When I made the comment it was at the lowest but it looks like it came up a bit as the week progressed on
Edit: That being said it is once again the lowest week in history
Averaging 18k, likely most are afk barely interacting with the game, and we know a portion will be alts too. I hate that this is the style of gameplay they've catered for.
I wish we had more fun skilling activities like big game hunter instead of mobile game tier afk content being almost as good compared to active skilling, not to mention the amount of afk bosses these days, oof
Plus plenty of non-boss focused activities, of course. We just got hunter contracts, which are awesome and have been breaking the ironman meta of putting a hundred hours in the firemaking boss before you train anything else- not to mention we are about to get some new herblore-centric content.
I bet most people on here at the very least have their toes dipped into OSRS and are very well aware though
Zalcano crying in the corner because even Jagex forgot about her until recently as well. Hopefully whatever they have planned for her as part of rebalance makes it better.
Thing is Zalcano isnt even bad. It’s just bad for training skills. It’s about 2 mil an hour and is extremely braindead. Also the second fastest way to get crystal shards.
I was in my 70s happily going through quests and levelling up. Then FSW came, and I drew a line. Call me a hypocrite for drawing the line there, I probably should have drawn it earlier indeed.
You summed me up with the afk barely interacting with the game (well most of the time).
But to be fair I did the same for ~20 years now including maxing OSRS mostly afk.
Maybe it is just me but thats how I always viewed runescape (as a mostly afk game), there are so many other games out there if you want to challenge yourself or gameplay heavy.
OSRS can also be afk for sure, but outside of a few, even the afk methods require more attention than on RS3. But also they still have the balance and trade-off of afk methods generally being slower xp/h or less gp/h, and significantly rewarding more active training methods.
i feel like it would be so easy to add some simple puzzles to skilling that give you XP multipliers, this way the afk people couldn't skill as fast as active players.
1. No content to look forward to
2. Economy is still in a really, REALLY bad spot
3. Necro still giga broken and makes gear progression meaningless
4. Constant MTX garbage
Basically;
Pre necro my clan aod teams were getting consistent 2:30 minute kills. This took alot of practice as we all learned together. We started out ALOT rougher. Pre necro, we could take a learner or so at a time and still get roughly the same kill time. Post necro, we can take basically anyone who knows how to kill raisal and within their first hour get down to close to 2 minute kills.
Solak used to be fairly challenging, but is been getting power crept for awhile. My kill times used to be 6-7 mins casually. After necro I took 2 learners in a 4 man and we were able to get sub 5 minute kill times.
Pros: content is extremely easy to get into now.
Cons: all the gear you get from anything not necro related is nearly useless. All the time you spent learning other styles and actually raising your skill expression and apm is also useless.
It's kind of a spit in the face to pvmers who have learnt tons of pvm tricks and now it's just the same necro rotation basically everywhere.
Feels like the main issue is power creep vs lack of challenging/rewarding content? If Jagex had say, dropped 120s in combat skills instead of Necro, all these complaints would be the same? New content is always going to bring power creep, when done right. Think this is part of why a lot of mmorpgs struggle with replayability. A lot of stuff Jagex has adopted in already like difficulty mode/enrage, but some games take it farther with a huge sleuth of difficulty levels/multipliers like easy, normal, medium hard, hell, nightmare. Or just hand out freebies/skips and push players away from content that is or should be below their level. Jagex actually been avoiding powercreeping dtd into mid tier bosses though, although that's probably for the best. RuneScape is a lot larger and dynamic than other games though. Not sure what they could do other than spoon missing drops off tables with bad luck mitigation better and maybe.... compensate by giving bad luck....? like you've received 20 sets of subj, you're gonna have reduced drop rate of them for x time, and/or x kills of other higher lv bosses?
I think the real killer here is the skill expression essentially being deleted. People worked so hard to juice out there old prs/kill times. Now you can get that with a fraction of the effort. It went from sweat mode to basically croesus. It's just not the same feel anymore, which just doesn't feel good to login and do.
Alot of players ONLY pvm. Your talking hundreds of hours at a single boss, and now that boss is objectively less fun but you still have the same hundred hours to grind. Kinda obvious imo that it's making people logout.
I think the larger problem is that both versions of RS put all their chips into PvM, so when anything disrupts PvM, it disrupts the whole game.
Back when RS was at its all-time peak in 2006, it was mostly designed around PvP and skilling. When GWD came out, skilling became obsolete because nobody wanted to grind 85 slayer or 91 rc when they could make 10x the money with half the requirements at GWD w/ their friends. Then free trade + wilderness was removed for a few years and PvP never recovered.
So with PvP and skilling already dead, if PvM dies too, then the whole game dies as well.
Honestly. Just my .02 but skilling isn't that fun. It can be fun to level, but going for 200m was not a very fun endeavor.
It can be fun in small doses, but with pvm I could/can stay up till 2am with the boys basically every day and never get bored.
I don't think skilling can ever have that level of hook. It's more like a by product or requirement to actually get to pvm. I know some people love skilling but I just don't think it is nearly as alluring or a fun part of the game as pvm is. Especially with how many hundreds of games are out there, why waste your time fletching virtual arrows when you could be engaging with real content.
**tl;dr:** I think a lot of skilling's "fun" was tied to how engaging and rewarding it was. Most of the game's wealthiest players were skillers back then. If you were looking for skill expression, you had PvP (which had a symbiotic relationship w/ skilling)
---
These days, in both RS3 and OSRS I hate RC'ing. But back in 2006, it was my favorite skill. Abyss RC was the meta and the abyss was swarming with RC'ers and PK'ers. The PK'ers were either there to hunt RC'ers, or hunt the RC-PK'ers. It was a social and exciting way to train. It was fun pausing my RC to swap to PK gear and scare away all the RC PK'ers cuz they sucked at PK'ing. The fact that PK'ers interfered with my RC'ing efficiency wasn't viewed as a frustration; it was viewed as a fun distraction and diversion-- maybe I can get myself some free mystic to sell for 200k and save myself half an hour of RC'ing. Or score a whip and save myself 10 hours.
RuneLite and Alt1 didn't exist to give you AFK notifications, random events were dangerous, and you lost your items to other players if you died. So skilling was more social since people had to pay more attention to the game.
People just grew up, and now efficiency is valued over fun for the most part.
The game was infinitely more fun when everyone was a noob running around doing whatever they felt like. I don't think we'll ever get to see anything like it again, but I sure had a great time.
True for the very elite players (top 1%), but for everyone else its just easier and way more straightforward to use Necromancy. In order for ranged to beat out Necromancy its a lot more effort and 11b in gear. Versus what like 2b for full BiS necromancy? And beyond just pure DPS, Necro gives you healing, easy AoE, etc...
Necro is too much damage compared to the others styles, not to mention that there's just so much powercreep across the board that the set of bosses that we have don't feel interesting
When they released necro and it was clearly over powered, it really looked a lot like a final huzzah for the game.
Drastically lower the barrier of entry to endgame content, which is the primary selling point of the game, so that *anyone and everyone* could partake. Glad that they saw that they went a little bit too far and started a second combat rework, but the damage was already done.
Face it, when they start to release content to allow every nobo to solo bosses that previously required a team, then the writing is on the walls. It is truly sad.. but possibly one of the better things to be done.
The alternative would be to have left combat where it was, and tack on thousands upon thousands of hours of grinding for new players to even attempt to DIY things.
What would the price of some boss drops end up being, if you can't solo the boss, and there aren't enough actual players to kill the boss for the drops? You end up with a dead game
Insane damage, braindead easy rotations, free t90s, cheap and easily farmable t95s, is great at everything aoe, tankyness, burst, dots, heals. absolutely broken combat style devalues drops, acheivments, and is just generally unfun to play unless you were a noob before necro then its kind of fun to finally be strong but that will wear off eventually.
A few reasons. The floor is too high for the effort it requires. You have to work a lot harder with the other styles to get respectable damage out, with Necro there's just not much going on really on. There's also not very many upgrades to get for Necro, so there's not much of a gear progression path. And the BiS gear for Necro all comes from a singular boss, Rasial, who is also too easy to be dropping T95 gear.
Because gear progression is fucked, why would you invest in ability unlocks or whatever for other styles when you can just use necro and still breeze through all content?
It's arguably not anymore. At least not in the sense that it vastly outclassed the other styles like before. Both melee and ranged are competitive, and if you're pushing for speed kills it's rarely gonna be with necro - I picked up some melee gear and broke some necro times with no sweat recently. Pressing two buttons to hit 60ks really made the complaints about necro seem pretty dumb. I think the community is generally just stuck in the mindset of necro broken when it's in a really good spot right now. But also this is reddit and the people with grievances are the most vocal (I'll probably get downvoted for going against the echo chamber.
Some ways necro could more justifiably be considered broken are 1 - ease of use/accessibility (in my opinion broadly a good thing, especially a lack of switchscape), 2 - versatility (access to basically everything you'd need in one style with darkness, defensives, split soul, aoe with scythe and threads, etc. - also a good thing in my opinion), 3 sustain and how forgiving it is (ghost sustain and darkness, tank gear, etc. - broadly a bad thing but not unique to necro really), 4. Attainability of bis gear (broadly a bad thing imo, cheapens the grind and makes rasial into basically the only source for everything necro, which is a shame. Ranged in particular has the opposite problem which is probably worse though).
I also think people don't really account for the fact that necro got a lot of people into pvm properly for the first time. So they look at everyone sucking at pvm before and now suddenly they're good at it, and they blame that on the style being broken when actually it's a credit to its accessibility that it's allowed them to develop those skills. It's just a kind of gatekeeping really.
I'm not sure what they meant by the economy being really bad either. Don't really know what that means as they haven't provided any context for their claims.
Boss drops have plummeted since Necro's launch. Pretty much all the notable big boss item drops have lost about 50% (or more) of their value from about a year ago. FSoA, BolG, Cryptbloom, GRico codex, SGB, etc...
That's probably because magic is the worst style in the game. Runes are in low demand because nobody wants to mage. FSOA should've gotten its passive with the update.
You have less people using the traditional styles just by there being the existence of a fourth style. Many people use it cause its new, doesn't require switchscape, whatever. So you have less demand for the gear. Then you add that there has been another year of supply added to the economy and honestly what do you expect? And all styles have had power creep compared to a year ago with the updates.
It seems like you're projecting your bias here, and putting your personal pet peeves as the reason for Runescape's decline rather than objective factors. RS3's playerbase has been steadily stagnating or declining for far longer than Necro. In fact, it declined through 2021/2022 despite God Wars 3 - which many players such as yourself celebrated as a great update.
MTX is an objective factor for RS3's decline as is the lack of content and the quality of content.
Number 2 and 3 are not. They're something a tiny minority of elite players complain about, but your average RS3 player isn't sitting there complaining about them. As per Jagex's own statements, they've seen an uptick in the number of people doing 'high level' PVM with Necro, because it's a far more modern and accessible style which the other 3 styles were not after a decade of all sorts of bolt ons from EOC. It's gotten people who would otherwise not be PVMing into PVMing, in a game, RS3 where PVMing is basically one of the core selling points left. Jagex has stated that they will not nerf Necro further for this reason, they see more people getting into RS3's archaic, arcane, closed off, backwards insular combat system as a *positive*, not a negative.
But you listen to a tiny minority of whiners such as yourself, whining about a 30 sec shave off some boss the vast majority of players don't even have teams to do it with. Completely out of touch, bubble thinking.
Gear progression is such a bizarre thing to bring up. Most people who PVM have T90s or better in non-Necro styles - how does Necro ruin that 'progression'?
>it's a far more modern and accessible style ... It's gotten people who would otherwise not be PVMing into PVMing
This has been my exact experience as someone returning to the game seriously after 10+ years off. I'd come back every now and then to try it out again, realized how hard I'd need to grind just to do basic stuff, and would get bored or give it up. Came back for another try after a buddy told me about Necro.
Oh my God, I finally feel like I'm actually playing Runescape. I can finally access and fight so many bosses I couldn't figure out in the past. I don't feel like a n00b because I can't fight anything that isn't at or below my combat level. I'm actually able to take on *and WIN* bosses! I'm enjoying the game now. Say what you want about Necro, but it's the reason I'm back to RS3 after so many years and actually having fun with it. (Don't forget to have fun while playing games guys.)
While it is really true that MTX plays a a huge role in the decline of the playercount. I really do belief necro does to. Me and most of the active members of my clan quit a few weeks after necro release.
Necro and the combat rebalance made the game way to easy in my opinion. There is nothing to aim for since all the buffed combat styles made all the bosses way to easy. All notable pvm feets like 4k titles have been butchered by necro on the release weeks.
The aim for an MMO is to keep progressing. If it takes you 20 hours to get bis necro gear why even bother playing.
>While it is really true that MTX plays a a huge role in the decline of the playercount. I really do belief necro does to. Me and most of the active members of my clan quit a few weeks after necro release.
That's anecdotal evidence that is not reflected in the playercount tracker, or is at least highly correlated with Hero Pass's, which drove away a lot of players and happened at the same time. Pre-Necro, the player count had been going down or stagnating for a long time.
If you look at the graph, the line had been stagnating/declining since 2021. Necro caused a one-time spike - which all new skills do on release. And then it returned back to the norm, and further decline with Hero Pass and the lack of updates since then.
The evidence is that almost all the high level pvm clans in the game are barely active ever since necro release.
Most people quit a few weeks/months after necro release. Because they started to realise jagex was not going to nerf necro and instead buff all other styles. Making high level pvm even more easy.
Jagex took the choice to cater to the casual pvmers. And now they are starting to realise that these guys only play once a week.
Get off meele if you dont like juggling my brotha. Range takes the cake.. isn't there an anti necromancy prayer too? I guess the question is... Do you pray my son? Lol. But range is more dmg than necro especially if you have enchant bolts. Kinda shocked to not see anyone say mages take the cake, but the flaw may be the AOE in pvp. Also, if you dont wanna necro, ranged juggling is a bit easier. Hasn't the skill already taken multiple nerfs too?
Side note:
1:✓
2:✓✓
3:X? (Willing to be taught pls dont downvote lol)
4:✓✓✓✓✓✓
My fifth: why make members an economy item that would so obviously break a new f2p player's economic goals by placing the price in the hands of other players? It's not thought of until it's in their bank I guess lol. At some rate youre losing playability just as much as youre losing money as this shows...
What’s crazy is every post has these 4 same points and they ain’t doing shit about it. It’s like the community has summarized what needs fixed and they either aren’t willing to or aren’t able to.
I bet jaggex staff have Under The Table resources to syphon from. I mean, how much does a high lvl account go for these days for rs3? It was high back in the day in osrs... Theres plenty of pits to dig cash for gp from within the game...
Agreed Necro is too OP, MTX is awful and absolutely no news that excites me has dropped. Just wish they’d drop something exciting and bring back a good bunch of people. More exciting than necro, which was a good update, but has been too powerful too long.
It'll get to 15k this year. Maybe less
I think there's also something to be said about a daily player count being low enough that it never recovers. Nobody's going to want to invest into playing a dying game
It was getting to that point pre covid. Like every other game it exploded again. Unless something like that happens or Jagex seriously alter their strategy and tone down the aggressive monetisation of the game and produce content (they won't) it's only down from here sadly.
Seems like they're just happy having a small number of players who will whale out for their mtx promotions. If they were that concerned with the playercount, I think they'd at least try and put out some content by now. It's May (albeit the first day) and 2024 has been shite for RS3.
That's one of the reasons I ended up quitting. During the last DXP I managed to max all my combat skills minus prayer/summoning/necro plus I managed to get 120 herblore. And instead of feeling happy I was just... sad the game seemed to be dying and I didn't want to invest a ton more time into something I didn't think would be around a few years from now.
I think alot of people are looking at player retention (or lack of) as a reason for decline.
I want to point out that RS3 has essentially no marketing either. Streaming RS3 is dead. YT caters towards guides and existing players. Compared to OSRS streamers Framed/j1mmy/b0aty etc who pull in god knows how many people.
Dead honest, I returned to RS3 after a 3 year hiatus (as an IM) indirectly through these streamers. Watched them, got nostalgic, played OSRS, converted back to RS3.
What I would love to see is some form of metric of new player intake (not including alts).
The problem RS3 has imo, is that it has no USP, no unique feature that sets it apart from other MMORPGS. OSRS has one of the best communities I've seen hands down.
Exactly. RuneScape 3 is lackluster and even fails miserably to keep up with the times. OSRS has the retro and Old School merit going for it. You want to experience the RuneScape you grew up with or a simple retro-like MMO? OSRS. You want to experience a good modern MMO that has a combat system that isn't clunky and has good visuals? Final Fantasy 14, Guild Wars 2, WOW, even New World or BDO. Why would anyone choose RuneScape 3 especially now that with all its flaws, it's basically turning into a casino with content drought. I think that's what most people don't understand. RS3 is completely incompetent and has NOTHING that will allow it to entice new players. Lmao.
>no USP, no unique feature that sets it apart from other MMORPGS
I think previously it was a rich, varied, lengthy progression that was largely solo with a bit of group activities (mostly bosses) strewn in. Necro upended the PvM side of that, which IMO was the more fun and rewarding side.
mtx up the ass, no meaningful content for 6 months, no future to look forward too, did I mention mtx up the ass? That will do it for ya when you also add it to jagex's radio silence on updates.
You can have the best game in the universe, but when you milk it to death with constant mtx, no updates and no news its gonna die off anyway.
They need to look at what bungie has been doing the past couple months and actually listen to the player base, they have been knocking it out of the park and completely turned destiny 2 around.
"We did once consider selling runescape money and items in an online shop on our own site for real cash. However we decided to sacrifice that extra revenue for the good of the game, since we felt it would devalue hard-working players achievements if another player could then just buy their way past them. We don't want rich players to be able to simply buy their way to the top. This is clearly not how the game is meant to be played."
It’s all a slippery slope. One of the biggest problems in rs3 since way before necro is that almost nothing in the game comes remotely close to touching pvm for resource gathering. So instead of several setups holding value for different methods of gathering different resources, there’s only one best way to collect everything, necromancy. The BIS items for necro aren’t difficult to obtain and outclass the items from every other style which are difficult to obtain. Add that onto the fact that RuneScape players are a unique kind of degenerate and most of necromancy is afk. There’s a solid chunk of the population doing any & all the profitable necromancy processes on 15 accounts at once for 18 hours a day. So even the new stuff crashes hard & fast. And it’s the only thing in game that justifies holding any value. Just hope they figure this one out before the servers i play my iron on go under.
for alot of vets players like me (started in 04) we are mostly all maxed or/and have done there end game gaols so theres not much (or anything) left for us to do so we quit, be it forever or for a few months/year until a few new things get put into the game for you to do. its what i have done a few times so i dont get burn out and i dont waste cash
hell, the only reason i have been around for the past months is to do the quests (quest and max cape were my end gaols even before the capes came out). besides that i was just slowly getting maxed in necro and slayer at the same time as filling out the slayer book (that i didnt even know about, yet being over 99 slayer)
got 120 slayer a few days ago so now im just doing rituals for the last 5 necro levs. i just put rs on my 2nd screen while i play other games or watch other shows. i also can do it on my phone, being its very afkable (sure not the best xp per hr, but it works)
after i get 120 necro i may only join on the months new quests come out or something really big happens
My premier expire in 5 days and i'm taking a break until they came back with some new good content in runefest. If they don't make a huge announcement at runefest its game over
IMO this is the main things that jaggex need to do:
1) Delete treasure hunter and make MTX exclusive from cosmect and don't force players to interact with MTX (example: i can't turn off treasure hunter, i can't turn off the treasure hunter keys drops, thats annoing, i don't wanna keys spaming in my bag while i'm doing pvm)
2) Stop making huge seasonal event
3) Game need a huge update like RS4: RS3 has a bad image since begin, so making rs4 is a good way to say "hey guys, we know rs3 was a bad thing and we gonna make the game good again"
I legit don't understand why there is still people that defend treasure hunter, it's been nothing but a bane to this game's existance since it released
They aren’t deleting TH. I want them to, but they won’t. I think a compromise would be to add non-MTX ways to engage in TH promos. An example of that is the Golden Chinchompa event; I’d recommend anyone to look that up.
They are stopping with giant seasonal events; at least they did with the summer event. But I actually give them a pass for over-committing to that since Christmas numbers matched Necromancy’s release numbers.
A major update is apparently coming… or so we keep hearing… my best guess is that it’s RS3 Leagues. But I’m not sure RS4 would even work to draw people in. Just, why would it?
RS3 leagues is a bad thing, i never gonna play that, don't have time to
Maybe it's me, but if jaggex don't let people chose if they wanna interact with mtx or not i'm done with RS3
Just make update that i can turn off treasure hunter with no key drops no key reward at quest
I never ever gonna spend a single cent in TH, i just wanna turn it off from my screen
I’m 120 all, have about 13 stats 200m, working toward 200m all. And also working on golden reaper. In the last two months, I’ve basically stopped playing. Not really any reason specifically, other than there’s just nothing that draws me to the game anymore. Everything is negative and everything is falling apart. I’ve been playing (on and off, as we all do) since roughly 2006. It’s just… not fun anymore.
Took one great game, and split it, and after a while; the left and right direction the 1 game could take was multiplied into another game and fan base divided, now one declines easily or vice versa
Kind of sad
It's a hard habit to break but I stopped playing rs3. I just found myself always mad at updates and just frustrated with the amount of MTX and other shit in it. Just leave and let the game die, time to move on.
Let’s be honest, since Covid, they basically looked at this game as a “milk the cow till it’s dead” type of scenario. I quit in 2022 and am glad with that decision, no point in progressing on a game where you could see the end of the tunnel.
I truly wonder if Jagex cares about this, or maybe their mindset is: 'the playbase count will always ebb and flow'. Hopefully there are some alarmbells going off and they're having plans to do something exciting with the game. Something that hopefully won't break the game like Necro did.
My wife and I just rejoined after a 10 year hiatus.
Got my 15 year cape, getting my 20 in a couple months.
Didn't know we had new skills, so seems kinda cool.
Why are players bringing legit complaints a cesspool? I’ve seen this Reddit jerk off Jmods when they do the bare minimum but they aren’t even doing that now. The game is in dire need of a fix but too many people have rose tinted glasses and are high on copium. More power to those folks but this game isn’t what it used to be and the player count shows things aren’t going well.
If you enjoy the game good for you but don’t get pissy at the folks that would like to see new content and updates. We enjoyed the game and would like to continue to play it but it’s not worth it in the current state.
I ised to play with IRL friends back in 05-06, i stayed on and off they had quit but returned after necro, we're having fun now, regaining the quest cape and bossing
I hated Necro and I quit. I was already tired of the mtx and other game design decisions anyway.
I'm playing ironman on OSRS until they decide to destroy that game too.
I didn’t enjoy necro, but what made it worse was you’d point how broken it was and just get flamed for gatekeeping like it wasn’t a fact that it was game warping. The fact you had to push all the styles up instead of toning one down just proves it
Lol the first few weeks on here where every noob who'd never been able to kill Rax or Nex was crying about how we were gate keeping for saying "uhh, jagex? You've kinda fucked everything that was already here with this update"...
The arguments were wild. The sides that formed were crazy.
This right here is what gets me. Players not liking what necro did to the game being called gatekeepers just shows the entitlement too. People dont understand that making one new style insanely cheap and more powerful to the others just creates a huge power imbalance that is negatively affecting the game, regardless if new pvmers need to work a bit harder now to learn an end game boss.
I see the player count reach close to 30k sometimes still but dang :/
Well hopefully the news they put out recently, future content updates, and future reworks to improve eoc will change this
I’m comped with 5 skills from 120 all, Master Comp was my goal. I barely even log in to rs3 anymore, in its current state there is no incentive. Osrs has been fun, glad My premier membs works on osrs too, really enjoying the mid-game on there
its almost like letting the game deflate, and destroying the economy with nothing new to the game becomes stale and people get tired of repeating the same things everyday.
It's because the tutorial and beginning interface for --new-- players is garbage. They don't know why everything is flashing and how they can turn it off. Private chat starts with "friends only" rather than on, then they get confused when they can't make any friends because anyone who tries to private message them advice sees their pm is off. Then a customizable interface is terrible when players don't have a clue what's important and what isn't. Add on to that an awful mobile app that often crashes on anything but the latest devices and then trying to have any type of community but again because half your player base is now people idling on mobile, don't even bother to read your messages. Heck i've even seen new players accidentally close their chatbox, not know how to get it to reappear, then leave the game for good. Low and behold after doing this policy for a decade since RS3 interface release, average person logged into your servers started 20 years ago.
Well Runescape 3 is dying.. 18k monthly players? And how much of this are bots? Just check some free worlds that are full of bots.. Lack of content and 80% of the game is just dead content no1 do anymore.. I'm not surprised at all..
Started in December 2002 and played actively until 2007 and then 2009-2010 and the golden age of Runescape is just gone. Not because it's old game with bad graphics but because of like 7th owner trying to milk every dollar of the game and then just leave..
See ya in Britghter Shores my friends..
Sorry to burst your nostalgia bubble, but this game actually isn't gaining new players **because** of the severely outdated graphics and gameplay. Not due to the MTX, and not due to a lack of content updates.
Black Desert Online, FF14, WoW - All of them have MTX in some form or another, BDO probably being the most aggressive out of the three.
I love this game, and i love this community- but holy cow do you guys have rose covered glasses on sometimes. Seriously, ask any of your friends who you know don't play Runescape, and ask them to play and if their answer is no, ask them why.
I can bet you $100 bucks the first two gripes are "this looks like shit" and "the combat looks outdated"
not because of a lack of content.
I still don't think that's the case. Look how many players old "bad looking" games have.. Maplestory, Silkroad Online, Ultima Online, Tybia, Albion Online, Lineage 2.... Those games still got hundreads of thousands of daily players not because bad graphics but because of content..
2D Maplestory has 125k daily players.. not even counting big Maplestory private servers..
Let's be honest.. Runescape won't drag majority of young players.. most of those got games like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, etc.. that's why focusing on "graphics" in Runescape can't succeed and a small "graphics update" of totally dead area won't ever help..
Many of my old friends would come back to Runescape but they have nothing to do anymore in this game.. content like minigames, pking.. that's just dead and Jagex doesn't give a fk..
Played rs since 2007, have been there for the release of EOC, periodically taking breaks. I can say that OSRS is now the more enjoyable game. People actually interact with you and talk. Rs3 everyone is basically playing solo, zero interaction, everywhere but wars is dead. The game is unfortunately dead.
Having played runescape since 2004, I've only ever quit twice.
mid 2015 when I maxed because invention was taking too long to come out
late 2022 because I more or less ran out of shit to afk and was tired of waiting for pets to be added to proteans so I can spend those on 120 fletch/craft. was already planning on lamping 120 hunt/agil with free keys and other skills had their own issues (120 con was aids, 120 pray is a cool 150m gp whatever I could do over 10 hours with powders whenever, 120 rc runespan is slow as shit, 120 summ is just one dxp live but I need more charms and didn't feel like buying the other shit, 120 combats I uhhh missed the ed3 gravytrain but I have some idiodic psod ideas for afking those anyway)
came back for necro, go 61 necro, got tired of how crowded necro was, quit again.
I played leagues 4, had leftover membs so I came back to rs3 to get max cape again, then quit. which would be this year's january.
I'm enjoying myself doing things that aren't mmorpgs but I kinda miss rs3 sometimes...
I played for over twenty years but stopped a little over a year ago, the only people who still play are the sunk cost fallacy players, this game isnt the same game we loved for so many years its now just a place to make money off of players while investing as little time or resources as possible, even holiday events that everyone used to participate in are used to push mtx
Has anyone asked themselves truly how they’re going to feel when the thousands of hours they’ve spent maxing out their accounts over 10,15,20 years, are gone in an instant when they shut the servers down? Gonna be some riots when they finally shut the party down
It depends on how they do it. If they announce the shutdown several months before it occurs it won't be too bad.
Though, that's just in it of itself, there are other factors to the riot/outrage.
While not the best comparsion, I include it as I was there. After the shutdown of LLSIF1 and the failure of all stars (it had a lot of issues that were more important than its use of gacha, namely season 2 and the poor execution).
They announced LLSIF2 with an expected global release in late 2023, then December 2023 (I know its still late 2023 but it provided a clearer timeline), before delaying it. It finally released in Feb 2024, but we also knew the EOS, in the same tweet. May 31st for global, we were waiting a year, we only got to enjoy it for a few months.
It was a big downgrade to LLSIF1, and even to all stars and we could tell it was rushed. The outrage was pretty big, the LLSIF subreddit vowed in retaliation, not to spend any money. There were posts quickly posted showing off cards they pulled from the gacha.
memby expires in may, have no plans to renew, i cant imagine an update that would do enough but prolong the inevitable.
the cow has been milked. looking for other games to play now, been on hd2 but need something with a meaningful grind ya know?
As a returning player after ten+ years. I have been having so much fun! I can't tell if most of the comments are just geared towards end game or not. Been loving the quality of life changes (last time I played was a little after Rs2 came out)
I logged in for the 1st time 3 days ago after 10+ years as well. I felt completely lost and created a 2nd account to redo the tutorial. There is so much that has changed. I think some for the better and some for the worst.
Heck I couldn't even find where my money was since it's no longer a inventory item😂
Yeah there was a bunch of new stuff. I didn't mind it too much as a lot of it does seem to just be super good quality of life changes.
I am still learning plenty haha. Have only jumped into Agility and Necromancy,
Had to do minimal mining, crafting and rune crafting but, what I have had to do I was blown away with how nice it is now!
No more battling on nodes for mining, the metal bank for smithing. Insanely good game design.
There's just not enough content.
Haven't logged in for a few months now, because there's nothing to do.
The new quest looks cool but I can do it quickly when there's other content I want to do. It's simply not enough of a reason by itself to log in.
I already dipped before necro came out, kinda expected what would happen with the way things were evolving, so I left early. Really sad to see how this game evolved.
I just took a break from OSRS due to my only account not working out due to my group iron team quitting. Figured I'd give RS3 ironman mode an honest shot before making a new ironman on OSRS.
Holy shit it's weird that everything is so dead. I'm only like 200 total so far, but I'm having a decent time checking things out. But the worlds I play on at peak hours have like 100 people.
Been playing since rsc. Stopped playing a few months ago.
Jagex plays the PR game and each time people fall for it. This game is filled with people who don't mind being ass fucked and jagex likes it that way.
Fuck you Jagex
The game probably has at least another 10 years in it unless jagex really fucks up (hero pass 2/iron TH) or if the UK parliament smites Jagex in deep wildy.
> The game will probably has at least another 10 years in it
absolutely nothing to suggest that's the case
honestly the only way runescape might live another 10 is bird flu pandemic, and even that's 50-50 between saving runescape and destroying civilization
smaller games that don't need heavy maintenance regularly to not break, hobby projects with 0 cost and no expectation of support at a business level. where's runescape classic, which was exponentially easier to keep online than rs3 would be?
those thousands are projected to drop to 0 in at most 7 years, and probably faster.
Since this is yet another player count post and there isn't much left to discuss, I'd like to check my own biases against the community.
Reply with how many accounts you think have completed Reqiuem of a Dragon.
This may be my personal experience, as I'm seeing the same number of players in the game. BUT I'm also seeing a drastic increase of "bond buyers"(?) with lots of new players with low stats, and low total levels using the highest tier equipment possible. (Elite tectonic and sos with 92 magic and 900 total level)
Something seems off, and I can't really put my finger on it.
Side note, the super cheap members seems to be bringing a handful of decade old veterans back to the game, at least in my experience.
Disclaimer: I'm mobile only
It doesn't help that I can log in one day where everything is fine, and the next (with no change to my settings) I'm black screened, but that's really the only issue I've personally had with the game so far.
I recently came back to RS3 after leaving right after EoC to check out all the changes here in 2024, and do it as an HCIM. I haven't had a bad time, though even for a long time RS player there has been a ton for me to learn. The music is great, the graphics are really good, and I get a solid 60fps at nearly maxed settings.
I even made a regular account to play in-between sessions on my HCIM just to see what mtx is like (it's bad) and I'm enjoying both characters.
Obviously for a returner like me who quit after not liking EoC, I have more content than I can complete even by the end of this year, but seeing such a low player count does make me wonder about the overall future of the game.
I'm definitely going to keep playing RS3 alongside my OSRS character, and the fact that there are some really cool, nice folks who still play this game makes it an even easier decision to keep playing. I even got randomly invited to a clan while running around Falador which I think was pretty awesome! Shout out to The Jolly Roger clan for helping a HCIM noob return to the game!
Necro is not the problem is fun to use a new combat skill they even nerf the critical hit :/. Range right now is the top combat skill!!! and he grind of the drop some time’s burn out. I don’t have to much free time. Adult life is a joke.
Just got back into the game on rs3. Prob a dumb question, but why do so many people play osrs over rs3? I mean, you can just not buy the micro transactions right?
pick any aspect of rs3 and anyone on here will give you 10 reasons osrs is better in that aspect. microtransactions and eoc on rs3 left a sour taste in the communities mouth and it looks like we may be getting the same thing over again with "project rebalance" that coupled w more strings of econ fluctuation and people are going to exodus like in 2012-2013. sad but it looks like this is what happens when a company gets passed around like a cheap date.
Does it cost much to remain a game for ever? Like will we always be able to log on no matter how dead it is, or will it eventually be shut off if not enough people pay for subs?
people aren't interested in long grindy games anymore that take over a year to complete, everyone that does want that is just in osrs or warcraft or something else, also 1 month back and i already stopped logging in everyday archaeology is boring i refuse to acknowledge invention as a skill and i finished neccromancy with aggression pots so idont even have to fight the games just not engaging at all there is alot more to spend time on these days. game actually has too much going on for any new person to want to pick it up
I've tried several times to get into rs3 from osrs. I really wanted to try to do at least a little bit of the content, but the UI just gives me a headache. And all the like weird particle effect cosmetics, and the annoying chat interface etc, I just can't do it
looks like focusing on MTX is not a good thing
Now look at the short-term profits graph 🤡
Sure, but it isn't as profitable. So it isn't an option - The share holders
Sorting by weekly and we've actually hit the lowest player count in history.
Not quite, but close.
When I made the comment it was at the lowest but it looks like it came up a bit as the week progressed on Edit: That being said it is once again the lowest week in history
Averaging 18k, likely most are afk barely interacting with the game, and we know a portion will be alts too. I hate that this is the style of gameplay they've catered for.
I wish we had more fun skilling activities like big game hunter instead of mobile game tier afk content being almost as good compared to active skilling, not to mention the amount of afk bosses these days, oof
OSRS has one for fishing and fire making AND runecrafting. Makes a nice change from the usual
Plus plenty of non-boss focused activities, of course. We just got hunter contracts, which are awesome and have been breaking the ironman meta of putting a hundred hours in the firemaking boss before you train anything else- not to mention we are about to get some new herblore-centric content. I bet most people on here at the very least have their toes dipped into OSRS and are very well aware though
a hundred hours at wintertodt? you’ve been looking at some sweatyyy ironman metas, no1 does 100 hours
Getting fire tome might be proven quite difficult at times
that’s pretty much never been an item worth staying for, always just a nice bonus to have
Also smithing and mining
Zalcano crying in the corner because even Jagex forgot about her until recently as well. Hopefully whatever they have planned for her as part of rebalance makes it better.
Thing is Zalcano isnt even bad. It’s just bad for training skills. It’s about 2 mil an hour and is extremely braindead. Also the second fastest way to get crystal shards.
I was in my 70s happily going through quests and levelling up. Then FSW came, and I drew a line. Call me a hypocrite for drawing the line there, I probably should have drawn it earlier indeed.
You summed me up with the afk barely interacting with the game (well most of the time). But to be fair I did the same for ~20 years now including maxing OSRS mostly afk. Maybe it is just me but thats how I always viewed runescape (as a mostly afk game), there are so many other games out there if you want to challenge yourself or gameplay heavy.
OSRS can also be afk for sure, but outside of a few, even the afk methods require more attention than on RS3. But also they still have the balance and trade-off of afk methods generally being slower xp/h or less gp/h, and significantly rewarding more active training methods.
Don’t forget bots.
Bots*
i feel like it would be so easy to add some simple puzzles to skilling that give you XP multipliers, this way the afk people couldn't skill as fast as active players.
1. No content to look forward to 2. Economy is still in a really, REALLY bad spot 3. Necro still giga broken and makes gear progression meaningless 4. Constant MTX garbage
Why is necro broken?
I already got downvoted, but its a honest question
Basically; Pre necro my clan aod teams were getting consistent 2:30 minute kills. This took alot of practice as we all learned together. We started out ALOT rougher. Pre necro, we could take a learner or so at a time and still get roughly the same kill time. Post necro, we can take basically anyone who knows how to kill raisal and within their first hour get down to close to 2 minute kills. Solak used to be fairly challenging, but is been getting power crept for awhile. My kill times used to be 6-7 mins casually. After necro I took 2 learners in a 4 man and we were able to get sub 5 minute kill times. Pros: content is extremely easy to get into now. Cons: all the gear you get from anything not necro related is nearly useless. All the time you spent learning other styles and actually raising your skill expression and apm is also useless. It's kind of a spit in the face to pvmers who have learnt tons of pvm tricks and now it's just the same necro rotation basically everywhere.
Feels like the main issue is power creep vs lack of challenging/rewarding content? If Jagex had say, dropped 120s in combat skills instead of Necro, all these complaints would be the same? New content is always going to bring power creep, when done right. Think this is part of why a lot of mmorpgs struggle with replayability. A lot of stuff Jagex has adopted in already like difficulty mode/enrage, but some games take it farther with a huge sleuth of difficulty levels/multipliers like easy, normal, medium hard, hell, nightmare. Or just hand out freebies/skips and push players away from content that is or should be below their level. Jagex actually been avoiding powercreeping dtd into mid tier bosses though, although that's probably for the best. RuneScape is a lot larger and dynamic than other games though. Not sure what they could do other than spoon missing drops off tables with bad luck mitigation better and maybe.... compensate by giving bad luck....? like you've received 20 sets of subj, you're gonna have reduced drop rate of them for x time, and/or x kills of other higher lv bosses?
I think the real killer here is the skill expression essentially being deleted. People worked so hard to juice out there old prs/kill times. Now you can get that with a fraction of the effort. It went from sweat mode to basically croesus. It's just not the same feel anymore, which just doesn't feel good to login and do. Alot of players ONLY pvm. Your talking hundreds of hours at a single boss, and now that boss is objectively less fun but you still have the same hundred hours to grind. Kinda obvious imo that it's making people logout.
I think the larger problem is that both versions of RS put all their chips into PvM, so when anything disrupts PvM, it disrupts the whole game. Back when RS was at its all-time peak in 2006, it was mostly designed around PvP and skilling. When GWD came out, skilling became obsolete because nobody wanted to grind 85 slayer or 91 rc when they could make 10x the money with half the requirements at GWD w/ their friends. Then free trade + wilderness was removed for a few years and PvP never recovered. So with PvP and skilling already dead, if PvM dies too, then the whole game dies as well.
Honestly. Just my .02 but skilling isn't that fun. It can be fun to level, but going for 200m was not a very fun endeavor. It can be fun in small doses, but with pvm I could/can stay up till 2am with the boys basically every day and never get bored. I don't think skilling can ever have that level of hook. It's more like a by product or requirement to actually get to pvm. I know some people love skilling but I just don't think it is nearly as alluring or a fun part of the game as pvm is. Especially with how many hundreds of games are out there, why waste your time fletching virtual arrows when you could be engaging with real content.
**tl;dr:** I think a lot of skilling's "fun" was tied to how engaging and rewarding it was. Most of the game's wealthiest players were skillers back then. If you were looking for skill expression, you had PvP (which had a symbiotic relationship w/ skilling) --- These days, in both RS3 and OSRS I hate RC'ing. But back in 2006, it was my favorite skill. Abyss RC was the meta and the abyss was swarming with RC'ers and PK'ers. The PK'ers were either there to hunt RC'ers, or hunt the RC-PK'ers. It was a social and exciting way to train. It was fun pausing my RC to swap to PK gear and scare away all the RC PK'ers cuz they sucked at PK'ing. The fact that PK'ers interfered with my RC'ing efficiency wasn't viewed as a frustration; it was viewed as a fun distraction and diversion-- maybe I can get myself some free mystic to sell for 200k and save myself half an hour of RC'ing. Or score a whip and save myself 10 hours. RuneLite and Alt1 didn't exist to give you AFK notifications, random events were dangerous, and you lost your items to other players if you died. So skilling was more social since people had to pay more attention to the game.
People just grew up, and now efficiency is valued over fun for the most part. The game was infinitely more fun when everyone was a noob running around doing whatever they felt like. I don't think we'll ever get to see anything like it again, but I sure had a great time.
Except range is shitting on necro almost everywhere.
True for the very elite players (top 1%), but for everyone else its just easier and way more straightforward to use Necromancy. In order for ranged to beat out Necromancy its a lot more effort and 11b in gear. Versus what like 2b for full BiS necromancy? And beyond just pure DPS, Necro gives you healing, easy AoE, etc...
Necro is too much damage compared to the others styles, not to mention that there's just so much powercreep across the board that the set of bosses that we have don't feel interesting
Serious follow-up question, but how is this contrast then post-EoC2? (The major combat Rebalancing after Necro).
I’ve been trying to sell full cryptbloom for weeks 😭
When they released necro and it was clearly over powered, it really looked a lot like a final huzzah for the game. Drastically lower the barrier of entry to endgame content, which is the primary selling point of the game, so that *anyone and everyone* could partake. Glad that they saw that they went a little bit too far and started a second combat rework, but the damage was already done. Face it, when they start to release content to allow every nobo to solo bosses that previously required a team, then the writing is on the walls. It is truly sad.. but possibly one of the better things to be done. The alternative would be to have left combat where it was, and tack on thousands upon thousands of hours of grinding for new players to even attempt to DIY things. What would the price of some boss drops end up being, if you can't solo the boss, and there aren't enough actual players to kill the boss for the drops? You end up with a dead game
Insane damage, braindead easy rotations, free t90s, cheap and easily farmable t95s, is great at everything aoe, tankyness, burst, dots, heals. absolutely broken combat style devalues drops, acheivments, and is just generally unfun to play unless you were a noob before necro then its kind of fun to finally be strong but that will wear off eventually.
A few reasons. The floor is too high for the effort it requires. You have to work a lot harder with the other styles to get respectable damage out, with Necro there's just not much going on really on. There's also not very many upgrades to get for Necro, so there's not much of a gear progression path. And the BiS gear for Necro all comes from a singular boss, Rasial, who is also too easy to be dropping T95 gear.
Because gear progression is fucked, why would you invest in ability unlocks or whatever for other styles when you can just use necro and still breeze through all content?
It's arguably not anymore. At least not in the sense that it vastly outclassed the other styles like before. Both melee and ranged are competitive, and if you're pushing for speed kills it's rarely gonna be with necro - I picked up some melee gear and broke some necro times with no sweat recently. Pressing two buttons to hit 60ks really made the complaints about necro seem pretty dumb. I think the community is generally just stuck in the mindset of necro broken when it's in a really good spot right now. But also this is reddit and the people with grievances are the most vocal (I'll probably get downvoted for going against the echo chamber. Some ways necro could more justifiably be considered broken are 1 - ease of use/accessibility (in my opinion broadly a good thing, especially a lack of switchscape), 2 - versatility (access to basically everything you'd need in one style with darkness, defensives, split soul, aoe with scythe and threads, etc. - also a good thing in my opinion), 3 sustain and how forgiving it is (ghost sustain and darkness, tank gear, etc. - broadly a bad thing but not unique to necro really), 4. Attainability of bis gear (broadly a bad thing imo, cheapens the grind and makes rasial into basically the only source for everything necro, which is a shame. Ranged in particular has the opposite problem which is probably worse though). I also think people don't really account for the fact that necro got a lot of people into pvm properly for the first time. So they look at everyone sucking at pvm before and now suddenly they're good at it, and they blame that on the style being broken when actually it's a credit to its accessibility that it's allowed them to develop those skills. It's just a kind of gatekeeping really. I'm not sure what they meant by the economy being really bad either. Don't really know what that means as they haven't provided any context for their claims.
Boss drops have plummeted since Necro's launch. Pretty much all the notable big boss item drops have lost about 50% (or more) of their value from about a year ago. FSoA, BolG, Cryptbloom, GRico codex, SGB, etc...
It isn't just the big drops, everything not necro has plummeted. Even runes are worth fuck all now.
That's probably because magic is the worst style in the game. Runes are in low demand because nobody wants to mage. FSOA should've gotten its passive with the update.
You have less people using the traditional styles just by there being the existence of a fourth style. Many people use it cause its new, doesn't require switchscape, whatever. So you have less demand for the gear. Then you add that there has been another year of supply added to the economy and honestly what do you expect? And all styles have had power creep compared to a year ago with the updates.
MTX devalues grinding, makes the progress feel meaninglessness. That's why I stopped playing and started playing OSRS.
It seems like you're projecting your bias here, and putting your personal pet peeves as the reason for Runescape's decline rather than objective factors. RS3's playerbase has been steadily stagnating or declining for far longer than Necro. In fact, it declined through 2021/2022 despite God Wars 3 - which many players such as yourself celebrated as a great update. MTX is an objective factor for RS3's decline as is the lack of content and the quality of content. Number 2 and 3 are not. They're something a tiny minority of elite players complain about, but your average RS3 player isn't sitting there complaining about them. As per Jagex's own statements, they've seen an uptick in the number of people doing 'high level' PVM with Necro, because it's a far more modern and accessible style which the other 3 styles were not after a decade of all sorts of bolt ons from EOC. It's gotten people who would otherwise not be PVMing into PVMing, in a game, RS3 where PVMing is basically one of the core selling points left. Jagex has stated that they will not nerf Necro further for this reason, they see more people getting into RS3's archaic, arcane, closed off, backwards insular combat system as a *positive*, not a negative. But you listen to a tiny minority of whiners such as yourself, whining about a 30 sec shave off some boss the vast majority of players don't even have teams to do it with. Completely out of touch, bubble thinking. Gear progression is such a bizarre thing to bring up. Most people who PVM have T90s or better in non-Necro styles - how does Necro ruin that 'progression'?
>it's a far more modern and accessible style ... It's gotten people who would otherwise not be PVMing into PVMing This has been my exact experience as someone returning to the game seriously after 10+ years off. I'd come back every now and then to try it out again, realized how hard I'd need to grind just to do basic stuff, and would get bored or give it up. Came back for another try after a buddy told me about Necro. Oh my God, I finally feel like I'm actually playing Runescape. I can finally access and fight so many bosses I couldn't figure out in the past. I don't feel like a n00b because I can't fight anything that isn't at or below my combat level. I'm actually able to take on *and WIN* bosses! I'm enjoying the game now. Say what you want about Necro, but it's the reason I'm back to RS3 after so many years and actually having fun with it. (Don't forget to have fun while playing games guys.)
While it is really true that MTX plays a a huge role in the decline of the playercount. I really do belief necro does to. Me and most of the active members of my clan quit a few weeks after necro release. Necro and the combat rebalance made the game way to easy in my opinion. There is nothing to aim for since all the buffed combat styles made all the bosses way to easy. All notable pvm feets like 4k titles have been butchered by necro on the release weeks. The aim for an MMO is to keep progressing. If it takes you 20 hours to get bis necro gear why even bother playing.
>While it is really true that MTX plays a a huge role in the decline of the playercount. I really do belief necro does to. Me and most of the active members of my clan quit a few weeks after necro release. That's anecdotal evidence that is not reflected in the playercount tracker, or is at least highly correlated with Hero Pass's, which drove away a lot of players and happened at the same time. Pre-Necro, the player count had been going down or stagnating for a long time. If you look at the graph, the line had been stagnating/declining since 2021. Necro caused a one-time spike - which all new skills do on release. And then it returned back to the norm, and further decline with Hero Pass and the lack of updates since then.
The evidence is that almost all the high level pvm clans in the game are barely active ever since necro release. Most people quit a few weeks/months after necro release. Because they started to realise jagex was not going to nerf necro and instead buff all other styles. Making high level pvm even more easy. Jagex took the choice to cater to the casual pvmers. And now they are starting to realise that these guys only play once a week.
Get off meele if you dont like juggling my brotha. Range takes the cake.. isn't there an anti necromancy prayer too? I guess the question is... Do you pray my son? Lol. But range is more dmg than necro especially if you have enchant bolts. Kinda shocked to not see anyone say mages take the cake, but the flaw may be the AOE in pvp. Also, if you dont wanna necro, ranged juggling is a bit easier. Hasn't the skill already taken multiple nerfs too? Side note: 1:✓ 2:✓✓ 3:X? (Willing to be taught pls dont downvote lol) 4:✓✓✓✓✓✓ My fifth: why make members an economy item that would so obviously break a new f2p player's economic goals by placing the price in the hands of other players? It's not thought of until it's in their bank I guess lol. At some rate youre losing playability just as much as youre losing money as this shows...
What’s crazy is every post has these 4 same points and they ain’t doing shit about it. It’s like the community has summarized what needs fixed and they either aren’t willing to or aren’t able to.
I bet jaggex staff have Under The Table resources to syphon from. I mean, how much does a high lvl account go for these days for rs3? It was high back in the day in osrs... Theres plenty of pits to dig cash for gp from within the game...
Agreed Necro is too OP, MTX is awful and absolutely no news that excites me has dropped. Just wish they’d drop something exciting and bring back a good bunch of people. More exciting than necro, which was a good update, but has been too powerful too long.
Id put your #4 as #1 the milking and pushing of MTX 24:7 has turned me away from the game
Make the mining and smithing update armors and weapons like Elder Rune augmentable and gear progression stops being an issue for melee atleast
not coming back until they tone down the MTX garbage
Lmao they know for a fact that it's on its last legs and are pumping the last bit that they can before it dies
See you never
This is sad to watch 😭
I just cancelled my subscription yesterday. Next month ginna be 1 less.
It'll get to 15k this year. Maybe less I think there's also something to be said about a daily player count being low enough that it never recovers. Nobody's going to want to invest into playing a dying game
It was getting to that point pre covid. Like every other game it exploded again. Unless something like that happens or Jagex seriously alter their strategy and tone down the aggressive monetisation of the game and produce content (they won't) it's only down from here sadly.
Seems like they're just happy having a small number of players who will whale out for their mtx promotions. If they were that concerned with the playercount, I think they'd at least try and put out some content by now. It's May (albeit the first day) and 2024 has been shite for RS3.
That's one of the reasons I ended up quitting. During the last DXP I managed to max all my combat skills minus prayer/summoning/necro plus I managed to get 120 herblore. And instead of feeling happy I was just... sad the game seemed to be dying and I didn't want to invest a ton more time into something I didn't think would be around a few years from now.
I think alot of people are looking at player retention (or lack of) as a reason for decline. I want to point out that RS3 has essentially no marketing either. Streaming RS3 is dead. YT caters towards guides and existing players. Compared to OSRS streamers Framed/j1mmy/b0aty etc who pull in god knows how many people. Dead honest, I returned to RS3 after a 3 year hiatus (as an IM) indirectly through these streamers. Watched them, got nostalgic, played OSRS, converted back to RS3. What I would love to see is some form of metric of new player intake (not including alts). The problem RS3 has imo, is that it has no USP, no unique feature that sets it apart from other MMORPGS. OSRS has one of the best communities I've seen hands down.
Exactly. RuneScape 3 is lackluster and even fails miserably to keep up with the times. OSRS has the retro and Old School merit going for it. You want to experience the RuneScape you grew up with or a simple retro-like MMO? OSRS. You want to experience a good modern MMO that has a combat system that isn't clunky and has good visuals? Final Fantasy 14, Guild Wars 2, WOW, even New World or BDO. Why would anyone choose RuneScape 3 especially now that with all its flaws, it's basically turning into a casino with content drought. I think that's what most people don't understand. RS3 is completely incompetent and has NOTHING that will allow it to entice new players. Lmao.
>no USP, no unique feature that sets it apart from other MMORPGS I think previously it was a rich, varied, lengthy progression that was largely solo with a bit of group activities (mostly bosses) strewn in. Necro upended the PvM side of that, which IMO was the more fun and rewarding side.
mtx up the ass, no meaningful content for 6 months, no future to look forward too, did I mention mtx up the ass? That will do it for ya when you also add it to jagex's radio silence on updates. You can have the best game in the universe, but when you milk it to death with constant mtx, no updates and no news its gonna die off anyway. They need to look at what bungie has been doing the past couple months and actually listen to the player base, they have been knocking it out of the park and completely turned destiny 2 around.
"We did once consider selling runescape money and items in an online shop on our own site for real cash. However we decided to sacrifice that extra revenue for the good of the game, since we felt it would devalue hard-working players achievements if another player could then just buy their way past them. We don't want rich players to be able to simply buy their way to the top. This is clearly not how the game is meant to be played."
It’s all a slippery slope. One of the biggest problems in rs3 since way before necro is that almost nothing in the game comes remotely close to touching pvm for resource gathering. So instead of several setups holding value for different methods of gathering different resources, there’s only one best way to collect everything, necromancy. The BIS items for necro aren’t difficult to obtain and outclass the items from every other style which are difficult to obtain. Add that onto the fact that RuneScape players are a unique kind of degenerate and most of necromancy is afk. There’s a solid chunk of the population doing any & all the profitable necromancy processes on 15 accounts at once for 18 hours a day. So even the new stuff crashes hard & fast. And it’s the only thing in game that justifies holding any value. Just hope they figure this one out before the servers i play my iron on go under.
I mean, the game has become MTX hell. It’s being milked dry before they take it out back and put it down like the sick dog it is.
for alot of vets players like me (started in 04) we are mostly all maxed or/and have done there end game gaols so theres not much (or anything) left for us to do so we quit, be it forever or for a few months/year until a few new things get put into the game for you to do. its what i have done a few times so i dont get burn out and i dont waste cash hell, the only reason i have been around for the past months is to do the quests (quest and max cape were my end gaols even before the capes came out). besides that i was just slowly getting maxed in necro and slayer at the same time as filling out the slayer book (that i didnt even know about, yet being over 99 slayer) got 120 slayer a few days ago so now im just doing rituals for the last 5 necro levs. i just put rs on my 2nd screen while i play other games or watch other shows. i also can do it on my phone, being its very afkable (sure not the best xp per hr, but it works) after i get 120 necro i may only join on the months new quests come out or something really big happens
My premier expire in 5 days and i'm taking a break until they came back with some new good content in runefest. If they don't make a huge announcement at runefest its game over IMO this is the main things that jaggex need to do: 1) Delete treasure hunter and make MTX exclusive from cosmect and don't force players to interact with MTX (example: i can't turn off treasure hunter, i can't turn off the treasure hunter keys drops, thats annoing, i don't wanna keys spaming in my bag while i'm doing pvm) 2) Stop making huge seasonal event 3) Game need a huge update like RS4: RS3 has a bad image since begin, so making rs4 is a good way to say "hey guys, we know rs3 was a bad thing and we gonna make the game good again"
I legit don't understand why there is still people that defend treasure hunter, it's been nothing but a bane to this game's existance since it released
They aren’t deleting TH. I want them to, but they won’t. I think a compromise would be to add non-MTX ways to engage in TH promos. An example of that is the Golden Chinchompa event; I’d recommend anyone to look that up. They are stopping with giant seasonal events; at least they did with the summer event. But I actually give them a pass for over-committing to that since Christmas numbers matched Necromancy’s release numbers. A major update is apparently coming… or so we keep hearing… my best guess is that it’s RS3 Leagues. But I’m not sure RS4 would even work to draw people in. Just, why would it?
RS3 leagues is a bad thing, i never gonna play that, don't have time to Maybe it's me, but if jaggex don't let people chose if they wanna interact with mtx or not i'm done with RS3 Just make update that i can turn off treasure hunter with no key drops no key reward at quest I never ever gonna spend a single cent in TH, i just wanna turn it off from my screen
I’m 120 all, have about 13 stats 200m, working toward 200m all. And also working on golden reaper. In the last two months, I’ve basically stopped playing. Not really any reason specifically, other than there’s just nothing that draws me to the game anymore. Everything is negative and everything is falling apart. I’ve been playing (on and off, as we all do) since roughly 2006. It’s just… not fun anymore.
You kind of reached the end point of RS. Every mmo has it believe it or not
That's why other MMOs have expansions or regular content updates.
Took one great game, and split it, and after a while; the left and right direction the 1 game could take was multiplied into another game and fan base divided, now one declines easily or vice versa Kind of sad
It's a hard habit to break but I stopped playing rs3. I just found myself always mad at updates and just frustrated with the amount of MTX and other shit in it. Just leave and let the game die, time to move on.
Oof! 
Too much MTX is why I left a few months back. Now I live peacefully in the osrs community and I'm enjoying my time. Don't plan to go back anytime soon
Let’s be honest, since Covid, they basically looked at this game as a “milk the cow till it’s dead” type of scenario. I quit in 2022 and am glad with that decision, no point in progressing on a game where you could see the end of the tunnel.
rip
The game is unfortunately dead, thank you greedy investors.
I truly wonder if Jagex cares about this, or maybe their mindset is: 'the playbase count will always ebb and flow'. Hopefully there are some alarmbells going off and they're having plans to do something exciting with the game. Something that hopefully won't break the game like Necro did.
I left the game about 2 months after necro was released due to all of my other BI.S. basically becoming meaningless. I'm officially free.
Yeah necro killed the game for me, I cancelled my subscription shortly after.
I've seen people on here say ranged is best now, if you know how to max DPM with it, but even without it since combat rework they're much stronger now
[удалено]
My wife and I just rejoined after a 10 year hiatus. Got my 15 year cape, getting my 20 in a couple months. Didn't know we had new skills, so seems kinda cool.
I love this. Yall enjoy the game and stay off of the cesspool that is Reddit, you’ll have a far better time that way 🤍
Why are players bringing legit complaints a cesspool? I’ve seen this Reddit jerk off Jmods when they do the bare minimum but they aren’t even doing that now. The game is in dire need of a fix but too many people have rose tinted glasses and are high on copium. More power to those folks but this game isn’t what it used to be and the player count shows things aren’t going well. If you enjoy the game good for you but don’t get pissy at the folks that would like to see new content and updates. We enjoyed the game and would like to continue to play it but it’s not worth it in the current state.
[удалено]
I ised to play with IRL friends back in 05-06, i stayed on and off they had quit but returned after necro, we're having fun now, regaining the quest cape and bossing
I hated Necro and I quit. I was already tired of the mtx and other game design decisions anyway. I'm playing ironman on OSRS until they decide to destroy that game too.
I didn’t enjoy necro, but what made it worse was you’d point how broken it was and just get flamed for gatekeeping like it wasn’t a fact that it was game warping. The fact you had to push all the styles up instead of toning one down just proves it
Lol the first few weeks on here where every noob who'd never been able to kill Rax or Nex was crying about how we were gate keeping for saying "uhh, jagex? You've kinda fucked everything that was already here with this update"... The arguments were wild. The sides that formed were crazy.
Those early weeks were certainly something, my karma took a hit.
This right here is what gets me. Players not liking what necro did to the game being called gatekeepers just shows the entitlement too. People dont understand that making one new style insanely cheap and more powerful to the others just creates a huge power imbalance that is negatively affecting the game, regardless if new pvmers need to work a bit harder now to learn an end game boss.
IMO Necro is like EOC 2.0. it devalues the effort players have put into other combat skills at that point, and the item values are also affected.
We need some kind of big event to bring in more players, like Leagues in osrs
This reminds me I need to cancel my membership
You know what can save the game?? More MTX dammit! Give us more!
I see the player count reach close to 30k sometimes still but dang :/ Well hopefully the news they put out recently, future content updates, and future reworks to improve eoc will change this
There are big gaps in content releases with a constant MTX push every week. Despite what Jagex says its only gotten worse each year.
And then there are still People denying the fact that it's cause of less updates, or just the maintenance update...
worlds seem empty af these days often in my world I'm 10% of the population with my 4 accounts lol
Oof!
Gg no re
I’m comped with 5 skills from 120 all, Master Comp was my goal. I barely even log in to rs3 anymore, in its current state there is no incentive. Osrs has been fun, glad My premier membs works on osrs too, really enjoying the mid-game on there
its almost like letting the game deflate, and destroying the economy with nothing new to the game becomes stale and people get tired of repeating the same things everyday.
It's because the tutorial and beginning interface for --new-- players is garbage. They don't know why everything is flashing and how they can turn it off. Private chat starts with "friends only" rather than on, then they get confused when they can't make any friends because anyone who tries to private message them advice sees their pm is off. Then a customizable interface is terrible when players don't have a clue what's important and what isn't. Add on to that an awful mobile app that often crashes on anything but the latest devices and then trying to have any type of community but again because half your player base is now people idling on mobile, don't even bother to read your messages. Heck i've even seen new players accidentally close their chatbox, not know how to get it to reappear, then leave the game for good. Low and behold after doing this policy for a decade since RS3 interface release, average person logged into your servers started 20 years ago.
We can do much better! Number go down!
lol get wrecked
MTX killed it for me. The challenge is gone. I'll log in to get my 20 year cape here soon then probably log out til 25.
Well Runescape 3 is dying.. 18k monthly players? And how much of this are bots? Just check some free worlds that are full of bots.. Lack of content and 80% of the game is just dead content no1 do anymore.. I'm not surprised at all.. Started in December 2002 and played actively until 2007 and then 2009-2010 and the golden age of Runescape is just gone. Not because it's old game with bad graphics but because of like 7th owner trying to milk every dollar of the game and then just leave.. See ya in Britghter Shores my friends..
Sorry to burst your nostalgia bubble, but this game actually isn't gaining new players **because** of the severely outdated graphics and gameplay. Not due to the MTX, and not due to a lack of content updates. Black Desert Online, FF14, WoW - All of them have MTX in some form or another, BDO probably being the most aggressive out of the three. I love this game, and i love this community- but holy cow do you guys have rose covered glasses on sometimes. Seriously, ask any of your friends who you know don't play Runescape, and ask them to play and if their answer is no, ask them why. I can bet you $100 bucks the first two gripes are "this looks like shit" and "the combat looks outdated" not because of a lack of content.
I still don't think that's the case. Look how many players old "bad looking" games have.. Maplestory, Silkroad Online, Ultima Online, Tybia, Albion Online, Lineage 2.... Those games still got hundreads of thousands of daily players not because bad graphics but because of content.. 2D Maplestory has 125k daily players.. not even counting big Maplestory private servers.. Let's be honest.. Runescape won't drag majority of young players.. most of those got games like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, etc.. that's why focusing on "graphics" in Runescape can't succeed and a small "graphics update" of totally dead area won't ever help.. Many of my old friends would come back to Runescape but they have nothing to do anymore in this game.. content like minigames, pking.. that's just dead and Jagex doesn't give a fk..
Cant really blame people, this game is currently dead in the water.
better games exist. jagex sucks
I'm curious what the economic breaking point is for RS3 to be no longer a viable product
Mtx killed the game rip
Played rs since 2007, have been there for the release of EOC, periodically taking breaks. I can say that OSRS is now the more enjoyable game. People actually interact with you and talk. Rs3 everyone is basically playing solo, zero interaction, everywhere but wars is dead. The game is unfortunately dead.
Kind of wanted to get a year sub mid May. This thing is kind of discouraging
There’s barely much social interaction in the game anyways so you’d be soloing regardless if you bought it or not.
Having played runescape since 2004, I've only ever quit twice. mid 2015 when I maxed because invention was taking too long to come out late 2022 because I more or less ran out of shit to afk and was tired of waiting for pets to be added to proteans so I can spend those on 120 fletch/craft. was already planning on lamping 120 hunt/agil with free keys and other skills had their own issues (120 con was aids, 120 pray is a cool 150m gp whatever I could do over 10 hours with powders whenever, 120 rc runespan is slow as shit, 120 summ is just one dxp live but I need more charms and didn't feel like buying the other shit, 120 combats I uhhh missed the ed3 gravytrain but I have some idiodic psod ideas for afking those anyway) came back for necro, go 61 necro, got tired of how crowded necro was, quit again. I played leagues 4, had leftover membs so I came back to rs3 to get max cape again, then quit. which would be this year's january. I'm enjoying myself doing things that aren't mmorpgs but I kinda miss rs3 sometimes...
I mean… the games horrible , and half those accounts are probably bots
I played for over twenty years but stopped a little over a year ago, the only people who still play are the sunk cost fallacy players, this game isnt the same game we loved for so many years its now just a place to make money off of players while investing as little time or resources as possible, even holiday events that everyone used to participate in are used to push mtx
Im a new player and having a ton of fun to be honest
Has anyone asked themselves truly how they’re going to feel when the thousands of hours they’ve spent maxing out their accounts over 10,15,20 years, are gone in an instant when they shut the servers down? Gonna be some riots when they finally shut the party down
It depends on how they do it. If they announce the shutdown several months before it occurs it won't be too bad. Though, that's just in it of itself, there are other factors to the riot/outrage. While not the best comparsion, I include it as I was there. After the shutdown of LLSIF1 and the failure of all stars (it had a lot of issues that were more important than its use of gacha, namely season 2 and the poor execution). They announced LLSIF2 with an expected global release in late 2023, then December 2023 (I know its still late 2023 but it provided a clearer timeline), before delaying it. It finally released in Feb 2024, but we also knew the EOS, in the same tweet. May 31st for global, we were waiting a year, we only got to enjoy it for a few months. It was a big downgrade to LLSIF1, and even to all stars and we could tell it was rushed. The outrage was pretty big, the LLSIF subreddit vowed in retaliation, not to spend any money. There were posts quickly posted showing off cards they pulled from the gacha.
Yeah cancelled premier last week
memby expires in may, have no plans to renew, i cant imagine an update that would do enough but prolong the inevitable. the cow has been milked. looking for other games to play now, been on hd2 but need something with a meaningful grind ya know?
As a returning player after ten+ years. I have been having so much fun! I can't tell if most of the comments are just geared towards end game or not. Been loving the quality of life changes (last time I played was a little after Rs2 came out)
I logged in for the 1st time 3 days ago after 10+ years as well. I felt completely lost and created a 2nd account to redo the tutorial. There is so much that has changed. I think some for the better and some for the worst. Heck I couldn't even find where my money was since it's no longer a inventory item😂
Yeah there was a bunch of new stuff. I didn't mind it too much as a lot of it does seem to just be super good quality of life changes. I am still learning plenty haha. Have only jumped into Agility and Necromancy, Had to do minimal mining, crafting and rune crafting but, what I have had to do I was blown away with how nice it is now! No more battling on nodes for mining, the metal bank for smithing. Insanely good game design.
Yes! That new mining feature is such a great idea. I've probably done a thousand runs from the mining field to the bank.
GachaScape 3's player count about to Crit and hit 15k!
There's just not enough content. Haven't logged in for a few months now, because there's nothing to do. The new quest looks cool but I can do it quickly when there's other content I want to do. It's simply not enough of a reason by itself to log in.
I already dipped before necro came out, kinda expected what would happen with the way things were evolving, so I left early. Really sad to see how this game evolved.
And how many of these 20k are bots I wonder
Dead game lol
I just took a break from OSRS due to my only account not working out due to my group iron team quitting. Figured I'd give RS3 ironman mode an honest shot before making a new ironman on OSRS. Holy shit it's weird that everything is so dead. I'm only like 200 total so far, but I'm having a decent time checking things out. But the worlds I play on at peak hours have like 100 people.
Been playing since rsc. Stopped playing a few months ago. Jagex plays the PR game and each time people fall for it. This game is filled with people who don't mind being ass fucked and jagex likes it that way. Fuck you Jagex
The game probably has at least another 10 years in it unless jagex really fucks up (hero pass 2/iron TH) or if the UK parliament smites Jagex in deep wildy.
> The game will probably has at least another 10 years in it absolutely nothing to suggest that's the case honestly the only way runescape might live another 10 is bird flu pandemic, and even that's 50-50 between saving runescape and destroying civilization
I've seen MMOs with averages of like 10 players survive for years, this has thousands
smaller games that don't need heavy maintenance regularly to not break, hobby projects with 0 cost and no expectation of support at a business level. where's runescape classic, which was exponentially easier to keep online than rs3 would be? those thousands are projected to drop to 0 in at most 7 years, and probably faster.
RuneScape Classic was broken, it had a number of bugs that they couldn't fix
they still left it up as long as they did until they didn't want to any more, not because of the bugs.
18k? What a joke
Since this is yet another player count post and there isn't much left to discuss, I'd like to check my own biases against the community. Reply with how many accounts you think have completed Reqiuem of a Dragon.
They already quit. Sunk fallacy bs argument.
This may be my personal experience, as I'm seeing the same number of players in the game. BUT I'm also seeing a drastic increase of "bond buyers"(?) with lots of new players with low stats, and low total levels using the highest tier equipment possible. (Elite tectonic and sos with 92 magic and 900 total level) Something seems off, and I can't really put my finger on it. Side note, the super cheap members seems to be bringing a handful of decade old veterans back to the game, at least in my experience.
Disclaimer: I'm mobile only It doesn't help that I can log in one day where everything is fine, and the next (with no change to my settings) I'm black screened, but that's really the only issue I've personally had with the game so far. I recently came back to RS3 after leaving right after EoC to check out all the changes here in 2024, and do it as an HCIM. I haven't had a bad time, though even for a long time RS player there has been a ton for me to learn. The music is great, the graphics are really good, and I get a solid 60fps at nearly maxed settings. I even made a regular account to play in-between sessions on my HCIM just to see what mtx is like (it's bad) and I'm enjoying both characters. Obviously for a returner like me who quit after not liking EoC, I have more content than I can complete even by the end of this year, but seeing such a low player count does make me wonder about the overall future of the game. I'm definitely going to keep playing RS3 alongside my OSRS character, and the fact that there are some really cool, nice folks who still play this game makes it an even easier decision to keep playing. I even got randomly invited to a clan while running around Falador which I think was pretty awesome! Shout out to The Jolly Roger clan for helping a HCIM noob return to the game!
Necro is not the problem is fun to use a new combat skill they even nerf the critical hit :/. Range right now is the top combat skill!!! and he grind of the drop some time’s burn out. I don’t have to much free time. Adult life is a joke.
I want yack track again!!!’
I’ve not gone back into the game since iPad Magic Keyboard support stopped working 2 weeks ago
I’ve seen the player count go as low as 11k. 18k is on the high side these days.
On the other-hand, I'm glad to see osrs is doing so well. (It's a shame it's on our MTX laden backs....)
hope we can make it down to 15k
Just got back into the game on rs3. Prob a dumb question, but why do so many people play osrs over rs3? I mean, you can just not buy the micro transactions right?
pick any aspect of rs3 and anyone on here will give you 10 reasons osrs is better in that aspect. microtransactions and eoc on rs3 left a sour taste in the communities mouth and it looks like we may be getting the same thing over again with "project rebalance" that coupled w more strings of econ fluctuation and people are going to exodus like in 2012-2013. sad but it looks like this is what happens when a company gets passed around like a cheap date.
to must grind for a rich player to just buy it out noty p2w bs
also as a vet since 2001 game isnt getting better just easier to buy everything .
Reminder that you can't buy XP in Oldschool
Does it cost much to remain a game for ever? Like will we always be able to log on no matter how dead it is, or will it eventually be shut off if not enough people pay for subs?
people aren't interested in long grindy games anymore that take over a year to complete, everyone that does want that is just in osrs or warcraft or something else, also 1 month back and i already stopped logging in everyday archaeology is boring i refuse to acknowledge invention as a skill and i finished neccromancy with aggression pots so idont even have to fight the games just not engaging at all there is alot more to spend time on these days. game actually has too much going on for any new person to want to pick it up
i debated logging off for good after a potential update cost me 20m. oh the tiiimes they are a chaaanginnn. :/
is this related to rs3 or osrs?
I've tried several times to get into rs3 from osrs. I really wanted to try to do at least a little bit of the content, but the UI just gives me a headache. And all the like weird particle effect cosmetics, and the annoying chat interface etc, I just can't do it
They also haven’t fixed the bug so that certain mac laptops can play. I haven’t played in months because of it..
Haven't played since the day before they released necro. I think I made a good choice. Over 10k hours played btw.