As World of Warcraft players and communities continue their vacations in Old School RuneScape with increasing voracity, the great summer MMO migration has turned up genuine moments of good-natured rivalry and mutual appreciation. New comments from the folks involved and the developers watching from the sidelines demonstrate just how deep the grindset goes, with OSRS progress beating a sizable chunk of money on the hierarchy of needs.
The OSRS community latched onto a recent comment from one of the migration's foremost converts: Twitch streamer Savix, who's now on day 15 of his OSRS Ironman journey. In a hot post on the OSRS Reddit community, which declares "It is official now: RuneScape won the MMO war," Savix says (in a Twitch clip) that he and other likeminded WoW streamers have not been sponsored to play OSRS. They're in it purely for the love of the game. (The title of the Twitch clip, "WE GOT HIM," seems more apt.)
More to the point, Savix says he specifically "declined a $5,000 deal to play Mists of Pandaria" in World of Warcraft Classic to keep playing OSRS, "so put some respect on my name, man. I actually enjoy this game. I rejected big money to play this."
It's worth remembering that these so-called WoW refugees didn't up and quit WoW or even express some great disappointment with the game; some big streamers just started playing OSRS for fun and it snowballed into a trend.
This kind of competitiveness, even if superficial, can feel endemic to gaming, but the conversation around this post, in the middle of an otherwise delightful collision of MMOs, stood out. Plenty of players understandably wondered "we were at war?" in the replies to this Reddit post, or reasoned that "This tribalism of the games people choose to play is ridiculous," but it's the response from Jagex Mod Sween that does it for me.
"Such a cool clip to see as both a player and a JMod," the dev begins, "but I’m not crazy about the title [of the post], you can love both games and plenty of us do, but we really are glad that so many more people are getting to experience OSRS and really give it a chance, all of us have known for years that we have something special and others are starting to get it too!"
As it happens, I remember seeing Savix mention this post and how it presented this clip of him in a separate stream featuring several other WoW content creators, and he seemed to be of a similar mind. The two games are very different and very good, and there's no sense pitting them against each other.
