TwistedPower

Hi Kaida23 and thank for the welcome :-D I would agree that the point of the article was not to say that free play should = pay play, but it was more of the fact that players who have played RS for a while are the only people who would understand how outdated the free version is. If anything I believe that Jagex wants the free game to feel outdated to the more experienced players so that some players will feel that they need to move to P2P RS. I have recently invited a friend to RS and she has been overwhelmed by the amount of things she had to do and learn. It is her first online game. She is having the time of her life getting to level 30 (hehe lvl 30 when she told me and was bouncing off the walls about a lvl 30 skill I just had to laugh to myself). It took her weeks just to be able to negate the old parts of RS without using the map. She is not at the point where she wants to max her XP per hour, and now that I think about it she probably doesn't even know about the high score list. She keeps her chats to "friends" instead of all because she had experienced and encounter with the few people who do the whole "youre a noob" thing. That has not discouraged her from playing. She even got distracted by those new tree designs they have (she doesnt know what the old ones look like) and she actually plays with the music on... My point is really that the last thing that she cares about is a high score list, when she is perfectly content with her highest skill being lvl 36 after almost of a month of play (she works a lot, but plays about an hour every day now). The things that pull people into this game are the simplicities that pulled people into the game when RS was classic. The things that keep us playing are not things you have when you first start or even in the first month. Free might need to be attractive, but I think that if members content keep people playing rather than free it will be better in the end. Free just needs to retain the simple things that get people INTO the game and if there is less later game materiel might even make it easier for new player to transition. I do not see this change as a bad thing for the new players in the game, it seems more of a good thing for them. Also the update gives more people a reason to move to members even if they do not want to. While not everybody will do so to retain their scores, some people will move to being members. There are many people who will benefit from the change. It also gives hope to people who want those spots and feel they did not have a chance before with the saturation of the high score list. I just was trying to point out in my last post to people who might have misunderstood what was quoted in the article because me and a long time friend on RS were debating about what the line I quoted before really meant.

I would just like to talk about the Goodbye Runescape article, in particular certain quotes pointed out by the author. I think it is important to talk about the degree in which something is stated and how people see it and how it is meant. For instance this was quoted in the article "If you can't enjoy the free game in its own right then we're not doing our jobs properly". This line only indicated that the free game should be fun, not exactly "how" fun it should be and for whom it should be fun for. This line does NOT state "The free game should be as enjoyable as the paid game." For if it did, then why pay? This line also does NOT state its target market of gamers. If the free game was as enjoyable as the paid game then why would you pay for something that is not better? The free version is only targeted towards newer players and is not meant, (and in my opinion) should not be meant for more experienced players. There should be a point where you basically "graduate" from F2P and move into P2P. This view allows for Jagex to cater to different people. When they update the free game it is not to give more content, but to make it easier for a person to get into the game itself. The new updates are for members and each new update should make free players want to move to P2P. This is what Jagex is doing and it is smart. Free vs. Paid is really a way to filter different types of players into different settings. Obviously the more things that come out for members the less appealing free to play becomes, BUT this is only to people who have played the game a long time already. The free version should never get too big that it feels that it is its own game because then it no longer functions and the transition into the full version that is P2P. For new players, the free version of the game is fun and enjoyable. I know this as I have recently brought in many new players who play the free version and find it fun and challenging. The free is probably not fun for higher lvl and more experienced played. It is not designed to be this way. If you try and look at F2P as its own sort of mini version of RS then you will find it lacking and rightly so. It is NOT designed to be that way. It is sort of like the first part of a game, like WoW classic, and then P2P is a bunch of expansions. I'm sure many people want the free version of Runescape to have value to an "end game" type play but that goes against its design. Removing high scores is just one of many steps Im sure Jagex will take to move free to play in this direction. Their goal is to get you to want to P2P. I do not see how that is bad. Should Jagex want you to never want to play as a member or at some point only play the free version? That makes no sense. If you want to talk about community presence in F2P I do not see how the high score list even relates. Most really high level players rarely interact with the new players anyways. New player mostly make friends with people their skill level. The new character with skill in the 40's doesn't really hang out with the person with half his skills 90+. Nobody likes to have things they once got for free taken away from them or all of a sudden making them pay for it. But times change, things gain value, and when things gain a value you do not give it away for free if your goal is to make money. If and free players stop playing I don't think it will phase Jagex to much, you already arent paying, what did they lose that they can't make back? For every single person who loses out on the high score list will be replaced by a new person who will be very happy that jagex did what it did. So the only people who lose are the people who quit no longer have fun playing.