- Joined
- Mar 18, 2021
The Runescape CommunityRunescape (formerly Runescape 2) is an MMORPG that was released in 2001. To many readers, Runescape was their first foray into the internet gaming world. This is evidenced by memes that have been in circulation since the MySpace era. The game had a broad appeal, being an early MMORPG in the arena, a staff that had worked on the original Runescape, and since it worked on your browser you essentially had nothing to download or manage. Over the course of Runescape's life it has gone through many changes. The most dramatic of which was the introduction of the Grand Exchange in 2007 which restructured the economy and dynamic of the game. The more modern version, Runescape 3, was released and met with heavy criticism and little player participation. This caused the devs to repackage Runescape 2 and roll in back to 2007, right when the Grand Exchange was established.
The Grand Exchange was an exceptionally controversial update that caused a significant portion of players to leave, because it introduced trading value caps (ie: all trades had to be somewhat equal in value, no gifting) and a centralized location for trading across all servers. Before the Grand Exchange update, you were able to trade and gift any amount of value for nothing in return, but you also had to find a player willing to participate in your trade. The reason trading values were capped was because Runescape was notorious for have bots farm resources constantly, and then sell these resources for real world money.
Jagex (the company behind Runescape) worked to combat these bots but were clearly unsuccessful every step of the way. The company had to stop real world trading for two reasons:
1. They stated that real-world transactions ruined the spirit of the game, that every object had to be earned through work and skill.
Being a grind-heavy game, this is true. Runescape thrived off of paid memberships. If you have to kill a metric butt load of dragons to max out a skill, or run Barrows for a month to get that armor set you wanted, then you will keep paying and playing.
2. The lesser known reason was that these botters were also using stolen credit cards to pay for memberships for their robotic legions. This put Jagex and credit car payment processors at odds. If Runescape got blacklisted by the credit card companies, they'd be dead in the water, financially speaking.
For these reasons, Jagex released the wildly unpopular trading caps with the Grand Exchange update. What followed was one of the largest fanbase outcries I've ever witnessed in my time as
The Economics of Prostitution AKA I'm not gay but $20 is $20
The most well known meme other than the '
' gnome is "buying gf." Since Runescape was a grind-heavy game, some people became jealous of couples playing together, tired of clicking the same willow tree over and over alone. If you told me prostitution was the oldest profession before playing Runescape, I might not have believed you. But it didn't take long until the thirsty boys of Runescape would start offering female avis items, gold, and questing help to be their girlfriends. This in turn caused many men to switch to female characters and began "dating" many men, essentially turning it into a business. They would chat with lonely guys in the PMs and collect that sweet, sweet, runescape gold. There was one particular quest where your character had to be female to complete, and when I changed genders I was offered gold to be a Runescape gf. I can't speak to what it's like now or if the Runescape gf black market is still around, but I recall stories of dudes scamming lonely guys out of some top-tier items back in the day.As a result, it was perfectly natural for two underage guys to engage in weird cyber sex for a few thousand pieces of gold. For those who never played, that's not very much.
Spergs Sperging about other Spergs
If a Runescape streamer or content creator powerlevels their autism too hard the community will turn around and meme you into the seventh layer of hell. Theoatrix was a Runescape Youtuber who made 1-99 skill guides for the game. He, like most video creators, lifted heavily from the wiki and other sources. He sperged hard about some other Runescape
And a classic sperg out over Theoatrix
The Theoatrix RANT - Maxed player's pov on shithead youtuber.
(Youtube link)
It's at this point I should remind the reader that the current OSRS community has not had a large influx of new players in, perhaps, a little over a decade. This means the community is comprised of adults in their late 20s to mid 30s. The toxicity you're seeing is not from children, but man-babies.
The State of the Community
Recently, Jagex announced they are discontinuing support of third party clients in favor of their own coming out. Whether Jagex follows through with releasing their own or not is not relevant, although it seems to be true. The community is in an absolute uproar as usual, and all you will see on the front page of any RS-themed subreddit for the next three weeks will be how everyone will cancel their subscriptions and how Jagex and Mod Ash brought Hitler back to life.
(The only downvoted post)
The cringe isn't just coming from inside the thread, it's literally all anyone can talk about for at least the first four pages
Communism Vs the Runescape Economy
What happens when your prosperous LatAm country elects a Communist party that bets the entire currency on oil only to get undercut by Middle Eastern oil producers?
This is what happens. (Headphone users beware)
With the Venezuelan economy in the toilet, many citizens turned to Runescape to make gold. They realized that, by killing green drags and grinding in a few areas for items, they could effectively make more money by selling in-game items than they could working any job inside their country. This spawned quite a conflict in the Runescape community. On one hand, bots were destroying the game. On the other hand, people were destroying one in-game economy to save a country's economy.
Shenanigans with the Venezuelans usually consists of them swarming an arena, the wilderness, or other profitable area like the plague and engaging in weird banter (en español, of course)
Venezuelan gold farming is well known in the economist world as well. I can confirm in my day-to-day life around policy makers and economists, the term "Venezuelan gold farmers" has been mentioned to a room on more than one occasion. It even earned a 20-minute episode on NPR's Planet Money. Here's the link and an archive. This episode is actually very interesting if you're interested in economics.
It's also made several news articles (archive). I could speak more from personal experience, but there are so many mediums of content going into this I'm going to conclude with two videos explaining the hilarious, sad, and ridiculous situation. One thing that's important to remember, is that Venezuelans weren't playing Runescape for fun, it was for money. The consequence of this is that they didn't really understand the mechanics of the game, just how to maximize cash flow. Many of these Venezuelans ended up hiring British and American players to defend them from PKers because they lacked the basic understanding of combat mechanics to counter these players. It isn't long until these Venezuelans learned how to fight back. They ended up taking over entire servers in the wilderness.
Runescape Players Are Hunting Down Venezuelans / Exploring the State of Venezuela and How It Affects RuneScape
Conclusion
In conclusion, Runescape is a classic MMO with an equally ubiquitous toxic fanbase. The community is synonymous with grumpy boys earning useless toys and complaining every step of the way. Every time something happens the community doesn't like it becomes an Avengers Level Threat™. I sympathize with a community that feels ignored by the developers, especially when you're spending your hard earned Soros Bux for years to keep it afloat, but whenever there's an update it becomes a disaster of epic proportions. And don't get me started on their views on people who admit to playing Runescape 3, the newest iteration of the game. That's a story for another time, or perhaps a reader will share one of the other classic spergeries that come out of this community. In the end, Old School Runescape is a nostalgia trip for many of us. It is a look to the past, where life was simpler, memes were fewer, and the climate was cooler. It was a beautiful relic of the past, and that's where it should remain, in the past. In the meantime we have an insane community full of entitled man-babies to laugh at on the way to the grave.
Additional Viewing:
The Runescape Community Will Never Be Like It Was / How a Single Item Consumed the RuneScape Community
RuneScape: An MMO Split In Half / Why People Are Playing RuneScape in 2021
Grand Exchangers: Old School Runescape Subreddit (archive) - /r/2007scape - Runescape Steam Community (archive) - /r/Runescape (archive) - Theoatrix's Twitter (archive)
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