The pinnacle of my Runescape days was just after they opened the Grand Exchange. That was around the time I realized that if I didn't stop playing this game every night, I'd have no life, so I began the process of walking away.
The fact that I lost my login (pre-password manager days) had nothing to do with me making that wise decision, nor the fact that I still don't have a life.
I play a couple hours a week, and I love it. It is a game that will have content for me to do for the next decade, and lately the dev activity and player count have picked up. It is incredible to see a 20 years old game to be the third most played MMO in the world.
As in game as in life, progress is a slow grind, but put in the effort, and you get rewarded for it.. eventually.
How much did unids sell for?
I've thought about a t-shirt that says "selling unids" just to see how many people get it
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Unids are Unidentified Herbs, an item since removed from RS. Processing Unids was a relatively fast and very repeatable way to get Herblore experience.
EDIT: actually, I think the 1k price was probably limited to herbs above a certain level. It was common practice to buy noted herbs above a certain level and keep your inventory full with other items to block trades with unidentified Guam leaves.
Here's another activity that will probably never exist again: Law running. I remember both being a runner and a crafter.
I'm out of the loop (I tried 2007scape but don't play it enough to be in the know). Is it because some other faster way of leveling Runecrafting has become available?
I suspect Law crafting (with runners) would still be more XP per hour, but I think the player dynamics are quite different nowadays. You used to spend a lot of time at the start trying out various things that are no longer "efficient" (another thing I remember doing was mining rune essence—I didn't do that at all in OSRS). I think it's because of a combination of things, like the age of players (younger people might not be as good at strategising), visibility through social media (eg, Twitch/Reddit) about how to play the game "properly", and modern updates that make some of the tedious tasks unnecessary (in Ironman, I think I got my rune essence from newer PvM and the "Temple Trekking" minigame). For all of these reasons, you don't end up with people that would be willing to queue to trade their time for someone else's runecrafting experience and a couple of Law runes.