PREVIEW 1: About talking to friends, changing your password and banking in RuneScape 1

When RuneScape was released in January of 2001, really all the community luxuries that we have today were absent. There were no banks, no clan chat or clan support, no friends chat, no Grand Exchange, no CoinShare or LootShare, no account-recovery system, no bot-detection system, no hiscores, no in-game privacy settings, no player moderators, no report system etc. There also was just one game server […], but what is perhaps the most striking in this image is the fact that there initially was no friends list! Instead, there was a tell command that a player had to use to message someone else. For example, if your name is 1337Pk3r and I wanted to say hello to you, I would have to type Tell 1337Pk3r Hello in the chat bar. The absence of the friends list also means that a player would not be able to see if any friends were online. To solve that problem, there was another unique feature: a current players page that showed the names of all players who were online in the same world. What privacy, right?

A similar situation existed for changing the account’s password because there was no feature for it on the website itself. Let’s say that you wanted to change your password to ilikescience. To do that, the command that you had to type was Setpass ilikescience, after which you would be prompted to repeat that command to confirm the new password. Another inconvenience, but I have already mentioned this in the previous chapter, is that only one player could talk to a NPC at a time. Every other player needed to wait until the first player had finished the conversation, and it stayed like that until the release of RS2 in 2004. This was extremely annoying when trying to use the bank due to the dialogue with the banker that could not be skipped. Even a year after the game’s launch, there were still only five banks, while only a handful of servers were available, which means that banks were crowded most of the time. By the way, this also means that a player who had been poisoned depended on the goodwill of the other players; it did happen that someone would deliberately stay in the conversation with the banker to prevent that the poisoned player could bank their items or withdraw some antipoison.

PREVIEW 2: About Andrew Gower’s ambitious attempt in November of 2001 to implement a very special chat filter

Three months later, on 14^th November, a few important updates happened in response to several community-related issues that had arisen. The first problem was that the in-game chat filter, which did already exist, had become ineffective because the community had found ways to circumvent the filter. Andrew also feared that exposing the community to verbal abuse by other players could lead to him getting sued, which is another reason why he wanted a much-improved chat filter. The first idea that he had was to work with a combination of templates and whitelisted words, or wildcards. For example, one of such templates was “$VERB$ me a $NOUN$” in which the verb and the noun had to appear on a list of allowed words, such as “give me a sword”. The allowed vocabulary would be restricted to all that would be frequently used in RuneScape. For the wildcard $NOUN$, that meant locations, NPCs, objects, skills etc.; all of which had their own wildcards as well. A template in this context meant a single grammatical syntax in which any word could be used that is covered by the wildcard. Any other phrase or grammatical structure would require another template to be made. For example, the phrases “I am level $NUM$ $SKILL$”, “$OBJ$ for sale”, “Can I buy $OBJ$?”, “Follow me” etc. are all separate templates. This means that Andrew needed to create a huge number of templates to cover all conversation scenarios. […] Andrew’s plan was to create a gigantic ASCII file that would contain all templates, or all phrases and structures, that would be allowed by the chat filter, which means that both grammar and vocabulary were heavily restricted. And that went quite far. For example, abbreviations and chat language or slang would not pass the filter. Adjectives would not be allowed either because they could be easily abused, but there were still exceptions for RuneScape-specific adjectives, such as “mithril” in “mithril sword”.

PREVIEW 3: About some interesting community statistics. Chapter 2 contains a lot of such statistics, including several tables

Next, we have the poll about biological sexes. It is no surprise that most RuneScape players are male. It is also no surprise that that has always been the case, but it is interesting to see that the females-to-males ratio appears to have been stable [at around 85% male] throughout the years. A Twitter poll by RuneScape in 2016 also revealed that 83% of the players signed up as a male character when they created their first account. Given that this overlaps with the numbers from the table, that could mean that new players only rarely choose the opposite biological sex when creating their first account. A quick side note that I will add is that these numbers do not apply to Old School RuneScape. In fact, a RuneScape livestream from May of 2016 revealed that 96% of the Old School RuneScape players were male. That is a significant difference.

PREVIEW 1: About Musa Point’s piers

Something else to point out about Musa Point is the number of piers. Originally, there was just one big pier. Today, however, there is a smaller one as well, to the east of it. This second pier was released as part of RS2 in March of 2004 and that is important to mention because this second and smaller pier is probably where most of you ended up training Fishing at Musa Point. In fact, it is not even possible anymore to train Fishing at the original pier!

PREVIEW 2: About Barbarian Outpost and the party room

At the end of March [of 2002], Kandarin received its first expansion, with Barbarian Outpost and Seers’ Village being the two new locations, but there was something special about that as Barbarian Outpost initially had a different location. Today, it can be found north of Baxtorian Falls, but its initial location was south of Keep Le Faye, and north of Ardougne, but Ardougne had not been released yet. That means that Barbarian Outpost was the most southern location of Kandarin at the end of March. Furthermore, the outpost did not have an Agility course yet because that skill had not been released yet, so the outpost was smaller than it is today. Barbarian Outpost and its Agility course, once the skill was released, were moved to their current location when RS2 was launched in March of 2004. Still in 2002, there was something special about Seers’ Village too because that is where the party room could initially be found, and for quite a few years. After five years of being located in Seers’ Village, the party room was moved to Falador in July of 2007 to free up space for the new King’s Ransom quest and in preparation of the removal of free trade later that year, which I discuss extensively in book three of the trilogy. The courthouse that is used in King’s Ransom today is where the party room could initially be found.

PREVIEW 1: About Melee equipment on day one of RuneScape

As explained in chapter one, upon the launch of RuneScape on 4^th January 2001, the types of armour that existed were bronze, iron, steel, and the pieces of the mithril and adamantite sets were limited to just a couple of items. The other items were gradually added to the game in the next weeks and months through the Smithing skill and the release of more shops. Rune armour followed in July and later. The only types of Melee weapons that initially existed were 2h swords, battleaxes, daggers, maces, longswords, scimitars and swords. Some of the pieces of the mithril, adamantite and runite sets could not be bought anywhere in RS1, so they were rare and expensive for a long time. Even a year after the release of RuneScape, there were not many people who could create those items by using the Smithing skill.

PREVIEW 2: About the release of special attacks in 2004 and its impact on Ranged

Special attacks were added to the game in June of 2004. That was an exciting update for anyone who loved combat, but there was something special for the Ranged skill. The magic shortbow had been in the game since March of 2002, but it was relatively useless in RS1 because, as we discussed earlier, bows did not carry any stats. That changed as part of RS2, which was a change that by itself promoted the use of higher-tiered bows. The magic shortbow and the magic longbow became the strongest bows of the game upon the launch of RS2, and they had exactly the same stats. Both of them were given a special attack in June of 2004, but the one given to the shortbow was considered much better, so the shortbow ended up becoming the new number-one choice for Ranged. The special attack consisted of firing two arrows in one attack, while only 35% of the special-attack bar would be consumed. This means that it was sometimes possible to use the special attack three times in a short period, which made the shortbow a little overpowered. At least, that is what Jagex must have thought because they later nerfed the special attack so that it would use 55% of the special-attack bar. Nevertheless, that still allowed two special attacks in quick succession, so the magic shortbow would remain popular for more than a year, and much longer than that in the mid-level community.

PREVIEW 3: About Prayer in RS1

Prayer is another combat skill that has quite a rich history. When RuneScape was released on 4^th January 2001, Prayer already existed, but training the skill did not result in any benefits because there was nothing to unlock yet. That is right, there were no prayers to use yet, even though the skill could already be trained by burying regular bones. […] Still before any prayer existed, Prayer was like Magic in the sense that also Prayer was divided into two skills: PrayEvil and PrayGood. Just to clarify: these did show up as two separate skills in the skill interface, just like the two Magic versions did, so it was possible to have a different level in both skills, although how exactly that worked is quite an enigma if we know that burying regular bones was the only way to train the skill. […] Prayer was considered the hardest skill of the game. Proof of that is a Tip.it poll from the summer of 2002. With an incredibly high number of participants – almost 80k – the general opinion was that Prayer was, indeed, the hardest skill of the game as 49% of the participants shared that opinion. The Smithing skill followed in second place, with 24% thinking that Smithing was the most difficult skill to train. Why Prayer and not another skill? Well, [… get the trilogy to find out!]

PREVIEW 4: And one final bit to hype you up a little about Summoning’s extremely interesting pre-release history

Summoning was released on 15^th January 2008, but its pre-release history is quite extensive. In fact, I am going to discuss this mainly chronologically and you will see that it will take me seven pages to arrive in 2008 again. So, earlier in this chapter, we saw that Jagex was years earlier already planning to release something like summoning spells, as an extension to the Magic skill, so not as a new skill. At that time, it was rumoured that a life rune would be used for those spells, but also the life rune has a rich history, going back all the way to 2001, […] so let’s talk about that now.

PREVIEW 1: About the impact of RS2’s launch on the PvM community in 2004

With combat becoming more flexible after the launch of RS2 in 2004 due to the release of attack styles, the combat triangle, more armour and weaponry etc., a first revolution of the entire combat environment had taken place. In the next year, much was about to change for the PvM community of that time, which was still only a minority group due to the overwhelming popularity of PvP and the emerging popularity of skilling. A first game-changing update for the PvM community was the release of the Kalphite Queen in September of 2004. That was a significant event because it was the first monster that would drop an extremely expensive item (the dragon chainbody) that could not be obtained by killing any other monster. Of course, as a Grand Exchange was still absent, the initial price was decided by the community, so it is the community that suddenly attached a value of a never-before-seen magnitude to a monster drop. More than 20m gp was being offered at a time when the economy was still primitive, although its growth had begun to accelerate by then as a consequence of the first so-called Miniclip RuneScape players, as explained in the chapter about the community. […]

PREVIEW 2: About the release of the Corporeal Beast

Half a year later, on 15^th September 2008, the Corporeal Beast revealed all of its secrets. […] The interesting part for the PvM community was, as always, the drops. And the drops were definitely worth the effort. People wanted to kill this monster mainly for the various sigil drops, which were worth hundreds of millions of gp at first, that could be turned into strong high-level shields. The divine sigil, which was the most expensive one, immediately skyrocketed to a price of 200m gp and topped in 2011 at a price of an astonishing 916m gp. Its corresponding shield peaked at 1,001 million (one billion) gp in 2011 as well, which is around eight times higher than the Armadyl godsword ever cost at its peak as the most expensive weapon, so it goes without saying that fighting the Corporeal Beast became extremely popular. Solo fighters would opt for a Zamorakian spear and a Statius’s warhammer to try to defeat this monster, although teaming up with others was usually the preferred strategy. The warhammer was used to reduce the Corporeal Beast’s defence, although the warhammer was quite expensive and would degrade, so it was not always used. Barrows armour was a good alternative as well.

PREVIEW 1: About the launch of P2P and duelling in 2002

The launch of the membership feature on 27^th February 2002 had something in store for the PvP community as well. That is when the option to invite another player to a duel outside the Wilderness was added to the right-click menu that pops up when you right-click on someone’s name. The Duel Arena was not included in that update, so the update was really just the duel option that can be used anywhere in the safe areas of RuneScape. Duelling that way also became known as staking. Given that the loser of a duel would lose the staked items only and keep everything else, staking was a good way for players who feared the Wilderness to still get some PvP experience, perhaps even as a means of training their PvP skills in preparation of the real deal in the Wilderness. By the way, Andrew had accidentally added duelling to the game in September of 2001 already, but it was removed on the same day as it was not supposed to have been released yet. Another interesting fun fact about staking is that it also ended up being used as a free teleportation method in RS1, as players would sometimes ask someone else to kill them for a free teleport to Lumbridge. That said, duelling was a members-only feature in RS1, so free players could not use it for the free teleport or to safely train their PvP abilities. The lodestone network and the free spell to teleport to Lumbridge did not exist in RS1.

PREVIEW 2: About a PvP clan war between the clans The Gladiatorz and Zeonic Force

One of the first wars of 2004 was repeated in October when The Gladiatorz declared war against Zeonic Force. The Gladiatorz had become stronger throughout the year, so after previously defeating Zeonic Force, they expected the same result. Both clans were enemies, so the stakes were high and neither of them felt like they could afford to lose. Zeonic Force attracted 80 clan members to the war, whereas The Gladiatorz managed to rally as many as 120. Nevertheless, there was no clear favourite because the average Zeonic Force member was considerably stronger (by combat level) and perhaps strong enough to make up for the numeric difference. Both clans had reasons to be optimistic, but eventually it was The Gladiatorz that prevailed once again. Zeonic Force had put up a good fight and they would continue being a strong clan for many more months.

PREVIEW 3: About the impact of the launch of Evolution of Combat (EoC) in 2012 on the PvP community

A central aspect of EoC PvP is the combat abilities. EoC PvP ended up revolving around the abilities that can stun the opponent to prevent the target from attacking, eating, enabling prayers, running away or using certain combat abilities. There are quite a few combat abilities that can stun the opponent in one way or another, such as asphyxiate and destroy, but that is a different story for the anti-stun abilities. Right after the launch of EoC, there were only two of such abilities: anticipation to prevent stuns and freedom to break free from stuns. Only one other anti-stun ability has been released since, which is transfigure. Due to the low number of anti-stun abilities, a common PvP strategy initially was to use the inferior stun abilities to trick the opponent into using the two/three anti-stun abilities, after which the first Pk’er could freely unleash the better stun abilities without the opponent being able to prevent or break the stuns. This is also called stun-locking, which would play a central role in EoC PvP. Another crucial category of abilities for PvP are the ones that disable another player’s protection prayers, such as havoc and smash. Those are the most important categories of abilities for EoC PvP. The use of other combat abilities generally boiled down to individual preference, skill and strategy.

PREVIEW 1: About two of the three potions that already existed before the release of Herblore in 2002

The Herblore skill was released on 27^th February 2002 under the name of Herblaw and also this skill has a pre-release history. In fact, there already were two potions in the game on 4^th January 2001, which is when RuneScape was launched. One of those potions just had potion as name, while the other one was called cadava (potion). Although some players initially also referred to the non-specified potion as the spot potion, perhaps it officially did not carry a more specific name for the simple reason that it had no function at all in RS1; a player could not do anything with it, even after the release of Herblaw, until the potion was eventually incorporated into the quest Forgettable Tale of a Drunken Dwarf, which happened in 2005. The potion’s name was changed to acne potion in 2015. Cadava, on the other hand, did have a purpose in RS1 because it was released as part of the quest Romeo and Juliet. The quest no longer exists today, but you will learn more about that later in this trilogy.

PREVIEW 2: About Smithing in January of 2001, which is when RuneScape was released

As far as content for the skill is concerned, there initially was only one anvil and one furnace. The anvil is the one that can be found in Varrock today, opposite the bank. The only furnace, on the other hand, was located in Lumbridge. I think that you can see the problem with that… Players who wanted to smith an item from scratch, so by starting with the ore, would have to walk all the way from Lumbridge to Varrock, and that at a time when: a) there was no run option; b) there were no teleportation spells; and c) there were no banks yet. Today, we would just smelt multiple inventories of ore in Lumbridge in one go before heading to Varrock to turn the many banked bars into items, so that was not possible in January of 2001. The game’s second furnace was added to Al Kharid later that month, but that did not help much either. […]

PREVIEW 3: About training Fishing and Woodcutting in Daemonheim

On 15^th March 2011, an update made Woodcutting in Daemonheim much faster […] That is also when Fishing in Daemonheim became the fastest Fishing method to train the skill, but that did not apply to Woodcutting. The xp rates for chopping gravecreeper and entgallow trees remained slower than using the sawmill or teak trees to level up. Training Woodcutting in Daemonheim must have given around 65k to 75k xp per hour back then. Almost exactly a year later, the Dungeoneering skill was tweaked again and the entire skill generally became easier and more convenient to train, which resulted in both Fishing and Woodcutting becoming faster in Daemonheim as well. In fact, the update turned training Woodcutting in Daemonheim into one of the fastest Woodcutting methods, with xp rates of around 110k xp per hour at high levels.

PREVIEW 1: About so-called think bubbles in RS1

Skilling looked quite different in RS1 because there were no animations for any of the skilling actions that a player performed, and that for any skill. Without the presence of such animations, it would be impossible to tell what the player was doing. To everyone else, it would look as if the player was not doing anything at all, but producing such animations was expensive, so the Gower brothers decided to try something else. Instead, so-called think bubbles, as they were called in RuneScape’s original script, were used that appeared above a player’s head when training a skill. Inside that bubble, that player and everyone around them would see an item that depicted the activity that the player was doing. For example, a mithril ore would appear inside the bubble when smelting mithril ores at a furnace, a harpoon when catching swordfish, a rune hatchet when training Woodcutting with a rune hatchet etc. There were no think bubbles for Agility, Fletching and Thieving, though, and also any combat activity did not produce an overhead bubble because combat did have animations, so a bubble was not necessary.

PREVIEW 2: About W132 Yanille Fletching Guild

Also the Fletching community established themselves in Yanille in 2006. In the second half of the year, the W132 Yanille Fletching Guild was founded. There already had been one for a while in world 71 with Ardougne as its main hub, but it had gone inactive, so a new one was needed. The W132 guild ended up becoming extremely successful for reasons that even its founder could not identify as the guild was just a copy of its predecessor in Ardougne. The Yanille bank became about more than just Fletching, though. At that time, most of the bows that were created through Fletching were completely useless because no one needed that many bows. That is why they were often used to train Magic by using the spell high-level alchemy. As a consequence, the guild also attracted players who were training Magic. Those players would buy the bows from the fletchers and then stay there to train Magic. In that sense, the Yanille bank in world 132 became sort of like a minimarket, but one with better deals for everyone. Trading Fletching resources and products commonly took place in Seers’ Village, in any world, but the bank there had turned into a playground for players who were interested in merchanting, so the prices there were less ideal. The W132 Fletching Guild would stay in existence for around five years and maybe even longer.

PREVIEW 3: About making money in 2001

A similar moneymaking method that was less reliant on luck involved the silk trader in Al Kharid, who would sell silk for three coins each, but that could be reduced to two coins if a player had completed a certain number of quests. Those players could buy silk from the silk trader for two coins and then sell it to the general store for anywhere from four to twelve coins each. The exact sale price depended on the available stock, but the lower limit was four coins. The general store in Al Kharid did not accept silk due to the store’s proximity to the silk trader, though, so players had walk to Lumbridge or Varrock to sell the silk in the general store there. As explained earlier, keep in mind that the Al Kharid gate did not exist until the last day of February, so getting to Lumbridge from Al Kharid took slightly longer than getting to Varrock as travelling to Lumbridge required walking all the way around via the south of Varrock, and that at a time when there was no option to run yet. That is true also because teleportation spells did not exist until May, and even if they did, using runes to teleport was a bad idea because the runes were more expensive than a full inventory of silk was, so walking was the only option. Selling silk this way became a reliable but slow moneymaker as a player could make only 60 to 300 gp per trip. Usually only new players would make money that way.

PREVIEW 1: About one of the players that have been added to the Hall of Fame chapter

Bluerose13x: If there is one name that I hope all of you will remember, it should be Bluerose13x. She was a living legend in the RS1 era and one of the pioneers of high-level skilling. What Bluerose13x is best known for is her Smithing achievements, which helped to make her become one of the best and wealthiest players of the RS1 era. Her dominance in the Smithing hiscores began quite early in 2001 already, as she was the first player who reached level 60 in the skill, and she then never lost her rank one on her journey to level 99. This means that she was the first player who could smith adamantite and runite items but not right away. As explained in book two, by the time that Bluerose13x reached the Smithing level that is required for rune, no player (including herself) could mine rune rocks yet, and the same was true for adamant, so she had to wait until the first miners reached the required Mining levels. By the time that the first miners could hack into rune rocks, also other players were already close to reaching the requirement of level 85 Smithing.

It is commonly believed that Bluerose13x had a monopoly on the Smithing market, but the truth is a little more nuanced, for several reasons. The above is one reason as she did not have the Mining level that was needed for the high-level types of ores, but there was no need for her to train Mining anyway because people just came to her with the ores or the bars, and also her friends sometimes mined for her, so she did depend on other players there. That said, she certainly was the only source of adamant and rune bars for some time. Furthermore, most types of high-level combat pieces at that time could be obtained through means other than Smithing. For example, the adamant platebody and the rune chainbody, platelegs and longsword could already be purchased in the Champions’ Guild; and the rune platebody could be bought from Oziach, so she had no influence on the market of those items, but that still leaves 2h swords, battleaxes, helms and shields.

Even though the true extent of her monopoly turns out to be a little more nuanced, she certainly was the first player who created runite items by using the Smithing skill, and she did have a monopoly on the runite weapon around which everything revolved back in 2002 for free players: the rune 2h sword. As explained in book two, the rune 2h sword was the strongest weapon of the F2P game after the launch of P2P in February of 2002, so the demand for it was huge. Also the market of kiteshields is where she had an absolute monopoly early on already, as wielding even a steel kiteshield was initially viewed as a symbol of status. Given that rune was still the strongest type of combat equipment, she did have a huge influence on the prices of some runite weapons for a long time, which enabled her to become one of the richest players in the game. Requiring level 99 to smith, when the rune 2h sword was released alongside the launch of P2P in 2002, she had the power to decide how expensive the weapon should be as no one else had reached level 99 in the skill yet. Several weeks later, she was still the only player who could smith rune 2h swords. There are varying accounts as to how much she would charge, but prices of over 1m gp were reported for the rune 2h sword.

It is known that Bluerose13x also offered her services for free sometimes, but it is not clear if that also applied to runite items or only to lower-tiered items. As soon as the first dragon-type weapons were released and when some of the runite weapons were added to the drop table of several monsters, both of which happened in February of 2002, and as soon as other players also reached 99 Smithing in April and May, the prices of rune combat gear slowly began to decrease, so that might be when Bluerose13x decided to smith the runite items for free. […]

Bluerose13x became known for a lot more than just for Smithing, though. Even before reaching 99 Smithing in December of 2001, she had already become the first player to reach 99 Magic, back in October. With both skills at level 99, this made her the first player to have level 99 in two skills. A clever strategy that she used to secure her rank one in Magic before reaching 99 in the skill is that she would sometimes also ask for runes in exchange for her smithing services. Mainly the non-elemental runes were what she looked for, and she ended up getting several thousands of those every day. This allowed her to reach 99 Magic without needing to face the struggle of trying to purchase the runes. Keep in mind that Runecrafting did not exist yet, so those runes were hard to come by. Given that she reached 99 Magic two months before reaching 99 Smithing, she probably asked for runes mainly in the initial phases of her smithing period when she did not have 99 Magic yet. By the way, she would sometimes use some of those runes to train both Magic and Smithing by superheating.

If her Magic and Smithing achievements are not impressive enough yet, then certainly her other achievements will be. For starters, Bluerose13x was the player who had the most total xp from October of 2001 (and possibly earlier too) until January of 2002. After the release of Herblore in February of 2002, Bluerose13x decided to focus on that skill as well. Even though she stopped training it at around level 80 as rank one in the skill, she had in the meantime realized a special achievement that only one other player would ever repeat in the entire history of the game; Bluerose13x became the first of only two players to ever hold rank one in three skills at the same time. This happened in March of 2002, when she was rank one in Herblore, Magic and Smithing. At that moment, she was also rank three in Crafting, while also being rank three in the total hiscores. Two months later, she also rose to rank two in the total hiscores as the highest rank that she would ever hold. In terms of hiscore accomplishments, this period marked the apex of her career.

Despite those incredibly impressive achievements in 2001 and 2002, Bluerose13x’s presence at the top of the hiscores was limited to the RS1 era. […]

PREVIEW 2: About the timeline reconstruction of players with the highest total xp at any given moment since January of 2001. That timeline is added right behind another timeline reconstruction that does the same but for total ranks one instead of total xp. Both timelines are exclusive content that is as detailed as showing updates for every single month since January of 2001.  

The timeline of all people who have held total rank one in the hiscores is certainly interesting, but a player who held rank one was not always the player who had the most total xp. For example, someone could be rank ten in the hiscores but have more total xp than the rank one did. So, instead of a timeline of total ranks one, it could also be interesting to reconstruct a timeline of all players who had the most total xp at any time since 2001, on a single account. If I then also mention the total xp in the timeline, then I can very beautifully show how the xp rates have evolved over the course of the years, so let’s do that! Before I get to that, however, it is important to note that it is impossible to know for sure who had the most total xp during the period January 2001 – October 2001. That is because the hiscore boards were added to the website in November. Until then, Andrew published less detailed lists every now and then. Those updates not only listed fewer players, but they also did not mention the total xp or the xp that the players had in the skills. That said, we can still derive some useful information from day one of the official hiscores, which were released on 22^nd November 2001 and listed the top 1k players (later also 2k), so the players that I have listed for the first ten months are what some people would call educated guesses. […]

Both timeline reconstructions also come with charts for RS1, RS2, RS3, and RS1-RS3. Here is the one for total xp in the RS3 era. That is admittedly the least interesting one, so you will have to read the trilogy for the other charts!

PREVIEW 1: About the release of the quest Pirate’s Treasure in June of 2001

Pirate’s Treasure was released on 11^th June 2001 and it partly takes places on the new island of Karamja that was released on the same day. Karamja was limited to just Musa Point, though, so Brimhaven and everything else did not exist yet. You might remember from the previous books that Musa Point was released as a fishing island because the Fishing skill was added to the game on that 11^th June as well. Musa Point’s northern pier immediately became an extremely popular location for training Fishing, more specifically for catching lobster. Fishing was often trained together with Cooking there because travelling to and from a bank took a long time, especially without a run option. Keep in mind that the amulet of glory did not exist yet at that time, so there was no option to teleport to the banana plantation yet. […] By the way, in the previous book, you learnt that sending bananas from Musa Point to Port Sarim, much like in the quest, was sometimes used as a way of making money, so that is one way in which Pirate’s Treasure had an impact on the community. Another way is that completion of the quest unlocks the pay-fare option to travel between Karamja and Port Sarim. Given the popularity of training Fishing on Musa Point, that was quite an impactful quest reward at the time. Pirate’s Treasure is one example of how a simple quest that does not stand out in any way today played a far more important role when it was originally added to the game.

PREVIEW 2: About the release of the quest Dealing with Scabaras in June of 2001

The quest Dealing with Scabaras was released on 2^nd January 2008. That quest added the Archaeologists’ Camp and its dangerous dungeon to the Kharidian Desert. One of the quest’s rewards is the ability to make and wear the enchanted water tiara, which protects a player from the desert heat so that waterskins or the humidify spell would no longer be needed. This was extremely useful for Mining because mining in the Quarry was still the fastest method to train the skill at that time, as explained in the previous book.

PREVIEW 3: At the end of the chapter, I have included tables to summarize the release of all quests and the impact that they had on the game. There is a table for every year, which together list all quests that have been released since the game’s launch in January of 2001 (including quests that no longer exist today). Here is the 2018 table as an example.

PREVIEW 1: About the different levels of moderators in 2001 – You will learn everything about these so-called board moderators in the trilogy.

With the launch of board moderators, there were three levels of moderators in RuneScape back in 2001 already: 1) board moderators who could temporarily mute players; 2) Rab as the only so-called full moderator who could use his Moderator account not only to temporarily mute players but also to permanently ban players and perform several other actions, such as spawning items, teleporting players, changing skill levels, removing items from someone’s account etc.; 3) Andrew and Paul had access to all those powers as well, but they were at the top of the chain of command. It is important to note that the Moderator account was never used to give items to other players, except during holiday events to help to distribute the event items, but more about that later in this chapter. As for the board moderators who could moderate both the forums and the game, there were no official guidelines for using the mute command because it was too limited to cause any problems. Besides, the board moderators had been carefully chosen from a selection of friends, some of whom already moderated the Tip.it forums, so no guidelines were needed as some of them already had some moderator experience and the risk for abuse was incredibly low anyway, so the board moderators were allowed to rely on their own judgment to decide if someone should be muted for ten minutes or not. […]

PREVIEW 2: About the removal of Wilderness PvP and the problem of real-world trading (RWT)

[…] In February of 2009, Andrew answered several questions on that topic. He mentioned that he had wondered several times in the past fourteen months if removing Wilderness PvP had been a mistake or not, but he added to that that he would still have done the same in 2009 because there was just really no other solution to the RWT problem. He said, “I genuinely believe that if we hadn’t acted when we did, that RuneScape wouldn’t exist anymore. […] If I could go back in time a year, I would make the same decision again.” That said, Andrew proceeded to clarify that one thing that he would have done differently was releasing the PvP worlds before removing Wilderness PvP and before removing free trade. If you remember from the chapter about PvP in book two, those PvP worlds were released in October of 2008, which was ten months after the removal of Wilderness PvP and free trade. […] Perhaps the most significant information from Andrew’s answers is that even though some RWT was still present as there were still several loopholes, the removal of free trade had by 2009 been more successful than Andrew had hoped back in 2007. In other words, and luckily for both Andrew and Jagex, the drastic measures that were taken in 2007 and January of 2008 had done exactly what they were supposed to do: stopping RWT.

PREVIEW 3: About the Hazelmere’s signet ring in the part about rare and other discontinued items

Another interesting rare item was released in March of 2017 during an update that reworked RuneScape’s luck system, i.e. the system that determines how lucky a player is with monster drops and other random rewards. Completely unannounced anywhere, including the update’s news post, Jagex added the Hazelmere’s signet ring to the game, which players discovered by accidentally finding it in the Grand Exchange. What could that mysterious item be? The community quickly figured out that it was probably related to the luck rework, so it was hypothesized that the ring had extremely powerful luck-boosting effects and that it was up to the community to figure out how to obtain it. Indeed, when asked about it, all Jagex moderators remained secretive about it and would only sporadically confirm or deny some of the speculations about it in the next weeks and months. All the secrecy around the Hazelmere signet ring created a massive hype as the community engaged in a collective endeavour to figure out how to obtain it. After several weeks, the community even asked Jagex to confirm that the ring was not bugged. […]

PREVIEW 4: About a bug in Dungeoneering two days after the skill’s release

Another bug that enabled players to gain millions of xp in a short period happened right after the release of Dungeoneering in April of 2010. Runecrafting inside Daemonheim was supposed to give much less xp than outside of Daemonheim, but the equation in the game code was incorrect, which resulted in Runecrafting xp rates of more than 20m xp per hour. Due to the scale of the bug and the popularity of the skill at the time, as Dungeoneering was only two days old, Jagex was forced to shut down all servers until the bug could be fixed. After four hours of downtime, Jagex decided to perform a system rollback during which the game was restored to a previous moment, erasing all in-game progress since the point of restoration. […]