What is the Appeal of Runescape?

Hey all,

Something that I have been thinking about recently, and so I thought I'd approach you guys (and gals) for your opinion. RS happens to be one of our more popular categories on PlayerAuctions (RS3 and RS2007), and I always like to be informed.

I am a gamer myself. I grew up with all sorts of games, but to keep it short, in terms of my MMO experience, I am primarily involved in WoW or EVE (important internet spaceships are important). I tried RS once a long time ago, and it just didn't stick for whatever reason.

So, I'd like to ask the question to a relevant audience:

- What is it that brought you to RS, and what is it's appeal that keeps you playing for years and years?

Looking forward,
jake
Marketplace PM

 

I'm also a WoW player, however I started off with Runescape.

Originally I started playing when I was in 5th grade, so 8 years ago. Being a kid, it was something to keep me occupied and connected with my friends. I was having fun being the highest level and richest among my friends, so I kept playing. That's what kept me entertained then.

Later on, in early high school, most of my friends had quit, and I was just playing with my RS-based friends. What kept me playing here was PKing and reputation among my pure clan. I was still having fun though, as it gave me something to do to escape troubles I was dealing with IRL.

What keeps me playing now is the nostalgia, and the fact that a few of my good friends also found that nostalgia to play 07 again. That's what keeps me playing now.

Honestly, it's just something to pass time.

Hope to see you more around here, and hoping to see some major change to PA. If you ever need any information RS-related, don't hesitate to ask. I'm a very experienced player and have extensive knowledge on it

 

The appeal is the concept of watching numbers go up. The grind is ironically attractive to a certain portion of the gamer market.

 

Gambling, but since that was removed from Jagex's runescape i went on to private servers with dicing :]

 

Like Xiero said - the numbers. It can be addictive watching yourself level up and get 'better' stuff, especially with fellow players to show it off too.

 

This was fun until people got greedy and botted everything. Who actually gives a shit about the highscores these days? Who actually cares about getting 80,90 99. It all means the sum of shit tbh. The fun was playing with friends and levelling together. The fun was edge pkin with a pure. The fun was pkin with a clan at gd 10 years ago. Those days are long gone and now we've ended up with the same shitty game as you see on every frickin RPG with some stupid action bar and clicking these icons.

 

The vast array of skills is nice, and the amount of diffrent things you can do in the game.

 

The thing that appeals to me most about Runescape is building something from nothing. It's like pottery or renovating a house; the raw material is there already and you can put your own personal touches on it. There's also no real "wrong" way to do it either, just less efficient ways.

 

Cool, I appreciate the answers. I wanted to prod a bit further.

On PlayerAuctions specifically, Runescape was a very small market for years. It was back in 2011 when Jagex brought back the wilderness and free trade that RS basically, EXPLODED (and out of nowhere I might add). Here's what I'm interested to know:

1) What was RS like prior to the change, and why did this move inherently make RS more popular?

2) Some of you have mentioned the appeal of numbers going up, but those are game dynamics in a lot of MMO's. Why does RS command a huge following, when these same game dynamics are present in other big AAA MMO's?

3) Dicing. I'm more or less familiar with that. For those of you interested, I know of some interesting movements taking place for dicing still within RS via IRC channels. Anyone interested, I'll share the info.

I myself, passionately dislike grind in most games. It is a poor game design mechanic, and if it weren't for secondary markets which allow me to bypass this, I'd likely not even be an MMO gamer. But with your comment, do you feel there is something innately better about RS's grind than other MMO's?

Open world, totally get it. Would you guys consider RS to be a sandbox?

Last but not least... what are the general impressions of RS3 vs Runescape 2007? Based on some internal metrics on our platform, once Jagex released RS 2007, we say a huge shift in market, to where almost 90% of trading activity was in Rs2007. After the launch of RS3, for the past 7 weeks trading activity hovers around 33% for RS3 and 66% for RS 2007. (If you guys like these kind of metrics, I'd be happy to share more in detail in the future)

Why does it seem to me that RS 2007 is more popular and have a greater trading activity levels than the newer RS?

Thanks Ract, I very well may hit you up.

 

Prior to the change, the game seemed almost more single player in the sense that things you accumulated on your account couldn't be shared with anyone else, and there was very little high risk-high reward play.

Diversity of skills mostly. A lot of those big MMO's are purely combat based, and all weapon/armor is acquired through combat. The economy and skill building of Runescape, makes it unique.

IRC based dicing isn't terribly foreign to Sythe. A large portion of the staff/ex staff were dicers, several Sythe ad sponsors, etc.

Here is where the Sythe and PA markets come into play: People enjoy the rewards of the grind based off of how difficult it is to get. Those who want to skip to the end rewards bypass it by using real money, which historically costs far less in real life man hours than it's worth to do it virtually.

 

For me it's the simplicity of the game but still very fun to play. Lots of skills so you don't get stuck doing almost the same thing all the time.

I'm tsundere for grinding

 

I like socialising with friends I've made over a number of years, I used to be on a RS forum years back, and I was a postwhore on there aswell, it's surprising how many people you get to know.

 

You are asking the wrong question here as if RS is a hugely popular game relative to others which it isn't.

If by your question you mean 'What makes people continue playing rs instead of switching to other MMOs' the answer is obvious, those people are conditioned to RS and not WoW or LoL or EVE.

 

The learning opportunities.

As a result of pursuing my interests on RuneScape, I learned about self control, investing, economics, probability, statistics, negotiation, rhetoric, coding, virtualization, security, protection against social engineering, optimization, etc. etc. long before I had opportunities to learn about those in school. As I began reaching the limits of what I could learn from RuneScape, I began seeing how much potential there was for making money off it. So I started doing that. I met some incredibly interesting people that will likely end up in some pretty powerful positions in real life that I still talk to often. I learned about Bitcoin in early 2010 from people I knew on RuneScape.

Now that RuneScape's popularity is dwindling and the opportunities it presents are more limited, I don't play it much anymore. But I can confidently say that playing RuneScape was one of the most valuable experiences of my life. It put me at an incredible advantage over my peers in real life because of what I learned from it.

Ultimately, I didn't end up profiting more than a few thousand from RuneScape. I made some bad investments along the way and made a few poor decisions. But do I regret those? No. They taught me how to handle large losses, and they taught me to always shoot for the long run rather than focus on short-term gains/losses.

Tl;Dr? RuneScape helped prepare me for the professional world in a way not even school, a job, or an internship could have. RuneScape was, for me, the ultimate sandbox.

 

This. Runescape wasn't a game to me the past several years. I learned more from Runescape about the business world through experience than anything else could have taught me.

 

This fascinates me to no end. Working at PA, I can't say that I have a particularly stellar compensation so to speak, and on a daily/weekly/monthly basis I am constantly seeing average Joe guys/girls striking handsome sums from games like RS. Last year we had two Finnish brothers on the platform that had won a hug sum through dicing. In less than two weeks, they sold more than $200k on our platform (we disbursed in periods to them because such surges are a bit suspect, but they ended up being honest traders and no one who bought from them had any issues).

I had also just finished an interview with one of our sellers from Latvia. He plays the games and is able to offload the currency he makes and is able to rake in more than that country's minimum wage and support his mother on top of that. I'll post it later this weekend, it will make for a very interesting read.