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Hello everyone, I've played a lot of Runescape over the last nine months. This year I got a new job, where I have 4 hour of work to do in 9 hours of sitting at a desk mostly every day. As a consequence, I played Runescape mobile on my phone for many hours at work, and afk'd skills on my phone after I got home for the night.
I'd like to say that this game was an absolute joy, and overall was an extremely positive experience. First, here's a picture of the maxing party I threw a few nights ago (we had 200m+ in drops, it was a blast!)
I was f2p for maybe a month? Probably less than that, because they did the Twitch Prime 2 weeks membership. After that I spent $30 for 3 months of membership, and that's all the money I spent on the game. I bought gold premier club with bonds after that.
Why am I writing this? Just to share in case anyone is interested to read. I tend to get into a game when I play it until I hit a major goal, and Runescape was the same way. I'm diamond in league, I have everyone in elite smash, and I've done Through the Fire and Flames on expert. Now I'm max in RS3. It doesn't really mean anything to anyone but myself, but I'll write out my opinions anyway because some people think it's interesting to read these types of opinions. If that's you, then great, hope you enjoy! If there's any value in these thoughts, its that I was a completely new player to the game only 9 months ago, which I think lends a new perspective to a game that many people have played for over a decade.
Stats
In 273 days, I played 80 days, 10 hours, and 14 minutes according to Hans. That's over 1930 hours, or just over 7 hours a day on average. Now I'm not going to lie, that sounds unhealthy. Most of these hours, however, were on mobile while I was doing other things. I'd estimate that maybe 70% of the time wasn't active. The only times I spent an unreasonable amount of time on the game were during double experience weekends, where I basically had my computer on skilling for about 36 hours of the weekend. Have no fear, I also have meaningful relationships, a fulfilling job, and non computer related hobbies.
I used the alt-1 toolkit to help me estimate my net worth in the game, which comes out to about 550m as of today in gear and loot. If you add the 200m I dropped in my maxing party, that means I ended the grind with about 750m, or making approximately 389k every hour I was in the game. I'll talk more about money making later, but I'll mention now that the largest drop I got was a 9m elven ritual shard from lost grove creatures.
Right now I have 452m exp across all skills. That's 234k ex/hr across all playtime.
New Player Experience
Joining this game for the first time is rather overwhelming. I knew basically nothing about Runescape when I made my account, only that one of my friends in college really enjoyed it. I think seeing this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLhLPFkqqM8) a year or two back was really my introduction into the game, but I still didn't understand the that rs3 and osrs were two different games until well after I made my account.
Loading into the game for the first time, I finished tutorial island and was pointed toward The Restless Ghost quest for some reason. I completed it, and was pointed toward Burthorpe I think to talk to the challenge mistress. After I did some tasks for her, the game stopped pointing me toward anywhere else and I was kinda lost. I assumed I had finished the tutorial, but I didn't understand the different skills, how to find quests, where I could go, anything about the three combat styles, or what fun things I could go do. It's like tutorial island is fantastic, and then the new player experience after that is made by someone who's played the game for 1000 hours and assumes that a new player knows way more than they do. The most confusing part was when I would look at the world map, see the 'quest start location' marker, go there, and there was nothing. It was very confusing. In addition, I would walk in a random direction until I saw something cool, click on it, and probably about every time I would get a "this is member's content" message. This did not make me want to spend money on the game, it was just frustrating.
The settings menu still makes 0 sense. I literally have to look at every single tab in the settings menu to find what I want, even now as a maxed player. I spent like an hour at the start trying to make the freaking fonts and ability icons bigger so I could see what all the abilities did. Turns out, you just can't. Honestly, that was the closest I came to stopping playing the game, was when I found out I could never make the ability and chat text bigger.
I googled a new player's guide and it suggested the combat academy, which was a real jumping off point for me. From there I explored Lumbridge castle, did the Cook's quest, a found a few more quests, the GE, and went about unlocking the lodestones. Running to all the ftp lodestones was probably the most welcoming and informative part of the new player experience.
I live in Korea right now, which means the game defaults me to the New Zealand server. The tick system is extremely unintuitive for a new player and while I've now done some high level bossing, it still doesn't feel very natural. My internet is fantastic, but it always feels like Runescape lags. I've heard something about Australian servers not working quite right, but I haven't looked any more into it.
After the rough introduction to the game world, Runescape has been a constant stream of serotonin into my brain, and it was by far the worst part of playing the game.
Quests
I have 318 quest points. I'm really conflicted about quests. The old ones really suck, but some of the new ones were pretty awesome. To me for quite a while, the game was skilling, and quests just helped you skill better by reaching Priff, getting items, stuff like that. In my mind, I kinda auto piloted the quests with a guide off the wiki just so I could get to priff or get some reward it was offering. Then one day when I was doing Fate of the Gods, holding down spacebar, I reached Mah for the first time and caught some of Zaros's text as it was skipping past, and for some reason it just hooked me. Like "Woah, these are gods of the world? Why am I here? I want to know." I really wish I would have paid attention earlier! But as I think about it, I had no reason to pay attention earlier. The quests were boring. If I had done a quest as cool as Fate of the Gods earlier on, I would have enjoyed the lore and the rest of the quests a ton more.
My favorite quest was "Violet is Blue", which I did right away when it came out. It just fit the spirit of the season so well and it was satisfying and cool and flowed well. Later when I did "Carnillean Rising" where you make a quest for the boy, I was so excited about it and invested in the play quest I had made. Then the boy was a little sh*t about the whole thing and I hated it lol. I remember thinking that I wish I could go get Violet and take her through the quest instead.
It was pretty annoying to do the quests where you just go talk to people the whole time, like "One Small Favor" and "Thrones of Miscellania". Way worse than that though was when a quest had a gimmick that just didn't work well. For example, the boss Abomination at the end of "Hero's Welcome" and Gielinor in the quest "Nomad's Elegy" when you play as Icthlarin and Death. The hurt boxes never seemed to align with the animations, but that could be a problem with the Aus servers, I don't really know. It was crazy frustrating though. Also, in "Sliske's Endgame" when there were 'puzzles' that made you stand in a spotlight that was moving around. There were two of those and they took me forever, because where I was supposed to stand didn't line up with where the spotlight actually was, it was always lagged behind it. Plus, why is that a puzzle? Chase a spotlight around an empty room? I really hope I'm one of the only ones that had trouble with these parts and I hope it was because of the server, because it just didn't make sense why they were in the game.
Skilling
Most of my levels in the game, I got afk on mobile while I was at work. I used to be a huge fan of incremental games, and Runescape filled that niche in my mind these last 9 months, constant positive reinforcement while I do real life stuff. For the most part, I loved how different each skill was and how it tied into other parts of the game. Making overloads or using skilling prayers or the entire skill of invention was really fun to discover and level up. I would say invention is probably the most enjoyable skill in the game for me, but I really enjoyed all of them as a whole besides dungeoneering. I really don't understand the point of dungeoneering. Fletching and Firemaking were also standout weirdos to me.
One major complaint/problem I have is farming. I started farming with the release of PoF, and it almost made me sad to hit that 99 because it felt like I didn't do anything. I wasn't even being efficient, I was selling all animals at adolescent stage to other players and I still hit 99 way, way too quickly. It's very fun to use PoF, but it just feels too strong. Even now, I make probably about 750k a day selling dragon eggs. Getting my 99 in farming made me millions and millions.
Money Making
One of the best parts of the game to me is how diverse the money making is, and how many things you can spend gold on. I loved how effort directly correlated into more money, and how afk money making was still a viable way to earn the cash for 99s. It was really satisfying to make a stack on slayer, then spend it on construction. Then make a stack with fishing, and spend it on herblore.
Daily's are great money for small effort, and I'd be willing to bet that someone could maintain a membership only doing PoF, PoP, and vis wax.
At the start of the game, you never need to buy anything that costs over a few 100k, so anything you're picking up will sell for enough as you play.
In mid game I made money almost entirely from gargoyles and qbd. This was right before the mobile app released, so I would spend a lot of time alt-tabbed and just check the gargoyles every 2 minutes. This evolved into aby demons, and then just inc farming with divine-o-matic for afk money.
There are just so many different ways to make money, depending on what you want to do that day, and then fun things to spend it on. I love this part of the game.
Mobile
I was lucky to get into the mobile beta as soon as it released, and honestly it's what made me play the game so much. I'd say 95% of what I do is on mobile, it works really, really well. I trained every gathering skill to 99 on mobile, and also construction, range, melee, smithing, thieving, crafting, firemaking, runecrafting, divination, and slayer.
I did some quests on mobile too but it was a little too tedious for me so I stopped. I never tried any bosses on mobile, but slayer tasks work really well. Daily challenges and other daily's are good for it too. I really have no complaints about mobile, except that maybe little things like the map in dungeoneering is awkward.
Community
I'm in a friendly clan that doesn't try hard for anything, but talks every day. For the most part people are helpful and nice. Weirdly, some people have an elitist mindset that just makes no sense. One guy was berating me for using my combat dummies on DXP weekend. Because you'd have to be stupid to waste your time on those he said. Other people that laugh when people don't have the right gear or levels. Like, the only difference between you and them is the amount of time they've afk'd the game, it seems like a really dumb thing to feel superior over.
I like the community as a whole, but I really, really don't understand the complaints about things like the bank rework, stone spirits, and MTX. This all comes from a brand new player, but those things didn't detract from my experience in almost 2000 hours hardly at all. Like maybe a little? But it's nothing compared to the enjoyment I got from the Elite Dungeons, the M&S rework, Violet is Blue, holiday events or other new updates in the short time span I've played. It's possible that those complaints are just typical Reddit circlejerk though, I'm not sure. I'd love to hear a veteran player's opinion on these things.
I watch Maikeru and TheRSGuy on Youtube, and they're amazing and entertaining. Beyond them though, the osrs Youtube content creators are leagues ahead of RS3. I'm sure some of you guys are keeping up with Swampletics. I love that series so much that I've gotten friends into it that have never played the game in their life. It's that good.
Future Plans
So what now? I'm not sure. I think I'll take a break from the game, then maybe try out some high level bosses like Telos or Nex. If I don't enjoy those then I'll probably just be finished with the game. It was so, so much fun and I can't wait to try the new content that comes out in the next 9 months.
Thank you everyone, and Jagex, for the amazing experience. And of course, if you read through all my rambling, thank you. If you have any questions or discussion points, I'd LOVE to hear them. Like I said, I have many hours of my day sitting at this computer. Thank you!
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