Since I started playing RuneScape, it seems every few months on forums a new thread discussing the community appears. Nine times out of ten it’s about how it is going downhill, citing as evidence some sort of mishap someone had with a rude low level. Then the thread creator usually says he’s had a few experiences like this, and generalizes that based on that, the community has in fact gone downhill from how it used to be a few months ago.

The main goal of this editorial is to counter this popular opinion. Many people agree without question that the community is much worse than it used to be when they started playing. While it is easy to conclude this, I will explain why it isn’t necessarily the case.

Talking to rsc veterans, you’ll find that they really cherish the “golden days,” the “good ol days,” the “oldskool days,” or whatever they called it when they first started playing. They’ll say how they can’t stand most players anymore and often they keep to themselves because of it. Feeling isolated, they conclude that the community has in fact gone down hill since they can’t really relate to or talk to anyone.

The thing they forget to consider is their objectivity. People never take into consideration their own perceptions and actions in relation to the time period they were playing in. Nobody ever considers that it was possible that they themselves acted the same way when they first started as people do now when they first start.

For people who do hold this belief, I'm willing to bet there's a good chance you acted somewhat immature and had this senseless fun you now frown upon when you first started fishing, joking around and making fun of things. At that age, or stage of maturity, those things seemed perfectly normal for you to talk about. Now that you're older, people are acting the same way you used to, but you've matured. Those days you had a great time chatting away at a fishing spot with everyone else seemed really fun, but if you return now all you can do is cringe.

To most people it seems like everyone else changed but the individual stayed the same, but people tend to only look at things through their own eyes. If you looked objectively at the whole community and their habits in relation to their age/stage of playing, things stayed the same. It's you who changed, not the community.

Most people who started playing RuneScape when they were 12-13, are now 14-18, and are wondering why everyone seems so immature. It's not the game that changed. It's the individual perspective that has.

It is because of this that people will always overglorify their time spent playing when they were just starting out. There was more senseless fun to be had exploring without a care. Asking for items didn’t seem wrong, because you needed help figuring things out. Now you frown upon the misspellings of the next wave of players attempts at getting help.

Complaints about there being so many 'idiotic players' now compared to the past seem justified at first glance, but what one doesn't realize is that while there are a lot of these players now, there are also a lot more players in total. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that the percentage of these types of players has always stayed the same. It just seems like there were a lot less of them because a lot less people in total played in rs1. In rs2 it's completely plausible that this ratio is still the same, but since there are so many more players, this group has increased in numbers while retaining its percentage, making it appear that there are more of them one encounters.

Even though rs1 was smaller then and people felt like they knew everyone, this doesn’t completely reflect the entire community, rather groups of friends. It is very likely people still acted the same then as they do now. It is just hard to objectively judge because people who played in rs1 inevitably changed and matured from rs1 to rs2 and are unable to determine impartially whether they changed or the community did. When you were at this stage of the game, you were part of a much larger population of younger players. It is only natural to now feel isolated without blaming it on the community’s downfall!