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Comment by bragr | Hacker News Reader

>136,079 online (53,634 in game)

Amazing that there are so many people active still, if that's accurate. RuneScape feels like a half forgotten childhood memory to me at this point.

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Well a nonzero (and possibly quite large) number of those are bots. OSRS is a fun game but it's design makes it very easy to make bots for. If you play for a while you'll see them almost everywhere.

its*

A lifetime ago I wrote an OpenCV blob detection auto-mining tool for it:

https://gitlab.com/mtekman/runescape-motiondetector

It worked for about an hour before having the nasty habit of attacking monsters, chasing them out into the wilderness where you'd check in on your character and find him dead, barren, and lost.

Fun though.

These days there are bots who hunt other bots. People make bots which kill "reventants" in the "revenant caves" for valuable loot, there were so many bots there that people made other bots to kill these bots and steal their loot from them.

Its almost a cool emergent ecosystem, except it sucks for us real players.

Well „modern“ MMOs are so bad that people still stick to the good old stuff. Honestly MMOs feel so over now, some old ones still clinging on, but the genre is dead now more or less

MMORPGs are going to have a hard time in an era of instant gratification. The era of grinding for months if not years to reach the elite ranks is a time gone by, gamers these days just will not respond anymore.

MOBAs are perhaps the most obvious reflection of this paradigm shift: Progression is achieved in mere minutes instead of months/years and it only lasts for a sitting session rather than for years to come.

That being said, I certainly miss those years and I for one still fondly remember my RuneScape and Ragnarok Online days. As fun as modern instant gratification MMOs are, the absolute high point of fun just doesn't compare to what I experienced in MMORPGs of ye olde days.

Can you imagine the absolute chaos and fun of almost 340 grizzly players (168 vs. 168) slogging it out in a small map, aka full scale War of Emperium in Ragnarok Online? God damn, I would kill to experience that again; forget 5v5s in MOBAs, that shit is n00bsauce.

Have never played Rag, but in Runescape and WoW progression was only measured in months and years at a time when one would be completely oblivious to any kind of far out goal or meta or otherwise being good at the game, and that's because the nature of the game was to get one level higher, not to the end, and you'd be naively taking ages to even progress that far. After you're aware of the end bits or have done the leveling a few times, progression could be measured in huge time blocks, but I don't know if those have much crossover with what you get through the eyes of a new adventurer.

The only nostalgia I have in RuneScape was learning to write basic bots in Pascal using... SCAR? and then acquiring or aspiring to acquire gear that was only novel because I didn't know how or where to get it, the mystery was the magic, bots did the rest. Wow was more punishing and more rewarding during this same period of wide-eyed new adventurer mode. "How did he get those shoulders!? Maybe some day". Although I do still play retail and haven't bothered with classic, because the systems are better and the fights are a bit more sophisticated

I played UO, AC,DAOC,Lineage2,Shadowbane,Planetside,Darkfall. Never really got into WoW because it lacked meaningful PvP and had grinded enough in previous games that I could see that mechanic clearly and it was no longer motivating.

As a player I remember in all of these games remarking that ‘can’t they just bring us the end game now without me having to grind for it?’ Planetside was the closest I got to that. I think working for something is important but too many games make the mouse trap the game.

Philosophically I wonder about how much ‘anticipation is everything’ is true ha

Progress should be earned like in Dark Souls.

The best example I have is the Caprademon. Early on in the game, you face a single one (granted, in a cramped area) and it is quite an obstacle. Later on in the game you face many of them in a row, and you don’t even blink.

At that point you have better gear, but it’s mostly going through the entire game that has taught you the skillset to make quick work of them.

You should get access to the endgame mostly by skill, not gear. That’s a good game.

Agreed 100%, the reward cycles have become so small.

MMOs will return to super niche games for the most hardcore nerds - maybe that’s a good thing

To be fair, MMOs after WoW were mostly bad as well. Such was the success of WoW (which, make no mistake, was a very good game), that it dried up the field completely: every "MMO" afterwards had to be a WoW clone with the same gameplay, same action bar, same progression, same end-game style, etc. There were exceptions and there was innovation of course, but I feel no game ever came close to making true justice to the possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world.

Those that came closer imo were UO and SWG: both before WoW :)

I loved SWTOR. The non-mmo part of it were more than great. If only they did something akin to NWN2 with Skyrim-level mod capacity, it would have been the best rpg of all time.

This is my opinion as well. Every MMO I’ve played since WoW felt like WoW-lite. If I wanted to spend a ton of my time playing a MMO why not play the OG instead of the copy-cats?

Still the best MMO, even for someone (like me) that has never player as a child.

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