I recently watched a video about an unpolled change in old-school runescape that added the ability to change your character’s pronouns, as well as have beards as female characters, and the community’s reaction to it. Sadly, most of the runescape playerbase is pretty right leaning, with the expected reactions of “this is dumb why would they add this,” “why add this unpolled,” and “this is a medieval fantasy game not a dating simulator”
I wonder what people’s thoughts on this are, as if you are a paying customer for a game, and the game has been promised to only add poll-approved changes, is this unreasonable and why? The game is “old-school runescape,” the players are notoriously resistant to change, and are paying to keep the game as they like it. Can you pay to keep your uninclusive game uninclusive? I don’t have a great argument against it past “this literally doesn’t matter” which won’t convince people who believe it does.
“Not a dating simulator”
Clearly these dorks don’t play Classic. Not back in the day and not now.
I like customization and I dislike gender locked cosmetics - just let people do the shit they want.
This feels to me like a change that if you do not like it you can choose to ignore it.
Companies don’t just think about paying customers, they also consider future paying customers. Making an accepting environment can broaden appeal and, at least to me, it makes sense why they would make this change. Don’t want a beard? Don’t choose a beard. Simple.
Customers aren’t uniform.
You may have 95% of a customer base who don’t want this feature, but it is very low on their priorities. In contrast, you may have 5% of a fan base who do want this feature, and it is very high on their list of priorities.
The change seems cheap, so it is probably worth pleasing that small part of customers.
if the owners want the game they own to perform this way and stick to their own inclusive desires it doesnt really matter what the users want. they can take it or leave it.
personally, id tell them not to let the door hit them on the way out.
We have integrity changes all the time. Usually only game balance and new content is polled. This is fine, let the malders mald and they’ll forget in a week.
In the case of old school Runescape you have to side with the players. They are the only reason the game exists. Jagex cannot be trusted with the direction of the game. I don’t care about adding a pronoun or a gay pride event to the game and that’s reflected in my votes. I do care about jagex ignoring players and implementing things because they think they know better.
The old school Runescape playerbase petitioned to get old school servers created. They paid an ever increasing monthly membership fee that is now jagex main source of revenue. The community advertises and promotes the game. The community is responsible for suggesting almost all of the most successful content for the game.
While the community has fought tooth and nail for this game jagex scams them, undermines, devalues years of their progress and sells them out to the highest bidder. While old school memberships were responsible for 70% of jagex’s income the old school team had 13 devs and the rs3 team had 100+. Jagex constantly tries to make content to draw in new types of players who don’t respect the grind. This has resulted in the time to max going from years to slightly over a month.
I no longer pay or play osrs because jagex got their way and and basically turned the game from rs2 into rs3 despite having a perfect road map of what not to do. They choose short term profits over the long term health of the game which is an incredibly stupid decision when the average member is paying over $100 a year.
They’re entirely right. If they paid for it to not change anything except when polled, then the company broke their promise. They should now vote with their wallet and leave.
Because while they are right that they didn’t get what they were promised, the company that makes the game is also entirely right with doing whatever the fuck they want with the game. If they want to break their promise, that’s entirely up to them.
I’m pretty sure the company didn’t enter a contractual agreement with the playerbase to never make unpolled changes. So the only thing you can do is voice your discontent and leave. Which is exactly what seems like it’s happening and what should happen.
Now what I would strongly disagree with is your assessment of “most of the playerbase is pretty right leaning” and upset with it. How do you know this? Did you personally poll/study all, or an accurately representative sample of RuneScape players, ensuring an unbiased evaluation of the data? I suspect not. I suspect what has happened, again, is the vocal minority doing what they do, being vocal and a minority. There’s a loud outcry from, just guessing, 5% of the players, while the silent 95% like it or don’t care and just continue on.
I just got around to reading this, I’m not even sure what my real question is and I agree they should leave if it bothers them so much.
My best analogy would be imagine you’re playing your favorite game of all time, and the devs add a feature that bothers a majority of the player base including you, but 5% of the player base feels like they are finally spoken to. The majority of players are upset and want it changed back. You don’t want to leave because it’s still your favorite game, but it does feel unfair when the people already playing the game who are paying to keep the game as they like it, have the game changed out from under them adding parts they really dislike.
I’m not trying to say this is a reasonable complaint, or that it should “ruin the game” for them.but hypothetically if it did ruin the game for them, is it unfair to make things better for some when the majority is paying to keep the game as it was before?
I know the playerbase is right leaning because most (all that I have seen) videos on diversity and inclusion posted on OSRS YouTube will be 70% dislikes (before dislike counters were removed) with 250k views. This has been a huge controversy in the game for years
https://youtu.be/EXE8p8jTKhM pride event first suggested by jagex (almost universally disliked update, I cannot find one positive comment towards it)
https://youtu.be/u40feYnbYKU video of huge gatherings of players to protest the event
https://youtube.com/shorts/1Ad8xwv7bnU protest with a very small amount of people counter protesting
None of these are studies or statistics, and maybe most people actually don’t care and just log in and play the game, I am just stating that from all the players I have seen and all the comments left on every video about inclusion, this is either a large portion of players, or the majority is nearly completely silent (which I doubt because these protests are about 35% of the total population on that runescape world)
is it unfair to make things better for some when the majority is paying to keep the game as it was before?
As I already said I think, yes it is unfair.
However, you really have to differentiate a bit here, because all the things you talk about that are changing in OSRS seem like they’re entirely ignorable. If there’s a gay pride event, yeah it doesn’t need to be there, but you can also just not participate in it. If it’s possible to change your character’s gender and appearance, you can simply not do it.
There is no core game mechanic being changed or even tangentially touched. So yeah, it’s unfair that they change it when the promise is to not change anything, but it’s really also an incredibly small change that has a minimal if not non-existent impact to the majority, but a very huge impact to a small amount of people. At that point it becomes a bit more grey what “should” be done.
almost universally disliked update, I cannot find one positive comment towards it
In the video you added this statement to, there are maybe like 10% of YouTube comments that say they’re fine with it. So you saying “I cannot find one positive comment towards it” is a little weird. This is also imo a high amount of positive comments even if it’s just like 10% because the 10k views it has will probably mostly be watched by people looking for the controversy and speak their dissent.
protest with a very small amount of people counter protesting
If the red icons are protestors, and the blue hearts are the counter-protestors (which is what it looks like to me) then it looks more like 60/40, which I wouldn’t call a very small amount.
But what you really have to compare is how many people participate in the pride march compared to how many protest, that is the real difference that needs to be measured. I look at this video https://youtu.be/jr1XAa2cx_M and there seems to at least be 20 times as many people as what you showed in your protest video. Which is funnily enough about the 5% minority we talked about xD
For me as an outsider looking in, this seems like exactly the kind of mindset by people opposing these changes that is problematic and they need to change, which is about 50% of the population of the US which I suspect is also reflected in OSRS playerbase. I’ve spoken with people before that are like this.
They think their opinions are being censored and that is a huge problem and they don’t want to see this stuff because it shouldn’t be political etc.
These are all completely valid arguments theoretically. Like these are not bad views to hold. But they entirely miss the point because that’s what humans do, human minds work by compartmentalizing and by “explaining away” their natural behavior. Humans are an incredibly irrational species that try to, after the fact, explain the irrational behavior with rational sounding explanations.
The natural behavior here is the disgust of gay and trans and queer people. Fear/disgust of the “foreigners” or “people very different from myself” is one of the base human behaviors. The reason they can’t ignore these events, even though they are entirely ignorable, is because this disgust reaction is triggered within them. Their automatic compartmentalizing brain then searches for acceptable reasons to dislike it, and comes up with “OSRS was said to never be changed” and “politics shouldn’t enter the game”. This process in a human mind is entirely automatic and not conscious at all. But the real motivation why they can’t ignore it is the disgust/hatred of queer people. But they don’t even see that this is what’s happening, as I said, this process is entirely automatic.
Everyone, including people that hate queers, has this image in their mind of being good. But hating queers isn’t good. So “hating queers” doesn’t even consciously enter the mind, even though you can easily see it from their behavior. If they didn’t have a problem with queers they’d just ignore these easily ignorable things. But they don’t.
And even this mine explanation will be vehemently denied by these people. Because that would be too painful, because they would be admitting they’re not the wonderful people whose image they have in their minds. Doing this would break them. So they continue consciously saying “of course we don’t hate the gays” while subconsciously still hating the gays. And I completely understand this behavior because I was exactly the same at some point. I personally was mysoginistic and racist against immigrants at one point in my life and completely oblivious about it. At the time, I didn’t think that I was. But I had all these little unconscious behaviors that showed my true subconscious beliefs. I know how painful it is to confront yourself being terrible. It is not possible to bear this pain for most if your life is already mostly miserable. I was lucky in that I had a relatively good life and a strong self-improvement mindset instilled from my environment, and thus was able to face and bear this pain and effect real change within me. But it was real pain, and had I been in a slightly worse situation, I might have not been able to do this.
What people are doing with pride events and these trans-inclusive changes is yes, forcing diversity down people’s throats. You could say that it’s wrong to do that to people, entirely true, it is authoritan of them. But the goal is to reduce hatred of queer people. There’s just no way you can really argue against these motivations. A gay pride event hurts nobody. No one is forced to participate. They’re forced to see it, yes, because studies have shown that exposure to different cultures and lifestyles increases acceptance of them. If they were tucked away, that wouldn’t happen. And this triggers their disgust. You probably can’t change these people, but maybe all the new ones that haven’t been tainted to much by disgust of others behaving “differently”.
So in the end, I think these changes and events are good even though they don’t strictly “belong” in OSRS.
Yeah I think the gray area is what made me want to make this post, but it being a gray area might be the most satisfying answer I get.
I looked through about 50 comments and didn’t see any comments positive towards the event, could you show me what you mean? Or did you mean a comment that was supportive of lgbtq? The closest I found is “I’m all for gay pride but it has no place in runescape” which is perhaps not hateful but misinformed. I think it’s a bit unfair to say this video was only searched by those looking to express dissent as this creator gets about 10-40k views on their videos just in general (during those years). If anything this video underperformed which would mean people are not seeking it out.
I would probably agree there was a decent amount of counter protest, but most people who disliked the update just begrudgingly ignored it, where if someone feels like their friends way of life is being protested against, they’re more likely to turn up.
The pride event was on I think 1 or 2 “worlds,” where each world has a limit of 2k people and there are about 150 worlds. It was also scheduled to start at a certain time, and this looks like the beginning with the most people. The protests against the event were on uncoordinated worlds with no set times, people were live streaming it and the size of the protest crowd remained essentially the entire day (with I don’t know how many/few on other worlds). This is just to say I feel like exact numbers aren’t comparable, I was just showing there are a large amount of players that are angry enough to actually protest it for hours. I could maybe find one of the streams if you’d like (for the pride event and for the protests)
Speaking of the comments on the video, someone posted this (I’m not sure how reliable you’ll find it, but this is what I recall being the case too)
This was a poll done on a live stream, so obviously not a full player base sample. I suppose for me I see the player base as not wanting change and being stuck in the past, quite literally people will say this skill in runescape is terrible but I had to do it so changing it now is unfair. This to me is basically right in line with slightly right leaning, as they are using the values of 20 years ago when they started playing to make decisions today. Not truly hateful but just stuck in how things were before all these “politics” got pushed into their game.
I think you actually did kind of answer my “gray area” question with all that. You’re going against the wishes of the many for the good of society as a whole, which is unfair but what’s the alternative? lgbtq+ people aren’t allowed to exist? humans are resistant to change so sometimes you have to force it on them for anything to improve.
I think I would argue that most of them aren’t hateful, I think especially in this case most of them are just in the mindset of “this is weird and irregular and I don’t want to deal with it” and another portion says “this does matter but I don’t want to see it in anything because it makes me feel uncomfortable.” Neither really hateful, but if you have 0 exposure to something it’s going to seem weird and scary. They don’t want to see it because it’s unfamiliar and it’s unfamiliar because they don’t want to see it. Definitely a large portion has some hatred mixed in, though that too might just be because they don’t have a single friend who is even partially involved with minorities.
What you said about needing to be in a good place to stop being hateful is true in I think even more ways, such as just the way you communicate in daily life. I used to think similarly to “I don’t care but don’t shove it in my face” so I get where these people are coming from, even if it is misguided.
The demographic of osrs I would wager is 50% people who are just addicted, most polls I’ve seen run by creators have people saying they are somewhat unhappy and are just addicted to the game (it’s pretty similar to cookie clicker, just with a game built around cookie clicker mechanics). That’s why I don’t think these people are hateful, they’re just me back when I was a lot younger but never had the experiences I did that changed my mind. Maybe I’ve just been lucky enough to not meet many truly hateful people.
Well the contents of this particular change aside I could see someone upset over the principle of it. I’m not familiar with old-school runescape but if the salespitch really was “no changes unless the community approves them in a poll” then this marks a breach of “contract” (I doubt them only ever adding stuff after polls was ever contractually agreed on) on the developers part. Now that door is open so what else are they going to change without a poll? Is this going to be a one off or will this now become a regular occurence where the developers go over the communities wishes?
So, again, the politics of this particular change aside I can absolutely see why a player would be upset by this change, it’s not the change itself that is worrying but rather what that means for the future, if players were sold the idea of control this change robbed them of that control they were sold. But again I have no clue about old-school runescape so I don’t know if the community just took the status-quo as granted and never had any promises made to them that only polled changesmwould happen.
Finally read this reply, the game was “sold” to the players with every little change being polled, and somewhat recently this has been loosened a bit without too much complaint as most people feel the devs have a good handle on what the players want.
This is sort of an issue of “they know what (most of) the players want, but they’re doing what they think is better anyway.” I think they would be upset regardless of if it was polled or not though, because they don’t think it belongs in an “old school” game, but I was more wondering if it was the majority, is it okay for them to pay to make an uninclusive game for themselves.
Well in that context yeah the only reason to get upset about this is if you have a problem with the mechanic itself, otherwise they should and would have started protesting a while ago.
As for your question: Yes absolutely. Such is the consequence of freedom of speech: people will have opinions you dislike. This isn’t some serious irl matter, it’s about features in a video game so let them have whatever they want. In fact forcing inclusivity might be the least inclusive thing one can do. Sure voice your dislike if you see a group playing a game you don’t like. That is your right. But it is also their right to play that game (and voice their dislike at your voiced dislike).
I don’t think this is unreasonable but how far would you take It? If a game was actively promoting hate, and is an mmo where the majority can sway your thoughts, and this game is constantly teaching you to be more hateful but the players keep voting to keep it that way… I don’t know at some point it seems like it becomes too much of a negative.
The way I see it the point where it becomes too negative would also be the point where several laws would crack down on it anway (ie the game would be shut down for inciting violence) it’s rare for an actual hate mob to skirt the line between “legally hateful” and “illegally hateful” so in that sense the problem would regulate itself
Politics aside, it looks like the developers went against community’s will and outrage is bound to happen that way.
I myself have not enough attachment to the context to tell whether this is good or bad, but some question I would ask is: Would this change provide any value? Also do keep in mind that change can be disruptive, no matter how trivial the change might seem.
Democracies are generally at their best when only stakeholders (people with something to lose like property) are allowed to vote. Things start going south the moment someone with nothing to contribute has the same voting rights as productive people.
Runescape was around long before moderndayisms, if you want change, recruit as many of your nonbinary furry yiffmates as you can, and put down cash for the privilege.
