I have so many thoughts about RuneScape.
As someone who played all through this period and never really was involved in merching I have really mixed feelings about the trade updates and the Grand Exchange (auction house). It absolutely was detrimental to large parts of the community as it existed and radically changed how the game was played, and they absolutely botched the implementation early on (a recurring theme with Jagex) particularly around PvP replacements. But at the same time, being able to bulk sell drops and buy resources and gear without spending an entire play session trying to find a merchant and to figure out and negotiate prices and not get scammed was absolutely a positive. I can’t imagine trying to play a traditional MMO these days without an auction house of some kind. It was such a different time.
That said, it extremely sucked that for years? price manipulation dominated the Grand Exchange and mass buyouts inflated and crashed prices of crucial items over and over, making it impossible to buy/sell key potions, gear and crafting materials for weeks at a time (something I’ve never heard of happening on that scale in any other traditional MMOs).
Player-run casinos and games of chance, typically scams, followed in this wake due to adjacent updates and the concentration of wealth facilitated by the Grand Exchange. It became very common to see wealthy players running gambling games in public spaces.
Whether it was a result of gold sellers adapting their tactics and inflating prices to create high value junk (this probably has a real world economic term, but I don’t know it - an item that has minimal practical value but which has a high price so it can be used as a proxy for wealth), or simply self-interested legitimate players doing the same, the combination of player chat channels and a simulated stock market absolutely allowed for already wealthy players (many of whom either had historical wealth via “rares” or must have bought gold) to accumulate even more wealth and power at an unprecedented scale and at the expense of everyone else.
It was bad. I learned a lot about economics, it was great. Eventually this all got patched or banned. In hindsight, it’s a fascinating parallel this economic crisis happened around 2008.
RuneScape mostly survived the trade updates of 2007 - it did not survive the Evolution of Combat in 2012 (and let’s not even mention the loot boxes).
So for those who don’t know, RuneScape was primarily played with a mouse. You’d click and right click to interact. Combat was simple - you click on an enemy and your character attacks it until one of you die or you click away. You drink potions, use prayers (buffs) and eat food and, in PvP, maybe gear switches. Some weapons had special attacks, which drained a percentage of a bar that refills over 5 minutes. The game overall was/is a very low-intensity one, and a lot of people played semi-AFK whilst watching videos or chatting. In many ways it was a casual multiplayer adventure game or social space first and an MMO second.
In 2012 developers Jagex decided that they needed to compete directly with games like WoW, and completely retooled the combat design to have a hotbar, manual ability rotation with synergies and reactive abilities and all that other stuff that MMOs were “supposed to have”. In a vacuum it was fine. I enjoyed it, even. It went terribly. They completely failed to account for how most players engaged with the game, had functionally no on-ramp and had just generally expected that players would want to play an entirely different genre of game.
As an example, public chat, dms and built in player-hosted chat channels were extremely common and typically positive way to interact with other players and a key part of how the game’s community flourished. When EoC happened, it became impossible to talk to other players whilst fighting because the keyboard focus went onto the hotbar rather than the chat box. Previously, players could coordinate via public chat in multiplayer scenarios - now they couldn’t. I co-ran the primary casual Dungeoneering (a teamwork-heavy roguelike minigame that unlocked what were at the time the highest level weapons) group around the time of the update - now it was extremely frustrating to coordinate in a minigame that demanded player communication, and basically unplayable at a high level without external voice chat. For real, that minigame is probably one of my favourite games of all time.
As months and years passed eventually Jagex rolled out updates that pulled back on EoC’s mechanics, offered various tiers of automatic mode for ability-driven combat and eventually settled on a reasonable combat balance. I kept playing, but I’m not sure the game ever really recovered from such a huge percentage of the playerbase being alienated both from the game and from each other - pretty visible in the huge support for Old School RuneScape when it was announced, and the complete desolation of RuneScape 3 in comparison.
What I understand now that I didn’t at the time is that the key thing Jagex were missing was accessibility. RuneScape was always a more casual social game with a minimal barrier to entry and relatively low physical and mental demands and the Evolution of Combat update massively and suddenly raised that barrier for even the most capable player. That they added accessibility options later missed the point - the long-term players who needed those tools then had already been excluded and moved on.
