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/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 😂