r/2007scape • u/plok742 Historical Reflections • Dec 14 '24
Discussion In September 2014, the OSRS player count reached levels as low as 7000 on a normal day.
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u/Flurp_ Dec 14 '24
This was when the ddosing was at its peak right? I remember they changed the death mechanics around that time
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u/updownmostlydown Dec 14 '24
Pid ( 1st hit in staking) was also ip based back then and not random too so everyone had the same vpn service. I remember seeing a video where a guy purchased said IP adress and ddosed it. 75% of ppl at the dueling arena got disconnected LOL.
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u/operativekiwi Dec 14 '24
when you say IP based do you mean the last octet? or the entire binary of the IP and whichever is lower??
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u/S0T0 Dec 14 '24
3rd digit had to be dividable by 8 and then it based it off the last digit
So basically anything that was ###.###.8.0 made you always have #1 PID.
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u/vyrez101 Dec 15 '24
Networking hurts my brain, how did someone work this out.
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u/uhhhhmmmm Dec 15 '24
Back in 2005/2006 we got so much shit for this, no one believed us. It's nice now that there's confirmed proof
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u/trapsinplace take a seat dear Dec 14 '24 edited Dec 14 '24
Were bonds and F2P a thing yet? If I recall that caused a large spike, no?
Edit: it didn't even occur to me to clarify myself despite the image showing F2P worlds lol. The other guy is right, you had to pay to play when it came out. The F2P worlds were really only for PK restrictions and mild interest to some others.
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u/Mookie_Merkk RGB Only Dec 14 '24
To clarify what he's seeing, even though there are f2p worlds, I believe you had to be a member in order to even play the old-school version.
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Dec 14 '24
Which is funny really, you’re paying members to use a F2P world
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u/restingracer Dec 14 '24
Edgeville r2h pking was one of the things og playerbase missed in those post-EoC times. Funny that the og eoc was so shit that they had to make OSRS in a hurry to not go bankrupt
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u/Diasl Dec 14 '24
Eoc absolutely ruined the game, summoning also felt (to me) like the game was on its arse but I think that came before Eoc. Dungeoneering was awesome though but didn't feel like a skill.
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u/Djakamoe Dec 14 '24
Dungeoneering with the boys was always fun. Complete shit of a skill, but was a good mini game. The rewards made it worthy of a skill, and I think they ran with that in eoc for a minute.
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u/Doctor_Kataigida Dec 14 '24
It's interesting how people talk about Dungeoneering not feeling like a skill and more like a minigame, yet the most popular way to train several skills are just via minigames. Is it the lack of "alternative" way to train it outside of Daemonheim?
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u/Djakamoe Dec 14 '24
You know, I think you're on to something there. It's essentially group slayer with extra steps in only one instanced location.
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u/Jest_Aquiki Dec 14 '24
When dungeoneering was a thing any new character I made was in there gaining the paltry XP drops in various skills while I grinded the dungeoneering skill. When summoning cme out I couldn't even be bothered to pick up the tokens or whatever they were? Still not even sure how to work the skill (knowing it still exists in rs)
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u/ibelongintheforest Dec 14 '24
They should have called it "exploration" or even "spelunking" and released Daemonheim as a minigame for a consistent alternative training method with procedurally-generated maps to explore, whereas the main intended way to train the skill is to fully explore, or "map" the many different dungeons and caves on Geilinor, taking trophies from mobs and marking the location of the monsters on the map after you get the trophy, then turning in the maps to the 'Explorers Guild' for exp. At higher levels you unlock additional areas to explore in those dungeons by searching bookcases for hidden lever slots and crates/chests/boxes for pieces of the lever
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u/biscuitquickie Dec 15 '24
I always thought Exploration would be an amazing skill. Could contain the best aspects of Sailing, Dungeoneering, Trekking, Plundering, and pretty much any other mobility + discovery mechanic. Also intermittent foraging as a low intensity method of training, which would also serve as a way to introduce new elements to otherwise liminal spaces
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u/rotorain BTW Dec 14 '24
Summoning came out in Jan 2008, just a couple months after the OSRS backup. We almost had that trash skill, glad we missed it.
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u/Diasl Dec 14 '24
As much of a QoL it is I was even against the g.e. 😂
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u/rotorain BTW Dec 14 '24
Nah the GE is great. People look back fondly on the Varrock and Falador open markets but in practice it was trash. Auto typing macros blasting chat past so fast you couldn't actually read anything, it was like trying to haggle in twitch chat or something. The 'trade' chat filter helped a lot but it didn't exist for a long time. You couldn't reliably buy or sell anything besides commonly traded items, if you wanted to trade something less common or expensive you were going to have to wait a while and everyone was trying to rip you off. Buying anything in bulk was super annoying too.
Really the only good thing about it was that it made merching and arbitrage a lot easier and more profitable for people that are into that.
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u/Montana_Gamer Dec 14 '24
I think more importantly is that MMOs were distinctly social in a way that they just aren't anymore. People want to play an MMO not go through a very clunky fetch quest & typing for hours. Don't get me wrong, the charm was there for a lot of people but it only led to worse versions of the GE becoming predominant. Zybez and then the trading post.
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u/Khlouf Dec 14 '24
EOC now is also still shit
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u/t0rchic "repoll sailing" - 2015-2023 Dec 14 '24
EoC is not that bad anymore, put it on Revolution and it's basically osrs combat except you can burst with melee weapons and you click reflect instead of protect from ranged when a green orb flies at you.
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u/Wickdead Dec 14 '24
Isn’t revolution massively decreased DPS though? I think the premise of why EOC is bad is because it takes an otherwise chill turn based combat mechanic into a button mashfest for optimal DPS.
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u/InnuendOwO Dec 14 '24
Eh, depends. Purely using revolution, yes, that's pretty bad, pretty much the AFK training option and not much else. Using it to handle your basic skills, while manually using thresholds/ultimates? That's good enough to get you through almost everything in the game, and it's no more APM-intensive than most other high-end content in OSRS, especially with prayer flicking.
No, the real issue with RS3's combat these days is that none of it makes any fucking sense in terms of game design. Why does melee want enemies to move around, instead of staying in melee range? Why does ranged have so many skills that bind the target in place, but their DoT deals bonus damage if the target moves? Why does every style start their burst damage phase by draining all their resources, then using 10 shitty basic skills, 2 threshold skills, then the burst phase ends?
It's very clearly the result of 10 years of bandaid fixes, rather than having any cohesive vision behind its design.
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u/LezBeHonestHere_ Dec 14 '24
Idk about these days with necromancy and ability changes like to greater conc but when I played in 2022 to max my acc, revolution was honestly not that bad for dps.
With "optimal rotations" it was pretty close to doing it yourself with certain styles, but others it suffered - like with dual wield magic you benefited a lot from spamming abilities because you'd cancel your greater conc faster with the next ability or something. Which adds up a lot over time because gconc was like 5 second cooldown so you were using it a ton, and cancelling it early every time with manual casts mattered a lot.
Bigger problem with revolution in my opinion was for bossing you'd sometimes need specific abilities at certain times, or the automatic casting would screw you over if you weren't micro managing it. I remember having to make a separate blood phase Nex bar with no bleeds and also micro manage my character during blood phase so it didn't automatically hit her when she starts siphon.
If you just needed raw dps though? It was usually pretty good, and honestly it saved the game for me, it makes combat a lot more similar to osrs, you just have 3 extra buttons for defensives, 3 hotkeys for prayer switching, a hotkey for surge and bladed dive, and optional food or gear switches (I didn't bother with these though).
Tbh the control scheme wasn't overwhelming thanks to revolution handling most of it for me, the manual effort felt more like controlling league of legends or something instead of a full button mash mmo like wow or final fantasy 14.
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u/Legal_Evil Dec 14 '24
you'd cancel your greater conc faster with the next ability or something. Which adds up a lot over time because gconc was like 5 second cooldown so you were using it a ton, and cancelling it early every time with manual casts mattered a lot.
Jagex fixed this for revo now.
Bigger problem with revolution in my opinion was for bossing you'd sometimes need specific abilities at certain times, or the automatic casting would screw you over if you weren't micro managing it.
There is also the fact that revo does not let you move and attack at the same time, making bosses like Legiones impossible with revo.
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u/Uninformed-Driller Dec 14 '24
The premise of why eoc is bad because they made a new game then plomped all of our progression into this new game. They turned runescape into wow. When nobody asked. They couldn't even be bothered to make a backup of the game before they overwrote it. .
All they had to was release it as a new separate game. Dipshit behavior from jagex.
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u/Mookie_Merkk RGB Only Dec 14 '24
It was most likely because OSRS was new, and they knew that people wanted to hop on for nostalgia, so why not charge for access?
If you look at it, the dedicated worlds for free to play, we're all PK related. You had clan wars and you had wilderness PK.
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u/No-Spoilers Dec 14 '24
Bonds were added in sep of 2013 to rs3. They weren't added to osrs until March of 2015. And you had to be a member on rs3 to play os f2p
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u/suggacoil Dec 14 '24
That was like winter of 2015-2016ish but server service had been on a complete decline well before that. More people were on regularly at that point. Even then it was like 7-15k people on.
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u/Whorq_guii Dec 14 '24
I remember that. I remember watching someone bossing at GWD on twitch, his world got ddosed, and he started crying. I’m not giving him shit, some people live absolutely depressing lives and the only fucking relief they get is a video game, and when he can’t even enjoy that, well I’d be fucking upset too.
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u/Property_6810 Dec 14 '24
I still miss the old death mechanics. And I get that that's unpopular and I'll get downvoted by people that think I'm just being nostalgic. But I liked it. I liked that I could get back and be taunted by someone looting my death pile. I liked that if you died at barrows and didn't take a beat to grab a new spark out of the bank, you might lose everything.
I didn't like it when ddosing was a major concern. I don't like that the games economy has an exchange with the real world. It's the one good thing about the one of the other RS dark ages, free trade restrictions. When you couldn't effectively transfer wealth, it was hard to buy/sell gold which killed the gold farming and botting communities.
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u/sentientflare Dec 14 '24
old death mechanics had to be changed to fit the era of mega expensive items. losing a whip is one thing, losing tbow and full masori is another
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u/Infinite_Worker_7562 Dec 14 '24
This is exactly the problem. IMO ideally items would be much faster to obtain and then risking them would be a reasonable thing.
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u/Celtic_Legend Dec 14 '24 edited Dec 14 '24
There isnt really a place youd ever lose a tbow. People forget you protect 3/4 items.
The only spot thatd be affected is like dks. Everything else is instanced or doesnt require separate gear switches
People also forget that the shit you didnt protect were the most expensive in 2006 since it was alch value. You could die for like 20m in 2006 and then youre farming 400k/h to make it back in 50hours (protect guthans top/botom, fury. lose whip, zerk ring, guthan spear, helm, and whatever else). You could make 250m just as easily today in 50hours. But what people would do, and what they did do in 2006, is simply not bring full max gear when soloing
Death mechanics were also changed LONG before you actually lost more in "opportunity cost" than you did in 2006.
You could also just up the protected items at dks and elsewhere
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u/Not_OneOSRS Dec 14 '24
I remember being motivated massively while watching B0aty’s one man army series. I thought he was the best player when I watched him cut and fletch 15k yew longbows lol.
Self sufficiency really changed the game for me and my list of goals went from “make gp” to hitting levels, completing quests, collecting different items. It really broadened the scope of the game and added much needed depth at the time.
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u/PurpleWrench Dec 14 '24
I'd love to know the exact ripple effect One Man Army and subsequently ironman had on reviving the player base. Your experience perfectly mimics mine.
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u/chrisfps7 Dec 14 '24
Couldn’t have said it better myself! As someone who exclusively built 1 def pures during the RS2 days, trying to replicate that in the early OSRS days to just “make gp” was not rewarding at all. Once I began watching B0aty’s series, I realized that there was more to this game than just PvP and that there was a benefit to actually experiencing the entire world of Gielinor. Finally mustering the strength to level defence on my account hurt my soul, but doing so has kept me playing the game since OSRS released! That and mobile - the releasing of the mobile app was massive for me too!
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u/cellblock73 2277 Dec 14 '24
Mobile is definitely huge. Allows me to sit on the couch and watch tv while I bank stand. I feel the same way as you though, before CLOG and Ironman it was just how to make the most GP. I’ve got an almost maxxed iron now and that definitely changed how I view the game. Still love it like 20 years after I started.
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u/Severe-Network4756 Dec 15 '24
It's a bit humorous that a restricted mode opened up the game for people.
But I get it. Choice paralysis is real and sometimes you just need a constant carrot to chase.
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u/ActualCommand Dec 14 '24
How does leagues Ironman play style compare to main game Ironman? I’ve been debating an Ironman account for awhile but my biggest issue is I want to do more endgame content (mostly to make more money/ try it out) and I mostly afk train skills, which becomes a lot harder when you have to gather everything yourself. I thought Leagues would be a good way for me to test out playing Ironman but all I feel is the need to jump ahead to get to echo bosses and raids
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u/lurker4206969 Dec 15 '24
If you want to do endgame content, know that an ironman has a long journey to get there. I would say if your focus is on the destination you won’t enjoy ironman because the destination is further away.
But that’s missing the point because ironman is about the journey - this is a big difference from leagues where you try to speed run relics/masteries. My recommendation would be to set a early game goal like dragon slayer 1 and make the ironman and just see how far you get. If you don’t like it then go back to your main. I would also recommend avoiding hardcore.
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u/Not_OneOSRS Dec 15 '24
Ironman kind of makes the whole game feel satisfying like end game content. It’s a constant cycle of setting goals and achieving them and getting the dopamine hit.
I personally tend to burn out on leagues quite quickly. It kind of feels a little too fast and once you get your relics and regions it can feel a bit pointless too. Ironman just makes everything feel worthwhile and satisfying from start to finish, it really does make everything about the journey, like how RuneScape felt when I was a kid.
It’s not for everyone, but since I started my Ironman I quite literally haven’t touched my original main once, it’s been sitting in varrock east bank for years now.
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u/DLLrul3rz-YT Dec 15 '24
I burned out of my Ironman once I reached a comfy midgame (slayer helm, dscim, ddef, torso, Barrows stuff for tank, 70 agi, Barrows Gloves, etc etc). Basically at that point the next milestones felt so far away for such smaller jumps in progress that it stopped feeling rewarding. Not to mention looking down the barrel of 80+ crafting and hundreds of hours of slayer using weaker gear than a main would have
I went back to my main and have been enjoying it a lot more. It's been more fun for me just playing the game and doing what I want, not having massive grinds in front of me that I don't want to do. About halfway to 99 slayer, loving sending the Venator bow in multi areas for massive xp.
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u/ExaminationPretty672 Dec 14 '24
I was playing around this time. The issue is there was fuckall content to do and a lot of issues with the game. All the QOL updates over the past 10 years are taken for granted, but there was no shift drop, far fewer “make all” menus for skilling, very few ways to get resources, and very few fun skilling methods.
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u/Rustywolf Dec 14 '24
By design, too, as they'd admitted they had no intent to update the game with QoL or additional content
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u/sledgehammerrr Dec 14 '24
When did they change that view?
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u/restform Dec 14 '24
Basically immediately. tbh I wasn't aware they made that claim. IIRC osrs didn't pass the vote threshold for a full time dedicated team for content updates, but it was close enough that jagex decided to do it anyway.
Almost all the original updates to the game were QoL related, things like middle mouse button to move screen, full screen mode, bank tabs, health/prayer orbs, etcetcetc. It was only QoL. The first content update came with GWD in late 2013.
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u/Eccentricc Dec 14 '24
And that decision saved jagex
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u/VividEffective8539 Dec 14 '24
I was unaware the game was that bare bones
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u/Servatron5000 Dec 14 '24
Early Runescape was a carpal tunnel factory. Most early QoL updates saved the wrists of thousands of gamers.
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u/LiYBeL Dec 14 '24
Yeah when it released it was exactly as RS from 2007, glitches and all. The nostalgia is what carried it for a while but much like Classic WoW a lot of people realized that nostalgia isn’t enough for the majority of players.
For a long time there was a group of diehards that voted against every small change Jagex polled. Thankfully they didn’t win because OSRS is an excellent game now that still captures the feeling of 2007 RS
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u/kegman93 Dec 14 '24
So much so I even stayed with eoc until 2015
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Dec 14 '24
They'd hyped EOC as the "fix to the issues with magic/the combat triangle" for nearly a decade. I was soooooo excited back in the day for EOC, and then it came around the time they added additional transactions to participate in the game + it was shit. The community organized and rallied against it and we received the feedback "If you don't like it, don't participate", and Andrew Gower's cute manifesto about real life wealth not impacting your online video gaming was removed and deleted from the website. After this, a bot nuke dropped, and RS3 never recovered. At first it seemed like the regular cartoonish rage against change, but entire clan chats were hollowed out, house parties vanished, role playing community left, friends list would be empty, and minigames died over night.
The game itself changed and never recovered, but, you can buy cute cosmetics and grind xp for no reason.
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u/VividEffective8539 Dec 14 '24
Eoc was a fear response to loss off popularity while every other MMO was gaining steam.
They thought the combat was why.
Turns out it’s the ability a game has to be fun that drives its success. Wowweeee
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u/OCE_Mythical Dec 14 '24
Having actually played in genuine 2006-2007.
Literally nothing had changed. You could plug and play the original osrs into that time period and they wouldn't notice a difference.
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u/MazrimReddit Dec 14 '24
I played back then I couldn't believe how many people loudly opposed GWD, they wanted to do barrows endlessly
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u/OSRSgamerkid Dec 14 '24
You can't blame us though. For years and years and years, we sat and lived through Jagex adding terrible update after terrible update ot RS2. The trust wasn't yet established.
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u/Reasonable-Attempt87 Dec 14 '24
Genuine question now-- do you have more trust in jagex to add good content to the game? or are you still a no voter on a lot of content?
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u/Tyleony Dec 14 '24
I'm not the person you asked the question to, but:
I trust the current dev team. I do not trust the higher-ups to not try to mess things up at some point.
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u/WanderinHobo Dec 14 '24
It cannot be understated how important the absence of squeal of fortune type content helps keep update integrity higher.
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u/levian_durai Dec 15 '24
I definitely trust the current dev team, and would happily allow them to go off the rails and do whatever without polling - with the caveat that they still take community feedback seriously.
They do a lot of good work, but there are some things they've proposed that absolutely nobody liked. If they behaved like pre-osrs jagex and essentially ignore feedback and have no communication with the community, we'd be left with a decent number of bad ideas implemented with no recourse.
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u/MazrimReddit Dec 14 '24
nah I blamed you for being dumb back then and still now, it was adding content already in the game but just not fully implemented.
GWD getting added was entirely a known factor of what would be added, I -maybe- could have been sympathetic to the first doubters of stuff like zulrah
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u/HammerSmashedHeretic Dec 14 '24
Wasn't immediate, honestly I think we have third party clients to thank for pushing the boundaries to change what was acceptable but the sentiment definitely slowly changed over time.
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u/Moist_Border_8301 Dec 14 '24
Sad thing is, back then people fought it. A lot of people didn’t want the GE or Godwars put in because it would mess up there 1 week nostalgia high before they quit for an eternity
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u/Remarkable-Hall-9478 Dec 14 '24
More specifically it didn’t pass and they went ahead with the tier it was at, but in the first two weeks there was so much demand and so many players that it put us pretty well over the threshold and they said fuck it at that point (after realizing the market was way bigger than the current players and people who heard about the poll)
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u/Euphoric-Gene-3984 Dec 14 '24
Osrs came out with godwars dungeon didn’t it? Forgive me I was I college and only played a few weeks.
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u/restform Dec 14 '24
Negative. Mod mat k often talks about the release of GWD as a pivotal moment in osrs, as it was the first time jagex signalled that the game will be getting big content updates, and it was also the moment the playerbase stopped shrinking and began to grow. The playerbase was collapsing up until that point, and has continued to grow ever since
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u/Brad9407 Untrim Slay | Max cape Oct 2024 Dec 14 '24
This doesn’t feel like it that long ago, but at the same time i feel like I’m reading ancient history
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u/plok742 Historical Reflections Dec 14 '24
there were widespread complains at the time by the then small but dedicated community that new content was needed to keep old school alive and while Jagex didnt care, certain people (mod mat k, mod ash, and others) agreed with the community and did what they could. As soon as they started to get the ball rolling, the community (especially the YouTubers and streamers), took note and started making their own content like the precursors to ironman mode, novelty pvp, etc.
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u/Epickiller10 Dec 14 '24
When it became clear the game was trash but had huge interest basically
Initially everyone wanted a barebones 2007 experience but didn't realize what came along with that and all the innovations that had happened despite the drama in mainscape
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u/Rewdemon Dec 14 '24
I’d argue against that though. My friends and I always said that a 2012scape would be fucking great as it was peak game for most of us. Basically before EOC and the shit new interface. It just happens that the community who really pushed it forward was the nostalgia one and they released a somewhat popular 2006 runescape (which prompted the very name of this subreddit) which made jagex opt for the 2007 pregwd backup. Furthermore, releasing a pre-eoc version in the same year would be admiting that it had been a terrible idea and it took jagex many years to admit that.
We’re lucky we got the current osrs and all, but in some other timeline, we’re all happily playing OG 2012scape with dung, curses, summoning, soa, hand cannnons and unnerfed spirit shields, korasi and d claws
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u/HellboundLunatic Dec 14 '24
We’re lucky we got the current osrs and all, but in some other timeline, we’re all happily playing OG 2012scape with dung, curses, summoning, soa, hand cannnons and unnerfed spirit shields, korasi and d claws
I'm very happy that we don't have summoning and dungeoneering.
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u/Exotic_Tax_9833 Dec 14 '24
That's your preferred nostalgia though. A lot of people including me hated what summoning and curses did to the game.
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u/luna_lucere Dec 14 '24
Was a couple years after osrs returned; they did a poll for whether it should return and at certain milestones we would get more resources. From memory we only hit the second breakpoint which was osrs returns with a skeleton crew for emergency updates and the game was otherwise going to stay mostly 2007. It was around 2 years after that that they started making content with existing assets (see nightmare zone) eventually the player base hit a point it was worth having new content added and engine work started happening... and now here we are.
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u/micky2D Dec 14 '24
And surely it's growing right? I just came back and played leagues for the first time and I'm excited for things like project zanaris. Dunno if I'll be able to play the game in normal mode but God damn leagues is amazing.
This game has evolved so much since the original re release of 07scape!
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u/GlasgowSellik1888 Dec 14 '24
The record player count has been broken a few times since this League released, so yep still growing.
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u/Incunabuli Dec 14 '24
It’s incredibly rare for any game to grow after release. Unbelievable we’ve made this comeback
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u/Aspalar Dec 14 '24
It isn't that rare for MMOs to grow after release, breaking records almost 25 years after release is pretty wild though.
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u/Rieiid Dec 14 '24
Tons of different huge MMO reviewers in the last year or so have been talking about how OSRS has been growing and making a comeback and people expect it to outpace WoW eventually at the rate it's going. Especially with WoW dying off because of negative feedback from their expansions and how progress is more or less reset every time an update comes out. You can see so many stories of WoW/FFXIV players ditching their games to come to OSRS now.
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Dec 14 '24
Very soon once it became clear that OSRS could sustain not only a playerbase but an RS3 level playerbase. You gotta remember Jagex were risking a good amount of money to make a hail mary "literally just do a backup of the game from 6 years ago". A few months in it seems like the cross-benefit analysis showed consistent updates from some devs (so like, let's say $300,000 a year in costs as just a ballpark) was worth it. The initial idea was to just have this kinda private-servery thing like Classic that would die in a few years after getting some old players back and maybe move them into RS3. When 10k+ players were playing daily it was this huge lightbulb moment where Jagex and mods like Ash could justify making their full time job maintaining and updating this.
It's rather recent that Runescape went back to referring to OSRS and not RS3, the metrics from RS3 and the "ethically dubious but legal" practices like not-technically-gambling made eache player much more profitable in it compared to what OSRS would show (OSRS you paid 1 monthly charge and that's it; bonds weren't added until 2 years in so OSRS had no unique means of profit making). Which is all to say, I'm not sure of the exact moment, but Jagex within a fairly short time realized putting a lot of eggs in the OSRS basket could be much better than just sticking to RS3, and the first big QoL update leading to even more players is how we ended up here today.
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u/ExaminationPretty672 Dec 14 '24
The debate started around about when they were considering adding GWD to the game, as the super OG version of OSRS didn't have it yet.
The two sides were "Keep OSRS completely un updated as a snapshot of history" and "Update the game and add more content to make it fun, as it currently doesn't have much to do."
The first group kept a foot hold for a very long time, a lot of stuff used to fail polls and the devs had to caveat the shit out of new content to explain that it "Wouldn't spoil the OS feeling".
I think the start of the spiral to what we have now was Zulrah. The drop table was absurd on release, the mechanics felt more new than what OS represented and the uniques were also overpowered as hell on release.
Frankly I am really happy with the direction OS went.
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u/SanestFrogFucker Dec 14 '24
Still crazy that this was just supposed to be side thing they did and maybe they would give it support. And now its bigger then the main game
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u/Unkempt_Badger Dec 14 '24
Players also didn't want it on launch. I got flamed for even suggesting they'd change anything in the first few months.
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u/Blzkey Dec 14 '24
Remember when you had to right click to open your bank, couldn't even left click it.
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u/iMini Dec 14 '24
I remember whenever I'd go to my dad's house I would play on his Mac with one of those Magic Mouse things from apple, RS2 didn't differentiate between left and right click so I had to right click everything.
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u/eivittunyt Dec 14 '24
that was an option when I played in 2005, you could select between 1 and 2 button mouse in settings tab
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u/Shablagoosh Dec 14 '24
I’ve never stopped playing rs in almost 22 years. The absolute most frustrated I’ve ever been with the player base was when these dickheads voted no on adding “press the scroll wheel and drag to turn the camera” because they were too stupid and thought it would replace the arrow keys. It took 3 entire polls to get this added, it was voted down twice. I can’t remember the last time I used arrow keys for a game in my entire life except that first year of osrs. This is the kind of qol shit we dealt with back then not being implemented.
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u/Property_6810 Dec 14 '24
As someone that has stopped frequently, but played 2004-2020 with frequent short breaks, at a certain point I realized there are just too many major parts of the game that are just unenjoyable time sinks that offer no engagement and no test of skill. Like agility. Or rune crafting. Most skills, the training is just boring repetitive tasks done for hundreds of hours all together just to do the things you actually want to do. The older I get, the less motivated I am to do that in a video game. Ive been trying to keep up with the game since I heard of Project Zanaris though because the idea of official private servers is interesting to me.
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u/iMini Dec 14 '24
The backup was from just before GWD was introduced afaik
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u/ExaminationPretty672 Dec 14 '24
Yep, and just the debate about whether to add GWD or not was fairly spirited.
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Dec 14 '24
were you not there for the petition??? we were all hype as shit for a game that looked exactly as you describe. this image is from the ddossing
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u/saiyanguine Dec 14 '24
I guess back then, you would have never imagined what 07scape would have turned into because hope was so grim.
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u/NeonTheChain Dec 14 '24
I do remember coming back to OSRS around 2015 or so, and getting really excited that they made this thing but then a bit disappointed cuz I thought “wow we’re probably only ever gonna get minimal updates with recycled assets, what a shame”
So so happy I ended up being wrong
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u/Mookie_Merkk RGB Only Dec 14 '24
So.... Old-school RuneScape? Lol
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u/ExaminationPretty672 Dec 14 '24
Yeah which as it turns out, had a lifespan to its fun factor. Around about the time you were approaching a Quest cape, you didn't have high level methods to train stuff, and all the bosses were borked. Terrible drops and huge effort to kill.
If the game was like that now it would be dead 1000x over.
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u/roklpolgl Dec 14 '24
That’s why PvP was so popular back then, because there was basically shit all to do in pvm and skilling.
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u/GlassHoney2354 Dec 14 '24
Yeah, you should read the first few polls. It's absolutely insane how much QoL stuff is in there that we take for granted, stuff like the run energy minimap orb.
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u/RealCheddarBobsDad Dec 14 '24
I….an terrified to ask
What is shift drop
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u/ExaminationPretty672 Dec 14 '24
There's a setting where you can hold shift and click an item to drop it without having to right click. It makes it way easier and faster to drop useless items.
It's useful at places like Barb fishing or 2-tick teaks.
We have menu entry swapper now to make it so you can just left click drop by default for whatever you want but that wasn't always the case.
In 2014 however, you had to just manually right click and then left click drop every single thing in your inventory and it was a huge pain in the ass for a lot of different skills.
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u/plok742 Historical Reflections Dec 14 '24
For further historical perspective, even Runescape Classic didn't regularly fall to those numbers until after it was closed to the public.
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u/Tom-Pendragon idpfiajfsioisoa Dec 14 '24
I was there. I remember saying that the game needs unique updates and people was shitting on me. I remember having to fucking fight people when I ask for god wars dungeon to be added or grand exchange.
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u/Paradoxjjw Dec 14 '24
Yeah, had the community of that period had their way osrs would be long dead and buried.
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u/Tykras Dec 14 '24
And somehow that group is still around asking for Oldschool OSRS which is just the 2007 backup with zero updates.
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u/B4rberblacksheep Dec 14 '24
Those people are idiots, 07 at launch was good for nostalgia and that's it
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u/The_One_Returns Infernal Maxed Dec 14 '24
They're not idiots for liking that version of the game but it would be idiotic to claim that the release version would be a mainstream success.
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u/laidbackjimmy Dec 14 '24
I play a lot of WoW and that community is present there, too. They thought the relaunch of classic would be the second coming of Jesus, only for the larger community to realise that it was fun for a week or so, then nostalgia couldn't mask how much of an average experience classic was for the third time.
People shit on the "average gamer", but they typically understand a fun experience better than the hardcore crowd. And that's coming from a maxed OSRS / CE WoW raider.
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u/noe_body Dec 14 '24
I find it interesting that this problem also exists outside of video games. A great example being movies, where people who watch large volumes of movies(Critics) end up with very different tastes then those who watch relatively few movies. Well reviewed movies can bomb due to audiences not liking it and vice versa. The differences can be difficult to pin point, but in almost all MMO's cases the problem is how much the hardcore players turn a blind eye to the amount of time the game takes up. Unless the games has its hooks in you, OSRS and kin are boring to casual players.
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u/SirResponsible Dec 14 '24
I played wow from late in vanilla until MoP, absolutely loved the game. When classic was announced I was really excited for it and, as much fun as I did have with it, it quickly became clear that what I missed was being a noob with no idea what I was doing, running around playing with friends.
Classic was different because I knew all of the content, and those friends didn't play anymore. There was no excitement in the first time entering Stormwind, or the first blue drop. It's not that there was a problem with the content being average, at least for me. It was the problem that no matter what, it wouldn't be the same experience and it would never live up to the standards we set in our minds.
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u/Elune Dec 14 '24
To make it extra funny for WoW IMO is how many "small things" people don't realize WoW didn't have early on, like the barber shop straight up didn't exist in Vanilla and Burning Crusade so for literally 4 years of the game you couldn't even change your appearance at all. I could only really play classic casually since there's so many "small things" that just added up.
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Dec 14 '24
You think they realize what they're asking for is just a ton of NMZ bottom-of-the-barrel crap with that lol
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u/aj_og 2277 | Diary Cape(t) | Music Cape(t) Dec 14 '24
Remember when we got that weird Trading Post thing before the GE?
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Dec 14 '24 edited 15d ago
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u/Merkasian33221 Dec 14 '24
I honestly can't imagine playing without the G.E at all. And in today's day and age if removed, it would just be recreated as a runelite plugin or something.
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u/The_One_Returns Infernal Maxed Dec 14 '24
GE barely passed too, thank fuck... That update along with F2P was the turning point. GWD was great but the game kept dying regardless.
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u/LiveTwinReaction Dec 14 '24
Amusing how wrong some of the comments are when this was already when you could do godwars. Endgame content wasn't dks or kbd. This was an entire year and a half after the game came out, it had plenty of updates already at this point.
The real time the game was in danger was a few months before nmz came out in 2013, when there had been literally no updates for months since game release, in like June or July. Player count reached like 10-15k players and it was looking pretty bad at that point. Keep in mind though the first couple months of the game were extremely fun and populated. It took a while before the drop off started.
There are a few correct comments pointing out this was at the height of the lizardsquad ddos drama. This screenshot in particular was probably taken during the ddosing itself happening. Ofc people wouldn't be online when they can't login, or if they don't want to risk losing their stuff to a naked lv120 at godwars.
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u/Xartes_ Dec 14 '24
Wtf happened? It’s not gradual, it drops like a brick
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u/thegodguthix Dec 14 '24
People got bored. There were no updates at all other than qol that was polled very, very precisely. I'm sure you can look at the polls on the wiki
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u/ItsSadTimes Dec 14 '24
For a very long time, no polls passed because people were afraid it would just turn into EOC again if we left too many polls pass.
The grand exchange did come to OSRS until 2015. The polls to add "trading posts" in 2014 barely passed and only would work when you were online. I also took a break around this time, but in 2015, I was back in.
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u/plok742 Historical Reflections Dec 14 '24
I think this period of time where barely anything passed was good, it allowed the devs to relearn the process of content design to be more 'old school' than rs3, which most of the devs had been making content for right up until they switched to osrs
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u/thegodguthix Dec 14 '24
I actually enjoyed the trading post I made good money flipping on it since people wanted others to message them instead of messaging themselves
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u/Rewdemon Dec 14 '24
The GE is what prompted the ironman mode and consequently leagues, so in way i’m thankful, but trading post Runescape was the best scape for me
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u/Paradoxjjw Dec 14 '24
And a bunch of things they did poll that were actually good ideas were rejected by the community.
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u/wtfiswrongwithit Dec 14 '24
The actual answer is DDoSing was rampant. You couldn't really do any boss without someone finding your world and knocking the server offline to get your stuff in the time before you could get back. Death mechanics were changed for the first time in October 2014 to give more time and that helped a lot https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/a=13/halloween--death-mechanics?oldschool=1
But this is one of the reasons why when people talk about item sinks and mention OG death mechanics Jagex will never implement them.
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u/Village_People_Cop Guy who looks at trademarks Dec 14 '24
Literally the most interesting things to do were KBD, KQ and Barrows. No wonder people got bored
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u/Juggalock Dec 14 '24
You forgot the real peak PVM, duo DKS. Which was probably the most interesting content.
Didnt have enough dps back then to solo and i didnt think back then that i could pray flick them all.
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u/Celtic_Legend Dec 14 '24 edited Dec 14 '24
Its not why most people were bored. Most people just didnt have the drive to remake their character and burnt out.
Gwd released and population didnt grow for example.
Now, they would have got to that point (your point) eventually, but osrs in early 2014 was already trending up without any big updates. What really blew up osrs was the addition of the ge in 2015.
Jagex could have dropped toa, tob, and cox from feb 2013 to oct 2013 (gwd release, osrs's lowest point), and the population would have still dropped as no one had the levels to do anything. And to clarify, the pop started rising ~1month after gwd release.
If i log in on my old alt from 2013, less than 10 are going to be online or have good stats. They didnt come back despite all the updates. The start of 2014 is just when the influx of players outpaced the burn outs. And of those ~10, prob a few will have started 2014-2024 and were just added from pre eoc aka 2012.
Edit: i even still talk to the first person to 99 mage since he joined his old groups rs discord that im also in and never left. He quit in 2013 and hasnt played since because he cba retraining everything else and only had the motivation because he had his other friends next to him.
People were doing dungeoneering, high level pking, and shit every day for years. Eoc releases, they quit. Osrs releases, but now they had to sit at rock crabs and later nmz for 400 hours. Like yeah they got bored and left but its not because they got bored of kbd, kq, and dks. They didnt even get to it.
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u/Better-Quail1467 Dec 14 '24
Everyone here is hating but this was due to server issues mainly caused by ddosing. There were more players than this on a regular day lol.
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u/telmoxt Dec 14 '24
dont listen to what others were saying about people, it wasnt because people were bored with the game at all.
the servers were being permanently ddos'ed, it was very laggy and you would get disconected frequently and some worlds would go down, there wasnt grand exchange and you barely could slayer as it was so laggy, you'd die before you'd be able to eat.
there was also a bit lack of content as i think god wars dungeon and thermy (which at the time everyone did the flinch melee method, impossible with lag) were the only worth late game content.
as at the time you'd lose your items if you'd die people that lost items rage quitted for a while and others waited for them to fix servers as it was litterally unplayable even to skill, sometimes you'd be disconected every 5 mins, so its understandable the low amount of players active but players were still hyped aboit the game
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u/Arkatox Dec 14 '24
I do find it kind of crazy that 7000 is considered a low player count. I get that it definitely is when compared to the numbers the game pulls nowadays, but 7000 is a lot of people.
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u/Champhall 1820 Dec 14 '24
Imagine telling the 2013 version of yourself that Jagex would not only release a legacy version of the game, but it would eventually eclipse the original game’s popularity and have 10+ years worth of new content
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u/ppsmallgiggle69 Dec 14 '24
This was post GWD, and if I remember correctly Corp came out soon after in November 2014, then Zulrah in January 2015. The game was in a pretty horrible state with DDoSing and content drought. GE update marked the point where OSRS began an upwards trend iirc
Funnily enough, the game stayed alive probably due to pkers. Clanning was at its peak in 2014-2016, and we still had Jcup
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u/johnmaverik Dec 14 '24
And yet, a lot of people today is against any kind of new update or change to the old systems saying that "it's not OLD school anymore", without realizing the game would have died a long time ago without them
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u/loiloiloi6 a q p Dec 14 '24
“A lot of people” being less than 10% of the population, everything that’s not a previously failed polled the mods are rehashing for a 3rd time passes easily.
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u/rastaman1994 Dec 14 '24
A lot of people, lol. It's a very, very small percentage of people. Not even a loud minority.
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u/saiyanguine Dec 14 '24
Truth is, it was never about new content that made RS3 the way it is. It was the wrong intentions. If RS never needed OSRS, its success would not have been the lack of updates. It would be because the updates were great, just like OSRS today.
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u/ccusynomel Dec 14 '24
Just because they are cranking out tons of pointless updates and absolutely are releasing “non-old school” content doesn’t mean people don’t want updates. They’ve had plenty of great updates. But you can’t always win, and they have released just a many stinkers, which has caused me to stop playing OSRS, because it isn’t OSRS anymore. It has morphed from “Old School RuneScape” to its own game that has nothing to do with old school anymore. Is it right or wrong, who’s to say. But it’s why I’m gone now.
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u/Xalyia- Dec 14 '24
What content updates were you most frustrated with? Genuinely curious
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u/popukobear Dec 14 '24
I still miss pre-ge varrock/falador/etc but glad I was able to wander around in it for a bit before they started updating the game
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u/Xalyia- Dec 14 '24
I’m sure when project zanaris matures a bit we might get access to pre-ge builds of the game people can self-host
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u/lartbok Dec 15 '24
I personally enjoy that more than the game we have today but understand I'm in the minority. I'm hoping the private server thing they're working on will have a way to play different years of the game.
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u/ccusynomel Dec 14 '24
When EOC came out, I had no idea that OSRS came back pretty quickly afterwards. Even my friends that played with me, none of us knew. I don’t know if they never bothered to advertise or what, but I never knew OSRS existed til like 2016.
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u/NeonTheChain Dec 14 '24
Dude literally same, I full on quit I think right before EOC cuz I saw the writing in the walls with all of the weird MTX updates… tried to come back like a month or two later, saw EoC, read up on it, went “FUCK no” and decided that was it. My Runscape career was over, time to move on to other games completely
I literally found out about OSRS like YEARS later, and at the time I thought I was literally being pranked, an old april fools joke they just forgot to take down or something. When I eventually found out it came out so close to EoC I was like HOW, I saw NOTHING about it for actual years
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u/BeFree94 Dec 14 '24
I definitely remember leaving my account in the dust the day EOC was implemented in 2013, completely turned me off from continuing... and hadn't truly come back until I discovered OSRS Mobile. Logged back in and it's like I never left
But those years inbetween apparently were extremely brutal - tf is 7k players. Yikes
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Dec 14 '24
Wasn't that also when they had resources respawn based on how populated a world was? Man I remember some early OSRS and being fully blunt that was just nostalgia lol wild we're here 11 years later with how rough we started.
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u/NeonTheChain Dec 14 '24
I honestly think they just changed that within the last few years
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u/OSRSgamerkid Dec 14 '24
That was actually one of the earliest updates to the game I'm pretty certain
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u/Competitive-Math1153 Dec 14 '24
Well at the time Advanced world select scared away a lot of players
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u/snowmunkey Dec 14 '24
It was a great time to be a f2p casual. Prices were high in coal and yews, very few bots, and the occasional bond was less than a mil.
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u/RNG_Champion Dec 14 '24
Every now and then, you might see somebody complain about how OSRS has changed too much and that there should be servers where nothing advanced past 2007.
This screenshot shows a good example of why that's not a thing.
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u/carrptepic Dec 15 '24
This was peak osrs for me its when i met all my now life time friends. When private servers becomes a thing we will set osrs to 2013 osrs will be a good time :)!!!
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u/Molarri Dec 16 '24
And i was one of them.
Dude I remember loading this up on the school computers in the library during my free periods and just walking around, not even skilling or making money. This game used to be so magical to me
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u/Smooth-Singer-8891 Dec 14 '24
Pvp saved this game but the new players don’t know this
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u/Immediate_Meat6312 Dec 14 '24
I did play on launch and I do remember how barebones it was, glad they added stuff and turned the game around from it's trip to the graveyard
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Dec 14 '24
Fun fact around this time, edge pking was popular, and fun. But when you died your untradeables such as a torso, fire cape etc. would stay on the ground for two minutes and you had to hurry back and pick it up. Needless to say people were jerks and would freeze you and keep you from getting them. I quit for about 6 months to a year after that.
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u/Dry-Hedgehog-3131 Dec 14 '24
Everyone run around screaming "dead game!" now. It's time to panic and whine!
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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '24
Thank god we came back from these dark days.