Old School RuneScape hits 200,000+ online after World of Warcraft hemorrhages players

Old School RuneScape has seen a surge in popularity this year, with the classic MMORPG recently surpassing a staggering 200,000 concurrent players, causing developers, Jagex, to upgrade the servers to balance the newfound growth.

RuneScape, a game that was originally released in January 2001, has gone through its many ups and downs throughout its lifetime, with the release of the Evolution of Combat in 2012 resulting in a mass exodus of players, to Jagex's petition to roll the servers back to classic 2007 RuneScape as an entirely separate game blowing far past its 50,000 needed mark with a staggering 449,351 votes.

That 2007 version of RuneScape is now far and away more popular than the original version of the game, and since its release in 2013, it has continued to grow in popularity, attracting both new and old players.

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But why the sudden spike in players? There are a few reasons. The first is that many popular World of Warcraft creators are currently unhappy with the state of WoW and have decided to give RuneScape a try, only to find out the game is fantastic.

This newfound love from the creators is founded on a multitude of reasons, but the main one is the support the developers provide to the community by responding to players' feedback, not to mention the democratic system the developers have implemented to ensure new content is fairly integrated into the game.

For those who are outside of the loop, here's how it works. Old School RuneScape moderators scour the Old School RuneScape subreddit, Discord, forums, for suggestions of changes being added to the game. The most popular suggestions are then placed in voting booths found in every bank within the in-game world. Players can then cast their vote for each of the content change suggestions, and those changes only make it into the live game if 75% or more of players agree for it to be added.

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The voting system is the backbone of Old School RuneScape and is one aspect of the game that many WoW creators are making quite a lot of videos about. These creators' drawing comparisons between World of Warcraft and Old School RuneScape has attracted the viewers of these creators to give Old School RuneScape a try, resulting in more than 200,000 concurrent players as of this weekend.

The spike in players has resulted in Jagex needing to upgrade its servers to support the new influx of accounts, with the developer confirming in a post that it is adding more worlds to support the increasing player count.

Remember, no one ever quits RuneScape; they just take a break.