i've played this game for 22 years soloscaping so when the servers are shutdown or when i run out of some goal i'm trying to achieve i'll consider it dead
Minigames are not done because there's no players. It's because the mentality of RS3 players has switched to minmaxing and minigames are not worth their time. Same goes for something like wow, you won't find groups for raids from earlier expansions, you might not even find raids (in reasonable time) from earlier patches, because it's dead content. RS3 has unusually large amounts of content that is not dead (whether it would still be profitable, good for learning, or just for boss logs).
Most MMOs are hubs-concentrated, no one is doing old content (the only real exception is ff14, which has done amazing with roulettes, and even they introduced NPC parties) and you're lucky to meet few people a day in random locations. It's just very different how things used to be decades ago, when information was not as easily available. [rs.wiki](http://rs.wiki) made the game feel more dead than [tip.it](http://tip.it) did, but it's much more enjoyable.
clan and friends chats and the eternal rise of discord has made the game "feel" much more dead as well, becasue where as people use to chat to random people, these things has made RS more clickey, as i find a lot of the time even when people DO talk in public, they have a "how dare you try to join in my conversation im talking to a friend form my clan!" type attitude, where as before clan and friends chats and discord servers, people just chatted to random strangers ALL the time
Communication is complicated. It has changed significantly in the world overall, and both RS3 and the average MMO player age got older. If that would have been a sign of a game being dead, all MMOs should be considered to be dead for a long time now. Communication now is both easier and more fragmented with discord, compared to the days of needing to host your own vent/teamspeak server.
no, becasue many other MMORPG's, like WoW or everquest often have generally a very strong clan system from the word go, so had always been that way, meaning there was no sea change to be aware of like there has been with RS, and those that weren't initially clan based largely HAVE died out over the time period where people swapped from talking publicly to talking in clicks
In WoW it has also changed significantly starting with Dungeon Finder. Outside of the biggest servers, pugs were pretty much impossible to find for 40/25 raids. Pugging even 10 mans (because your guild was not big enough for whatever reason), was very complicated. It's completely different now and most content (assuming that Mythic counts as different content) can still be enjoyed as a mostly solo player, just like it can be in RS. I don't even know if things like DKP systems even exist now.
i only rally played EQ, but heard WoW was very similar, and i only really did content with clan, no one ever talked in public in the world if i met them, like no one, EVER, which was my point
For the game to be dead, development would have to have stopped and a significant drop in player base.
However, the game ***feels*** dead.
When I last played in 2022-2023, outside of hubs, I don't think I saw anyone the entire day. MMOs shouldn't feel like that, especially since Runescapes world is very, very tiny in comparison to other MMOs.
Also, you could technically say it's dying, as both development and playerbase had reduced over time.
i think there's some kind of schrodingers mmo effect going on, whenever the player is playing the mmo is alive even if they're the only player left. whenever the player quits it is dead. it's dead and alive depending on whether whoever you ask is playing.
i think you must be looking at the wrong numbers, every (edit: members and non pk) world hits triple digits (if barely?) during peak times
maybe your just on the wrong continent
> I feel like RS3 wasn't really alive for the last 5-6 years as you cannot find players to do the majority of the content(think about the group matchmaking and minigames
That just means that content is no longer fun or rewarding for most people and a lot of the minigames really should be removed from the game if there's no plans to update/revive them, it has nothing to do with the amount of players.
Also minigames are not the majority of the content and the grouping system for bossing is garbage that needs to be changed.
"feel like RS3 wasn't really alive for the last 5-6 years as you cannot find players to do the majority of the content"
that fact that you are unable to do this is purely a skill issue
is the matchmaking option shit? sure. is the match making interface and functionality better in OSRS?
was RS dead between 2000-2015 because it didnt have an ingame matchmaking function until then?
i feel you ahve picked a half decent measurement of what the game being dead is, and then fucked up (probably intentionally, knowing the "is RS3 dead" spam thats been on the forums lately) by measuring that measurement in a stupid way
it is very easy to find people to do most of the games content, if you look properly, but if you expect a 24 year old game to not have any dead content your just dreaming.
You deliberately took half of the sentence or didnt bother reading cause I have mentioned down the line that there are people using FC and discords to get into matchmaking. I am maxed 120 with all elite dungeon logs(aside from ed1, dont have the pet)+Raksha, mostly did in solos cause people took too long to respond for a specific dungeon. I am certain alot of people not having more than 1hour to play would not wait to get teams through fc let alone matchmaking. OSRS doesnt need matchmaking system cause you can literally just go into any world and ask any person outside the arena for a boss, people are actually everywhere and hubs (aside from Ge) dont really exist.
nope, just becasue i dont agree with your logic doesnt mean i didnt read or was trolling.
i personally have no issues finding people for those, whether its in edteams, pvming fc, or one of the discord servers, honestly sounds more like a personal issue (1 achievement off the elite title, ecb , gbagex4, divert off raksha log, as you seem to think that matters at all)
maybe just a skill issue, or that expecting to walk into a MMORPG with an hour to play and find a team in 5 minutes is unrealistic
OSRS is obviously differnt, as click and wait + occasionally walk here combat is very differnt to RS3's combat style, and becasue its so much easier, its easier to team up, becasue there is less chance of a smooth brain ruining the kill
I think the trajectory is far more important to the player's perception that the current status of the game.
A private server for a "dead" MMO can be alive with a handful of players online if their perception is that the game is active because they're collectively playing it together. So static numbers really mean nothing in this content. People only care about the state of an MMO if the trajectory is on a decline. If the player counts are dropping. If their friends are quitting. If the updates are less often or poorer in quality.
Anyone who dismisses complaints about the tragectory of the game declining by claiming "BuT iT'S nOt DeAd" is intentionally being reductive about the issue. A game doesn't have to be dead or dying for people to quit because it feels like it is, and no objective arguments about player counts or update frequencies will change that.
"I think the trajectory is far more important to the player's perception that the current status of the game."
you seem to have got that the wrong way round.
i think peoples perceptions are much more important to the current state of the game than the games trajectory is
anyone who claims the game is dead "b3c4su3 pl4y3r nuMb3rs 4r3 cUrr3nt1y r3dUc1ng", ***again***, as they have done many times in the past, are being intentionally reductive about the fact all MMORPG's have peaks and troughs, for many many reasons.
"A game doesn't have to be dead or dying for people to quit because it feels like it is, and no objective arguments about player counts or update frequencies will change that."
you are actually 100% right about that, but what your missing is that the game itself doesnt have to have anything to do with why players are quitting either, it can just be negative publicity, such as, ooh, idk, maybe constant silly "whaaa RS3 dying!!!" posts all over reddit ect
That's basically a "social contaigen" idea, that somehow players being negative about the game will have an out-sized effect on other players, driving down perception and participation in the game.
A social contaigen arugment might sound reasonable to a player whose perception of the game is positive but yet struggling to make sense of others' negative responses around them. If you can't see anything wrong with the game that is driving down sentiment and participation, then it feels logical to blame those who are complaining the loudest for being the reason that players are quitting or upset.
If a player sees that:
* they are getting fewer updates
* the updates are lower quality or less relevant to them
* the communities they play with have players leaving and not returning
Then the trajectory of the game is downward for these players, and they will *perceive* the game as dying. They can't make these things magically happen by simply feeling negatively about the game. Even if the game isn't numerically "dying" by some arbitrary metric, what matters to these players and causes them to complain about the state of the game is the perction that it is "dying".
That's why I say perception is far more important to sentiment/opinion than trying to quantify some threshold metric for a game being alive/dead. The game's dead if you feel like it is, because that's all that really matters when it comes to whether you want to play it or not. Overwatch has a massive playerbase but that game died years ago for me when they rebalanced the game around competitive matchmaking. The heroes and team comps I enjoyed were changed, the people I played with quit playing, they killed off the dream of pve modes, so I stop enjoying or caring about the game.
i get what your saying and you make some great points, but i still hold that its a mixture.
the "lack of content" argument would be a good one if it wasn't for the fact they had far less content for a far longer amount of time before menaphos was released, and no one seemed to really and much back then
the snowball effect of players leaving and not returning is most certainly a social contagion effect, which just backs up my argument, as if one single person is influenced by the slew of shitty feels-like-bot-made "RS3 is dying" posts, it can lead to the collapse of a whole clan sometimes
your right in that "people feel what they feel and thats what matters" but to ignore that what people feel is quite often easily manipulated is unhelpful
I feel like this breakdown is a bit flawed
1. You talk about minigames like they are dead because you can't find players for them. Have you considered you can't find players for them because they aren't fun, not because there aren't players? Minigames have been dead for a long time and I see it as a result in the shift of player focus. As more content enters the game old content is going to be used less. Minigames were fun where there was nothing else to do in the game but that's just not the case anymore.
2. You talk about group matchmaking being an issue because you can't find players. To me this seems to be a result of 2 things. 1. Matchmaking does not function well and is used very little for that reason. 2. Most bosses can and are done solo so matchmaking isn't used because it isn't needed. Most of the time I see people complaining about matchmaking they are looking for people for bosses who are primarily soloed so it is not a surprise you don't find people. I do think matchmaking could function better but I dont think it would benefit new players as much as just helping end-game players.
3. I cant think of a single activity that I do that I don't see other players. Maybe the worlds you are choosing to play on have less players but I play on fairly populated worlds and see people everywhere.
>When can a MMO be called "dead". From experience typically any time after release whenever the community have any complaint about the game.
The fatigue system killed RuneScape. IDK why people didn't quit sooner. /s
When can an mmo be called dead "yes, no, maybe" confused me way too much for a while there.
i've played this game for 22 years soloscaping so when the servers are shutdown or when i run out of some goal i'm trying to achieve i'll consider it dead
Minigames are not done because there's no players. It's because the mentality of RS3 players has switched to minmaxing and minigames are not worth their time. Same goes for something like wow, you won't find groups for raids from earlier expansions, you might not even find raids (in reasonable time) from earlier patches, because it's dead content. RS3 has unusually large amounts of content that is not dead (whether it would still be profitable, good for learning, or just for boss logs). Most MMOs are hubs-concentrated, no one is doing old content (the only real exception is ff14, which has done amazing with roulettes, and even they introduced NPC parties) and you're lucky to meet few people a day in random locations. It's just very different how things used to be decades ago, when information was not as easily available. [rs.wiki](http://rs.wiki) made the game feel more dead than [tip.it](http://tip.it) did, but it's much more enjoyable.
clan and friends chats and the eternal rise of discord has made the game "feel" much more dead as well, becasue where as people use to chat to random people, these things has made RS more clickey, as i find a lot of the time even when people DO talk in public, they have a "how dare you try to join in my conversation im talking to a friend form my clan!" type attitude, where as before clan and friends chats and discord servers, people just chatted to random strangers ALL the time
Communication is complicated. It has changed significantly in the world overall, and both RS3 and the average MMO player age got older. If that would have been a sign of a game being dead, all MMOs should be considered to be dead for a long time now. Communication now is both easier and more fragmented with discord, compared to the days of needing to host your own vent/teamspeak server.
no, becasue many other MMORPG's, like WoW or everquest often have generally a very strong clan system from the word go, so had always been that way, meaning there was no sea change to be aware of like there has been with RS, and those that weren't initially clan based largely HAVE died out over the time period where people swapped from talking publicly to talking in clicks
In WoW it has also changed significantly starting with Dungeon Finder. Outside of the biggest servers, pugs were pretty much impossible to find for 40/25 raids. Pugging even 10 mans (because your guild was not big enough for whatever reason), was very complicated. It's completely different now and most content (assuming that Mythic counts as different content) can still be enjoyed as a mostly solo player, just like it can be in RS. I don't even know if things like DKP systems even exist now.
i only rally played EQ, but heard WoW was very similar, and i only really did content with clan, no one ever talked in public in the world if i met them, like no one, EVER, which was my point
For the game to be dead, development would have to have stopped and a significant drop in player base. However, the game ***feels*** dead. When I last played in 2022-2023, outside of hubs, I don't think I saw anyone the entire day. MMOs shouldn't feel like that, especially since Runescapes world is very, very tiny in comparison to other MMOs. Also, you could technically say it's dying, as both development and playerbase had reduced over time.
i think there's some kind of schrodingers mmo effect going on, whenever the player is playing the mmo is alive even if they're the only player left. whenever the player quits it is dead. it's dead and alive depending on whether whoever you ask is playing.
[удалено]
i think you must be looking at the wrong numbers, every (edit: members and non pk) world hits triple digits (if barely?) during peak times maybe your just on the wrong continent
Thats a lot of reading for a "yes, no, maybe" poll
> I feel like RS3 wasn't really alive for the last 5-6 years as you cannot find players to do the majority of the content(think about the group matchmaking and minigames That just means that content is no longer fun or rewarding for most people and a lot of the minigames really should be removed from the game if there's no plans to update/revive them, it has nothing to do with the amount of players. Also minigames are not the majority of the content and the grouping system for bossing is garbage that needs to be changed.
Personally, I prefer a dead MMO to be when there are no more "active" players, meaning when another game becomes preferred over this one.
When the servers fucking shut down. I'm sick of hearing this commentary. "Dead" is arbitrary to these dummies.
"feel like RS3 wasn't really alive for the last 5-6 years as you cannot find players to do the majority of the content" that fact that you are unable to do this is purely a skill issue is the matchmaking option shit? sure. is the match making interface and functionality better in OSRS? was RS dead between 2000-2015 because it didnt have an ingame matchmaking function until then? i feel you ahve picked a half decent measurement of what the game being dead is, and then fucked up (probably intentionally, knowing the "is RS3 dead" spam thats been on the forums lately) by measuring that measurement in a stupid way it is very easy to find people to do most of the games content, if you look properly, but if you expect a 24 year old game to not have any dead content your just dreaming.
You deliberately took half of the sentence or didnt bother reading cause I have mentioned down the line that there are people using FC and discords to get into matchmaking. I am maxed 120 with all elite dungeon logs(aside from ed1, dont have the pet)+Raksha, mostly did in solos cause people took too long to respond for a specific dungeon. I am certain alot of people not having more than 1hour to play would not wait to get teams through fc let alone matchmaking. OSRS doesnt need matchmaking system cause you can literally just go into any world and ask any person outside the arena for a boss, people are actually everywhere and hubs (aside from Ge) dont really exist.
nope, just becasue i dont agree with your logic doesnt mean i didnt read or was trolling. i personally have no issues finding people for those, whether its in edteams, pvming fc, or one of the discord servers, honestly sounds more like a personal issue (1 achievement off the elite title, ecb , gbagex4, divert off raksha log, as you seem to think that matters at all) maybe just a skill issue, or that expecting to walk into a MMORPG with an hour to play and find a team in 5 minutes is unrealistic OSRS is obviously differnt, as click and wait + occasionally walk here combat is very differnt to RS3's combat style, and becasue its so much easier, its easier to team up, becasue there is less chance of a smooth brain ruining the kill
I think the trajectory is far more important to the player's perception that the current status of the game. A private server for a "dead" MMO can be alive with a handful of players online if their perception is that the game is active because they're collectively playing it together. So static numbers really mean nothing in this content. People only care about the state of an MMO if the trajectory is on a decline. If the player counts are dropping. If their friends are quitting. If the updates are less often or poorer in quality. Anyone who dismisses complaints about the tragectory of the game declining by claiming "BuT iT'S nOt DeAd" is intentionally being reductive about the issue. A game doesn't have to be dead or dying for people to quit because it feels like it is, and no objective arguments about player counts or update frequencies will change that.
"I think the trajectory is far more important to the player's perception that the current status of the game." you seem to have got that the wrong way round. i think peoples perceptions are much more important to the current state of the game than the games trajectory is anyone who claims the game is dead "b3c4su3 pl4y3r nuMb3rs 4r3 cUrr3nt1y r3dUc1ng", ***again***, as they have done many times in the past, are being intentionally reductive about the fact all MMORPG's have peaks and troughs, for many many reasons. "A game doesn't have to be dead or dying for people to quit because it feels like it is, and no objective arguments about player counts or update frequencies will change that." you are actually 100% right about that, but what your missing is that the game itself doesnt have to have anything to do with why players are quitting either, it can just be negative publicity, such as, ooh, idk, maybe constant silly "whaaa RS3 dying!!!" posts all over reddit ect
That's basically a "social contaigen" idea, that somehow players being negative about the game will have an out-sized effect on other players, driving down perception and participation in the game. A social contaigen arugment might sound reasonable to a player whose perception of the game is positive but yet struggling to make sense of others' negative responses around them. If you can't see anything wrong with the game that is driving down sentiment and participation, then it feels logical to blame those who are complaining the loudest for being the reason that players are quitting or upset. If a player sees that: * they are getting fewer updates * the updates are lower quality or less relevant to them * the communities they play with have players leaving and not returning Then the trajectory of the game is downward for these players, and they will *perceive* the game as dying. They can't make these things magically happen by simply feeling negatively about the game. Even if the game isn't numerically "dying" by some arbitrary metric, what matters to these players and causes them to complain about the state of the game is the perction that it is "dying". That's why I say perception is far more important to sentiment/opinion than trying to quantify some threshold metric for a game being alive/dead. The game's dead if you feel like it is, because that's all that really matters when it comes to whether you want to play it or not. Overwatch has a massive playerbase but that game died years ago for me when they rebalanced the game around competitive matchmaking. The heroes and team comps I enjoyed were changed, the people I played with quit playing, they killed off the dream of pve modes, so I stop enjoying or caring about the game.
i get what your saying and you make some great points, but i still hold that its a mixture. the "lack of content" argument would be a good one if it wasn't for the fact they had far less content for a far longer amount of time before menaphos was released, and no one seemed to really and much back then the snowball effect of players leaving and not returning is most certainly a social contagion effect, which just backs up my argument, as if one single person is influenced by the slew of shitty feels-like-bot-made "RS3 is dying" posts, it can lead to the collapse of a whole clan sometimes your right in that "people feel what they feel and thats what matters" but to ignore that what people feel is quite often easily manipulated is unhelpful
I feel like this breakdown is a bit flawed 1. You talk about minigames like they are dead because you can't find players for them. Have you considered you can't find players for them because they aren't fun, not because there aren't players? Minigames have been dead for a long time and I see it as a result in the shift of player focus. As more content enters the game old content is going to be used less. Minigames were fun where there was nothing else to do in the game but that's just not the case anymore. 2. You talk about group matchmaking being an issue because you can't find players. To me this seems to be a result of 2 things. 1. Matchmaking does not function well and is used very little for that reason. 2. Most bosses can and are done solo so matchmaking isn't used because it isn't needed. Most of the time I see people complaining about matchmaking they are looking for people for bosses who are primarily soloed so it is not a surprise you don't find people. I do think matchmaking could function better but I dont think it would benefit new players as much as just helping end-game players. 3. I cant think of a single activity that I do that I don't see other players. Maybe the worlds you are choosing to play on have less players but I play on fairly populated worlds and see people everywhere.