Anonymous asked: I'm sure people have told you how much they dislike Runescape. How would you convince these people that the game is worthy of your time?

[Cross-post from Tumblr]

Worthy of your time? Are you kidding? It’s a time sink. That’s the whole point of the MMORPG genre. You wouldn’t play it—or any of its competitors—unless you had time to kill.

I’ve played a lot of RuneScape, and I’ve dabbled a little bit in other MMORPGs. As far as I can tell, they’re all pretty much the same. I’m certainly not going to recommend one over another. If you’re picking between MMORPGs, you should go with whichever your friends are playing so that you can at least have a shared experience. And if you don’t have any friends who play MMORPGs, then you might as well play a single-player RPG instead.

If you really want reasons, here’s a few advantages RuneScape has over similar games:

• Cheap.
• Some of the best quests I’ve seen in an MMORPG.
• Accessible. (Browser-based, low system reqs, etc.)

Those are the big ones. I’m pretty sure none of them can trump “I have friends who play [other game]” anyway.

Way I see it, there are three types of people who dislike RuneScape:

1. There’s people who play a different MMORPG, and for those people it’s perfectly reasonable not to want to play RuneScape, as MMORPGs require a significant time investment and there’s usually not much reason to swap between them.
2. There’s people who don’t play MMORPGs at all, and they’re usually disliking the entire genre moreso than any individual game. That’s fine; there’s no accounting for taste.
3. And there are ex-RuneScape players who quit because they got bored, or because they thought some update or other “ruined” the game. Well, they probably got their money’s worth back when they were playing, so bully for them.

Me, I pretty much beat the game, more or less, so I don’t play much anymore except to make my weekly contributions to clan projects.

Have you ever played through your Pokémon game so long that you’ve beaten the story and found all the secrets and filled up your Pokédex, and the only reason to play it is to train Pokémon for competitive battling? It could be one of your favorite games of all time—heck, you wouldn’t have sunk so many hours into it if it weren’t—but at some point you hit a ceiling where you just can’t squeeze any more play out of it. Sure, you could try and endlessly beat your Battle Tower high score or something, but when it comes down to it, no matter how addicted you might have been to it before, there’s no longer much reason to turn it on again.

That’s basically where I’m standing in RuneScape. I’ve completed all the quests and I have all the levels I ever wanted. Do I really need to try and max every skill? I have nothing to prove and better things to do. Regardless of how good I think the game is, I don’t really have much reason to keep logging in anymore.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question.