RuneScape/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced:
    • In December 2010, Jagex put up a vote to bring back free trade and the old wilderness, as they figured the real world traders wouldn't be a threat either way. The response from the players was very enthusiastic, though the Grand Exchange was well-received enough by the player fanbase for it to stay.
    • In April 2011, Jagex announced that on death, you would keep your three most valuable items as determined by market value (previously it was your three most valuable as determined by alchemy value, a totally arbitrary amount. Partyhats, some of the rarest and expensive items in the game, therefore were never kept on death).
    • In October of 2011, Jagex announced they planned to ban 98% of all "reflection" bots in the game. Cue joy, and rising prices on commonly botted items.
  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • Delrith, the super-demon the Dark Wizards in the Demon Slayer quest are trying to summon, has fewer hit points than a cow.
    • Mother Mallum, who has a pillar dropped on her, and your own character never battles her. One can argue that the final boss music is decent at least, though you can also argue that it’s nice to see everyone working together to take her down.
  • Anvilicious: Perils of Ice Mountain, so very much.
  • Awesome Music: See RuneScape/Awesome Music.
  • Broken Base: In December 2007, Jagex made the bold move of eliminating all means of large scale private wealth transfer in an effort to combat bots and gold farmers. Among other things, this meant no more trading items with a net loss/gain of more then 3000 gold and no more unrestrained Player Versus Player combat in the wilderness. This led quite a few people to quit "RuinedScape" or at least riot, though the Grand Exchange at least has been well-received by the fandom.
  • Complete Monster: Sigmund, a man who seeks nothing other than the complete genocide of all goblins (despite knowing that not all goblins are evil, as Duke Horacio points out to him), and receives a Karmic Death as a result. He also wishes to wipe out the dwarves, even though dwarves are not a threat to humans.
    • Also present is Lord Drakan, who transformed Hallowvale into Mortyania, which is essentially a Death World that's also haunted with various creatures of the night such as vampires and werewolves.
    • Also Amascut, who committed genocide on sentient monkeys. There were only three survivors of the incident, and even then, as a result of her actions, one of them is blind, one of them is deaf, and one of them is mute. It's left ambiguous as to whether they each regained their lost sense after Apmeken had her senses restored, though it's likely. She also is responsible for the cruel Pharaoh's personality, serving as the corrupter. Osman still blames him for what he had done, but he's perfectly willing to face death with dignity either way.
  • Designated Hero / Villain Protagonist: The so-named Wise Old Man. 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. Miss Schism at least realizes that he's responsible for robbing the bank though.
  • Dude, Not Funny / Cruelty Is the Only Option: The 2012 Easter event. The Easter Bunny is out of action with an injury, so the player gets the choice of serving either the Evil Chicken or the Chocatrice (both villains). The task? Go around Gielinor using your newly-acquired "Eggsterminator" to break the Easter eggs and convert their fluffy contents into either chicken drumsticks or chocolate.
  • Ear Worm:
    • Many of the earlier music tracks are very catchy, especially the main theme, and some of the later ones too.
    • Bard Roberts on Mos Le'Harmless can sing you a shanty recapping any one of the pirate quests. This comes complete with voice acting.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: 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.
  • Fan Hater: Loads. Many people view it as a poor man's World of Warcraft, and saying anything positive about it on some websites will get you laughed off the internet.
  • 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.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: 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.
  • 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.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Wild dogs in Brimhaven dungeon and Shadows in the temple of light. They're not difficult to take down, but they keep on coming, and they interrupt whatever else you were doing.
    • Ghasts. When just crossing the Myre they sometimes destroy your food, and during Temple Trekking they have annoyingly high HP and drop little loot. You can kill them but the items required to do so are irritating to gather.
  • Goddamned Boss: Quite a few.
    • Loads of these now exist in Dungoneering. AsteaFrostweb is relatively low-level, but she freezes you in place and puts up prayers that make her immune to certain types of damage. And Stomp...See Luck-Based Mission.
    • The Fight Caves minigame has Tz-Tok Jad at the end, his attacks are fairly easy to dodge[1], 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 a knockback attack it loves to spam.
  • Hate Dumb: Many of the detractors refer to Runescape as a dumbed-down knockoff of World of Warcraft or EverQuest, despite a) the game doesn't play anything like either of those and b) it was first released months before World of Warcraft was even announced.
  • I Knew It!: The Rewards Trader is Marmaros.
  • Internet Backlash: Oh so many times, most infamously after the removal of the old Wilderness PvP and free trade in 2007. It continued long after that, and three years later Jagex decided to undo that particular change.
  • 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, Zarosian armour and weapons are never referred to as such, instead being referred to by the word "Ancient".
  • 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.
    • Clue scrolls occasionally reward the player with rare and valuable items...and other times, you get a handful of mundane firelighters.
  • Memetic Badass: Thok
  • Memetic Mutation: Pillars, after Mother Mallum's infamously anticlimactic death in Salt in the Wound.
  • Most Annoying Sound:
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The "level up" fireworks, and the fanfare that plays when you advance a Combat Level.
    • The trickle of coins when your Ring of Wealth affects a drop. Interestingly enough, this can also become a Most Annoying Sound while fighting Cave Horrors, since it plays after every single kill, regardless of the drop's value.
    • The sound of a fire spell hitting alternates between this and Hell Is That Noise, depending on who the caster is. Doubly so for ice spells.
  • 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.
  • 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. And 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 the one opposite to your gender a few moments before!
  • 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.
  • The Scrappy:
    • The Sawmill Operator, for the exorbitant prices he charges.
    • Zachary Bragg of the Temple Trekking series. For one thing, he's the escortee in an Escort Mission, and his accuracy is laughable. It takes fifty levels (compared to the usual twenty) for him to learn an attack that regularly hits, meaning he's a chore to train. He's a Miles Gloriosus, despite being a nerfed version of his counterpart, Pazuzu. The best part? In order to get one of the best shortcuts in the game, you have to get him to level 99. Even the Runescape Wiki makes fun of him.
    • Random event NPC's were widely hated before an update that made events less frequent and more rewarding. They're still not exactly fan favorites. The lone exception is probably the Evil Chicken.
    • Yelps, the host of the daily Squeal of Fortune game. Plenty of players hate the game because the wheel has a habit of rarely rolling on something good and usually giving players trash items such as 50gp, logs, daggers and other useless scrap on a regular basis. It does explain why (and makes it that much more satisfying when) the goblin looks like he is bruised and beaten when the character does happen to get a rare or super rare item.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • 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.
    • 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.
  • Ship Tease: Quite a lot between the Player Character and Badass Adorable Cave Goblin chick Zanik. Crosses over into Interspecies Romance, and, if the player is female, Les Yay. One of the letters pages reveals that Zanik does indeed have feelings for the player, but wants to go off on her own so she won't be stuck in your shadow.
  • Tear Jerker: The Vengeance! saga is a surprisingly poignant Perspective Flip from the view of a female Forgotten Warrior in Daemonheim. The saga begins with you in control of a normal adventuring party comprised of a few player stereotypes (one who's obsessed with killing, a role-player, a rule breaker, and their sane team leader), after entering a room and seemingly killing everyone within it, you then take control of one of the victims who's Not Quite Dead. She awakes, poisoned, and surrounded by her dead comrades and her dead little brother (Taevas). She continues to wander through the dungeon, the poison slowly killing her, as she runs into more dead friends (each with their own examine info as she fondly remembered them), confronts and kills the members of the adventuring party that attacked them, and struggles with her own madness as her thirst for revenge begins to warp her mind, turning her into one of the very killers that she hunts...
  • That One Boss:
    • Nomad. The custodian of a minigame as a fight, shouldn't be hard, right? Well, he's been gathering the souls of everyone who's died there for a year, and has harnessed their power for himself. He will freeze you, hit you to the literal maximum your body can withstand without disintegrating, summon land mines in a circle around you, and call up clones that fight at 100% power. What's that, you think you're going to win? He heals himself once you get him to a quarter of his health, and if you do it again he'll knock off the nonsense and just smack you around faster than you can blink. Your reward is a solid red or blue cape. Enjoy.
    • Another Dungeoneering boss, Shadow-forger Ihlakhizan. It can kill a player with maximum HP with a single attack by splashing acid on them, since the puddles spread out and the damage from each puddle stacks if multiple ones land where you are standing. His special attack alone will reduce your combat stats by a ton if it connects, as well as most likely killing you instantly. The only way to dodge this is to hide behind the pillars he hangs from, but if you stay there too long, the shadows will literally tear you apart. You only get a few seconds to get behind the pillars as well, so if you walk into the boss room just as he uses his special, you can expect to have to walk back all over again. Did I mention none of these attacks can be blocked by Prayer? And Saradomin help you if you forget to turn off Auto Retaliate.
  • That One Puzzle:
    • The sliding puzzle in Elemental Workshop 3.
    • The Temple of Light in Mourning's End Part 2, though Author's Saving Throw thankfully it's been made easier with the Evolution of Combat and the introduction of the spirit terrorbird, which makes running across the temple a lot easier.
    • The sliding puzzle in Monkey Madness. Thankfully, you're allowed to skip it for a fee (though it costs 200k), and the rest of the quest is far easier. (Jagex also allows players to use a puzzle solver, though not everyone has heard of that.)
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
    • The 12-10-07 updates.
    • 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.
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  1. ↑ 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.
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