I think paradoxically in your comment, a lot of people associate a game with a time before life got optimized in various ways, things running at their own pace. You would do stuff you found fun or found the idea of it fun. Like making 100 cakes from scratch or something, but if you would play the game today, you would look up a guide, maximize your money asap to buy what you need for the cakes, find the stove closest to a bank, etc.

So what I think was magical about the game was that the ends were different back then (process then vs levels now). I really have to think about it consciously today when I play various games because it really does improve the enjoyment.

Life certainly was simpler back then!

while that is true, a big core of runescape was the grind. I remember what an idiot I felt like after finding the forums spending time picking bananas for 25 gold as a 7 year old. Back then games were simpler and less stuff to compete with longer attention spans

I dunno about this. I know several people who got into coding because they were writing little scripts to autocraft in RuneScape. Min-maxing profit/skills has always been a thing in these games. As far as looking it up goes, we’d go to GameFAQs or forums (both are still viable - for older games I still use the text guides if I can find them because they were often so well written).

I played it in 2001 (I remember when paid memberships first came out) and yeah, I could spend ages doing everything because I was a kid with no responsibilities aside from schoolwork.

Nowadays with a wife and kid of my own it'd just be impossible to spend that much time on it.

I wish there was a millenial version of "too old to click around for 99 hours" where they just allow bots. Maybe they can be certain servers or certain account types, like ironman. We can call it botman.

I run a free private server which is exactly this! Come bot via your coding agent by sharing this link with them

https://github.com/MaxBittker/rs-sdk

Is that 55h to max out?! That’s nothing.

I'd much rather just not need to grind instead of throwing compute and time at it?

Honestly it wouldn’t be the same. You had to earn a 99.

And how would you earn it with a bot?

Different value prop. Playing on a bot server I imagine my goals would be different since the computer handles all the drudgery for you. Maybe I’d just quest or something idk.

Why not simply remove the skills levels, or make them depend only on the time since making the account? That would be almost the same as allowing bots

In theory you could make a game where you’re max level everything from the start, but I think the pointlessness of that is obvious. The journey is the game to an extent, and the low attention requirements allow us to dream of all the possible efficiencies.

A lot of mobile games do auto-grind and auto-level you, so you have the endorphine spike of "number go up" without having to work (or possibly drop the game due to difficulty.) Some people really don't like the journey, it seems.

Hey, I'm working on exactly this! If you're interested please subscribe to my newsletter at alfheimgame.com

There are many private servers on which this is allowed! I play on vanilla where it is not allowed, but there are others where it is. I love logging on to vanilla every few months and grinding some skill. It really isn’t dozens of hours - with the adult level of cognitive focus and executive function capacity you can get to level 40 attack in maybe 5-6 hours

Leagues fulfills this by ramping up to things like 16x exp rates and 8x drop rates. It is a limited time game mode however

For those like OP and me who don’t want to grind but want a little bit of the RuneScape-themed “number go up”, there’s Melvor Idle - originally RuneScape-inspired and I believe Jagex bought it eventually. I like to have it idling on the other monitor when I’m doing mindless admin on the pc, or will check it on my phone a couple times a day

Melvor idle was so fun!

I have some bad news: Playing the new game will not make you 14 with no responsibilities again, no matter how good a job they do making it.

I came back to RS a couple years ago and made macros to run on my account by clicking the screen at specific coordinates to do some of this.

I know there's a bot problem but I only did it for my one paid account - purely for the reasons you described because otherwise I'd never get to an upper level account.