How has OSRS thrived for so long?

saraxisters... our response?

i pay my bills with osrs gold

Bots.

No, really.
The entire OSRS economy revolves around them either directly or indirectly.
If all bots would disappear the game would run out of both money and players in a month.

based af venny bro

no
i only do high risk pvp

based af gambler bro

i try not to think about RS and avoid these threads, from 2006-2017 99% of my freetime was spent on RS and people had their entire social lives on there like that, when i started to quit the game most of my dozens of very social friends quit and maybe 1 or 2 were somewhat normal, the rest extremely NEET/autistic.

OSRS especially is paced perfectly so that you can watch movies, chat with others and do anything while you're playing it. also a lot of (real) girls played it and autists would e-date en masse.
when i quit the game i was so burnt out and depressed i suicidebotted like 10 accounts with multiple year in-game times (both OSRS and RS3, maxed with many 120s etc) and got them all permabanned and didn't care one bit, shit ruined my life.

also, markdonalds.

Bots

Very low maintenance gameplay

Extremely impressionable community

Player base does not know any better (plus nostalgia)

A smart fridge can run the game, probably twice

Mobile app

hope you are in a better place now anon

i'm even more isolated, much older, and my life never started, i would escape into something else if not RS, but it could have been something highly useful, the irony is i thought it was a lame stupid thing to play before i started. RS really was just WoW for poor kids.

"thrived" is a strong word

take the hikepill

work your body the indented way

fell pure joy exploring nature

build a sense of purpose

bound to interact with amazing people (not always but hikers tend to be cool)

And you don't even have to put that much money. Trust me, RS has nothing compared to the adventures you make yourself, no matter the age. From time to time, I meet people in their 40' who are a fountain of energy on harsh hikes, only to find out they started hiking 5 months go. It's never late anon.

Nobody wants to hear it, but the polling system.

The polling system that gets ignored whenever gay shit is gonna be added?

It's the most popular non-WoWclone and non-Themepark MMO.

weapons-grade autism and a very specific kind of stockholm syndrome + fried dopamine pathways from years of slave-tier grinding
those tiny fireworks are the only things that bring true joy
Run Escape before it's too late

i appreciate the post but i take long walks often and they make me more depressed, i'm physically active otherwise but my life is kind of wrecked beyond repair. it would have been without RS too like i said.

cap

I'm sorry that happened to you. I've been in a similar place socially but I never had the patience to crash my life doing that sort of grinding. Hope you're doing better now.

no worries man, everyone finds their own peace

the version of RuneScape that OSRS is based off of is almost 20 years old

That's King's Field, not OSRS

dummy

The hikepill is great, all I need are working legs.

i once grinded to 120 slayer on RS3 (i actually always hated rs3 since EoC/2012) and i think i stayed in my room for 3 months straight just grinding the same shit, i started to get those carpal tunnel symptoms and started to use my other hand. iirc i once skipped showering for 2 weeks during that time. back then NEET services didnt start asking anything yet and i completely forgot about real life for 2-3 years.

i once skipped showering for 2 weeks during that time

ponder the aroma

Addicts with massive sunk cost syndrome.

Jesus dude.
I might have fallen into similar circumstances as you actually if I didn't have my parents and siblings being semi-dependent on me and I didn't need to make money.
Like I still play OSRS and WoW to this day but it's real fuckin casually. I can't imagine grinding slayer for months on end without leaving my apartment.

I don't know if my ADHD or lack of will to finish anything saved me, but just after my first 99 I felt like I was throwing my life away and my brain was ruined. Can't imagine what it would be like to even max half the skills.

i still lived with my mother in a very tiny basically never cleaned bedroom, about the size of a prisoncell. i'm kind of surprised you guys are surprised by this since i grew up on imageboards with people posting their pissbottles.
this was like 10 years ago though.

Slayer was fucking agony just getting it high enough to beat all the quests.
For me, getting the quest cape was enough for me, I stand by the fact RuneScape quests are fun but anything past that I just do not care

It's turns into a good game if you play ironman

probably this, like half the population in any world is bots

no, it becomes more of a grind simulator than before

It's basically an idle game, not a lot of competition.

i think most OSRS players quit after 2012 and don't realize the road rs3 was on even though most RS3 players also played OSRS, it got more complex and mostly had new content only for elite players, xp/hour went up majorly after mid levels and a huge number of players had many 99s. most skills started to get very expensive but high xp/hour methods, that could break even but had that barrier of entry of needing the money, also lots of double xp weekends. but yeah, 120s were 104million xp i think, and i think it took me 2.5-3months back then, i think including going to level 99. getting to 120 slayer also got me all melee 120s i think.
you could optimize the shit out of everything with priority task lists and semi-afk cannoning methods for specific tasks, autistically minmaxxing teleporting around, timing weeklies/monthlies etc.

fuck that cursed game.

also this made me realize a lot of old players who quit around or in 2012, then logged into rs3 before trying out OSRS, would think the game was super dead (it kind of was), when in reality most players would only go to that high level elf hub that had important teleporters and features for high level players and had a high barrier of entry, like everything that was around back in 2007 became abandoned irrelevant content at a certain time.
i think you could even directly teleport to your friends. some high population worlds would have 0 players at grand exchange because there was no reason to be there.

I never liked how venomous jagex was towards their players if they had a genuine issue

Sort of but it adds a lot more purpose to everything and forces you to play content you never would on a main and there's more sense of accomplishment. On an IM you're grinding one thing to be able to grind another thing and so on rather than just buying all your shit and then grinding for no reason.
The game is also less fun if you look up all the gay metas and stick to them religiously.

Please understand. The shareholders and the credit vultures NEED us to shove this cactus up your ass!