As much as I miss the Gowers for nostalgia's sake, I think most of MMG's updates have been big improvements, or even if I hated them, added some excitement. Runescape, honestly, was relatively stagnant from 2003 to 2009 or so. I know there's RS2, but having played RS Classic and EOCscape side by side, it really wasn't THAT big of an update.
Sure, there were nearly 100 new quests and several skills, but the CORE of the game never changed. Veterans were kept happy, but noobs left RS for LoL or WoW by the hundreds. Runescape was the game that people played because they couldn't afford the computer or membership for warcraft, and would leave as soon as they got money (unless they got horribly addicted).
Then, in 2009, everything started to change. It started out relatively mild, with dungeoneering, but the precedent that the CORE of the game was not adequate had been set. Before long we had EoC, NIS, Divination, tens of new minigames, Runespan, and many other items that are too numerous to list. Then there were the graphics. EOCscape is what RS2 should have been.
And you know what? It worked. Runescape is nearly unrecognizable. It has the graphics and mechanics to supercede Warcraft, is still half the price, and has a fraction of the microtransactions. We lost players, sure. By Christmas 2013, I doubt RS could have sustained itself without the Squeal. Jagex had to chop off a third of the worlds...and nobody noticed.
But nobody realized at the time that Jagex was in the early, rough stages of Runescape's transformation. EoC was always a public beta, and the reset of combat levels made it into a viable finished product. The new and more numerous tabs saved NIS. Tens of new areas and graphics reworks came out. Today, our player count is finally stabilizing, and actually rising, the community is even tolerably sane again
And with that, MMG's job is done, and he knows it. He took risks percieved to be to great by many, but it paid off in the end. Mod Pips, keep at it!
13-Sep-2014 20:39:33
