A trend among top World of Warcraft streamers has snowballed into an entire MMO migration, with many WoW fans spending at least part of their summer in a very different game: Old School RuneScape.
Check the OSRS Twitch category and you'll find a lot of the streamers at the heart of this community movement. WoW veterans like Guzu, Shobek, and AnnieFuchsia are all live at the time of writing, and the likes of Sodapoppin, Savix, and many more have also hopped aboard the train.
The OSRS community, meanwhile, is loving the attention that their favorite game is getting – and the show. Many of these so-called WoW refugees – who haven't up and quit WoW, they're just vacationing a bit – are entirely new to OSRS and know next to nothing about the game, and watching them learn the ropes while translating their MMO knowledge is the best part.
"Would love to hear the highlights," said Mod Gengis of OSRS developer Jagex. "Always looking to compare notes on how we can improve [first time user experience]. Also so psyched we’re getting these guys trying out Old School. Huge honor and I truly hope they and the audience enjoy the ride!"
WOW streamer, Guzu playing OSRS for the first time, accidentally enters wilderness on he's HCIM. from r/2007scape
Fascinatingly, many of these new players have chosen to play OSRS on Ironman accounts, meaning they cannot trade with other players and must acquire all items and resources themselves. This differs dramatically from traditional accounts which can find one good money making method and then use those gold pieces (GP) to buy most of what they need from the auction house-style Grand Exchange – GPscape, as some OSRS players call it.
What's more, many are also Hardcore Ironman who will lose their coveted Hardcore status if they die a single time. You can keep playing the game after you die, so this just adds an extra wrinkle of danger to the journey.
Ironmen absolutely have to interact with much more of the game. When you're an Ironman, cheap, readily available buyables may instead become laborious, multi-step, and positively engrossing chains of quests, challenges, and skills. (Your Twitch chat also can't donate you millions and ruin the early game experience, which is nice.)
This diversity of goals, and the sense of accomplishment that comes with it, is one of the reasons that Ironman accounts seem to have steadily grown in popularity over the years. It's a great way to play the game, but it also adds to the challenge of learning to speak RuneScape, especially when you've already got years of muscle memory from a very different MMO pulling you in other directions.
A lot of WoW players are obsessed with Smithing, for example, as the OSRS subreddit noticed. Blacksmithing in WoW is a very different, arguably much more important skill, whereas Smithing in OSRS is mostly just tied to quest skill requirements and, especially for Ironmen, a few ammunition types like bolts and arrows. It isn't great money and you don't actually smith a lot of your own weapons or armor in OSRS, as the stuff you can make from scratch is very weak compared to what you can get from monster drops or other PvE activities.
"Their WoW brains are immediately set to 'QUESTS AND SMITHING NOW' and since they all do it I assume it has to do with how WoW is, but slowly they will come to realization that they just have to grind levels in other skills," as Redditor Coinsandtime put it.
WoW streamer luck from r/2007scape
People have also been discovering, or in some cases rediscovering, what makes OSRS so unique in the MMO landscape. It's even older than WoW, and OSRS is fundamentally doing things the same way all this time after what's colloquially known as RuneScape 2. The community latched onto a quote from Shobek, who said, "I find it so fresh that I can play a character that will not be irrelevant one year later."
OSRS doesn't follow the traditional class/job system or expansion cycle that guides most other MMOs, from WoW to Final Fantasy 14. It does get big new updates and regions, but most content is commendably evergreen.
You play as one character that can, with enough effort, do anything and everything. It's less about what content the game itself is focusing on right now – the veteran community and the meta and the general zeitgeist – and more about what content suits your account's current stage of progression and the goal you want to reach. It's like fitness in that sense: everyone is at a different stage of their journey.
"Anti-irrelevancy design is what makes this game great and timeless," said Reddit user loopuleasa.
"You don't need to make a new character, go through the same, or very similar storyline again, just to experience the game as a different class to do the same content but different," adds joost00719.
Naturally, this influx of WoW players and streamers has also brought about some goofs. Unwittingly blowing your life savings on magic runes. Guzu audibly gasping and saying "chat, I'm freaking out" after accidentally teleporting himself to the Wilderness, a dangerous PvP zone. Shobek panicking after another player tricks him into thinking he's dying. Shobek, again, understandably losing his mind after nabbing an iconic rune scimitar in just two kills.
"I love the joy of people that haven’t played this before," says the sagely SparkleTarkle. "I truly hope more and more people keep experiencing this game for the first time."
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