This is a joke. Let me count the ways...
* Banned accounts. They're counting accounts created, not existing. Every single bot, cheater, hacker, gold farmer or real world trader they have removed still count towards this total.
* Bots. We still have problems with bots, as evidenced by Grand Exchange prices that keep deflating as supply continues to go up. It's not just real players, since prices went way up after the first Bot Nuke day and many bots were disabled.
* Abandoned accounts. Many people may have made an account to play and found they didn't like it, possibly because the best stuff they have to pay for or any sort of significant accomplishment (99s) requires months of commitment. Or they did what they wanted and quit.
* Alt accounts. More than one account may be tied to one real person. They may be all played legitimately, acting independently of each other, but it inflates the account total over the number of actual players.
Finally we get to the number of actual people; the number of paying members is between one and two million, and the number of free players is probably between one and five times that.
Conclusion: Runescape claims to be the "largest" "free" online game. It is far smaller than they appear to claim, and for something to be "free" I would think the whole game would be free, not just a quarter of it.
13-Jun-2012 01:21:27