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Corporate greed is killing RuneScape. What do people play instead? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by Buttflapper@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I'd play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with bots. It's honestly so bad. I tried to play it and it feels so... good, but also low effort. The worst part, however, is the corporate greed. Jagex, the company that developes Runescape, has been sold numerous times. This time, it's owned by some Venture Capital or investment firm, the kind that kills games off to gain their IP and then sell them for huge amounts of money (CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments). The first thing they've done is raise the subscription of Runescape to nearly $15, which is truly nuts. This game used to be like $8 a month previously, some are still paying that much....

It's sad to see corporate greed kill such a great game. Idk what to even play now....

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[-] Buttflapper@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

they've done a really good job culling the bots in osrs

You're badly misinformed. Their official subreddit is rife with complaints constantly about how bad the bot problem is. Some top ranked players on high scores are bots too.

Example one where top fishing skill players are bots.

Example 2 The top 25 Bandos highscore ranks are dominated by ranged-only tick-perfect bots, with a combined kill count of 1.7 million, generating approximately 225 billion gold from Bandos sets and 50 billion gold from hilts, and similar botting issues persist across other high-level bosses and activities.

Example 3 where CVC admits they have no fucking idea how many bots there even are but that they're important to OSRS and part of the game.

The bot problem is out of control and they obviously profit from it massively, banning them takes away subscribers

[-] clickyello@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

example 1 is from a year ago, 2 is new so it may still be a thing but likely something they've already dealt with and 3 is from "someone close to CVC" how on earth are you gonna take that as fact?

from mod ayiza's response to that 3rd one:

"To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats:

Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.

So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.

So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.

Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.

Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.

Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy. "

they're playing wack-a-mole because there's no possible way to preemptively ban bots, but they've done a good job of it and will continue to.

[-] Velonie@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

In addition to what the other commenter said, it's more likely as someone newer and thus engaging in lower level activities to encounter bots since it takes less time to set them up and get going than mid to late game content. I find it rare to encounter an obvious bot as someone doing high level pvm/skilling