Oldschool Runescape Youtuber J1mmy recently made a video discussing the nature of nostalgia and its effect (or lack thereof) on the OSRS community.
Essentially, his video boils down to reasoning out why players continue to stick with OSRS, which is an MMO that has a strong player base, while other MMOs, such as WoW, continue to see their player counts decline. Nostalgia, as it happens, is not one of the reasons, but rather the game’s quality.
There’s an important element to OSRS’s success that J1mmy didn’t touch on: the game’s ability to be played without any guides whatsoever. And already there will be a group of OSRS veterans rolling their eyes at the prospect of scaping without Runelite plugins, wiki information, and a “k thx bai” quest guide.
Ignore the urge to wiki the most effective methods for training crafting for a moment (it’s giant seaweed, btw) and you’ll find that the process of searching for your own methods trumps the feeling of unlocking Fossil Island for the sole purpose of seaweed farming.
More to the point of the article, one of the greatest strengths of OSRS is that no matter how much you Wiki or look for other methods through third-party sources, there will always be another useful thing you just don’t know about. This is a principle exemplified by the numerous “restricted” accounts, such as Settled’s Swampletics, which restrict accounts to specific locations and rulesets.
These accounts always, inevitably, find some obscure training methods and methodologies for obtaining items that wiki-warriors would simply never come across due to unintentionally restricting their accounts to whatever content the Wiki states is kosher.
To achieve this strength naturally, developers of MMOs should look to stop releasing patch notes for anything other than bug fixes, major releases, and specific data such as drop table changes (Lizardman Shamans no longer drop the DWH, you’re not crazy).
There should be relatively common, undisclosed changes to XP rates, value of items, weapon viability, and the like. This way, players will feel good about exploring and discovering their own methodologies instead of feeling restricted for not googling the right answers to every problem they come across.
This principle of vague game development will look different for every MMO, but would ultimately result in gameplay where the process of finding one’s own solution to a problem is a reward itself, and keeps content from ever feeling “dead”.