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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Old school RuneScape is an mmorpg where each game update goes to a vote, and if it doesn’t get 75% approval the updates are not worked on by devs and don’t get released. The community feels a strong ownership and connection over the game. So much so that when the development company (Jagex) makes a wrong decision, it’s common for users to “riot” in game. They go to a specific world, at a specific town, place down specific items, and chant.

While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar.

Wiki article about an example with a video. Occurred prior to the voting system, but still occurs even 15 years later https://runescape.wiki/w/Pay_to_PK_Riot

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Having been part of multiple gaming communities where the game was destroyed by the developers with updates the community told them would not work, were bad for the gameplay or just plain out of scope (not wrt to monetization, just gameplay elements or mechanics) and them pushing on, mostly either ridiculing, ignoring or even insulting said players, this sounds like a dream. Results were basically the same. The death of 90% of the enthusiast community in mere months.

Sounds very familiar.

I’m writing a book about Why We Play RuneScape, and the evolution of democratic updates is one of my favorite topics.

Usually I hear bad things about Jagex, I’m surprised they have a system in OSR where they don’t make changes without user approval

OSR exists to to serve their legacy userbase it feels like, who are older and therefore more likely to purchase subscriptions (so they feel it's worthwhile from a business POV) but also more likely to be put off by the level of microtransactions they wanted to put in RS3. So after some very vocal criticism, the "by vote only" system was basically put in because it was the only way what became the OSR community could trust them.

As a current player, I feel a lot of the bad things talked about Jagex are more on the management side rather than the development side. Most of the known OSRS devs and community staff are held in pretty high regard, and my limited interaction with the RS3 community suggest some of the same. The most regular complaints are about how many microtransactions are in RS3, how poorly the devs are paid (though, that's also the video game industry as a whole), and specific events that seem to be very much streamlined through by management and then later patched up after community backlash.

Some changes do get into the game without player approval. The idea behind them is that some changes are necessary for the long-term integrity of the game (in-game economy, gear balancing, etc). They are always controversial.

Interesting way of doing it. I haven't played official RuneScape in a while but glad to see some input is taken by the devs.

Game I learned to code on/with, writing java bots around 2001 time frame. Involved in the big dupe, fun times. May need to see how much has changed.

> While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar.

The Ultima Online postmortem session from GDC 2018 has some similar stories about in-game protests. The stories in said session are quite entertaining, and there is a lot of other interesting information too in the session. The whole thing is worth a watch.

https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0

wait, you're telling me Runescape is still alive?

Yeah, at least Old School Runescape gets weekly updates. It's apparently bigger than something like Elder Scrolls Online. Community is also really active, with an open-source client (https://runelite.net) and one of the best game wiki's I've ever seen (https://osrs.wiki).

Fun fact, JaGex at some point decided they wanted to ban the RuneLite client, riots ensued, and now RuneLite is actually listed on the official website.

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