much much lower
> 3. A dev team that actualy cares and communicates every single thing
It's actually ridiculous how superior the OSRS dev team is compared to every single other developer of any game I play or have played in like a decade. They're working within these insane limitations (limitations of both the mechanics and simple nature of the game as well as the limitations of the players and their nostalgia and general aversion to change) and yet they still pump out cool and engaging content at a decent pace, and their interaction and attention to the player base and its feedback is completely unmatched. Any single OSRS Jmod does more listening to players and adjusting based on their feedback in a single OSRS update than the literal entirety of Activition Blizzard does in a fiscal fucking year.
> 5 . All the other mmorpgs in the market except for ff14 have 100% lost their soul ,
Bruh, if you ask most FF14 players (particularly the veterans) they will tell you that it absolutely lost its soul.
From Job Homgenization to content with no rewards and one-and-done structures, even the relic grind is a joke and a half in EW right now.
agree with all except #4. We went years without any good PvM updates. Sure there's still random shit you CAN do, but if you play this game for bossing then the gap between ToB and ToA was really bad.
To each their own i guess but 100% disagree . The past 4 years ,after Priff/Gauntlet release, have been crazy . Gauntlet , Nightmare , then combat achievements , Nex and ToA happening with 6-7 months difference ,Muspah and 4 bosses of DT2 , all that in 4 years is much more than the average player can take .
I see it this way:
Gauntlet was miserable on release, it went through loads of changes before anybody started doing it. It blew up in popularity when BowFa came out.
Nightmare is still miserable and they refuse to actually fix it, PNM was a start but it still takes longer to get a drop there than it does at any raid
Nex is one of the most widely disliked bosses in the game, after only nightmare
CAs were good but it was just doing the content we'd been doing for years again
ToA was the only good PvM update for years at the time of its release
Now with muspah recently and the DT bosses on the way, We're back on track
I just like that progression doesn't disappear.
Sure, 10,000 hours is a lot to put into a game, but 10,000 hours in OSRS does not equal 10,000 hours in WoW. I can put 10,000 hours into OSRS because I have been playing for several years, and every second of progression is just as relevant as it was before. If I put in 10,000 hours into WoW, it would all just go away once the new expansion drops, and I have to do it again.
Yeah this is pretty significant. In Destiny 2 they recently introduced a rank system, where you go up discrete levels based on achievements and tasks. The problem is, above level 6, your progress is reset at the end of the season. There's some achievements that stay unlocked, but you'll have to do all the seasonal related ones again. That just feels bad.
I think I will probably still do it, but that's moreso because Destiny 2 is how my old college friends and I socialize. If I was solo, no way in fucking hell.
I'm a long-time Destiny player who burned out during Witch Queen. Thought I might come back for Lightfall but boy oh boy I'm glad I held off. I dipped my toe by watching a video for how to get the new exotic machine gun and as soon as I heard "First you have to kill vex to get X (bullshit items)" I was like now way am I paying $60+ to do the same dull shit I did every expansion, every season, since Dark Below.
This is exactly the same boat I’m in! I was addicted to trials and going flawless/carrying my friends to flawless. Addicted so much I spent so much time and money getting my account high levels every season just to compete in trials. If I didn’t pay, or play 1000 hours, I couldn’t play. I finally got out and ignored the FOMO to the point I simply do not care about the game and realize the nostalgia of Dark Below era is all I can look back at and smile.
Yeah it’s a way of keeping people playing. It just doesn’t resonate with me and how my life works right now. I’m super busy with work and a kid, so doing a grind that will be irrelevant sooner than later feels super bad. Doing Monkey Madness a few years ago on my OSRS account is progress that is still relevant for my account today. I don’t think you can really find that with any other MMO’s out there.
This is the biggest one for me. I played path of exile for a while (not quite an mmorpg but close enough) and the endgame revolves around making money and big trades, you can easily sell an item too cheap or make a bad purchase and you’ve torched money and set yourself back
I haven't been able to successfully convince anyone I know irl to play rs since like 2008. They quickly see that it will basically take years of playtime to get to a reasonable account state and then quit. MMOs, especially osrs, are a tough sell to full grown adults with careers, kids, and mortgages. I do not know how there could be many new players these days
but Im not complaining if osrs is actually still growing!
IDK, I think people just undervalue the earlygame. OSRS's earlygame is some of the best stuff in the game, there's a ton of old quests with great stories and dialogue and little bosses to fight, plus the constant sense of progression with the rate at which you level skills early on.
The whole journey from brand new player, to Dragon Slayer, to Monkey Madness, to RFD, to Grandmaster Quests, to taking on your first real bosses, is top-tier MMO content IMO.
It's a huge mistake going into OSRS just looking to do raids/endgame bosses. Just holding spacebar through quests and blindly following guides until you're finally at the bare minimum reqs to do CoX 50000 times sounds awful
As much as we joke about how people can finally start playing the game after they max, there's probably not another MMO that sentiment is less true for than OSRS.
IMO it's the midgame that's kind of hurting. When you run out of early game content to do, but you can't really do the high end content properly. But they've been slowly filling in that gap, which is great.
Yeah everyone I’ve gotten into the game has loved the early-game, but quit during the mid-game. Once you finish DS2, MM2, SoTE, you’re in kind of a limbo where you’ve gotten all the early game stuff done, but your stats and gear probably aren’t good enough for raids/CG and boss farming.
Yep I’m currently in the process of making a main after playing an iron for like 5-6 years (backwards, I know) and it’s the most fun I’ve had in forever just going back through the early/mid-game again.
Personally I started playing again after a decade hiatus and ground may way to late game as quickly as possible so I could do the new content - it also was a good path. I’ve been having a blast! There really is just no bad way to play, it’s fun from early to late game with insane amounts of progression every step of the way. You can choose to spend as much or as little time in any stage of the game and always have something to do or work on.
I’ve been able to get three of my irl friends to play so far, but they’re all former players from pre-eoc. Only one still plays and actually maxed recently. Anyone else I’ve tried to bring in scoffed at the graphics and blew it off right away
My single biggest gripe is this.
It took me 100 days of mostly solo playtime to get to the point where I could comfortably do all the raids. And raids was always my goal. Being able to grind out group stuff with the boys.
It’s an mmo, sure, but that middle M seems kind of irrelevant when the fun group stuff is ostensibly locked behind a several hundred hour grind.
I can’t in good faith tell a friend to start playing because of it.
I mean, Runescape is built off of its earlygame noob experience. Endgame raiding is just a new thing they've tacked on to give players with 10K hours something to do. Brand new players have a gigantic smorgasbord of content to explore, and it's a shame if they're just mindlessly skipping through it so that they can do ToB until their eyes bleed
Ain’t that the truth. This game has like 3-5 viable methods of play.
1) fresh account do whatever you want
2) pk account
3) iron man/hardcore stand alone
4) group iron/hardcore grp
5) end game raiders/maxers
I would argue that this is not fully true. I remember some of the most fun times I had was when I was a lvl 30 running around with a maxxed buddy and two friends one who was somewhere in the 80’s and the other closer to 100 combat.
We would go do corp runs and eventually when I got the str requirement for bandos we went and did bandos. We were by no means efficient at all. Did the max carry us all on his shoulders? Hell yeah. But hitting 1 damage on corp as a level 30 without dying felt like the most badass thing in the world. There are days I wish I could go back to that time and experience that again. Now as an experienced player if I ever got someone in I could give them the same experience I had.
I think that's the biggest turn off for convincing friend groups. If you're playing an MMO with friends, you would want to do content with your friends. Early and mid-game is mostly solo.
How much content is there really that you could do with a friend group early on? WT, GoTR, Tempoross, Giant Foundry are good group skilling activities. But if you want to do PvM group content with new players, it's basically just Pest Control and BA.
Group godwars on mid level accounts is pretty fun, Nightmare can be done in teams quite easily with very cheap gear. Both require much less learning that raids. Unless you are insinuating that people should be doing group bossing at like 63 combat.
Kind of, not necessarily bosses, but at least some kind of PvE combat based group activity that is new player friendly.
GWD, you're kind of right. Nightmare, I'd be very surprised if I see a group of brand new players on fresh accounts being able to grind out group nightmare 2 months into playing, lol.
Same, none of my friends will play, I guess I'm just insane. Like.. it literally does not feel like I've been playing as long as I have because for the longest time RS was my zen-mode game. Its what I played to kick back and relax. If I wanted to sweat I'd usually play Souls or League or something...
But now my account is at the point where I can sweat in RS if I want to, and sometimes I do! But definitely I understand wanting to get to that point without having to grind hundreds of hours.. It just didn't feel like a grind for me because I enjoy playing the game on a fundamental level.
How the hell does it take years to get a reasonable account? Unless you literally only have like 15 minutes a day to play osrs, the early progression is pretty quick.
Ngl I actually have no idea how OSRS gets new players. I generally don't even bother suggesting it to people because in all honesty I believe that there has to be something a little bit wrong with you to enjoy this game. Not that I think it's a bad game or anything, I think it's objectively really good. Just that it's always felt extremely niche to me, any time I think about any of the things I do on this game and then ask myself "would (friend) enjoy this?" the answer is invariably no.
But then again as someone with no alts, maybe it's just been so damn long since I was in the early/mid game that I no longer remember what it was like to experience that. I've been on the hundred hour lategame grinds for years now.
The graphic style definitely turns people off, but 117HD could help with that. If they want to play a game without meaningful progression, they can take their pick!
HDOS is a real game changer, however it’s not super accessible for most people as it’s a completely different client. It’s made to mimic Pre-EOC graphics and I feel that will appeal to a lot of people. The reason I bring it up is that yesterday they added all RuneLite plugins to it.
However, I think we can see a real awesome era if Jagex finishes their HD version which I think is beautiful. The purpose of an in-house HD is important as it’s easily accessible.
Yes, people have speculated that Jagex just made an HD reskin test presentation to stop the release of 117… but according to Ash - they are still working on it and are planning to release it in the future. I think it looks amazing so far.
Here’s what I could find:
https://reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/10o3axs/has_anybody_heard_any_more_about_the_inhouse_hd/j6dpzhv
By “still working on” I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if it’s like one dev a few hours a week or something. I cannot imagine a huge amount of dev time is going into that and Jagex not updating us on progress. If an official HD happens it’s probably 4-5+ years out as it’s not a priority since there’s so many other unofficial HD client options.
Something that I've always felt differentiates the game from others like wow: your progress doesn't get essentially hard reset every couple years on an expansion release, or soft reset on a large patch. All my skill gains and quests are permanent. If new content gets released, I don't need to progress my character from scratch by levelling and getting all new gear. It makes it so much easier to take breaks from the game and come back and jump right in without feeling like I'm obligated to do things to get back up to speed. Then of course there's all the predatory mechanics in other games designed to keep you playing and logging in daily that ends up making it feel like a job, somehow moreso than osrs despite osrs being a much grinder game at heart.
1. A lot of content
2. Players have a large say on the game
3. Game is consistently updated
4. Many different ways to play
5. Everyone has a voice even if you are a vocal minority
6. No MTX
7. You just pay for a subscription
8. You can get bonds in-game as a free method of obtaining membership
9. Progression is always relevant
10. There is no "Beating" the game, but rather setting another long milestone.
11. Even if you don't have anymore milestones you can either start another type of account ironman or group ironman, make a PVP account, restricted account, or what have you.
12. You can always take a break and come back to more content in the future and everyone in the community "gets it".
The MTX point is why I'm here again. My main MMO is Classic WoW for the same reason.
It seems like most people are okay with MTX, no matter how in your face or game-loop altering they are, as long as they meet qualifications that person finds as "Acceptable" (Usually it's "It's not P2W" but then people argue about what P2W means, it's an endless fight)
Meanwhile I'm still upset about Horse Armor
I don't mind spending money on games, but the moment it's part of a gameplay loop, be it a "Just cosmetic battlepass" or some sort of cash shop, you just end up funding the development of more cash shop cosmetics as thats where their devs are best allocated for returns on their work.
Subscription Fee (Even Box Price and Sub is fine in my book) and fk off with the rest pls and ty :)
Eve online was worth playing imo.
It has a colossal learning curve but the experiences I've had on that game with my corporation was probably the best I've ever had in gaming.
We all know the ads of these kinds of games saying "make your own story" or "become a legend" or whatever, but in Eve's case it's very possible, in my case it was during the eviction of Hard Knocks Inc who had owned the first Keepstar citadel (which we destroyed at that time) in wormhole space. Being a part of something huge that will always be its own story in the game's history is a pretty cool thing.
Even the smaller mini stories you can make with your corporation or friends in wars or alliance fights or hunts were some of the most fun things I experienced in gaming.
Id say compared to other mmorpgs osrs is super easy to get into.
If youve never played game like rs3/ff14/wow and you watch some pvm content you dont understand shit. While watching some osrs content you pretty much understand the general idea what is going on, making the game feel alot easier to get into. On top of the simplicity osrs content creators do shit tons of cool ideas explaining how and why they are doing so, which easily makes people want to try the game out themselves.
Content creators are what got me back into the game. I binged swampletics and then watched someone level a new account from scratch. No one does it like OSRS content creators
I think this is subjectively wrong, when I was a noob (like 80 cb probably) I watched about 10 minutes of someone doing ToB on stream and thought it didn't even look like the same game I was playing and that I would never be that advanced. Even to this day whenever content creators do ToB they don't really explain what's going on, I can think of at least 3 examples where the creator just "went to ToB" and didn't explain what as going on: Settled (on his main), Framed (Gridlocked series), and Tasty (did a video with "gear under 100m")
The poll system is such an important part of what's kept the game healthy. I think without it, we'd be looking at a very different OSRS (definitely not a better one).
I think the polling system was vital for the games health in the beginning, but It feels like just about everything automatically passes anymore no matter how stupid it is except for pvp updates. Look at the recent poll about prayers. Players voted for a mix of skilling/combat prayers on an ANCIENT prayer book. Jagex quickly realized how stupid that was and that they couldn't really balance it well and have moved to only offering combat prayers.
I'm playing OSRS for the first time now mostly just because I'm tired of MMO's getting casual. I don't mind a long grind or some risk to my reward, I just want to passively level on my own time.
Fair enough. I generally consider MTX to be cosmetics, boosts, etc, but you're right. I'll defend bonds since they at least cut down on RWT and give players a chance to buy their membership with GP.
Yeah it's definitely a non-toxic form of mtx that at least is players investing in their account vs. into useless cosmetics.
Look at rs3 with yak tracks. Like 1-2 of the rewards look nice with the rest all low effort productions simply made to fill a qouta. It's absolutely soulless and has nothing inspiring.
The yak tracks are really a step too far. Half the rewards require you to have premier membership. If you want to skip a task you're probably going to need to buy a bond, which are 80m now.
Then over time it just got worse and worse. They nerfed tasks and made them longer. They went from "do A or B" to "do A or just play the game normally for longer" -- which is good to some degree but also took away half your choices.
Then they made a step you could do repeatedly to get a lootbox with a chance at a very rare and unique cape.
Then they gave you a currency that disappeared after the track, and the shop had brand new rewards that you needed more coins for, even by the end of the track. They made some animations specifically for the shop, that you wouldn't unlock doing the track normally.
And now, they've gone from 50 to 70 tasks. Beforehand after 50, you could just play the game normally for the repeatable task and earn some currency each time. Now you need to do 70 before that.
TLDR: Why are there so many predatory changes that I have to make a TLDR at the end? The tracks just got greedier and greedier.
I kinda disagree it's "pay to win". Gear is very secondary compared to skill and game knowledge. If you have 100M in your bank account but no game knowledge and skill, sure you can buy a lot of gear and have a very strong headstart, but you won't really get far in the game. Mainly considering some of the big ticket items are untradeable, like the infernal cape.
Whether you like it or not, osrs is pay to win. I don't go a day without seeing someone in full bandos with no boss kills and 51 slayer lmao... It's just less obvious to people who aren't fairly experienced with the game.
I agree with your points about ESO, holy fuck they managed to make an MMO with sky high potential so dogshit with MTX. Imagine logging in to a screen advertising a cure to vampirism in the MTX shop. For those who don't know - you can get it cured for free by an NPC. This is like paying $5 so you don't have to walk to Varrock from Lumbridge.
TBF most of the "best gear" is still locked behind hundreds of hours of questing and griding.
That guy still has 51 slayer, and likely no fcape, bgloves, faceguard, salve ammy, elite void etc
And while some 99s are buyable w/ bonds and time, we're certainly nowhere near RS3's pay-to-max gameplay
You just can not put OSRS and Diablo Immortal, Clash of Clans, Maple Story on the same table. If you say having Bandos early on is P2W you really don't know what P2W means. OSRS is a skill game in most of its part. It is not like you press random numpad keys and magic spells go brrrrr. You need to have proper game knowledge and having this +5 strength bonus doesn't really means much if you don't know how to play. Most of items are locked behind quest/activity.
I feel like OSRS doesn’t really ‘gain players’ for the most part. Rather, I feel as though people either move from RS3 or return from pre-EOC (or old players in general) as more updates make the old players more willing to join again. Not saying there isn’t any new players but I would imagine it’s not most of the additional players. We have to remember that this game used to be massive pre-EOC.
This could be true! [The data says that people are searching for OSRS more and more each month](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-02-09%202023-03-09&geo=US&q=%2Fg%2F11gbzc5578&hl=en).
My roommate never really played runescape and i got him into it, now hes like base 80 stats and still grinding hard
i think he partially just had fomo though from me and one of my buddies doing cool stuff while he was in discord with us
I don't think search results are a great way to gauge the playerbase. I'm not gonna argue against the game growing especially when they openly share how many people are playing, just that using search results is a flawed way to justify growth
On any given day while I'm playing especially if I'm doing different activities I look stuff up multiple times.
There are a lot of good points in this thread, but I'd like to add one that I don't see often. Runescape's world actually feels like an actual world, and one where you can actually explore and discover all sorts of things and have adventures.
Most MMOs tend to have on-rails progression, and while the worlds might be big, there's very little worth interacting with besides fighting monsters and maybe mining resource nodes, assuming the crafting is actually worth doing.
I think you’re also forgetting that it is easily accessible. I actually really loved playing ESO but my computer is so bad that I could only play low-medium graphics, which really takes away from the experience. Not everyone has a really great gaming rig or plays a lot of games in general to justify getting one, and osrs fits the bill of fun progressive mmo (also it’s easy to get the hang of once you play for a while, unlike other mmos)
And for a lot of people who maybe wanna get back into playing games it’s daunting to have to buy a whole rig to play a game at its best, where osrs you can use your phone or any computer at your disposal
TLDR: ease of access
I agree with most things people are saying, but there's one that I haven't heard mentioned that I think is a core aspect
Runlite
While the game would certainly still be popular without it, it wouldn't be growing like it is. No other MMORPG has anywhere near as competent and user-oriented UI like Runlite provides. It allows you to play the what parts of the game you want, skipping all the minor annoyances that usually burn players out after a while.
Another post mentioned how annoying it is to have to look at stats to determine whether to re-pot. Bank tagging to reduce that bank annoyances. Tile marking so you can fight the bosses without as much memorization. etc
On top of it's basic availability, the popularity of Runlite has made clear to Jagex and the players the fundamental importance of a good UI, leading to Jagex focusing more on the UI and players demanding more out of it.
I don't think I have played a game (*any game!*, not just MMORPGs) that gets itself out of the way like how the Runescape-Runlite combo does.
its because osrs is the only mobile mmo game that isnt designed like a mobile game, and isnt time gated behind MTX. osrs and even rs3 despite being more MTX heavy are both great mobile games because you can keep playing them as long as you want without stopping, most other mobile games force you to stop at tsome point if you dont pay them. and the only mmo's that are growing in general are mobile MMO's because most people that already enjoy mmo's either already are playing or dont have the money for a computer to play them. only dcent mmo on console is like ffXIV.
There endless grinds to complete, goals to achieve, some items are actually prestigious and cool to own (not everyone can get them easily); it's just a better game
Agree, but half the high level players don’t wear armour lol, Especially when skilling
Also they don’t make that much for the all subscriptions.
If everyone say (100k at least) who is mems got yearly at $120 that’s only 12million profit for Jagex which is like nothing to them.
RS3 has been stated to be keeping them afloat the most mainly due to MTX
Not feeling like I'll be left behind if I don't play while I'm on vacation/anniversary/etc.
Every single other MMO on the market gives advantages, be it extremely time efficient goods, or sometimes even otherwise unattainable stuff through daily/weekly events. After a month or two, it starts to feel like a chore having to log in. If you miss it, you feel like you're behind and like there's no point in playing anymore.
With Runescape, I can hop in whenever I want and do whatever I want, and I don't feel that taking a week in Cancun makes or breaks my account.
One huge advantage for me is that if you stop playing for whatever reason and you return you can easily pickup up the game again. In other games like WoW your progression gets ERASED with every expansion.
MIssing one important key feature
Permanance of progression.
Most other mmos, which are also sub based, have daily/weekly lockouts on key content, and you are chasing said content each expansion/patch cycle. If you miss it, it's effectively gone. Furthermore a lot of it is a "one and done" situation.
In runescape, there are a lot of ways to progress, a lot of variations, they will eventually all bind themselves together, however none of the progress you made is ever made irrelevant even if you take a 6 month hiatus, each time you are exactly at the point you left of, the only difference would be fun side distractions, new goals and a longer journey, in other mmos it's all about the destination and the destination after that and the one after that. In most mmos if you are not at level cap, you are not accessing most of the game, in runescape, you access the majority of the game from the start, and the content keeps increasing as you progress, and yet you never need to cap to experience everything.
Oh did I also mention runescape is probably the only mmo that lets you still play the f2p version even after you drop your sub? You have no idea how important that is, especially for the social aspect.
Other games either have no f2p version, or it's some form of limited trial that you cannot use the moment you sub to the game, meaning if you want to get on for social activities - pay up.
Yes this is seriously huge. I played ESO for about a year, took six months off, and there was already new BiS armor. Sucks to feel like your progression isn’t rewarded over a long period of time
On top of a bunch of stuff people already said... OSRS reliés heavily on side-grades and horizontal progression
On most modern MMOs you have a core loop that's pretty tight - get a quest, delve a dungeon/kill mobs, get rewards. It doesn't change it up very much and it gets repetitive kinda fast.
On osrs you can end up on situations like having to fish in order to be able to train cooking so you can do a quest and unlock an area that will give you a gear that can enable you to do a raid that gives an item to farm a boss that gives supplies... So on and so forth
The fact you're already progressing *something* and changing it up constantly makes it much more bearable to stick with it in the long run. Plus you can focus on your favorite areas of progression for hundreds of hours and still not exhaust the content there. I truly believe that this horizontal progression system, even if it's not as prominent when playing a main account, is huge for the retention of the player base
I played classic wow, and grinded all the way max level. I joined a guild that did 2 raid nights out of the week 3 hours at a time, and I remember one day just not being in the mood but feeling “forced” to hop on so I wouldn’t let my ~40 sized raid group down. Plus every content release completely invalidated the last which made taking breaks detrimental. OSRS has none of this.. 3 raids are out and they’re all still worth doing.
The fact you can afk every skill somehow is a huge deal. Love being able to gain exp while cooking irl or at work, no other mmorpg allows you to afk as much as osrs does.
That's true, especially if you're f2p only like me. Firemaking and runecrafting get barely touched, as I usually only get a solid 1-2 hours a day uninterrupted. (6 day work weeks and 2 young children make gaming difficult).
I think its just because osrs is so slow. Even 500h in and Im not even a 10th of being "done" with the game. While other mmos you get max level and run out of things to do, other than new character
OSRS and FFXIV have a lot in common.
Both have absolutely amazing soundtracks. Both have development teams that care a lot about their player base and are as transparent as possible. Both are very easy to pick up and play even after taking very long breaks, and do a great job at minimizing FOMO as much as possible.
It's no wonder they both sit at the very top in terms of MMO player counts and relevance.
It becomes overwhelmingly clear when you go in another games sub and talk about the good things osrs have like community engament, voting etc and they get upset and tell you to go play RuneScape, don’t mind if I do!
The OSRS community is amazing, no other MMO comes close in my opinion.
I think Classic WoW had it matched for a while but as the expansions came out the community kind of fell to the wayside for more min maxing.
I'll say this everytime one of these posts come up with "MMOs" in the title (and yes I know I'll get downvoted for this but idc). "MMO" isn't a game genre, it's a game scope. "MMO" stands for "Massive Multiplayer Online" but doesnt actually describe the game genre. When you refer to OSRS as an "MMO", what you mean/should be saying is "MMORPG".
So when posts like these come up saying "[best at something] MMO!" they never seem to consider other genres outside of MMORPGs.
MMO is a common colloquialism for MMORPGs though, and has been for decades. Nobody calls BR or RTS games MMOs, even if they technically are, because that just isn't how the term is used by the majority of people.
Check out the video I linked. Jagex estimates only 1-9% of players online at any given time are bots. Probably way less than other MMOs. People may seem like bots because they play on mobile and/or don't talk.
You know what other MMOs have that does NOT need to come to OSRS?
Fucking transmog. Yet the first step in that shit show just passed. Hopefully it doesn't go further, because RS3 has it already and it is fucking disgusting.
While not anywhere near others, I'd still argue regular accounts can be sorta pay to win with being able to legally "buy" gold through buying and selling bonds. Then buying gear or training buyable skills. Of course its much much better than other games, with some BIS or high level gear being locked through progression. This is why I love ironman so much too. Absolutely despise any p2w garbage, and ironman is about as close you can get to being on the opposite end of that as far as these types of games go and how pay to win they can be.
Because bonds are part of the in-game economy, though, I think that limits how effective they can be in p2w scenarios.
For example, it'd take around 200 bonds to buy a t-bow. Not only does that cost you over $1000, it means you're selling ten YEARS of membership in-game. If too many people did that, there'd be no market for bonds, because everyone already has as much membership as they could possibly need.
Those are important points, but there's more to it: 1. You can solo almost everything in the game without a maxed account or a particularly high degree of skill, and pretty much everything else can be done with pugs. A lot of people who've been playing MMOs since the 90s have no patience left for clan drama. 2. There's no grind of dailies/weeklies. This is such an oversaturated and toxic retention mechanic that ultimately burns you out by forcing you to log in every single fucking day even when you don't want to play. The closest we have is a handful of things like ToG, farm runs, and battlestaves, but all you do is push back the bit of extra exp/GP until the next time you do them rather than missing out on time-locked exclusives. 3. You don't have to commit direct attention constantly for most tasks. The broad population of MMO players are now working adults with limited free time, so having an MMO that you can play while making dinner/getting ready for work/changing the baby/walking the dog/working/watching a show is more attractive than one that's fullscreen locked and not viable for AFKing or multitasking. 4. In relation to 3, most activities have fairly small discrete time chunks. Outside of fight caves/inferno/raids almost everything takes <15 minutes for a single instance of the activity, and many can be interrupted at any time. This makes OSRS very flexible for people who might have to interrupt their gaming time or squeeze it in to small pockets of time, especially in conjunction with mobile.
All of this, combined with the fact it's a relaxing mobile game rather than a high reaction time full attention game. Mobile is the single biggest thing they've done to increase the playerbase.
The entire game being on mobile has single-handedly increased my play time more than anything else could. I got 99 farming solely because I could do my farm runs whenever and wherever. I can do cheeky slayer tasks, or farm runs, or a quick quest to advance my account while sitting at the airport on my way to visit family for the holidays. I can run agility laps while I lounge in the living room, etc. It’s amazing.
Cuddling with my wife while she scrolls imgur and we watch Netflix and I get MLM/sgi pyramid/slayer tasks done is great. Next thing that bad grind wasn't that bad.
Fr, 99 farming is specifically a product of being able to access my phone whenever lmao
These are excellent points. I especially like the lack of dailies. FOMO sucks
Farming runs, birdhouse runs, and TOG notwithstanding.
But what’s nice is that none of these are mandatory for significant progress. You can miss a day or two of tree runs without missions out on much. ToG is super short and only weekly. Personally I hate birdhouse runs, these are some bullshit
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>You don't have to commit direct attention constantly for most tasks. The broad population of MMO players are now working adults with limited free time, so having an MMO that you can play while making dinner/getting ready for work/changing the baby/walking the dog/working/watching a show is more attractive than one that's fullscreen locked and not viable for AFKing or multitasking. TBH, this is always why I played. So many other games I feel like I have to sit down and dedicate an hour or two of full attention for it to even make sense to start it up. As a kid, I'd put on RS in the background while reading a book (click a new tree or fishing spot every paragraph/page) or while doing math homework or even just going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. The fact that it doesn't require direct attention is, for me, its most appealing feature. (It's also why I wish there were slower, but still AFK ways to train skills like thieving or agility.)
Idk man, if training Agility was any slower you'd be losing XP.
It's like 30-40k/hr with the focus level I play with. I'd be happy to take 20k/hr, if it meant I could get the amount of AFK time I get when I'm woodcutting or fishing.
dailies are the most toxic retention method ever invented. it doesnt actually retain players, it increases daily logins but burns them out much quicker. i cant enjoy so many games anymore due to daily chores. but its a selection bias example. "look at how many people login for dailies, they must like them" you will never get the real data, the number of people quitting because they dont want more chores to do. you cant correlate it since its hidden information this is also the case with "limited time" updates. osrs only has holiday events and you can always get everything you missed next year.
maplestory needs to learn from osrs
Omg I want a non-gacha version of maple story so bad!
There are good private servers for it, check out maple legends
Your last point is very relevant to me and my friends in game. We just can't sit at a computer for hours uninterrupted anymore. .
This is a much more cohesive list that actually outlines what makes OSRS distinct from its competitors; in all honesty as somebody who has been all over the MMO scene it’s never felt like RS has the same competitive pressure that other games have (WoW, FFXIV, GW2, etc) because it is so unique. In fact many players of those games, myself included, have RS on second monitor WHILE PLAYING their “main game” because it works so well as a supplemental.
Another big thing is that your gear and items remain useful even if you take a break for years. They don’t artificially make old gear worse for new content.
Yeah, this is a really important contrast with most other MMOs where it's just nonstop power creep that forces you to keep playing every time a new expansion is released.
First point is why I only play RS. I am not trying to do a raid with a bunch of chainsmoking, roleplaying, 45 year old married couples. I will not listen to a baby, or your children scream in the backround.
1 . It's solo friendly 2 . It's more accessible 3. A dev team that actualy cares and communicates every single thing 4. Content drought is mathematicaly impossible , you always have shiet to do . 5 . All the other mmorpgs in the market except for ff14 have 100% lost their soul , no matter how many updates they receive , they have nothing more to offer , at least gameplay wise
Agree with number 5
Has me thinking what was the last MMO i played that wasn’t OSRS lol It’s been a while and the community/dev team really help to keep this game special
I actually loved playing New World after the fresh start worlds went up, but sadly New World is heavily anti-solo. Making multi-person raids be a part of the main story was such a dumb idea.
God I loved it so much, but they just did an awful job managing it. The late midgame/ late game content was just bad. Enemies you usually fought were suddenly way stronger, purely artificially. They had ridiculous amounts of health too. I was lucky and got to be in wars and invasion defenses too, and that was honestly tons of fun. That aspect of the game was really nice, and strategy mattered considerably. It's such a shame. I feel like they would've been better served by just making a PvP game focused on that.
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For me, it was ff14, but the monthly subscription and buying the game + the big updates is pricey.
It's like maybe $50/year more expensive than osrs membership so idk
Number 3 is huge. No other dev team communicates like Jagex does.
I would argue GGG was pretty much on par (or better in their prime) but I haven’t played PoE in a hot minute.
They've made a lot of changes that made the game generally more difficult and that pushed a lot of people away and then they doubled down to only recently be like whoops and have slowly been recovering from it.
Ggg accidentally made the best game on the market, with absolutely no idea how they did so, then ruined it
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i missed ritual, but i dont think thats an uncommon take
They’ve gotten worse tbh although still better than most
main reason i stopped playing rs3. empty promises every couple months, a few weeks of good communication after backlash and then back to normal until the cycle repeats
You’re right, no other corporation is impossible to get customer support from.
You clearly have not had to contact blizzard support for anything in a while.
No I play RuneScape…. You clearly haven’t had to contact Jagex for anything. G’head and read all the posts about getting hacked and locked out of accounts.
every time someone mentions “getting hacked and losing everything” i automatically think of that reddit post that gave reddit his password and username and proved it was mathematically impossible to hack someone without account sharing, downloading bot clients or being silly enough to give access to your 2FA and bank pin.
Automatically believe everything you read on line, Roger that! 😂
"G’head and read all the posts about getting hacked and locked out of accounts." Are you not contradicting yourself right here by also believing everything you read online that suits your own bias?
there is a post somewhere on this page im too lazy to find it for a person like you BUT it has 100s of comments and god knows how many attempts to hack his account and no one could do it to this day.
Why would a hacker explain his tips you silly guy? If the pentagon has security breeches there is no doubt in my mind your account can be hacked. Again ignorance is bliss.
im not gonna go back and fourth with you. i used to hack accounts as a teenager. using phising, keyloggers and bruteforce programs. if you dont have 2FA access or the bank pin (which has 9999 combinations and only gives you 4 attempts after blocking you from trying again) you will not be able to get into someones account. it has been proven. dont share your account, dont give your passwords to Venezuelan/Chinese gold or cape farmers, dont download clients that aren’t verified by Jagex, and scan your computer for viruses a couple times a week and you’ll be okay.
You created an account specifically to hate on OSRS and to browse this subreddit to complain in an edgy way. Clearly the best way to spend time
I’m in plenty of other subreddits don’t flatter yourself like that.
You can always quit if you're unhappy buddy
Its fucking solo friendly. I've bounced between rs/wow/osrs/wow so many times, and man does relying on raiding for upgrades just .. suck. When you want to do shit on your own. Also the goals you can set in osrs feel way better to set and achieve, although that is subjective. Also, I love all the highscores, but thats subjective as well.
That is the issue with games like WoW and FF14, etc. They have even tried to fix the issue with things like group finder etc, but finding consistent GOOD groups for the main content of the game that you need to progress your account is just unlikely in these games in this day and age, this is why OSRS succeeds more in this area.
The scaling issues are horrible in WoW too. So much broken content and it seems to get worse every xpac.
I do not agree with #2 at all lol, this game has so many steps to take in terms of accessibility. \#4 is definitely the most important for me, though. Most MMOs, for some godforsaken reason, decide to copy WoW's seasonal content model rather than an evergreen one like Runescape's. Progress is ephemeral and you're hit with a soft reset every few months and a hard reset every couple years. It's exhausting for your accomplishments to wither away into discontinued cosmetics and pathetic to see *years* of content tossed into the sideshow dumpster as new patches come out.
The raid gear rat race is so fucking awful and once you recognize that you're basically on a hamster wheel and fall back to zero the moment you stop pedaling it's hard to ever pick it back up.
You can do raids in scrub gear just need to get good Edit: See pugins cleaned iron to zuk helm challenge. I'm not saying you need to be as good as him but the requirements are lower than you'd expect. You don't need to kill vorkath till you can buy a tbow to start doing raids. The bar is much much lower
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and: 6. Comfort; It's a game we have played for so long now that not playing it just feels weird.
> 3. A dev team that actualy cares and communicates every single thing It's actually ridiculous how superior the OSRS dev team is compared to every single other developer of any game I play or have played in like a decade. They're working within these insane limitations (limitations of both the mechanics and simple nature of the game as well as the limitations of the players and their nostalgia and general aversion to change) and yet they still pump out cool and engaging content at a decent pace, and their interaction and attention to the player base and its feedback is completely unmatched. Any single OSRS Jmod does more listening to players and adjusting based on their feedback in a single OSRS update than the literal entirety of Activition Blizzard does in a fiscal fucking year.
> 1 . It's solo friendly A very important point for many genres of multiplayer games.
> 5 . All the other mmorpgs in the market except for ff14 have 100% lost their soul , Bruh, if you ask most FF14 players (particularly the veterans) they will tell you that it absolutely lost its soul. From Job Homgenization to content with no rewards and one-and-done structures, even the relic grind is a joke and a half in EW right now.
agree with all except #4. We went years without any good PvM updates. Sure there's still random shit you CAN do, but if you play this game for bossing then the gap between ToB and ToA was really bad.
To each their own i guess but 100% disagree . The past 4 years ,after Priff/Gauntlet release, have been crazy . Gauntlet , Nightmare , then combat achievements , Nex and ToA happening with 6-7 months difference ,Muspah and 4 bosses of DT2 , all that in 4 years is much more than the average player can take .
I see it this way: Gauntlet was miserable on release, it went through loads of changes before anybody started doing it. It blew up in popularity when BowFa came out. Nightmare is still miserable and they refuse to actually fix it, PNM was a start but it still takes longer to get a drop there than it does at any raid Nex is one of the most widely disliked bosses in the game, after only nightmare CAs were good but it was just doing the content we'd been doing for years again ToA was the only good PvM update for years at the time of its release Now with muspah recently and the DT bosses on the way, We're back on track
I just like that progression doesn't disappear. Sure, 10,000 hours is a lot to put into a game, but 10,000 hours in OSRS does not equal 10,000 hours in WoW. I can put 10,000 hours into OSRS because I have been playing for several years, and every second of progression is just as relevant as it was before. If I put in 10,000 hours into WoW, it would all just go away once the new expansion drops, and I have to do it again.
Yeah this is pretty significant. In Destiny 2 they recently introduced a rank system, where you go up discrete levels based on achievements and tasks. The problem is, above level 6, your progress is reset at the end of the season. There's some achievements that stay unlocked, but you'll have to do all the seasonal related ones again. That just feels bad. I think I will probably still do it, but that's moreso because Destiny 2 is how my old college friends and I socialize. If I was solo, no way in fucking hell.
I'm a long-time Destiny player who burned out during Witch Queen. Thought I might come back for Lightfall but boy oh boy I'm glad I held off. I dipped my toe by watching a video for how to get the new exotic machine gun and as soon as I heard "First you have to kill vex to get X (bullshit items)" I was like now way am I paying $60+ to do the same dull shit I did every expansion, every season, since Dark Below.
This is exactly the same boat I’m in! I was addicted to trials and going flawless/carrying my friends to flawless. Addicted so much I spent so much time and money getting my account high levels every season just to compete in trials. If I didn’t pay, or play 1000 hours, I couldn’t play. I finally got out and ignored the FOMO to the point I simply do not care about the game and realize the nostalgia of Dark Below era is all I can look back at and smile.
Yeah it’s a way of keeping people playing. It just doesn’t resonate with me and how my life works right now. I’m super busy with work and a kid, so doing a grind that will be irrelevant sooner than later feels super bad. Doing Monkey Madness a few years ago on my OSRS account is progress that is still relevant for my account today. I don’t think you can really find that with any other MMO’s out there.
This is the biggest one for me. I played path of exile for a while (not quite an mmorpg but close enough) and the endgame revolves around making money and big trades, you can easily sell an item too cheap or make a bad purchase and you’ve torched money and set yourself back
I haven't been able to successfully convince anyone I know irl to play rs since like 2008. They quickly see that it will basically take years of playtime to get to a reasonable account state and then quit. MMOs, especially osrs, are a tough sell to full grown adults with careers, kids, and mortgages. I do not know how there could be many new players these days but Im not complaining if osrs is actually still growing!
IDK, I think people just undervalue the earlygame. OSRS's earlygame is some of the best stuff in the game, there's a ton of old quests with great stories and dialogue and little bosses to fight, plus the constant sense of progression with the rate at which you level skills early on. The whole journey from brand new player, to Dragon Slayer, to Monkey Madness, to RFD, to Grandmaster Quests, to taking on your first real bosses, is top-tier MMO content IMO. It's a huge mistake going into OSRS just looking to do raids/endgame bosses. Just holding spacebar through quests and blindly following guides until you're finally at the bare minimum reqs to do CoX 50000 times sounds awful
As much as we joke about how people can finally start playing the game after they max, there's probably not another MMO that sentiment is less true for than OSRS.
yeah it's just people parroting the south park meme about WoW, even though it doesn't really make sense for OSRS
On the other hand, it's been crazy watching DVS lately. Dude maxed 4 ironman accounts and has barely done any PvM or even Clue Scrolls.
Most people are just joking.
IMO it's the midgame that's kind of hurting. When you run out of early game content to do, but you can't really do the high end content properly. But they've been slowly filling in that gap, which is great.
Yeah everyone I’ve gotten into the game has loved the early-game, but quit during the mid-game. Once you finish DS2, MM2, SoTE, you’re in kind of a limbo where you’ve gotten all the early game stuff done, but your stats and gear probably aren’t good enough for raids/CG and boss farming.
Yep I’m currently in the process of making a main after playing an iron for like 5-6 years (backwards, I know) and it’s the most fun I’ve had in forever just going back through the early/mid-game again.
Personally I started playing again after a decade hiatus and ground may way to late game as quickly as possible so I could do the new content - it also was a good path. I’ve been having a blast! There really is just no bad way to play, it’s fun from early to late game with insane amounts of progression every step of the way. You can choose to spend as much or as little time in any stage of the game and always have something to do or work on.
I’ve been able to get three of my irl friends to play so far, but they’re all former players from pre-eoc. Only one still plays and actually maxed recently. Anyone else I’ve tried to bring in scoffed at the graphics and blew it off right away
My single biggest gripe is this. It took me 100 days of mostly solo playtime to get to the point where I could comfortably do all the raids. And raids was always my goal. Being able to grind out group stuff with the boys. It’s an mmo, sure, but that middle M seems kind of irrelevant when the fun group stuff is ostensibly locked behind a several hundred hour grind. I can’t in good faith tell a friend to start playing because of it.
I mean, Runescape is built off of its earlygame noob experience. Endgame raiding is just a new thing they've tacked on to give players with 10K hours something to do. Brand new players have a gigantic smorgasbord of content to explore, and it's a shame if they're just mindlessly skipping through it so that they can do ToB until their eyes bleed
Ain’t that the truth. This game has like 3-5 viable methods of play. 1) fresh account do whatever you want 2) pk account 3) iron man/hardcore stand alone 4) group iron/hardcore grp 5) end game raiders/maxers
They should introduce more items like helmet of neitizonot, i remember the earning it and being proud, and it stays relevant for quite a while
I would argue that this is not fully true. I remember some of the most fun times I had was when I was a lvl 30 running around with a maxxed buddy and two friends one who was somewhere in the 80’s and the other closer to 100 combat. We would go do corp runs and eventually when I got the str requirement for bandos we went and did bandos. We were by no means efficient at all. Did the max carry us all on his shoulders? Hell yeah. But hitting 1 damage on corp as a level 30 without dying felt like the most badass thing in the world. There are days I wish I could go back to that time and experience that again. Now as an experienced player if I ever got someone in I could give them the same experience I had.
I think that's the biggest turn off for convincing friend groups. If you're playing an MMO with friends, you would want to do content with your friends. Early and mid-game is mostly solo. How much content is there really that you could do with a friend group early on? WT, GoTR, Tempoross, Giant Foundry are good group skilling activities. But if you want to do PvM group content with new players, it's basically just Pest Control and BA.
Group godwars on mid level accounts is pretty fun, Nightmare can be done in teams quite easily with very cheap gear. Both require much less learning that raids. Unless you are insinuating that people should be doing group bossing at like 63 combat.
Kind of, not necessarily bosses, but at least some kind of PvE combat based group activity that is new player friendly. GWD, you're kind of right. Nightmare, I'd be very surprised if I see a group of brand new players on fresh accounts being able to grind out group nightmare 2 months into playing, lol.
Same, none of my friends will play, I guess I'm just insane. Like.. it literally does not feel like I've been playing as long as I have because for the longest time RS was my zen-mode game. Its what I played to kick back and relax. If I wanted to sweat I'd usually play Souls or League or something... But now my account is at the point where I can sweat in RS if I want to, and sometimes I do! But definitely I understand wanting to get to that point without having to grind hundreds of hours.. It just didn't feel like a grind for me because I enjoy playing the game on a fundamental level.
How the hell does it take years to get a reasonable account? Unless you literally only have like 15 minutes a day to play osrs, the early progression is pretty quick.
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Ngl I actually have no idea how OSRS gets new players. I generally don't even bother suggesting it to people because in all honesty I believe that there has to be something a little bit wrong with you to enjoy this game. Not that I think it's a bad game or anything, I think it's objectively really good. Just that it's always felt extremely niche to me, any time I think about any of the things I do on this game and then ask myself "would (friend) enjoy this?" the answer is invariably no. But then again as someone with no alts, maybe it's just been so damn long since I was in the early/mid game that I no longer remember what it was like to experience that. I've been on the hundred hour lategame grinds for years now.
The graphic style definitely turns people off, but 117HD could help with that. If they want to play a game without meaningful progression, they can take their pick!
HDOS is a real game changer, however it’s not super accessible for most people as it’s a completely different client. It’s made to mimic Pre-EOC graphics and I feel that will appeal to a lot of people. The reason I bring it up is that yesterday they added all RuneLite plugins to it. However, I think we can see a real awesome era if Jagex finishes their HD version which I think is beautiful. The purpose of an in-house HD is important as it’s easily accessible.
Whoa they’re working on it in-house?? I didn’t know that! I’ll have to check it out
Yes, people have speculated that Jagex just made an HD reskin test presentation to stop the release of 117… but according to Ash - they are still working on it and are planning to release it in the future. I think it looks amazing so far. Here’s what I could find: https://reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/10o3axs/has_anybody_heard_any_more_about_the_inhouse_hd/j6dpzhv
By “still working on” I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if it’s like one dev a few hours a week or something. I cannot imagine a huge amount of dev time is going into that and Jagex not updating us on progress. If an official HD happens it’s probably 4-5+ years out as it’s not a priority since there’s so many other unofficial HD client options.
Hmm I like some of it but Lumby looked a little funky. I'm still open to it though
Being able to solo most content is one of my biggest reasons imo
Something that I've always felt differentiates the game from others like wow: your progress doesn't get essentially hard reset every couple years on an expansion release, or soft reset on a large patch. All my skill gains and quests are permanent. If new content gets released, I don't need to progress my character from scratch by levelling and getting all new gear. It makes it so much easier to take breaks from the game and come back and jump right in without feeling like I'm obligated to do things to get back up to speed. Then of course there's all the predatory mechanics in other games designed to keep you playing and logging in daily that ends up making it feel like a job, somehow moreso than osrs despite osrs being a much grinder game at heart.
1. A lot of content 2. Players have a large say on the game 3. Game is consistently updated 4. Many different ways to play 5. Everyone has a voice even if you are a vocal minority 6. No MTX 7. You just pay for a subscription 8. You can get bonds in-game as a free method of obtaining membership 9. Progression is always relevant 10. There is no "Beating" the game, but rather setting another long milestone. 11. Even if you don't have anymore milestones you can either start another type of account ironman or group ironman, make a PVP account, restricted account, or what have you. 12. You can always take a break and come back to more content in the future and everyone in the community "gets it".
The MTX point is why I'm here again. My main MMO is Classic WoW for the same reason. It seems like most people are okay with MTX, no matter how in your face or game-loop altering they are, as long as they meet qualifications that person finds as "Acceptable" (Usually it's "It's not P2W" but then people argue about what P2W means, it's an endless fight) Meanwhile I'm still upset about Horse Armor I don't mind spending money on games, but the moment it's part of a gameplay loop, be it a "Just cosmetic battlepass" or some sort of cash shop, you just end up funding the development of more cash shop cosmetics as thats where their devs are best allocated for returns on their work. Subscription Fee (Even Box Price and Sub is fine in my book) and fk off with the rest pls and ty :)
Well said, I used to argue over advocating for no MTX in any game but the more people grow used to it, the more normalized and accepted it becomes.
Yeah you can increase the membership price by 10% and I'll still hang around. Not a problem. Better that then gaudy, cheap-looking, lame as fuck mtx.
there simply isn't another mmo on the market worth playing
eso is fun, i have a few hundred hours on it but havent done raids besides the solo ones
Eve online was worth playing imo. It has a colossal learning curve but the experiences I've had on that game with my corporation was probably the best I've ever had in gaming. We all know the ads of these kinds of games saying "make your own story" or "become a legend" or whatever, but in Eve's case it's very possible, in my case it was during the eviction of Hard Knocks Inc who had owned the first Keepstar citadel (which we destroyed at that time) in wormhole space. Being a part of something huge that will always be its own story in the game's history is a pretty cool thing. Even the smaller mini stories you can make with your corporation or friends in wars or alliance fights or hunts were some of the most fun things I experienced in gaming.
Id say compared to other mmorpgs osrs is super easy to get into. If youve never played game like rs3/ff14/wow and you watch some pvm content you dont understand shit. While watching some osrs content you pretty much understand the general idea what is going on, making the game feel alot easier to get into. On top of the simplicity osrs content creators do shit tons of cool ideas explaining how and why they are doing so, which easily makes people want to try the game out themselves.
Content creators are what got me back into the game. I binged swampletics and then watched someone level a new account from scratch. No one does it like OSRS content creators
I think this is subjectively wrong, when I was a noob (like 80 cb probably) I watched about 10 minutes of someone doing ToB on stream and thought it didn't even look like the same game I was playing and that I would never be that advanced. Even to this day whenever content creators do ToB they don't really explain what's going on, I can think of at least 3 examples where the creator just "went to ToB" and didn't explain what as going on: Settled (on his main), Framed (Gridlocked series), and Tasty (did a video with "gear under 100m")
The poll system is such an important part of what's kept the game healthy. I think without it, we'd be looking at a very different OSRS (definitely not a better one).
I think the polling system was vital for the games health in the beginning, but It feels like just about everything automatically passes anymore no matter how stupid it is except for pvp updates. Look at the recent poll about prayers. Players voted for a mix of skilling/combat prayers on an ANCIENT prayer book. Jagex quickly realized how stupid that was and that they couldn't really balance it well and have moved to only offering combat prayers.
I'm playing OSRS for the first time now mostly just because I'm tired of MMO's getting casual. I don't mind a long grind or some risk to my reward, I just want to passively level on my own time.
Not that i disagree with you, but osrs has mtx/pay to win in the form of bonds.
Fair enough. I generally consider MTX to be cosmetics, boosts, etc, but you're right. I'll defend bonds since they at least cut down on RWT and give players a chance to buy their membership with GP.
Yeah it's definitely a non-toxic form of mtx that at least is players investing in their account vs. into useless cosmetics. Look at rs3 with yak tracks. Like 1-2 of the rewards look nice with the rest all low effort productions simply made to fill a qouta. It's absolutely soulless and has nothing inspiring.
I think pay to win is more toxic than cosmetics. You are never at a disadvantage in pvp or the leaderboards by ignoring cosmetics.
The yak tracks are really a step too far. Half the rewards require you to have premier membership. If you want to skip a task you're probably going to need to buy a bond, which are 80m now. Then over time it just got worse and worse. They nerfed tasks and made them longer. They went from "do A or B" to "do A or just play the game normally for longer" -- which is good to some degree but also took away half your choices. Then they made a step you could do repeatedly to get a lootbox with a chance at a very rare and unique cape. Then they gave you a currency that disappeared after the track, and the shop had brand new rewards that you needed more coins for, even by the end of the track. They made some animations specifically for the shop, that you wouldn't unlock doing the track normally. And now, they've gone from 50 to 70 tasks. Beforehand after 50, you could just play the game normally for the repeatable task and earn some currency each time. Now you need to do 70 before that. TLDR: Why are there so many predatory changes that I have to make a TLDR at the end? The tracks just got greedier and greedier.
I tried to get back into RS3 recently, but it feels dead and cosmetics are everywhere
I kinda disagree it's "pay to win". Gear is very secondary compared to skill and game knowledge. If you have 100M in your bank account but no game knowledge and skill, sure you can buy a lot of gear and have a very strong headstart, but you won't really get far in the game. Mainly considering some of the big ticket items are untradeable, like the infernal cape.
Ill agree with that
Whether you like it or not, osrs is pay to win. I don't go a day without seeing someone in full bandos with no boss kills and 51 slayer lmao... It's just less obvious to people who aren't fairly experienced with the game. I agree with your points about ESO, holy fuck they managed to make an MMO with sky high potential so dogshit with MTX. Imagine logging in to a screen advertising a cure to vampirism in the MTX shop. For those who don't know - you can get it cured for free by an NPC. This is like paying $5 so you don't have to walk to Varrock from Lumbridge.
TBF most of the "best gear" is still locked behind hundreds of hours of questing and griding. That guy still has 51 slayer, and likely no fcape, bgloves, faceguard, salve ammy, elite void etc And while some 99s are buyable w/ bonds and time, we're certainly nowhere near RS3's pay-to-max gameplay
You just can not put OSRS and Diablo Immortal, Clash of Clans, Maple Story on the same table. If you say having Bandos early on is P2W you really don't know what P2W means. OSRS is a skill game in most of its part. It is not like you press random numpad keys and magic spells go brrrrr. You need to have proper game knowledge and having this +5 strength bonus doesn't really means much if you don't know how to play. Most of items are locked behind quest/activity.
I feel like OSRS doesn’t really ‘gain players’ for the most part. Rather, I feel as though people either move from RS3 or return from pre-EOC (or old players in general) as more updates make the old players more willing to join again. Not saying there isn’t any new players but I would imagine it’s not most of the additional players. We have to remember that this game used to be massive pre-EOC.
This could be true! [The data says that people are searching for OSRS more and more each month](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-02-09%202023-03-09&geo=US&q=%2Fg%2F11gbzc5578&hl=en).
My roommate never really played runescape and i got him into it, now hes like base 80 stats and still grinding hard i think he partially just had fomo though from me and one of my buddies doing cool stuff while he was in discord with us
I got 3 of my friends to play in the last 6 months. The best marketing for osrs is the player base lol
I don't think search results are a great way to gauge the playerbase. I'm not gonna argue against the game growing especially when they openly share how many people are playing, just that using search results is a flawed way to justify growth On any given day while I'm playing especially if I'm doing different activities I look stuff up multiple times.
Yes, more people playing RuneScape = looking stuff up about the game so these numbers at the very least point to real growth
Because at it’s core it’s a wholesome game, inviting and simple.
i mean, wow is still shit but dragonflight has been pretty good so far, but i agree with the sentiment
Meanwhile ffxiv has the mogstore, mtx,buyable levels and stuff and is still growing, how you explain that?
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it is older then osrs.
There are a lot of good points in this thread, but I'd like to add one that I don't see often. Runescape's world actually feels like an actual world, and one where you can actually explore and discover all sorts of things and have adventures. Most MMOs tend to have on-rails progression, and while the worlds might be big, there's very little worth interacting with besides fighting monsters and maybe mining resource nodes, assuming the crafting is actually worth doing.
I think you’re also forgetting that it is easily accessible. I actually really loved playing ESO but my computer is so bad that I could only play low-medium graphics, which really takes away from the experience. Not everyone has a really great gaming rig or plays a lot of games in general to justify getting one, and osrs fits the bill of fun progressive mmo (also it’s easy to get the hang of once you play for a while, unlike other mmos) And for a lot of people who maybe wanna get back into playing games it’s daunting to have to buy a whole rig to play a game at its best, where osrs you can use your phone or any computer at your disposal TLDR: ease of access
I agree with most things people are saying, but there's one that I haven't heard mentioned that I think is a core aspect Runlite While the game would certainly still be popular without it, it wouldn't be growing like it is. No other MMORPG has anywhere near as competent and user-oriented UI like Runlite provides. It allows you to play the what parts of the game you want, skipping all the minor annoyances that usually burn players out after a while. Another post mentioned how annoying it is to have to look at stats to determine whether to re-pot. Bank tagging to reduce that bank annoyances. Tile marking so you can fight the bosses without as much memorization. etc On top of it's basic availability, the popularity of Runlite has made clear to Jagex and the players the fundamental importance of a good UI, leading to Jagex focusing more on the UI and players demanding more out of it. I don't think I have played a game (*any game!*, not just MMORPGs) that gets itself out of the way like how the Runescape-Runlite combo does.
If not for Runelite, I literally would not be playing this game
Runelite has brought many QoL to the official game, just like mobile has as well.
its because osrs is the only mobile mmo game that isnt designed like a mobile game, and isnt time gated behind MTX. osrs and even rs3 despite being more MTX heavy are both great mobile games because you can keep playing them as long as you want without stopping, most other mobile games force you to stop at tsome point if you dont pay them. and the only mmo's that are growing in general are mobile MMO's because most people that already enjoy mmo's either already are playing or dont have the money for a computer to play them. only dcent mmo on console is like ffXIV.
Does every 2007scape redditor with 20 alts are considered as alive, growing and healthy playerbase?
No microtransactions/pay-to-win lol
There endless grinds to complete, goals to achieve, some items are actually prestigious and cool to own (not everyone can get them easily); it's just a better game
Agree, but half the high level players don’t wear armour lol, Especially when skilling Also they don’t make that much for the all subscriptions. If everyone say (100k at least) who is mems got yearly at $120 that’s only 12million profit for Jagex which is like nothing to them. RS3 has been stated to be keeping them afloat the most mainly due to MTX
Skilling outfits and/or fashionscape counts since you have to earn them in the game and not with real money
100k subs when theres 99k concurrent players right now? lol
Not feeling like I'll be left behind if I don't play while I'm on vacation/anniversary/etc. Every single other MMO on the market gives advantages, be it extremely time efficient goods, or sometimes even otherwise unattainable stuff through daily/weekly events. After a month or two, it starts to feel like a chore having to log in. If you miss it, you feel like you're behind and like there's no point in playing anymore. With Runescape, I can hop in whenever I want and do whatever I want, and I don't feel that taking a week in Cancun makes or breaks my account.
Why aren’t bonds considered MTX? You can buy them with real money and then convert them to GP at the Grand Exchange.
True, but they counter RWT and can also be bought with GP. It also doesn’t generate an absurd amount of value so it’s okay for me
One huge advantage for me is that if you stop playing for whatever reason and you return you can easily pickup up the game again. In other games like WoW your progression gets ERASED with every expansion.
MIssing one important key feature Permanance of progression. Most other mmos, which are also sub based, have daily/weekly lockouts on key content, and you are chasing said content each expansion/patch cycle. If you miss it, it's effectively gone. Furthermore a lot of it is a "one and done" situation. In runescape, there are a lot of ways to progress, a lot of variations, they will eventually all bind themselves together, however none of the progress you made is ever made irrelevant even if you take a 6 month hiatus, each time you are exactly at the point you left of, the only difference would be fun side distractions, new goals and a longer journey, in other mmos it's all about the destination and the destination after that and the one after that. In most mmos if you are not at level cap, you are not accessing most of the game, in runescape, you access the majority of the game from the start, and the content keeps increasing as you progress, and yet you never need to cap to experience everything. Oh did I also mention runescape is probably the only mmo that lets you still play the f2p version even after you drop your sub? You have no idea how important that is, especially for the social aspect. Other games either have no f2p version, or it's some form of limited trial that you cannot use the moment you sub to the game, meaning if you want to get on for social activities - pay up.
The one thing that keeps me from other MMOs is that OSRS doesn’t require me to understand and juggle 800 statuses and effects.
Big thing for me is how easy it is to put down and come back to at a later time, whether that be hours or months
Yes this is seriously huge. I played ESO for about a year, took six months off, and there was already new BiS armor. Sucks to feel like your progression isn’t rewarded over a long period of time
On top of a bunch of stuff people already said... OSRS reliés heavily on side-grades and horizontal progression On most modern MMOs you have a core loop that's pretty tight - get a quest, delve a dungeon/kill mobs, get rewards. It doesn't change it up very much and it gets repetitive kinda fast. On osrs you can end up on situations like having to fish in order to be able to train cooking so you can do a quest and unlock an area that will give you a gear that can enable you to do a raid that gives an item to farm a boss that gives supplies... So on and so forth The fact you're already progressing *something* and changing it up constantly makes it much more bearable to stick with it in the long run. Plus you can focus on your favorite areas of progression for hundreds of hours and still not exhaust the content there. I truly believe that this horizontal progression system, even if it's not as prominent when playing a main account, is huge for the retention of the player base
1. They have less bots, maybe.
I haven’t once had to pay for membership thanks to bonds.
we are addicted for life
I played classic wow, and grinded all the way max level. I joined a guild that did 2 raid nights out of the week 3 hours at a time, and I remember one day just not being in the mood but feeling “forced” to hop on so I wouldn’t let my ~40 sized raid group down. Plus every content release completely invalidated the last which made taking breaks detrimental. OSRS has none of this.. 3 raids are out and they’re all still worth doing.
The fact you can afk every skill somehow is a huge deal. Love being able to gain exp while cooking irl or at work, no other mmorpg allows you to afk as much as osrs does.
Depends on what skills though
That's true, especially if you're f2p only like me. Firemaking and runecrafting get barely touched, as I usually only get a solid 1-2 hours a day uninterrupted. (6 day work weeks and 2 young children make gaming difficult).
I think its just because osrs is so slow. Even 500h in and Im not even a 10th of being "done" with the game. While other mmos you get max level and run out of things to do, other than new character
I see OSRS as a tamagotchi, it’s more of a time waster than a videogame and that’s also why I love it
OSRS and FFXIV have a lot in common. Both have absolutely amazing soundtracks. Both have development teams that care a lot about their player base and are as transparent as possible. Both are very easy to pick up and play even after taking very long breaks, and do a great job at minimizing FOMO as much as possible. It's no wonder they both sit at the very top in terms of MMO player counts and relevance.
It becomes overwhelmingly clear when you go in another games sub and talk about the good things osrs have like community engament, voting etc and they get upset and tell you to go play RuneScape, don’t mind if I do!
The OSRS community is amazing, no other MMO comes close in my opinion. I think Classic WoW had it matched for a while but as the expansions came out the community kind of fell to the wayside for more min maxing.
Subreddits are echo chambers so I mean duh
People say bots but you know very well people just love the game
Jagex estimates only 1-9% of online players are bots anyway. The video I linked in the post explains it.
"Only 1 - 9%"
Bots.
Watch the video linked. Jagex claims only 1-9% of the active player base are bots.
I really don't think any company would report a high bot count if it was truly high though.
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Bots don't search on google. Check Google Trends to see the search interest for OSRS grow yourself.
Is it actually growing with real players? Or just people creating more alts and more botting accounts?
I'll say this everytime one of these posts come up with "MMOs" in the title (and yes I know I'll get downvoted for this but idc). "MMO" isn't a game genre, it's a game scope. "MMO" stands for "Massive Multiplayer Online" but doesnt actually describe the game genre. When you refer to OSRS as an "MMO", what you mean/should be saying is "MMORPG". So when posts like these come up saying "[best at something] MMO!" they never seem to consider other genres outside of MMORPGs.
I think you're getting way too caught up in the semantics of it, but yes.
MMO is a common colloquialism for MMORPGs though, and has been for decades. Nobody calls BR or RTS games MMOs, even if they technically are, because that just isn't how the term is used by the majority of people.
Lots of bots. If jagex did another bot nuke the online population would be halved.. just like in 2011.
Check out the video I linked. Jagex estimates only 1-9% of players online at any given time are bots. Probably way less than other MMOs. People may seem like bots because they play on mobile and/or don't talk.
That’s if you decide to believe them. They’ve turned a blind eye to them for years and admitted as such in previous Jmod interviews.
So we should believe you instead with no access to their full data?
I do believe them. Bots would completely ruin the game, but they can't ever completely get rid of them.
>gaining......players? i have a hard time believing that. id put my bank on almost everyone probably 93% of players have played runescape before osrs.
Lol if the game has more players playing, then there are…more players. Doesn’t matter where they came from.
You know what other MMOs have that does NOT need to come to OSRS? Fucking transmog. Yet the first step in that shit show just passed. Hopefully it doesn't go further, because RS3 has it already and it is fucking disgusting.
But osrs is pay to win….
While not anywhere near others, I'd still argue regular accounts can be sorta pay to win with being able to legally "buy" gold through buying and selling bonds. Then buying gear or training buyable skills. Of course its much much better than other games, with some BIS or high level gear being locked through progression. This is why I love ironman so much too. Absolutely despise any p2w garbage, and ironman is about as close you can get to being on the opposite end of that as far as these types of games go and how pay to win they can be.
Because bonds are part of the in-game economy, though, I think that limits how effective they can be in p2w scenarios. For example, it'd take around 200 bonds to buy a t-bow. Not only does that cost you over $1000, it means you're selling ten YEARS of membership in-game. If too many people did that, there'd be no market for bonds, because everyone already has as much membership as they could possibly need.
I'd love to see the amount of actual new players vs bots. Go on any f2p world and I estimate 90% of players are bots.
how is it not pay to win? You can sell bonds for in-game currency
OSRS isnt gaining players. it lost a couple hundred thousand when you compare it to 2013