History YMMV / RuneScape

* OffscreenMomentOfAwesome:
** After "Ritual of the Mahjarrat", some [=NPCs=] will talk about how they were at the battle, just at another part of the plateau. Kuradal takes the cake, having slain a few hundred Glacors (very powerful ice elemental bosses who summon minions) after chasing one of the Mahjarrat's minions into a cave.
** Player Owned Ports pretty much define this trope. The premise is that you, the portmaster, send ships to the Eastern Lands to trade. You don't interact with the Wushanko Isles themselves, you just send a crew there to spy on [[FantasticRacism Purist thugs]] or fight fire breathing turtles. There are also some [=NPCs=] who can do special voyages, some of which involve backstory on the Isles. It culminates in the Whaler (using his talk to sea creatures ability to get Shuma the whale to fight with him), the Occultist ( [[ICannotSelfTerminate who is immortal thanks to her time as the Dragon]] ), and the [[HandicappedBadass Assassin]] attacking [[EvilOverlord Quin]], who may or may not have an Elder Artefact that she uses to command an army of monsters, and winning. That sounds, if possible, ''better'' than the Ritual of the Mahjarrat fight, and it all took place off screen.

* SelfImposedChallenge: Ironman Mode forbids any kind of trading with or receiving aide from other players. You must be entirely self sufficient, which puts a unique spin of the game. But this mode is entirely optional.

** In ''[=RS3=]'', this conflict was even worse, due to the sheer abundance of skull tricks in that game. Jagex's attempts to revitalize the Wilderness by adding content like Charming Moths, the Cursed Energy crater, and the Demonic Skull to give an XP boost while in the Wilderness resulted in people taking very little gear into the wild to train non-combat skills. Several people refused to call what happened in the Wilderness "[=PvP=]" because it was almost never a fair fight; it consisted almost entirely of people in Tier 90 gear killing players who were wearing XP-boosting outfits (which aren't even lost on death) for the sake of maybe 600k gold, a pitance in ''Runescape 3'''s economy. [=PVP=] was made opt-in 2022, and many agree that nothing of value was lost; if anything, the Wildenress has become ''more'' active, thanks to the abundance of slayer mobs and the near-hourly Flash Events.

** Arraxor and Arraxi's acid phase has the ability to spawn an acidic spider that is a guaranteed OneHitKO if it hits the player. It spawns from a green puddle on the floor which next-to-impossible to see in the acid pool and can spawn on top of the player. If you're too busy dealing with other mechancis like summoned minions or darkness periods, expect to be paying Death a lot of cash for this bullshit.

** Arraxor's aci phase has the ability to spawn an acidic spider that is a guaranteed OneHitKO if it hits you. It spawns from a green puddle on the floor which next-to-impossible to see in the acid pool and can spawn on top of the player. If you're too busy dealing with other mechancis like summoned minions or darkness periods, expect to be paying Death a lot of cash for this bullshit.

** The Firemaker's Curse quest is interminable. It has no less than ''ten'' instances of ThatOnePuzzle. Half of those are due to the way that Runescape's pathfinding system interacts with the firemaking skill-- every time you make a fire, you move west until you hit a wall. Other instances of ThatOnePuzzle include figuring out who in the room is possessed, or else someone in the party dies (which is a GuideDangIt in and of itself), a section where you have to click on hard-to-see hands of shadow to drive them away using light from a torch or else take heavy damage, and the PuzzleBoss fight against the antagonist of the quest. The fight against Char is a GoddamnedBoss for two reasons: 1) you do damage proportional to the number of fires you have lit in the arena, and 2) Char does damage to you proportional to your max lifepoints, and seems to do even more damage when you're wearing armor. At least the boss fight is safe, so you don't lose items when you die. And you ''will'' die.

** The Arch-Glacor's laser beam basically requires you to pray Protect/Deflect Magic and use the Devotion prayer or else face a OneHitKO. Only problem: Devotion has a one-minute cooldown, and the Arch-Glacor can use this attack multiple times in a row on Hard Mode. Other methods to survive it exist, such as Debilitate or hoping that your Devoted perk will proc, but they're less relaible.

** Not a ''single'' player in ''[=RS3=]'' liked the change to the Divine-o-Matic vacuum being made so that it was always lost on death in 2019. Previously, the best way to fill it up was to bring it to the Cursed Energy crater in the Wilderness, as the energy would be directly converted into divine charges. Players who had a Divine-o-Matic in the Wilderness were basically already wearing a sign that said "PK Me", now with the addendum of "It will take me at least five hours to get the components to rebuild this thing".

** Basically everything about the Menaphos questline in ''Runescape 3'' feels like it was rushed. Dialog lacks characterization, plot points just happen with seemingly no connection between them, and the fight with the Pharoah of Menaphos in the final quest is simultaneously both ThatOneBoss, as you need Feathers of Ma'at to fight him (and aren't told this) and an AnticlimaxBoss, as they were given barely any characterization (He's not even ''named!'') before you're just told 'Hey, recruit the district heads for a rebellion against the ruler of Menaphos'.

** During ''Monkey Madness II'', you and Nieve partner up to defeat Glough and his demonic gorillas. It's possible to hide in a corner and let Nieve defeat all of the gorillas for you since the gorillas won't attack her.

* MorePopularSpinOff: ''Old School'' was released as a way to pacify those who were dissatisfied with the Evolution of Combat. Jagex initially treated it as more of a companion to the main game, and they didn't even expect it to last more than six months. However, ''Old School'' went on to eclipse the main game, and remains popular ten years after it launched.

* Nex's "A Siphon Will Solve This" attack can be seriously tilting. Attacks made against her while she's in this state heal her instead, and are a major wall to anyone wanting to fight Nex solo. Necromancy makes this even worse, as unless you click off of her and onto one of the blood creatures she summons, she's getting healed by any construct that's still aggroed onto her. Oh, and you have to ''beat her with Necromancy'' to unlock Tier 80 power armor.