It's mostly a "grind" sort of game with simplistic combat. It's pretty relaxing for the most part, though it does have some tense PvP elements if you enter into some special areas. You can definitely play it fully focused, but most people would conside it a "Second Monitor" game. i.e. You can watch YouTube or do work and keep old-school RuneScape active on a second screen, interacting every minute or so.
This is a trade off for me because I would prefer 2006scape or pre market place economy where you had to buy and sell manually by sitting in an area and trade. Automated trading economy made a lot of the content of the game easy to cheat because a good deal of the Quests and such are really just running around picking up obscure items. With the exchange and the wiki its practically ez scape.
I'm curious, let's say I've only played like Crawl down to level 7, and some Torchlight II. What's the daily routine / grind / goal look like in this kind of game? It seems to include some social or community aspects? Are those part of the game itself or?
(And, just as a veteran web designer, can I say that I _love_ seeing that good old textured website style again. Obvious Voronoi mathematics included. :-) Smoking hot stuff right there in historical context, but also even in broader design-principles terms...not even joking. Crucify me on those wrought-iron headers if you wish)
(There's a 2011scape too...? What is this?)