Blog

Site Updates

What I thought would be a simple change turned into an all-day task. I moved the KPI cards into HTML because that would help Google scrapers see my content, but that created a chain of issues with caching, flickering, mobile loading, and latency. After about seven hours, I think it is working as expected again and in many ways better than before, although it is a little slower in some cases.

If I do not get approved for AdSense, I will likely revert the site back to fully JavaScript. The site felt much smoother before.

I'm Not the Biggest Fan of Blogs

I have to make more original content to get ads, so one goal is to be approved for AdSense on Google and run some really unobtrusive ads.

I'm not a fan of ads, but this site costs money to run. Thankfully not so much, roughly $50 a month or thereabouts. I may be able to recoup some of that back. I'm at roughly 40 visitors per day, and that could grow, it might not, and even still the ads might not generate any money, and if so, that's fine, but any little bit back would be helpful. I'm thinking ads only on certain pages, like this blog, or the main page, maybe only desktop at first, and at the very bottom on mobile. Did I say I hate ads?

Some of the content on this page may be more aligned with expectations (data analysis), and some may just be my opinions on RS3/OSRS.

I'm working on a big text analysis for EoC. I'm looking for forum posts, wikis, third-party articles, etc. that I can both save on Wayback and glean insight into themes for why it didn't work. Stay tuned. Will likely post that here as analysis.

I noticed a couple things I need to work on:

Jagex and PKing

I want to comment on Jagex's relationship with PKing; from an RS3 growth perspective, not necessarily from an OSRS perspective.

Back in the golden era of RS2, I was in a PKing clan: the most dominant F2P PKing clan at the time, Dark Slayers. DS was undefeated in F2P at the highest levels for over a year. You can still find videos of our run-ins on YouTube.

Here's one of the DS clan sigs from back in the day that highlighted DS's accomplishments:

And here's another that people used:

DS also did limited P2P PKing, but we were mostly F2P.

After DS closed in 2007, I spent a year skilling, then went to college. I essentially stopped PKing. It wasn't just a personal decision. Jagex had removed the Wilderness, removed free trade, and gave us Bounty Hunter, which I loathed. PKing eventually tapered off for me, and I stopped completely.

I had recently argued that Jagex should gamify and reward PKing on RS3, even if it's a minor adjustment, like designating one area of the Wilderness for PKing or building it into a minigame. This would be a start at bringing PKing communities back.

Jagex has never really understood that PKing; or that joining a PKing clan was, for many, the endgame of that era's RS. It has never given weight to the community, even when the community was very vocal, such as Robtokill's "clan support" push in 2006. Here's a pic of Rob and many PKers crashing a secret mod event in 2006:

Colonello covered that here.

While Jagex has historically shown antipathy towards PKing, Jagex has understood very well that people are addicted to RS and have their foot in the door, and really no matter what happens, people won't leave.

And in 2006 this might have been reasonable because it is likely that most people based on raw numbers who were playing at that time were either bots or not affiliated with clans. Even after the Wilderness removal and free trade restrictions, people didn't abandon the game en masse until EoC, and that was six years between the two, essentially proving Jagex correct that people would stay no matter the disruption.

I recently heard Asmongold say that PKing is the most difficult thing to successfully balance in an MMO, and that's why devs hate it. He also mentioned that if devs add PvP, it should be unbalanced.

I don't think he's wrong.

This ties into a point I recently made: RS has always been about who was there the longest, who could spend the most time, and exploits. The game has rarely been about true mechanical skill, the kind you see in games like Marvel Rivals, although it does exist, especially with PKing.

So, as a "sandbox," without PKing and minigames, those who seek high mechanical skill activities (outside of PVM) have no outlet on RS3 and migrate to OSRS. In fact, the PKing community on OSRS is still quite large and popular, although according to Framed, it's dying also.

I do think that RS3 can distinguish itself with minigames and PKing-specific areas, but it has to be unbalanced.

A friend of mine, the first F2P player to 126 combat and likely one of the first 100 people who ever signed up for RuneScape, told me what made him rich and when he had the most fun was the transition from Classic to RS2, because so many noobs were in the Wilderness and they didn't know the "glitched" levels like 94 Ranged.

I don't recall the Attack/Strength and Magic levels, but there were levels for each that were more accurate or hit harder than they should have. And players who had been on the game for years would take advantage of that by capping themselves at that level to PK.

So from what I've heard and experience with PKing personally, I believe for PKing to be successful it will need to be something that people can use their experience and skill to create massive disadvantages for others, where high-level rewards are at stake.

I don't know how Jagex does this. I'm not a game developer. But I do know that it would attract interest.

I mostly agree with Framed's historical recap, although I added some commentary below. I also don't think his solutions will work because for PKing to be fun in a game like RS, it should be imbalanced. While I do think PKing should be part of RS, teaching PVP likely still won't get people PVPing.

2:52 - No one called Greater Demons (GDs) "Annakarl" back in the day. Maybe they do now? DS referred to it as "Gladz Castle." Mostly GDs or Greater Demons. Ancient Magicks were released in 2005, which is where the teleport name comes from.

3:03 - People did PK on W18, which eventually became a PK world later, but originally it was just like every other world, but with a bunch of pures at Edge in the Wild.

Clans would world hop in the deep Wild on F2P, usually with "official" or planned run-ins, unless a clan accidentally crossed paths, which became rarer as clans like DI and DS became more dominant.

The video from Bibbleboy is from a P2P war, which wasn't the most common clan PKing at that time. Mostly because multi sucked. A single noob with barrage and no gear could grief your run-in. A lot of noobs could do even worse. Most high-level P2P PKing was in single combat at the Mage Bank or W18 Edgeville.

4:56 - People absolutely knew about tick eating/potting at that time. This is a common myth that we didn't know about ticks in 2006. Combo foods? Most serious PKers on P2P used tuna potatoes, brews (after release), and fell back on sharks.

5:04 - There were established metas. You already mentioned one: no honor PKing (NH). But look at the gear in your own videos, the locations. Those are all metas. You're interpreting the scene from the PoV of an eleven year old, not how it was at that time.

And that happens a few times in an otherwise good video.

6:28 - Why did so many quit after EoC?

Combat Update Still Not Moving the Needle

The combat update dropped yesterday. On paper, this is a major update. In practice, looking at hourly averages at a week-over-week grain for the same day, RS3 is still underperforming with very few glimmers of upticks. Each day is logging new low hourly averages, although last night (CST) the game slightly overperformed between 8pm and midnight, but not by any substantive margins.

February 2026 finished with an average of 20,776 concurrent players. That is the lowest February in 13 years of data.

With fewer concurrent players there is less chance people are multi-logging on alts, which lowers both active counts and concurrent counts. There are also fewer bots, which lowers counts further. Jagex has done well on bot bans, but the underlying player engagement is not improving.

After trying out the combat update myself, I do not feel it qualifies as new content. It is modified content. I don't see it creating a reason for people to log back in just yet. While seasonality at this time of year does tend to push counts lower, I am not seeing upticks or upward momentum to suggest that players are staying or returning due to the recent roadmap. Instead, the data suggests they are leaving, and maybe more quickly.

Basic features, expected functionality, and stable systems do not motivate players when they are present. But when they are absent, they cause frustration and disengagement (Herzberg). Jagex needs to do more to ensure that features customers assume will be there are actually there. When you remove an experience or feature, especially a valued one that has become a standard part of the service, you are always more likely to drive people away, just based on how motivation works.

Removing people's auras, for example, especially when some took months of effort to earn, is a hassle in the context of many hassles. That accumulation leads to burnout if not adequately addressed. This pattern is a common theme with Jagex updates: remove, don't replace, and don't compensate for the removal. This is wrong, and you are driving people away.

The combat update looks mostly solid and logical, but there are still hassles Jagex is baking in. Thankfully, Mod Sponge has been quickly fixing bugs.

Mod Anvil mentioned on Reddit that world consolidation is being considered to increase player collision.

Mod Anvil has mentioned several times that he is the community manager. This presents an interesting pattern: many of the recent changes, including AFK nerfs, MTX removal, rebalances, and simplifications, share a commonality of promoting more community-driven interactions and easier engagement with the content. In my opinion, Anvil is literally creating a new community for RS3. It does not surprise me that he believes world consolidation is a winning idea.

My opinion on this is that statistically there are over 100 worlds on RS, and it is inefficient that most have 200 or fewer players. An MMO shouldn't feel empty.

From that perspective, I agree with this direction, but with several caveats: Jagex needs to fix its lag issues. I'm on a high-end computer, and I still experience lag. Competition for resources should be adequately addressed. Even with half measures on both of those, Jagex could reduce the world count down to 45 worlds and many would still be barely populated with these counts.

I firmly believe one of the central reasons OSRS is so popular is because it's popular. It's a network effect (positive feedback loop). People join the game because other people have joined the game.

People say it's the combat, it's the events, PvM, player support, but I think objectively, RS3 is a more modern and better game, so I have to ask, am I just missing something here? Or is there another explanation. Since I essentially played 2007 RuneScape when it was new, I don't feel I'm missing anything. I think that if RS3 felt more populated, it would paradoxically become more populated. That's my hypothesis.

I saw people saying that Jagex is hoping to save money by doing this. I don't always like what Jagex does, but will say, that does not appear to be the case. I've seen no evidence that they're cost-saving, and I don't imagine these servers are costing them that much money overall.

This is strategic, not financial. If Jagex were most concerned about finances and appearances, they wouldn't have hired a new lead community member (Mod Anvil) last year. And they certainly would not be nuking bots to the extent they are. Bots are not only player count numbers they can boast but likely subscriptions they're removing also.

In sum, I am slightly surprised more players haven't returned for the combat update. However, I still believe many will return when there is exceptional content and when they feel valued. Historically, that has been the pattern driving player counts.

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The site was down earlier due to some overly aggressive anti-bot rules I had in place. Sorry for the delay.

While I was at it, I cleaned up the historical population data. Any 15-minute snapshot where total players fell below 1,000 is now excluded before daily averages are calculated. More often than not, these were just bad data pulls when RS was being updated or the old Perl process was broken.

I also added a refresh for the monthly hiscores pull, so that data is as current as possible.

Everything seems to be running again. I have my Discord linked at the top and my email on the main page. Please send a notice somewhere if you spot bugs. Thanks.

More Updates

The overall trend for concurrent player counts is decreasing. About two weeks ago, I made a post on Reddit labeling the trend flat, and also later admitted it was flat and slightly down. Yes, this was noticeable two weeks ago.

There is a YoY pattern of player growth between October and December that declines afterward. This is seasonality. Many players log in for holiday content (or new content drops); since 2020, the Oct-to-Dec surge has averaged around 24% in years where it occurred. But those players give those counts all back in 2-3 months, every time. This year's holiday surge was only about 4%, compared to 25-34% in the two prior years. RS3's seasonality is especially conspicuous on the hiscores counts, where monthly active accounts have gone from ~370K (Aug 2023) to ~288K (Jan 2026), with February currently at ~216K. So suggesting that player counts would drop this time of year without new content wasn't a wild leap. A bigger leap was the folks saying one outlier day in January was indicative of the game coming back. Those folks are really quiet right now.

So what's driving lower numbers? Several things:

These YoY trends are predictable. You can see the slope decreasing from the peak back during COVID, and this can be mapped YoY (I've done it on the Trends page). Assuming that trajectories hold, Jagex wouldn't want to keep losing players, so they make adjustments: new skills, new areas, new minigames, new content.

Jagex is clearly experienced at monitoring these trends considering how far ahead they implemented the roadmap for these changes (last summer). But again, a blind man could see the ongoing downtrend since COVID and rightly expect it to continue.

I believe 120 combat levels and Havenhythe will bring people back, if Jagex executes well.

I've added a lot more data, including Player Support, which tracks the botting data that Jagex releases. I don't have a programmatic solution for that yet, so it's completely manual until next month.

I redid the labels on the weekly data tooltips for hiscores because, for Jagex, a new week starts on Wednesday (or Tuesday for me). The data was always correct; the labels just weren't accurate because I had the week starting on Monday. The reason the data is correct is because Jagex does a weekly summation that drops on Wednesday.

Just some transparency on how the process works: I collect three data streams: monthly, weekly, and live. Live gives accurate counts, but Jagex adjusts them when the final data dump comes in. I overwrite live data with the final figures from Jagex so the counts are as accurate as possible. Even still, I have seen some data that don't match month over month because it seems Jagex can revise old data somehow? (Maybe bot bans.)

The RS3 Time of Day and Day of Week trend views for YoY comparison have become the two things I review the most, because I can easily see whether today is trending low compared to the last three months, or whether the day is low compared to all of the data. This gives me a quick read on the game's level of engagement at any given moment.

Last thing: I want to add links to some historical data, and maybe callouts to data sources in case people want to review those themselves. I would also like to pull in social media data on RuneScape, but the Reddit API has been tricky to obtain. Might keep trying, might not. I was also thinking about getting Jagex's financials and graphing those, but may not do that either.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the site. There are some quality-of-life changes I might try in the future, such as making graphs linkable and shareable.

Finally, THANK YOU to everyone who has been SHARING the site with positive intent. I really appreciate that.

Fixed Some Issues

I added Day of Week (DoW) filters to the year over year (YoY) charts on both the Population and Trends pages. You can now compare Daily (all days), DoW (e.g., all Sundays vs. all Sundays), or Monthly averages across years.

Why does this matter? Sunday is typically the highest population day on RuneScape, while midweek days tend to be lower. When you look at a YoY chart using daily data, you're comparing a Sunday in 2026 against a Wednesday in 2025, which is not an apples:apples comparison. The DoW filter fixes this by aligning the same weekday across years. That said, the daily view can still be useful for spotting broader patterns.

I also noticed that the regression trendlines on the Trends page were sometimes showing player gains even when recent data clearly showed a sustained downtrend. The issue was in how seasonality was being handled.

The old approach computed a multiplicative seasonal index by averaging each day of the year across all available years, then dividing by the global mean. The problem is that if the population in 2013 was 60,000 and in 2026 it's 21,000, those values get averaged together, contaminating the seasonal adjustment. It also averaged out the weekly cycle entirely, since Monday through Sunday all fell on different calendar days each year.

The new method uses Fourier regression, which models the linear trend and seasonal patterns simultaneously. It fits sin/cos harmonics at weekly (period = 7 days) and annual (period = 365.25 days) frequencies using ordinary least squares (OLS). This means the weekly cycle (weekday vs. weekend) and annual seasonality (summer lows, holiday spikes) are estimated alongside the trend, not separately. The result is a regression line that strips out both weekly and annual noise to give a more accurate estimate of the actual direction of population change.

Annual harmonics are only used on windows with 2+ years of data. On shorter windows (1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month), only weekly harmonics are applied, because annual harmonics overfit when you have less than a full cycle. I discovered this the hard way when testing the 6-month regression line went from 0 to 40,000, which was clearly wrong.

The trendlines are now tighter, more responsive to recent data, and better aligned with what the moving averages show. If the data says RS3 is flat or declining, the regression will reflect that instead of being pulled by stale seasonal estimates from a decade ago.

In conclusion, these estimates are much closer to reality. Jagex likely has their own data scientists sweating over these numbers, one would hope. Jagex does have a major update scheduled for next week, the Early Game Rebalance (part of the Road to Restoration), that will likely increase concurrent player counts and people hitting the hiscores. We will see.

We are currently looking at the lowest hiscores period since October 2025. As of February 15, weekly accounts on hiscores sit at 134,375, the 4th lowest week out of 110 weeks on record, only above the late September/early October 2025 trough (which bottomed at 127,225).

This does not bode well for the game. Expect some major motion next week.

Welcome to aggrgtr

The site has been updated to what I hope will be a somewhat final version, amenable to feedback of course, with charts and data that are easily accessible and usable by anyone. And for RS data will always be free for use. I don't even run ads, although I may in the future.

A bit about me: I have many strong feelings on RS3. I don't play frequently, but I'm maxed. I've been maxed in most skills essentially since 2008. I don't intend to play much this year, although I am a premier member on two separate accounts. I appreciate RS3 and want to see it be successful.

99 Smithing, early 2008. 99 Crafting followed that summer.

This site is not an attempt to p-hack or lie with data or push whatever other narratives people have had and will have about me. The purpose is to be transparent, responsible, and honest about changes.

Overall, now that I have a full inventory of data and analysis I trust, I have thoughts on recent changes: I've noticed over the last decade that Jagex becomes especially antsy when the core player counts drop to or below an average of 20K people. At that point, I believe the corporate emails are being fired off frantically and courses are being corrected. I see no difference here.

Over the last couple of years, RS3 players have been routinely complaining about the lack of new content, the overuse of rare items and FOMO, and if you look at the last 5 year chart there has been a decline of 2,595 players on average per year. And only in the last year and only after beginning course correction has there been an uptick of 4K players per year (growth).

While this trend looks positive, the impetus for it seems to be just how major the changes have been that Jagex is implementing. Removing Treasure Hunter, removing items, removing many things, actually, including gameplay loops (see the full announcement). Changes so drastic even I came back after almost a year hiatus to get rid of my items before they were deleted. It looks like many people were doing the same.

I see a lot of people hyping these changes. And I see many in fear of them.

At a very high, superficial level these changes look positive (and maybe they will sustain); however, digging into the drivers of these numbers reveals nothing much has changed. RS3 has a lot of seasonality at the end of the year (see below). And these dramatic announcements by Jagex have brought people back, but has it been to play the game again or out of fear and shock?

The question is not whether population totals went up. They have. The question is whether that has been sustained, and as of right now, 2026 YTD is averaging 21,971 players. That is above 2025's average of 20,759, but it is still well below the 24,000-25,000 range that RS3 sat at just a few years ago. A month and a half into 2026 with 1K more total players when massive content changes have been announced is not a fact pattern... yet.

The Trends page on this site controls for seasonality using a multiplicative day-of-year seasonal index. For every day of the year (1-366), the index computes the average population on that day across all available years, divided by the global mean. Trendline regressions are run on seasonally-adjusted values. When you strip out seasonality effects, the underlying trajectory is clearer, and what it shows is that RS3 is still in a 5-year decline that recently flattened. See below. The table has gone from 23K per week to now being roughly 21K per week.

I have seen more interest in RS3 lately, and that is a good thing. I have seen some streamers coming back (A Friend, for example). And there have been many positive changes. Removing bloat, Tutorial Island returning, spawning at Lumbridge, etc. Many of the changes and reversions look smart. However, fully removing MTX lamps rather than gatekeeping them, removing events, reducing AFK... all of this makes the game harder. And I do not think that should be the goal when your average player is roughly 30 years old. (I agree with Protoxx's sentiments, essentially, which were also seen as unpopular.)

I leveled my skills when Mining and Agility, for example, were 30K xp per hour at max in 2007. That is 10 hours per day for 30 days for each skill. I was ranked 778 in the world at 97 Mining. No one should need to do that. No one.

One thing I've learned over the years is that things change. And they should. Because I did it the hard way doesn't mean everyone should need to do it the same way. What matters, ultimately, isn't an achievement, isn't bragging rights, it's just having a good time. I don't think back to getting 99 Hunter with glee, I think about how it gave me carpal tunnel and was a massive waste of time, overall.

Ranked 778 in the world at 97 Mining, 2007.

Overall, most people who play RS3 do not have time for it. Even Jagex knows this. CEO Jon Bellamy said in January 2026 that the playerbase "used to be angsty 16-year-olds listening to Breaking Benjamin. Now it's 33-year-old accountants and CEOs who've got 41 minutes in an evening" (GamesRadar). 41 minutes. 41 minutes. And the expectation is to spend 1000s of hours getting skills maxed?

Why is Jagex making changes that will essentially run off older players? My guess is they're counting on newer players to come in when they see people streaming the game on Twitch. I will say this, right now, things don't look as rosy as they could, but they could also look worse. Let's hope this game of chicken Jagex is playing works out. I don't care that I don't rank on hiscores anymore, but I would care if the game died.

I'm overall neutral on the changes. I think some people do want to see RS3 die. Others, I believe, are wrong. But there is a lot of data abuse and misinformation right now. Even A Friend called a secular event, a massive snowstorm in the US, a good day for RS's new changes when there is likely no correlation.

In conclusion, I just want this site to function where there is a blind spot in what's happening with the game.