Runescape... Again

It was only a matter of time. After a hiatus of a few months, I’m playing Runescape again.

The last time I spoke of Runescape, I had recently started back and was contemplating paying for a membership again. Though the dates are a little fuzzy at this point, I seem to have started back sometime around Thanksgiving 2015. I made the blog post above on January 27, 2016. Though I’m not sure how gradual the process was, I eventually played for the last time on April 19, 2016. I’ll get to how I came up with that date in a moment.

While I did stop actively playing the game for a period, I continued to keep up with it. I still followed the official Runescape facebook page, as well as periodically browsed the subreddit forums for Runescape 3 and Old School. As I’ve mentioned time and time again, I do miss the game when I’m not playing it. It’s occasionally nice to talk about it and reminisce about all the fun I’ve had with it through the years.

Eventually, one of these channels mentioned a mobile version of Runescape. I thought to myself how neat that would be, since I’ve used remote desktop to play from my phone, but it would be so much better to have a native client running on my phone or tablet. I considered that once mobile came out, I would try it out and maybe start playing somewhat actively again. Mobile wasn’t scheduled to drop until sometime early 2018, though, so it would be a while yet.

On October 15, I discovered that the fletching skill had been made free-to-play (f2p). Honestly, I was taken aback. As a sort of freemium game, with a free version that has most of the content behind a subscription paywall, RS has typically added very little to the f2p game and instead made new stuff exclusive to pay-to-play (p2p). I can’t blame Jagex, the creators. They are a business, and they exist to make money. If you give out more and more features for free, what incentive do players have to pay? This was huge. They made a skill that was previously p2p, and made the entire skill f2p, with the exception of a few members-only items.

I talked about this decision with MrPickler, a fellow ‘scaper who I’ve mentioned before. We both expressed a renewed interest in playing again, since one of our favorite p2p skills was now available for free players. For kicks and giggles, as well as a little bit of nostalgia, I decided to download the client and log into the game again.

On the login page, you can see how long it has been since you last logged in. My previous login read 544 days. About a year and a half. I took a screen capture for posterity and logged in. Later, I used this figure and the date it was taken to calculate that April 19, 2016 was the date 544 days before October 15, 2017. I played around for a few minutes, looking through my bank to see what all I still had, and playing with the new interface. With updates like the NXT client, RS actually looked pretty good. I had no intention of playing at length, but it was nice to just know Myst_Jake was still hanging around in Gielinor.

Within a matter of days, MrPickler mentioned that he had started high alching. High Level Alchemy is a spell in the game that converts items to a set number of coins. For a few items, the cost to purchase the item and the materials to cast High Level Alchemy are less than the amount of coins produced by casting it. As such, you can purchase a large number of these items and “high alch” them for a profit. What makes this such an attractive prospect is that players can organize their inventory in a way that the item to be alchemized is positioned directly behind the spell’s icon, and can click their mouse to a rhythm to cast the spell without paying attention at all. If you set up something like mouse keys or remote desktop in order to click without moving the cursor’s position, you can simply tap to a beat and alchemize hundreds if not thousands of items with very little effort. I started high alching in my spare time, since it was so easy to tap on my phone screen while doing other things.

Skill levels on 2017-10-18 (left) vs 2017-11-17 (right)

I still haven’t restarted my membership since I ended it on September 8, 2013. As much as I did play fairly regularly for a half a year or so between the end of 2015 and middle of 2016, I remained f2p for the duration. Fortunately, Jagex did give a free membership weekend this past weekend, from Friday the 24th to Monday the 27th. I’ll probably post about that more in-depth later, but it did give me a chance to play around with the p2p skills that I haven’t gotten a chance to use in over 4 years.

For now, I’m going to keep high alching, doing a dungeon here and there, and trying to keep on top of my daily challenges. Without paying for a membership, I can play or not play at my leisure, and not feel obligated to get my money’s worth with anything. If I decide I want to go p2p again, the option is there. If not, the free game is more comprehensive than ever, and there is plenty to keep me busy for a very long time.