Runescape - Free Open Membership Weekend

On two occasions, Jagex has made the full paid version of Runescape available to all players for a 72 hour duration over “free” or “open” weekends. For free players, this has been a boon and truly valuable opportunity.

The first “Open Weekend” spanned from June 9 to June 12, 2017. This was during a time when I wasn’t playing, so I wasn’t aware of it. However, had I been playing at the time, or at least knew about it, I certainly would have hopped on to play.

The second, this time called a “Free Weekend,” was from November 24 to November 27, 2017. As I mentioned soon after, I was actually playing for that membership weekend. I did some Slayer tasks, both solo and group. I ran some dungeons with the full gamut of p2p skills available to me. When I couldn’t actively play, I worked on Divination and managed to get it all the way up to level 50.

Since Jagex normally charges for access to this portion of the game, it begs a few questions. First, why did they offer free access to the paid parts of the game, even for a limited time? Logically, the answer seems to be that they wanted to bring in new players who were previously f2p exclusive. For many free players, if you never see the paid skills and activities, you may be content with just playing the free game. However, if you get to try out a teaser of the paid parts of the game, you may be more likely to pay for membership after the free access has ended.

Will Jagex offer another weekend of free access to p2p portions of Runescape? I think that depends heavily on whether they see an influx of new members in the weeks following these events. It is tremendously unlikely that Jagex loses money with these promotions. While some p2p players were vocally bitter about Jagex offering f2p players the chance to play the full game without giving current members 3 extra days of membership, I highly doubt that it caused anyone to quit playing the game and cancel their membership. If a substantial amount of previously free players did elect to pay for membership after these free weekends, it would behoove Jagex to continue them on occasion. Not so often that free players get their fill of membership, but enough to remind them of what they’re missing out on.

With the first weekend in early June, and the second in late November, they were separated by about 6 months. Considering Jagex already runs the Double XP Weekend promotions roughly twice a year, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them do free access weekends on about the same schedule. We’ll see if they decide to run another one sometime in late Spring or early Summer.

If Jagex does decide to make a semi-annual event of the free access weekends, it would behoove free players to plan for them, in order to take full advantage of the temporary membership. For players like myself, with no plans to start a regular membership anytime soon, to use these membership weekends to take care of some p2p tasks that actually improve and aid the f2p experience. Because of this, I’ve come up with a tentative plan in case Jagex does announce another free access weekend.

Before the weekend, I want to line up a few things that I can do on f2p. I’ll get my Dungeoneering progress up to the full 35 floors that f2p can access. While I already have 100% respect in Artisan’s Workshop, I’ll get it back to 100% if the free weekends become a regular thing. Finally, I’ll identify p2p items in my bank that I’d like to sell or otherwise get rid of. Free players can occasionally get p2p items from Treasure Hunter or other sources, and I’d like to clean out as many of these as possible from my bank.

During the weekend, I’ll capitalize on this preparation. At Artisan’s Workshop, I’ll cash out my respect. I’ll set up Grand Exchange orders to sell off any items I want to get rid of. Any xp boost items that I obtain, I’ll use on the p2p money sink skills. Construction and Summoning, most notably, require inane amounts of gold to train. The best thing that I can do is push bonus xp into those skills to reduce the total amount of money I have to spend on them.

When actively playing, I’ll get my Dungeoneering progress as high as possible. Since prestige is based on the number of floors you completed on your previous reset, and averages with the current floor progression, it should increase my experience gain after I reset again. If I reach the highest floor available at my current level, I’ll prestige and stop training Dungeoneering for the weekend. If not, I’ll reset just before the weekend is over.

At times when I can’t actively play, I’ll train Divination. With so few required clicks, I can easily work on my Divination skill without paying much attention. I’d like to reach level 80 to unlock the Invention skill, but that isn’t likely with everything else I have planned for the weekend.

Above everything else, though, I plan on having fun. I don’t often get to train skills like Slayer, and I have a lot of fun with them. Despite the running gag of Runescape players being hyper efficient at the expense of enjoying the game, I mostly do what I want to do. So what if I don’t get the absolute maximum gold and experience out of those 72 hours? At the end of the day, it’s a game, and it is intended to be fun.

After the weekend is over, I’ll go back to training Smithing at Artisan’s Workshop. I’ll begin at floor 1 in Daemonheim and work my way through every f2p floor in time. I’ll do basically the same stuff I already do, just with an extra bump of experience, cash, or whatever else I get during the brief time on p2p.

Obviously, another weekend of free access to the paid areas of Runescape is far from guaranteed. Jagex has made no official statement on whether they’ll do another one. I think it’s likely that they will, especially since it serves as an easy way to demo p2p for otherwise free players, and possibly bring in some new subscriptions. However, if they do decide to run the promotion again, and especially if it becomes a regular thing, I want to be prepared to maximize my benefit from that time.

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