Where RuneScape Went Wrong

In the beginning, god created heaven and earth.

However, in the other beginning, Andrew Gower sat in his parents bedroom for roughly a year and the result was runescape classic. This was in 1999. Runescape Classic (RSC) started off as a simple idea that Andrew Gower had in his mind. Over the course of about 3 years, RSC grew and grew until eventually it was decided that it was time for an upgrade, so along came runescape (otherwise known as runescape 2) at this time graphics went from this:

Image via Wikipedia

To this:

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, this was seen as being a huge improvement and Andrew Gower was applauded by the ever growing runescape community (myself being 1 of them) and as the runescape community grew, it appeared that so did Jagex’s ambitions for runescape. They continued to expand the runescape world, added in random events and the ever popular holiday drops for more ’seasoned’ players. However, this was where the problem began. Following the party hat and halloween mask drops, the runescape community grew hugely, this growth consisted of children who were hoping for some other tradeable holiday item. However they were not so lucky. By roughly 2004, the little children were getting more and more annoyed that there was no ‘quick fix’ to being poor in runescape, because they were just too lazy to work hard for money, while the veterans of runescape held their riches over them. As more discontinued items like the half full wine jug and the disk of returning came in to the game, they became even more annoyed that there had been no ‘fair warning’ about it, as they put it at the time. So, they decided to go and waste their parents hard earned money on buying virtual gold. This came at a cost to the runescape community. People began to buy more and more gold, some accounts were stolen or banned in the process and the children that lost their accounts began to cry about it… But those who were not stopped quickly got ripped off by the higher players and they found themselves with a lot less than they wanted. So, they bought more gold. Jagex quickly realised what was going on and took action against them. But, they found more and more ways to get the gold on to their accounts without Jagex realising. But Jagex did realise. By mid 2008 the methods they were using were completely obvious. They were using either a small corner of the wilderness to kill the player who had the gold that they’d bought or using the duel arena by staking the millions that they’d payed for. If they weren’t in to attempted subtlety, there was always the old favourite of just simply trading it. So what did Jagex do? They removed pvp in the wilderness and replaced it with a badly thought out minigame named bounty hunter. People began to become annoyed because pvping was a large part of runescape, in fact several thousand people logged on for pvp and nothing else. So all those people unsubscribed. So what if it’s a few thousand people you say? Well, those thousands of people who used pvp each would have had 2-6 accounts each. A tank, range pure, mage pure, main, str pure etc. So that was a fairly large part of the community gone. However, people buying gold didn’t stop. They continued to just trade it over or use the duel arena. So Jagex decided that they would add in a trade limit… They thought that this would stop people from being able to buy gold. A 3k limit for people with no quest points, up to a 60k limit for people with 270+ quest points. A picture of the new trade screen is below.

Image Via tip.it

So this was a major let down for all of those people who enjoyed merchanting. The same trade limit was also applied to the duel arena, however, the maximum either player could stake was made 3k instead of a 3k difference. Players of course found a way round this, using junk items to make up the trade difference. However this didn’t change the fact that the runescape economy was crashing. Jagex attempted to replace free trading like they tried to do with pvp (and failed). Their new idea was the grand exchange, a place where players could go to buy and sell items, but within a set price that was set by Jagex. This led to the price changing daily for almost every item in the game, which meant that players were left often losing gold from buying something and then seeing the price fall when they tried to sell it again. While this happened before the grand exchange, it was never to this level for a single item. This also led to the rare items dramatically falling in price, as thousands more players quit the game, selling their rares at low prices. Since Jagex removed pvp, over 600 thousand people have cancelled their runescape subscriptions. Over half the runescape population decided it was time to move on. Since they left, rare items have dramatically fallen, christmas crackers that were once 1 billion gp have almost halved, now selling for just under 700m. Blue partyhats that were once around 550m are now selling for less tan 350m. The global runescape economy is crashing. Have a look through http://itemdb-rs.runescape.com/frontpage.ws if you want to see for yourself. Although the xmas cracker appears to have stabled, there’s no denying that it’s fallen over 300m in the past 18 months or so. In the past 30 days alone, the blue phat has fallen 2% in price.

However, despite all the doom and gloom, Jagex have at least made 1 slight comeback. The introduction of pvp worlds. This is slightly ironic, for those of you who had accounts at the time, think back a bit. About 3 years ago, a player logged in to rs to find a bug, this bug was not there because he chose it to be there, it just happened to be there when he logged on. This bug made his character act as though it was in the wilderness, so he could attack anybody no matter where he was. So he decided to abuse it and stood in falador killing people as they went around. The people were unable to fight back, so he gained a lot of loot. People heard about this and started going on to the world he was on and decided to actually line up with their rares shouting “kill me!” Jagex heard about this, went to him in game and permenantly banned him from runescape. 3 years on, they’ve decided to make worlds where anybody can attack anybody (within a certain level range) IMO this has been the best addition to runescape since the wilderness was made pvp-less.

I just hope that runescape can become great like it was before it all went wrong.

Also, notice how Jagex had to remove the “over 250 million players” banner that they had on their site for about a day. This was removed because Jagex were sued by other MMOs because they were using lies to make themselves look better than other gaming companies. Out of those “250 million” accounts, only 50 million were active in the past 5 years and 3 million in the past year. Out of those 3 million in the past year, only 400k were paying members.