‘Armour trimming – 10k!’

‘Drop party in wildy!’

‘Go north to Varrock, but go west at the fork in the road!’

‘Giving 1 mil to first person to trade!’

In October of 2007 I began a journey that would change my view of video games forever. I was in 6th grade and, by random chance, was recommended to play RuneScape by a friend on my bus route. I got home and pulled the game up on Firefox (it was browser based back then) and set foot in Gielinor for the first time. I had no idea how influential this game would be – not just in terms of what video games I liked, but in life. It was my first MMO, my first taste of web based chat rooms, my first expansive RPG experience aside from Pokémon and Final Fantasy. It taught me mathematical ratios, exponential growth vs logarithmic growth, supply and demand, time vs money, how to recognize scams, and so, so much more. Here’s the story of how RuneScape changed my life forever. 

Part 1: People are Garbage. Except when they are not.

I’d been playing RuneScape for a few weeks at this point, and my friend Trevor and I had just gotten full sets of mithril armor. It was a beautiful blue color and stood out against the greys and browns of the previous sets of armor. We were chatting in the square of Lumbridge, the starting town, when a random guy showed up in a trimmed set of rune armor. Rune was, to our 11 year old minds, the end-all-be-all of armor. He offers to trim our armor for 1k gold each, but he has to go to a members world to do so. We gratefully give this random guy our hard-earned armor, along with 1k in gold, and he leaves. We wait. And then we wait. And then the anxiety creeps in. We realize that we were scammed. He had no intention of giving the armor back, in fact, you can’t even get trimmed mithril armor. Our hopes were crushed. It’s a hard lesson for a pre-teen: up to this point, almost all interactions had been vetted by my parents, some even under their watchful guidance. But not here. Here I was at the whims of the best and worst of people and had my first run in with anonymity. We reported the guy, but it didn’t really help. We didn’t have our things back. So then we concocted a plan – we would do the same thing, to the next person we saw. A little ‘if everyone else is doing it, why not us?’. We found an unsuspecting person, and pulled the same scam – almost word for word. After I took the armor, I remember logging out and thinking to myself – what a bastard. Not them obviously, but me. I tried to find the guy to return the armor, but he was gone. I’ll never know just how much that scam had set him back. Maybe they would never even play RuneScape again. I got reported to Jagex and they threatened to turn off my account. I was devastated. My first response was to lie, to tell them they have the wrong man and I didn’t steal that armor. But they had the receipts in the form of the entire chat log. Not just the public chat where we were saying we would trim his armor, but the private chat where we were concocting our scheme. In the end, I didn’t lie, I owned up to it and told the whole story. Got a final warning on the account, and never looked back. I think that was the first and last time I was scammed in RuneScape. 

A few months after that I met a player named Joshpm10000. Josh was a wonderful player, would always message with me back and forth Everytime I logged on the game, and taught me so much about RuneScape in those early years. He taught me about ‘RuneHQ’ and the quest guides. He taught me about the clue scroll helpers and how to figure out the anagrams. And then there were my real life friends that I grew closer to from playing RuneScape – Trevor and Avery. Yes, I spent time at school with them and we would talk on the bus, but so much of my memories of them were from this game. Before discord and voicechat, we would call each other on the landline phone and sit for hours cutting down maples or fishing for lobsters. And that’s not even mentioning the randoms in chat that showed me that humans can be kind. People were helping each other all the time – handing out stacks of gold to newbie players, kitting them out with a full set of iron armor straight off the bat. We used to sit at the GE and just play Santa Claus and give away loads of items straight from our banks. Anonymity, much like alcohol, does not make people act bad – but empowers them to act on their true selves. 

Part 2: 92 is half of 99

One of the biggest differences for me when going from playing Pokémon and final fantasy to RuneScape was a little known (by myself) mathematical principle called ‘exponential growth’. You see, in Pokémon and Final Fantasy, the time it takes to level up each level is relatively the same – killing level 4 monsters at level 4 gives you roughly the same percentage of a level as killing level 15 monsters at level 15. Therefore, you would be rewarded for your time with level ups at a regular pace. Less time spent grinding, more time saving princesses! RuneScape was not, and still is not, kind in that regard. RuneScape level ups worked on the before-mentioned exponential growth principle – each level would take more, and more, and more, and more xp with the ways to earn xp plateauing every so many levels. And the final level, level 99, required a staggering 13 million xp – while level 92 requires a measly 6.5 million. I spent years, and I mean years, mining and smithing in RuneScape from 2007 to at least 2011. I felt like it was almost all I ever did. And I never got to level 85 mining. I never got 3 million mining xp. In 2025 these statements seem crazy – we know so much more about this simple game now that we are adults. We know about ‘efficiency’ and ‘tick manipulation’. We have videos and guides about where to skill and what the best xp rates are. There are people getting level 99’s every hour of every day. But that simple principle of exponential growth, that staggering, insurmountable xp grind, that will forever be burned into my memory. And make no mistake, this grind did not discourage me and make me take a step away from the game and play something else that appreciated my time more. It was just a hard reality of the game and, ultimately, integral to the gameplay loop.

Part 3: What is more valuable – time or money?

One of the most important lessons to learn in RuneScape is when to value time more, and when to value money more. And when I say money, I don’t just mean in-game gold, but real life money too. The coolest part of RuneScape for me (even now) is the interconnectedness of the gameplay loop. For example, lets look at one of the three main combat types, ranged. Ranged involves using bows, crossbows, and thrown weapons to attack enemies from a distance, while wearing leather or hide armor obtained from slain enemies. You can go to the grand exchange and buy a bow, and some arrows, and some leather armor, and just go out and start killing stuff and getting loot. Or, if you don’t have the money to do so, you can obtain everything on your own. To make a bow, you need to take a woodcutting axe to a tree and get some logs, then use your knife on the logs to widdle it down to an unstrung bow. You then need to pick flax from a flax field and take the flax to a spinning loom and spin it into bowstring. Then, combine the unstrung bow with the bowstring and voila you have a bow. To recap, you use woodcutting, crafting, and fletching to create one bow. This process takes roughly 3 minutes, but saves you some money and gives you some xp. And this goes back to my initial point – what is more valuable – convenience or money? When I was a kid I wanted to just move forward and do more and more as fast as possible, and, as consequence of this, I never had any in-game gold to buy the really expensive items. I spent 1k gold here and there not think much of it, when in reality I was spending more gold than I could recoup in a reasonable amount of time. This is where I believe that the lessons transcend the video game and become analogous to real life – what do I value more, time or money? Do I run up and get fast food because it means I don’t have to cook and clean dishes, or do I eat at the house and save some money?

Part 4: Mathematics 101

Fast-forward to 2010 – I’ve been playing RuneScape for just about 2 years at this point. I have the same character, but due to a general lack of focus, I am still relatively low level and not quite into the midgame yet. I am obsessed with a treasure-hunt mechanic called “clue scrolls’ and spend DAYS mindlessly killing guards in one of the beginning cities for the drops. One of the rarer drops is a stack of three grapes – which I have no use for, and go to the general exchange to sell them. I go to list them and the suggested price is 1.3k. For grapes! Excited, I run back and continue to kill guards and grab up all the grapes I can. Throughout the week I notice that, very slowly, the grapes are dropping in suggested price. And not only that, they are selling slower and slower, to the point where I question whether it makes sense to even farm them. At the age of 14 I had first-hand experience with supply and demand, by randomly deciding to sell grapes in a point and click medieval MMORPG. On the other hand, I was struggling with inventory management within the game. In RuneScape, 99% of the time, you are limited to 28 inventory slots. One of my favorite skills to train was mining, which is a sister skill to smithing. As you increase in smithing level you gain access to higher tier metal bars, but the trade off being that you need more and more coal to create the bars. For example, mithril (which was the highest smithing I ever got) requires 4 coal to 1 mithril ore, or a 4:1 ratio. Now, as an adult this math problem is incredibly simple – 28/5=5 and some change. Therefore, you can bring 5 mithril ore and 20 coal, yielding 5 bars. Inventory management and mathematical ratios go hand in hand and I would like to attribute my future success in the field of mathematics with the thousands of hours I put in RuneScape.

Part 5: That all sounds great – what’s next?

RuneScape is an incredibly important videogame for many people, myself included. Many of us got into this game in the very formulative years of middle school or early high school. I remember playing RuneScape when the news broke that Michael Jackson had passed away and everyone in the grand exchange started spamming “RIP MJ” and it was a legitimately heartfelt moment. And when I took my first “break” from RuneScape (as the saying goes, you never truly quit RuneScape, you just take long breaks) way back in 2011ish, I never really thought I would come back. I had new videogames, like Dragon Age and Skyrim, Call of Duty and Halo, but, as most things go, I found myself reminscing the spring of 2015 during my freshman year of college and redownloaded RuneScape 3. I was blown away by all the changes, and it consumed my life for the next month or so. I keep coming back to this game, and will most likely leave it and come back again dozens of times, and I hope that it will always be there when I need a dose of nostalgia.