That was, until the first of Jagex's hugely unpopular changes came, and also the game's downturn - in the opinion of many - started.

The'Grand Exchange' was used as a means for best places to buy runescape gold gamers to exchange more easily - albeit less straight - with one another through a kind of auction-house-slash-stock-market. Previously, purchasing a new pair of armour or a fresh weapon required a participant to park themselves in one of the game's unofficial'trading hub' towns and arduously type out the lineup"Selling 145k lobsters" for hours on end until enough deals could be hit to unburden the player of the excess shellfish. With the execution of the Grand Exchange, a participant could look for an item to purchase, or list each of the items they wished to market for your pre-established market cost, or another custom value. Many criticised the helpful update as the'passing of free trade', but the worst would be to follow along.

Whilst Jagex were happy to allow overpowered items run amok there was one glaring problem that they would not stick - and rightfully so: so-called real-world trading; that is, the exchange of actual cash to in-game items. They saw this as a proof of their intellectual property and it left them angry - even going so far as to sue the creators of'bot' accounts used for gold-farming for a period that"exceeded six figures". In late 2007, Jagex removed the entire notion of'free' trade from the game - meaning that transactions must be fair in the view of this Grand Exchange, with a rather restricted margin for imbalance. This meant that the benefits for PvP were hugely neutered - as formerly the successful player would keep 100 percent of their spoils, the maximum value that could be dropped by a defeated combatant was severely confined to stop illegal transactions. No longer could a player lend their friend a sum of cash to get their account began; nor can a player winning a PvP duel pocket over a few million coins - than hundreds of millions which were frequently put at stake. To say this upgrade was extremely unpopular is a massive understatement, and it had been the conclusion that ultimately contributed to many diehard fans stopping the game only months after the membership foundation handed one million. The busy playerbase plummeted, and the game that had in its peak seen concurrent online-players from the hundreds of thousands was facing a mass exodus. This wasn't the death of RuneScape, nevertheless; nor was it that the death of the match's unique quality. By this stage, the match had seen 130 quests released - most of that composed with the same tongue-in-cheek humor and occasional pop-culture references that lent some undeniable allure to the match and kept players curious, one seven-quest storyline even ended up spanning nearly 13 decades.

2012 brought with it several claws which could find themselves hammered into RuneScape's coffin. The first of which was the odious, yet depressingly inevitable'Squeal of Fortune' (a phrase that I'll use sparingly as the act of simply writing it makes me inhale ) - a cynical gaming mechanic that enabled Jagex (and their new American majority shareholders) to squeeze microtransactions to the beloved MMORPG. Incredibly, however, this wasn't the year's least popular upgrade, as a collection of graphic changes took off the lovably chunky style of this game's armours in favour of shinier (and in my view a lot more dull ) versions. The final - and arguably the largest - nail came with an entire overhaul of the battle system - replacing the simplistic tick-based system with a more intricate mechanic that required the usage of unique abilities and constant player input - à la each other MMORPG below sunlight. Whilst the machine itself wasn't really all that dreadful and could somewhat be regarded as an improvement, it - and the armour visuals upgrade - demonstrated just how tone-deaf Jagex were about what the vast majority of veteran players adored about the game. Jagex eventually realised that, nearly unbearably cynically, they might sell the older, beloved armour designs as decorative items for real money money (demonstrating the custom of so-called real-world trading was actually okay, as long as Jagex pay for rs gold with gift card were performing it). The'Evolution of Combat' - since the overhaul was titled, led to yet more gamers stopping and would be the last straw which broke Runescape's back; and yet the game wasn't fully dead, instead trapped beneath a mound of overly-controversial game-altering updates.