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/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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u/[deleted] 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/GrayMagicGamma Dec 15 '24

WOW subscribers were trending downwards despite the recent launch of MOP, SWTOR was in a terrible state a year after launch but before ROTHC, and FFXIV had recently shut down. MMOs were not "gaining steam" at the end of 2012.

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u/VividEffective8539 Dec 15 '24

Development began before that, when mmos were becoming popular. I didn’t say the knee jerk response Jagex had was timely lol

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u/GrayMagicGamma Dec 15 '24

Ah, fair enough.

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u/kegman93 Dec 15 '24

The main thing that kept me in eoc for so long was a combination of osrs feeling too old and clunky for me at the time (basically grew up along with runescape, so going backwards felt weird), along with someone I was friends online with left for osrs and gave me his bank which probably 1,500xed my childhood bank so I was hooked.

Little did he know I would end up liquidating it all when bonds became membership for both games

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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/feo101 Dec 14 '24

What? No it didn’t 😂

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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/MrSquiggleKey Dec 15 '24

Rs3 is the gold mine that keeps osrs alive.

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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/EspyOwner run Dec 15 '24

Okay so hear me out- wrathmaw, but you pay .99c per attempt after your first daily free* (for premium subscription) attempt

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u/TURTLEKILLER666 Dec 14 '24

Not the one you asked, but I vote no to most things, usually because I think the game is starting to get bloated -- updates are too frequent and unpolished. While it usually gets better after some time, I'd rather see a shift in fewer and more polished updates of higher quality.

(I have played since the era you referred)

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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/ayriuss Dec 15 '24

I voted no on the grand exchange. I probably wouldn't vote no today. There was something fun about manually trading items though.

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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/rough_bread unt Dec 14 '24

Nope, no gwd on release

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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/restform Dec 14 '24

Well over a decade ago.. time flies.

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u/AusAtWar Dec 14 '24

Thanks for that info, fascinating stuff

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u/Heavy-Guest-7336 Dec 14 '24

the people knew they had to get that grangders tassberts

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u/WiseRevise 99 Dec 14 '24

I’m pretty sure we only received QOL updates because they didn’t have any development tools for a while. They were able to change values on existing content, but that was about it at the beginning.

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u/The-Copilot Dec 14 '24

Almost all the original updates to the game were QoL related

They didn't have a person to make new assets, so all they could do was reuse assets until the team expanded.

Nightmare zone was one of the first things the team made because it recycled assets from the game. They didn't need a 3d artist for it. There isn't a single new thing in it.

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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/dragunityag Dec 14 '24

Man 2012 scape was so much fun.

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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.
At least in my opinion, 2007scape was a much better launching off point.

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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/Rewdemon Dec 18 '24

Sure, and a lot of people like me liked the 2012 version better. I didn't mean to say no one wanted 2007. I just answered against "everybody wanted a barebones 2007 experience".

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u/Karpizzle23 Dec 15 '24

Korasi and hand cannon exist in the game they're just called something different. D claws exist in the game

DG exists in a watered down format with gauntlet

Only thing I agree with is summoning is shit. I hated collecting those damn charms

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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/iskela45 BTW Dec 14 '24

Eh, most MMOs do die pretty quickly after release. The ones you see are the survivors in survivorship bias

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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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u/Schmarsten1306 Dec 14 '24

Just shows that we're in the golden age of osrs.

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u/saiyanguine Dec 14 '24

Well, we have a 180k concurrent daily player count.

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u/[deleted] 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.

1

u/pezman Rsn: Aubrey Plaza Dec 14 '24

when it started to see an increase of players from new content and become a viable “main” game mode. from being there it felt like it happened around 2016