OSRS players have not been "stuck with low quality graphics". The appeal of that version of the game is as a whole. It was not just "the version without the one later change that wasn't liked". It was the version before the general change in approach.

The big problem with the "HD" version was that it was inconsistent. They couldn't update the whole world at once (or chose not to) so they updated it in bits, and those bits often felt really out of place compared to the much more cohesive older style.

>2009 still predates many of the wild changes Jagex made that eventually morphed into RS3. Some would be nice to have in OSRS (mining/smithing was rehauled in a nice way, some new skills that OSRS players wish they had like Dungeoneering are missing --- but changes like "Evolution of Combat"[1] was a breaking point for many). My understanding is that if they had found the source code circa 2009, Jagex would have used that and OSRS players would have enjoyed HD on day one.

Dungeoneering was a (pretty good) minigame forced into the mould of a (pretty bad) skill for essentially no reason. The mining/smithing rework was very recent and not at all good for the game.

Contrary to the popular belief of people like you (who seem to be the dominant voice on social media), the desire in the first place for "2007scape" did not originate with JaGEx. It came from a website very similar to this one, which aimed to recreate a 2005 or 2006 version of the game. JaGEx saw this desire and found the oldest copy of the RS2 source code they could. It isn't that they would have gone later if they could have. They would have gone earlier if they could have. Even 2007 was the beginning of the end for the game. It was when it started to morph further towards what it is like today: a wholly unlikable game, the players of which are obsessed with grinding to the maximum level in every skill. That's not how people played before they added the level 99 skillcapes in 2006.

>Jagex has done a good job with OSRS, running it with just a few people and heavily relying on community feedback in the form of polling content updates.

This was true for the first few years but clearly isn't true today. They add a lot of content to the game now.

>If something does not pass majority opinion, it is not added to the game. They've added multiple new quests, areas, and skilling options under this model, to the point where OSRS is quite distinct from its circa-2007 seed. One thing they can't seem to get consensus on though is a new skill - every attempt I'm aware of has been downvoted by the community, seemingly for reasons similar to "it would devalue my investment in X skill".

This is evidence that the game is nothing like it was in 2007. Back then, people loved new skills and the idea of "devaluing my investment" just didn't exist. The awful "xp waste"/"grind" mentality of players today is what has driven a lot of players away from the game. It's this sort of mentality where you cannot have a valid opinion on the game unless you're at "endgame" and have basically maximum levels in every skill. That is a World of Warcraft/Everquest-style mentality. "The game starts at endgame". "The game is about raiding and killing bosses". Just not what RS was originally about at all.

Frankly they've changed the game so much since the 2014 revival of "2007"-scape that it is more different today than RS3 was from 2007scape in 2014. And not for the better.

I wonder what the impact of social media has been.

1. I was on Runscape in the early 2000s. There was no Twitter, Facebook was very new and not really that popular, and nothing else existed. Like, I think Gaia was one of the more popular forums I knew of lol. That meant that Runescape was actually a highly social experience - it's insane the kinds of relationships I built as a 14-18 year old who played the game somewhat obsessively. Staying up all night, meeting strangers. Not actually "playing" the game - like, that was something to do for fun, but so much of it was hanging out with people.

With social media I get a lot of that from other sites. And in general I don't need it as much as I'm not staying up until 4am anymore lol but man it was something else to socialize through a "forum" like Runescape. Even the organic fact that people could "overhear" your conversations just because they were near you in the game led to so many funny "meet cutes", for lack of a better term.

2. The other side of social media influence is that there's a lot more flexing, memeing, and appealing to masses. When I played Runescape it was like... a shameful thing lol, I literally told almost no one at school, and when it came up it was kind of a secret between the few kids who played. It was lame, period , and we did not want to be thought of as lame. No way in hell would I have been posting online about it, nor was there any place to post about it like Reddit - you either posted on the RS boards (probably not tho), or in your clan's custom forum that someone set up.

But now, re (2), there's a lot more room to posture. You can brag way more about your 99s, show them off, show off what you're doing etc. And I think that probably leads to a lot more of the 'grind', which, again (1) was not the point. The point was to run through the wild with your friends at 4am and get scared when pkers came after you and you'd lose a bunch of your shit but who cares. The money we made was genuinely just to fuel those good times. No one actually thought they were going to be the next Zezima - I say this as someone who had multiple 99s, it was mostly just for fun. And it's interesting that you bring up the capes - all of my 99s were after the capes, they were definitely a part of the ceremony.

Viewing RS as a game with an "endgame" or as a game where the points matter is just sort of baffling to me and it's a bit of a shame to me that that's where it apparently has gone.

> Not actually "playing" the game - like, that was something to do for fun, but so much of it was hanging out with people.

I think probably far too much about how social media (or, in a broader sense, the mass adoption of the internet) has affected online games like this, and I was really happy to see your point here since this is a thought I've had a lot, but few people seem to understand what I mean when I try to bring it up! I vividly remember a time where people used to just talk in online games a lot more, whereas now most online games feel sorta dead (if they even have a chat option) -- and I suspect that's due to the fact that people are either A) playing with people they already know from real life and don't see any reason to communicate with anyone else, or B) only communicating with the community on platforms like Reddit, in an asynchronous, "flex"-based way. Imo, that shift is the major reason online games have essentially died out except in the form of competitive multiplayer with ephemeral lobbies.

And I've noticed that when I try to explain how things were to people who weren't online before the shift happened, they can't even picture what it was like, or why it was fun. It's so odd to me that that entire way of interaction has just... disappeared.

There has been a similar - but different - effect on games that were traditionally server-based like FPS games. Games where once you would join the same little deathmatch server, which had its own community and culture? Now you discuss the game on reddit (ew) and play MatchMaking against everyone else on your continent. You will never see those players again, ever, unless you're on a tiny server like the Australian one.

>I vividly remember a time where people used to just talk in online games a lot more

I play(ed) Ragnarok Online, and some of my fondest memories is logging into one of my characters, going into a PVP map, and then just sit around and talk shit with friends I made there.

We would just sit and talk there, in the PVP map, and when someone who didn't get the memo stopped by to fight we'd collectively kick his ass out and then go back to talking. Some of them would get the memo and come back, then just sit down and join in and bam: New friend made.

Those were some good times.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In 07 I made close friendships on the rs servers, enough that my friends would ask where I was if I took a few days. We reconnected years later, and if I was less asocial we could've met irl. I've been playing 07scape again and while I found a fun clan chat, I've been invited to several others by people I'm chatting with in public, due to just being prosocial and maybe well-adjusted.

My point is, maybe people have a higher barrier to entry for 'online friendship', now, as adults, but at least in this same game, people still reach our and form bonds despite there being little in-game support for that socialization. Many still recognize that it's the funny yellow text that touches the heart, and not the count of exp in stats.

I hadn't considered it like that, but that was pretty much how I experienced MUDding. I got into it and wanted to level up, do quests, and explore. Before hitting level 20 (out of 100, basically barely out of newbie status), I stopped caring about progress - but spent even more time there.

I tried going back once, but without spending time to build connections with other players, it wasn't fun. Didn't quite realise that till I read your comment though.

You so well describe why I played RS back in those days. I tried getting back into it a few years ago and it just didn't feel the same without my friends. But I never realized why it felt different until I read your comment.

I never played RuneScape but man the talk about using it as a social platform brings memories back. Quake 2, Tribes 2, The Palace Chat, First star online (the PC thing that was like an open clone of Zelda) and a few others. I miss the community and shenanigans and overall super supportive friendly people.

Tribes 2 holds a special place in that they effectively built a proto-internet inside the game client.

It shipped with user-accounts, IRC (chat), newsgroups (forums), email (direct messages), LDAP (groups/clans/tribes), integrated voice, basically all the components of the internet except calendaring, and if you call CD-Keys like client certs... we'll, just impressive for any game and especially a game of the 2002 era.

Slight quibble: that flex culture you and the parent discuss, embodied by going for 99s/200ms pre-skillcapes, definitely existed; you just weren't privy to it. Places like the tip.it forums were full of flex - remember those autogenerated stats signatures? - but that was its own little niche, not the dominant culture. You're probably right that social media amplified that dynamic a lot, but people like Zarfot and clans like DivinationX[0] were all about no xp waste well before that ethos hit the mainstream. It came from somewhere, rather than appearing fully formed from a seashell.

I think you both have good points around how a monoculture makes the game less rich and more theme-park-MMO-ish. I always felt that one of the things that helped it feel a bit more like a world simulator and a bit less like a game was the diversity of ways in which people interacted with the game. Wanna be the guy who only farms herbs? Knock yourself out, the game won't stop you and make you go save the world or whatever. When everyone has the same goal (which when I still played I thought of as the slayer-ironman industrial complex rather than no xp waste) you lose that and are back to the inherent absurdity of 50 million different Chosen Ones. It's just a little ironic that in a "no wrong way to play, do it for fun" kind of take you're calling out a wrong way to play.

Disclaimer: obviously very biased; multiply maxed

[0] I wanna say '06 but can't find forum archives and the swiftirc timestamps got reset at some point

I think you're totally right - all of that existed, always. It's just that it was "over there". And RS facilitated having lots of "over there" communities well in a number of ways.

> It's just a little ironic that in a "no wrong way to play, do it for fun" kind of take you're calling out a wrong way to play.

I considered this, with my last sentence where I say that it's a "shame". But I'm not saying there's a wrong way to play at all, it's just that things are different.

> OSRS players have not been "stuck with low quality graphics". The appeal of that version of the game is as a whole. It was not just "the version without the one later change that wasn't liked". It was the version before the general change in approach.

Sure, it's important to note that OSRS players are not a monolith, and people differ on which aspects of the more modern game they disliked. As I recall, HD was an optional toggle. So yes, all OSRS players indeed are "stuck" with the older graphics - the presence of HD would not mean players with a nostalgia for the 2007-era graphics would be left out in the cold. Anecdotally everyone I know lauded the HD upgrade at the time, but I get it wasn't perfect.

> Dungeoneering was a (pretty good) minigame forced into the mould of a (pretty bad) skill for essentially no reason. The mining/smithing rework was very recent and not at all good for the game.

Admittedly I've only seen some commentary from OSRS youtubers about the mining update, and I came away from that thinking the changed mechanics sounded desirable. I've no direct experience.

One small additional point. I completely agree that Jagex has done a great job maintaining OSRS. Polls for changes to OSRS typically require 70% of votes to pass[1] instead of a simple majority. This is part of the reason why it is difficult to get major changes like new skills added to the game.

As a long-time player, I really enjoy the conservatism this leads to in the evolution of the game. It is great to be able to pick up my character after a year or two off and have a very similar experience (+/- a few quality of life updates I'm likely to appreciate).

[1] https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Polls

They charge so much and do so little, they better do a good job with it. Or rather, not doing anything is a very low bar to be defined as a "good job".

(I'm aware subscription includes RS3, but the OSRS playerbase far eclipses RS3. You are paying for OSRS with RS3 as a cherry on top, not the other way around. Also, RS3 is funded with microtransactions.)

> One thing they can't seem to get consensus on though is a new skill - every attempt I'm aware of has been downvoted by the community, seemingly for reasons similar to "it would devalue my investment in X skill".

Sailing recently got enough votes that they've started development on it:

https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Sailing

I suppose it could still get shut down by the community later.

Oh that's exciting! Thanks for sharing. I might play a bit more when that is released.

I just pulled up my OSRS Google doc "backlog" and it's a few pages of things tracking what I should do next. The game really scratches that itch of crossing items off a TODO list.