I recently watched a video about an unpolled change in old-school runescape that added the ability to change your character’s pronouns, as well as have beards as female characters, and the community’s reaction to it. Sadly, most of the runescape playerbase is pretty right leaning, with the expected reactions of “this is dumb why would they add this,” “why add this unpolled,” and “this is a medieval fantasy game not a dating simulator”
I wonder what people’s thoughts on this are, as if you are a paying customer for a game, and the game has been promised to only add poll-approved changes, is this unreasonable and why? The game is “old-school runescape,” the players are notoriously resistant to change, and are paying to keep the game as they like it. Can you pay to keep your uninclusive game uninclusive? I don’t have a great argument against it past “this literally doesn’t matter” which won’t convince people who believe it does.
In the case of old school Runescape you have to side with the players. They are the only reason the game exists. Jagex cannot be trusted with the direction of the game. I don’t care about adding a pronoun or a gay pride event to the game and that’s reflected in my votes. I do care about jagex ignoring players and implementing things because they think they know better.
The old school Runescape playerbase petitioned to get old school servers created. They paid an ever increasing monthly membership fee that is now jagex main source of revenue. The community advertises and promotes the game. The community is responsible for suggesting almost all of the most successful content for the game.
While the community has fought tooth and nail for this game jagex scams them, undermines, devalues years of their progress and sells them out to the highest bidder. While old school memberships were responsible for 70% of jagex’s income the old school team had 13 devs and the rs3 team had 100+. Jagex constantly tries to make content to draw in new types of players who don’t respect the grind. This has resulted in the time to max going from years to slightly over a month.
I no longer pay or play osrs because jagex got their way and and basically turned the game from rs2 into rs3 despite having a perfect road map of what not to do. They choose short term profits over the long term health of the game which is an incredibly stupid decision when the average member is paying over $100 a year.