Runescape The Best Browser Game, A Decade Ago

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A simple browser based roleplaying game joined together millions of people from across the seas to complete quests, craft and trade. The game takes place in a Dark Age medieval world with fancy castles within a fortress of a town, large wooden ships along the docks, giant rats 10x in size dwelling inside the sewers of a city and a demon locked inside a tower full of those who worship the magical arts.

The world itself is vast and you are free to explore, add by the fact that the game is still updated with new content. However the game will never be the same as it was a decade ago. In its prime of 2007 Runescape reached more than 200,000 players online together. The many sudden and unwanted changes caused many to leave the game lowering the numbers to around 50k. Personally this was a game from my childhood and I learned quite a lot from it.

First things first, the game features a combat system which determines your level and within that a numerous amount of trainable skills like mining, woodcutting, fishing, hunting, smiting and farming. As of now there are 26 skills however 10 are only available to paying members. Increasing your stats allows you to unlock various things like the ability to craft better armor with smiting, or learn to craft jewelry and enchant it. At busy times of the day many players gather to fisheries, mines or other places to increase their stats.

There is also a trading system implemented so that players can trade freshly harvested willow logs for cold iron ore or simply coin. Trading was difficult before the implementation of the grand exchange which acted as a stock exchange and trading facility. Easily place an order or set an item up a certain place and wait. In earlier times players had to meet each other in game in order to trade, with the meeting place being mostly banks. With this Runescape had its own miniature economy.

A small problem with the economy is that trees grow back almost instantaneous depending on their rarity after being cut down and the same goes for minerals and fish. Also, weapons and tools after being crafted do not degrade and are indestructible. Trees however are mostly used and burnt to increase ones fire making level and simply disappear.

With resources that never run out and keep reappearing this puts a massive input that can damage the economy. Thus more coin is entering the game than leaving it. The balancing factors are the player quitting the game with the items stuck in the account, or dying in game which drops all your items. All in all I learned a lot about trading and the stock exchange and buying items low and selling high.

Although I did say at one point there was 250k users, about at least a quarter of those were bots. Since throughout most of the game all that is done is clicking your mouse, a couple programs were made to do that for you. Using a bot program would allow the mouse to move by itself, clicking, cutting down trees and what not. It was a huge problem back in the day as it is hard to distinguish a person from a bot. Nowadays bots can do odd humanistic mouse movements and chat as well.

Runescape fell around 2007 where many changes were applied. The biggest being that free trade was now disallowed. Players couldn’t give gold, armor or items above 5k net worth to their friends. There was also the removal of PvP and battles. The game is pretty good today with HD graphics and more features but it will never be the adventure it was in 2005-2007. Because of this Jagex decided to remake the old server so that players could relive their nostalgia.

http://imgur.com/gallery/0NnSF

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/2r7rqs/whats_the_highest_amount_of_active_players/

http://kotaku.com/5927446/browser-based-mmo-runescape-boasts-200-million-players-and-counting?sidebar_promotions_icons=testingoff&utm_expid=66866090-67.e9PWeE2DSnKObFD7vNEoqg.1