I place an additional eight hours into fostering my skills

Lumbridge is still there, with its set of Mischievous Imps still wandering the castle grounds amidst a sea of gamers barking the same immortal question at each other:"Will u be my gf?"

In spite of all of the updates, slipping back buy RuneScape gold to the identical old regime of grinding tools and sprinting to the nearest bank to sell them is eloquent.

My experience of Runescape in 2006 was mainly this: grind for hours, purchase some shiny new equipment, smash keyboard upon realising my combat level wasn't enough to equip it, grind battle levels, equip gear, get killed in the Wilderness, shed shiny new equipment, repeat. Every few months I'd decide it was time to start a new account, inspired by some expert build I'd seen or a inexplicable desire to live an easy life and become some sort of fabled hermit. Honestly, 12-year-old me believed that would be a fun thing to do.

Initially you could sulk and long to get your dog that was, but soon enough you begin to notice the pet is gorgeous compared to its haggard predecessor. It does all kinds of new tricks, it's charm and character, heaps of endgame content and doesn't have to be fed or walked often.

Where Runescape utilized to involve offering up one's hands to hours, or even days, of grinding for piecemeal progress, today it hands out flat raises with a regularity that is hard to stomach if you can remember sinking 20 hours of continuous play into acquiring just half of the XP you need to level up.

Happy with my progress, I place an additional eight hours into fostering my skills. At this time my general impression is that Runescape has only gotten prettier and easier, which wouldn't be enough to haul me back to its F2P clutches.

What did manage that RS gold (I begrudgingly admit) was that the amount and quality of quests to be performed in RuneScape. There's even a quest where you take control of a seagull and use it to bomb zombie pirates with bird poo.

Runescape's tone is joyously light, and with fewer degree cap hurdles to leap over you are free to adopt and explore it without submitting to the mill. Which is great, since Runescape's quests haven't really required one to use skills aside from battle, and have usually incorporated puzzles or interactive elements that have more in common with old school point-and-click adventure games than fantasy questing.