'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007
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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
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.
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.
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.
I spent a lot of time soloing in EQ2, good times. But then my in game friends all went to WoW and I didn't like the graphics.
I got out of the MMORPG world after that. Kind of rehab. I still think back to it but glad I'm not still doing 6-8 a day!
I used to watch your channel (previously MMOHut) a few years back. This was my favorite ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi_tazQbLo
We were playing on dial-up, my friend regularly clocked up $500 of call charges a month. We called it Evercrack for a reason.
For a while I played with 3D shutter glasses but the HUD was 2d overlayed so it was only for the enjoyment of the effect.
We played with such wonder, and we were 20 years old. The EQ world was so hostile, a mechanic that I won't think will be repeated.
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.
Being 21 years old this article hit quite a point of nostalgia remembering the days of summertime '04-07 RuneScape.
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
Big chance that I still know you as well if I know your old nickname. Especially the programmer community was pretty cozy.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
WOW has changed lots in every version. There are plenty of holdouts that think it's gotten too "easy" since the first expansion, a flaw that has been repeated by every expansion after. Yet WOW has thrived (yes, their numbers peaked, but I've not seen any convincing argument that they have been better off not making the changes they did.)
And that's just one example. In my limited experience, EVERY game that is maintained over time gets changes to make it more accessible, and some portion of existing players always bitch.
In some cases, they are right (thus your above examples). In others, the masses decide these changes WEREN'T so drastic, and are content. (Or they decide them like them, which automatically makes them non-drastic). And those many examples simply fail to stand out over time, skewing your perception.
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) ;)
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.
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..
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.
While not directly related, definitely worth a watch.
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
And somebody preserved my script on pastie for prosperity: http://pastie.org/pastes/1603353
Found a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it8QwmDj7Pw
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.
I'll try lower contrast colors and a different font. Thanks for the feedback!
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.
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).
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.