RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I’d play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with bots. It’s honestly so bad. I tried to play it and it feels so… good, but also low effort. The worst part, however, is the corporate greed. Jagex, the company that developes Runescape, has been sold numerous times. This time, it’s owned by some Venture Capital or investment firm, the kind that kills games off to gain their IP and then sell them for huge amounts of money (CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments). The first thing they’ve done is raise the subscription of Runescape to nearly $15, which is truly nuts. This game used to be like $8 a month previously, some are still paying that much…
It’s sad to see corporate greed kill such a great game. Idk what to even play now…
Try Wakfu. There are a lot of chill trades to grind casually and the economy is completely player driven. There are no NPCs to buy or sell your loot to.
The PvE gameplay loop is really fun. The game has an adjustable level system that encourages players to replay lower level dungeons. Battles are turn based and have a surprising amount of strategy.
The only real problem with the game is that the devs seem to not care about player growth at all. They do zero marketing and sometimes the registration system is broken and won’t get fixed for awhile. It’s like the opposite problem to RuneScape.
How’s the bot situation?
Minimal. There’s a unique captcha system in harvesting that makes it difficult to bot. The closest thing to bad bots are people running multiple accounts on single account servers to run dungeons. It’s a bannable offense and people do get banned for doing it.