I actually liked runescape while I played it well most aspects except for the community.
then I found other games and could never go back.
amazingly when I logged in for kicks there were still friends playing from years ago. couldn't convince them to play wurm (we totally need a fanboy smiley, but this one seems to work )
yes runescape was my first MMO and it took going through 3 others to find wurm.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
The reason Runescape is so successful, in my point of view, is because it's just a humongous chat-room... Just add some sounds, some pretty graphics, and characters. Then they just glamor it up with all the special features.
BTW, I've played Runescape for 3 years now, and the graphics aren't all that good, true, but it has a lot of plot, a good story, etc.
BTW(2), I've temporarily quit due to the lack of graphics, so don't flame me...
I'm a Kickass Russian... Btw, the strange symbols on one Userbar are in Russian... It means "For the Purity of the Russian Language!"
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Customer Service stinks big time - when i played I had an issue - 4 thats FOUR "run of the mill automated" not on subject mails I got back, the issue i had still wasnt resolved 13 months later.
Noticed now how they try to hide the CS stuff on the main page.
This game will always be full of bots and l33t speaking kiddies 14 and under who buy RS gold from the sweatshops. Jagex thinks they are doing something, but you know what its too little too late - this stuff was happening 5 years ago. No matter what they implement ppl will still buy the gold in this partcular game. They are pushing the gold market undergound even more. The worst thing is the community with all its kids will keep on buying and buying - there's hope in other games but not this one because of the age difference of the players.
Oh and the amount of players is not true. If you read there main webpage they banned like a few thousand lvl 3's (starting lvl) this make up the general population. I wouldnt hesitate to say half of the free players accounts are lvl 3 storage accounts.
Customer Service stinks big time - when i played I had an issue - 4 thats FOUR "run of the mill automated" not on subject mails I got back, the issue i had still wasnt resolved 13 months later.
I agree with this. Their staff is still very small compared to most 'major' mmo developers. I started playing the game over 7 years ago, and I stopped partially because of this. The community is also complete crap.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by Koolaider
Originally posted by AmazingAvery
Customer Service stinks big time - when i played I had an issue - 4 thats FOUR "run of the mill automated" not on subject mails I got back, the issue i had still wasnt resolved 13 months later.
I agree with this. Their staff is still very small compared to most 'major' mmo developers. I started playing the game over 7 years ago, and I stopped partially because of this. The community is also complete crap.
Yeppers I played from the start and at one point was ranked inside the top 100 players overall (74th highest) - now its abandoned at 900 something last time i checked and that was over a year ago.
Let me assure anyone interested in playing this game, sure go ahead try it out - but I'll bet you will be dissapointed, if not straight away at somepoint not long after playing, and this is more so than any game you have played before. (that is if it isnt your first game) If it is your first game then, just FYI there are tons better options out there - keep browsing. The only future I predict for this game is a monotony of crap introduced over and over again with reinvented quests. There's no progress happening, no foreward though fromt the company. The game and client are been re done in German so it shows there intentions are to continually to flog a dead horse - or dying. Technology is old, community sucks, Customer Service sucks, Content Sucks (after a relatively short period)
Do not forget what Runescape is aimed at... Younger kids. Easy to play as the download would confuzzle those noobs. If they made a client for it and download and revamp it... They would lose customers. The young children will all leave. Huge client download would be for older people and as we don't like Runescape, at least I don't and I'm fifteen so "older" is used conservatively.
I'm had some fun times on runescape and made some fun friends among the kiddies. But looking back personally i wish i'd never started, its addictive but if you actually play other games you realise how crap it is. And the reason it sucks is not graphics, it's gameplay and controlls.
Javascript is not an excuse why the graphics sucks, its a reason. I know there are benfits to javascript, ie everyone can play. But like somebody else said; even this javascript game lags alot on a good spec pc. I'm not sure why that is i'm no techie, but my PC could run guildwars with less lag than runescape. Just shows javascript is a crappy outdated peice of junk.
Do not forget what Runescape is aimed at... Younger kids. Easy to play as the download would confuzzle those noobs. If they made a client for it and download and revamp it... They would lose customers. The young children will all leave. Huge client download would be for older people and as we don't like Runescape, at least I don't and I'm fifteen so "older" is used conservatively.
I know its mainly kids but there are adult and middle aged players, at least on member servers. I presume F2p is like very young children (ie my 9 year old brother plays) or mentally young people, because of they way they act and brain capabilities they show (generally).
those 5mil f2p's are playing with adverts so jagex prolly get more money from that than the 1mil paying $5 a month. Jagex has got to be the worst mmorpg. And one of the richest imo. They are incredibly lazy since sticking with antique jagex system instead of good standard stuff the rest of the world uses. i guess their view is "if its not broke don't fix it" since they are reeling in cash, why bother improving the game. No adding a lame quest every month is not improving. I still maintain that it could be a good game if they made some serious changes, but they never will. I'm ashamed to find out they are an english company.
this man really knows wat his talking about, agree 100%
RS is a mint game... well, was a mint game when i played it a long time ago, i played it for so long and i loved it but in the end the graphics got to me, Jagex is racking in millions and millions of dollars yet they still dont upgrade from old skool java to a real mmorpg gfx engine!
just imagine Runescape on a Crytek 2 engine lol! i would quit any game to play that!
what Jagex fails to realise is that "yes" if they do make the graphics of the game extremely better there going to lose players due to systems not being able to handle it, however what they fail to see is that all the old skool players of runescape will return to runescape, they dont realise that runescape is a "starter" mmo, thats where kids start to be gamers and then move on to more hardcore games, they need to make RS a hardcore game so that all the old fellas will return, im telling you now that the amount of people they lose they will gain almost 95% of them back, 50% old skool RS players, 45% new guys who like the games graphics
but like this man above me said "if its not broke dont fix it" thats literally how jagex sees RS, they are racking in money now y bother changing right?
Actually my son (12) and his friends and cousans all play and love runescape. I have seen it and it does beat Toontown and yes I do pay for his membership.
RS is a good primer MMOG, yes there are better games out there but none aimed at the beginers. As far as the numbers of players. What do you consider an active account?. There is a large group of us EVE players that simply log on to set skills but are playing other games. In the last 3 months I have not actually played EVE for more than a total of 6 hours, that is I have spent maybe 6 hours total playing EVE in the last 3 months. Does that mean that my account does not count, it does just as people that play RS once in a blue moon accounts count. If you use play time as a measument then even games like WOW would have lower numbers as people like myself only play that for a few hours a month.
Forget about the graphics, yes they are dated but graphics alone does not make up for good gameplay. There are some games out today that have fantastic graphics, eye popping textures and skins but the gameplay sucks. RS is one of those games like CS, low budget but a good place to get your feet wet.
After ditching runescape and moving onto greater things (guildwars) then having your computer breaka nd having to come back to runescape as its the only dam thing you computer runs, I realised a good dam many things wrong with this friggin game. Things which I doubt I'll be able to articulate well but here goes. 1. Yeah we all know graphics suck the reason this pisses me and prolly alot of people off is... why? 1 million members = 5 million a month is more than most games. theres no reason why they have to suck so bad, hire people! 2.My personal biggest bitch with it is controlls!. the thing build on some wierd system which means your only controlls in the game is clickage. this after playing decent games is just so ridiuculusly crap. click-click-click and most the time ur clikcing doesn't work (the game system cant multitask well) so you have to lcik thing s a few times before they work. it really slows you down when you have to click on several locations on the screen to not die. 3.Combat. is bacially clicking on each other and seeing who wins. some of the magic spells can be fun but the whole things ridikulusly (yeah i know i cant spell pardon the pun) unbalanced and you have to earn alot to run spells as the cost so much. 4. food. why? why o why? cant u use prayer to heal or something. clicking on a shark to not die is more than just lame, it makes combat even more dull. and more fiddly with a clicker controll 5.Quests, they suck and its the only thing jagex put their slight effort into all the updates r crummy quests not things every1 wants. 6.mindless grind. click click click for hours on end to grind up to decent skills. boring although i have done alot of it, it depresses me the time it wastes. 7.dieng. can be really fustrating although is prolly the best part of the game since you can nick people stuff (which is unqiue i think). but still losing all ur hard earned stuff if ur computer freezes or you get an evil chicken appear and kill you whilst you send an msn message is not cool. 8. its just seriously uncool. I'd dont care who knows i play guildwars but runescape just embarrassin it just the worst street cred out of any game and puts a bad name on the word mmorpg. partly cause like all little kiddies play it (although this the noob factor is my favourite part of the game) 9.Cheating, lots of it goes on with bots n stuff. You all know about this and why it sucks tbh, hacking has pissed of many ex-players also. 10. the sheer fact that its pay to playa nd expensive and yet games like guildwars (pardon my frequent references to this game) do the bundle for no monthly fee and has none of the other 9 reasons whyt his game sucks. well there you have 10 good solid reasons why this game is tird. I'd like to know any counter arguements to my points but keep em short i can never be bothered to read long waffly posts.
Sorry to get off topic, but many people are saying apart from graphics this game is good, I thought i'd remind them why it isn't.
Regardless the amount of people playing runescape, be it 1 million or 5 million the bottom line is they do not have sufficient, no wait I think its safe to say they don'y have ANY customer support to provide their paying customers with adequate responses to queries. Basically you are left feeling abandoned and totally empty.
Further to the lack of support, helpful and honest people (some whom I know personally and who have played for 4 +years) have been banned for no reason. I know that some people out there are guilty of breaking rules however it has become rather unnerving to find out that some people have been banned just because they trade another account that had questionable activity associated with it.
I happened accross several video's on you tube.com showing customer support response's to player's concerns. Some people have been banned for nothing. Years of working on a character gone and there is no 'real' medium to discuss with customer support and its shocking.
Nearly all those subs are from the western world which is simply incredible since getting that many subs in just the west is pretty difficult. I wouldn't say it has had the 3rd most subs in the world. There are quite a few Korean MMOs that have toped over 4 million subscribers at 1 time. However, in the west its been a huge success and probably for all the reasons we would consider wrong.
The best move jagex could do right now is pull out a runescape 3, totally new world, same features.The amount of people playing would increase significantly.
to be perfectly honest you kinda need to respect jagex's runescape developers.
they have a skill based leveling system, PvP with real loss(not better, but it is more balanced than other MMO's), crafting that matters, and REAL quests there are no kill 5 rats followed by 5 cats quests.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by paulscott
to be perfectly honest you kinda need to respect jagex's runescape developers. they have a skill based leveling system, PvP with real loss(not better, but it is more balanced than other MMO's), crafting that matters, and REAL quests there are no kill 5 rats followed by 5 cats quests.
You got it a bit wrong there - there is the infamous kill rat amount quest, and there is the cat quest where you have to go and search several boxes for the kitten, there are lots of monotonous pointless quests quests. Balance is the one thing they messed upon ever since summer 2001, since then it just went down hill in a balancing respect. Items that cant be crafted and take 1 in 20000 to maybe get a specific item. I respect them for their inital thought and design, but for lack of customer support and pointless updates im totally unforgiving.
I tried out Runescape and it is a POS. The graphics are so outdated, even AC1 and UO look alot better. The UI was a joke and lag even on a midrange machine with cable connection was horrible. With the poor system resources that the game requires, it should have run like a top, but didn't because it is poorly optimized and very poorly written.
Also, a statement released by the company trying to recruit new employees should not be declared as "OFFICIAL".
A recruitment statement is usually filled with half-truths and I have always taken them with a grain of salt.
To say they have 5mil players is totally ludicrous and even the industry standard site run by a well known analyst of MMO's shows thats not true
The site might be a little outdated now, but to say they gained 4mil since the last update is crazy. I can see them as having over their lifetime 5mil free players and 1mil paying customers, but to say that they have it currently is stretching it to the limits of human imagination.
Ohh, check the chart, it isnt even close to the second biggest MMO and that isnt even counting the newest ones that have came out since the last update.
That link you gave shows how many SUBSCRIBERS there are in Runescape, not the total amount of active players. They currently have about 1.1 million subscribers.
____________________
Have played: RuneScape, EQ2 (free trial), Last Chaos, Silk Road, Dungeon Runners. Currently playing: RuneScape, Dungeon Runners.
The notion that graphics, or anything else for that matter, are anywhere near as important as gameplay/fun is so utterly ridiculous that anyone who shares such a view should be placed in an asylum.
This is an exciting opportunity for a candidate with ambition and initiative to join a fast paced, rapidly expanding online games company based in Cambridge and help us achieve our ambitious goals for 2007 and beyond.
You will be working with our expanding Game Content Development department creating (design and script) new quests, skills and monsters for RuneScape.
We are looking for passionate gamers with a methodical approach, strong creative and artistic skills and deep motivation to create games, who can cope with the thrilling challenges of a development environment releasing new game elements almost every week.
Key duties include:
Create new game element ideas (quests, mini-games, skills, monsters etc.) based on pre-defined expectations for RuneScape; Use our internal scripting language to write high quality script running the new game contents; Work together with graphic artists, testers and other professionals to produce the best possible content; Communicating complex creative ideas in a clear and concise manner; Participate in large scale design decisions to establish the future of the game.
Requirements: Good programming or game scripting skills (basic C++ or Java or game scripting); Good creative writing skills and imaginative storyline ideas; Clear understanding of game design terminology and realistic game design ideas; Very strong and proven communication skills; Experience of working to deadlines and/or in project based environment; Keen interest in role playing games.
Also useful: Previously written quests (levels) for CRPGs, MUDs or similar; Game industry experience preferably in creative, game design or scripting roles; A computer science degree is a plus but isn't essential if good programming and/or scripting skills can be demonstrated; Having any one of -German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, French, Chinese or Japanese- language skills would be looked upon very favourably.
About Jagex Ltd and RuneScape
Jagex Ltd was founded in December 2001. The company now has more than 300 employees, making us one of the largest independent games studios in the UK. Jagex intends to become a significant operator in all the major gaming markets worldwide, developing and commercialising highly compelling character games that appeal to a wide audience.
Jagex provides a positive, challenging and rewarding working environment and in March 2007 achieved 59th place in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For.
Since its launch, RuneScape has grown to over 5,500,000 active free players, whilst the members’ version has over 1 million paying subscribers. This ranks RuneScape as the third largest MMORPG title in the world. The game is updated with new playable content almost every week, providing a constantly evolving gaming experience for all our players.
Oh well, I'm sure youll come up with some excuse to how these numbers are wrong , or how the game still 'sucks'
isnt runescape spme shitty flash mmo? wtf is going on?
It's no suprise this game is 3rd in the world. All you need is an internet browser wih java(56k connection) and 128mb of ram to play. Virtually every computer in the world has that now. This was one of the first mmos I played. I played it knowing it was terrible, but I know my computer at the time could run nothing (I think I had less than 128mb of ram as reqs were lower at one time, 5 gig hardrive, windows 95 OS). I had access to better computers but this was the one at my house, so naturally I played this game. In the library at my highschool we had 30+ computers and every single one comtained a person playing runescape. This was even back when the graphics were the bad 2d comic style. I even have a cousin who is 6 and can barly read but has managed to play this game. He is level 30 something. I'm not saying it's the best game ever in fact it could be the worst game ever, but you need next to nothing to play it. That's the one reason it draws in people. The free accounts are making just as much money as the p2p. The ads make alot of profit.
Comments
then I found other games and could never go back.
amazingly when I logged in for kicks there were still friends playing from years ago. couldn't convince them to play wurm (we totally need a fanboy smiley, but this one seems to work
yes runescape was my first MMO and it took going through 3 others to find wurm.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
BTW, I've played Runescape for 3 years now, and the graphics aren't all that good, true, but it has a lot of plot, a good story, etc.
BTW(2), I've temporarily quit due to the lack of graphics, so don't flame me...
I'm a Kickass Russian...
Btw, the strange symbols on one Userbar are in Russian... It means "For the Purity of the Russian Language!"
Customer Service stinks big time - when i played I had an issue - 4 thats FOUR "run of the mill automated" not on subject mails I got back, the issue i had still wasnt resolved 13 months later.
Noticed now how they try to hide the CS stuff on the main page.
This game will always be full of bots and l33t speaking kiddies 14 and under who buy RS gold from the sweatshops. Jagex thinks they are doing something, but you know what its too little too late - this stuff was happening 5 years ago. No matter what they implement ppl will still buy the gold in this partcular game. They are pushing the gold market undergound even more. The worst thing is the community with all its kids will keep on buying and buying - there's hope in other games but not this one because of the age difference of the players.
Oh and the amount of players is not true. If you read there main webpage they banned like a few thousand lvl 3's (starting lvl) this make up the general population. I wouldnt hesitate to say half of the free players accounts are lvl 3 storage accounts.
Yeppers I played from the start and at one point was ranked inside the top 100 players overall (74th highest) - now its abandoned at 900 something last time i checked and that was over a year ago.
Let me assure anyone interested in playing this game, sure go ahead try it out - but I'll bet you will be dissapointed, if not straight away at somepoint not long after playing, and this is more so than any game you have played before. (that is if it isnt your first game) If it is your first game then, just FYI there are tons better options out there - keep browsing. The only future I predict for this game is a monotony of crap introduced over and over again with reinvented quests. There's no progress happening, no foreward though fromt the company. The game and client are been re done in German so it shows there intentions are to continually to flog a dead horse - or dying. Technology is old, community sucks, Customer Service sucks, Content Sucks (after a relatively short period)
I'm had some fun times on runescape and made some fun friends among the kiddies. But looking back personally i wish i'd never started, its addictive but if you actually play other games you realise how crap it is. And the reason it sucks is not graphics, it's gameplay and controlls.
Javascript is not an excuse why the graphics sucks, its a reason. I know there are benfits to javascript, ie everyone can play. But like somebody else said; even this javascript game lags alot on a good spec pc. I'm not sure why that is i'm no techie, but my PC could run guildwars with less lag than runescape. Just shows javascript is a crappy outdated peice of junk.
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I sure count as an "Active Player" too, since I made my Account ~5 years ago ^_^
Only people actively subscribing should be counted as active. Or having logged in for more than 1 hour during the past 2 weeks.
I bet they did not do that.
RS is a mint game... well, was a mint game when i played it a long time ago, i played it for so long and i loved it but in the end the graphics got to me, Jagex is racking in millions and millions of dollars yet they still dont upgrade from old skool java to a real mmorpg gfx engine!
just imagine Runescape on a Crytek 2 engine lol! i would quit any game to play that!
what Jagex fails to realise is that "yes" if they do make the graphics of the game extremely better there going to lose players due to systems not being able to handle it, however what they fail to see is that all the old skool players of runescape will return to runescape, they dont realise that runescape is a "starter" mmo, thats where kids start to be gamers and then move on to more hardcore games, they need to make RS a hardcore game so that all the old fellas will return, im telling you now that the amount of people they lose they will gain almost 95% of them back, 50% old skool RS players, 45% new guys who like the games graphics
but like this man above me said "if its not broke dont fix it" thats literally how jagex sees RS, they are racking in money now y bother changing right?
ohhhh Jagex, u will never learn will u >_>
Actually my son (12) and his friends and cousans all play and love runescape. I have seen it and it does beat Toontown and yes I do pay for his membership.
RS is a good primer MMOG, yes there are better games out there but none aimed at the beginers. As far as the numbers of players. What do you consider an active account?. There is a large group of us EVE players that simply log on to set skills but are playing other games. In the last 3 months I have not actually played EVE for more than a total of 6 hours, that is I have spent maybe 6 hours total playing EVE in the last 3 months. Does that mean that my account does not count, it does just as people that play RS once in a blue moon accounts count. If you use play time as a measument then even games like WOW would have lower numbers as people like myself only play that for a few hours a month.
Forget about the graphics, yes they are dated but graphics alone does not make up for good gameplay. There are some games out today that have fantastic graphics, eye popping textures and skins but the gameplay sucks. RS is one of those games like CS, low budget but a good place to get your feet wet.
An so it begins
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Regardless the amount of people playing runescape, be it 1 million or 5 million the bottom line is they do not have sufficient, no wait I think its safe to say they don'y have ANY customer support to provide their paying customers with adequate responses to queries. Basically you are left feeling abandoned and totally empty.
Further to the lack of support, helpful and honest people (some whom I know personally and who have played for 4 +years) have been banned for no reason. I know that some people out there are guilty of breaking rules however it has become rather unnerving to find out that some people have been banned just because they trade another account that had questionable activity associated with it.
I happened accross several video's on you tube.com showing customer support response's to player's concerns. Some people have been banned for nothing. Years of working on a character gone and there is no 'real' medium to discuss with customer support and its shocking.
Check these videos out for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pmMYN4H8Os Customer Support ? Not!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yY1oiEEU9U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQN7u-pUbgQ&mode=related&search=
Here's one showing a player of 4 years banned for offensive name? jeesh.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78eXZc5m5cg
Nearly all those subs are from the western world which is simply incredible since getting that many subs in just the west is pretty difficult. I wouldn't say it has had the 3rd most subs in the world. There are quite a few Korean MMOs that have toped over 4 million subscribers at 1 time. However, in the west its been a huge success and probably for all the reasons we would consider wrong.
The best move jagex could do right now is pull out a runescape 3, totally new world, same features.The amount of people playing would increase significantly.
Well deserved in my opinion, it kept my interest for 2 years, good for Jagex.
to be perfectly honest you kinda need to respect jagex's runescape developers.
they have a skill based leveling system, PvP with real loss(not better, but it is more balanced than other MMO's), crafting that matters, and REAL quests there are no kill 5 rats followed by 5 cats quests.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
You got it a bit wrong there - there is the infamous kill rat amount quest, and there is the cat quest where you have to go and search several boxes for the kitten, there are lots of monotonous pointless quests quests. Balance is the one thing they messed upon ever since summer 2001, since then it just went down hill in a balancing respect. Items that cant be crafted and take 1 in 20000 to maybe get a specific item. I respect them for their inital thought and design, but for lack of customer support and pointless updates im totally unforgiving.
That link you gave shows how many SUBSCRIBERS there are in Runescape, not the total amount of active players. They currently have about 1.1 million subscribers.
____________________
Have played: RuneScape, EQ2 (free trial), Last Chaos, Silk Road, Dungeon Runners.
Currently playing: RuneScape, Dungeon Runners.
The notion that graphics, or anything else for that matter, are anywhere near as important as gameplay/fun is so utterly ridiculous that anyone who shares such a view should be placed in an asylum.
2nd largest? i think tht says something. No im not saying its the best but its pretty decent.
?
since 1999 runescape has got so so so so much better in graphics, chat room, and a lot more because at first when it started it stunk in my opinion.
isnt runescape spme shitty flash mmo? wtf is going on?
It's no suprise this game is 3rd in the world. All you need is an internet browser wih java(56k connection) and 128mb of ram to play. Virtually every computer in the world has that now. This was one of the first mmos I played. I played it knowing it was terrible, but I know my computer at the time could run nothing (I think I had less than 128mb of ram as reqs were lower at one time, 5 gig hardrive, windows 95 OS). I had access to better computers but this was the one at my house, so naturally I played this game. In the library at my highschool we had 30+ computers and every single one comtained a person playing runescape. This was even back when the graphics were the bad 2d comic style. I even have a cousin who is 6 and can barly read but has managed to play this game. He is level 30 something. I'm not saying it's the best game ever in fact it could be the worst game ever, but you need next to nothing to play it. That's the one reason it draws in people. The free accounts are making just as much money as the p2p. The ads make alot of profit.