** The End: 2006-2007 **
I kept playing Runescape after a lot of my friends had moved on to better things in high school. Part of my motivation was that the clan system came out. It was just a little window back then (might still be, idk) and you'd type in your name and get your clan network. You could give people ranks and stuff. I made a bunch of GeoCities websites with JavaScript add-ons from BraveNet.
There was a limit of 200 friends... I would have to comb through my friends list periodically and delete people. I never deleted the original friends though, even if I hadn't seen them since 2004, even the girl I had taken to that bridge, I always hoped, even two years later, that one day she'd appear again, that all my old friends would appear again, and we'd go pking in the Dark Knight's Fortress and bullshit each other and explore and it would be just like old times.
I did the Monkey Madness quest that summer, between middle school and high school. I was too low-level to really do it, but I managed to complete it anyway with lots of food, prayer, cleverness, and help from friends. The demon took me like ten tries to kill before I found a hacky way to kill it where I could run around on the edge and he wouldn't be able to hit me.
Also one time I was beating the demon and it just disappeared, and I was left there trapped in the demon-fighting arena and nothing would happen, it was really scary, I had to use the home teleport to escape otherwise I would have been stuck forever (like the old void, which was before even my time) and I was worried the demon wouldn't be there when I went back and I'd never be able to finish the quest.
After doing that I started just doing all the really hard quests. It was a point of pride that I could do them at such low levels. I think you needed a certain combat level to start the Legends Quest and I thought that was really lame. But I did Legends Quest, Mournings Ends part 1 & 2 (the 2 was a nightmare, I needed RuneHQ to help me with that), all the desert and elf quests, Desert Treasure, which was supposed to be the hardest quest in the game, and that one quest where you had to do all the different things and then fight the Culinaromancer. I think it was like the fifth anniversary quest. It was pretty underwhelming though, the end reward was just a bank in the basement of Lumbridge and some experience lamps.
Everyone was really into Barrows hunting, but I was never elite enough to kill them with my 60s combat levels.
The best way for me to make money, I found, was the Mage Training Arena. I could make a lot of money doing the puzzles, buying the infinity stuff, and then selling it for like 1-2M. We're talking like 1.5M for 6-7 hours of work, which was pretty good, and also I got magic experience for it. But it was sooooooooooo boring. This was probably when runescape started to die a lot for me just as a personal thing, because I needed the money to buy stuff for my skills since I was getting to a high level, but I also prized my low combat level and wasn't able to go kill monsters for loot, so I had to do these degrading and boring things to get money. There was a maze part of the Mage Arena that was the worst of all, because there were only five mazes, but they took forever to do, and I knew them all by heart.
Some kid in my new high school was really into glitches in Runescape and the whole Scythe/Hacks thing. He would sell me 1M for $10 each, and I started shoveling snow in the winter for $5 a driveway, thinking that each driveway was 500K. So much better than actually playing the game. This was before Jagex did their RWT balance thing.
I spent most of my time in the game after that just trying to get little rare items or find cool things. All my friends had left one by one and I was getting too old for the game at 14-15. I couldn't connect with new friends in the game anymore, and the sense of exploration was all gone, so I just spent my time wallowing in materialism and aimless self-improvement. Sort of like real life I guess.
The brief spark came when I started wanting to investigate the glitches this kid was talking about for myself. I joined these sites and became a regular contributor. One site you needed like 1000 posts to get access to the secret forum where they talked about new glitches, and I made all 1000 of those posts. The glitches I remember the most were one that let you stay a monkey outside of the zoo in West Ardougne, one that let you take items from people's houses, and one that made you like invincible in the Duel Arena, although it was really hard to pull off.
I started to get pretty rich around this time. Like 6-7M in my bank account and enough poisoned rune arrows to last me to the end of my days. But it was so intoxicating that I went too far into the darkness. I started conspiring with other guys on there to share access to our accounts to pull of bigger and newer glitches, like to finish quests and stuff. Then one of the guys turned out to be a scammer and stole all my stuff. I still remember being on my alt account and watching him take too long at the Lumbridge bank, my heart sinking with every second he stood there going through my bank account when he was allegedly just withdrawing arrows.
I never got my revenge, so I just aimlessly did the same to someone else, posted a thread saying that for 1M I'd do a fire cape for you, and then I just got on the guy's account and took all his stuff. It felt terrible and I was starting to feel really sick and depressed about the whole game.
I only played sporadically after the summer of 2007. I think there was a new desert quest, or a new elvish quest, and I got on to do that, but I had promised myself to stay away from the whole dark side of Runescape after feeling sick about the fire cape scam, and slaving away to make relatively small amounts of money just didn't feel good anymore. My friends were all gone, I'd done all the quests there was to do, nobody was impressed by my stylish outfits or cool items anymore, there was just no point.
The final straw was the RWT ban in late 2007. I couldn't play games in my beloved duel arena anymore, and there was no more pking, which I hadn't done in forever but which always held the magic appeal of being what originally drew me to the game. I figured, that's it, it's finally done, and stopped logging in altogether.
** Afterlife: 2007-present **
Well there wasn't much afterlife. I did a pretty good job of staying away, really there was no motivation to go back. One time they made a bunch of pk worlds, and I logged on in the middle of Falador with all my stuff and got killed in like five seconds. So much for all the riches I had.
I made a F2P account in 2010 and played around a little bit. It wasn't very interesting. I got to 50 fishing on Karamja in one day just for fun while watching Scorsese movies and Skyping.
There are some pictures on an old PhotoBucket account of mine that have my bank: http://ctrlv.in/495310
and my stats (name cropped out but I had 50 construction and 32 hunter): http://ctrlv.in/495311
Oh! There was also a glitch we found that let you take CastleWars items out of CastleWars and set up barricades anywhere: http://ctrlv.in/495312
I also obviously was a bit of a piece of shit back then, when I was 12-14 years old... obviously I'm not proud of most of the stuff I did. So sorry for that. Fwiw, Jagex banned me about a dozen times. I could usually appeal it pretty decently though. We always suspected that they looked for keywords in an automated appeal system and would coordinate on how to match them and learn how to get through the appeals. One of my very early accounts that I used to pull of two-person heists got banned in 2004 and then after 2006 all the black marks became "Legacy Punishment." I think I took this picture because I was upset about not being able to get the account back since it had a Yo-yo. http://ctrlv.in/495313