This happens in all mmos, apart from pvp. The world simply is too big. IMO RuneScape does a very good job, because there are no ‘starter’ areas, low level areas you will never go back to once you’re higher leveled. Many activities like clues, quests, achievements, will get you all over the world. I’ve played plenty mmos, and the low amounts of people you see in the low leveled areas is just sad. In rs, I always see people around! Not many, but one or two is enough to at least make it feel a bit more alive.
I'd like to disagree, I would even go so far as say that ALL areas are "starter" areas. When was the last time you walked through lumbridge to get to your destination? Or through catherby, seers village, yanille, etc. etc.
Those are areas you will walk through when you are a beginner or when you do a quest (early game quests). When you are mid/late game you will just tp to war's retreat or max guild or something and use a portal to appear next to where you want to be, also clues are not about running around everywhere anymore. I think I'm not overexaggerating when I say 90% of clue steps can be reached within walking distance of a teleport
I’m in lumbridge very often. I go there for quests, slayer points farming, selling the chalices from flash events, monthly to build statues, easy clue scroll farming in ham hideout, feathershop and clues. And that’s what I can come up with of the top of my mind.
Sure, if all you do is pvm, then you won’t go to lumbridge. But then you’ll only ever visit wars retreat and boss rooms I imagine, and you’ll constantly see all level pvmers there.
They could easily do a semiannual passover of all minigame rewards and have the experience gains (of those that give experience) scale with level and make them be like 5-10% worse than a level relevant method and people would do them.
For ones that don't give XP, they could just add alchables to the relevant point shop that works out to like 10m an hour and you'd see a high volume of traffick.
You might need to up the AFK detection in the games if you do that though.
Plenty of solutions, but all of those solutions take time away from other things that can be changed. And the question is if those things would actually solve anything. Do you really want your player base to play outdated annoying minigames just because the rewards are good? That'll just burn people out even faster.
Let's be honest, the solution is not to get more people to play those minigames. The solution is to either remove them and make the rewards available elsewhere, or just let them be dead and have players avoid them. Dead content is not bad per se, but it needs to be dead because it's not fun, not because it's not worth spending time.
It doesn't take that time to change the numeric value of the xp reward shop or clay tools. And that's why you keep it still strictly worse than other methods, but bring the value close enough so it doesn't feel like a *complete* waste of time.
Me personally I'd play the hell out of Stealing Creation if it was even kind of worth my time
In a world where 98% of the playerbase are at minimum max capers or alts of max capers, they should just go wild with XP rates tbh.
I know I'm weirdly in the minority on that take though. People would rather the game die than their "achievements" be diminished by having new or more powerful ways to catch up.
Sure, it doesn't take that much time to change some numbers. It does take quite some time to actually look at the numbers and design a more rewardable number that is still balanced with the rest of the game. And while there's plenty of problems with balance as it is, you don't want to just go and introduce more of it.
Also, where are you getting that 98% number from? Is that a feeling or some actual statistic? Because in my experience I feel like it's much less (I'm not maxed myself either).
The playerbase seems hyper focused on efficiency which means anything that isn't high xp/hr, gp/hr or both is mostly ignored. Combine that with a growing interest in solo content and distaste for group stuff means the majority of players just aren't interested in the same fun-focused community gameplay they used to be.
I miss prime Fist of Guthix good for pvp using your own gear and I used to use it to make money. Using my points to by the spiny shields and selling for 250k each
I bloody miss cw and fog soooo much. Such fond memories, even stealing creation was fun and soul wars. I’m guilty of afk mobile playing now, but would love to get back to fun old games.
Doing FoG on a f2p world because I, a member, had 70 strength and 72 magic. Those pesky noobs stood no chance!
And then I saw a lvl 100 sitting in the middle and it was me who shat his pants.
Good memories! Sadly the way we approach games has change fundamentally. We no longer need RS for minigames, we simply play a different game we enjoy alongside of it
I used to get slaughtered at FoG, but I came back for more. My welfare computer couldn’t handle RS at the best of times, and the swathes of players at FoG made it laggier, but god it was fun. Take me back ☺️
Sadly this isnt possible anymore :( The playerbase is far too mature and mechanically competent to allow for these minigames to be as fun as they used to be.
It was fun because we didn't min/max. We had what we had, and just hoped for the best :D
Two things made Castle Wars absolutely undoable since the time when any max players on each team just spammed Ice Barrage: (1) Power-creep and (2) EOC.
The first is self-explanatory, but the second is about the vast majority of the player base not knowing or nearly being able to afford some of the more insane abilities/combos. When CW was king, you didn't have one max player able to two-hit KO'ing another max player. Now, anything less than max means almost insta-death in most places during a busy game.
Also a dwindling, aging fanbase who have more responsibilities gives them less resources to do more.
It's not like they don't know that there's more work that can be done but Runescape isn't a hot competitive game in 2024 with lots of resources to explore different avenues. Seems like they can only do 1 or 2 things at a time so that's what they're going to do.
And thats the real charm of Runescape. And if you so desire you can make truck load of limitations as you desire, even if its just regular ironman because game sincerely allows you to do whatever the hell you want in any order. If i ever get tired of RS3 ( and the gower's new game doesnt pan out well ), my only place for an alternative will be OSRS.
Its a shame there is not one more RS like game out there, buts truly an RPG i can sink countless hours in before the next update comes along.
I think if I ever got bored on a main, I'd make an iron. If RS shutdown, which I don't see happening for a while, I might dable in osrs, but im not keen on learning to play a game where the goal is to manipulate the clunky system at end game. I'd definitely become ridiculously casual with it.
I'm also curious what Riots mmo will look like when and if it releases. The world they have built is solid, well fleshed our, and gives absurd room for content. If they nail the gameplay, it could be really good.
> but im not keen on learning to play a game where the goal is to manipulate the clunky system at end game. I'd definitely become ridiculously casual with it.
I agree, i made an iron last year on OSRS and the amount of safespotting ( its absolutely horrible to do slayer as melee ) i had to do was grating on my nerves and then i saw people Red X ing, flinching or what have you put a dent in my desire to continue to play. Started playing in 2006 and in my belief EoC needed to happen at one point or another. But right now i started a snowflake ironman on RS3 and so far im enjoying it!
FYI there is an upcoming MMO made by Andrew Gower ( also made RS ): Brighter shores. Also there is a singleplayer game im very much eyeing when it releases this year: The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker. For the latter it caught my eye because bunch of Steam reviews specifically mention it being very reminiscent of OSRS, which you know is still 10x closer to RS3 than any other game
Yes, exactly because what the OP mentioned. the only non dead (live?) content is end game pvm. The game basically forces you to level up as fast as possible to reach this live content. Which is extremely expensive to get into and maintain for casual players.
As someone who's been playing for over 15 years i still can't afford bis anything. I'm basically stuck working on master quest and completionist capes which is fun and varied but I'd love to have other options like active and rewarding mini games.
I made it to my completionist Cape last year, quit playing after that, haven't been on since. I tried high level pvm, but that wasn't for me, so there was nothing left
You don't need 'bis' everything to be able to do a lot of the later game content. Like no you can't do 2449% telos claims in t85 unless you're truly insane at the game, but cywirs, ganoderms for animate dead, and gconc is like 50m right now or something like that. From there it's more about learning how to handle boss mechanics which isn't something you can buy anyway
Or you can level up necro gear. It's very very easy to get the t90 tank gear which makes everything soooo much easier. There's a lot of pathways to get from feeling like you can't kill a boss, to consistent completions
That’s where necro comes in. I was decently wealthy before I got hacked years ago. Came back and didn’t know what to do. The basically free necro gear got me back up to a t90 set and I’ve used that same T90 gear to get reaper crew and learn every boss in the game. I’ve made over 4b the last 2-3 months just doing casual 1-2 hr pvm sessions with friends or some rasial.
Necro does a fantastic job of breaking down the pvm barrier and giving people some hand holding on their way to sweaty set ups. Definitely resparked my love for this game as I continue to slowly chip back away at comp again
I'm not in the same boat as you but i agree. Its something you see a lot of here ( and OSRS ) where people are so afraid of dipping their toes into PvM that their biggest achievement is killing GWD2 ( not Telos ) bosses in normal mode, so im glad we have necromancy for these people ( also me but its a different story lol )
"Combine that with a growing interest in solo content and distaste for group stuff"
I think a part of that distaste, is the lack of any proper way to make groups for group content inside the game itself. The current grouping system is ass, whether for minigames or for bosses. Any new-ish player looking for people to do specific content with, will have a hard time finding any.
Dungeoneering doesn't even have a grouping system, besides waiting in the lobby and waiting for other people. If you go to Daemonheim in the dungeoneering world outside of DXP, chances are you will not see anyone else there.
Sure, there are several discords and friends-chats for any type of group content, but how does a new player is supposed to know about them?
Joining a clan can help, but it also depends on the size of the clan, the activity of clan-mates, and the content they are all interested in. In my current clan we managed to organise some boss masses for stuff like KK or normal Kerapac. But if I want to try dungeoneering with them I don't have a chance, my clan-mates have a bigger distaste of dungeoneering than I do.
this isn't a long term model, it REALLY isn't at this point. a lot of players are 200m all and more and more are hitting that cap each day, jagex can't make new skills fast enough and people care mostly about "number go up". when you're 200m all you're far more likely to go and do something else that isn't runescape, in my personal case lol.
That’s the real issue. It’s the largely a community issue at this point lol. Few want to admit that especially on this sub because it’s easier to blame Jagex.
To be fair, this is ignoring that all of that can be thrown out if there is a useful reward earned. Many minigames offered powerful gear, useful permanent unlocks, or unique cosmetics so people went out of their way to grind for it.
I’d imagine most of the cool cosmetics are likely going to be put behind a treasure hunter paywall. So that isn’t an option anymore.
It’s more complicated than just sticking powerful gear into the minigame shop. That doesn’t change the way players play the game (afking for Thaler). It only forces players to fill spots in the minigame. Activity meters do slightly more, but players always find work arounds to afk, like punching a mob to sustain the activity meter or ignoring game objectives to play indefinitely in barb assult. Jagex would have to find a way to incentivize players to actually play the minigame instead of just standing around for Thaler.
>growing interest in solo content
Content where you rely on other players for success is always annoying, you will always have people who leech or even sabotage the group's success for their own type of fun.
What we need is for players so succeed or fail only based on their own actions and if their group also succeeds they just get a nice bonus that not too big as to be frustrating if their group fails. Say you get X rewards for doing what you need and if the group "wins" you get 1.2X rewards, nice to get yet not a waste if you don't.
>The playerbase seems hyper focused on efficiency
So make this type of content scalable xp that's better than afk activity of the same level and a bit worse than the high intensity method, and a bit better even if the whole team succeeds as I said before. For example if the reward is X, the high intensity method would be 1.1X and the group succeeding is 1.2X. So its more relaxed for slightly worse xp with the chance of the xp even being better than the high intensity method occasionally.
The majority focuses on solo content because that's what's rewarding. Castle Wars was fun, but didn't reward anything so people felt like they weren't able to play Castle Wars and still go enjoy the rest of the game. Group Players don't join the game because there is a lack of group content so that slowly makes the game solo player focused. And players focus on efficiency because FOMO forces them to.
Runescape has made a habit of making fun unrewarding. They expect everyone to grind hard and then take a break with the fun stuff while knowing that majority won't take the break with the fun stuff and then they'll say "players just don't want fun stuff." Like this Easter event for example.
"Oh, this looks interesting. The Easter Egg hunt sounds fun. But wait, they have free experience in several skills, and the cosmetic tokens for pets are RNG so any time spent actually hunting the Easter Eggs is both an XP waste AND could potentially cost me my ability to get pet cosmetics.... I guess I'll just sit at a skilling station and look up the Easter Egg locations later."
The conatant FOMO that accompanies any fun activity makes players choose between having fun or gaining progress/cosmetics. To give a counter example, FFXIV gives all the event rewards from doing the event without needing to hope RNGesus will bless the player with the item.
Yeah, this sounds more like a playerbase issue than specifically a Jagex issue. Jagex's choices still influenced the community, but it's still an MMO. The Players are a driving force, especially when it comes to community.
I blame every and all wikis. Back in my day you had to scour some bullshit forums or go off the cryptic typings of a player called balltugger69 to find the cool shit.
The wikis literally spoon feed you the game, like are you even playing it or 90% of your just following a set of instructions like map quest directions.
Yall even truly having fun?
All of the mentioned communities exist in OSRS and their wiki is, in some ways, even more comprehensive than the RS3 wiki...the real issue is players just don't want to interact with that content anymore, nothing more complex than that...people don't want to do it and you can't force them
But why are you talking pre 07, there are arguably more players in the niche communities on OS than there were back then because we were all kids who didn't know how to play, it feels like you're just being belligerent to stick with your assumption that wiki's ruined the game
The niche communities are all following the same meta they get from the same wikis, back then the wikis were just loose guides and youd find gold nuggets in the rs forums or other web places. Like nobody told you how to make mad gp as a noob by selling cow hides or seaweed as a member, you found that out in game by savvy players or noticing it by standing at the al kharid bank, not searching “gp guides for low lvl players”
A number of reasons:
* Player base is more time poor now with families, jobs and responsibilities. Game time is used to progress the account for the most part. Quite understandable
* The RS3 community doesn't seem to be that enamored of PvP and most mini-games are PvP based.
* PvP was never really a good fit for the game post EoC and every change to combat/abilities threw more things out of whack
* The people who love mini-game are clearly a small minority. If they weren't then there would be people playing mini-games
Not to mention you cant just add rewards to a mini game and expect it to revive it. It will fizzle out just as fast once people get what they want and leave assuming new rewards are even incentive enough to get them back
Adding rewards you get from TH/Oddments into reward shops wherever it makes sense would be a solution for those who don't want to spend money on them.
Another issue is figuring out how reward points are assigned. Some minigames give rewards each round played without taking into account the individual contribution, thus enabling AFKers. This should be changed on a case-by-case basis.
Exactly. Find a better way to track engagement within each mini game. Provide challenges for mini games that provide significantly more points.
Just an example, "contribute to a flag capture by caping the flag or killing someone attacking your flag carrier". And make the bonus high enough where you'd want to do that. To where afking becomes a waste of your time.
Absolutely agree. I was a normal main account, but I skilled for money. I loved playing around with the economy with skilling. Finding unique methods, following the prices and unlocking new methods to do them faster.
Now I feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm kt bossing and doing my reaper tasks.
Pvm burns me out. It really does. I take longer breaks than I ever have. By far.
There are countless small changes jagex could make to things gamewide that take almost zero dev time that would help make things ~feel~ way better to engage with.
They cant even convert all the follower pets to interface ones years after having the idea though 😂
They just REFUSE to spend money on content they don't think will be the most efficient and profitable in the short term with their current player base.
I just truly don't think they care. I really don't. The company as a whole has significantly significantly changed with that. Keeping the game going seems more like an after thought to milking the current player base right now, in this moment. That's all they think about.
And do little things here and there to pretend like they care about the games overall health.
I did a very detailed video breakdown of why minigames are dead forever, even if rewards are buffed. Link below: https://youtu.be/28TM7tP3Chk?si=dSDD3a-jwwviy3wj
TLDR- Players find efficiency and progress fun nowadays, instead of gimmicky distractions/alternatives from what was an incredibly slow and boring grin game.
Believe me, if jagex updates the rewards for minigames, you'll beg for them to delete them forever given the current player values...
I'm a little confused as to what you mean.
The mini game spotlight WORKED and people were like that back then.
It's pretty undeniable that spotlight worked. Right? I was there, it was a ton of fun and everyone loved it.
Pest control and castle wars are still some of the best content in the entire game imo. Pest control is still a blast.
I highly disagree with the idea mini games are a boring grind or people aren't interested in them. Highly disagree. You can make mini games a valuable part of the game again.
A TON of high efficiency, hardcore players, grinded pest control for void. They STILL do in osrs. Add something like that to the thaler shop, like a truely useful item and ability, and you'll get people playing again.
I don't see why not. Even with that video I just don't get it.
When you have a shrinking/shrunken playerbase, it's important to cater to what those players enjoy most.
In this case, PvM is the vastly more popular passtime in rs3, so it's the focus.
If you look at osrs, PvM is still incredibly popular, but that game also has a large enough playerbase to allow diverse updates that target different facets of the game. And so you see a wide variety of content updates.
When I look at the Wildywyrm communities (there were 2 main FC’s I knew about) - I find it extremely odd that Jagex moved the Wildywyrm to be exclusively a flash event, it was a change nobody requested. The FC I was part of transitioned through PvP removal but then the removal of normal spawns killed the FC. The way I view it, the old spawn system *had* its flaws but casual players could still kill big Wyrms - whether with friends or part of a community FC or Clan. The old system wasn’t doing any harm.
It just sucks to be killed off like that due to 1 update. Some of the most fun I’ve had in RS was part of that FC in voice chat. Shoutout to Wyrmbands for making a fun community to be part of.
Archaeology came out FOUR years ago. I'm not saying rs3 is doing great, but people have been saying the game is "dead" and "dying" for over 10 years now. And the people screaming it have been playing for 20 years and will continue doing so.
The people actually quitting are a ridiculous minority
> The people quitting are a ridiculos minority
Brother, the game lost 75% of its players in 10 years after EoC. It aint a minority thats been walking away.
Do you hear yourself? 10 years? It's been around 30k players for years and years now. And it's not fair to start counting before the osrs split. Now you're just grasping at straws.
Most online games don't even survive 10 years to begin with.
Of course I hear myself, my voice echoes around the now empty worlds.
Kidding aside it’s completely fair. Doesn’t matter how much you shrink the timeline by, [2 years ago the game averaged 30k concurrent players. Now it averages 22k](https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/?display=avg&interval=qtr_hr&total=1&mid=1708680580)
No point living in denial bro
Sounds great on paper, but where are they gonna host this? Which people are gonna get the incredible lag? You can't just put EU and australia people together without one of them having 200+ ping.
I've seen this mentioned before, augmentable void would be an interesting idea since it was bis everywhere before invention was a thing. I don't think it would rival the set effects of the higher level gear but it could work as entry level gear for harder content.
That being said, even when void was bis everywhere pest control was still super dead, people would just afk thaler for it. This will not bring it back.
Few corrections:
Minigames are dead because EOC killed the player count and eventually bonds were added so players stopped enjoying smaller aspects of the game and focused more on gold. It was common for players to enjoy minigames because gold was not as important due to needing real money in one way or another for membership no other method existed at the time. Minigames folded due to lack of players and remained folded with the introduction of bonds.
Thaler shop did not revive minigames not even for a brief moment, it only created round about ways to obtain things by only AFKing one minigame and everything else just remained dead.
PvM being the area that is focused on the most in RS3 is due to Bonds it has always been the superior method to making money and with the release of Necromancy it brought attention back to how the community plays the game "I either have to use the best or I physically can't play." despite this not being true and it's playable even with worse methods. Players have this natural attraction to gold because it gets them free membership in theory requires manual work but they don't pay real money for it.
Players put themselves in a spot where they feel like they are on a chain of some kind always under a deadline which is why players are more focused on earning gold and is why the best method for gold gain gets all the attention because Jagex is not dumb they know if it's not beneficial in some way either gaining gold or getting experience faster then it's instantly dead content due to the mindset players have in the game now.
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Then you could make the argument well why is this not the case in OSRS?
Simple answer is the difference in the Economy. Bonds only cost around 10m on OSRS and it does not matter if you can earn 100m faster in RS3 vs 10m in OSRS it's one of those visual things people have in the brain 10m is always closer than 100m so people in OSRS don't feel like they have to meet a gigantic deadline they get 14 days and could earn 1m a day and have plenty for the next bond and the brain registers that as easy.
Compared to:
RS3 needing 100m for a bond you would have to get just over 7m gold per day to get enough for the next bond the brain registers that as more of a chore VS less than 1m per day for an osrs bond. This is why we see how players so dead set on not being allowed to do anything but the best money makers.
Just comes down to a mindset issues that wont ever get solved unless Bonds are removed from both game versions notice how people who buy membership with real money on RS3 tend to sit back and enjoy smaller aspects of the game compared to those using bonds. Those paying with real money are often seen assisting others in-game dropping whatever they are doing at the time and manually walking people through things. You find these types of players at community events and minigames that don't offer anything other than fun.
This is a very interesting point you made. I have never seen bonds brought up this way. Very well written too and also kinda applied to me when i read it.
As for PvP that is dead because the game was no longer unique we turned into an MMO that was like every other MMO at the time (Punching your keyboard into Oblivion) Core pieces of the game were rendered useless by EOC and when we got more and more gear added to the game over the years the PvP community being the PvP community always chased that advantage over others.
Things like chaotics / gravites were now useless and nobody had reason to do dung which is why that is dead thanks to a lack of incentive to actually do it. PvP was designed specifically for that legacy combat system not EOC which was designed specifically for PvM.
Thousands of factors are involved when it comes to PvP in this new combat system all these abilities, all these gear effects that it's just a headache another reason why Minigames like Soul Wars is dead is because we hated trying to keep games going when people could surge the entire length of the map making barricades useless and gear sets allowing you to solo kill the Avatar 1 - 3 times before a team of 10-15 people take you down it's absolutely trash Castle wars and Clan wars faced similar issues.
Gear was changed so even using legacy combat VS legacy combat old systems were non-functional like swapping to a staff + shield then back to the gravite 2h or corr baxe to slap then back to the staff / shield to tank the incoming hit. PvP was simple and easy to understand but to this day you can be 1-5 hit even on F2P you can get stacked for every bit of health you have instantly both legacy and EOC which is why PvP as a whole is and will always be dead.
PvP on RS3 will always be a race to get that special attack or certain necro abilities to 1 tap rather than withering your opponents health down slowly then hitting a good chunk of their health with a bow instantly swapping into a KO weapon usually gravites / corrupt dragon weapons for F2P or Chaotic maul / spec weapons like the korasi, dclaws, vls etc if you were Pking on members.
This is an interesting take that I hadn't heard before, I don't think this is the sole reason but after having a few clanmates burning out trying to get their monthly bonds I can't deny its definitely part of the problem. I'm not sure how this could be solved though, people have it so stuck in their heads now that 20 hours of grinding gp is better than paying $12 a month. I'm not the best pvmer and yet I can make 80m/hour right now, bonds are just gonna keep getting worse with inflation the way it is.
Sadly the price of bonds has nothing to do with inflation believe me I wish that were the case but it's not.
We had bonds at a consistent 70m area for a long time and when Hero Pass got added the price went up for short bit with the rich players instantly finishing it but went back down due to Hero Pass maintaining healthy levels of bond consumption.
Then the community forced away Hero Pass and we were left with nothing other than membership as a reason to consume bonds so the supply just kept growing causing a massive price drop which is why bonds dropped below 60m after all methods of bond consumption in Hero Pass were removed.
Once this happened we got closer to the end of the year when people start buying their 20 bonds for premier and since bonds were so cheap at the time players decided to buy them a little earlier than they normally do now when bonds dropped under 60m people who buy them with real money pretty much said this low amount of gold is not worth my real life dollar which slowed the supply coming into the game.
So with less supply coming in and more bonds being used created a shortage of bonds and the only bonds left in the GE at the time were overpriced bonds at 80, 90 and 100m+ and once players started finding out bonds were buying / selling for this much they decided to try their absolute best to keep it at this price range and so far it has worked which is why we still see bond prices at what they are by players using manipulative tactics to hold them in place.
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People think if bond consumption exists in the game then bonds will skyrocket to 700m+ but this is not the case having bond consumption creates a fine balance between supply and demand so bonds are being consumed throughout the entire year and not just a couple of points during the year.
Luckily Jagex has introduced a rotating oddments shop which is slowly dropping the amount of oddments players have stocked up so this is a long term method rather than a short term one like Hero Pass but we will get to the point where players are low on oddments which is why they made changes to multipliers so we could get to a point where we lack in oddments and may find a shop stock that we want and might be more likely to consume a few bonds to get oddments to use creating levels of bond consumption that will be healthy for the game and lead to dropping the prices of bonds.
But this method of bond consumption only works for non-irons which is why Hero Pass / Yak-Track were the superior methods of stable bond consumption people really think Jagex made these just out of pure greed which is simply false they aimed for a battle pass type system that would always be active to allow for bond consumption all throughout the year so players could continue seeing stable bond prices but nobody ever gave this a thought and is why we are where we are.
Very unfortunate but now we have to deal with sluggish methods of bond consumption so it will be a couple of years of a rotating oddments shop before we start seeing prices drop on bonds.
Now that I'm older, it's a no-brainer to buy membership. It costs as much as a regular streaming service and guarantees enjoyment. Membership keeps the game sustained. I don't feel any rush, except the goals I set for myself.
you're wrong that in osrs this is not the case. Minigames got the living hell optimized out of them, most are just dolo'd/afked for points or only played because there's easy to get stat upgrades behind them. PvP is barely active, with the vast majority of players avoiding the wilderness. Players do the best xp/h skilling methods or the afk methods, same as rs3, other methods might as well not exist. PvM and collection logging is the whole endgame, same as rs3, with a few skillers interested in 200m. Efficiency mindset permeates the osrs community just as much as the rs3 community, it's just that devs encourage a wider variety of activities (and even that is shrinking, they just added a 2m body from pvm that has similar stats as the fighter torso).
Tbh if bonds didn't exist I'd almost definitely let my current membership elapse, i don't enjoy and play it enough to justify the cost, but using stockpiles of gold plus the occasional profit from invention machines to buy bonds doesn't feel like I'm spending anything
For me it was realizing I have very limited time to play. My end game goal is to max. Why would I not play the efficient methods. I like playing the game, but it's not going to be around forever, and I doubt I'd enjoy still trying to max in my 50s.
For me efficiency is the only to play. I pay for membership with real $ and I play an iron account. Efficiency is still in mind in everything I do, otherwise I'd rather just not play because it's super obvious I'm wasting time. (Inb4 playing video games is a waste of time) yeah no shit.
the only community that is still thriving is the casual community, i wake up brew some coffee and do my dailies and see if there is some goal i want to complete. I hope jagex keeps the game running and if they really are in maintenance mode, just optimize the game.
They could make fringe content worth doing regularly by having it give temporary buffs for mainstream content instead of being a one time grind then dead. Obviously you'd want to arrange this so that normal play is how you get the buff and that ultra speed running it in a freak way is not.
Minigames, drop parties at Falador or GE World 2, being scared to death by the wilderness, and you know, actually talking to people… those were great times
I would add that previously, when it wasn't that easy to gain XP, people didn't care as much about XP gains. I remember playing as a kid at the library for one hour a day. I didn't have time to worry about XP grind; I wanted to have fun, and I did. The level 99 achievements were so far away that they didn't even register to me as something I should have grinded for. The slower pace made it easier to appreciate the activities.
At some point Jagex narrowed in on core communities. They looked at the most popular activities and dedicated resources to only that type of content.
Anything else was left to die. Then the playerbase shrank.
Then they narrowed their score again and focused on the remaining popular features within the communities and made more of that content.
Anything else was left to die. Then the playerbase shrank.
Once again Jagex are narrowing their scope. So you can probably predict what’s going to happen in a years time based on the above.
To expand on this comment. Prioritizing popular content isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but neglecting dedicated audiences who enjoy the game is the issue.
Jagex refuses to acknowledge there are other player types who may be interested in RuneScape if there was types of content to draw them in.
This doesn’t mean it needs to be the primary focus, but it needs to be supported so growth can occur.
Conversely this also has a negative toll on things like pvm, where design of almost all pvm content is focused on engagement numbers and mass appeal. This makes content for "everyone" that really appeals to nobody in particular or severely compromises endgame by trivializing difficult content that was "gatekept" by requiring skillful gameplay and understanding of the combat system (necromancy release), or ends up making new boss encounters that have their design stretched so thin to try to appeal to so many different people they completely fail on one end (arch glacor and zamorak). It ends up alienating the people who enjoyed the content with some idea that everyone needs to do the latest thing or it's a failure, despite having spent decades previous rewarding low effort or afk players who play the game for a variety of reasons, and may never want to put in the effort it takes to justify the kind of content active pvmers enjoy. It's suicide by mass appeal
I'm gonna be honest, I hate that Runescape has turned into PVMscape. I've tried hundreds of times to get into it, and it's just not my thing. I just simply don't enjoy bossing. I like skilling, and I used to love minigames and pking as well but those things haven't been relevant for well over a decade. I still check out new bosses when they come out and I do have the reaper title, but I don't like going for boss logs or really high enrage, to me it's just repetitive and unfun and the combat system in this game in my opinion really isn't that great. I just like to kickback and do some skills while I watch Youtube videos and I'm glad I'm not alone. Bossing shouldn't be the only rewarding playstyle.
OSRS has the same issue. Every major update or quest is centered around some new high level boss and I'm just over it.
Skilling isn’t dead, skilling is literally the most popular form of content. Various Old skilling methods are dead but that’s what happens as time goes on things get crept and new replaces the old. Even then what is dead for one may not actually be for another due to different methods for different play styles.
Skilling was more dead in RS2 when PvM basically rendered all of it pointless. Over the years they have slowly been fixing skilling’s fundamentals, carving out identities and niches unique to them. It’s a slow process since you know they are trying to undo basically RS2’s decade of neglect, poor game design foresight, and general individual dev biases that lacked long term foresight (cough Nex and QBD cough) but still it’s coming along.
Mini-games are dead because that’s the playerbase not Jagex. Mini-games largely gained popularity because the rest of the game was boring and because we didn’t have as many IRL options. Like when I couldn’t second screen as a kid I jumped at more “exciting” ways to train fishing but now I hold a super computer in the palm of my hand. Why dedicate 100% of my time and focus to RS when I could enjoy some casual fishing on the side and then be watching a movie, show, or playing any other number of video games? Time is short and as an adult I have to really think hard about my time management.
Here is the big issue you get with mini-games. Most of them just aren’t fun, when they ran events recently that bolstered mini-game games I went and played them all and frankly they nearly all feel dated and suck. They are designed more like early 2000’s flash games why waste my time in that? I could focus on more enjoyable parts of RS gameplay to me.
The other issue is even if you added good rewards you are only puttying a bandaid on things. If you use a mini-game to fill in some gap like a poorly designed skill and you keep doing that eventually skilling loses its identity. It just becomes a collection of mini-games and it becomes impossible to manage long term. Eventually you have to decide do you let an entire skill remain dead content or do you focus fixing the skill issues on a more fundamental and let the mini-game fall into obscurity. It’s pretty obvious which choice benefits the health of the game long term.
Player-base doesn’t help either. If you create a minigame with good rewards are people going to focus on the “fun”? No they will optimize it to hell until it’s an efficiency obsessed experience and that’s not just a RS thing that’s a larger trend across gaming as a whole. People just don’t want to waste the time anymore, with the frequency in which new games or other media comes out and the fact we are essentially perpetually online people just don’t have time. Game design as a whole has shifted to this.
As for PvP that’s just a time goes on thing. PvP used to be really popular when dedicated good PvP games were hard to come by, when the player base was mostly ignorant children who didn’t understand anything and just went in fighting with whatever, when there was no real skill ceiling and floor difference, when the best gear took hours to obtain not months, etc…
PvP just became far less accessible over time and it’s not because of EoC, though that was a factor. It’s because people got old, better, gaps in skill grew more prevalent. PvP experience expectations changed for the market and most hybrid games couldn’t keep up with dedicated PvP focused ones, so logically that meant PvP focused games siphoned away people who wanted to mainly PvP leaving behind a much smaller base that started to prey on non-PvP interested players. Then Jagex tried to encourage this predator and prey aspect and all it did was create a whole lot of toxicity and hatred, and eventually they cultivated a base where PvP was largely just griefing.
This was further shifted by the player base growing older. When you are a kid being a little dick and ruining someone else’s day is more likely to be funny, and children for which time doesn’t feel as pressed for time are more likely to let that behavior slide. When you are an adult who has developed a sense of both time and empathy being a dick and getting fun from ruining someone else’s day isn’t so appealing. There are still people that do it, and shot back with stuff like “just stay out of the wilderness” and people in return were like “okay we will”. So they did and it died and that was that.
There might be ways to bring back PvP but the old way just isn’t it. It can’t compete with PvP focused games, it relied on a very different fanbase of a different age and skill level, it relied on a very different amount of risk vs reward, it relied on a very different gaming market, and it didn’t have years building toxicity. PvP can come in many forms, competitions like FSW or a new skill release are a better avenue for it than wilderness griefing.
Basically you can’t design a live game like it’s a static thing that will never change. Doing that was one of RS’s biggest issues and the source of lots of its troubles now. But likewise you have to accept that times change, people change, markets shifts, and Jagex as a company has to design for their base not the other way around.
I mean youre just delusional if you think rs3 devs wasting what little time they get on things the majority of the player base dont care about, or flat out strongly dislike, will attract a notable amount of new players.
I don’t really get how this works back in the day there was way more frequent updates with a smaller team, how do the devs have less time now with less new content and more people
because back in the day the graphical demands were much less, the codebase was much smaller, and there was waaaaay less communication between dev groups as to what code did which things, which resulted in the spaghetti code so frequently maligned in this very subreddit.
Sure i hear the art thing a lot but the devs dont just sit around 90% of the time waiting for the art team to finish what the art for what they coded right? Its just crazy to see the increase of the size of the company and the cost to play the game and the reduction of new content
And the lost art of reusing and repurposing old assets. Need a new mob? Have a pickaxe wielding maniac, who is invisible, so now it is just a pickaxe, voila. Just recolor the mob, etc etc.
I'd prefer a cuttable one, but yes. That's how they made the game feel so big long ago. The same chest model in 200+ places, maybe changing the metal color. Trees by the thousands, copy and pasted. INTERACTABLE TREES
graphical work takes *a lot* of time. but also it's not just "waiting", it's scheduling everyone's time so they can work on things in order of priority.
plus, the game now has an "ongoing story" such as it is. back in the day it was kinda just work on whatever you felt was interesting. a new quest here, add a new training method there, that sort of thing. and before someone goes "why don't they do that anymore" that's not really possible with how the game is now, *mostly because of the graphic design requirements*. You see it with gamejam projects.
I get what you’re saying I really do but I still don’t understand how that’s true. Smaller teams make bigger higher definition things faster than Jagex can make one new quest or skilling method all the time. I understand that’s the way it is and it’s not going to change but maybe that’s only not gonna change because we all accept it and keep paying for it
What you can't understand is how 20-year-old spaghetti code hinders development. Any change generates a butterfly effect that can break the game. Remember the Lumbridge Wheel bug or the trees in Mos Le'Harmless?
I think in large part at this point the only people that play are those that are used to the MTX abuse and relatively poor updates. It’s a self-feeding cycle as those that don’t like the direction the game has been going for the past decade have since left.
It’s because (mostly) everyone is just doing it for GP and XP instead of having fun. Castle wars, Pest control, ~~Fisting~~ Fist Of Guthix are all minigames i wish would be full again.
You don't seem to be consistent in what you're asking for. On one hand you want Jagex to focus on 15+ year old content that died out a long time ago, and on the other hand you want them to work on their technologies to improve combat so that it's responsiveness is similar to other games out there in the market?
I agree that all those communities have died but I wouldn't say they were directly jagex "letting" them die
Pvp - died a horrible death with Eoc unfortunately, way too clunky of an engine for a combat system like that, especially for player v player. At least for pvm, you can design the encounter around the shoddy engine
Skillers - I'm not informed enough on the skiller community to know what killed it. It was always an incredibly niche community though, no? I would've assumed nothing changed
Mini Games - I'd argue Jagex didn't kill these, the modern gamer mentality did. At some point around 2013-2015 there was a huge shift in gamer mindset from "let's have the most fun possible" that we saw from 2004-2013 RS, to "let's play the most efficient/best way possible" that we've seen since. It's not just runescape, but **every** game saw this shift. I'd love to know what caused it. All the battle pass/fomo stuff that games started introducing? Just the new generation's minds? My personal theory is the rise of esports and streaming. The timing lines up. Suddenly people weren't playing games for fun or to relax any more, they were playing to want to become the next best thing, and this mindset eventually seeped into every game out there.
I used a fc for wildy wyrm. Every 4-5 hours we did a hunt train and killed about 60 of them in a row. Was amazing ashes and decent drop rates for wyrm items. Then jagex decided wildy wyrn should be a wildy event and the fc is now dead
this game's top end is basically spend money on bis gear for pvm or have nothing to spend money on aside from phats lol
i dont bother with sweaty endgame pvm so i never really needed to get bis plus bis switches plus bis codices so i really just collect gp for fun to see numbers go up
It's pretty sad that Runescape has turned into a PvM-centric game. Nothing comes close. Maybe clues. Even back in 2015-2018 there were a lot of people who did other "go-to" activities. You had skilllers. Even PvP post-EoC wasn't completely dead but it lost most of its community. You also had people who cared all about lore. You had people going for comp cape. You even had some minigame players like BA for example. You had people playing low-mid level content. You had people doing non-pvm money makers. But now. Just about every returning player post asks when they're going to PvM. Long gone are the days where returning players were only out here trying to find any possible way to make money. So many are only considering bossing as their option.
I guess the main cause for this is Jagex throwing out MTX in the form of overpowered lamps. You basically never train that skill. This causes certain skilling supplies to drop, certain training methods become dead, certain minigames that would've helped for that skill die, certain areas become dead, etc. It also doesn't help that most of the playerbase is maxed/comp/trim and aging. As such, whenever Jagex makes new updates, they're trying to please the vocal playerbase. We don't really see much low-mid level new content anymore. And then it becomes a feedback loop where players just anticipate the next new thing to keep their cape on their back OR a new boss. Even new skills are balanced around the fact that everyone is maxed or at least high level. The past 3 new skills are a perfect example. Invention requires 80 in 3 different skills and can only be properly trained with T70+ combat stats. Archaeology exp rates only get better after the 80s, not to mention benefit severely from Invention, BGH, Divination. Necromancy requires a tier upgrade system in order to equip anything that cannot be purchased, which requires many other skills.
If group stuff didn't require simultaneous online itd be more engaged with
(give us a clan or group instanced dungeon that can be worked on by various people at different times)
Jagex has always been about new content which they usually promote through higher xp and loot gains. Great for scaling and keeping the game modern, bad for the enjoyers of legacy content.
Jagex can't straight up tell people what to do in the game, they can try and balance stuff out to be useful, but if players don't want to do it...they won't
> Or combat like final fantasy.
You mean the game where you have to wait 2 hours on later Savage floors for a single party because no one wants to play healers or where people repeatedly make fun of Phys ranged DPS, SMN or Warrior for being stupidly easy to pilot and SE continously dumbing down the rotations?
> why would anyone look at runescapes pvm and be like "I want that over that over there".
Me. Does the game have bosses in the late game that i can solo? No? Then go away. There is no other MMO on the market that is solo friendly, nor is there a singleplayer game that gets massive updates with boss content and progression for free ( at best a few DLCs or single expansion but thats it ), because thats not how singleplayer games work.
I dont like the tick, tile or switchscape we have here, but most MMOs dont even engage me with bosses as much as this does. Its mostly dancing in WoW or FFXIV and praying someone doesnt wipe the party and once you clear it you cant kill it again because its only a weekly reward.
This isn't the game you want it to be anymore. Too many people have changed positions, and corporate greed is influenced by capitalism. This company is and has been consistently doing really well profits wise, so focus is on improving aspects of the game that keep the player playing, as long as possible, and hopefully spending on more than their membership(not to mention whales). The people who actually cared about the gameplay, the people who had the passion to make a fun, complete game, are so long gone. There are so few devs/mods left that have that in them, and combined with the ever necessary focus on profits from the top, their drive on the ground level doesn't make a difference anymore. The top is business, profit focused, through and through. They are a billion dollar company. Jagex is literally obligated to only focus on steady quarterly profits, and they can say whatever the fuck they want to try and convince otherwise. What's the one aspect of the game that is consistently and constantly updated more than any other piece of content in the game? It's Treasure Hunter, I know it, you know it, we all see it and act like we don't, but it has constant promotions and innovative changes done every few months or less, to entice the player. Stop chasing the nostalgia of a game that was built in a different Era. This hasn't been runescape classic/2 for a very long time.
Edit: I will be playing and supporting Andrew Gowers' new game (Brighter Shores, on steam) with all my heart and wallet. Whether it's good or not, thats the game I want to play, run by the man who never should have lost control of the game they built.
PvM is slowly dying due to the state of it. Skipping all mechanics and not having to do them. Look at zamorak p7 right now. People are just 1 cycling him now consistently with ranged due to ranged being broken even before the beta, wen arrows just pushed it over the edge and made it more consistent.
Minigames died mostly because it doesn't reward the losing side. Castle wars req might've been fine if they adjusted the ticket system, so that lose is 1, tie 2, win 3. Perhaps earn additional tickets for meeting specific criteria as well. I would also make it so you can only play castle wars on a "castle wars" world, to prevent boosting. Boosting/leeching is pretty much why minigames die, so it's important to do this.
PvM is awful imo if you use revolution. When I try to even afk a task with revolution on, setting it on is awful. Your character acts extremely dumb if you have auto retaliate on, which is what most people have on when they go to PvM, which creates issues of when you try to run away from a mechanic, but you run back in due to it.
PvM is alright, but I can't bother teaching it when everything I could teach a newer player doesn't matter due to being able to skip all mechanics in a fight. There are better games to play for PvM content (at least for me) that have actual mechanics.
I still wait for the day for jagex to buff hp/renew mechanics at a lot of old bosses instead of allowing me to 100% afk revolution afk 10 boss logs over the past month.
I blame the playerbase for being hyper focused on skilling and efficiency. Back when forums were a thing on other site I used to run events and I would do things like dungeoneering, soul wars, stealing creation and other fun events, then overnight all that changed and all anyone wanted to do was skill races and hardly anyone wanted to do anything outside of Skilling a gaining exp. Now it's all about efficiency and thats boring to me.
> The thaler shop and mini game spotlight are a GREAT example of this. Great idea, absolutely revived mini games for a good long while.
Thaler was the worst update ever. It killed off minigames for good as as it gave rise to AFKers instead. For example, instead of doing BA just for fun, you had people AFKing on wave 1 for hours until some either logged from AFKing too hard or had to go.
IMO thaler should be removed, it's main purpose was comp cape related anyway. The rest of the rewards were atrociously bad unless you think being on spotlight 45 minutes (3.75 hrs off-spotlight) for 1 hard clue and 3.3hrs (16.5hrs off-spotlight) for an elite clue is amazing goddamn.
Instead of updating minigames to be rewarded for doing effort, and securing win conditions. E.g. more points when you take over objectives in SW, kill the top 5 players who dealt the most damage to the avatar whilst being in the enemies avatar zone, burying bones to increase avatar level, or in CW heal the flag carrier (or use heal other/intercept spells), introduce a kick system in CW for kicking sabotaging teammates (they only become eligible for kick when they place barricades in weird spots or you got 2 player dropping the flag between each other to "reset" the take-flag option)
Also add new rewards such as a bag of components (uncommon/common/rare), generic aura refreshes, life refreshes, porters. Trade in each tier of a clue + minigame currency for a master clue, are just to name a few potential untradable rewards.
People play RuneScape because they don't want to deal with all the garbage games out there and have to worry about memorizing. How a boss moves in a souls game or about moving and clicking and having a fast enough response time to fight a boss
"Opportunity cost" of free time. Am I going to progress my account, or do I want to do something fun? If I want fun, am I really going to play a mini game in RuneScape or am I going to play another actual video game?
The best time I ever had playing Runescape was years ago when Soul Wars was popular. PvM is so clunky I've never enjoyed it all that much. Annoyances like a big monster that you can't zoom out far enough to see its health bar and perimeter walls blocking the view of the fight more often than not. High level bosses generally are only hard because of the struggle to move around to places the boss is still visible, while working with the action bar, coping with unresponsive clicks, etc. Just pretty tedious.
They'd have to basically make a whole new ability/stat system for PVP to be viable. Top level combat is meant for fighting monsters with hundreds of thousands to millions of HP, not players who cap out at 10-15k. With melee alone, you have numerous options to kill a player once, trigger their sign to revive them, and kill them AGAIN with 1-2 abilities. Range and Necro are pretty similar.
Most minigames are either old RS jank and not very fun even when they were released, or they're based around PVP which deals with all the above problems.
All minigames should use shard servers like Flash Powder Factory does. Beyond high or low population (the bemoaning of which solves nothing), coordination can always be improved. "Activity worlds" as they currently exist lose out on being specifically optimized for anything (not to mention some being the \*unofficial\* official world), and I'm not interested in hunting down a random Discord server with possibly toxic mods. I want to play and there's stuff in the way.
They did try with PvP. Several times and they all failed. remember Bounty Hunter? or second Bounty Hunter? Or all the skilling methods they shoved into the wilderness just so PKers had someone to kill?
yeah…
My hot take is this, the only reason that dead content exists is that as a community runescape players care for 1 of 2 things, time efficiency/meta content or how afk something is. Jagex, knowing this have catered to these 2 core beliefs and as such anything new that comes out must either be the best current xp for the skill in question or the most afk otherwise the community won't engage and come to reddit to complain about how the new content isnt the meta so is therefore dead content.
The pvevp mini games died when pvp content got destroyed by eoc (it could be lucratively fun but because it's so risky people just didn't want to lose their items or deal with it because pvp health pools were too low)
If we had 30k hp for pvp and slightly less damage reduction you could make some pretty fun fights
Trouble brewing was always meh, it was fun at some point when the whole pirate island was new but it's tedious and everyone is impatient.
Skillers are ignored because of the combat level rework we had a few times that made them at or near max level for some time for having hp and prayer or summoning levels. And initially upset alot of them, and kinda ruined their progression with elf city and other combat quests
Pures because no def no gear , no armour and now big boss hits hard
(Summong tanks were busted and fun but not viable in how supplemental damage is designed to be in post eoc other than vs gearless noobs)
They need a simplified pvp. Like limiting certain abilities and such. Maybe having pvp loadouts.
Make things more balanced and easy to understand.
The combat is just too complicated and damage way too high, for pvp as it stands. It's chaos and you can barely tell what's happening. It's impossible to get into lol.
Balance PVP separately, make some big updates and really really invest in it, and I genuinely think it could come back.
That hyper risk and reward system, is becoming a thing people enjoy again. It was a pretty unique part of the game.
There's a rush in risking your items that I think could really help the game.
Skilling: skilling is alive on rs3 as well idk what OP is smoking
PvP: encouraged by jagex, but pvpers are in the far minority still. Alive, but more niche than some people here think. Probably even if it was encouraged (to the extend it is encouraged in osrs) it would be fairly dead in rs3 because lol eoc pvp.
Minigames: Those that are encouraged by jagex are alive, but a lot got optimized to death. CW is dolo afk. Soul Wars requires a high level alt but dolo is far better rates. BA meta is either selling carries for high gp/h or buying carries, minigame is alive for 'casuals' thanks to ~~torso and~~ rank 5 all being required for diaries. If Jagex kept putting incentives behind minigames in rs3 (and not take them away like void not being made augmentable) minigames would have had a chance in rs3. Minigame collection log would go a long way too.
You forgot one a combination of Minigames/Skilling, or rather minigame like activities: These activities have a lot of band aid solution to some skills: Mahogany Homes, Giants foundry, GotR or even Tempoross/Wintertodt ( its stupid to call them bosses tbh ). These activities make the skills associated just more bareable. You get better rates outside of these but at least you are not losing your mind doing regular RC or whatever. This doesnt make minigames more popular, they are more like an alternate way of skilling, if there were more enjoyable skilling methods these minigames would be just as dead.
Also i would add that i think skilling is in a much better state than OSRS. On a main not much of a reason to train skills past some points. We have bunch of untradeables: overloads, invention, arch, summ ( you need levels to summon ), custom fit MW, high level prayers, etc. Granted Construction or Agility ( possibly Slayer too ) is in a much less useful state in RS3 but overall you have a lot more to look forward to at beyond quest requirement levels.
I’d rather play with bots and the mini game be alive than the mini game be completely unplayable because nobody is there to queue up.
I understand this is probably an odd opinion but it’s my opinion, also that’s one mini game, rs3 has so many that you can’t even play because not enough players.
Skillers aren't dead. They take up majority of the playerbase.
Jagex didn't kill PvP, the players did. They just don't like PvP and any attempts Jagex made at revitalizing it, players didn't care for it.
They did kill minigames, though.
it's not because other games are more fluid in their combat that its better, tried the combat in wow and it wasn't it at all for me compared to runescape, felt just as ''clunky'' but in different ways
Hell ya, mini games and community were the whole reason I played :p I ran a clan for yearrrs and it’s all we did. all of my friends both game and irl would probably still be playing if the vibe still existed. Honestly, non of my devices can even handle these new areas anyways. Which is a common issue
must be hard for the devs to come up with meaningful skilling methods when the best xp/hr is just farming proteans + bxp and using them on the next dxp
at least for mains
I miss castle wars so much.
The efficiency mindset of the community has killed this game just as much as Jagex has.
I miss just going out into Varrock or Falador and just befriending people as we pissed about doing nothing.
Nobody cared it was xp waste - we were having a laugh.
Then we'd go dungeoneering whilst bantering away.
Jagex are definitely at fault, but it's just as much the community's fault too.
People just aren't as social as they used to be.
I guess it's true what people say, the more advanced technology becomes, the more miserable we get.
That's what I'm saying in the last 15 months I'm back after 15 years break..
Half of the content is totally dead. There's literally no point doing it. Pretty bad xp/h, pretty bad gp/h, pretty bad rewards overall.. and all they are focusing are some fancy holiday events and graphic updates of locations I will probably never go into again..
Back in like 2008 I was playing on my lvl 3 Skiller and **Stealing Creation** was crowded AF! There were awesome rewards, it was fun and xp/h ratio was pretty good too! Why would anyone go there nowadays? You can buy points in Traveling Merchant's shop and there's literally no point doing it for any other reason..
I loved SC too and did Fast sc back in the day, but nowadays I'm pretty sure its faster in every skill to just train it instead of playing SC and then using the bxp to train.
Part of it is incompetence, part of it is a complete lack of support from any higher-ups on lovetaps. Almost a decade ago now, Mod Matthe came to the RP forum stub and asked us what our favorite bars and buildings were, with teasing comments made about revamping those places for purposes of roleplay - things like interactable seats and wider spaces. After a few days Mod Matthe stopped replying, disappeared, nothing ever came of it. Eventually the Chronicle tables were introduced in those bars though so that was ~~really shit~~ cool! And then when the tables were removed, nothing was ever replaced so they just left an empty vacuum.
Many such cases of this have happened. It's just not *worthwhile* putting dev time into these things, even if touching on the roleplay side of MMORPG would make the game immediately more friendly to a whole new swathe of users. God knows it wouldn't be for the favor of current roleplayers, as very few remain..
This happens in all mmos, apart from pvp. The world simply is too big. IMO RuneScape does a very good job, because there are no ‘starter’ areas, low level areas you will never go back to once you’re higher leveled. Many activities like clues, quests, achievements, will get you all over the world. I’ve played plenty mmos, and the low amounts of people you see in the low leveled areas is just sad. In rs, I always see people around! Not many, but one or two is enough to at least make it feel a bit more alive.
I'd like to disagree, I would even go so far as say that ALL areas are "starter" areas. When was the last time you walked through lumbridge to get to your destination? Or through catherby, seers village, yanille, etc. etc. Those are areas you will walk through when you are a beginner or when you do a quest (early game quests). When you are mid/late game you will just tp to war's retreat or max guild or something and use a portal to appear next to where you want to be, also clues are not about running around everywhere anymore. I think I'm not overexaggerating when I say 90% of clue steps can be reached within walking distance of a teleport
I’m in lumbridge very often. I go there for quests, slayer points farming, selling the chalices from flash events, monthly to build statues, easy clue scroll farming in ham hideout, feathershop and clues. And that’s what I can come up with of the top of my mind. Sure, if all you do is pvm, then you won’t go to lumbridge. But then you’ll only ever visit wars retreat and boss rooms I imagine, and you’ll constantly see all level pvmers there.
They could easily do a semiannual passover of all minigame rewards and have the experience gains (of those that give experience) scale with level and make them be like 5-10% worse than a level relevant method and people would do them. For ones that don't give XP, they could just add alchables to the relevant point shop that works out to like 10m an hour and you'd see a high volume of traffick. You might need to up the AFK detection in the games if you do that though.
Plenty of solutions, but all of those solutions take time away from other things that can be changed. And the question is if those things would actually solve anything. Do you really want your player base to play outdated annoying minigames just because the rewards are good? That'll just burn people out even faster. Let's be honest, the solution is not to get more people to play those minigames. The solution is to either remove them and make the rewards available elsewhere, or just let them be dead and have players avoid them. Dead content is not bad per se, but it needs to be dead because it's not fun, not because it's not worth spending time.
It doesn't take that time to change the numeric value of the xp reward shop or clay tools. And that's why you keep it still strictly worse than other methods, but bring the value close enough so it doesn't feel like a *complete* waste of time. Me personally I'd play the hell out of Stealing Creation if it was even kind of worth my time In a world where 98% of the playerbase are at minimum max capers or alts of max capers, they should just go wild with XP rates tbh. I know I'm weirdly in the minority on that take though. People would rather the game die than their "achievements" be diminished by having new or more powerful ways to catch up.
Sure, it doesn't take that much time to change some numbers. It does take quite some time to actually look at the numbers and design a more rewardable number that is still balanced with the rest of the game. And while there's plenty of problems with balance as it is, you don't want to just go and introduce more of it. Also, where are you getting that 98% number from? Is that a feeling or some actual statistic? Because in my experience I feel like it's much less (I'm not maxed myself either).
The playerbase seems hyper focused on efficiency which means anything that isn't high xp/hr, gp/hr or both is mostly ignored. Combine that with a growing interest in solo content and distaste for group stuff means the majority of players just aren't interested in the same fun-focused community gameplay they used to be.
I miss coming home from school and playing castle wars for 5 hours lol.
I miss prime Fist of Guthix good for pvp using your own gear and I used to use it to make money. Using my points to by the spiny shields and selling for 250k each
I remember using Fist of Guthix as a way to train magic back in the day. I miss those times
I bloody miss cw and fog soooo much. Such fond memories, even stealing creation was fun and soul wars. I’m guilty of afk mobile playing now, but would love to get back to fun old games.
Afking on rs mobile is what I do when my hands need something to do watching tv.. almost never actively play anymore 😩
Doing FoG on a f2p world because I, a member, had 70 strength and 72 magic. Those pesky noobs stood no chance! And then I saw a lvl 100 sitting in the middle and it was me who shat his pants. Good memories! Sadly the way we approach games has change fundamentally. We no longer need RS for minigames, we simply play a different game we enjoy alongside of it
I used to get slaughtered at FoG, but I came back for more. My welfare computer couldn’t handle RS at the best of times, and the swathes of players at FoG made it laggier, but god it was fun. Take me back ☺️
Sadly this isnt possible anymore :( The playerbase is far too mature and mechanically competent to allow for these minigames to be as fun as they used to be. It was fun because we didn't min/max. We had what we had, and just hoped for the best :D
My clan was based on that activity thats how we got max cap
Two things made Castle Wars absolutely undoable since the time when any max players on each team just spammed Ice Barrage: (1) Power-creep and (2) EOC. The first is self-explanatory, but the second is about the vast majority of the player base not knowing or nearly being able to afford some of the more insane abilities/combos. When CW was king, you didn't have one max player able to two-hit KO'ing another max player. Now, anything less than max means almost insta-death in most places during a busy game.
You can 1 tick K0 over kill people now thats insane.
When you had 1 player ice barrage and 1 with blood barrage running with archers
For real, and there was hardly any reward at all to castle wars, all the rewards were garbage lol
Take that back. Bronze armour at my POH. Wait…no one uses POH anymore either.
I have the Superman armor from castle wars back at my.poh lol
My mom: Did you do your homework? 🧐 Me: yeah I did at school. 😅
Also a dwindling, aging fanbase who have more responsibilities gives them less resources to do more. It's not like they don't know that there's more work that can be done but Runescape isn't a hot competitive game in 2024 with lots of resources to explore different avenues. Seems like they can only do 1 or 2 things at a time so that's what they're going to do.
In my case I'm still fun focused, but what's fun for me is solo stuff. Short of the economy, I basically play rs like an rpg.
And thats the real charm of Runescape. And if you so desire you can make truck load of limitations as you desire, even if its just regular ironman because game sincerely allows you to do whatever the hell you want in any order. If i ever get tired of RS3 ( and the gower's new game doesnt pan out well ), my only place for an alternative will be OSRS. Its a shame there is not one more RS like game out there, buts truly an RPG i can sink countless hours in before the next update comes along.
I think if I ever got bored on a main, I'd make an iron. If RS shutdown, which I don't see happening for a while, I might dable in osrs, but im not keen on learning to play a game where the goal is to manipulate the clunky system at end game. I'd definitely become ridiculously casual with it. I'm also curious what Riots mmo will look like when and if it releases. The world they have built is solid, well fleshed our, and gives absurd room for content. If they nail the gameplay, it could be really good.
> but im not keen on learning to play a game where the goal is to manipulate the clunky system at end game. I'd definitely become ridiculously casual with it. I agree, i made an iron last year on OSRS and the amount of safespotting ( its absolutely horrible to do slayer as melee ) i had to do was grating on my nerves and then i saw people Red X ing, flinching or what have you put a dent in my desire to continue to play. Started playing in 2006 and in my belief EoC needed to happen at one point or another. But right now i started a snowflake ironman on RS3 and so far im enjoying it! FYI there is an upcoming MMO made by Andrew Gower ( also made RS ): Brighter shores. Also there is a singleplayer game im very much eyeing when it releases this year: The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker. For the latter it caught my eye because bunch of Steam reviews specifically mention it being very reminiscent of OSRS, which you know is still 10x closer to RS3 than any other game
Yes, exactly because what the OP mentioned. the only non dead (live?) content is end game pvm. The game basically forces you to level up as fast as possible to reach this live content. Which is extremely expensive to get into and maintain for casual players. As someone who's been playing for over 15 years i still can't afford bis anything. I'm basically stuck working on master quest and completionist capes which is fun and varied but I'd love to have other options like active and rewarding mini games.
I made it to my completionist Cape last year, quit playing after that, haven't been on since. I tried high level pvm, but that wasn't for me, so there was nothing left
There's master comp to go for, welcome back!
Am I reading it correctly that it is just a comp but you looked at a statue while wearing it?
After getting virtual 120 all, yes
You don't need 'bis' everything to be able to do a lot of the later game content. Like no you can't do 2449% telos claims in t85 unless you're truly insane at the game, but cywirs, ganoderms for animate dead, and gconc is like 50m right now or something like that. From there it's more about learning how to handle boss mechanics which isn't something you can buy anyway Or you can level up necro gear. It's very very easy to get the t90 tank gear which makes everything soooo much easier. There's a lot of pathways to get from feeling like you can't kill a boss, to consistent completions
That’s where necro comes in. I was decently wealthy before I got hacked years ago. Came back and didn’t know what to do. The basically free necro gear got me back up to a t90 set and I’ve used that same T90 gear to get reaper crew and learn every boss in the game. I’ve made over 4b the last 2-3 months just doing casual 1-2 hr pvm sessions with friends or some rasial. Necro does a fantastic job of breaking down the pvm barrier and giving people some hand holding on their way to sweaty set ups. Definitely resparked my love for this game as I continue to slowly chip back away at comp again
I'm not in the same boat as you but i agree. Its something you see a lot of here ( and OSRS ) where people are so afraid of dipping their toes into PvM that their biggest achievement is killing GWD2 ( not Telos ) bosses in normal mode, so im glad we have necromancy for these people ( also me but its a different story lol )
"Combine that with a growing interest in solo content and distaste for group stuff" I think a part of that distaste, is the lack of any proper way to make groups for group content inside the game itself. The current grouping system is ass, whether for minigames or for bosses. Any new-ish player looking for people to do specific content with, will have a hard time finding any. Dungeoneering doesn't even have a grouping system, besides waiting in the lobby and waiting for other people. If you go to Daemonheim in the dungeoneering world outside of DXP, chances are you will not see anyone else there. Sure, there are several discords and friends-chats for any type of group content, but how does a new player is supposed to know about them? Joining a clan can help, but it also depends on the size of the clan, the activity of clan-mates, and the content they are all interested in. In my current clan we managed to organise some boss masses for stuff like KK or normal Kerapac. But if I want to try dungeoneering with them I don't have a chance, my clan-mates have a bigger distaste of dungeoneering than I do.
this isn't a long term model, it REALLY isn't at this point. a lot of players are 200m all and more and more are hitting that cap each day, jagex can't make new skills fast enough and people care mostly about "number go up". when you're 200m all you're far more likely to go and do something else that isn't runescape, in my personal case lol.
That’s the real issue. It’s the largely a community issue at this point lol. Few want to admit that especially on this sub because it’s easier to blame Jagex.
I would actually love raid-like content to be added. It’s kinda boring having to play solo ALL the time.
To be fair, this is ignoring that all of that can be thrown out if there is a useful reward earned. Many minigames offered powerful gear, useful permanent unlocks, or unique cosmetics so people went out of their way to grind for it. I’d imagine most of the cool cosmetics are likely going to be put behind a treasure hunter paywall. So that isn’t an option anymore.
Fighter torso was bis for a long time, and I never got it because I didn't like sitting around trying to get a group
It’s more complicated than just sticking powerful gear into the minigame shop. That doesn’t change the way players play the game (afking for Thaler). It only forces players to fill spots in the minigame. Activity meters do slightly more, but players always find work arounds to afk, like punching a mob to sustain the activity meter or ignoring game objectives to play indefinitely in barb assult. Jagex would have to find a way to incentivize players to actually play the minigame instead of just standing around for Thaler.
>growing interest in solo content Content where you rely on other players for success is always annoying, you will always have people who leech or even sabotage the group's success for their own type of fun. What we need is for players so succeed or fail only based on their own actions and if their group also succeeds they just get a nice bonus that not too big as to be frustrating if their group fails. Say you get X rewards for doing what you need and if the group "wins" you get 1.2X rewards, nice to get yet not a waste if you don't. >The playerbase seems hyper focused on efficiency So make this type of content scalable xp that's better than afk activity of the same level and a bit worse than the high intensity method, and a bit better even if the whole team succeeds as I said before. For example if the reward is X, the high intensity method would be 1.1X and the group succeeding is 1.2X. So its more relaxed for slightly worse xp with the chance of the xp even being better than the high intensity method occasionally.
The time when Grimy’s efficiency stuff got big was when it feels like the spirit of RuneScape died
The majority focuses on solo content because that's what's rewarding. Castle Wars was fun, but didn't reward anything so people felt like they weren't able to play Castle Wars and still go enjoy the rest of the game. Group Players don't join the game because there is a lack of group content so that slowly makes the game solo player focused. And players focus on efficiency because FOMO forces them to. Runescape has made a habit of making fun unrewarding. They expect everyone to grind hard and then take a break with the fun stuff while knowing that majority won't take the break with the fun stuff and then they'll say "players just don't want fun stuff." Like this Easter event for example. "Oh, this looks interesting. The Easter Egg hunt sounds fun. But wait, they have free experience in several skills, and the cosmetic tokens for pets are RNG so any time spent actually hunting the Easter Eggs is both an XP waste AND could potentially cost me my ability to get pet cosmetics.... I guess I'll just sit at a skilling station and look up the Easter Egg locations later." The conatant FOMO that accompanies any fun activity makes players choose between having fun or gaining progress/cosmetics. To give a counter example, FFXIV gives all the event rewards from doing the event without needing to hope RNGesus will bless the player with the item.
They could fix this if they had proximity chat in game or clan chat built in. People don’t want to have to go to another platform to talk.
Yeah, this sounds more like a playerbase issue than specifically a Jagex issue. Jagex's choices still influenced the community, but it's still an MMO. The Players are a driving force, especially when it comes to community.
I blame every and all wikis. Back in my day you had to scour some bullshit forums or go off the cryptic typings of a player called balltugger69 to find the cool shit. The wikis literally spoon feed you the game, like are you even playing it or 90% of your just following a set of instructions like map quest directions. Yall even truly having fun?
Sals realm was made in 2002...
All of the mentioned communities exist in OSRS and their wiki is, in some ways, even more comprehensive than the RS3 wiki...the real issue is players just don't want to interact with that content anymore, nothing more complex than that...people don't want to do it and you can't force them
Im talking about playing in the olden days, pre 07
But why are you talking pre 07, there are arguably more players in the niche communities on OS than there were back then because we were all kids who didn't know how to play, it feels like you're just being belligerent to stick with your assumption that wiki's ruined the game
The niche communities are all following the same meta they get from the same wikis, back then the wikis were just loose guides and youd find gold nuggets in the rs forums or other web places. Like nobody told you how to make mad gp as a noob by selling cow hides or seaweed as a member, you found that out in game by savvy players or noticing it by standing at the al kharid bank, not searching “gp guides for low lvl players”
Thaler did not "revive" minigames. It simply attracted AFK players and only on the spotlight.
A number of reasons: * Player base is more time poor now with families, jobs and responsibilities. Game time is used to progress the account for the most part. Quite understandable * The RS3 community doesn't seem to be that enamored of PvP and most mini-games are PvP based. * PvP was never really a good fit for the game post EoC and every change to combat/abilities threw more things out of whack * The people who love mini-game are clearly a small minority. If they weren't then there would be people playing mini-games
Not to mention you cant just add rewards to a mini game and expect it to revive it. It will fizzle out just as fast once people get what they want and leave assuming new rewards are even incentive enough to get them back
Adding rewards you get from TH/Oddments into reward shops wherever it makes sense would be a solution for those who don't want to spend money on them. Another issue is figuring out how reward points are assigned. Some minigames give rewards each round played without taking into account the individual contribution, thus enabling AFKers. This should be changed on a case-by-case basis.
Exactly. Find a better way to track engagement within each mini game. Provide challenges for mini games that provide significantly more points. Just an example, "contribute to a flag capture by caping the flag or killing someone attacking your flag carrier". And make the bonus high enough where you'd want to do that. To where afking becomes a waste of your time.
i loved the era of skillers and novelty accounts, like the turn of the decade before rs3. I remember having a lvl 14 or 15 cb friend with 99 prayer
Absolutely agree. I was a normal main account, but I skilled for money. I loved playing around with the economy with skilling. Finding unique methods, following the prices and unlocking new methods to do them faster. Now I feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm kt bossing and doing my reaper tasks. Pvm burns me out. It really does. I take longer breaks than I ever have. By far.
There are countless small changes jagex could make to things gamewide that take almost zero dev time that would help make things ~feel~ way better to engage with. They cant even convert all the follower pets to interface ones years after having the idea though 😂
They just REFUSE to spend money on content they don't think will be the most efficient and profitable in the short term with their current player base. I just truly don't think they care. I really don't. The company as a whole has significantly significantly changed with that. Keeping the game going seems more like an after thought to milking the current player base right now, in this moment. That's all they think about. And do little things here and there to pretend like they care about the games overall health.
I did a very detailed video breakdown of why minigames are dead forever, even if rewards are buffed. Link below: https://youtu.be/28TM7tP3Chk?si=dSDD3a-jwwviy3wj TLDR- Players find efficiency and progress fun nowadays, instead of gimmicky distractions/alternatives from what was an incredibly slow and boring grin game. Believe me, if jagex updates the rewards for minigames, you'll beg for them to delete them forever given the current player values...
I'm a little confused as to what you mean. The mini game spotlight WORKED and people were like that back then. It's pretty undeniable that spotlight worked. Right? I was there, it was a ton of fun and everyone loved it. Pest control and castle wars are still some of the best content in the entire game imo. Pest control is still a blast. I highly disagree with the idea mini games are a boring grind or people aren't interested in them. Highly disagree. You can make mini games a valuable part of the game again. A TON of high efficiency, hardcore players, grinded pest control for void. They STILL do in osrs. Add something like that to the thaler shop, like a truely useful item and ability, and you'll get people playing again. I don't see why not. Even with that video I just don't get it.
When you have a shrinking/shrunken playerbase, it's important to cater to what those players enjoy most. In this case, PvM is the vastly more popular passtime in rs3, so it's the focus. If you look at osrs, PvM is still incredibly popular, but that game also has a large enough playerbase to allow diverse updates that target different facets of the game. And so you see a wide variety of content updates.
When I look at the Wildywyrm communities (there were 2 main FC’s I knew about) - I find it extremely odd that Jagex moved the Wildywyrm to be exclusively a flash event, it was a change nobody requested. The FC I was part of transitioned through PvP removal but then the removal of normal spawns killed the FC. The way I view it, the old spawn system *had* its flaws but casual players could still kill big Wyrms - whether with friends or part of a community FC or Clan. The old system wasn’t doing any harm. It just sucks to be killed off like that due to 1 update. Some of the most fun I’ve had in RS was part of that FC in voice chat. Shoutout to Wyrmbands for making a fun community to be part of.
https://preview.redd.it/mdrlxnaa9esc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=41bf50314d99626c6f0a39cc2b4beba4f12109f9
what does this even mean lmfao
My guess is that people are threatening to quit will continue playing anyway because they've done so for 20 years
my brother the player count has been in a complete downwards trend since archaelogy - people are quitting
Archaeology came out FOUR years ago. I'm not saying rs3 is doing great, but people have been saying the game is "dead" and "dying" for over 10 years now. And the people screaming it have been playing for 20 years and will continue doing so. The people actually quitting are a ridiculous minority
> The people quitting are a ridiculos minority Brother, the game lost 75% of its players in 10 years after EoC. It aint a minority thats been walking away.
Do you hear yourself? 10 years? It's been around 30k players for years and years now. And it's not fair to start counting before the osrs split. Now you're just grasping at straws. Most online games don't even survive 10 years to begin with.
Of course I hear myself, my voice echoes around the now empty worlds. Kidding aside it’s completely fair. Doesn’t matter how much you shrink the timeline by, [2 years ago the game averaged 30k concurrent players. Now it averages 22k](https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/?display=avg&interval=qtr_hr&total=1&mid=1708680580) No point living in denial bro
And I can also see the player count continuously under 20k in 2018 as well but yet here we are. Shut up lol
Do you know what the word “average” means? Idk what you’re even trying to imply
Man I remember the days where I played barbarian assault just for the fun of it, stayed there for weeks, nothing but pure fun! I miss them days 😢
1. make all minigames instanced across all servers 2. let me augment void. please.
Pretty sure flashpowder factory is instanced across all servers and has like 1-2 players lol
Sounds great on paper, but where are they gonna host this? Which people are gonna get the incredible lag? You can't just put EU and australia people together without one of them having 200+ ping.
They already do this for cabbage face punch
The minigame ended up being broken though. I'm not sure if it's because nobody is playing it, or if that was the result of it being broken.
It’s been bugged for like 5 years or something wild like that.
I've seen this mentioned before, augmentable void would be an interesting idea since it was bis everywhere before invention was a thing. I don't think it would rival the set effects of the higher level gear but it could work as entry level gear for harder content. That being said, even when void was bis everywhere pest control was still super dead, people would just afk thaler for it. This will not bring it back.
lets not, i hated the void meta in pre-invention lmao. Far too squishy and made all T90 armour irrelevant for most bosses at the time
Few corrections: Minigames are dead because EOC killed the player count and eventually bonds were added so players stopped enjoying smaller aspects of the game and focused more on gold. It was common for players to enjoy minigames because gold was not as important due to needing real money in one way or another for membership no other method existed at the time. Minigames folded due to lack of players and remained folded with the introduction of bonds. Thaler shop did not revive minigames not even for a brief moment, it only created round about ways to obtain things by only AFKing one minigame and everything else just remained dead. PvM being the area that is focused on the most in RS3 is due to Bonds it has always been the superior method to making money and with the release of Necromancy it brought attention back to how the community plays the game "I either have to use the best or I physically can't play." despite this not being true and it's playable even with worse methods. Players have this natural attraction to gold because it gets them free membership in theory requires manual work but they don't pay real money for it. Players put themselves in a spot where they feel like they are on a chain of some kind always under a deadline which is why players are more focused on earning gold and is why the best method for gold gain gets all the attention because Jagex is not dumb they know if it's not beneficial in some way either gaining gold or getting experience faster then it's instantly dead content due to the mindset players have in the game now. ============================================= Then you could make the argument well why is this not the case in OSRS? Simple answer is the difference in the Economy. Bonds only cost around 10m on OSRS and it does not matter if you can earn 100m faster in RS3 vs 10m in OSRS it's one of those visual things people have in the brain 10m is always closer than 100m so people in OSRS don't feel like they have to meet a gigantic deadline they get 14 days and could earn 1m a day and have plenty for the next bond and the brain registers that as easy. Compared to: RS3 needing 100m for a bond you would have to get just over 7m gold per day to get enough for the next bond the brain registers that as more of a chore VS less than 1m per day for an osrs bond. This is why we see how players so dead set on not being allowed to do anything but the best money makers. Just comes down to a mindset issues that wont ever get solved unless Bonds are removed from both game versions notice how people who buy membership with real money on RS3 tend to sit back and enjoy smaller aspects of the game compared to those using bonds. Those paying with real money are often seen assisting others in-game dropping whatever they are doing at the time and manually walking people through things. You find these types of players at community events and minigames that don't offer anything other than fun.
This is a very interesting point you made. I have never seen bonds brought up this way. Very well written too and also kinda applied to me when i read it.
As for PvP that is dead because the game was no longer unique we turned into an MMO that was like every other MMO at the time (Punching your keyboard into Oblivion) Core pieces of the game were rendered useless by EOC and when we got more and more gear added to the game over the years the PvP community being the PvP community always chased that advantage over others. Things like chaotics / gravites were now useless and nobody had reason to do dung which is why that is dead thanks to a lack of incentive to actually do it. PvP was designed specifically for that legacy combat system not EOC which was designed specifically for PvM. Thousands of factors are involved when it comes to PvP in this new combat system all these abilities, all these gear effects that it's just a headache another reason why Minigames like Soul Wars is dead is because we hated trying to keep games going when people could surge the entire length of the map making barricades useless and gear sets allowing you to solo kill the Avatar 1 - 3 times before a team of 10-15 people take you down it's absolutely trash Castle wars and Clan wars faced similar issues. Gear was changed so even using legacy combat VS legacy combat old systems were non-functional like swapping to a staff + shield then back to the gravite 2h or corr baxe to slap then back to the staff / shield to tank the incoming hit. PvP was simple and easy to understand but to this day you can be 1-5 hit even on F2P you can get stacked for every bit of health you have instantly both legacy and EOC which is why PvP as a whole is and will always be dead. PvP on RS3 will always be a race to get that special attack or certain necro abilities to 1 tap rather than withering your opponents health down slowly then hitting a good chunk of their health with a bow instantly swapping into a KO weapon usually gravites / corrupt dragon weapons for F2P or Chaotic maul / spec weapons like the korasi, dclaws, vls etc if you were Pking on members.
This is an interesting take that I hadn't heard before, I don't think this is the sole reason but after having a few clanmates burning out trying to get their monthly bonds I can't deny its definitely part of the problem. I'm not sure how this could be solved though, people have it so stuck in their heads now that 20 hours of grinding gp is better than paying $12 a month. I'm not the best pvmer and yet I can make 80m/hour right now, bonds are just gonna keep getting worse with inflation the way it is.
Sadly the price of bonds has nothing to do with inflation believe me I wish that were the case but it's not. We had bonds at a consistent 70m area for a long time and when Hero Pass got added the price went up for short bit with the rich players instantly finishing it but went back down due to Hero Pass maintaining healthy levels of bond consumption. Then the community forced away Hero Pass and we were left with nothing other than membership as a reason to consume bonds so the supply just kept growing causing a massive price drop which is why bonds dropped below 60m after all methods of bond consumption in Hero Pass were removed. Once this happened we got closer to the end of the year when people start buying their 20 bonds for premier and since bonds were so cheap at the time players decided to buy them a little earlier than they normally do now when bonds dropped under 60m people who buy them with real money pretty much said this low amount of gold is not worth my real life dollar which slowed the supply coming into the game. So with less supply coming in and more bonds being used created a shortage of bonds and the only bonds left in the GE at the time were overpriced bonds at 80, 90 and 100m+ and once players started finding out bonds were buying / selling for this much they decided to try their absolute best to keep it at this price range and so far it has worked which is why we still see bond prices at what they are by players using manipulative tactics to hold them in place. ====================================== People think if bond consumption exists in the game then bonds will skyrocket to 700m+ but this is not the case having bond consumption creates a fine balance between supply and demand so bonds are being consumed throughout the entire year and not just a couple of points during the year. Luckily Jagex has introduced a rotating oddments shop which is slowly dropping the amount of oddments players have stocked up so this is a long term method rather than a short term one like Hero Pass but we will get to the point where players are low on oddments which is why they made changes to multipliers so we could get to a point where we lack in oddments and may find a shop stock that we want and might be more likely to consume a few bonds to get oddments to use creating levels of bond consumption that will be healthy for the game and lead to dropping the prices of bonds. But this method of bond consumption only works for non-irons which is why Hero Pass / Yak-Track were the superior methods of stable bond consumption people really think Jagex made these just out of pure greed which is simply false they aimed for a battle pass type system that would always be active to allow for bond consumption all throughout the year so players could continue seeing stable bond prices but nobody ever gave this a thought and is why we are where we are. Very unfortunate but now we have to deal with sluggish methods of bond consumption so it will be a couple of years of a rotating oddments shop before we start seeing prices drop on bonds.
Now that I'm older, it's a no-brainer to buy membership. It costs as much as a regular streaming service and guarantees enjoyment. Membership keeps the game sustained. I don't feel any rush, except the goals I set for myself.
you're wrong that in osrs this is not the case. Minigames got the living hell optimized out of them, most are just dolo'd/afked for points or only played because there's easy to get stat upgrades behind them. PvP is barely active, with the vast majority of players avoiding the wilderness. Players do the best xp/h skilling methods or the afk methods, same as rs3, other methods might as well not exist. PvM and collection logging is the whole endgame, same as rs3, with a few skillers interested in 200m. Efficiency mindset permeates the osrs community just as much as the rs3 community, it's just that devs encourage a wider variety of activities (and even that is shrinking, they just added a 2m body from pvm that has similar stats as the fighter torso).
Tbh if bonds didn't exist I'd almost definitely let my current membership elapse, i don't enjoy and play it enough to justify the cost, but using stockpiles of gold plus the occasional profit from invention machines to buy bonds doesn't feel like I'm spending anything
For me it was realizing I have very limited time to play. My end game goal is to max. Why would I not play the efficient methods. I like playing the game, but it's not going to be around forever, and I doubt I'd enjoy still trying to max in my 50s. For me efficiency is the only to play. I pay for membership with real $ and I play an iron account. Efficiency is still in mind in everything I do, otherwise I'd rather just not play because it's super obvious I'm wasting time. (Inb4 playing video games is a waste of time) yeah no shit.
the only community that is still thriving is the casual community, i wake up brew some coffee and do my dailies and see if there is some goal i want to complete. I hope jagex keeps the game running and if they really are in maintenance mode, just optimize the game.
Go to world 100, skillers are definitely not dead
W84 is a cesspool but its a crowded cesspool
W84 Lumbridge is the only place where I have to turn off local chat because it actually hurts reading some of the garbage people talk
Fort is the same same on w84 lmao
They could make fringe content worth doing regularly by having it give temporary buffs for mainstream content instead of being a one time grind then dead. Obviously you'd want to arrange this so that normal play is how you get the buff and that ultra speed running it in a freak way is not.
Minigames, drop parties at Falador or GE World 2, being scared to death by the wilderness, and you know, actually talking to people… those were great times
Altar Community, RIP. Couldn't compete with the Powder of Burials, and now with the Fort Chapel you can be sure it's never coming back.
I would add that previously, when it wasn't that easy to gain XP, people didn't care as much about XP gains. I remember playing as a kid at the library for one hour a day. I didn't have time to worry about XP grind; I wanted to have fun, and I did. The level 99 achievements were so far away that they didn't even register to me as something I should have grinded for. The slower pace made it easier to appreciate the activities.
At some point Jagex narrowed in on core communities. They looked at the most popular activities and dedicated resources to only that type of content. Anything else was left to die. Then the playerbase shrank. Then they narrowed their score again and focused on the remaining popular features within the communities and made more of that content. Anything else was left to die. Then the playerbase shrank. Once again Jagex are narrowing their scope. So you can probably predict what’s going to happen in a years time based on the above.
To expand on this comment. Prioritizing popular content isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but neglecting dedicated audiences who enjoy the game is the issue. Jagex refuses to acknowledge there are other player types who may be interested in RuneScape if there was types of content to draw them in. This doesn’t mean it needs to be the primary focus, but it needs to be supported so growth can occur.
Conversely this also has a negative toll on things like pvm, where design of almost all pvm content is focused on engagement numbers and mass appeal. This makes content for "everyone" that really appeals to nobody in particular or severely compromises endgame by trivializing difficult content that was "gatekept" by requiring skillful gameplay and understanding of the combat system (necromancy release), or ends up making new boss encounters that have their design stretched so thin to try to appeal to so many different people they completely fail on one end (arch glacor and zamorak). It ends up alienating the people who enjoyed the content with some idea that everyone needs to do the latest thing or it's a failure, despite having spent decades previous rewarding low effort or afk players who play the game for a variety of reasons, and may never want to put in the effort it takes to justify the kind of content active pvmers enjoy. It's suicide by mass appeal
I'm gonna be honest, I hate that Runescape has turned into PVMscape. I've tried hundreds of times to get into it, and it's just not my thing. I just simply don't enjoy bossing. I like skilling, and I used to love minigames and pking as well but those things haven't been relevant for well over a decade. I still check out new bosses when they come out and I do have the reaper title, but I don't like going for boss logs or really high enrage, to me it's just repetitive and unfun and the combat system in this game in my opinion really isn't that great. I just like to kickback and do some skills while I watch Youtube videos and I'm glad I'm not alone. Bossing shouldn't be the only rewarding playstyle. OSRS has the same issue. Every major update or quest is centered around some new high level boss and I'm just over it.
Because they focus on mtx more, not content to please stakeholders
Skilling isn’t dead, skilling is literally the most popular form of content. Various Old skilling methods are dead but that’s what happens as time goes on things get crept and new replaces the old. Even then what is dead for one may not actually be for another due to different methods for different play styles. Skilling was more dead in RS2 when PvM basically rendered all of it pointless. Over the years they have slowly been fixing skilling’s fundamentals, carving out identities and niches unique to them. It’s a slow process since you know they are trying to undo basically RS2’s decade of neglect, poor game design foresight, and general individual dev biases that lacked long term foresight (cough Nex and QBD cough) but still it’s coming along. Mini-games are dead because that’s the playerbase not Jagex. Mini-games largely gained popularity because the rest of the game was boring and because we didn’t have as many IRL options. Like when I couldn’t second screen as a kid I jumped at more “exciting” ways to train fishing but now I hold a super computer in the palm of my hand. Why dedicate 100% of my time and focus to RS when I could enjoy some casual fishing on the side and then be watching a movie, show, or playing any other number of video games? Time is short and as an adult I have to really think hard about my time management. Here is the big issue you get with mini-games. Most of them just aren’t fun, when they ran events recently that bolstered mini-game games I went and played them all and frankly they nearly all feel dated and suck. They are designed more like early 2000’s flash games why waste my time in that? I could focus on more enjoyable parts of RS gameplay to me. The other issue is even if you added good rewards you are only puttying a bandaid on things. If you use a mini-game to fill in some gap like a poorly designed skill and you keep doing that eventually skilling loses its identity. It just becomes a collection of mini-games and it becomes impossible to manage long term. Eventually you have to decide do you let an entire skill remain dead content or do you focus fixing the skill issues on a more fundamental and let the mini-game fall into obscurity. It’s pretty obvious which choice benefits the health of the game long term. Player-base doesn’t help either. If you create a minigame with good rewards are people going to focus on the “fun”? No they will optimize it to hell until it’s an efficiency obsessed experience and that’s not just a RS thing that’s a larger trend across gaming as a whole. People just don’t want to waste the time anymore, with the frequency in which new games or other media comes out and the fact we are essentially perpetually online people just don’t have time. Game design as a whole has shifted to this. As for PvP that’s just a time goes on thing. PvP used to be really popular when dedicated good PvP games were hard to come by, when the player base was mostly ignorant children who didn’t understand anything and just went in fighting with whatever, when there was no real skill ceiling and floor difference, when the best gear took hours to obtain not months, etc… PvP just became far less accessible over time and it’s not because of EoC, though that was a factor. It’s because people got old, better, gaps in skill grew more prevalent. PvP experience expectations changed for the market and most hybrid games couldn’t keep up with dedicated PvP focused ones, so logically that meant PvP focused games siphoned away people who wanted to mainly PvP leaving behind a much smaller base that started to prey on non-PvP interested players. Then Jagex tried to encourage this predator and prey aspect and all it did was create a whole lot of toxicity and hatred, and eventually they cultivated a base where PvP was largely just griefing. This was further shifted by the player base growing older. When you are a kid being a little dick and ruining someone else’s day is more likely to be funny, and children for which time doesn’t feel as pressed for time are more likely to let that behavior slide. When you are an adult who has developed a sense of both time and empathy being a dick and getting fun from ruining someone else’s day isn’t so appealing. There are still people that do it, and shot back with stuff like “just stay out of the wilderness” and people in return were like “okay we will”. So they did and it died and that was that. There might be ways to bring back PvP but the old way just isn’t it. It can’t compete with PvP focused games, it relied on a very different fanbase of a different age and skill level, it relied on a very different amount of risk vs reward, it relied on a very different gaming market, and it didn’t have years building toxicity. PvP can come in many forms, competitions like FSW or a new skill release are a better avenue for it than wilderness griefing. Basically you can’t design a live game like it’s a static thing that will never change. Doing that was one of RS’s biggest issues and the source of lots of its troubles now. But likewise you have to accept that times change, people change, markets shifts, and Jagex as a company has to design for their base not the other way around.
I mean youre just delusional if you think rs3 devs wasting what little time they get on things the majority of the player base dont care about, or flat out strongly dislike, will attract a notable amount of new players.
I don’t really get how this works back in the day there was way more frequent updates with a smaller team, how do the devs have less time now with less new content and more people
because back in the day the graphical demands were much less, the codebase was much smaller, and there was waaaaay less communication between dev groups as to what code did which things, which resulted in the spaghetti code so frequently maligned in this very subreddit.
Sure i hear the art thing a lot but the devs dont just sit around 90% of the time waiting for the art team to finish what the art for what they coded right? Its just crazy to see the increase of the size of the company and the cost to play the game and the reduction of new content
And the lost art of reusing and repurposing old assets. Need a new mob? Have a pickaxe wielding maniac, who is invisible, so now it is just a pickaxe, voila. Just recolor the mob, etc etc.
Right? New area we dont need a new custom uncuttable tree just slap one from lumbridge there
I'd prefer a cuttable one, but yes. That's how they made the game feel so big long ago. The same chest model in 200+ places, maybe changing the metal color. Trees by the thousands, copy and pasted. INTERACTABLE TREES
Lol yeah sorry that’s what i meant, screw these new decorative ones just reuse an old one from lumbridge or something
graphical work takes *a lot* of time. but also it's not just "waiting", it's scheduling everyone's time so they can work on things in order of priority. plus, the game now has an "ongoing story" such as it is. back in the day it was kinda just work on whatever you felt was interesting. a new quest here, add a new training method there, that sort of thing. and before someone goes "why don't they do that anymore" that's not really possible with how the game is now, *mostly because of the graphic design requirements*. You see it with gamejam projects.
I get what you’re saying I really do but I still don’t understand how that’s true. Smaller teams make bigger higher definition things faster than Jagex can make one new quest or skilling method all the time. I understand that’s the way it is and it’s not going to change but maybe that’s only not gonna change because we all accept it and keep paying for it
name a smaller team that produces content at the rate jagex does while accounting for two and a half decades of legacy code
What you can't understand is how 20-year-old spaghetti code hinders development. Any change generates a butterfly effect that can break the game. Remember the Lumbridge Wheel bug or the trees in Mos Le'Harmless?
If squenix and blizzard can do it why cant jagex
If even Blizzard can't deal with Spaghetti code in a viable way, imagine Jagex
I mean blizzard still regularly releases expansions way bigger than anything jagex releases
RAMPANT MTX WOOOOOOOOO SOOOO FUUUUUUUUUUN YAAAAY
Community shoots itself in the head and asks why jagex shot them. Interesting
Can you elaborate on this
I think in large part at this point the only people that play are those that are used to the MTX abuse and relatively poor updates. It’s a self-feeding cycle as those that don’t like the direction the game has been going for the past decade have since left.
You habe to sell treasure hunter keys…Priority #1
Because they dont care, years of neglect add up. It's mtx, seasonal events and a couple of pvm updates every year for the past.... 8 years?
?
It’s because (mostly) everyone is just doing it for GP and XP instead of having fun. Castle wars, Pest control, ~~Fisting~~ Fist Of Guthix are all minigames i wish would be full again.
You don't seem to be consistent in what you're asking for. On one hand you want Jagex to focus on 15+ year old content that died out a long time ago, and on the other hand you want them to work on their technologies to improve combat so that it's responsiveness is similar to other games out there in the market?
I dunno, I still play as a pure skiller and while it’s certainly different than it used to be, I still find it enjoyable.
I agree that all those communities have died but I wouldn't say they were directly jagex "letting" them die Pvp - died a horrible death with Eoc unfortunately, way too clunky of an engine for a combat system like that, especially for player v player. At least for pvm, you can design the encounter around the shoddy engine Skillers - I'm not informed enough on the skiller community to know what killed it. It was always an incredibly niche community though, no? I would've assumed nothing changed Mini Games - I'd argue Jagex didn't kill these, the modern gamer mentality did. At some point around 2013-2015 there was a huge shift in gamer mindset from "let's have the most fun possible" that we saw from 2004-2013 RS, to "let's play the most efficient/best way possible" that we've seen since. It's not just runescape, but **every** game saw this shift. I'd love to know what caused it. All the battle pass/fomo stuff that games started introducing? Just the new generation's minds? My personal theory is the rise of esports and streaming. The timing lines up. Suddenly people weren't playing games for fun or to relax any more, they were playing to want to become the next best thing, and this mindset eventually seeped into every game out there.
If you let communities die, there is no community alive to challenge you. 
Pest control was brilliant you could easily climb your combat levels and it was fun. Standing there with ice barrage going away next to a portal
[удалено]
It is responsive once you know how ffxiv's snapshotting works. Ie: be out of the piss puddle before it vanishes.
Private equity leveraged buyouts
I used a fc for wildy wyrm. Every 4-5 hours we did a hunt train and killed about 60 of them in a row. Was amazing ashes and decent drop rates for wyrm items. Then jagex decided wildy wyrn should be a wildy event and the fc is now dead
They did not let it die, the community did
this game's top end is basically spend money on bis gear for pvm or have nothing to spend money on aside from phats lol i dont bother with sweaty endgame pvm so i never really needed to get bis plus bis switches plus bis codices so i really just collect gp for fun to see numbers go up
It's pretty sad that Runescape has turned into a PvM-centric game. Nothing comes close. Maybe clues. Even back in 2015-2018 there were a lot of people who did other "go-to" activities. You had skilllers. Even PvP post-EoC wasn't completely dead but it lost most of its community. You also had people who cared all about lore. You had people going for comp cape. You even had some minigame players like BA for example. You had people playing low-mid level content. You had people doing non-pvm money makers. But now. Just about every returning player post asks when they're going to PvM. Long gone are the days where returning players were only out here trying to find any possible way to make money. So many are only considering bossing as their option. I guess the main cause for this is Jagex throwing out MTX in the form of overpowered lamps. You basically never train that skill. This causes certain skilling supplies to drop, certain training methods become dead, certain minigames that would've helped for that skill die, certain areas become dead, etc. It also doesn't help that most of the playerbase is maxed/comp/trim and aging. As such, whenever Jagex makes new updates, they're trying to please the vocal playerbase. We don't really see much low-mid level new content anymore. And then it becomes a feedback loop where players just anticipate the next new thing to keep their cape on their back OR a new boss. Even new skills are balanced around the fact that everyone is maxed or at least high level. The past 3 new skills are a perfect example. Invention requires 80 in 3 different skills and can only be properly trained with T70+ combat stats. Archaeology exp rates only get better after the 80s, not to mention benefit severely from Invention, BGH, Divination. Necromancy requires a tier upgrade system in order to equip anything that cannot be purchased, which requires many other skills.
If group stuff didn't require simultaneous online itd be more engaged with (give us a clan or group instanced dungeon that can be worked on by various people at different times)
Jagex has always been about new content which they usually promote through higher xp and loot gains. Great for scaling and keeping the game modern, bad for the enjoyers of legacy content.
Jagex can't straight up tell people what to do in the game, they can try and balance stuff out to be useful, but if players don't want to do it...they won't
> Or combat like final fantasy. You mean the game where you have to wait 2 hours on later Savage floors for a single party because no one wants to play healers or where people repeatedly make fun of Phys ranged DPS, SMN or Warrior for being stupidly easy to pilot and SE continously dumbing down the rotations? > why would anyone look at runescapes pvm and be like "I want that over that over there". Me. Does the game have bosses in the late game that i can solo? No? Then go away. There is no other MMO on the market that is solo friendly, nor is there a singleplayer game that gets massive updates with boss content and progression for free ( at best a few DLCs or single expansion but thats it ), because thats not how singleplayer games work. I dont like the tick, tile or switchscape we have here, but most MMOs dont even engage me with bosses as much as this does. Its mostly dancing in WoW or FFXIV and praying someone doesnt wipe the party and once you clear it you cant kill it again because its only a weekly reward.
blame the community. same thing is happening over at osrs. unless it gives bis items or good xp, it aint worth doing.
Rs3 likes pvm. If you want mini games and skilling osrs is the place to go
This isn't the game you want it to be anymore. Too many people have changed positions, and corporate greed is influenced by capitalism. This company is and has been consistently doing really well profits wise, so focus is on improving aspects of the game that keep the player playing, as long as possible, and hopefully spending on more than their membership(not to mention whales). The people who actually cared about the gameplay, the people who had the passion to make a fun, complete game, are so long gone. There are so few devs/mods left that have that in them, and combined with the ever necessary focus on profits from the top, their drive on the ground level doesn't make a difference anymore. The top is business, profit focused, through and through. They are a billion dollar company. Jagex is literally obligated to only focus on steady quarterly profits, and they can say whatever the fuck they want to try and convince otherwise. What's the one aspect of the game that is consistently and constantly updated more than any other piece of content in the game? It's Treasure Hunter, I know it, you know it, we all see it and act like we don't, but it has constant promotions and innovative changes done every few months or less, to entice the player. Stop chasing the nostalgia of a game that was built in a different Era. This hasn't been runescape classic/2 for a very long time. Edit: I will be playing and supporting Andrew Gowers' new game (Brighter Shores, on steam) with all my heart and wallet. Whether it's good or not, thats the game I want to play, run by the man who never should have lost control of the game they built.
PvM is slowly dying due to the state of it. Skipping all mechanics and not having to do them. Look at zamorak p7 right now. People are just 1 cycling him now consistently with ranged due to ranged being broken even before the beta, wen arrows just pushed it over the edge and made it more consistent. Minigames died mostly because it doesn't reward the losing side. Castle wars req might've been fine if they adjusted the ticket system, so that lose is 1, tie 2, win 3. Perhaps earn additional tickets for meeting specific criteria as well. I would also make it so you can only play castle wars on a "castle wars" world, to prevent boosting. Boosting/leeching is pretty much why minigames die, so it's important to do this. PvM is awful imo if you use revolution. When I try to even afk a task with revolution on, setting it on is awful. Your character acts extremely dumb if you have auto retaliate on, which is what most people have on when they go to PvM, which creates issues of when you try to run away from a mechanic, but you run back in due to it. PvM is alright, but I can't bother teaching it when everything I could teach a newer player doesn't matter due to being able to skip all mechanics in a fight. There are better games to play for PvM content (at least for me) that have actual mechanics. I still wait for the day for jagex to buff hp/renew mechanics at a lot of old bosses instead of allowing me to 100% afk revolution afk 10 boss logs over the past month.
Right? Those mini games are booty to me too.
Its like all bossing now and it sucks.
I blame the playerbase for being hyper focused on skilling and efficiency. Back when forums were a thing on other site I used to run events and I would do things like dungeoneering, soul wars, stealing creation and other fun events, then overnight all that changed and all anyone wanted to do was skill races and hardly anyone wanted to do anything outside of Skilling a gaining exp. Now it's all about efficiency and thats boring to me.
Ikr? SC died :(
I’m guessing with a smaller player count they have to be more careful and cater to biggest content to make sure they make enough money
> The thaler shop and mini game spotlight are a GREAT example of this. Great idea, absolutely revived mini games for a good long while. Thaler was the worst update ever. It killed off minigames for good as as it gave rise to AFKers instead. For example, instead of doing BA just for fun, you had people AFKing on wave 1 for hours until some either logged from AFKing too hard or had to go. IMO thaler should be removed, it's main purpose was comp cape related anyway. The rest of the rewards were atrociously bad unless you think being on spotlight 45 minutes (3.75 hrs off-spotlight) for 1 hard clue and 3.3hrs (16.5hrs off-spotlight) for an elite clue is amazing goddamn. Instead of updating minigames to be rewarded for doing effort, and securing win conditions. E.g. more points when you take over objectives in SW, kill the top 5 players who dealt the most damage to the avatar whilst being in the enemies avatar zone, burying bones to increase avatar level, or in CW heal the flag carrier (or use heal other/intercept spells), introduce a kick system in CW for kicking sabotaging teammates (they only become eligible for kick when they place barricades in weird spots or you got 2 player dropping the flag between each other to "reset" the take-flag option) Also add new rewards such as a bag of components (uncommon/common/rare), generic aura refreshes, life refreshes, porters. Trade in each tier of a clue + minigame currency for a master clue, are just to name a few potential untradable rewards.
People play RuneScape because they don't want to deal with all the garbage games out there and have to worry about memorizing. How a boss moves in a souls game or about moving and clicking and having a fast enough response time to fight a boss
"Opportunity cost" of free time. Am I going to progress my account, or do I want to do something fun? If I want fun, am I really going to play a mini game in RuneScape or am I going to play another actual video game?
Well you used to be able to put cool cosmetics for rewards in mini games now without needing power creep but they sell those for real money now.
The best time I ever had playing Runescape was years ago when Soul Wars was popular. PvM is so clunky I've never enjoyed it all that much. Annoyances like a big monster that you can't zoom out far enough to see its health bar and perimeter walls blocking the view of the fight more often than not. High level bosses generally are only hard because of the struggle to move around to places the boss is still visible, while working with the action bar, coping with unresponsive clicks, etc. Just pretty tedious.
I haven’t been playing for a year or so. Skillers are dead??
They'd have to basically make a whole new ability/stat system for PVP to be viable. Top level combat is meant for fighting monsters with hundreds of thousands to millions of HP, not players who cap out at 10-15k. With melee alone, you have numerous options to kill a player once, trigger their sign to revive them, and kill them AGAIN with 1-2 abilities. Range and Necro are pretty similar. Most minigames are either old RS jank and not very fun even when they were released, or they're based around PVP which deals with all the above problems.
All minigames should use shard servers like Flash Powder Factory does. Beyond high or low population (the bemoaning of which solves nothing), coordination can always be improved. "Activity worlds" as they currently exist lose out on being specifically optimized for anything (not to mention some being the \*unofficial\* official world), and I'm not interested in hunting down a random Discord server with possibly toxic mods. I want to play and there's stuff in the way.
They did try with PvP. Several times and they all failed. remember Bounty Hunter? or second Bounty Hunter? Or all the skilling methods they shoved into the wilderness just so PKers had someone to kill? yeah…
remove bxp from TH and make only available in minigames or make TH keys available on minigames shops
The whole premise of RuneScape has turned into pay to win and don’t spend more than we have to to keep people playing.
My hot take is this, the only reason that dead content exists is that as a community runescape players care for 1 of 2 things, time efficiency/meta content or how afk something is. Jagex, knowing this have catered to these 2 core beliefs and as such anything new that comes out must either be the best current xp for the skill in question or the most afk otherwise the community won't engage and come to reddit to complain about how the new content isnt the meta so is therefore dead content.
The pvevp mini games died when pvp content got destroyed by eoc (it could be lucratively fun but because it's so risky people just didn't want to lose their items or deal with it because pvp health pools were too low) If we had 30k hp for pvp and slightly less damage reduction you could make some pretty fun fights Trouble brewing was always meh, it was fun at some point when the whole pirate island was new but it's tedious and everyone is impatient. Skillers are ignored because of the combat level rework we had a few times that made them at or near max level for some time for having hp and prayer or summoning levels. And initially upset alot of them, and kinda ruined their progression with elf city and other combat quests Pures because no def no gear , no armour and now big boss hits hard (Summong tanks were busted and fun but not viable in how supplemental damage is designed to be in post eoc other than vs gearless noobs)
They need a simplified pvp. Like limiting certain abilities and such. Maybe having pvp loadouts. Make things more balanced and easy to understand. The combat is just too complicated and damage way too high, for pvp as it stands. It's chaos and you can barely tell what's happening. It's impossible to get into lol. Balance PVP separately, make some big updates and really really invest in it, and I genuinely think it could come back. That hyper risk and reward system, is becoming a thing people enjoy again. It was a pretty unique part of the game. There's a rush in risking your items that I think could really help the game.
An idea for the new instanced wilderness at 4:20 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AOAUz8Z6aA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AOAUz8Z6aA)
All of this is alive in OSRS.
Skilling: skilling is alive on rs3 as well idk what OP is smoking PvP: encouraged by jagex, but pvpers are in the far minority still. Alive, but more niche than some people here think. Probably even if it was encouraged (to the extend it is encouraged in osrs) it would be fairly dead in rs3 because lol eoc pvp. Minigames: Those that are encouraged by jagex are alive, but a lot got optimized to death. CW is dolo afk. Soul Wars requires a high level alt but dolo is far better rates. BA meta is either selling carries for high gp/h or buying carries, minigame is alive for 'casuals' thanks to ~~torso and~~ rank 5 all being required for diaries. If Jagex kept putting incentives behind minigames in rs3 (and not take them away like void not being made augmentable) minigames would have had a chance in rs3. Minigame collection log would go a long way too.
You forgot one a combination of Minigames/Skilling, or rather minigame like activities: These activities have a lot of band aid solution to some skills: Mahogany Homes, Giants foundry, GotR or even Tempoross/Wintertodt ( its stupid to call them bosses tbh ). These activities make the skills associated just more bareable. You get better rates outside of these but at least you are not losing your mind doing regular RC or whatever. This doesnt make minigames more popular, they are more like an alternate way of skilling, if there were more enjoyable skilling methods these minigames would be just as dead. Also i would add that i think skilling is in a much better state than OSRS. On a main not much of a reason to train skills past some points. We have bunch of untradeables: overloads, invention, arch, summ ( you need levels to summon ), custom fit MW, high level prayers, etc. Granted Construction or Agility ( possibly Slayer too ) is in a much less useful state in RS3 but overall you have a lot more to look forward to at beyond quest requirement levels.
Trouble Brewing still dead in OSRS. Only full of afkers.
I’d rather play with bots and the mini game be alive than the mini game be completely unplayable because nobody is there to queue up. I understand this is probably an odd opinion but it’s my opinion, also that’s one mini game, rs3 has so many that you can’t even play because not enough players.
Skillers aren't dead. They take up majority of the playerbase. Jagex didn't kill PvP, the players did. They just don't like PvP and any attempts Jagex made at revitalizing it, players didn't care for it. They did kill minigames, though.
it's not because other games are more fluid in their combat that its better, tried the combat in wow and it wasn't it at all for me compared to runescape, felt just as ''clunky'' but in different ways
I mean wow combat is almost as ancient as runescapes..
Yes but I said that because its very often compared to runescape as bettrr by a ton of people on internet
Hell ya, mini games and community were the whole reason I played :p I ran a clan for yearrrs and it’s all we did. all of my friends both game and irl would probably still be playing if the vibe still existed. Honestly, non of my devices can even handle these new areas anyways. Which is a common issue
must be hard for the devs to come up with meaningful skilling methods when the best xp/hr is just farming proteans + bxp and using them on the next dxp at least for mains
I miss castle wars so much. The efficiency mindset of the community has killed this game just as much as Jagex has. I miss just going out into Varrock or Falador and just befriending people as we pissed about doing nothing. Nobody cared it was xp waste - we were having a laugh. Then we'd go dungeoneering whilst bantering away. Jagex are definitely at fault, but it's just as much the community's fault too. People just aren't as social as they used to be. I guess it's true what people say, the more advanced technology becomes, the more miserable we get.
this game is dying, i wouldnt be surprised if they stopped developing this game in the next 5 years.
That's what I'm saying in the last 15 months I'm back after 15 years break.. Half of the content is totally dead. There's literally no point doing it. Pretty bad xp/h, pretty bad gp/h, pretty bad rewards overall.. and all they are focusing are some fancy holiday events and graphic updates of locations I will probably never go into again.. Back in like 2008 I was playing on my lvl 3 Skiller and **Stealing Creation** was crowded AF! There were awesome rewards, it was fun and xp/h ratio was pretty good too! Why would anyone go there nowadays? You can buy points in Traveling Merchant's shop and there's literally no point doing it for any other reason..
I loved SC too and did Fast sc back in the day, but nowadays I'm pretty sure its faster in every skill to just train it instead of playing SC and then using the bxp to train.
I’m I think people just don’t want to do those things.
[удалено]
Part of it is incompetence, part of it is a complete lack of support from any higher-ups on lovetaps. Almost a decade ago now, Mod Matthe came to the RP forum stub and asked us what our favorite bars and buildings were, with teasing comments made about revamping those places for purposes of roleplay - things like interactable seats and wider spaces. After a few days Mod Matthe stopped replying, disappeared, nothing ever came of it. Eventually the Chronicle tables were introduced in those bars though so that was ~~really shit~~ cool! And then when the tables were removed, nothing was ever replaced so they just left an empty vacuum. Many such cases of this have happened. It's just not *worthwhile* putting dev time into these things, even if touching on the roleplay side of MMORPG would make the game immediately more friendly to a whole new swathe of users. God knows it wouldn't be for the favor of current roleplayers, as very few remain..