Veteran - of the first batch of players to ever play RuneScape. Sadly Jagex has slowly killed my beloved game RIP
The 2D model was removed, and some nice 3D graphics were added to the game, as well as changes to combat that forever changed RuneScape - for the better. Now weapons had various attack speeds, stats, and looks. If you wanted to be a tank, you could wear your full armor and go to battle with a longsword, battleaxe, or scimitar and a big kite or square shield. If you wanted to inflict maximum damage on your enemy you could ditch the shield and just use a two-handed sword. Melee not your cup of tea? Pull out your bow and arrow, and inflict maximum damage at a range. You sacrifice armor, but make up for it in attack speed and long range capabilities. Or, my personal favorite, don your staff and wizard robes and shoot fireballs, water bolts, wind gusts, and chunks of rock at your enemy, weaken his stats and freeze him in place! Magic comes with a high cost of runes, but provides the ultimate destructive capability (assuming you don't get hit back!). Ultimately the combat triangle was perfect at this stage.
Next came the ultimate nail in the coffin for RuneScape. Jagex made a bone-head move and removed the wilderness and free trade - an act which RuneScape has never recovered from. There used to be a time before this happened when I had at least 50 friends logged online every day on my friend's list...but now, there are only the occasional green names in my list, as the rest of my friends never came back to RuneScape. The Grand Exchange made buying the occasional miscellaneous item so easy, but at the same time prices ran rampant, as merchanting clans and bots soon took over the market in masses, and ever since that day RuneScape has become all about who has the most money.
Did Jagex stop there? Nope. The next series of updates added things that completely screwed the game. One day I was sitting cool and comfortable at 100 million coins which I had worked hard runecrafting to get. I could afford the best armors and weapons (with a few exceptions, but ultimately my go-to-gear was 20 mil - full Dharok's with a dragonfire shield and a whip, with the amazing greataxe to deal those amazing final blows). Bandos was cool, but really the defensive abilities of Dharok's was still my favorite. All of the gear was comparable to eachother. Realistically, a person with 10 mil could afford the best of the best.
But then all of the sudden come things like spirit shields. Suddenly here I am at 100mil nowhere near close to putting down a downpayment on one of these shields (I recall the best of the shields being over 1 billion coins - an amount of money impossible to reach with legitimate means). I soon found that people MUCH lower levels than me could put on this shield and absolutely dominate me. I found people as much as 20 levels lower than me were able to kill me frequently when they wore this shield, even though I was wearing the best gear available to non-billionaires.
Again, Jagex didn't stop there. The next introductions included things like ultra-high level herblore potions, and quickly the cost of getting 95+ herblore rose from just over 100 million to over 400 million coins. Once again, the rich (most of whom got their money through botting) ruled over the skilled. Added to that was the addition of Nex and the subsequent armors. I soon found that even though I had the best gear available to me with my then 150mil (I was also around level 120 (without summoning) at this time) I was losing to people as low as level 90, who were packing spirit shields and full Torva. So my stats were far superior to theirs, and even potting I found I was unable to so much as hit these people, and they were able to kill me with ease, simply because they had the money to buy all this armor. At the time, to own this full armor and the best spirit shield a person would have to have over 3 billion coins - more money than able to be held in a single cash-stack - and an amount that me, a 10+ year RuneScape veteran, has never come close to. At my peak I was worth 600mil, and that was for the next reason...
Evolution of Combat. The final straw. Despite all the crap that went on before, I continued playing. Despite the cost of membership virtually doubling, I kept playing. Despite the game completely leaning towards favoring the illegitimate players with absurd amounts of money, I kept playing. But this killed RuneScape. Ever since this has been instituted, I have seen the amount of players online continue to decrease. The uniqueness of RuneScape was lost, as it became another cookie-cutter MMORPG with the new combat system. Jagex tried to rekindle playership by creating the 2007 server, but it's too late because all the veterans are gone. Only new players remain, and the old stock has left. Just like that, the combat triangle was eliminated and the player base was killed off. It's clearly evident in the price of high level equipment. I paid 200mil for full Torva. It rose to 600 mil with the announcement that it would be updated and made better, and then it crashed clear down to 240mil literally within a month. All the high-level gear is crashing, because all the high-level people are leaving.
Adding insult to injury is Jagex's continued attack on real-world traders, while at the same time releasing virtually weekly costume skins that can only be purchased from Jagex with real-world money. The content that you are paying $8+ a month to access is now almost solely comprised of unnecessary graphics updates that make the game look more WoW with every go-around, and costume skins you need to pay money to get. RuneScape is dead, and Jagex keeps poking the carcass with every insulting update to this now terrible game. This game was my child-hood. I remember when I would get on and it would be fun. I didn't need billions of coins to be competitive. I just needed a little money for some armor and to train my stats. Now, stats don't matter - it's all about the money.
RIP RuneScape