YMMV / RuneScape

The following tropes have their own subpages:

• Complete Monster
• Demonic Spiders
• Magnificent Bastard
• That One Boss
• That One Achievement

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• Accidental Innuendo:
  • One-Eyed Willy.
  • My Arm's Big Adventure was originally this, with Mod Ash only realizing the obvious joke later into the quest and character's development.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Nieve, one of the higher tier slayer masters added in Old School, was particularly reviled by parts of the community for being a boring self-insert character. That said, many players mourned her after her death at the hands of a mutated Glough in Monkey Madness II, and her cousin Steve quickly became a Replacement Scrappy. One of the more obscure RuneLite plugins resurrects Nieve and places Steve in her grave in the Gnome Stronghold.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Has Saradomin really taken a few levels in kindness and feels regret for his earlier arrogant actions? Or is he just trying to get on the Player Character's good side?
  • Does Zaros really have any interest in the benefit of mortals, or is he also just trying to make an ally of the World Guardian?
• Alt-itis: After the rules were relaxed to allow multiple accounts to interact with one another, many players have started using alternate accounts to farm resources, and rewards from Treasure Hunter and time-limited events (such as the 2021 Golden Partyhat Hunt and Secret Santa). This is not without controversy as some players consider it to be an unfair practice.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Old School servers were made as a concession to the fandom in 2013, and even got the required amount of votes to receive a dedicated development team, but even then, Jagex expected the novelty to wear off and the game to die out after six months. Come its tenth anniversary, and Old School has over double the daily playerbase of 3.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Prior to the rework of the "Demon Slayer" quest, Delrith^note the super-demon the Dark Wizards are trying to summon had fewer hit points than a cow or an imp. In fact, depending on your combat levels, you were more at risk of getting killed by the surrounding Dark Wizards who, despite their relative weakness, could get quite annoying with their ranged magical attacks.
  • The Boss Rush at the end of Recipe for Disaster is a tough, challenging fight. The Culinaromancer is little more than a speed bump at the end; his attack can hit hard, but he has no defense and goes down like a chump.
  • Mother Mallum, the Sea Slug Queen, who turns out to be a Puzzle Boss who dies when a secondary character drops a pillar on her; your own character never battles her.
  • Tuska, the central focus of the third World Event — billed as an apocalyptic pig-shaped Eldritch Abomination — turned out to be one of the biggest laughingstocks in the whole game.
• Anvilicious: "Perils of Ice Mountain", so very much. Climate change is bad, we get it. The puns didn't help either.
• Ass Pull:
  • Sliske killing Guthix with the Staff of Armadyl at the end of "The World Wakes" can feel like one of these, considering that by all indications, the Dragonkin had utterly destroyed the Staff at the end of "Ritual of the Mahjarrat".
  • Linza "betraying" the Player Character towards the end of "Kindred Spirits" can easily come across as a largely out-of-character moment simply thrown into the storyline for the sake of making her Darker and Edgier and to justify getting her killed off and turned into a Barrows wight.
  • At the end of "Sliske's Endgame", just when you've finally bested him in combat, the eponymous Manipulative Bastard of a Mahjarrat conveniently gets both you and him impaled on the Staff of Armadyl and wastes no time in transferring his soul into the Player Character (complete with an Evil Laugh for good measure). The staff had been shown to be capable of killing beings and siphoning power from one to another, but not going so far as actual souls and consciousnesses. It just comes across as a blatant Sequel Hook towards yet another future plot still to be revealed. Made even worse since to even get to this quest, you've also repeatedly learned about Zaros's fall, which happened in the exact same way. The World Guardian has no reason to use the Staff anyways, since Sliske's defences are gone and your normal weapons are more than sufficient, and they should know this is a really bad idea.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The RuneScape fanbase is notoriously factionalized, but many would agree that 2017 and 2018 were unusually weak years.
  • Jagex was purchased by a Shanghai investment firm called Fukong, who emphasized microtransactions to make money over more meaningful game content, and that combined with the conclusion of the Second God War arc at the end of 2016 left the game's overarching plot in a sort of Limbo, with very little major quest content.
  • The largest update in that regard was the long-awaited desert city of Menaphos, which underwhelmed many due to a bad case of Uncertain Audience - the city was intended as a Hub Level for mid-game players, but much of its content required endgame-level stats and/or was gated behind a tedious "reputation"-grinding system.
  • Perhaps the absolute nadir of the game's reputation came with the news that the microtransactions had gotten so intrusive that Jagex representatives were called before Parliament on the charges of encouraging underage gambling.
  • Things improved in subsequent years with, among other things, the game's Myth Arc coming back to the forefront with Anachronia and the Archaeology skill, the release of the Steam and mobile versions of the game bringing player counts to levels not seen in five years, Fukong selling Jagex off, and the appointment of a well-received new head mod, but controversial updates still surface on occasion.
• Badass Decay: Guthix, Saradomin and Zamorak, coinciding with their collective retcon from abstract, nigh-omnipotent godly entities to essentially super-powered mortals. Similarly, protection prayers were nerfed from boss-dominating Game-Breaker abilities to be only 50% effective at best. Considering that they nearly wrecked the whole of Gielinor the last time they fought, Saradomin, Zamorak, Armadyl and Bandos are surprisingly small and unimposing in-game. Word of God confirms this is due to to them being Shrouded in Myth in-universe; they're legitimately extremely powerful, but being disappeared for millennia their stories evolved to portray them as even stronger, particularly Saradomin, whose cult evolved into borderline monotheism with Zamorak as an inferior Satan-figure. And despite this, the first major battle between Saradomin and Zamorak still managed to blow a large crater into what once was Lumbridge Forest. They could still destroy the world by fighting, only little-by-little rather than in one fell swoop — the God Wars did, after all, ruin Forinthry into the Wilderness^note Admittedly, Zamorak used the Stone of Jas to do this, so it wasn't entirely through his own power, and it's far from inconceivable that the gods could eventually and gradually do the same to the rest of Gielinor.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Most of the Gods. For every single major deity, you will find players who fanatically venerate their philosophies while you will find others who consider the them to be a God of Evil who has long since passed the Moral Event Horizon.
  • The Signature Heroes were designed to be popular, invoking classic fantasy archetypes, starring in some well-designed quests to sell the game to new players. They were featured heavily both inside and outside the game, however they have arguably failed to serve their purpose as adventures on par with the Player Character, seeming more like random one-offs instead. For players who were around before the Signature Heroes were added, there is the added insult of the heroes treating the Player Character like a newbie despite the player predating the heroes. Their reception has warmed over time as the majority have received follow-up quests in subsequent years, but their reputation as awkward attempts to shoehorn in new mascots persists.
  • Sliske the Mahjarrat. A sizable segment of the player base, including Jagex's developers, absolutely love him because they find him to be a cool villain or actually appreciate his outlook and actions. On the other hand, there are many players who have long since lost patience with his abject cruelty, his continual lies and his constant domination of Sixth Age storylines, and can't wait until he is finally taken down once and for all.
  • The Raptor, with the reveal in that they've been Queen Ellamaria of Misthalin the whole time. Several people claimed it was an Ass Pull Retcon, some stating that the fact that the Raptor had a masculine voice made no sense (despite this being a setting where magic exists) with some going so far as to claim that the Raptor being revealed as female was 'male erasure'.
• Best Level Ever: Several of the quests qualify.
  • "While Guthix Sleeps" is a quest that is near-universally acclaimed for the level of immersion featured in the quest and the impact on the world of Runescape at large. The fact that the rewards include 100k in four different skills and the ability to forge your own Dragon Platebody helps this as well.
  • "The Chosen Commander" is the finale for the Dorgeshuun quest series. While it didn't quite have the impact that "While Guthix Sleeps" had, it was tremendously well received when it was first released, and is still considered an excellent ending to this day. (The less said about The Mighty Fall, the better).
  • Nomad's Elegy is the payoff for half a dozen NPC deaths over the course of the game's story. An entire Ensemble Dark Horse herd, consisting of Zanik, Xenia, Hazelmere, Brand or Astrid, and Jessika or Korasi join up with the player character to stop Nomad from trying to take over the underworld. Unlike several Nomad encounters, this is far less of a Goddamned Boss, and gameplay is changed up through you taking control of Xenia, Death and Icthlarin to defeat an artificial god! In Zanik's case, her Happy Ending Override turns into a much-deserved Earn Your Happy Ending, with players being able to choose whether she can go to her deserved afterlife, or come back to life, as it was not her time.
  • 'A Kingdom Divided' from Old School Runescape manages to tie nearly every bit of Kourend lore together, as well as having fun puzzles, challenging boss fights, and rewarding you with a huge expansion to the Arceuus spellbook.
  • Old School's "Song of the Elves" surprised players with its plot taking a hefty departure from RuneScape's "Within the Light" and "Plague's End", including reviving King Baxtorian in the Waterfall Dungeon, turning Lord Iorwerth into an Anti-Villain, Arianwyn's betrayal and then redemption, the true nature of the "Dark Lord", and a big Ship Tease between the player and Elena, all leading to a final showdown in the Underground Pass. While some players might be frustrated by some of the puzzles (especially those in the Grand Library), almost everyone agrees that both the visuals and soundtrack are stunning, especially at the end when you finally unlock access to Prifddinas.
  • Beyond quests, several boss fights qualify.
    • The Queen Black Dragon, for instance, is a monster so large that you only ever see her head and hands. It requires 60 Summoning to even fight her, and you have to do it alone. Being able to defeat this beast is viewed by many as a key milestone in your RuneScape career.
    • There's also Telos, the Warden, an entity created by the Elder Gods themselves to protect the Heart of Gielinor. Like the QBD, you fight him alone above the Heart of Gielinor, and the battle has 4 phases with many tricky mechanics to master. Killing him just once is a feat in and of itself, but as you continue to fight Telos, he gains enrage, which increases both the battle's difficulty and the rewards for beating him. Once you get him to 100% enrage, you unlock a fifth phase where Telos embraces the Anima Mundi in the Heart and dwarfs you in size. And it doesn't stop there - you can keep increasing Telos' enrage even further, all the way to a whopping 4000%. And if you beat him then, you get a special title to show just how much of a PvM master you are.
• Broken Aesop: The "Tower of Life" quest. The moral of the whole story is that meddling with creation is wrong, and life should be treated with respect. Your reward for completing the quest is access to a minigame where you can create new mutant life-forms, kill them, and harvest their organs.
• Broken Base:
  • In general, there sometimes seems to be an undercurrent of resentment in free-to-play (f2p) players against pay-to-play (p2p) members. Part of it was that members have hundreds of extra hours of content, with a game world several times the volume of the free-to-play zone. Several years back, there was even a page on the RuneScape wiki about free-to-play versus pay-to-play wars, all about how f2p tried to revolt to get more content.
  • The December 10th, 2007 updates tore the community asunder. In response to a downright massive number of gold farmers, macros, and websites selling Runescape gold and items for real world money, Jagex introduced several restrictions on trading and player killing (including the complete removal of player killing in the Wilderness) in an attempt to cut off real world item trading by limiting the ways that illegally purchased gold could be transferred to the buyers. Community reaction was split:
    • Those against the changes pointed out that legitimate trade outside of the Grand Exchange had been crippled (as part of the updates included the inability to trade items or gold at a price that was outside of a very slim margin based on the market price determined by the Grand Exchange), that player vs. player had been largely gutted outside of minigames (particularly in the free version of the game), and that the Wilderness had been rendered largely obsolete (dangerous but well-rewarding Revenant monsters were introduced to make the Wilderness more dangerous, but they were easier and less rewarding than most player killing).
    • Those in favour of the changes pointed out that the restrictions had greatly reduced the number of bots (which made a resurgence very shortly after the restrictions were eventually removed), stabilized the game's economy (which had suffered immensely under the inflation caused by bots harvesting logs, ore, fish, and other resources to sell to feed the gold sellers, drastically reducing the value of most gathering skills), inadvertently eliminated several types of player-based scams (as the aforementioned Grand Exchange-based margins prevented users from taking anything of value without giving their marks something of roughly equivalent value), and that the Wilderness changes solved griefing problems for Wilderness-based quests and activities.
  • Like the 12-10-07 updates, the introduction of PVP Worlds in 2008 caused another rift among the player killing community. Some enjoyed the freedom of being able to attack other players nearly anywhere in the game world and always being on the lookout for trouble even in usually completely safe areas, and that the randomized loot upon a successful kill (which included some highly valuable, exclusive loot that could be earned if the player had survived in dangerous areas long enough) made for a more interesting reward for ambushing players who weren't equipped for a fight, while others felt that by turning the entire world into a PVP Area that it was too difficult to find a target aside from camping just outside of safe zones, that it was a pale imitation of the traditional Wilderness experience that had been removed nearly a year before, and that the randomized loot was rarely worth carrying around valuable enough items that could be lost on death in order to qualify for.
  • In early 2013, Jagex introduced dedicated "Old School RuneScape" servers, running a complete version of the game from back in August 2007. This went just fine until the divisions really kicked off with the announcement that a highly-anticipated and lore-critical Grandmaster-level quest (among other possible updates) was being pushed back, simply due to the sheer amount of resources dedicated to resurrecting the older version.^note Modern-day Scapers are fed up with "Old School" announcements out-spamming even the Squeal of Fortune, while old-school purists look down on modernists simply for the sin of accepting the Evolution of Combat.
  • In early 2014, Jagex used the newly-implemented player poll system to float the idea of reintroducing old-style combat into the modern game (alongside the existing Evolution of Combat abilities). Naturally, this split the player base between those who want the change back to the older style, those who think it is a waste of time, and those who wish Jagex had made the announcement before thousands of players spent most of a year on the "Old School" servers to get away from "EoC" in the first place.
  • The base fragments yet again with the ongoing development of "Legacy Mode", which basically reverts the combat mechanics, interfaces and other elements back to RuneScape 2. There's division within the divisions with Jagex's developers noting that the Legacy Mode users will not be doing as much damage as the users of EoC, and therefore will not earn experience nearly as quickly as the former. On top of that, Jagex has also mentioned that game content will continue to be designed around EoC anyways, without much regard for Legacy Mode, meaning that the players in Legacy Mode will not be capable of doing all the activities, boss fights, and so on that EoC players will be able to enjoy.
  • Since the re-implementation of PKing, the fanbase split yet again, with a fairly sizable faction calling Player-Killers nothing more than toxic, legitimized griefers who like to go around and ruin the experience for everyone else, while PKers themselves claim that people should know the risks while entering the Wilderness.
  • The Death system in RS3 caused this. In 2015, it was overhauled and several changes were made; on one hand, most items could no longer be looted by other players once the Gravestone timer^note Upon dying, an Instant Gravestone is dropped where the player died if they lost any items on death, and the player can recover their stuff for free if they can reach it before the timer expires. runs out, instead being sent to Death's Office where they can be reclaimed at a cost for the next 24 hours (though they could instantly be lost forever if the player dies and loses items again before reclaiming them), providing players with the ability to not permanently lose their valuables when dying in a place that can't be reached quickly. As an added bonus, paying to reclaim degradable loot (which most high-level weapons and armour are) doesn't have the significant degrading penalty that recovering them from a gravestone does. On the other hand, Gravestone timers were reduced from a maximum of an hour to three minutes, five percent of the original length, and items that used to increase grave timers now increase it by seconds at a time. While you can still pay Death to get your items back, some players called foul, accusing the new system of being a Money Sink and arguing that it doesn't work as it's intended because the players with the most money are the ones least likely to die because they are generally higher-leveled and have access to better equipment while also driving away people from learning high-tier content for fear of losing millions of gold. When a similar system was introduced to OSRS, the fees were hard-capped at only 500k gold (roughly 4 million in RS3 gold), wheras a single mistake at a boss like Raksha, Telos or the Ambassador, where high-level gear is a necessity, could potentially leave an RS3 player tens of millions of gold in the hole if they wanted to reclaim all their gear. An update in 2023 resulted in an average reduction in death costs of, on average, 89%, while a tax was implemented on the Grand Exchange to act as an alterantive gold sink.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict:
  • Or more specifically, PvE and PvP conflict, at least in Old School. Due to increasing disinterest in PvP and issues in changing that^note most infamously in Bounty Hunter 2, where the "incentive" to play it amounted to filling the wilderness with people farming BH points because it was incredibly profitable while requiring almost no interaction or skill, and despite this Jagex didn't do anything until popular PKing Youtuber Torvesta made a video on it, and even then their replacement for Bounty Hunter was just miles worse and drove away legitimate players completely Jagex ended up putting a significant amount of interesting things, some shortcuts for non-wilderness content, and some decently profitable bosses. This, in turn, forces players who don't care about it to either put up with PKers or deliberately avoid benefits, which results in conflict between them. Unsurprisingly, people aren't happy about amounting to kill fodder due to issues with actually fighting back (risking gear and wasting most of your inventory on supplies specifically for this is required to stand a chance 1v1 most of the time, let alone do anything against the groups PKers are always in)) and buffs to PKers that are heavily unpopular. Not helping matters is the increasing number of dirty tricks (Dragon Spear Special Attack abuse to stun and push victims from single- to multi-combat zones, skull tricks^note tricking a player to attack someone else (usually someone with a borderline identical name, such as a capital i or lower case L difference) so they lose all their items upon death rather than keeping three and clan ambushes, all of which discourage more honest PKers and fuel the hostility. Notably, in spite of Jagex's increasingly desperate attempts to revive the Wilderness outside of clans and gold farmers, they still refused to let clans have a say in what it'll become due to, as directly stated in an update post, the large levels of toxicity being a deterrent from allowing them to partake in the discussion. Not helping matters is an increasingly large amount of players deeming the Wilderness revival project a failure from the very start, with the only ways to convince a sufficiently large number of "prey" players to even enter it^note namely, providing incentives to make up for the risk, which is nearly impossible in the game's current state without destroying the game's economy or making a skill's grind effortless having such huge drawbacks that it would greatly cause adverse reactions to the rest of the game. This being increasingly obvious that it's merely a JMod pet project (particularly Mod Ayiza, who gets very heated when it's brought up) despite consistent feedback that this isn't what the community wants no matter how much voting is restricted to get the desired outcomes^note a mere 10% of voters were allowed to vote in the meaningful choices in poll 206, and that's despite the lower then average headcount than a PvE, skilling, or quest poll gets, the failed rewards aren't reworked in any meaningful way and serve as little more than fueling the disdain.
  • 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 Wilderness has become more active, thanks to the abundance of slayer mobs and the near-hourly Flash Events.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • "Plague's End" has been called anticlimactic as a Grand Finale and as a Grandmaster-level quest, but after over a decade of waiting for this last act in the Elf and Plague series, it is downright awesome to personally curbstomp and/or actually kill off all of the Mourners, King Lathas and his numerous paladin bodyguards, Lord Iorwerth and his underlings, and the heretofore-unseen "Dark Lord" itself. It ends up as a subversion in the Dark Lord's case, as the Dark Lord is really just a warped fragment of Seren, who as an Actual Pacifist has done nothing to warrant your frustration. Virtually every other positive character in the series gets a chance to bite back at Lathas and Iorwerth, too. Councilor Halgrive, Lathas's deputy, after hearing of his King's wrongdoing makes you commander of the army. Bravek, the city warder of West Ardougne who'd been forced to keep up the lie also gives you his support. Elena and the other West Ardougne activists you've met get to lead a revolution. General Hining, the very angry best friend and right-hand-man to the betrayed and murdered King Tyras, gets to lead his army in an outright massacre of Iorwerth's. And finally, the Elven Elders, driven into exile by Iorwerth, get to activate the lock that seals their people's old enemy, the Dark Lord, away for good.
  • In the Sliske quest series:
    • "Kindred Spirits" finally lets you get in a few shots, verbal and physical, against Sliske. Early on, you're given the option to repeatedly punch him in the face while he's defenseless, and later, you manage to weaken his control over the Barrows brothers and learn something about his true plans, which really gets under his skin. While he still partially succeeds in the end, it shows that he's not as untouchable as he'd like to think.
    • And again in "Sliske's Endgame", only this time, you fight him up, close and personal after you deal with Nomad, Linza, and Gregorovic. The scuffle ultimately ends with his demise in your hands, using the Staff of Armadyl to finish him off for real.
• Character Rerailment: This happened to Saradomin. In earlier quests during the Fifth Age, he was presented as a generally benevolent god who cared for his followers but was fairly ruthless toward evil. The more recent quests and Sixth Age storylines have played up his ruthlessness and pride to the point of portraying him as a Villain with Good Publicity. But in "The Death of Chivalry", he will openly admit to the Player Character that his past actions were wrong, hurtful, and motivated by arrogance. He admits that he still does do awful things, but he views them as necessary, and he does them so his followers won't have to.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Old School has a technique known as "flinching", which is attacking a monster while it is out of combat, running into a safe spot before it can retaliate, waiting until it's no longer in combat, and repeating. This strategy makes fights in some quests much, much easier.
  • And that's not including bosses that you can outright safespot, i.e., standing behind an obstacle and firing away with ranged or magic attacks while the boss— many of which only have melee autoattacks— stands there and just takes it since they have no way of retaliating or pathing away.
  • Or fights (many that were released during RuneScape Classic) where the enemy attacks are completely nullified by protection prayers.
  • 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 they won't attack her.
  • Ultimate Ironman Mode prevents you from banking, but there are some workarounds that allow you to store items. Dominic Onion's coffer can be used to store money, and certain items can be stored inside STASH units.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Playing (the now-defunct) DarkScape? Odds are you're either using a two-handed sword or air staff. Maybe ranged weapons or armour if you're doing PvE, but almost never when doing PvP or just walking around.
  • In the Old School-exclusive Nightmare Zone, there's two builds. Either you're using Dharok the Wretched's equipment set, or you're using obsidian armor and weaponry with the Berserker Necklace. Either way, you're also using Overloads and lowering your health to 1 to take advantage of the properties of Absorption Potions.
  • In RS3, if you intend to primarily use Magic and have an Essence of Finality amulet, you're likely going to store the special attack from the Guthix Staff, Claws of Guthix, on it. Claws of Guthix drains the defense and lowers magic resistance on the target, and the Guthix Staff can be gotten after some time investment at the Mage Arena in the Wilderness either for free or (if you chose another god staff first) for 80,000 coins, which is bascially nothing in RS3's economy.
  • This is so prevalent in Runescape 3 that several quest and activity rewards involve making certain things passive buffs; for instance, the Ring of Vigour is considered a necessary part of PVM rotation, due to its ability to allow the player to preserve 10% adrenaline after casting an ultimate ability. One of the quest rewards from Extinction allows players to make it into just a passive ability they have.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • In Dimension of Disaster, you travel to an Alternate Universe version of Varrock, where most of the citizens are dead, and those that aren't are zombified. The dead have various things written on their gravestones, from Party Pete playing with Icthlarin's torch to the point where he abandoned him halfway to the underworld, to Romeo and Juliet, sans heads. These include Gertrude's four children. One of them is completely unrelated to the others, but the rest:
  Shilop Fairweather. Mauled by a giant, sabre-toothed wildcat.
  Wilough Fairweather. Died laughing while watching his brother being mauled by a giant sabre-toothed wildcat.
  Kanel Fairweather. Tripped over his brother, who had died laughing while watching his other brother being mauled by a wildcat.
  • "One Small Favour" is a Chain of Deals that takes you halfway around the globe; it starts simple, grows annoying, and ends hilariously, as your adventurer grows more annoyed than the player, and actually seems like they might kill the quest giver just from how frustrated they are. And if that's not enough, a sequel to the quest is confirmed to be in the works. Rage quitting ensues.
• Damsel Scrappy: Pauline Polaris, who runs the Livid Farm minigame. Livid Farm is already one of the most hated minigames in the game, due to it being an incredibly repetitive activity that takes a minimum of 44 hours and 50 minutes to earn all the spell rewards, which are required for the completionist cape. The fact that the minigame exists because Pauline bit off more than she could chew with a strain of fast-growing plants, and the fact that she needs constant encouragement^note which requires that you pick the sole nice option from a list of remarks, the meaner of which likely represent how you actually feel about her make her one of the most hated characters in the game.
• Designated Hero: The so-named Wise Old Man, although he seems to be an intentional example. He's remembered fondly by various NPCs in-game and is a key character in a few quests, but his pastimes generally involve abusing his powers to break into banks and rob or murder innocents just because he feels he got shortchanged for heroic deeds in the past.
• Designated Villain: The HAM cult. Many sentient monsters are indeed violent or warmongers that threaten others simply by being around them, such as the trolls with Burthrope. It just so happens that they're the villains in a questline featuring peaceful, pacifistic cave goblins. If it were a number of other quests, or if they toned down their extremism to exclude peaceful monsters, they'd be the heroes.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Some of the various gods' worst actions are ignored or poorly justified by players. The most common cases are Saradomin ripping off Garlandia's wings, Zamorak betraying Zaros, Zaros carving up sentient beings to create the Nihil and then abandoning them, etc. — although a good portion of this sentiment could easily be due to players' skepticism after only being told about the events instead of witnessing them personally, or otherwise could be backlash to Jagex pushing for the Godless in Sixth-Age quests.
  • Judging from this forum topic, Sliske's managed to pick up quite a few fangirls.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: RS3's writing is surprisingly compelling, to the point where even some ex- or Old School players keep watch of it despite not enjoying the Evolution of Combat system.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • General Graardor has loads of fans, and it seems Jagex has picked up on this, as he functioned as the game's mascot for a while.
  • Zanik, heroine of the cave goblin quests. At one point, she was arguably the most popular NPC in the game, and is off having adventures of her own after her quest line is done, which include trekking through Morytania, attempting the TzHaar Fight Caves, and absolutely owning the Ranging Guild's archery contest, despite the guild members saying a crossbow isn't as good as a "real" bow. Sadly, this has been downplayed as of late due to The Mighty Fall giving her a... less-than-attractive graphical update, aligning her with divisive Godless faction, and giving the player the option to kill her at the end of the quest, which several players argue makes no sense why this choice was even given. They've been slightly redeemed, however, through Nomad's Elegy.
  • Brassica Prime (the God of Cabbages) was originally intended as an April Fools joke, but it became so popular that it's now an officially recognized part of the Gielinor pantheon, and even has a minigame based on it, alongside the ape goddess Marimbo.
  • In a similar vein, a new god, Loarnab was introduced in a lore book, meant as an in-joke (the name is a corruption of 'Lore-noob'). However, it too (despite originally being mentioned only by name) gained so much popularity among players that it got a full description in another lore book, and was apparently supposed to actually appear (albeit as a statue) in the quest 'Broken Home' before being cut due to time constraints. Loarnab's severed, petrified (and implied semi-conscious) head can now be found and interacted with during the quest Dimension of Disaster.
  • Prince Brand and Princess Astrid, the heirs of Miscellania whom your character becomes engaged to (Brand for women, Astrid for men) in "Throne of Miscellania." While in-universe the marriage is supposed to be a political one to legitimize your claim as regent of the eponymous throne, many players became legitimately fond of them and were genuinely saddened when both fall victim to the Cartwright Curse in "Blood Runs Deep." "Nomad's Elegy" provides some closure for them.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Debating whether RS3 or Old School is better is an easy way to start a Flame War.
  • The same goes for the rivalries between RuneScape and other contemporary MMORPGs, such as (and most prominently with) World of Warcraft.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Aside from the usual abbreviations (Addy = Adamant, mith = mithril, etc. etc.), a few otherwise-ordinary locations get this treatment. For instance, the Varrock southeast mine is sometimes called "Boot Mine" or "Ballsack mine" because of its resemblance to a boot and, well...
  • The Old School bosses Zulrah and Vorkath are often known as the "Profit Snake" and "Money Dragon" respectively due to their generous drop tables, and their popularity as moneymakers for high-level players.
    • Zulrah is also occasionally called the "Danger Noodle" or the "Big Jiant Snake" (the latter being a helpful mnemonic for the Zul-Andra Fairy Ring code)
  • Old School's Bowfa^note short for Bow of Faerdhinen, whose pronunciation is only obvious if you're familiar with Celtic languages like Welsh, Cornish, Irish, or Sindarin. What does Bowfa stand for? Bowfa deez nuts!
  • One of the rocks inside of TzHaar Fight Cave is known by fans as the "Italy Rock", due to it being shaped like a boot.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • After the release of "Salt in the Wound", a popular theory amongst the fanbase was that the entire quest was nothing more than a delusion brought on by Mother Mallum. This is because the fanbase refused to accept the events of the quest as canon and violently ridiculed it to the point where many believe the quest's developer left the company solely to avoid further ridicule.
  • A sizable number of players do not regard Dungeoneering as a "real" skill but rather as a glorified minigame. Amusingly, the same concept was later introduced in Old School...as a minigame.
  • Some people view the Camelot quest series as non-canon, due to the fact that it relies on pre-existing characters from Arthurian Legend. However, this ignores the fact that Camelot is vitally important to another quest series, as King Lathas's emnity towards Arthur and his Knights was a large reason why he aligned himself with the Iorwerth clan and faked the plague West Ardougne, kicking off the Plague/Elf Quest Series.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Ancient Effigies are sometimes considered this for skilling. They allow a player to gain 90k+ xp without training those skills at all, are semi-rare combat drops, and essentially allow player to train non-combat skills in combat. The fact that effigies require 90+ levels in pretty much every skill to be very useful makes this less of an issue to most people. However, this has since been nerfed to only being able to store 5 at a time in your bank, with each one reducing the drop rate of the next.
  • Halberds are this for melee warriors in 3, for one main reason — their longer reach compared to other melee weapons. Impressive in its own right, but when you take into account that the extra reach applies to abilities as well, including the many area-of-effect abilities available to two-handed melee weapons, you have a weapon class that, with the right setups, can result in hundreds of thousands to over a million melee experience per hour in places with large amounts of monsters, such as the Abyss or Mazcab. There's a very good reason why the strongest of these halberd-type weapons, the level 90 Noxious Scythe, is much more expensive compared to similar level 90 melee weaponry.
  • A few other combat weapons and spells also came to mind, some eventually getting nerfed. Ice Barrage is one of the most memorable in its glory days for making any PvP game laughably easy (unless your opponents are also using it), and Dragon Claws once went for hundreds of millions due to their special attack being essentially a one-hit kill if the user uses a setup focused on maximum strength. Both of these are still possible in Old School.
  • Speaking of Old School, two weapons stand out there: the Scythe of Vitur, and the Twisted Bow. The scythe because it hits in an arc like RS3's halberds listed above, but it does it with its basic attack, and hits targets bigger than one tile more than once, which can only be done with the dragon and crystal halberd's special attacks, the magic shortbow's special attack, or the dark bow. The Twisted Bow, however, takes the cake: it gains power and accuracy based on its target's Magic stat, which anything worth its salt has a very high level in because of how magic defence is calculated. With very few exceptions (made specifically to nerf the bow's ability against them, because it just shreds through them otherwise), anything that isn't very weak to magic is very weak to the twisted bow. The cherry on top is that while the scythe requires constant recharging with consumable materials that are used on each attack (~1250 coins per swing), the bow doesn't require any charging at all. Instead, its upkeep is the arrows it uses — while the cost per arrow is actually slightly more expensive than the scythe^note assuming the use of dragon arrows, the bow's intended ammo, at about 1500 coins each, they can at least be conserved by using an Ava's device as with any other ranged weapon, resulting in lower upkeep costs in the long run.
  • For skilling and general usage, Old School's graceful outfit also counts. The graceful outfit is a set of clothing with two useful features, -25Kg weight reduction and +30% run energy restoration. These combine to provide a great deal of mobility, which is handy considering Old School lacks many of the quick teleportation options offered by 3. Furthermore, it's relatively easy to obtain: it's purchased with marks of grace, which are periodically dropped during runs of rooftop agility courses, which also offer some of the best Agility experience rates. To top it off, it looks damn good, and has many recoloring options if you don't like the default colors.
  • Some of the Archaeology relic powers qualify, but not in obvious ways.
    • Fury of the Small generates 1% extra adrenaline when using basic abilities. Might not sound like much, but having to use even one fewer ability in your rotation to get your ultimate fired off is a big deal.
    • Death Ward makes players much harder to kill, offering up to 10% damage reduction when your life points are below 25%. That might not sound like much, but it can make all the difference when fighting a difficult boss.
    • Persistent Rage used to just stall adrenaline drain outside of combat, but after that was made redundant by the Infernal Puzzle Box, it was changed so that players generate adrenaline outside of combat, which is much more useful.
• Gameplay Derailment:
  • Twice in Old School.
    • The first is prayer flicking, which is activating a protection prayer active on the same tick^note 0.6 seconds an attack is considered "active" to negate the damage, then turning it off the very next one. This strategy is so effective that it actually turned very hard bosses into a much easier fight, and had Jagex require future bosses target tiles with some of their attacks to provide some semblance of challenge without entering Fake Difficulty territory by removing tells. This notably was around even in RS2, before Evolution of Combat (where it doesn't work due to the nerf to protection prayers) was created, let alone implemented, but a lack of understanding the game's mechanics made it very uncommon and more a gimmick.
    • The second is tick eating, or eating immediately after damage is registered, but before the game registers you as dead. Due to a quirk in how the game handles HP, you'll never drop below zero HP, meaning you're effectively immortal as long as your food stack lasts. Jagex has done nothing about this, however, due to the fact that it's so impossibly hard even while standing still, let alone while being able to fight back. There's only one player that's able to consistently do it in actual combat, and even then he's not capable of beating the hardest bosses in the game 100% of the time with it. It has to be seen to be believed.
  • Another, different form of derailment is in the Ultimate Iron Man mode, which was created a challenge account and then adopted as an official option upon character creation. Ultimate follows the same rules as normal Iron Men accounts - no trading, no buying overstock or items that aren't naturally stocked from stores, no loot from an enemy another player has damaged, and no loot from PvP kills - but comes with another restriction: no using your bank. All you have are your 28 inventory spaces, a looting bag (which can only be filled in the wilderness and emptied by dying) if you're a member, what you're wearing, and what you can build with Construction. And, since this is OS and not 3, no coin pouch or toolbelt, meaning your money takes up one slot, and tools such as chisels and hatchets take up one slot each if you want to keep them in your inventory. Even with a sufficiently well-built house and all the useful STASH units (of which there are painfully few) made to store gear, you'll constantly be hurting for room to hold things.
  • In RS3, the introduction of Necromancy as the fourth major combat style caused this, due to being objectively superior to the other three styles; getting high-tier gear for the skill simply required some time investment, as opposed to attempting to grind Tier-90+ weapon parts from bosses with heavily unfavorable RNG. On top of that, Necromancy is far less resource-intensive vs Magic and Ranged while still having a larger range than Melee, and its system of always hitting and having damage scale based off of the player's accuracy meant that it could out-damage the rest of the combat triangle. This accuracy system was later implemented in other styles and Melee, Magic and Ranged were all given massive buffs in March of 2024, but it might not be enough to break Necromancy's dominance on the meta.
• Gateway Series: Many millennials grew up with this game around elementary or middle school, and this was likely their first encounter with the MMORPG genre ever.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Wild dogs in Brimhaven Dungeon were a famously annoying example, but more recent updates have nerfed their aggression significantly. In 3, they stop being aggressive at combat level 75, and in Old School their aggression was removed entirely.
  • Ghasts. When just crossing the Myre they sometimes turn your food into inedible rotten food, and during Temple Trekking they have annoyingly high HP and drop little loot. You can kill them, and you'll actually get a small amount of Prayer experience for it, but doing so requires druid pouches, which can be annoying to acquire. Thankfully a permanent version of the druid pouch can be earned as a Temple Trekking reward in 3, and a special structure can be built in Old School that permanently stops them from rotting your food, but it doesn't make them any less annoying to deal with.
  • Vampyre juvinates east of Burgh de Rott. If you're trying to farm Vyre Corpses, get used to scrambling around to avoid them, because they're everywhere.
  • Almost everything in the Abyss. Even while having to deal with losing all of your prayer points and becoming skulled upon entering, they will almost never kill you unless you stay in the outer ring for more than a few minutes without doing anything.
  • Pretty much every normal monster encountered in Daemonheim while Dungeoneering counts, particularly when you're trying to do a puzzle at the same time, or if there's a guardian door in the room, thus requiring every monster in that room to be killed. Doubly so in Hard Mode, where every door counts as a guardian door, and the monsters are almost always at their maximum level. And yes, on some floors there are even literal bats.
  • The Tz-Kihs, literal flaming bats that dwell inside the Fight Cave. While they're the weakest enemy inside the cave, they drain your prayer, even if their attacks deal no damage. A group of them can quickly drain your prayer if they're not dealt with.
  • And the Jal-Nibs ("Nibblers") in Old School's Inferno. They go down with one or two Ice Barrages and have nonexistent attack, but they will rapidly eat away at the pillars providing your only source of cover and safespots in the entire arena. Easy to deal with in earlier waves. Not so easy when you're surrounded by enemies that can One-Hit Kill you.
• Goddamned Boss: Quite a few.
  • Loads of these now exist in Dungeoneering. Astea Frostweb is relatively low-level, but she freezes you in place, making it annoying to fight her with melee, and puts up prayers that make her immune to certain types of damage. It doesn't help that she frequently summons ice spiders to help her, especially if you decide to alternate between ranged and magic.
  • The Fight Caves minigame has Tz-Tok Jad at the end, his attacks are fairly easy to dodge^note  You can use Protect from Range and Protect from Magic prayers which block all damage of that type, and you have to watch Jad's attacks and switch to the correct prayer before it hits., but if you mess up, he can easily One-Hit KO you and you have to start from the beginning of the caves, which typically takes 2-3 hours to complete.
  • Plane-Freezer Lakhrahnaz's room is covered in Frictionless Ice. It has moderately high defence against rangers and mages, and it also has a knockback attack it loves to spam against melee warriors.
  • Night-Gazer Khighorahk. Its room has four torches at the corner that must be lit in order for the boss to become vulnerable. Keeping them lit is a chore, and you'll spend the brunt of the first phase relighting them over and over, only having enough time to get maybe a few attacks in. On top of this, if you get within melee distance of the boss, it uses a special attack that can deal well over 8,000 damage if you don't get out of the way. The second phase thankfully eliminates the need to light the torches, but the boss's regular attacks hit harder and it gains a stun attack that it just loves to spam. Getting hit by said stun just before it prepares a special attack is almost guaranteed death unless you use Freedom.
  • Fitting for The Scrappy, Yelps is not so much hard as just hideously annoying. Fought in The Mighty Fall, Yelps has a mountain of HP and can't be damaged until his goblin bodyguards are killed. He also has an immensely irritating special attack where he spins around with his sword and teleports around the arena. Getting caught by his spin attack does ridiculous amounts of damage, and it's hard to dodge. On the bright side, at the end of the fight, you finally get the chance to kill the little bastard. And There Was Much Rejoicing.
  • The eighth Barrows wight, Linza the Disgraced. It's similar to the other Barrows wights, but for whatever reason, it has over twelve times as much HP as they do, at 150,000 HP. Furthermore, the wight's special power can randomly reflect damage done back onto you, making it a hellish fight of attrition. Even worse, for whatever reason, Barrows amulets don't work on it. Thankfully, you never have to deal with this particular wight in the actual crypts by the loot chest.
• Good Bad Bugs: When two players try to follow each other, they end up confusing the pathfinding and thus either end up running through one another back and forth, or facing each other and sidestepping like some kind of schoolyard standoff. This has actually become humorous enough that Jagex has refused to "fix" it. It's even referenced in the Old School quest Making Friends With My Arm as the dance of love, with My Arm and his love interest doing it at the end.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the leading Running Gags through out the Pirate/Rabid Jack quest series was animations of kittens popping up to hide scenes of horrific events. In Pieces of Hate, the text in the "censored" scenes switches from hilarious to threatening during the scene where the 'rum'-pumped crabs destroy the zombies on Braindeath Island, with whoever is provided the text saying that you cannot be saved from its horror. And considering that the kitten you encounter repeatedly in the quest is implied to be a manifestation of Xau-Tak, who's to say it wasn't talking to you in the other quests?
  • During the 2011 Christmas Event in relation to the 2010-released Grandmaster Quest "The Void Stares Back". For those who did the available-for-all Christmas event before one of the highest-requirement quests in the game, Wizard Grayzag mentions that he desires to become the greatest summoner in the world in a semi-joking way while he faces opponents in friendly Snowman-summoning battles. During "The Void Stares Back", it is revealed he has been killing Void Knights for 20 years through the pests to prove this. For those who did the quest before the Christmas Event, these lines are instead said by a Suspiciously Similar Substitute named Wizard Whitezag, serving as a Call-Back instead.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Some fans still cling to the possibility that Guthix could come back in some way, despite the fact that he has been confirmed to be Deader than Dead multiple times by Jagex and even stating himself that he wanted to die.
  • The same has been claimed by many players regarding Bandos, despite also being seen killed on-screen (and having his remains smashed by Armadyl) and Jagex's explicit announcement that the losing god of that battle would die.
  • Hazelmere has also been theorized to have survived Lucien's disintegration attack, due the fact he was known to be an excellent illusionist and could have easily faked his death — this despite the fact he foresaw his coming death and, when he had the possibility to evade his destiny via teleportation, he chose not to. His death, just like Xenia's, is confirmed in Nomad's Elegy.
  • This trope also applies to certain villains like Fairy Godfather and Wizard Ellaron; Word of God is that "they are dead unless it is later decided they are wanted to come back."
  • King Tyras, allegedly killed during the Regicide quest in the Elf series, is subject to this. Some players suspect that his second-in-command, General Hining, might actually be Tyras. Not only do you never find a body, you never even see Tyras directly — the Player Character's method of assassination is a napalm explosive launched at Tyras' closed tent, which is only ever seen burning from the outside. His death, however, is verbally confirmed in "Plague's End".
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In July of 2013, the quest Bringing Home the Bacon was released in which the player builds a machine to train pigs for various tasks. The following month, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs became available for preorder.
• Hype Backlash: A downplayed version in the Mobilizing Armies minigame. Prior to its release, it was really hyped up as the next big thing and something that a significant part of the fanbase was looking forward to. It even got a main page post specifically apologizing for its delay when it got pushed back a month. When it finally came out...it wasn't bad, but it died fairly quickly. After a few months, the only reason people went was to boost so they could access the higher tier reward shops.
• I Knew It!:
  • The Rewards Trader is Marmaros.
  • Koschei the Deathless revealed to be Kharshai, which was correctly theorised by a large part of the fanbase.
  • Some fans even managed to correctly guess that Wizard Melville Grayzag, a comic-relief villain from the very old quest "Imp Catcher," was the mysterious person responsible for the events of the Void Pest questline, solely due to the fact that "Quiet Before the Swarm," the first installment of the Void series, has the aforementioned very old quest as a prerequisite despite otherwise having nothing to do with it.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Much of the history of Zaros is well known to those who care for the plot, despite much of it coming from Master-tier quests. Still, most Zarosian armour and weapons are never referred to as such, instead being referred to by the word "Ancient". Lampshaded in Movario's notes:
    First, we have Zamorak, the Mahjarrat god who wielded the staff to gain power and fight the 'Nameless One' (whose name is Zaros: doesn't everyone know this already?).
  • Guthix's death. Despite happening at the end of a grandmaster quest, due to being referenced in almost every piece of content since the start of the Sixth Age (including low-level quests accessible in the free part of the game), it's widely known.
• Jerkass Woobie: Crossing over with Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, there's the Dark Lord, otherwise known as the Fragment of Seren from the Old School plague/elf questline. While it's undeniable that she's caused a lot of harm in Underground Pass, Song of the Elves reveals that she was a fragment of Seren's darkness that was infused with some of Geilinor's darkness, creating the Fragment in an attempt to break the curse she accidentally put upon the elves. Upon her creation, she immediately tried to kill Seren because of what she is, and was sealed away. Rather than attempting to rehabilitate her, Seren just left her locked up in the Temple of Light for thousands of years and tried to forget about her, deeming the Fragment her greatest failure. When you fight her, her dialogue sounds like you're fighting an abused child rather than an actual monster.
• Junk Rare:
  • It's possible, but extremely rare, to randomly receive 100 silver ore as a drop from most monsters with drop tables. Otherwise, silver ore is a common item, and even a hundred of them are only worth a few thousand gold in total. The dragon spear is obtained through a similar system (an extremely rare drop from the same wide variety of enemies) and is also very close to completely worthless. Other items on the rare drop table include stacks of 150 lobsters or 500 flax.
  • Clue scrolls occasionally reward the player with rare and valuable items... and other times, you get a handful of mundane firelighters, herb seeds, teleport scrolls to places that already have a lodestone nearby, biscuits, or purple sweets. At the very least, purple sweets are very valuable in Old School, there are no seed or biscuit rewards, and only one teleport scroll (Void Knight Outpost) is actually worthless.
  • A potential reward for a master clue in Old School is a head of cabbage. The odds of getting one is extremely low.
  • Fish masks. Despite being discontinued, due to being released long after other rares such as partyhats, it was expected that they would become as valuable as they were, and were thus hoarded in great numbers. Due to this, they are worth less than one million coins, even after almost two years after release. It's probably not helped by the fact that compared to party hats, they're incredibly ugly.
  • Tradeable holiday event items, such as the party hat and the Santa hat, are some of the most valuable items in the entire game, some of which have market values of more gold than the maximum amount possible. However, virtually all of them do not do anything to the player's stats when worn. Discontinued items are similar, very valuable, even though some of them are now completely useless.
  • Seercull is one of the unique drops from the Dagannoth Kings. It's a unique bow that, according to lore, was used by the Fremennik to fight the Moon Clan. Unfortunately, it's functionally just a reskinned magic longbow with a different special attack. Magic longbows are already unimpressive Ranged weapons, and Seercull's special attack is nearly useless.
  • Wilderness Slayer tasks in Old School have a very rare chance of dropping an enchantment scroll for the slayer staff, which increases damage done by Slayer Dart on Slayer tasks by your Magic level for 2500 hits (not casts, hits). It's almost universally seen as worthless, since it not only also increases the minimum level to use it from 55 Magic to 75 (at which point you'd have better staves to use), but Slayer Dart is a terrible spell for tasks to begin with. As such, despite its rarity, it's worth only just a little over a thousand gold and is often better left on the ground.
  • The Pegasian Crystal in Old School. It's a rare drop (1/512) from Cerberus that can be used to create the Pegasian Boots, which have the strongest Ranged bonus for the boots slot. The problem is, creating the boots requires the Ranger Boots, a very rare reward (1/1,133 per reward roll) from medium Treasure Trails. Since most players seldom bother with medium Treasure Trails, there is typically a huge surplus of Pegasian Crystals, and they sell for a pittance compared to the other rare items Cerberus can drop.
  • Arguably, Bryophyta's Staff, but only on member's worlds. As a combat staff, it's got high magical accuracy and melee bonuses, but the Ancient Staff outclasses it in every single way. It can store nature runes, and has a 1/15 chance to save a nature rune, but nature runes are cheap and if you're casting skilling spells, you'll probably want an elemental staff. That said, it's by far the strongest staff available to free players, and that alone lets it maintain a consistently hefty value.
  • Mod Dolan's rubber duck is an untradeable item that is dropped at a 1/10,000 rate from using the Fertiliser ability of legendary pets.
  • The Zaryte bow is dropped by Nihil at a 1/1,000,000 rate, but its street value has gradually decreased from 200 million to about 10 million coins.
• Like You Would Really Do It: The supposed penalty for losing the third World Event, "Tuska Comes", was the destruction of Gielinor. Literally no one thought that Jagex would actually go through with it, and some players even advocated for deliberately losing the event just to see what would happen. To their disappointment, we never found out. Although it was hinted that Zaros would have been the one to kill Tuska if that had been the result.
• Love to Hate: Sliske, full stop. On top of assassinating Guthix and converting many mortals into his personal wights, he garnered this reputation for his trollish antics, not only from pissing off his detractors as much as possible, but being secretive when questioned about his motivations while simultaneously enjoying the confusion as others try to learn what he's really up to. At the same time, though, plenty of players are just sick and tired of enduring him being a blatant Karma Houdini for years on end (until "Sliske's Endgame" came along).
• Low-Tier Letdown: Among Slayer masters, Duradel is the least popular. Not only is he one of the masters with the highest requirements (at level 100 combat and 50 Slayer, he has the fourth highest requirements in RS3 and the highest ones in OSRS), but he's out of the way unless you have Karamja gloves 3 or 4, and Sumona or Nieve (depending on which version you're playing, with them being RS3 and Old School, respectively) are very similar in the tasks they give out while having lower requirements (90 Combat and 35 Slayer/85 Combat and no Slayer prerequisite respectively). While Sumona is also out of the way and requires you to complete Smoking Kills, Nieve is both near the spirit tree in the Gnome Stronghold and can be teleported to directly with a slayer ring.
• Memetic Badass:
  • In-game, Thok of Daemonheim.
  • Within the community, Zezima has reached this level for being the player who held the global #1 spot on the High Scores list for several years until he retired following the release of Summoning. He still logs into the game from time to time, however, and is still regarded as such, even over a decade after he dropped off from the position.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The old Gnome Child chathead model, due to Gnome Children saying utterly bizarre things combined with a completely blank, slightly derpy-looking expression. Sometimes combined with the Halo announcer declaring "Slayer".
  • Runescape allows players to simply follow other players. However, if two players both select "Follow" on each other, the game will be confused and result in a rather humorous animation where they either walk through each other repeatedly or constantly sidestep while facing one another. Expect to see at least two people doing this in front of the grand exchange.
  • Pillars, after Mother Mallum's infamously anticlimactic death in Salt in the Wound.
  • This is not a dating site.
  • spin2win, also a reference to the meme from League of Legends.
  • "Gainz", referring to Level Grinding as the absolute way of life, either seriously, mockingly, or as Self-Deprecation.
  • Connection Lost. Please wait - Attempting to Reestablish.
  • "Zezima has logged in." "Zezima has logged out.", as players who had him added as a friend would see Zezima log in, take a few steps or do a few tasks, and then instantly log out. On a documentary, he would reveal that the moment he logged in, he would see a flood of messages from people asking him for things, and had to log out quickly to avoid being overrun.
  • Due to the rather aged and ragged look of their graphical update and their association with crystals, the elves in Runescape are sometimes referred to as drug addicts, particularly crystal meth. During "Plague's End", Lady Meilyr mentions using her potions recreationally and even mistakes your arrival for a hallucination. The fact that the Cywir clan on Tarddiad in The Light Within quest literally cannot live without crystals does not help this image one bit.
  • The phrase "buying gf"
  • "Joel get on Skype", originally a Twitch meme, has become popular at sinkholes and Wintertodt.
  • "Naabe", a nickname used by the Gorajo, also tends to be spouted endlessly around sinkholes.
  • The Black Knight Titan, an otherwise forgettable enemy in an easy mid-level quest, became something of a running joke due to his simplistic, low-polygon model that the developers never bothered updating. He's the surprise villain of the 15 year Milestone Celebration quest, where he's angry about having never been updated.
  • A fan petition started after 'Sliske's Endgame' for renaming Akrisae The Doomed into Akrisae The Forgotten after it was revealed that the developers actually had forgotten about him. Hence why he wasn't in the quest or even mentioned for that matter.
  • "Spaghetti code" as an excuse for why old content is so buggy and/or can't be updated.
  • "I have defeated 0 the Magister" is a quick chat option often spammed at Soul Obelisks, notably before the Magister was even released.
  • On the Runescape subreddit in October 2017, there's an endless amount of snarky memes about the Treasure Hunter Loot Box system being skill-based as opposed to pure RNG, after Jagex released a statement to various charities saying that Runescape is a purely skill-based game.
  • "Have you heard about the Mining and Smithing rework?" This phrase came from NPCs that were added to the game to advertise the upcoming massive overhaul to Mining and Smithing (which has been released in early January 2019). They would periodically repeat the phrase "Hey, <nearby player's name>. Have you heard about the Mining and Smithing rework?".
  • 92 is half of 99.^note Runescape's experience curves are designed that, barring the first few dozen levels, the player essentially doubles their experience in that skill every 7 levels. This means that, for most skills (Invention in RS3 being the sole exception due to having an entirely different curve), reaching Level 92 means that you've only earned half of the experience required to reach Level 99, the level where most skills are considered "mastered".
  • Baroo! ^note The onomatopoeia used for yak calls
  • Crabs ^note Based on the "Crab Rave" meme, it's common for posts critical of Jagex on sites like Reddit or Imgur to begin and end with crab emojis. Popular snowclones include "JAGEX IS POWERLESS AGAINST X" (originally "JAGEX IS POWERLESS AGAINST A PVP CLAN", referring to an incident where a competitive tournament in Old School was, after massive uproar, forced to disqualify the winning player due to blatant cheating via DDOSing the other contestants, while accusations were leveled at a member of the Old School staff, who happened to be a member of the same clan as the cheater on his non-staff account, for helping him; the staff member in question was later fired for abusing his position to steal in-game gold from players for his own agenda, with many players believing, albeit with no conclusive proof, that it was to benefit the aforementioned clan), "$11" (referring to a controversial increase in the price of membership for both games in 2018), and "HIDE POLL RESULTS" (the polling system in Old School used to show the current results of player votes even before a player cast a vote of their own, which was widely believed to skew results via peer pressure)
  • For Wonderfuckland! ^note Back in the days of RS2, wonderfuckland bypassed the swear filter for some bizarre reason and had the swear in plain sight. It became a meme to say that when using the Excalibur special attack to replace the "For Camelot!" that automatically appeared overhead.
  • 73, the ginger integer.^note Old School streamer B0aty (whose hair is ginger) had an infamous incident where, while doing PvP, got hit by an Armadyl Godsword special attack for all of his health, which was 73 (it's obscenely rare for it to hit that high, so he was assumed to be at a safe HP level). Since then, it took off to the point where the number 73 is associated with him. Amusingly, it got to the point where after a Tangleroot update that allowed you to change its appearance got a hotfix for the herb variant to remove a reference to the number 420...and also the number 73.
  • The Announcement ^ExplanationIn 2017, players were greeted by a cryptic message in-game, teasing "The Announcement" in a week. This turned out to be an announcement for a Mobile version of Runescape, but the ominous way in which it was teased spawned several memes.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Lucien murdering half-a-dozen of Gielinor's greatest heroes (which were close friends of the player character) and severely injuring two more of them.
  • Wizard Ellaron trying to use Ariane as the conduit for the destruction of the Wizards' Tower. He even gets mocked by the wizards he is supposedly avenging before their spirits transport him to the Abyss to experience the conflagration himself.
  • Amascut crosses the line when she massacres the desert monkeys and curses their goddess to lose three of her senses.
  • Sigmund's repeated attempts to commit genocide against the entire goblin race.
  • Sliske may have used the heroic Barrows Brothers for his own personal gain, but he crosses it big time in The World Wakes by murdering Guthix. He continues merrily frolicking deeper and deeper into this territory as his "game" progresses, murdering innocents and heroes alike for kicks and coming out a Karma Houdini every single time to keep his quest line running, until the finale, Sliske's Endgame, when he finally gets his comeuppance at the player's hands.
  • Bandos crosses it in his backstory when he murders his sleeping deity to become a god despite knowing it would wipe all life on his home world.
  • Lord Iorwerth and King Lathas crossed the line when they tried to slaughter the entire population of West Ardougne to fuel the ritual to restore the Dark Lord.
  • Lord Drakan created magical storms to turn the once beautiful Icyene kingdom of Hallowvale into the haunted swampland of Morytania.
  • Zamorak crossed this at the end of the God Wars when, as he was facing defeat from the combined forces of Saradomin, Armadyl, and Bandos, he essentially nuked Forinthry with the Stone of Jas, turning it into what eventually became the Wilderness. The resulting loss of life and damage to the planet's Anima Mundi was so massive that it woke Guthix from his original slumber and caused him to banish every other god while preventing them from returning until his death removed those protections.
• More Popular Spin Off: 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 over a decade after it launched.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The "level up" fireworks, and the fanfare that plays when you advance a Combat Level. Also, the fanfare and fireworks you get when you reach level 99 in a skill.
  • The fanfare that plays whenever you reach a total level milestone.
  • The Grand Exchange update jingle. There's nothing more satisfying than knowing that your items have been sold.
  • The trickle of coins when your Ring of Wealth affects a drop. Interestingly enough, this can also become annoying while fighting Cave Horrors, since it plays after every single kill, regardless of the drop's value.
  • The sound of a fire spell. Doubly so for ice spells... unless you are on the receiving end. Sadly, while the iconic ringing sound of ice spells is no more in RS3^note except for the strongest ice spell, Ice Barrage, which it is most associated with, it is still present in Old School.
  • The sound of enchanted bolts activating. Each one has a different sound, but the best would be ruby bolts. Not necessarily in terms of the sound it makes (it sounds like a bird of prey screaming), but because it deals 10% of your target's current HP. If you're using them instead of the other bolts you brought with you, that sound means you broke past your max hit.
• Narm:
  • The Grotesque Guardians, Dawn and Dusk, are gigantic Dual Boss gargoyles created during the God Wars with Bandosian steel that can hit through prayer. They sound like a chinchompa.
  • The player-owned-port random event 'A Simple Favour' has you playing as the Black Marketeer, helping some Death Lotus assassins find their targets. The Death Lotus are skilled and deadly assassins, feared throughout the Wushanko Isles... and in the random event, they're hiding in barrels. They look ridiculous.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: A segment of the player base feels the game simply hasn't been the same since Insight Venture Partners bought out Jagex and the Gower brothers left the company. In particular, it was only after this point that microtransactions were implemented — something the Gower-era administration explicitly promised not to do.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Most press around Runescape 3 centers around the predatory microtransactions in the game, rather than major updates such as new skills; people who follow Old School but not 3 are probably apathetic to developments in Runescape 3, but will gladly let you know about the time that Jagex executives got called before the British Parliament due to concerns about monetization.
• Nintendo Hard: Ultimate Ironman Mode locks you out from banks, so you're limited to just your inventory and whatever items you can equip. Needless to say, this mode provides quite a challenge.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • While on the "Desert Treasure" quest, you'd better bank those Diamonds of Azzanadra until the final part of the quest. If you don't, you may get randomly attacked by a stranger with a poisoned dragon dagger. He CAN and WILL use the special. And yes, this can happen in your house.
    • "Desert Treasure II" ups the ante with the Mysterious Figure, who packs a lot more of a punch than the stranger does. She can ambush you anywhere at anytime, even inside the comforts of your own home. Once she appears she will tele-block you, and occasionally uses Ice Barrage if you try to leg it. If you didn't have a weapon switch prepared, she will protect against the damage type you last used. And to top it all off, you can't bank the "Desert Treasure II" medallions, meaning you have to book it to the Ancient Vault basically as soon as you get one of them. She'll also sometimes disguise herself as the sandwich lady.
  • The Wilderness. A huge, desolate, mostly empty area, where you can be attacked by other players at any given time.
  • Post-"Azzanadra's Quest", the only named Temple Knights who are confirmed to still be Saradominist loyalists are Sir Tiffy Cashien and Sir Owen, and the only confirmed Zarosian loyalist is Lady Eva Cashien. Everyone else the player has encountered up to then could potentially secretly have been a Zaros devotee all along. Any one of them.
  • Prior to the retirement of random events, the evil chicken could pop up at any time with no warning whatsover.
• Player Punch:
  • Players who have become fond of Hazelmere the ancient gnome mage, Cyrisus the fighter, Ghommal the giant door man, Sloane the Strength master, and the Slayer Masters Duradel and Turael may feel like they've been punched in the gut when all of those people die confronting Lucien during "While Guthix Sleeps".
  • In "Ritual of the Mahjarrat", Jhallan, Idria and Akrisae are killed by Lucien, the Dragonkin, and Sliske, respectively. Sir Tiffy and Thaerisk also die during a nightmarish vision, in which all the aforementioned characters make an appearance just to die again, but the former two get better.
  • Likewise, people who became fond of Princess Astrid and Prince Brand may feel like crying after they die fighting the Dagganoth Kings in the "Blood Runs Deep" quest. It doesn't help that you married one of them a few moments before!
  • The deaths of Thaerisk Cemphier, Fiara, Cres and Guthix in "The World Wakes".
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: It's common to find players with this attitude, clicking rapidly through all the dialogue in quests and consulting a fansite Walkthrough instead so they can get the rewards as quickly as possible without bothering with the storyline.
• Popular with Furries:
  • Mr. Mordaut, intelligent red dragon, former Random Event NPC and current head of the outpost on Anachronia, has some devotees among the scalie crowd.
  • Bird-loving furries have displayed some affection for Armadyl, being that he is both an aviansie and canonically gay.
• Quality by Popular Vote: Tends to be claimed by both sides in the "RS3 vs. OSRS" debate; OSRS fans claim that their much higher player counts in recent years are proof of higher quality, while RS3 fans often point to the botting problems in OSRS (or this trope) to counter those assertions.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The Dragon Scimitar fell into Scrappy Weapon territory once the Evolution of Combat dropped, which only worsened once its historically-reviled special attack got added back in 2014, making it inferior to literally all other dragon weapons (which had the same or similar stats, but better special attacks). This all changed in 2022, when dragon weapons had their special attacks rebalanced across the board. The scimitar got one of the biggest buffs, with its attack going from a vastly inferior version of the Havoc ability that cost 55% adrenaline, to a more utility-oriented special attack — in addition to having a much lower cost of 25% adrenaline, it now gives a 25% accuracy bonus to slashing weapons for one minute. Combine this with the fact that many of the best melee weapons in the game — most notably halberds and both tier 95 melee weapons — are slashing weapons, and you have a highly useful special attack for fighting targets with high defence. While it might not have restored the beloved Dragon Scimitar to its former glory, it at least gives players a reason to keep it in their arsenal even for endgame combat.
  • Old School had an equipment rebalance in 2021 that rescued several weapons from the heap, but the most significantly affected among them were warhammers. Once one of the worst weapon types in Old School, warhammers got a significant buff that not only increased their damage output to be roughly the same as battleaxes, but also changed them to have Strength level requirements instead of the typical Attack requirements of other weapons. This would be a significant change to the Player Killing scene, as it not only introduced Strength pures to the free-to-play game, it also gave members pures access to the powerful special attack of the Dragon warhammer.
  • Queen Ellamaria of Varrock had been known for the longest time as the obnoxious questgiver who sent players on the infamous Garden of Tranquility quest. While the novels alleviated this slightly by portraying her as a queen who actually does something, this was largely lost on the playerbase who got their story from the game alone. Come the Fort Forinthry storyline, her reputation as a Retired Badass slowly began to catch on with players, but it was not until The Reveal in Dead and Buried that she’d been the fan-favorite NPC and Slayer Master The Raptor that opinions on her fully swung around.
• Saved by the Fans:
  • The Golden Chinchompa promo in September 2013, wherein players could win the pet at random from the Squeal of Fortune and would have to feed it food specifically from said wheel. The goal was to feed the creature until it exploded into gold, and more morbidly, a grave complete with the animal's personalized name, free to place in your player-owned house. After a wave of outcry for the fuzzy creature, Jagex added it as a permanent pet for members to obtain from Solomon's General Store (either free for members, or a number of RuneCoins for non-members. In fact, it was so popular it even made its way into Old School!
  • The Teddy from the 2014 Halloween event was an item that reduced the player's fear whilst busting ghosts, but was initially not available outside the event. After players mounted a campaign, it was eventually added to Solomon's General Store as an offhand Magic cosmetic override in November 2014.
  • The Juvenile Wolves from Carnillean Rising were eventually added as post-quest pets in January 2017; that said, Rover and Spot each required 200 and 400 Quest Points respectively to claim. It helps that they are both essentially large puppies, wearing Dragon heads over their actual heads, adding a kind of Badass Adorable vibe.
  • After the Evolution of Combat dropped, Jagex entertained the idea of bringing back an older version of the game for players who were dissatisifed. They polled the playerbase to see if there was any interest in this older version, which was responsed with an overwhelming "Yes". Had interest not been high enough, Old School may have never been revived.
• The Scrappy: Hatius Cosaintus from Old School. He's one of the first NPCs a new player sees, and between his name ("hate us 'cause they ain't us") and his equipment, he looks very out of place in Lumbridge, and doesn't fit the tone of the game well. He's so hated, he's actually been polled for removal several times.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The six-hour logout timer. While ostensibly to prevent macros or bots, most players simply find it annoying at best, and infuriating at worst. If you get logged out, say, thirty minutes into a raid, you will lose all your progress on the raid and will have to start over. Even worse is if you get logged out in the wilderness or while there is loot on the floor, which is on a timer and may despawn in the time it takes to log back in.
  • Failable agility obstacles. While players may concede that they are fine in agility training courses, and will at most grumble about failable agility shortcuts, most find them inexcusable if a quest requires passing multiple failable agility obstacles. Particular offenders are Underground Pass, Mourning's End part II, Icthlarin's Little Helper, Monkey Madness II, and Dragon Slayer II.
  • Emote clue scrolls require you to perform an emote with certain items equipped. Obtaining said items is annoying to begin with, but some of them, like metal boots and snakeskin armor, are especially irritating due to not being sold by NPC's and rarely being sold on the Grand Exchange, which means you'll also probably use up a bank spot to hang onto them for the next time you get that clue. However, an update to revamp the clue scroll system included the ability to add hidey-holes/STASH units to store items near emote sites. Of course, if you forget to put the items back into the hidey-holes after you use them, you only have yourself to blame.
  • Coordinate clues require you to use a very clunky navigation interface to find a spot to dig. What's worse, some of them send you to dangerous places like the Wilderness where stopping to use said interface would be problematic. Many players regard these as de facto Guide Dang It! moments. Old School would eventually remove the requirement to carry a sextant and watch, so you only have to know where to dig.
  • The inability to play music of your choice in Daemonheim. Don't like the ambient soundtrack or the battle songs? Too bad, whatever you put on will get cut off in a few seconds and replaced with the Daemonheim music.
  • The Livid Farm. If you want to unlock all the Lunar spells, you have to play over forty hours of an incredibly repetitive and dull minigame that takes tons of runes and has lousy XP rewards. To make matters worse, a lot of the spells are virtually useless. Teleport to South Falador? Okay...or I could warp to the Port Sarim lodestone and run for three seconds.
  • The Treasure Hunter minigame and its predecessor, the Squeal of Fortune. Both are widely reviled by the player base for essentially allowing players to spend unlimited amounts of real-life money to buy "keys" or "spins" which usually give in-game rewards including (but not limited to) immediate experience boosts, bonus experience rewarded while training, sacks full of thousands or even millions of coins, experience-boosting equipment, "lucky" versions of powerful high-level gear, unique cosmetic equipment or useful in-game goods and items. Rarely does a week go by without Jagex running and advertising a new promotion to entice players to spend money on Keys, and they resolutely ignore or dismiss any negative sentiment that players express about it.
  • Solomon's General Store is a milder example — while many players do resent it for being emblematic of Jagex's ever-increasing emphasis on microtransactions (including NPCs whose only function in-game is to constantly advertise for it), it isn't generally as loathed as Treasure Hunter or the Squeal of Fortune, since almost all of the merchandise in the Store is cosmetic in nature.
  • Stuns. During the early days of RuneScape, they were actually a mildly annoying mechanic to deal with, as they simply prevented you from moving or attacking. Once the Evolution of Combat came around, however, they became much worse and are one of the main sources of complaints about the combat system, particularly in regards to PvP. Now in addition to stopping you from moving or attacking, they prevent you from eating, teleporting, changing prayers, and even changing your gear, all while your chatbox gets spammed with "You can't (walk/eat/teleport/change prayers/do that/whatever) while stunned.". The worst part about this is, NPCs that already could stun you were retrofitted with the new stun mechanics. Fortunately, Jagex has shown some mercy on this mechanic by including ways that you can render yourself temporarily immune to or even release yourself from stuns, but those abilities have long cooldowns and you'll find yourself stunned with no way out more often than not against certain foes.
  • Stealth sections in some quests and minigames. Often it is not very clear when the NPC can detect the player or not. That is coupled with tick-based movement in Oldschool Runescape which can result of sections largely based on luck.
  • About 90% of the Wilderness Refresh was despised by players. PVP being made opt-in, the abundance of Slayer mobs and the introduction of Mandrith as a Wilderness-exclusive Slayer Master were were well-liked; everything else wasn't. There was a 'threat' system introduced that meant that the longer you stayed in the Wilderness and the more mobs you killed, the more likely that random monsters would spawn in your vicinity and attack you for no reason, on top of the Wilderness Volcano randomly shooting projectiles at players that could insta-gib them if they didn't pray the correct Protect/Deflect prayer. This was taken out of the game seven months later.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • A big part of the fanbase claims that RuneScape has been getting worse since 2007 — the majority of the gripes on here are from at least 2008 or later^note although as of 2019, RuneScape is eighteen years old, 2008 is over half of the game's existence ago, and very few players have stuck with the game consistently that entire time. Since that point, RuneScape's number of subscribers has been slowly but steadily decreasing, and it doesn't help that the newer quests and content are riddled with unfair bosses, highly unintuitive puzzles, bugs and Aborted Arcs aplenty.
  • A considerable part of the fanbase believes that the plot has fallen apart after "The World Wakes" was released. While the quest itself has been praised as a Wham Episode and a Best Level Ever, the fallout of Guthix's death has resulted in questionable storytelling choices ever since. This sentiment included the deaths of Ensemble Darkhorses like Zanik in "The Mighty Fall", the sidelining and gradual killing-off of the Signature Heroes, the Wolverine Publicity of Sliske the Mahjarrat and the Godless faction, and the constant focus on the growing Cosmic Horror Story of the Elder Gods at the expense of rushed and unsatisfying ends to several long-standing series like the Elf and Myreque quests. It got to the point that anything that didn't revolve around the Elder Gods and/or Sliske seemed to be consigned by Jagex to outright Development Hell.
    • Perhaps not coincidentally, mid-2016 was when Old School became a More Popular Spin-Off, pulling ahead of the main version of RuneScape in active player counts.
    • There was much relief when the Second God War arc ended in late 2016 with Sliske's death and the Stone of Jas' destruction, and since then the game's lore has shifted focus the The Dreaded Lovecraftian god Xau-Tak as the new main villain, who many players find far more interesting (not to mention terrifying) than Sliske.
  • On top of all of this, "rewards" for microtransactions are being rolled out monthly and even weekly, with a clear intent to bleed out the players' wallets so they can get an unfair advantage — or just to prey on players who feel like they've Gotta Catch 'Em All, who incidentally are the ideal mark for microtransactions to bleed dry.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • 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. Some players take it a step further by playing region-locked Ironman accounts.
  • Some players stay at combat level 3^note There is no combat level 1 or 2. Runescape 3 briefly increased the minimum level to 4, though this was changed back after a while. The minimum level was always 3 in Old School. and only level up non-combat skills like cooking.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Recipe for Disaster, which at the time of its release was the game's longest and most difficult quest, is the sequel to Cook's Assistant, a tutorial quest. The quest was designed so that pretty much anyone could start it, but only the most accomplished could actually finish it.
    • Within said quest, several quest bosses are fought in new forms, which also feature higher levels, and some other gimmicks (like the inability to use prayer.) Thankfully, the player is able to exit the battle to restock at any time, and does not have to refight any bosses they have beaten, which makes preparing for these fights far easier.
    • Averted with Cook's Assistant's second sequel, Chef's Assistant, where you instead introduce cheesecake to Gielinor.
  • Demon Slayer and its sequel Shadow of the Storm. From an early-game freeplay quest where your biggest Fetch Quest is 25 bones and your biggest fear of dying is accidentally aggroing a level 9 mage, to a long, desert-based quest with several puzzles and a level 100 boss capable of using protection prayers.
  • Infamously in the Plague quest line.
    • First, you have two easy (if rather long) quests to the frustrating Underground Pass, which is a very, very long trek through a monster-infested cave wit many riddles, enemies to fight, and agility checks to pass or else take lots of damage. Some people still consider Underground Pass to be one of the hardest quests in the game, particularly for the level it's "intended" to be completed at.
    • Once out of the Underground Pass, then comes Regicide, which is less frustrating but rather plot-heavy and still has some frustrating moments. After that comes Roving Elves, a much shorter Breather Level, then Mourning's End Part I which is long but intricate, and then the infamous Mourning's End Part II, which is considered to be even harder for its level than even Underground Pass was.
    • In Old School, you proceed directly to Song of the Elves to cap off the questline, but in the main game, you still have a few quests left that offer another quick breather, before you can complete Plague's End, which features one of the most difficult quest bosses in the game.
  • Also in Old School, Dragon Slayer II is much more difficult than the original Dragon Slayer quest.
  • Desert Treasure II is billed as the most challenging quest in Old School, which is saying a lot as the first quest was challenging in its own right.
• Sequelitis: Several quest lines have gone downhill spectacularly.
  • "The Chosen Commander" was the finale for the Dorgeshuun quest series, and is generally considered one of the finest quests in the game. "The Mighty Fall", billed as another Dorgeshuun quest, naturally would have some big shoes to fill. However, it fell short in nearly every regard, featuring a Happy Ending Override for "The Chosen Commander", some of the cheapest boss fights in the game, and possibly the ugliest graphical update in any game ever. Fortunately, the Happy Ending Override was itself overridden in "Nomad's Elegy."
  • The slug questline started promisingly, with "Sea Slug", "The Slug Menace", and "Kennith's Concerns" setting up the slugs and their leader Mother Mallum as a major threat to the whole of Gielinor. "The Hunt for Red Raktuber" even implies that the slugs have gained control of advanced penguin technology. Then came "Salt in the Wound". Widely considered one of the worst quests in the game, "Salt in the Wound" throws out a lot of plot points from previous quests, shoehorns in Dungeoneering for no reason, is absolutely packed with plot holes and out of character moments, reduces Mother Mallum to an absurd Anticlimax Boss, and introduces a lot of humor (mostly in the form of bland pop-culture references) into a previously very serious questline. To date, a sizable portion of the player base refuses to acknowledge it as canon, or believes that it was all a delusion caused by Mother Mallum. Word of God stated that the intent behind this quest was to create a series of quests that could be completed in its entirety by lower-middle level players, but the majority of players felt it wasn't worth it at all.
  • Sliske's quest series, which reached Spotlight-Stealing Squad status through most of 2016, quickly got tiresome and irritating for plenty of players, considering each new quest reached new heights of That One Level, involving confrontations with That One Puzzle and That One Boss (or several at once). Meanwhile, there was no actual payoff at any point, as Sliske always had a way to come out a Karma Houdini to preserve his Joker Immunity, even in "Sliske's Endgame", the alleged Grand Finale of his series, where yet another Sequel Hook ensued as Sliske transfers his soul into the World Guardian via the Staff of Armadyl while dying and being Taken for Granite.
• Song Association: "Planet Hell" by Nightwish is perhaps best known for its association with the Falador Massacre.
• So Okay, It's Average: Several of the quests made earlier in Runescape's history get this reaction, especially Free-To-Play quests. Nobody can say with a straight face that they remember anything about the Clock Tower quest, other than the fact that it would be made much better if Scissorman made an appearance.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Tuska's theme is very, very similar to Leaving Earth from Mass Effect 3.
  • A few tracks in Old School's "Theatre of Blood" raid were changed due to similarities to songs from Rayman games.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • With the retirement and replacement of Yelps and the Squeal of Fortune, Jagex issued a player poll to decide the goblin's fate. Some of the options included peaceful retirement, completely removing him from the game, and using him as a target for sharp thrown objects in a minigame. The winning option, however, was one in which players get to kill Yelps in a messy way in a future quest, which turned out to be "The Mighty Fall".
  • After his removal as a random event, the Drunken Dwarf showed up in several quests, usually annoying an NPC and getting maimed for it.
  • Pauline is the NPC in charge of Livid Farm, a tedious mini game that, though a good source of magic xp, requires an extensive amount of time to unlock anything in. During the "Dimension of Disaster" quest, her Alternate Self is one of Zemourgal's living prisoners. You have the option to give sarcastic versions of the encouragement you give her in the minigame, her examine text says it would be harder to break her free than it would be to complete Livid Farm, and there is an NPC throwing tomatoes at her, saying "This is for Livid Farm!".
  • After making random events optional in Old School, refusing to participate in one without just choosing the dismiss option has you insult the character.
• That One Attack:
  • If you have a slow internet connection, any attack that requires you to dodge projectiles can turn into this. Particularly nasty examples include the Luminescent Icefiend's icicle rain and the Spirit Beast's magical attacks.
  • In its heyday, Ice Barrage was this to players who played Castle Wars and other PvP minigames. A lot of Ancient Magicks users were usually trash-talked by those on the receiving end of such attacks. This is still the case in Old School, and doubly so if your opponent is in maxed mage gear.
  • The Crazy Archaeologist and Deranged Archaeologist in Old School both have the same special attack; they throw explosive books at and around your current position. Thankfully, the attack is avoidable if you start running as soon as they launch it. However, the version used by the Deranged Archaeologist does absurd damage, easily hitting into the 80s or 90s if you get hit by multiple books. This might still be manageable, but the Deranged Archaeologist is fought in a small enclosed arena, and he has powerful, accurate melee attacks, meaning that it's easy to accidentally take a book hit, panic, misclick, and end up running into melee range and getting punched to death.
  • Galvek, the final boss of Dragon Slayer II, will ocassionally lob a fireball into the air that will land where you're standing after a few seconds. This attack can be avoided by moving out of the way, but if the fireball makes a direct hit, it's pretty much a guaranteed instant kill.
  • The fragment of Seren has an attack that freezes you in place and then does 99% of your max HP. This attack can't be avoided, so you must be prepared to tank the hit.
  • 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.
  • The Arch-Glacor's laser beam basically requires you to pray Protect/Deflect Magic and use the Devotion ability or else face a One-Hit KO. 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.
  • Arraxor and Arraxi's acid phase has the ability to spawn an acidic spider that is a guaranteed One-Hit KO 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 mechanics like summoned minions or darkness periods, expect to be paying Death a lot of cash for this bullshit.
• That One Level:
  • One Small Favor. A Chain of Deals quest taken to absurdity. It starts with you needing to ask for some logs from one of the foresters nearby, but the chain of "small favors" ends up taking you arround nearly the entire world. And the quest likes throwing curveballs to get you to run arround more, such as the person not having the item you need but knowing another person who does, and even a few combats while you're finally resolving the chain. The player character's frustration is shared with the actual player, especially when you're finally done and the quest giver nearly doesn't reward you until you explain what you had to go through just for some goddamn logs.
  • The snake event in Temple Trekking / Burgh de Rott Ramble is generally accepted as the hardest challenge to take a hard-tier character through, especially in Old School. If you're particularly unlucky, the snakes can quickly stack out your escort before you get a chance to attack them. Oh, and good luck trying to attack all of the snakes before that happens; they're a pain to click on.
  • The gnome tunnel under Ape Atoll, if you attempt "Monkey Madness" at a low level, especially in Old School. Hundreds of aggressive, powerful skeleton gorillas and zombie monkeys, poisonous floor traps, and constant damage from falling rocks, all on the epitome of a Space-Filling Path.
  • Icthlarin's Little Helper is a quest that requires all of two other quests to do: Diamond in the Rough and Gertrude's Cat, both very easy quests, all things considered. So this can't be too bad, right? HAHAHA No. The majority of the action in this quest happens though a Whole Episode Flashback as it comes to light what your adventurer did something under the influence of a malevolent deity that majorly pissed off a ghost and most of Sophanem. "Highlights" include a pyramid filled with deathtraps often obscured by a rotating "filter" indicating that it's in a flashback, dying in the flashback being no different than a regular death somehow, and the ability to lose your cat if you answer a Sphinx's riddle wrong.
  • The Underground Pass quest is a struggle to get through for just about anyone. The titular location has enough traps that it's surprising that Iban's not wearing a Hunter skillcape at this point. The only concrete requirements for this quest are Level 25 ranged and the completion of two easy quests, meaning that this is Schmuck Bait for lower-level players. This isn't helped that, the first time through, your chatbox will be spammed by game messages from a dark presence.
  • The Ratcatchers quest is already dull as dishwater, but Jimmy Dazzler's section is an awful, interminable slog. It's a forced stealth level where you have to clear a mansion of rats by killing them with your cat without being spotted by guards. If you get spotted, you get teleported back to a checkpoint (of which there are exactly three). The problem is, the game's detection for being spotted is atrocious. It's possible for a guard with his back to you, on the other side of a wall, to "spot" you running past an open door for less than a second. The places you can hide from the guards and the areas you're supposed to go to are not well indicated. The patrol routes for the guards are long, they move along them agonizingly slowly, and if you have bad luck with timing, they can actually get desynchronized and render the section nigh-impossible unless you leave and come back to reset their pathing. Finally, if you have a kitten, enjoy watching them fail to catch the rats over and over and over again (although thankfully the rats are in rooms without guards, meaning there's no danger of getting caught).
  • The Firemaker's Curse quest is interminable. It has no less than ten instances of That One Puzzle. 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, and most of the puzzles involve lighting fires in a specific patern. Other instances of That One Puzzle include figuring out who in the room is possessed, or else someone in the party dies (which is a Guide Dang It! 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 Puzzle Boss fight against the antagonist of the quest. The fight against Char is a Goddamned Boss 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 Lava Flow Mine sequence in Birthright of the Dwarves. You have to dodge cannon fire from five dwarf multicannons, which can hit up to 5,000 each, and at at least two points, you'll be attacked by two at once. Protect from Missiles/Deflect Missiles only protects for half of the damage unless the Devotion ability (which has a cooldown of one minute) is active, which is still about 2,500 each. You can hide from cover, which breaks in one to two hits, and you can sabotage the cannons, but if you're within a certain distance of a cannon as it explodes, you can take over 6000 damage. Surge and Escape are, naturally, disabled. Oh, and it's an Escort Mission too— if Veldaban dies (which he will), you have to start the entire thing over.
  • Summer's End can be immensely frustrating. As part of the opening stages of the quest, the player has to lure the Spirit Beast over top of various platforms by using Summoning Familiars as live bait, then dismissing them before the Beast eats them in order to injure it. Due to the size of the platforms relative to the Beast's size, the timing is surprisingly tight, made worse by the game's inherent lagginess. Later stages of the quest also require completing tasks while dodging area-of-effect attacks from the Beast, which is also made more challenging by the lag and the sheer power of the attacks being strong enough to kill all but the highest level players nearly instantly.
  • A huge part of "Sliske's Endgame" has you go through not one, but two, series of massive and overly cryptic mazes as you make your way over to the Stone of Jas. There's no obvious indication as to which path you need to take to progress, and it's very easy to get lost (even with the minimap maximised as much as possible), costing you a lot of unnecessary wasted time in the process. Even if you're relying on a guide just to go through the mazes alone while skipping random encounters with the other participants of Sliske's sadistic games, it can still take an excrutiatingly long time before you finally call the mazes done and dusted.
  • "Mourning's End Part II". Most of the quest consists of That One Puzzle (see below), and then to rub salt in the wound, when you finally solve the Temple of Light and reach the Death Altar, you get handed a list of items and sent on a scavenger hunt. Thankfully, non-Ironman players can skip this by buying a death talisman off the Grand Exchange, and the list is mostly static.
  • Two from the Old School-exclusive quest Monkey Madness II:
    • You get a choice of paths when going through Kruk's Dungeon, either tanking or agility. The tanking path requires you to run through hordes of hard-hitting maniacal monkeys, while the agility path makes you go through a maze of obstacles. Both of them engage heavily in Trial-and-Error Gameplay; the correct path through is randomized, and the only way to tell is to attempt to advance is to try and fail. Unfortunately, failure often involves running through the aforementioned monkey hordes, which will deplete your supplies quickly. Even worse, there's a boss fight at the end of the dungeon, and the checkpoint is hidden in an inconspicuous wall nearby - meaning that unless you find it, you'll have to run through the dungeon every time the boss kills you.
    • The goddamn airship platform is a Stealth-Based Mission from hell. You have a series of narrow hallways patrolled by monkey guards, and you have to find six satchels, fill them with gunpowder, and set them at different points on the platforms to blow them up. The game does not tell you any of this, just saying you need to find something to blow it up with. Even when you figure this out, it's still a very long level, with nothing else to break it up - and every time you get caught, your gunpowder gets ruined, meaning that you have to go back to the gunpowder barrel to refill your satchels. It's better than the Ratcatchers stealth level, but not by much.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The sliding puzzle in "Elemental Workshop 3". Tricky to figure out, your view is obscured by an odd angle (plus a pillar), and there's little margin for error, due to a limited number of moves unless you complete optional routes with the sliding puzzle, which are equally as difficult, and the sheer length of the puzzle— later stages require nearly 40 moves at bare minimum. It's telling that the light and logic puzzles in "Elemental Workshop 4" are significantly easier in comparison.
  • The Temple of Light in "Mourning's End Part II" is a massive, multi-level light and mirrors puzzle. Does that sound fun? How about a massive, multi-level light and mirrors puzzle, full of agility obstacles that you will frequently fail without an absurdly high Agility level? Plus, hordes upon hordes of aggressive Glass Cannon shadows that can deal alarmingly high amounts of melee damage^note at least this is the case in Old School, where their max hit is a pretty decent 13 HP (out of a player's possible 99); in RS3, their max hit is much lower relative to a player's maximum HP to top it all off? This is widely considered to be the hardest puzzle in the game, and for good reason.
  • One Cracked article lists the accordion puzzle from "Rocking Out" as #1 on its list due to extremely vague details and the general absurdity of the solution. You would have to be capable of thinking outside the box on a grand scale to consider figuring out using a mixture of an accordion, a seagull, and paper instead of doing something mundane. Justified, as it's intended as a homage to the Monkey Island series.
  • "Monkey Madness" has a sliding block puzzle that's so frustrating that the developers intentionally added in a way to bypass it by paying one of the quest NPCs a large amount of gold. Many players take them up on that offer. Similar puzzles also appear in hard clue scrolls, except you can't bypass them via bribery like you could in Monkey Madness. These are thankfully mitigated in more modern times, as there's both a fairly straightforward solution and an overlay program called Alt+1 which can make these puzzles much easier. In addition, 3 adds special "puzzle box skip tickets" that can be earned by completing clue scrolls, which can instantly skip the puzzles.
  • "Recruitment Drive" is a quest that is literally and intentionally made of frustrating puzzles— it's the entry exam for the Temple Knights, who by profession need intelligence and creativity as well as strength.
  • Half of the puzzles in Dungeoneering qualify. For instance:
    • One puzzle tasks you with catching a pondskater with a key in its mouth. Simple enough, except Runescape's pathfinding system acts oddly when you click a moving, interactable object that can't be reached all of the time. This can lead to minutes of waiting for the pondskater to get in range so you can grab the key out... despite the fact that you have a fishing rod to get it out!
    • Another puzzle has you charging four lodestones that power an obelisk; the energy they emit is desyncrhonized, so you have to stand on pressure plates in order to stall the power and then release it in time with the rest of them. Unfortunately, Runescape's engine has a built-in delay, which can make timing this aggravating.
    • There is a puzzle which tasks you with getting multiple colored ferrets onto the correct platforms so the door will open. You have to spook the ferrets into moving, at which point they move randomly away from your character, usually within a space of the pressure plate, before you have to scare them again, which will cause them to move away from the plate. Many a lock melter is used on these rooms.
    • One possible room layout in Dungeoneering is a Luck-Based Mission, requiring the party to step on one of four pressure plates in a narrow hallway. Three out of the four are booby-trapped and do massive damage (and unlike most traps in Dungeoneering, this damage cannot be reduced by taking the Gatherer "class" on the Ring of Kinship), while only one allows the player to pass unharmed. The problem is twofold; picking the wrong plate does not let you pass, forcing you to keep taking damage until you get the right one, and you have to pass three sets of traps in order to move on (which means, if your luck is particularly bad, you can be hit nine times per room). In addition, Ranged or Magic enemies (which make up about two-thirds of the possible enemy spawns) can hit you from the other side of the hallway, chipping away your health further, especially if you're using Melee (or a shortbow, which has a smaller range than most of these enemies); and if you're playing the unlockable Hard Mode, the doors seal shut upon entering until all three enemies in the room are dead, meaning the only way out (other than dying, which comes with a hefty XP penalty for the floor) is teleporting (nearly impossible to do with Home Teleport while being attacked as each "flinch" ends the teleport animation, and the Gatestone teleports require placing the precious item beforehand). You can't even use a Lockmelter or Trailblazer Outfit perk to skip the puzzle, because the other doors are on the other side of the trap!
    • The boobytrap room isn't the only room that can get a player locked in an Unwinnable state in Hard Mode; the puzzles where the party has to repair/extend a literal Broken Bridge can trap players in a shooting gallery where they can be picked off by Ranged/Magic enemies from outside of their attack range. Solving the puzzle itself isn't particularly hard, but the problem is that the skill level requirements can be higher than what the player has^note or even beyond the normal level cap, requiring the party to make specific stat boosting potions which require some prep work to make, while the player isn't told that they lack the required skills to complete the challenge until it's too late. At that point, the only option is to die and suffer the penalty.
    • There's a puzzle found only on the Occult floors (thank God) where the room has a number of bookshelves that can be rotated, several coloured books that fly between these bookshelves, and four coloured bookshelves on one wall that need to receive the appropriately coloured book to unlock the door. Rotating the bookshelves to get the books in the right position is such an arduous task that giving up is entirely understandable.
    • The lodestone puzzle. You have to jump from platform to platform over a chasm in order to get a power crystal to the lodestone in order to unlock the door. Simple, right? Wrong. There's two complications: first, there's a floating orb that's trying to catch you, and if it does, it'll dump you back at the start and do you some damage. The orb can only move diagonally and after the player has moved, and there's a pretty simple solution... but then that second complication turns up: the player can randomly stumble for no reason, which wastes a move while letting the orb move. Many an attempt has been ruined by a badly-placed stumble.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "Mahjarrat Memories", the followup to a very short and simple miniquest. Kharshai asks you to find lost memories of his fellow Mahjarrat, and gives you a device to do so. The device has to be charged, and doing so requires 500 divine memories of vibrant or better quality. Not divine energy, note, but divine memories. It takes about half an hour to gather enough divine memories to give the device one charge, and you have to charge it sixteen times to get the full rewards. So you pump up your device...now where do you get said memories? Thankfully, most of them are located in spots related to the Mahjarrat and thus easy enough to find if you remember the lore associated with them...with a few exceptions. Zemouregal's memory is the worst of the bunch, located deep in a dangerous quest dungeon that you've probably forgotten about by the time you're attempting this sidequest, but some of the others are tricky to find as well. On the plus side the total experience rewards are about twice the experience you'd get for converting the 8000 divine memories normally so it's worth doing.
  • "Curse of the Empty Lord" (renamed "Curse of Zaros" in later versions) is particularly notorious for requiring you to stand for long amounts of time in high-level Wilderness listening to NPCs give you a lore dump, hoping some PKer doesn't show up just to ruin your day. It's better in RS3, where PvP is now opt-in only, but in Old School PvP is always on in the Wilderness.
  • In RuneScape 3, the quests "Shield of Arrav" and "Heroes' Quest" were patched to no longer require a second player in the gang you didn't choose to join. This is not the case in Old School. Fortunately, in "Heroes' Quest" either role can be completed by anyone regardless of quest completion status, and finding a partner can be easier using Jagex's grouping chat-channel, but "Shield of Arrav" requires both players to not have completed the quest. This is particularly annoying since both of these quests are requirements to complete "Recipe for Disaster" and "Dragon Slayer II", and "Shield of Arrav" will be a requirement for "While Guthix Sleeps".
  • Wilderness Flash Events are considered not worth the time investment most of the time. The rarest drop from the event, the Dark Onyx Core (used to upgrade alchemical onyx jewelry) is only a 0.02% drop in three out of the thirteen potential events, which you have to be online for at the top of every hour in order to participate in, and if you fail, no rewards, period. Only one of the upgrades (the Dark Facet of Grace, an upgrade for Grace of the Elves, which gives unlimited prayer points for Seren skilling prayers and upgrades the total porter charges from 500 to 2000) is even worth getting.
  • Filling up the Well of Souls in Um is such a chore that most players recommend one waits until Level 60 to even start on communion rituals that aren't part of the tutorial. To unlock all Necromancy abilities, you need a total of 35,000 souls. From talking to inhabitants around Um and fulfilling certian requests, you get 570 of them, just over 1% of what you need. The rest needs to be from Communion Rituals. Assuming you're at Level 103 Necromancy to use as many instances of the Multiply III glyph on a Powerful Communion ritual as possible (3 on the Ritual Site, one on your Necromancy Skillcape) and are using the Alteration Necklace, you are getting a maximum of 291 souls. Assumign you fulfilled the 3000 Soul requirement needed to complete an earlier quest, you have to do this ritual, at a minimum, 110 times. Assuming you don't interact with any of the ritual distractions, a single ritual takes about 1:37, meaning that under optlimal conditions, you need to spend two and a half hours doing rituals to fill up the well.
  • "Rag and Bone Man II" was originally a mini-quest titled "Rag and Bone Wishlist". Depsite being a miniquest, it rewarded one quest point, so it was required to complete in order to obtain the Quest Point cape. Have fun going around the world on a tedious quest to collect the bones you need. It's made even more annoying because the monsters only have a 25% chance of dropping the bones you need.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The 12-10-07 updates, for the reasons under Broken Base above.
  • Then there was PvP Worlds that appeared from late 2008 up until the 12-10-07 update was reversed on the account the drops ended up inflating the economy to ridiculous proportions.
  • The introduction of microtransactions and particularly the associated changes to the rules and terms of use were poorly received.
  • Every update gets this reaction from at least one section of the Broken Base. Some being reasonable, others not so much.
  • The early reaction by most of the Broken Base to the Evolution of Combat Beta.
  • Naturally, the Runescape 3 update is subject to this. Probably the biggest controversy is the new interface system, which despite allowing for more flexibility in how players view their interface while playing, is also not quite intuitive enough to edit, and the default layout is different from what people were used to.
  • An especially notable example is the graphical update of skillcapes. The moment they were implemented the players went berserk, criticizing the textures, the new icons, and the different coloration. Players who played with graphics at low settings were especially angry as the low detail capes resembled "bland sheets." The outcry was so violent and incredible that Jagex had to rework the new capes again and provide a toggle so people could switch to the old capes; those updates quieted many of the haters. The kicker, however, is that the original update was polled in-game weeks prior; the poll showed images of what the new capes would look like and linked to the official forum discussion of the rework, and as many as seventy percent of the voters chose the new look.
  • The May 2016 patch that nerfed Dreadnips, the Heal Other spell, and the Barricade ability due to making multiplayer bosses such as the Mazcab Raids villains much harder. Many players felt that this was a cynical attempt by Jagex to convince people to utilise the disliked Invention skill, as new Invention devices with similar effects to all of the aforementioned had recently been released.
  • There exists a small but vocal portion of the Old School community that insists any major visual or mechanical change would make OS stop being "Old School", and believe that the many Newbie Booms that happened since Old School's launch are ruining the game by voting for updates they don't like. Particular examples include the addition of the Grand exchange, any changes to the layouts of free-to-play towns, and the poll which allowed Sailing to be added as the first new skill.
  • 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". This change may have led to Cursed Energy being removed entirely.
  • Protean Planks were previously able to be used to assemble items in both the Player Owned House and Fort Forinthry, but a patch in 2023 made them unable to be used for anything other than raw XP. While arugably an Obvious Rule Patch (Protean Planks could be converted into tradable items, which no other Protean item is capable of, and could potentially pollute the economy) some have argued that this has just made the item obsolete.
  • The Ring of Death used to be a key item in PVM builds, as it would teleport the player to safety if they would die to a boss, proccing after the Sign of Life did so. With the reduction of Death Costs in 2023, it was given what several people percieve as a massive Nerf: instead of teleporting you away, it would revive you to full health, but give you rapid Damage Over Time that would inevitably kill you within three minutes unless you teleported out successfully killed the boss and hit the bank. On release, this new effect procced before the Sign of Life, essentially breaking PVM until an update a few weeks later.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The general consensus on the Fremennik hero-god "V" is that he wasn't properly established before his demise. His existence as a historical figure was mentioned briefly in one or two quests, but the only quest that really establishes his character and nature and sees him return to Gielinor is the same that sees him killed almost unceremoniously by the Dragonkin.
  • The six Signature Heroes were billed as NPC adventurers whose own journeys would frequently intersect with the player's, developing the world of Gielinor from more perspectives than the player's alone. In actuality, they seemingly came out of nowhere, featured in a single quest, and had a good chance of being killed off or otherwise incapacitated without meaningfully affecting the setting. Their reputation as letdowns was not lost on Jagex, who slowly found ways to integrate them into larger questlines, to modest approval.
  • Tuska, the Almighty Idiot Apocalypse How-causing boar god. Her arrival on Gilenor was the basis for the third World Event... and it just plain stunk. Tuska was supposed to be this massive apocalyptic threat, but her event was scaled far back from what the original vision was, and it ended up being a repetitive minigame that you had to do for a single faction. Combine that with the Like You Would Really Do It factor of the claims that Tuska would destroy Gilenor if she wasn't stopped, it's little wonder that she's been swept under the rug, with nary a mention of her since 2015; what's worse, she may have killed the concept of World Events in Runescape entirely, and her association with Mazcab may have resulted in the discontinuation of the development of that questline, as well.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In "Hunt for Red Raktuber", you infiltrate the 'Pengmersible', a rogue penguin submarine, and discover that the captain of the sub, Captain Marlin, has been taken over by the sea slugs, and is planning to join forces with Mother Mallum to take over humanity. This provides a very interesting potential crossover between the sea slug questline and the penguin questline...that never came to fruition. Instead, Pescaling Pax recaptures the sub, "Salt in the Wound" happened, and Word of God says that the sea slug was dead and Captain Marlin was just insane.
  • 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 That One Boss, as you need Feathers of Ma'at to fight him (and aren't told this) and he can essentially one-shot you regardless of what your health is. Somehow, they're also an Anticlimax Boss, 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'.
• Tough Act to Follow: After the amazing and resounding success of OSRS’s Trailblazer League, the Shattered Relics League had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately for it, there were a number of drawbacks that kept it from achieving the same level of success: a slow start, a strong lack of information on how to get combat relics (they’re drops from bosses and superior Slayer monsters, with harder bosses/superiors giving higher tier relics, but this had to be figured out by the playerbase and was different from the advertised skilling relics), and a task list mostly recycled from the far more restricted Twisted and Trailblazer Leagues that didn’t take the new restrictions into account, among other things. While player retention is far higher than Twisted and the mid to late game allows for a lot of uniqueness, its flaws meant it wasn’t able to live up to the hype.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The snaggle-toothed bug-eyed Extreme Omnivore baby troll.
  • Sneakerpeepers, a pet based on the Stalkers of Daemonheim. They're giant living eyeballs with little stumpy legs, and their examine text is "Isn't it abhorable?"
  • Zanik's first design, where she sported a hunchback and Big Ol' Eyebrows but was still pretty endearing. Her second design was just plain ugly, and her third just plain cute.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Several of the newer character models look far too detailed to the point where they look wrong, to the point where some people prefer to play with the graphics on lower settings to make the models not look incredibly ugly and weird. This especially works well for Zanik's graphical update.
• Vindicated by History:
  • The 2007 Christmas Event. The community was in a ranting mood thanks to the recent Wilderness and Free Trade changes, the event itself was extremely short, and the reward wasn't wearable, so it was very swiftly harshly panned. However, it included a post-event activity that gained some popularity, and the snow globe that was rewarded could be used to quickly generate snowballs for several of the future events which other people had to get gradually. It is now considered by many to be one of the best holiday events ever.
  • The Pest Control change, which greatly lowered the possible experience gain for high level players (but increased it for low level players). It was one of the first seriously controversial updates of RuneScape 2, and triggered many in-game riots. However, thanks to the addition of Void Knight Helmets, and other training areas being released, it has been considered an alright update.
• The Woobie:
  • "The World Wakes" gives us, of all people, Guthix. Not only he does he die, but his backstory shows he came from another world that was destroyed by an unknown war between gods. He knew all along his Edicts wouldn't be enough to save Gielinor from the same fate that befell his homeworld. He personally shows us all of this before lying on a bed in his desolate home (in the memories of his home world, that is).
  • Poor, poor Zanik. Thanks to her adventurous and reckless spirit, she was ostracized by the cave goblins from a young age. When the cave goblins make contact with the surface, she repeatedly gets tangled up with the H.A.M. cult and their schemes, and at one point is savagely beaten and left for dead. After she is revived, she finds out that she is The Chosen One...of Bandos, whose plan involves turning her into a mindless puppet-general and taking over the world. Thankfully, she and the player manage to overcome both the H.A.M. cult and Bandos, and Zanik is free to explore the world...until The Mighty Fall. Bandos' followers show up on the cave goblins' doorstep, blaming Zanik for their god's death and threatening to destroy her people. Also, since she was connected to a now-dead god, Zanik is slowly dying as well. At the end of the quest, you can either allow her to go off into the ruins of Yu'biusk to die, or execute her yourself. And we're not done here. In Nomad's Elegy, you meet her in the Bandosian afterlife, where, as apostates of Bandos, she and the other cave goblins exist to be brutally beaten to death, over and over again, forever. Thankfully, at the end of all this, she finally gets a happy ending: either she's revived and takes over Soul Wars, or she gets to go to her own afterlife, freed from the influence of the gods.
  • "Song of the Elves" from Old School gives us Seren. Unlike her RS3 version, she didn't shatter into a million pieces over her love of Guthix, but rather because she accidentally tied the elves' lifespan to her presence, meaning if she left after Guthix banished all the gods, she would commit genocide. Prior to that, she spent all her time on Gielinor trying (and failing) to undo her mistake, undertaking a number of desperate measures that led to her becoming corrupted, and inadvertently starting a civil war fueled by her corrupted self that lasted most of the Fifth Age. When you finally fight her, she's only barely sentient and acting out of pain. All because she made a mistake when bringing elves to Gielinor.

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