I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like between Hacker News readers and Runescape players. I loved playing the Ironman game mode.
I thought about getting into custom botting as a fun challenge but it’s still kinda pointless - even if I had a ton of gp and max levels there would not be much to do except all the quests. PvP in the contemporary scene seems way too complicated and difficult due to the reliance on quirks of the game engine.
Definitely an interesting and quirky game but can’t fathom spending days of RL time grinding levels to chop a different color tree.
If you're okay unethically and immorally deteriorating the game experience you can make a pretty penny operating a large bot farm.
I take frequent breaks from the grind, but I keep seeing a parallel with real life effort: nothing worthwhile is achievable unless you put your back and a LOT of time into it.
Like the meme says, Runescape players either are basement dwelling NEETs, or accomplished people with families, going to the gym every day. There's no in between.
(Grinding OSRS a couple hours a week is the only thing keeping me sane while trying to bootstrap a business)
We all die, become dust and soon forgotten, whether your time is spent maxing RS or achieving world peace. The only judge will be yourself in your deathbed.
(It might now be obvious I was not raised Protestant nor Calvinist)
And no, not really.
One, it was a lot of fun. I guess I should clarify that I spent much of that playtime doing pvp of one sort or another and the stats were almost incidental. Mastery of one thing has always been more attractive than spreading time around a bunch of different games, and I have a lot of fond memories of what it was like to play that game at a high level and still have good friends from that time. So, from that angle I don't consider the time wasted any more than I'd consider time spent relaxing, playing any other games or reading a good book wasted. I was never a NEET and didn't really push it beyond what I'd call fairly typical entertainment hours per week, but those hours were just concentrated on this one thing over a long timeframe, and that adds up - especially when both leisure and competitive goals are satisfied by different aspects of the same thing. More a case of being unusually efficient in using my spare/entertainment time than of reshaping my life around it.
On that note, you develop some pretty intense split focus abilities regularly playing multiple accounts at once and/or doing high-intensity skilling. A lot of those hours were actually me, in some kind of zen robot state, bashing out actions while paying almost full attention to reading or watching something else. Read an awful lot of books while grinding, worked on my language, got some good treadmill/powerlifting time, that sort of stuff. I find that I'm more relaxed and creative when doing some kind of physical activity like running, and that same dynamic felt true of skilling. When not multilogging, skilling can be very meditative and relaxing. Something about having a task that takes some but not a ton of attention is just nice.
Two, I owe my professional tech career to it.
[1]: I mean this literally: RuneScape is an addicting game, in a way that makes me a little sad.
Definitely gave me a leg up on things like spelling, social interaction, learning not to trust strangers who promise to guard you through the wilderness, etc. Arguably guided, subconsciously, some much later intuitions I had about psychology / economics / game theory. And it was probably also responsible in getting me interested in computers.
I could see it being part of a funnel that makes people more likely to wind up on HN.