I would love if someone forks this and turns it into an AI competition. Like that social network only for bots, this would be a runescape server only for bots.
Private servers like this (though for a different game) were my first exposure to programming, free and open source software, and eventually, computer science as a whole- when I eventually went off to college I majored in computer science and had a great head start in many of the practical/application courses.
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.
OdinMS was such a fun time. I too started programming MapleStory private servers. Vana was my intro to C++ and as I learned in Uni it made it so much more fun.
Had a similar experience. I was a complete addict in High School to late 90's Everquest. I believe the project was EQEmu and I was able to spin up a local SQL server and run my own private server. I had no idea what I was doing at the time but I got it to work and was able to have friends join me...over my dialup connection. Unreal at the time :)
I ended up cutting my teeth working on maintaining a MUD (that sadly just recently went offline). I think gaming is a big draw for tinkering and programming simply because how much time we spent interacting with it and how (at the time at least) it was very accessible to modify. A lot of what you're working on is changing data values and plugin-style things rather than getting bogged down in modeling and other much less approachable aspects of the game.
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.
You've just reminded me of one of my learning experiences on my private server. I implemented a HTTP server. It was very basic but this was before I really learned about using libraries.
Oh fun, I love discovering new game projects like that.
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)
It's a very solo friendly MMO. Private servers are usually for people who want changes to the official game (or removal of changes), and sometimes just to avoid paying subscription fees. This one is aiming to replicate the official state of the game as it was in 2009.
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.
There's a large amount of osrs that play "ironman" myself included which prohibits interacting with the economy at all.
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.
I am seriously tempted by a project like this. They even have a linux client!
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.
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.
Pretty sure I used to buy them for 1k each. Identified Ranarrs would sell for around 7k each, and I think prayer potions (4) would sell at a slight profit for 9k. I guess the lack of "make X" and automatic decanting made skilling actually profitable.
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.
> 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?
In modern OSRS I believe the main way of training Runecrafting is through the Ourania altar, and at higher levels the Soul/Blood altars, both OSRS-specific (I've used both as an Ironman player, but haven't played in the last few years, so not familiar with newer updates).
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 think that most people these days train runecrafting with the "guardians of the rift" minigame. At least at lower levels. It adds some rewards and makes it somewhat less tedious.
I decided there are worse thing I can waste my time on, so a few years ago I installed Old School Runescape for the first time and made an Ironman character (you can use banks but you can't trade with players, so you have to do all the content yourself), after falling in love with the adventures of Swampletics.
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.
For some context, the Jagex reboot "Old School Runescape" (OSRS) forked from a circa-2007 build of the game. It was apparently a stroke of luck that they still had the source code.
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".
OSRS players have not been "stuck with low quality graphics". The appeal of that version of the game is as a whole. It was not just "the version without the one later change that wasn't liked". It was the version before the general change in approach.
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.
> OSRS players have not been "stuck with low quality graphics". The appeal of that version of the game is as a whole. It was not just "the version without the one later change that wasn't liked". It was the version before the general change in approach.
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.
I wonder what the impact of social media has been.
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.
> Not actually "playing" the game - like, that was something to do for fun, but so much of it was hanging out with people.
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.
There has been a similar - but different - effect on games that were traditionally server-based like FPS games. Games where once you would join the same little deathmatch server, which had its own community and culture? Now you discuss the game on reddit (ew) and play MatchMaking against everyone else on your continent. You will never see those players again, ever, unless you're on a tiny server like the Australian one.
>I vividly remember a time where people used to just talk in online games a lot more
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.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In 07 I made close friendships on the rs servers, enough that my friends would ask where I was if I took a few days. We reconnected years later, and if I was less asocial we could've met irl. I've been playing 07scape again and while I found a fun clan chat, I've been invited to several others by people I'm chatting with in public, due to just being prosocial and maybe well-adjusted.
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 hadn't considered it like that, but that was pretty much how I experienced MUDding. I got into it and wanted to level up, do quests, and explore. Before hitting level 20 (out of 100, basically barely out of newbie status), I stopped caring about progress - but spent even more time there.
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.
You so well describe why I played RS back in those days. I tried getting back into it a few years ago and it just didn't feel the same without my friends. But I never realized why it felt different until I read your comment.
I never played RuneScape but man the talk about using it as a social platform brings memories back. Quake 2, Tribes 2, The Palace Chat, First star online (the PC thing that was like an open clone of Zelda) and a few others. I miss the community and shenanigans and overall super supportive friendly people.
Tribes 2 holds a special place in that they effectively built a proto-internet inside the game client.
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.
Slight quibble: that flex culture you and the parent discuss, embodied by going for 99s/200ms pre-skillcapes, definitely existed; you just weren't privy to it. Places like the tip.it forums were full of flex - remember those autogenerated stats signatures? - but that was its own little niche, not the dominant culture. You're probably right that social media amplified that dynamic a lot, but people like Zarfot and clans like DivinationX[0] were all about no xp waste well before that ethos hit the mainstream. It came from somewhere, rather than appearing fully formed from a seashell.
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
I think you're totally right - all of that existed, always. It's just that it was "over there". And RS facilitated having lots of "over there" communities well in a number of ways.
> 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.
One small additional point. I completely agree that Jagex has done a great job maintaining OSRS. Polls for changes to OSRS typically require 70% of votes to pass[1] instead of a simple majority. This is part of the reason why it is difficult to get major changes like new skills added to the game.
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).
They charge so much and do so little, they better do a good job with it. Or rather, not doing anything is a very low bar to be defined as a "good job".
(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.)
> 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".
Sailing recently got enough votes that they've started development on it:
Oh that's exciting! Thanks for sharing. I might play a bit more when that is released.
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.
I'd love to see Jagex open source OSRS as a business decision to keep the game alive forever, and for leveraging the dedicated community.
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.
Not the same, but Jagex has embraced (probably because they really had no choice) the 3p client "RuneLite". There is an understanding between Jagex and that community that the client is blessed, but only if they steer clear of certain features - like things that would reduce how much you have to interact with UI in the game, such as re-ordering items in the Construction right-click menu for convenience.
TIL that this is why I couldn’t configure the Menu Item Swapper or whatever last week when I was leveling Construction with oak larders. I wonder what makes construction a special case here vs, say, allowing one click dropping of collected resources.
"Licenses which only permit non-commercial redistribution or modification of the source code for personal use only are generally not considered as open-source licenses. However, open-source licenses may have some restrictions, particularly regarding the expression of respect to the origin of software, such as a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and a copyright statement within the code, or a requirement to redistribute the licensed software only under the same license (as in a copyleft license)"
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"
No, it doesn't. Everyone knows what 'open source' means: what the open source definition says. Literally the *only* place on the Internet where people pretend this isn't true is HN. I have never seen anyone suggest that 'open source' means anything else anywhere else.
I just disagree and use a different definition of open source than you/your sources (many people share my definition, mind you). If the source is open, its open-source. It can be free, commercial, or have any license. I feel like people with the other definition of OS, do it because they have a vendetta against companies that open-source code with a non-free license.
>I feel like people with the other definition of OS, do it because they have a vendetta against companies that open-source code with a non-free license.
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.
No, I am saying open source code is open source. Open source has had an established, fixed definition for decades. It was coined for a specific purpose to represent a particular category of software licence.
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.
Can't believe Runescape private server are still a thing after 18 years. This is what got me into programming. I remember working with the first version back in early 2006 I believe it was called winterlove. You couldn't even play multiplayer. Then someone got multiplayer to work, I think that was called blakescape, then there was cheezscape and whitescape which became the popular versions to use because they came with a lot of content like combat ect.
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.
A friend of mine in college made about $500~1000/mo running some Runescape private servers with subscriptions. He hosted a few different types of servers, but I know his most profitable one allowed players to buy "chests". Basically modern-day loot boxes with random high level gear. He got the idea from Korean MMOs at the time. No idea what he's up to nowadays.
Back when the economy in RS wasn't bad, the play I did would be to run an RSPS server and sell items, stats, ect. in it for gold in actual Runescape and then sell that gold for actual money. 1m was like a little over 1$ back then.
I never really got into Runescape but I did start programming in PHP with notepad and attribute a very accurate "tab pinky" to those long nights. If I remember correctly, Notepad was the only thing I directly edit remote files in using CuteFTP, so I think that's why I used it at the time as I learned by editing existing "scripts." Good times.
I also got into programming like this. I even remember working with whitefang, the creator of whitescape, to try and build a 377 server when everyone was on 317. I don't remember if that attempt ever got anywhere though.
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
I meant about 15 years ago when I believe it was mangos and scriptdev2. Compared to runescape servers which I don't think any server software even had a CVS/SVN repo. It was just zip downloads on rapidshare on a downloads sub-forum with zero expectation of there ever being an update.
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.
I played a lot of moparscape back in the day. Was a fun community of people. Learned a lot standing up my own server and getting it listed on their registry for others to join.
I'm happy to see Jagex is still around to this day. They used to make a lot of free games that you could play in the browser. Pre-runescape, I wasted many hours playing games like vertigo and flea circus. It makes me happy to see the company is still alive and well, though it probably has been through many changes.
I'm making a UO inspired MMO and have been wanting to play more MMOs lately. Anyone similar up for experimenting with RS, WoW HC, Zenith, LiF, MO, UO player servers, or anything? Hit me up!
I really appreciate the web design. That was a style that only existed for about five years, give or take a year or two.
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.
I didn't mean to sound condescending, I was genuinely curious. I was wondering if there's a correlation between age and aesthetics, but we're about the same age.
Modern designers would think it’s terrible because it gives you too much information, and suggest putting in way more white space, hiding things under menu bars. I wish I was being facetious but sadly it’s a sincere statement.
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
Back in the day it was just a table based layout though. It was used for quite some time. I'd say the design first emerged about 1998 and lasted until the smartphones came in 2010 or so.
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.
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.
Cool, I didn't realize Runescape private servers were a thing still.
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.
My 2 cents is that evolution of combat is good actually, up to a point. Because the apm and tick rate are limited, getting good after a certain point means memorizing an exact rotation, learning keyboard shortcuts, memorizing the boss mechanics to know when to switch to a shield and res or whatever. Point being it’s not really fun. After a while any minor mistake on a challenging boss screws you up really bad.
Old RuneScape private servers like Dodian, Ub3r server, these got me started on my programming journey. Gotta throw out a thank you to Winten, and all the folks there. After playing RuneScape since 2001, it is great to see progress continues. Projects like https://rsc.vet keep the oldest version alive. RuneScape lead me to a Software career! ( - Formerly "Kankles" alias)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadI think 2009scape itself might even have some automation-focused servers as well
[1] https://rsc.vet/
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/O9wG5jGP32M
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.
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".
[1] https://runescape.wiki/w/Evolution_of_Combat
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).
[1] https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Polls
(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.
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"
https://opensource.org/osd/
If you don't allow commercial use, your code is "source-available", not "open source"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
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.
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:
https://www.gamespot.com
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.
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.
Eventually (not sure how long after) you could just toggle the option at the bank.
Talk about qol improvements.
P.S. https://github.com/reinismu/runescape-web-client-377 Souce code for one of my first ports
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.
[0] https://github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk
https://gitlab.com/2009scape/2009scape