'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007

http://digg.com/2016/old-school-runescape-history

by samclemens • 10 years ago

90 59 10 years ago

A similar phenomenon is happening with Everquest.

The current owners of the franchise are pushing "progression" servers - servers that start with only the original game and move on from there. Though their numbers are hidden, most of the interest in the game as it is now seems to be in these kinds of servers.

These legacy servers come about - runescape included - because owners recognize the success of emulators that try to recall the original game whatever that may be. All the popular MMOs have these emulator servers - world of warcraft, star wars galaxies, etc. Some have very large populations.

The question I have is whether it's all nostalgia or did MMO game designers collectively lose something as they tried to modernize?

dfischer• 10 years ago

Yeah I played recently on the new EQ phinny launch. I loved EQ back in 99-2004.

I would always reminisce about how EQ was the best game. I have so many fond memories.

Needless to say, playing again kinda sucked. It wasn't fun. It was a grind. Life is different.

Nostalgia is sweeter in the end.

P.s loved classic SWG too.

sbov• 10 years ago

Yeah, I loved Everquest. But it was a different time. I was in college, had no job, had no wife, had no kid, and had no social life. I had the time to spend most of my waking hours in the game.

Edit: actually, it sort of was my social life. I played with a group of friends I met online that I had been playing video games with for 4 or so years.

ergothus2• 10 years ago

you have N million customers.

You make a change. X percentage of your customers love it, Y hate it, Z are ambivalent, and you attract M new customers.

Cool...but Y was not a zero number. Often, the same things that M love about the changes are exactly what Y hate. You can't please both with the same product.

Repeat for every successful game.

For example: I'm a casual player, I prefer solo content because I hate not understanding what's going on, and my schedule doesn't lend itself to being online regularly. The same changes that will attract me to a game will tend to drive away those that like hardcore difficulty and massive raids.

Thus, I think they ARE collectively "losing" something, but they are also gaining. The nostalgia servers are about regaining those lost Y, not about rectifying some terribly and inevitable mistake.

throwaway133372• 10 years ago

Of course you're correct that they're making these changes to attract new customers.

The problem is when they drive enough player type Y away without attracting more M.

The solution is to create another game that caters to player time M.

This is not always desirable to the developers. Instead, they have the vision that they can keep Y can have M too without the cost of an entirely new game.

But that model has proven quite a few times not to work. They lose Y and never attract M. I believe FFXIV is the only one where they saved their game by changing it drastically. The rest were shutdown quickly after.

jonesb62• 10 years ago

The case of Runescape is very simple. They got bought out in 2012 by Insight Venture Partners, a firm specialized in buying out MMO's and milking them for everything they are worth. Adding micro transactions and shifting content focus away from player experience towards player acquisition and retention.

diegorbaquero• 10 years ago

I was there at the launch of RS 2 @ 2004 then making the first bots and scripts' APIs in rsbot.org @ 2006. I learned to code and chose the CS career thanks to RS. Great times.

Elv13• 10 years ago

The first bots were based on the "autominer" shareware, if you could get your hands on it. That was in 2002 or so. It was a simple macro based bot system. It was before they made anything to stop people from doing that (beside occasional baning). At first they added a "sleeping" mode to the game where played had to sleep after too much work and there was a CAPTCHA to wake up. It worked, but played hated that as it made some things hopelessly long to do and gave massive advantage to players who had done them before the sleeping concept was introduced. It actually had the interesting effect of shifting the in-game economy from the normal "gold coins" to a bond like system that handled inflation much better. At the end of RS1, most transactions were done in coal and lobster (really!) certificates, worth about 1500 and 1200 cold coins each.

I lost too much time to this game (mostly RSC / RuneScape1) and liked it very much. I have fond memories of it, but as time passed it changed and I quited. The clans and forums were quite lively. I never (and will never, ever) played another MMORPG, but still, nice memories. I dropped my party hat long ago (only RS player can get that one) ;)

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

I lost too much time to the original RuneScape. Liked its depth of skills, community, and access from anyone's browser. Quit playing after my account was deleted during release of new game. I was like, "what a waste of a lot of time..." Briefly played WoW to realize it, like many, were endless variations of the same basic stuff. So, quit that genre in general.

I'd have actually used the bots I made if I knew that my account would be deleted anyway. Get adamantite everything with max spells and stockpiled lobsters haha.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention that the situation in this article is pretty retarded and maybe I didn't miss anything. I did meet a friend who was one of original to game the trading market and ponzi'd others gaming the market. Eventually got bored then started learning game for women. Smart, devious kid haha.

timemachine• 10 years ago

The irony that this article, about how RuneScape is an anachronism of the mid 2000's, is hosted on digg.com is not lost on me.

bdcravens• 10 years ago

Digg isn't much older than Reddit. (Nov 2004 / June 2005)

icpmacdo• 10 years ago

How much different is this version of digg from the original? I have only browse'd through this iteration of the website.

Being 21 years old this article hit quite a point of nostalgia remembering the days of summertime '04-07 RuneScape.

andrepd4• 10 years ago

Everyone who played MMOs talks with utmost fondness of their unforgettable time in their first MMO. Be it Everquest, Ultima Online, Runescape or WoW, it seems no other genre in video gaming elicits such fondness, or reaches immersion levels so deep as the MMORPG. The immense potential in having a virtual, persistent world inhabited by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, with the virtually inexhaustible possibilities of gameplay that arise from people inhabiting a shared, persistent world, make the MMORPG the king in this department: immersion and fan dedication.

Yet it seems that this doesn't happen anymore, that the cosy world of Ultima Online or Runescape 2006ish doesn't exist anymore. MMORPGs have found it more profitable to engage in a variety of design choices that, ultimately, destroyed what MMOs were about. The open endedness of Ultima Online, the thoughtfulness and deep worldbuilding of quests in Everquest, the charming aesthetics that left just the right amount to imagination, just like a book, of Runescape, all that was replaced by high action, cheap thrills, and a lot of shiny particle effects everywhere (and of course microtransactions, because why not). The charming, cosy, vast, deep world people remember from Vanilla WoW doesn't exist anymore. Now you got a conveyor belt to level cap and cheap end-game content.

For anyone interested, this is one of the most insightful videos I've seen lately, and it addresses this issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

pvg• 10 years ago

I think your first point might be a much more important one than the one argued in the video you link. The first MMORPG experience is about as much fun as you can reasonably have in a video game but a great deal of the fun comes from it being first: the lack of familiarity, the unexpected, the 'emergent gameplay', the interactions with everyone from befuddled strangers to helpful friends.

Once WoW got everyone who was ever likely to try an MMORPG to actually try one, MMORPGs reached 'peak players'. There is (statistically) no-one left for whom any MMORPG is a first one and no amount of 'sandbox' or anything else can change that.

kedean• 10 years ago

That's not entirely true. The new players who haven't experienced an MMO are children, obviously.

Unfortunately for would-be MMO's, the modern world has Minecraft. Unlike most MMO's, Minecraft fully appeals to the minds of the young children who would one day become new MMO players. Personally, I believe that this prevents those kids from ever having a 'first MMO' kind of experience, because none of it will really be "new" since they grew up with it. It's not novel to anyone anymore.

Altay-2• 10 years ago

While nothing will compare to the 'first time', the bewilderment need not diminish to zero.

Ultima Online was my first and still favorite MMORPG back in the late 1990s/early 2000s but when I tried EverQuest for the first, the 3D world and depth of races/characters/NPCs blew me away.

Then I tried Dark Age of Camelot. The 1-world-but-3-continents/factions concept amazed me. There was always 'the others' and a sense of citizenship with the group of players I could actually interact with. Everyone in UO/EQ was a potential rival/friend. In DAOC I knew where my loyalty lied and the enemy was always clear.

Then I played Ragnarok Online -- my first Korean MMORPG. Again, blown away for totally different reasons. The music, the colors, the sprites, and GIRLS!! Lots of girls played Ragnarok. I didn't meet any girls on UO/EQ/DAOC -- 95% boys, 5% house wives.

Next up was Star Wars Galaxies. No more 'levels', back to skills ala Ultima Online but in a totally different and more complicated way! 3D persistent housing! Crafting! Dancing at the local cantina as a totally legit profession! Multiple PLANETS!! OMG!

Then came World of Warcraft -- nothing I hadn't seen before this time. But it was presented in the most streamlined manner and was the first MAINSTREAM MMORPG. Everyone my age was playing. I felt like the grizzled veteran of the genre/ I knew the mechanics. I taught my friends how to tank. How to heal. How to lead a raid, etc. Again, amazing for totally different reasons.

Sad to say, I haven't felt anything new since WoW. But I honestly don't think its because the genre is played out. Its just we haven't been shown anything different. That might change this year with plenty of promising games in the pipeline -- Shards Online, Albion Online, Camelot Unchained, etc.

If you still think the genre has hope, check out my ~1yr old website, http://mmos.com I hope to see you on my next adventure.

pgodzin• 10 years ago

In my generation Runescape and Maple Story were the most popular by far. Anyone know how Maple Story has turned out?

douche• 10 years ago

Oh man, those Maple Story ads they used to run...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi_tazQbLo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hHM7GwdS8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKB8PO0ZQVY

golergka• 10 years ago

Eve Online though.

cjslep• 10 years ago

Exactly what I was going to say. My first MMO and an awful experience.

SixSigma3• 10 years ago

I still spend time remembering the times I had in Everquest, a few screengrabs I still have [1]. A game where dying had real consequences, sometimes very bad.

We were playing on dial-up, my friend regularly clocked up $500 of call charges a month. We called it Evercrack for a reason.

[1] http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/everquest/cmunthen/

andrepd4• 10 years ago

You have no idea how charming those screengrabs are :O

sergiotapia• 10 years ago

Money money money money money.

Everything is about turning 1 cent into 20 cents, these days. Gone are the days where a game was fun first and foremost. Now it's about who can squeeze the most money out of their playerbase.

One game I've been playing that did rekindle that feeling of good ol MMO fun is http://projectgorgon.com/.

Fully skill based, exploration focused and -zero- hand holding.

andrepd4• 10 years ago

Exactly. That's what happens when your game isn't being lovingly crafted by (e.g) Richard Garriott and his pals, and is instead a product on a treadmill to maximise profit.

diffraction• 10 years ago

It's a problem of economic inflation. The games start out easy at release, but developers see the need to tighten their belts to prevent game currency/abilities/skill from being worthless. So the template has been in MMO land for developers to let a few early adopters climb the ladder to the top until they patch the ladder away. Or the opposite, like WoW, just keep it easy and let everyone into the top.

Runescape has a good place to see this with holiday items: http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Holiday_rewards

The right way to solve this problem is to keep the game as easy as it was at release, but to implement economic atrophy and redistribution of outcomes. I'm not aware of any game that does this other than Eve Online. I do not play these games but I like thinking about their economics.

0xCMP• 10 years ago

And boy does Eve bring the redistribution of outcome-hammer down hard.

The incredible effort of groups to build up military strength as well as economic factories that also require skills to be able to do any of those things makes sure you never think Eve is too easy, but also not too hard. Thats why I quit. I learned from Runescape how horrible a well made game can be to your productivity and sanity. Better to obsess over algorithms and programming than MMORPGs

tdeck• 10 years ago

I used to play on a Minecraft server called Civcraft[1] which, while not "massive" in the conventional sense, has/had a large enough player base and a persistent world. In Civcraft there is no skill/XP ladder, all you have is your wealth and reputation. You can lose your wealth by having it stolen, and your reputation by your own behavior or the words of others, so it makes for a more dynamic game. Still, you ended up with people at the top of the pyramid who wouldn't be readily dislodged, just like in real life.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/civcraft

vortico• 10 years ago

wc lvls?

verroq2• 10 years ago

Botting was actually much more fun the playing the real game.

Back in the golden days, the bot frameworks rsbot/powerbot/rsbuddy gave you a Java API into the game. Your script gets called every game loop (by the API) and you can tell your character to walk to places, click on things, pathfind your way around the game world. The API could access your player's levels and experience and gave your script (a Java class) an onPaint event to draw a GUI.

Botters were spending their time learning Java, on the forums were people talking about more in depth programming concepts and ways to improve code quality. The bot frameworks were open source (with the exception of "modscripts" - a series of regexes and what not to remap the bot APIs back into functions in the obfuscated Jagex client).

Jagex has also implemented turing tests - "random events" where your character get teleported a special area and has to perform a challenge. The bot framework has scripts to handle this as well and was generally not a huge issue.

The best part was that it was all real, if your code misbehaves, people will report you and you will get banned. If your code works flawlessly, it will run for days and you'll get rave reviews from fellow botters on the forums.

If anything it was a great environment to develop CS skills. And of course after you botted up your stats and unlocked new abilities the game becomes even more fun.

kmf• 10 years ago

This was a really fun read - any longform posts on the history of this? Would love to read more.

ryanlol• 10 years ago

There was an interesting defcon talk featuring the developer of WoWGlider, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-no

While not directly related, definitely worth a watch.

dwetterau• 10 years ago

I initially fell in love with programming by botting Runescape. If you want to look at some old (and very very poor quality) code to see what the botting scripts looked like, this was my most popular one: http://pastebin.com/WENWkWEW

There were some really interesting "innovations" in those scripts compared to the other free ones that were available at the time. For example, this script would allow the character to harvest and store wood from trees that would regrow / respawn. This script would time each hardcoded tree to count how long it had been de-spawned (dead) in order to move the bot user to wait by the tree that had been de-spawned the longest when all of the others were de-spawned. This was a good way to avoid being reported because most bots would just wait by the last tree to de-spawn and then instantly start moving to the first one that respawned.

Some other interesting tricks could be found in the "antiBan" method in a lot of scripts. Given a random input this script would move the mouse in some random ways, check some random stats, move the camera around, etc. One additional "antiBan" approach that I implemented for this script was to "take breaks". The idea was that a real player would probably not be watching their account and harvest the wood with perfect efficiency all of the time. Telling the bot to "take breaks" meant that it would turn itself off entirely for a short time (maybe a minute?) and just not react to any input, as if you were using the restroom or doing something else.

I could talk about this stuff for ages, it was great fun. :)

P.S. I have a tiny blurb about it on my website too: https://www.dwett.com/projects/#runescape-bot

bojo3• 10 years ago

Semi-related I suppose, I'm building a game where botting is the whole point: http://armoredbits.com/

Guyag2• 10 years ago

I've always thought that something like this could be really cool; I'll be following with interest.

I will say that your website is fairly hard to read. The high contrast and squashed text (and maybe font?) are quite hard on the eyes, at least for me.

YeGoblynQueenne• 10 years ago

I saw this yesterday but only now I realise it's (probably) about programming your mechs to fight.

I think you need some better presentation. I'm reading the main page again but I still don't have a good idea of how the whole thing is supposed to work. The FAQ is a bit more clear.

Anyway, if I got it right, it sounds interesting. I'll be keeping an eye out. Good luck.

ZoF• 10 years ago

Yep, this was what got me into CS in the first place, that and glider for WoW.

I easily spent more time botting than pk'ing/questing/etc.

Tweaking an autominer script to better detect patches, fixing a pathing issue for a random event, even more rewarding than the levels/items(but they didn't hurt).

tkel• 10 years ago

This was how I got started - https://villavu.com/

orf• 10 years ago

SCAR Resource Library was the best, it was this huge framework for making SCAR scripts (which basically automated pointing and clicking). There was a lot of code in that framework, handling all the 'edge cases' of RuneScape like random events and other players interacting with you.

Guyag2• 10 years ago

This is something that I'm really quite sad that I missed out on. By the time I was interested in programming enough to understand how this would all work it was a couple of years too late.

I'd say Minecraft is the 'new' version of this kind of thing, though certainly in a different sense - it's actually pretty opposite in some ways (making the gameplay rather than beating it). I'd be interested to see what comes along next.

arvinjoar• 10 years ago

I've spent countless hours creating botting frameworks/bots as well as client features for the Haven & Hearth client (http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/). The vanilla client is open source and pretty shitty, so the community is basically relying on hobbyist devs to create their own versions. The super-secret clients (that will eventually leak) all have their own botting frameworks. The game is permadeath, as well, so a lot is at stake.

pizzeys• 10 years ago

Absolutely agree with the sentiment but it should be illegal to call powerbot rs buddy etc the golden days :D the golden days were before the profiteering age...

rcconf• 10 years ago

RuneScape was a giant reason I got into programming and has a special place in my heart.

I was about 13 years old at the time. I recall reverse engineering the client, modifying existing Java private servers and interacting with a range of hackers that have taught me lessons that I still remember until this day. The race to see who could reverse engineer the client and implement a feature the fastest was amazingly exciting.

I remember the day I was messaging someone to send me the packets for spells in the game. They sent me the packet id, how to supply x,y,z coordinates for the opposite player, and I was suddenly shooting fireballs in my private server. Amazing!

I'm now working at a game development company and teaching at a local college (I did not finish high school.) and I'm thankful for the entire RuneScape botting and private server community

arianvanp• 10 years ago

Exactly the same for me. This is how I got interested in programming. The fun part is that many of the people I met on the runescape private server forums 10 years ago I still talk to daily. Complaining about college and our day jobs in IRC. We all have the same history and all sort of ended up in the same place.

Big chance that I still know you as well if I know your old nickname. Especially the programmer community was pretty cozy.

hmate9• 10 years ago

Selling rune scimi 30k

an_ko• 10 years ago

@ran@ lol nub

jonesb62• 10 years ago

When I was 16/17 years old I was clearing 500/1000 a week goldfarming for this game. Failed AP Calculus and stunted my social life.. and the money didn't last long.. but it sparked an interest in software engineering and entrepreneurship that continues to this day.

The margins for large scale botting operations on this game were absolutely ludicrous if you knew what you were doing. Gold coins were going for $5/million and a good bot could churn in about 7.2 million/day. The bot clients were a pretty un-optimized pile of java and could eat up about half a gig of ram each, but once you hit any sort of scale the vps's became a drop in the hat to the amount you were raking in.

That hardest part was actually managing the cash flow. Gold was usually sold through paypal transactions and charge backs were egregiously common. Paypal would basically tell you to go fuck yourself because they were "virtual transactions" regardless of how much evidence was provided. I had a partner from New Zealand (now working in finance) who would negotiate bulk rates, as well as purchase accounts in order to optimize our workflow.

Every now and then I look back and imagine how much I vould've made if I knew then what I knew now regarding scaling, coding, business, etc. I knew kids buying hundred thousand dollar sports cars with the money they earned. Sigh to be young again..

voltagex_• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why, but I loved the mining/crafting part of RuneScape. It was so repetitive, I guess part of me really likes those numbers going up. I've never really found a game with a similar crafting system, although Minecraft comes close - any ideas?

'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007

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