We’re now coming to the end of the Classic trial period and it’s time to let you know what we’re going to do next with RuneScape Classic. First of all, thanks very much for your response and enthusiasm – it’s great to see that many of you still enjoy Classic! We’re very glad to see new people playing the game again.
Many have been asking why we don’t open some of the servers up to free players. One reason is that it’s a great benefit for us to offer to our members in appreciation of their support, but the main reason is that we want to keep Classic’s gameplay just as it is. In order to allow an unlimited number of accounts into Classic, we would have to make a lot of the big changes to it that we have made to RS2, and then it wouldn’t be Classic any more.
There is good news, though, if you missed out on the opportunity to join Classic this time: it’s not the last chance! We will be opening Classic up to allow new members to join the game every six months from now on.
The plan is:
- After Wednesday 25th November, there will be two Classic worlds.
- If you are a veteran (that is, if you logged in to Classic between August 2005 and January 2006), you will have access to both worlds.
- If you are a Classic member (that is, if you logged in to Classic in the last two weeks but are not a veteran), you will have access to world 2 only.
- If you stop being a member, you will not be able to access Classic until you become a member again, at which point your access will be restored.
- If you did not log in to Classic in the past two weeks, you will get another chance in around six months’ time. We will announce the exact dates nearer to the time.
As for the player-owned servers idea, we have decided not to proceed with it in Classic at this point: the game is working fine as it is, with new people playing it, and there’s no reason to continue with such a big project with the numbers of players in Classic as they currently are. We do still really like the idea of player-owned servers, though, and will continue to think about it.