Runescape Dying? [Discussion/Observation]

[Kimberly]

I suppose if you didn't play since free trade came back, it might be reasonable to think that the community has died. Those that have continued to play, however, know that it's not dead but diminished.

[Estoc]

I started playing scape in 2004, and while I dislike the periodic 'RS is dying' dramas as much as the next guy, I don't think it's ever been closer to being true than now. I stopped playing regularly about 3 years ago (blame league of legends), and since then I feel like I've watched the average number of players online decrease slowly but continuously. Some of that is the removal of bots of course, but it used to make it to 200k at peak times (summer, evening). Right now it's summertime and there's like 50k people online; the most populous world has 1100 people in it. There's like 3 worlds over 1000. There were a lot of bots, but I'm pretty sure they didn't constitute the majority across the entire game. I would argue that the population drop also has a lot to do with people not wanting to play scape anymore.

 

Can you answer these questions?

• How many players and bots were active 'back then'?
  
• How many players and bots are active now?
  
• Is 'dying' defined simply as a population drop?
  
• Are bots leaving the game defined as a population drop?
  

If your answers begin with "I think", then you are judging Runescape's health as the pre-industrial world judged the shape of the earth. You are forming a conclusion with a view that is, at the best of times, extremely limited.

[Quyneax]

Reasonable estimates of the size of the Earth were made well before Christ, based on a comparison of the angles of sunlight in Aswan and Alexandria, in Egypt. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes . Don't think that the 'pre-industrial' world didn't have a good idea of what was going on. There are a lot of industrial-era myths about how 'barbaric' every other era and country are/were.

 

That said, I agree a population drop does not mean the game is dying.

[God Of Lego]

Reasonable estimates of the size of the Earth were made well before Christ, based on a comparison of the angles of sunlight in Aswan and Alexandria, in Egypt. See http://en.wikipedia....i/Eratosthenes. Don't think that the 'pre-industrial' world didn't have a good idea of what was going on. There are a lot of industrial-era myths about how 'barbaric' every other era and country are/were.

 

That said, I agree a population drop does not mean the game is dying.

 

To some extent it does.

 

It'll cause a chain reaction due to it being Jagex' main money maker. Micro Payments just slowed this down.

 

First off, they'll cut staff as theres less players to cater for. This will eventually lead to less content and less happy players. Less customer to buy spins and cosmetics. Less members. Then they'll cut staff again on repeat untill its just servers up with maintenance. Leaving RuneScape to be milked for its last bit money.

 

I dont really understand why they havent halved the servers so the worlds feel more full. it'll average 300-400 people then. But at the same time people will rage for loss of home worlds.

 

The difference between it being this low in 2003-4 and now was that at that time. The player base was rising. Not droping. Not only that summers nearly over. Most children will be back in school. Most servers are going to be even more of a ghost town. Its not healthy. Im also sure some people will unsubscribe due to studies. Not as many (i didnt) but it all adds up..

 

So its definitely dying. It'll just be a slow progress.

 

Lore wise, it could never been better.

Combat wise, its dying

 

The futures bright for people who enjoy skilling and quest related content.

 

----

 

Other than that if you think a game not dying is based on content and future expansion. RuneScapes got alot to come. But it will only come if they can get players back and then new players in.

[Blofeld]

Its clear that the game deffinitely needs a new generation of players to come in, does anyone know how much promotion theyve been doing for the game in the last month or so out of interest?

 

I know they had some magazine articles a few months ago, and the big media event at that castle. But I think it would have been foolish to advertise RS3 too much to new players on launchday (and the following few weeks) because there were so many bugs.

 

My guess is that surely theyre waiting for the problems to be completly ironed out before really trying to get new people in. But I guess the fudge up with regards to HTML5 has also raised the question of when is RS3 going to be complete to the stage that they want to reshow it properly to the world that may have not seen the game for many years/ever before. Theres no point in spending mega money on marketing if it isnt finished properly yet.

[PolarBearBlue]

Reasonable estimates of the size of the Earth were made well before Christ, based on a comparison of the angles of sunlight in Aswan and Alexandria, in Egypt. See http://en.wikipedia....i/Eratosthenes. Don't think that the 'pre-industrial' world didn't have a good idea of what was going on. There are a lot of industrial-era myths about how 'barbaric' every other era and country are/were.

 

That said, I agree a population drop does not mean the game is dying.

 

To some extent it does.

 

It'll cause a chain reaction due to it being Jagex' main money maker. Micro Payments just slowed this down.

 

First off, they'll cut staff as theres less players to cater for. This will eventually lead to less content and less happy players. Less customer to buy spins and cosmetics. Less members. Then they'll cut staff again on repeat untill its just servers up with maintenance. Leaving RuneScape to be milked for its last bit money.

 

I don't I totally agree with this statement. Using population size to extrapolate a chain reaction of events is almost as bad as using a sample size of 5 to draw a scientific conclusion, or using totally different sample population to replicate an experiment for criticism.

 

I do agree skillers and quest players largely enjoy the game and combat minded player are adjusting. And I think we can say that PvP is dead; however, I think the jury is still out on combat as a whole consider there seems to a be a revival in terms of older players returning.

[Platinum_Myr]

First off, they'll cut staff as theres less players to cater for. This will eventually lead to less content and less happy players. Less customer to buy spins and cosmetics. Less members. Then they'll cut staff again on repeat untill its just servers up with maintenance. Leaving RuneScape to be milked for its last bit money.

 

They did actually acquire a lot more staff for the large projects they had. Obviously they will cut staff if they have to, but right now the development team is pretty large.

[Kaida23]

I dont really understand why they havent halved the servers so the worlds feel more full. it'll average 300-400 people then. But at the same time people will rage for loss of home worlds.

 

They did this after the Bot Nuke back in 2011 for exactly that reason (and with the same rage over loss of home worlds). Well, maybe not 'halved' but they did remove several worlds and retasked others so more people would use them. Perhaps they're hoping the populations will go back up now that RS3 has been released.

[Sy_Accursed]

Honestly if any servers are getting removed due to player density the translated servers ought to be the first to go.

 

It's a noble idea about making the game accessible to other nations, but the reality is they probably aren't all that cost effective. The busier ones (French and German in my experience) hover around 100-200 at best. The others rarely breach 100 with the worst (Spanish) often being as low as 20-30.

 

In all honesty I think these servers are kind of a waste of time given the player numbers, especially as they require a whole team to translate everything (in turn slowing down the overall dev process)

[Estoc]

Reasonable estimates of the size of the Earth were made well before Christ, based on a comparison of the angles of sunlight in Aswan and Alexandria, in Egypt. See http://en.wikipedia....ki/Eratosthenes . Don't think that the 'pre-industrial' world didn't have a good idea of what was going on. There are a lot of industrial-era myths about how 'barbaric' every other era and country are/were.

 

The only problem is that the people with the knowledge and data to back up their claims are comparatively few compared to the general population. The only thing Runescape players have are their observations which, as has been proven time and again, is often not enough to get an accurate conclusion.

[Sy_Accursed]

Reasonable estimates of the size of the Earth were made well before Christ, based on a comparison of the angles of sunlight in Aswan and Alexandria, in Egypt. See http://en.wikipedia....ki/Eratosthenes . Don't think that the 'pre-industrial' world didn't have a good idea of what was going on. There are a lot of industrial-era myths about how 'barbaric' every other era and country are/were.

 

The only problem is that the people with the knowledge and data to back up their claims are comparatively few compared to the general population. The only thing Runescape players have are their observations, which as has been proven time and again, is often not enough to get an accurate conclusion.

 

To cite just a couple of high-profile examples:

"Pkers are the majority of your players you can't go on without us" - Runescape proceeds to lose only a miniority of players and continue on.

"Everyone will play Old school because EoC is rubbish and then watch Jagex backpedal" - OSRS launches to lower player figures than the live game that only slip lower over time even when many bots migrate from live game to OSRS (thereby lowering live and bolstering osrs numbers)

[Fallstar]

Bots have returned to the live game - RDI red dragons being one of the first areas. The price of gold has remained constant for the past 4-6 weeks too - this is strongly linked to the quantity of bots (the price started rising hours after botwatch's first successful bot wave).

 

This means that there must a consistent supply of goldfarming bots somewhere on the live game.

 

The Old school:EoC player ratio has been just under 1:2 for the past couple of months, OSRS appears to have 'reached its level' in terms of steady population.

[God Of Lego]

My point was that it'll happen in future. Not right now.

 

Lets say over a year the population dropped to 30k at peak times. with 300k members. (rough numbers, made up)

 

I cant see them wanting to purposely loose million is staff costs due to the small people to cater for and the drop in revenue.

 

It'll cut down bit by bit. But it will happens. The only reason they are investing more in people right now is because of the MicroPayment boost. But thats just a tempory slow down.

[Robert_R]

My point was that it'll happen in future. Not right now.

 

Lets say over a year the population dropped to 30k at peak times. with 300k members. (rough numbers, made up)

 

I cant see them wanting to purposely loose million is staff costs due to the small people to cater for and the drop in revenue.

 

It'll cut down bit by bit. But it will happens. The only reason they are investing more in people right now is because of the MicroPayment boost. But thats just a tempory slow down.

So you're saying that some time in the future this game will die? No shit I thought this game would last until the end of the world. You must be some kind of fortune teller or something.

[Estoc]

My point was that it'll happen in future. Not right now.

 

[Kimberly]

It'll cut down bit by bit. But it will happens. The only reason they are investing more in people right now is because of the MicroPayment boost. But thats just a tempory slow down.

 

That's only assuming that the game doesn't start to attract new customers, or at least to stop losing what they currently have.

[God Of Lego]

Again people take it too serious.

 

Im just saying thats how it'll likely happen. You all assumed I meant right this second. Throwing statements of "but they've employed more". I only said how RuneScape will die due to decline in players.

[Panda P K]

The player population is low, but I also feel like slowly Jagex without realizing it has narrowed runescape's population smaller and smaller until now you see this culture of players who for the most part have played Runescape through most game shattering/changing updates. And who are xp/skill centric. I've been a career pker from 02-2k11 but as I myself have gotten older and the pking community and rs community in general has changed and grown up with me I have become more and more skill/friend's chat, centric.

 

I've played for 11+ years now, and although if you add up all of my breaks together i'm sure it would add up to 3 maybe 4 years of not playing in that time, however, when life slows down one thing remains true. I return to Runescape as my game of choice. Through my own eyes I see the current population as very similar to the early population in 01-02 where players more or less play very balanced. You don't have the extremes where some people play only to pk or stake or w/e floats their boat. The population I see today for the most part seems to be a relatively loyal, skiller population. The population that has always been the more stable backbone of runescape's subscription base is the player I just described.

 

*disclaimer* random ramblings from a veteran who just started playing regularly again within the last 2 months, not proof-read. I'm not arguing or trying to debate anything, these are just some general observations i've made on my most recent return to RS3.

[Estoc]

You all assumed I meant right this second.

 

Because that's what the discussion is about. It's "Runescape dying?" not "How will Runescape die?".

[Fallstar]

Believe it or not, discussions sometimes veer from the precise wording in the thread title.

[Kaida23]

I think we've already crested the peak of player numbers and are in a slow, inevitable, decline. There will be upswings every so often, but we're never going to see numbers like they were a few years ago. That doesn't necessarily mean that the game is "dying" per se, but people will naturally move away from a game that's been around this long.

[Estoc]

Believe it or not, discussions sometimes veer from the precise wording in the thread title.

 

And people become justifiably confused, especially when they are both about "something happening in the future" and it is not explicitly stated which subject the op is talking about.

[God Of Lego]

How runescape will likely start dying is linked to "Runescape dying?"

[Quyneax]

How runescape will likely start dying is linked to "Runescape dying?"

Related =/= relevant. Saying that RS will end someday, and that that ending will involve less people playing the game, is like saying that eventually [car X] will go out of production. It doesn't really add any new information. Now, if you knew something about when this will happen, or under what conditions precisely, then it would be good to post that. Life has a 100% mortality rate etc..

 

So far we've concluded that the game won't die if/when it stays profitable, that the game still is profitable, that the development team has grown (costing more money) and that user online counts have been dropping. This suggests that a lot more money is being earned per player than previously. We know that the amount of money earned per player has to reach a ceiling somewhere, so this strategy of less people paying more money is not sustainable. However, it doesn't have to be - at this point, staying at this level is good enough. So the question is, are user numbers dropping to the point that they can't afford to support the game anymore? Not any time soon, I think.

[Guest Smelly Paws]

When I read these threads I sometimes get the feeling that some of the community wants RS to die....Like a spite thing because they don't enjoy the game anymore. :(