Culture RuneScape Classic to be shutdown

https://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-classic-farewell?oldschool=1
http://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-44240147

RuneScape Classic was the first version of RuneScape, released in 2001.

For many years we've left all of the content from the original game available to play. Whilst it's seemingly been happily plodding along since then, it is with great sadness that we have taken the difficult decision to say goodbye to RuneScape Classic, which we will be winding down over the next 3 months.

It has been amazing to see such dedication amongst those of you who have kept playing RuneScape Classic over the last few years, some of you have even managed to reach max total! However, it's not all fun and games.

With advancements in technology helping to further support both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, our tools are no longer compatible with Classic. This is particularly a problem with our community safety and macro detection tools. The game is now easily abused with the use of 3rd party macro tools, and botting has become an increasing issue.

We've not fully supported RuneScape Classic for years, so why are we suddenly seeing it as a problem now? The truth is that bots and lack of community safety tools are serious problems, however, we also feel that we can no longer offer long term service reliability due to the growing risk of unrecoverable game breaking bugs.

The number of bugs is getting worse, and we're gradually seeing the game breaking. It's important to highlight that these are bugs which we can't fix due to the unsupported nature of the game.

As such, rather than have the game break indefinitely without any warning, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to have their last goodbyes.

The RuneScape Classic servers will be taken offline at 8:00am BST on the 6th of August 2018. After such date, it will no longer be possible to log in to the Classic game. You will, of course, be able to continue playing as normal up until that date.

Thank you for your support over the years.

I wonder how difficult it is to maintain ancient games like this. Perhaps a private server will pop up and actually be maintained?

 

[Echo_Ender]

It's because their shoddy Terms of Service make a bunch of mentions about "Game Masters" and other such employees handling bugs and server issues. And NO ONE from their company has touched Classic in years.

That leaves them open to the possibility of legal shennanigans from a properly motivated autist. Since the servers have a few hundred people on them at best (And a lot of those are mules/bots), they'd rather cut their losses.

 

[Billy_Sama]

Now that is a game that should never been online in the first place.

 

[OhGoy]

I was about to give this ratings up the ass,

but then i remembered that "classic" and "old-school" were two different things and that "classic" is absolute

a s s

 

[DumbDosh]

It's incredible that RSC stayed around for so long since they stopped maintaining it a good decade ago

But I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner since last I checked the servers didn't have more than a few dozen people on at a time, since there's nothing to do and OSRS is better in every way.

I assumed coming into this thread that Runescape Classic = OSRS and was wondering why they were shutting down the best version of Runescape.

It doesn't matter to a lot us either way since a lot aren't going back to play Runescape in 2018 but it's just nice to know that something you're nostalgic for can still be accessed in an official capacity.

Why would anyone even play the first gen worst runescape.

 

[Manah]

They're shutting down classic, not oldschool. Classic is total dogshit and no one plays it, oldschool is the version everyone remembers.

What's the difference?

 

[D.Va]

What's the difference?

Classic/RSC was the original 2001 version of the game that looks like it was made in mspaint
OSRS/RS2 was the 2004 update which used 3D models instead of sprite graphics
EOC/RS3 is the current edition of the game where they updated the graphics again, moved off of Java, overhauled the combat system (Evolution of Combat), etc.

OSRS is the version Jagex had to backpedal to because nobody was playing RS3, since they managed to kill the community of their game in a series of dumb moves back in '07. So they went back and launched a version of the game from earlier that year, hence Old School

The most embarrassing aspect is that OSRS gets more players than their more modern flagship despite it being developed less and it not being the first thing you see on their website.

 

[Dysnomia]

I never played it. But I remember others who did and it was very ugly. I don't know why people were playing such a bad version of the game in 2018 anyway is the oldschool version is actually a way better update. Nostalgia I guess.