When you late 90s-early 2000s borns say how you miss "old RuneScape", you're not really thinking of classic RS; you're thinking of an economy sterilized by the Grand Exchange (which removed a lot of player-to-player interactivity from the game and made items lose their value as items), the horrendous trade limit, Bounty Hunter, Summoning messing up the combat level system, worrying about revenants instead of player-killers in the Wilderness, and Party Pete having an afro.
Back around 2004-2007, RuneScape was the best of the best. While you late 90s-early 2000s borns were watching Cheese and Fred Fredburger act like idiots on Cartoon Network, we early to mid-90s borns, who also witnessed the Golden Age of Cartoon Network (CCF, weekday Toonami, etc.) enjoyed the best of what RuneScape had to offer. Castle Wars was the minigame to play. TzTok-Jad was the monster to beat. Abyssal whips and Ancient Magicks ruled the combat world. Completing Monkey Madness to upgrade your dragon longsword to a dragon scimitar was a rite of passage. Zezima was our idol. Skychi provided us with the best YouTube content. We didn't clean herbs; we identified them. We traded directly with other players. Getting teleblocked in the Wilderness was your worst nightmare. We remember the Falador Massacre.
I don't even care about half of that stuff, I just miss the player interaction side of it. You could wander to the most remote corner of your world and still make a friend by accident. If you were struggling with something, you asked a player and they told you to follow them and they'd tell/show you what you needed to do. Any time you ran through Varrock the chat would be moving so fast you'd have to scroll for two minutes to accept a trade request until you finally realised you could hide public chat.
Literally none of that stuff exists any more and it sucks dick.
I was too busy with Star Wars Galaxies to care much about Runescape.
Anthony Foster
I was just walking through taverly the other day and complimented a dudes granite set. We talked for 30 mins and became buds. I was doing the heros quest the day after and ran into some other dudes in brimhaven that helped me out with the candlestick. This stuff still happens all the time
Jackson Gonzalez
This is definitely true. RuneScape started feeling more "corporate" after that. Even in OSRS, players are all about preventing "XP waste" at the expense of the camaraderie that made RuneScape great. It's like what happened to Cartoon Network after Betty Cohen resigned and Jim Samples took over.
