The following quote was taken from this careers site: http://careers.computing.co.uk/texis/co ... ex+Limited Question What is the best way to earn money for a F2P player? Yes mining ess is a good way, no major skills requirement and only 1 quest required. But another way to make good money its cutting yews to sell to the P2P fletch/alchers. Except for one thing - there aren't many places to cut yews in F2P - which is why Varrock has become infested with auto'ers since the pure ess update. So what's a F2P yew cutter going to do to continue earning the kind of money they are used to? Answer Get a subscription! The P2P worlds have many more yew cutting opportunities and are not suffering the auto'er invasion anywhere near as badly as the F2P worlds. I'm not F2P (I started P2P 3 weeks after starting to play Runescape) but if I was a F2P yew cutter who had spent months getting my woodcutting to the point where I could cut yews and was seeing my only major source of income in the game being taken away from me, I would seriously be considering becoming P2P right now. Consequence Lots more subscriptions for Jagex. Now I know there are lots of F2P'ers out there who can't get P2P for one reason or another, but there are plenty who can. Call me cynical (and I am so fair cop), but I see this ess update as a business strategy by Jagex to increase their subscription rates by trimming out some of the F2P'ers who are able to transfer to P2P and will do so in order to continue playing the game. In short, I dont think this update was to stop the ess auto'ers, but to shift them to another area which will hit more F2P'ers in an area which it will have more impact, thus forcing more people over to P2P. There may well be ways to stop autoing once and for all, but if I was running Jagex, I wouldn't implement them until I had squeezed F2P for every last subscription I could get. Whatever you do or think remember this one thing. Jagex is a business, businesses exist to make money! You can say all you want about advertising on F2P servers but that advertising is trying to sell to people who dont even spend $5/̢̮â¬Å¡Ãâã3.20 a month on a game which they spend a large amount of their leisure time on. How many of you have made a purchase from one of those advertisers? How many of you even LOOK at those adverts when you are playing? Trust me, Jagex's priority is getting as many people as possible to pay for a subscription. Because increased subscriptions is the only way their business is going to grow, especially if they aim to go public (offer shares on the stock market) Here's another quote taken from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... _n15733544 Jagex Ltd Secures Investment from Insight Venture Partners; Investment Fuels Global Growth and Accelerates Delivery of New Products to Loyal Player Community Business Wire, Oct 25, 2005 LONDON -- Jagex Limited, developer of the popular Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game, RuneScape, today announced it has secured an investment from Insight Venture Partners. The minority investment follows explosive growth over the past 18 months and will help expand the depth and breadth of Jagex's product offerings globally, including additional development of RuneScape to enhance the playing community's experience. "Insight Venture Partners is one of the leading investment firms for software, content, and Internet enabled businesses," said Constant Tedder, Chief Executive Officer of Jagex Limited. "Considering Insight's excellent track record, talented team and dedication to the online gaming community, they were an ideal investor and we look forward to partnering to achieve great milestones for our community, our employees, and our partners." RuneScape, is one of the most popular MMORPGs (Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games) in the world. Jagex currently has over 3.5 million active players and 500,000 paying subscribers. The Company intends to become a significant online operator in all the major gaming markets worldwide, developing and commercializing compelling persistent character games that appeal to a wide audience and based on cutting-edge technologies developed in-house. The Company aims to grow RuneScape market share in non-English language markets as well as to release completely new games for its loyal user community. From Insight Venture Partners website: People with this kind of money dont invest in you because you have a couple of adverts on your website. They are looking for returns. That means SUBSCRIPTIONS. Don't take this as a condemnation of Jagex. I think that for what they offer, $5/̢̮â¬Å¡Ãâã3.20 a month is a damn good deal - if I didn't I'd be playing WOW - and I'm happy to keep on playing and paying. But what we all have to realise is that the days of a couple of undergrads bashing away at RSC in their dorm rooms are long gone. Jagex is a business with big ambitions. Yes they need customer loyalty, but they need that loyalty from PAYING customers. If you're not prepared (or are unable) to pay dont be surprised to find that your views fall on deaf ears.