2009scape
2009scape.org
2009scape.org
Notably, the 2007 version was before huge changes to the game that many original players disliked enough to stop playing. But it was also before the HD version. So OSRS player have been stuck with low quality graphics (however, a modder has recently fixed that. There was some drama over this, Jagex tried to prevent the mod from being allowed, but they backed off).
The OSRS version was also pre-neutering of PvP for real-word currency purposes, which happened Dec 2007. I guess this 2009scape would have a neutered Wilderness too. Or perhaps they're making some editorial tweaks.
2009 still predates many of the wild changes Jagex made that eventually morphed into RS3. Some would be nice to have in OSRS (mining/smithing was rehauled in a nice way, some new skills that OSRS players wish they had like Dungeoneering are missing --- but changes like "Evolution of Combat"[1] was a breaking point for many). My understanding is that if they had found the source code circa 2009, Jagex would have used that and OSRS players would have enjoyed HD on day one.
Jagex has done a good job with OSRS, running it with just a few people and heavily relying on community feedback in the form of polling content updates. If something does not pass majority opinion, it is not added to the game. They've added multiple new quests, areas, and skilling options under this model, to the point where OSRS is quite distinct from its circa-2007 seed. One thing they can't seem to get consensus on though is a new skill - every attempt I'm aware of has been downvoted by the community, seemingly for reasons similar to "it would devalue my investment in X skill".
The big problem with the "HD" version was that it was inconsistent. They couldn't update the whole world at once (or chose not to) so they updated it in bits, and those bits often felt really out of place compared to the much more cohesive older style.
>2009 still predates many of the wild changes Jagex made that eventually morphed into RS3. Some would be nice to have in OSRS (mining/smithing was rehauled in a nice way, some new skills that OSRS players wish they had like Dungeoneering are missing --- but changes like "Evolution of Combat"[1] was a breaking point for many). My understanding is that if they had found the source code circa 2009, Jagex would have used that and OSRS players would have enjoyed HD on day one.
Dungeoneering was a (pretty good) minigame forced into the mould of a (pretty bad) skill for essentially no reason. The mining/smithing rework was very recent and not at all good for the game.
Contrary to the popular belief of people like you (who seem to be the dominant voice on social media), the desire in the first place for "2007scape" did not originate with JaGEx. It came from a website very similar to this one, which aimed to recreate a 2005 or 2006 version of the game. JaGEx saw this desire and found the oldest copy of the RS2 source code they could. It isn't that they would have gone later if they could have. They would have gone earlier if they could have. Even 2007 was the beginning of the end for the game. It was when it started to morph further towards what it is like today: a wholly unlikable game, the players of which are obsessed with grinding to the maximum level in every skill. That's not how people played before they added the level 99 skillcapes in 2006.
>Jagex has done a good job with OSRS, running it with just a few people and heavily relying on community feedback in the form of polling content updates.
This was true for the first few years but clearly isn't true today. They add a lot of content to the game now.
>If something does not pass majority opinion, it is not added to the game. They've added multiple new quests, areas, and skilling options under this model, to the point where OSRS is quite distinct from its circa-2007 seed. One thing they can't seem to get consensus on though is a new skill - every attempt I'm aware of has been downvoted by the community, seemingly for reasons similar to "it would devalue my investment in X skill".
This is evidence that the game is nothing like it was in 2007. Back then, people loved new skills and the idea of "devaluing my investment" just didn't exist. The awful "xp waste"/"grind" mentality of players today is what has driven a lot of players away from the game. It's this sort of mentality where you cannot have a valid opinion on the game unless you're at "endgame" and have basically maximum levels in every skill. That is a World of Warcraft/Everquest-style mentality. "The game starts at endgame". "The game is about raiding and killing bosses". Just not what RS was originally about at all.
Frankly they've changed the game so much since the 2014 revival of "2007"-scape that it is more different today than RS3 was from 2007scape in 2014. And not for the better.
Sure, it's important to note that OSRS players are not a monolith, and people differ on which aspects of the more modern game they disliked. As I recall, HD was an optional toggle. So yes, all OSRS players indeed are "stuck" with the older graphics - the presence of HD would not mean players with a nostalgia for the 2007-era graphics would be left out in the cold. Anecdotally everyone I know lauded the HD upgrade at the time, but I get it wasn't perfect.
> Dungeoneering was a (pretty good) minigame forced into the mould of a (pretty bad) skill for essentially no reason. The mining/smithing rework was very recent and not at all good for the game.
Admittedly I've only seen some commentary from OSRS youtubers about the mining update, and I came away from that thinking the changed mechanics sounded desirable. I've no direct experience.
1. I was on Runscape in the early 2000s. There was no Twitter, Facebook was very new and not really that popular, and nothing else existed. Like, I think Gaia was one of the more popular forums I knew of lol. That meant that Runescape was actually a highly social experience - it's insane the kinds of relationships I built as a 14-18 year old who played the game somewhat obsessively. Staying up all night, meeting strangers. Not actually "playing" the game - like, that was something to do for fun, but so much of it was hanging out with people.
With social media I get a lot of that from other sites. And in general I don't need it as much as I'm not staying up until 4am anymore lol but man it was something else to socialize through a "forum" like Runescape. Even the organic fact that people could "overhear" your conversations just because they were near you in the game led to so many funny "meet cutes", for lack of a better term.
2. The other side of social media influence is that there's a lot more flexing, memeing, and appealing to masses. When I played Runescape it was like... a shameful thing lol, I literally told almost no one at school, and when it came up it was kind of a secret between the few kids who played. It was lame, period , and we did not want to be thought of as lame. No way in hell would I have been posting online about it, nor was there any place to post about it like Reddit - you either posted on the RS boards (probably not tho), or in your clan's custom forum that someone set up.
But now, re (2), there's a lot more room to posture. You can brag way more about your 99s, show them off, show off what you're doing etc. And I think that probably leads to a lot more of the 'grind', which, again (1) was not the point. The point was to run through the wild with your friends at 4am and get scared when pkers came after you and you'd lose a bunch of your shit but who cares. The money we made was genuinely just to fuel those good times. No one actually thought they were going to be the next Zezima - I say this as someone who had multiple 99s, it was mostly just for fun. And it's interesting that you bring up the capes - all of my 99s were after the capes, they were definitely a part of the ceremony.
Viewing RS as a game with an "endgame" or as a game where the points matter is just sort of baffling to me and it's a bit of a shame to me that that's where it apparently has gone.
I think probably far too much about how social media (or, in a broader sense, the mass adoption of the internet) has affected online games like this, and I was really happy to see your point here since this is a thought I've had a lot, but few people seem to understand what I mean when I try to bring it up! I vividly remember a time where people used to just talk in online games a lot more, whereas now most online games feel sorta dead (if they even have a chat option) -- and I suspect that's due to the fact that people are either A) playing with people they already know from real life and don't see any reason to communicate with anyone else, or B) only communicating with the community on platforms like Reddit, in an asynchronous, "flex"-based way. Imo, that shift is the major reason online games have essentially died out except in the form of competitive multiplayer with ephemeral lobbies.
And I've noticed that when I try to explain how things were to people who weren't online before the shift happened, they can't even picture what it was like, or why it was fun. It's so odd to me that that entire way of interaction has just... disappeared.
I play(ed) Ragnarok Online, and some of my fondest memories are logging into one of my characters, going into a PVP map, and then just sit around and talk shit with friends I made there.
We would just sit and talk there, in the PVP map, and when someone who didn't get the memo stopped by to fight we'd collectively kick his ass out and then go back to talking. Some of them would get the memo and come back, then just sit down and join in and bam: New friend made.
Those were some good times.
My point is, maybe people have a higher barrier to entry for 'online friendship', now, as adults, but at least in this same game, people still reach our and form bonds despite there being little in-game support for that socialization. Many still recognize that it's the funny yellow text that touches the heart, and not the count of exp in stats.
I tried going back once, but without spending time to build connections with other players, it wasn't fun. Didn't quite realise that till I read your comment though.
It shipped with user-accounts, IRC (chat), newsgroups (forums), email (direct messages), LDAP (groups/clans/tribes), integrated voice, basically all the components of the internet except calendaring, and if you call CD-Keys like client certs... we'll, just impressive for any game and especially a game of the 2002 era.
I think you both have good points around how a monoculture makes the game less rich and more theme-park-MMO-ish. I always felt that one of the things that helped it feel a bit more like a world simulator and a bit less like a game was the diversity of ways in which people interacted with the game. Wanna be the guy who only farms herbs? Knock yourself out, the game won't stop you and make you go save the world or whatever. When everyone has the same goal (which when I still played I thought of as the slayer-ironman industrial complex rather than no xp waste) you lose that and are back to the inherent absurdity of 50 million different Chosen Ones. It's just a little ironic that in a "no wrong way to play, do it for fun" kind of take you're calling out a wrong way to play.
Disclaimer: obviously very biased; multiply maxed
[0] I wanna say '06 but can't find forum archives and the swiftirc timestamps got reset at some point
> It's just a little ironic that in a "no wrong way to play, do it for fun" kind of take you're calling out a wrong way to play.
I considered this, with my last sentence where I say that it's a "shame". But I'm not saying there's a wrong way to play at all, it's just that things are different.
As a long-time player, I really enjoy the conservatism this leads to in the evolution of the game. It is great to be able to pick up my character after a year or two off and have a very similar experience (+/- a few quality of life updates I'm likely to appreciate).
(I'm aware subscription includes RS3, but the OSRS playerbase far eclipses RS3. You are paying for OSRS with RS3 as a cherry on top, not the other way around. Also, RS3 is funded with microtransactions.)
Sailing recently got enough votes that they've started development on it:
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Sailing
I suppose it could still get shut down by the community later.
I just pulled up my OSRS Google doc "backlog" and it's a few pages of things tracking what I should do next. The game really scratches that itch of crossing items off a TODO list.
All of the coding I did was done using notepad on Windows lol.
I remember when the major version this server is based on 470-500+ versions which is when they updated the graphics. We spent days trying to be the first one to get a working server and client. You had to mod the client and walk around the game to collect map data to be able to load the map on private server.
The most fun times I had programing to this day.
I miss laughing at 2speced Tyler and Nikki not actually being a girl wasn’t much of a surprise.
I think what you're describing with all the code bases is why I lost interest. It felt like everyone was just doing their own thing without any collaboration. Unlike say World of Warcraft servers where everyone used MaNGOS. I hope it's better now
In fact it looks like those forums are still up, and still has all the old posts. I found an aggregate list from 2008 with 300+ (dead) links to various releases. And this was before multiple clients versions were even a thing. There were only 317 servers, which still seem to be very popular today.
there's also so many weird quirks to the projects, it's basically what keeps me coming back.
It makes me really nostalgic. But beyond that, that style of web design has completely disappeared. It was expensive to make, not particularly mobile-friendly, and only really favors one screen resolution. But it was beautiful.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070228162159/http://www.gamesp...
Very similar. So much more personality than Gamespot today:
But back then everyone viewed websites on desktop. Mobile if supported was special-cased. It's the opposite now.
Completely agree though. Information-heavy pages for desktop consumption were wonderful. It truly feels like we’ve regressed. Just loading that gamespot link honestly filled me with an immense nostalgia for the web of 10-15 years ago
It's surprisingly easy to make that sort of design if you use the right tools. You just drew it in photoshop and sliced it up and exported it as an HTML table, then you poked out the bits where the content was supposed to go.
Doing it with CSS is a right pain in the ass though. I guess that's why there are so many mono-colored rectangles in modern web design.
The pinnacle of my Runescape days was just after they opened the Grand Exchange. That was around the time I realized that if I didn't stop playing this game every night, I'd have no life, so I began the process of walking away.
The fact that I lost my login (pre-password manager days) had nothing to do with me making that wise decision, nor the fact that I still don't have a life.
How much did unids sell for?
I've thought about a t-shirt that says "selling unids" just to see how many people get it
----
Unids are Unidentified Herbs, an item since removed from RS. Processing Unids was a relatively fast and very repeatable way to get Herblore experience.
EDIT: actually, I think the 1k price was probably limited to herbs above a certain level. It was common practice to buy noted herbs above a certain level and keep your inventory full with other items to block trades with unidentified Guam leaves.
Here's another activity that will probably never exist again: Law running. I remember both being a runner and a crafter.
I'm out of the loop (I tried 2007scape but don't play it enough to be in the know). Is it because some other faster way of leveling Runecrafting has become available?
I suspect Law crafting (with runners) would still be more XP per hour, but I think the player dynamics are quite different nowadays. You used to spend a lot of time at the start trying out various things that are no longer "efficient" (another thing I remember doing was mining rune essence—I didn't do that at all in OSRS). I think it's because of a combination of things, like the age of players (younger people might not be as good at strategising), visibility through social media (eg, Twitch/Reddit) about how to play the game "properly", and modern updates that make some of the tedious tasks unnecessary (in Ironman, I think I got my rune essence from newer PvM and the "Temple Trekking" minigame). For all of these reasons, you don't end up with people that would be willing to queue to trade their time for someone else's runecrafting experience and a couple of Law runes.
I play a couple hours a week, and I love it. It is a game that will have content for me to do for the next decade, and lately the dev activity and player count have picked up. It is incredible to see a 20 years old game to be the third most played MMO in the world.
As in game as in life, progress is a slow grind, but put in the effort, and you get rewarded for it.. eventually.
P.S. https://github.com/reinismu/runescape-web-client-377 Souce code for one of my first ports
I learned about versioning with SVN, OOP with Java, hacking together websites and forums with PHP while in middle school. Really fun times on the Internet.
That and Minecraft modding with hMod and Bukkit.
I imagine you can't throw a rock in the HN crowd without hitting someone who once worked on an EVE Online spreadsheet of one disposition or another.
Now, I said open source, but that doesn't mean free. Even if the source was available, it would make the most sense if they kept it "non-free", as in, no commercial usage of the source may be allowed.
People are free to run their own servers, but the Jagex ones will be "blessed".
The only problem I see is if some group in a country outside of IP legality were to take it and try to monetize it.
Alternatively I hope one day Jagex has a "hail mary" and releases the source when they think the game is considered commercially dead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
"No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research"
If you don't allow commercial use, your code is "source-available", not "open source"
No. It is because that's what the term means and has *ALWAYS* meant. You don't get to just turn up and change the definition of a term that has been fixed and useful as a term for decades. This isn't the evolution of language. It's just you ignorantly being unaware of the actual definition and using your own.
You are doing a disservice to anyone reading what you write if you use a term with a fixed, established definition to mean something completely different without signalling that you are doing so. Language is for communication.
'Open source' has meant the same thing for decades. Its meaning has not changed.
Nice way to invalidate any current or future arguments you may have.
Who can I trust? How do I empower my team? What is the best way to turn fear and anxiety into success and glory?
I was scammed around 10 years old and I remember crying lol. But it also motivated me to play the game differently to focus on market factors and make all that money plus way more.
I remember being 11 with a dozen or so of the boys going into the deep wilderness with the boys taking on high level players as a group. We all had our roles and jobs. I recently heard the ancient magick ice barrage sound and it brought back those memories. We made so much money fighting in the wilderness, and some time later we got into the fishing and runes businesses. we had running business of lobsters, nature and law runes and it was way more lucrative than risking a lot in the wilderness.
I quit just after the grand exchange was implemented like 2008. Imo it was the end for me and I have never really played video games like that ever since. Probably never will since I’m an adult now and real life is way more fun. But the grand exchange really killed the “social” aspect of that game. You no longer needed to interact with others. The in game market and economy were basically removed. There was no longer a reason to interact with people in the game as everything became on demand.
Anyway this brought back some great childhood memories.
RIP The Falador and Varrock markets
There were spots dedicated to certain items, and this wasn't programmed in the game, it was ingrained in the folklore of the community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNW9TAwImBY
Something very deep inside of me is triggered by Runescape. I think staying up all night for days in a row playing just permanently ingrained certain emotions of my teenage self, and nothing lets me access them the way Runescape does.
I contribute to AzerothCore[0] pretty regularly. There's a lot of improvements that could be made, but it's overall fun and the majority of people who frequent their Discord are friendly enough.
I think 2009scape itself might even have some automation-focused servers as well
[1] https://rsc.vet/
I'm curious, let's say I've only played like Crawl down to level 7, and some Torchlight II. What's the daily routine / grind / goal look like in this kind of game? It seems to include some social or community aspects? Are those part of the game itself or?
(And, just as a veteran web designer, can I say that I _love_ seeing that good old textured website style again. Obvious Voronoi mathematics included. :-) Smoking hot stuff right there in historical context, but also even in broader design-principles terms...not even joking. Crucify me on those wrought-iron headers if you wish)
(There's a 2011scape too...? What is this?)
It's mostly a "grind" sort of game with simplistic combat. It's pretty relaxing for the most part, though it does have some tense PvP elements if you enter into some special areas. You can definitely play it fully focused, but most people would conside it a "Second Monitor" game. i.e. You can watch YouTube or do work and keep old-school RuneScape active on a second screen, interacting every minute or so.
This is a trade off for me because I would prefer 2006scape or pre market place economy where you had to buy and sell manually by sitting in an area and trade. Automated trading economy made a lot of the content of the game easy to cheat because a good deal of the Quests and such are really just running around picking up obscure items. With the exchange and the wiki its practically ez scape.
1) Yes, there's lots of bugs, that's why there's a gitlab where you can report them and we fix them. We didn't make most of these bugs, they were inherited from previous developers. If you'd bothered to check, you'd know that we resolve about 100 issues a month.
2) That death bug you mentioned was rare, hard to reproduce, and fixed within 2 hours of us finding out about it :)
3) The dummies don't stop at 8 attack, they stop at combat level 8. You'd know if you bothered to spend 5 seconds doing any real research, I imagine this is applicable to at least another 50% of the "bugs" you say you logged but never reported (I wonder why that was?)
4) We did not do an emergency patch to fix this thing you believed was a bug, because it wasn't. You're just directly making that up.
5) You were banned because you explicitly stated a very clear malicious intent to, and I quote from you ingame, "take advantage of this before I report it". Bug abuse is zero tolerance. When I confronted you about this in game, you literally said something along the lines of "I was only pretending to be retarded"
6) PKing was not a thing in 2009, therefore its nonexistence is not custom content. Again, if you had done 5 seconds of research...
7) Again, you were banned for explicitly stating an intent in public to abuse bugs before reporting them, and sharing details of abusable bugs with other players. Both of these things get anyone banned.
I then installed Ubuntu (arm server, then installed desktop) via UTM and installed 2009scape via flatpack and was able to scale the UI up but still no HD mode. Scaling is better than nothing even if I have to run a VM but I wish I could run HD. I can't find much info about this online unfortunately other than the FAQ saying you need java 11 (the flatpack installed that) and that it doesn't work on Mac.
Eventually (not sure how long after) you could just toggle the option at the bank.
Talk about qol improvements.