I originally started using these forums because keeping up with the ever-changing in-game market use to be quite difficult - prices varied from world to world and town to town, so I used the forum as a general guideline for item values. I also occasionally read the recent update forum to read the responses for players about updates.
Believe it or not, that section use to be a very positive one.
After some time of just lurking in the trade section, recent updates, and general; I made my first post(and thread, at the same time) in one of the trade boards to both buy and sell a variety of items, as well as trade smithed bars/fletched bows for raw materials. Although this later got me banned for a very significant amount of time(nearly two years), it used to be a great way to get exp and cost me nothing.
If I had to say something I noticed right away? It was that the community on the forum differed greatly from the one in-game. Although you had similarities here and there, and the general mindset was very much the same, the peoples' opinions were exact opposites. This is still very true today, and not just in RuneScape: every game forum has a very different crowd populating it than the community that remains voiceless in-game.
What made me stay? My desire for knowledge. Nothing in particular makes me enjoy a forum, I'm more-or-less attracted to the abundance of information available on them.
17-Feb-2014 04:05:11