RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years

To quote JoshStrifeHayes:

This is a Chatroom first with a game slapped onto it.

You won’t be able to fully enjoy it on your own. I like it as an experience but not as a game as I prefer other types of games.

I played the older rune scape growing up, like a lot, it was my first MMO, and also my last, since nothing else scratched the same itch.

The draw of the game, at least for me, were two things.

One: the punishment for dying was losing all but 3 of your items, so there were high stakes that made enemy encounters kinda exciting. It was pretty unique at the time, though maybe Ultima Online had that too, not sure.

Two: the quests in run escape actually slapped. Unlike literally every other MMO on the market (which had simple fetch quests or kill X amount of things quests), Rune scape had really well written, funny, interesting quests that often played like an older point’n’click adventure, many of which gave really unique and odd rewards that you could practically use in other parts of the game.

Those just blew my wee little mind back then, and I was absolutely hooked on it. I think in particular the quests would hold up, even against modern titles.

The downside was to get to those quests, you had to grind like a motherfucker to get the required skill levels to start it. That padded out the play time by hundreds of hours, but doing it with friends or chatting while you did cooked some lobster for the 300th time made it bearable, sometimes even soothing to zone out to.

I could never tolerate the grind today like 12 year old me could, it’s unbearable, but if I could play a version of runescspe that removed the grind, I’d be tempted just to play allthe quests I never got to.

I just started like 3 months ago and I’m fucking obsessed. It’s so zen and grindy and full of content both old and fuck and super fresh.

You can pay as much or as little attention as you want and still make progress in a million different interconnecting ways.

It’s machine that turns a monthly subscription into compressed nostalgia

The classics never had micro transactions and still hold up and have mods. I replayed fable recently and had a lot of fun and nostalgia

The time demands of raiding in WoW made me drop the game cold turkey.

And WoW offers an API for plugins like boss assistants.

Tbf to Jagex. An RS or OSRS character doesn’t need an alt in the same way you need to be able to have different builds in WOW.

Has WoW actually become alt friendly in the recent expansions?

I’m pretty sure the price increase is for OSRS also, but they just don’t get anything.

Anyway, I somewhat agree with your argument. You get what you pay for, and if you want the game to not have MTX then you’re going to pay more (possibly, increased players could counteract this). I wouldn’t use an “hours played” metric to defend this though. I think it’s a bad metric even for regular games, but especially RS where it’s a “second monitor game” much of the time. Enjoyment/$ is the metric that matters. It’s harder to measure (as it should be, as it’s subjective), but it’s actually the reason we play games.

$40 seems a drop in the bucket compared to about 20 years ago when I was then toiling in a Korean F2P while watching the whales turbo-grind their way to lvl200, spending several times more than a game in a shrink-wrapped box.

Still the second price hike and all of that occurred right after the first price hike. Players assumed the first hike was the trade-off to get rid of MTX since that was already the discussion at the time.

RuneScape is definitely fun though, I’m not disputing that.

That’s definitely some important context.

I highly doubt RS3 will outpace OSRS ever. The majority of the money Jagex pulls in is through OSRS, that’s why it gets so much more content. RS3 can be fun for the certain group of people but OSRS is just a behemoth.

Lets federate it (if it hasn’t already been done)

I can finally get some coal without 300 people on the same vein

There’s a scape for every major version of RS you could have nostalgia for. It’s beautiful.

This is amazing, thanks for sharing!

Very cool, thanks!

“i dont like something and so no one else should” there are people who like the game. Its an mmo, so there are costs inherent in that, server, full time staff etc. It is not unreasonable to ask for some amount of money to keep the game going with updates. Is this price point unreasonable and greedy? Sure feels like it. Is your comment even more unreasonable? Definitely.

It’s pretty fun these days actually, new endgame bosses come out every now and then, they’ve added a ton of new skills, and they removed their lootbox mechanic and have done a lot to get rid of the daily FOMO grind. Lifted daily caps on some activities, gotten rid of others.

I haven’t played in half a year, but honestly, a lot of the changes they’ve been talking about are a huge positive for the game.

They’ve done a massive purge of MTX throughout the game.

I will be back for the next osrs league with my gf I bought at GE. I do not know what the price was for the last league but I was not appaled for the 3 months. I wonder if players like us will smooth out the long term players who have less or no membership after this.

from what ive saw on the subreddit, orS has mostly bots in it, skewing the player count.

its mostly bots in both games. they are sustaining the game by keeping in game items cost low, rs too grindy for irl people to play so its bots/alts are doing the dirty work.

OSRS is a completely new game. They’ve added so much content, it’s absolutely worth it if you haven’t played in a while.

Oh that got more expensive as well