Lodestone

We may have found the floor

Preceding Double XP, the late-April high was 17,348 on April 26. A little over a month later, the highs were steadily moving lower, and that is while including the lift from the Double XP residual player counts.

Over the last few days, RS3 retested the floor, but it did not break lower than previous lows. Thursday, June 4, averaged 14,988, slightly above the prior Thursday low of 14,821. June 5 averaged 15,282, barely below the prior Friday's 15,309. Then June 7 came in at 16,988, slightly above the prior Sunday at 16,673.

Not to be too optimistic, but it looks like a slowing bleed and perhaps a small bounce is occurring.

Two other data points suggest the counts have found equilibrium.

Weekly hiscores activity also seems to be stabilizing after a post-Double XP drop. Week 20 was 117,453, week 21 was 111,966, week 22 was 110,670, and the current week is 107,232 with one more day to accumulate counts. So while the current week is 10K lower, the subsequent declines after Double XP have been small, roughly at a 1K difference, and I do expect tomorrow that we will likely close out above the prior week, maybe even the two prior weeks.

The member counts from the hiscores page show the same direction. From May 15 to May 28, the member counts were losing about 518 per day. From June 4 to June 8, they were losing about 238 per day.

All of these data indicate stabilization.

What has been odd is that while the highs have been melting like a mound of snow, the lows have been far more resilient, abnormally so.

In off-peak hours, players are not leaving the game at the same average rate that players in peak hours are. At least recently. In fact, off-peak hours have shown increases in size over the 30-day average at some hours.

So, what could be causing this? Are there any new servers? None that I could find. What explanation for this trend could there be? I went around to F2P worlds looking at normal botting locations. It was not long before I found two different bot farms. Here is one below:

Over the weekend, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole searching through different botting locations. I found a Mining Guild bot farm, a dwarven stout bot farm, and maybe some other one-offs. Most of these bots had the same name pattern: three consonants followed by a bunch of numbers, something like AAA12345.

When you expect to see seasonality or weekly harmonics, and those trends are being abnormally violated in a way that should not be, there is a good chance that you are seeing a bot farm in action.

This is one of the reasons why it would be good to have world data for RS3 because we could see which worlds show abnormal fluctuations at odd hours, and that could point to where bot farms are operating.

I took screenshots of the bot farms, much like the stack seen in the picture above, and then came back later to see if any of them were still operating. I will say that within hours, many of these bots were banned.

Botting aside, I do think the player counts have found the floor.

We are entering the historical pattern I previously called the doldrums: a flat period with a little uplift near the end of June and another uplift near the end of July. I still do not expect to see explosive, higher population numbers, but we are experiencing stabilization.

This is a good sign that player counts will increase following historical patterns.

The Playerbase Consensus Is Consistently 2-3 Months Behind aggrgtr

The collective unconscious of the RS3/OSRS playerbase is roughly 2-3 months behind where it would be if more people followed aggrgtr.

Points showing up later on Reddit are often things I had clarified months prior.

In February, I wrote that RS3 player count was still trending flat. I was making a gentle argument that player counts were not showing lift from the recent updates, and that the data were also showing a slight downtrend, which I was roasted for.

About three months later, a different user posted monthly active players from February 2014 to April 2026, which dramatically showed that player counts were declining based on hiscores data. It is the same idea and same data, but presented more starkly: not as merely a flat trend with my boring analysis, but as a steep declination. When it was safer to discuss this topic, it was seen as very popular.

In April, I posted on Reddit that OSRS player counts were 80K+ higher than normal. I was discussing player counts, people saying they were quitting, and the riots, with the parallel being that player counts were now much higher than they had been previously, which belied the idea that people were quitting because of membership prices. I then posted Why Jagex will never take rioting seriously in one chart, again discussing player counts and the large number of people online versus what people were saying.

Now, on June 4, there is a new thread, which has since been deleted, saying OSRS player count has dropped 30% since the start of the year, and it received widespread approval (1K Upvotes!). The user was discussing the drop in player counts and membership costs posting, "And yet, that massive margin is still not enough for the owners... They demand more!"

Some of the analysis by that poster might be fair, but the idea that people are quitting because of membership prices is not correlated with what the data show.

We can look at a few other convergent/divergent datapoints to see how they trend.

If players did not want to pay more money for RuneScape, why was Leagues an increase of 90K-100K more players on average, and why did it set new highs? Leagues VI was a members-only mode. As I showed in Jagex Raised Membership to $15; OSRS Players Responded by Paying $1.4M, the Leagues worlds alone represented roughly $1.4 million in one-month membership-equivalent value.

If people are unwilling to pay for RuneScape, why are they paying for RS?

Bot/RWT ban data more directly correlate with the real cause. OSRS F2P was roughly 20% of the OSRS population before the bot bans. Now it is under 10%.

Jagex has put real pressure on bots and real-world traders. Botters who used to brag openly and talk to people like SirPugger about their inner workings are now very mum. Something has changed, and that is what the data are showing.

The playerbase is consistently wildly uninformed and months late to the party.

That is one of the reasons why I started this site. It is hard to believe what others are saying without evidence, especially when people can be so confidently wrong.

Site Fixes

• I fixed several pages so they are better cached and no longer feel as sluggish when they load.
• I fixed the population chart overlays for RWT and bot/macro data. When a shorter time filter is selected, those overlay points now stay inside the active chart range instead of clumping from older dates outside the filter.
• I added OSRS Worlds filtering so region and Free/Members summaries can be clicked like worlds and activities, making it possible to view those trends over time.

Future Updates & May Final Notes

There are a few updates I wanted to log before the month closes out.

Things I'm considering adding:

• Ironman max stats on the Maxed page, or possibly on a separate page.
• An Ironman RuneScore page that will probably need to be limited to the top 1,000 accounts while I clean up issues with the Ironman hiscores.
• Historical OSRS tracking. I was offered historical data for OSRS, but there is too much of it to use in a reasonable way, so I may need to track specific players over time.
• A searchable list of JMod comments on Reddit, maybe expanding into the forums and Discord if possible.

Bugs I need to fix:

• On the RS population page, when filtering All Time and then looking through Wayback data, the KPIs do not provide peaks.
• RWT and bot overlays on the population chart show when not filtering in that date range. They are clumped on one side of the chart and should not be there.
• X/Y labels on charts are still inconsistent in look and appearance.
• On the Maxed page, a partial run is not updating the run time at the top, and I have a couple of other validation issues on the back end I need to work out.

Final notes on player counts:

• I correctly predicted that May would average less players than April.
• May did not hit a new low low, although it will hit a new low high.

The resistance held!

OSRS Has 141% More Maxed Players Than RS3, Adding Them 8.5x Faster

True.

As of May 28, 2026, the current max total count for RS3 is 19,476 accounts (3,211 total level) versus OSRS at 47,038 accounts (2,376 total level). OSRS has 141% more maxed accounts.

From May 15 to May 28, OSRS added 992 maxed accounts versus 117 for RS3, an 8.5x increase.

The max XP numbers tell a different story. OSRS stayed at 51 accounts at the XP cap over the same period, while RS3 went from 6,014 to 6,046.

In RS3, all 99s would be roughly 2,871 total level. Of course, this is not exact because there are 110s and 120s. However, there are roughly 148K people in RS3 at or above that level if we use that as a proxy, which is 3.2x more than the OSRS maxed count.

This suggests that getting all 99s is much easier in RS3. However, being maxed in RS3 is much harder and less common than it is in OSRS.

This supports the contention that I made in a previous post that OSRS is becoming more skiller-focused than it has been in the past, and I predict it will likely pass RS3.

To JMods on Surveys and Data Analysis

I aim to be the weatherman, not the whether-man. I try to say what happened, what is happening, and what appears likely to happen. I try to keep my biases in check, although that is not always possible or easy.

This post is mostly personal opinion, based on data, research, and experience.

I do not think RS3 is failing yet. But the player counts do not look great. I do think it is worth discussing how Jagex should in the future use surveys more effectively than it has in the past.

EoC is a great comparison because Jagex made a consequential decision in 2012 after sending out surveys to players who no longer played the game. According to RS WillMissIt's video, Jagex found that the combat system and people's friends leaving were major reasons why players had left. Enter EOC.

Here is a list of EoC changes that I curated. Please read this list and tell me which type of RuneScaper you believe was most impacted.

If your answer to my question was PKers, player killers, PvP players, correct.

I recall that most of my friends moved to OSRS after EoC. I think most of the major PKing clans moved there also.

OSRS gave old PKers 2007 RS again, an active play style based on the old combat system. And they were later joined by PVMers, and then even later by new age OSRS skillers. OSRS also had very good community managers in the JMod team who understood the game and that specific community.

Back then, EoC highlighted an age-old divide in RuneScape: skillers versus PKers. The skillers stayed on RS3 and the PKers went to OSRS.

It should also be noted that people with immense sunk costs also stayed: rare traders, high-level accounts, big banks, and probably people who just liked the RS3 version of the game.

Jagex essentially nullifying how PKers enjoyed the game ran off 25 to 35% of the active player base in 2012, and you could still argue the ripple effects are being felt now, 14 years later, and it could possibly get even worse.

Are we seeing this repeat today?

Feedback to fix or change game mechanics sourced from people who left the game is not a surefire way to bring those players back to the game or retain existing players. Those players may have left even if those issues had been resolved before they left, and there still may have been no correlation with what might be appealing, what might be satisfying, and what might actually bring those players back to the game.

Jagex should have been more balanced in 2012 when asking players for feedback. They not only should have done an exit interview, but a stay interview.

So what went wrong for RS3?

Many currently believe that MTX caused the degradation of skill achievements, and it has. But so has Time. So have normal updates and natural game progression.

Pyramid Plunder was released in roughly 2005 or 2006, and it was roughly 180K Thieving XP per hour. Before that, the best XP was likely Ardougne guards. I recall Herbaman refusing to do Pyramid Plunder because he thought that it would taint his achievement, and he finished 200M Thieving on Ardougne guards.

High-level PKers used to disparage other players who used Pest Control, labeling them PC products. The reason was that they believed Pest Control ruined the game because it made combat advancement easier. It created too many high-level accounts, degraded the achievement of combat stats, and made PKing harder because more players would return to fights or run-ins, and those players had built up more gear and bigger banks than previous generations had.

What people were really complaining over was the loss of Imbalance. Pest Control was making the game more balanced and therefore less fun to high-level players.

I am recalling these examples because this is what is happening now. The people who are complaining about skill degradation are making the same argument that people made over Pest Control. These are likely people who have high-level accounts on RS3 and are simply upset because currently there are over 6,000 players who have max XP. These are players whose accounts have become just another brick in the wall.

I think that the truth is that the game has simply become more balanced, allowing people with less time available to achieve more and compete with people who have an infinite amount of time available.

Solutions

1.Reduce the Number of Max Players

One solution could be to reduce the number of people who are maxed.

OSRS distracts players with content that is fun and satisfying, such as PvM, PvP, and community-based achievements. In OSRS, being a part of the community is kind of the endgame.

OSRS has roughly 51 max XP players right now, whereas RS3 has over 6,000. There are probably more skillers on OSRS. Why have more of them not obtained max XP? A lot of the same skilling methods are available. If 51 people have done it, why not more? I think the answer is that on OSRS, being max XP is not the endgame like it is on RS3.

However, from what I have read, maxing in general is becoming more of the endgame for OSRS. So I would hypothesize that as that becomes more true, we are likely to see the same arguments on OSRS about how the game has gotten too easy.

2.The Value of AFK

Mod Hooli has said AFK is a valuable reward himself.

Mod Hooli (Nov. 12, 2025)

We hear you - definitely not the plan to only deliver AFK skilling! We just understand the lack of AFK methods in some skills contributes to why MTX items were so valued and helped keep the game be accessible for some. It doesn't mean those solutions need to be the only way we offer skilling updates, or that they have to be the best / most potent options. 120 Thieving's Heists are very active. We also have some other active skilling stuff in the works for next year too. Definitely not either or!

Source

Mod Hooli (Nov. 12, 2025)

We're not doubling down on it, so much as understanding some players valued MTX as they offered a way to skill that was less intensive. It doesn't mean introducing AFK options that are potent or best. We have some cool active skilling stuff in the works - Heists for Thieving 120 being one of those - and more to come next year.

Source

I cannot find a reason to disagree with what Mod Hooli has said. But maybe instead of removing those things entirely, there should be options for portables and AFKable protean packs, maybe through Invention or something else, that people can obtain.

Maybe what Jagex should do is make a new skill called Support. You get XP by using your XP to make XP packages for other players. XP is taken away from your account, and other people can use your XP so that they can get XP themselves. 😂

3.Mod Breezy on Fun

This comment from Mod Breezy about fun is so wrong that I think he should be reprimanded.

This gets into the psychology of motivation, such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which I do not want to get into at that level of detail here. But I do want to talk about some of the more consequential research worth noting involving video games.

Mod Breezy (Feb. 7, 2026)

In game design the paradox of "fun" is that fun comes from challenge. Any game you've ever played is about overcoming an arbitrary challenge which no one has asked you to complete. You do it because you want to. Be it Tetris or Elden Ring, the overcoming of obstacles and the opportunity to learn, strategise, and master mechanics and gameplay to overcome those challenges is what = fun. Where those things become too easy / the challenge is minimised is actually where fun deteriorates. Game design is all about getting that balance right. I'm with you, we're not trying to suddenly turn everything to a bore, but where we're at with RS in 2026 is years of bandaiding things through things like dailyscape, unlimited grindy events, and even in the past MTX. We've got a long road ahead of us in getting things back in place, but we want to get it into a place where it feels damn good to have earned your way through it.

Source

There is no research directly supporting a simple claim that fun comes from challenge. None. The closest might be goal-setting theory from Locke and Latham, but that is about performance, not fun. You could also point to Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, but flow is not fun from challenge. Flow is when challenge and skill are both high and in balance, and that is a mental state. A mental state is also not fun.

Research on gaming and challenge contradicts what Mod Breezy said directly. Corcos argues that players are more likely to have a positive experience when they are enjoyably challenged, meaning the challenge itself has to feel pleasant. A 2023 meta-analysis on video game enjoyment found that game difficulty did not show a significant overall effect on enjoyment.

A better way to frame this is that players enjoy games when they perceive that they are confident, in control, progressing, efficient, and connected with something they value (Deci and Ryan). The belief that you can succeed at the thing in front of you is also important (Bandura). These principles have been applied to video games for decades (Przybylski, Rigby, and Ryan). Other researchers found that feeling like your actions affect the game world is an important point of game enjoyment (Klimmt, Hartmann, and Frey).

People have fun playing games and keep playing games because the games tell them they are succeeding, improving, and making progress, not because challenging content itself is magically fun. Fun is less about challenge and more about successfully progressing through that challenge and receiving positive feedback.

So to Mod Breezy's comment that when things become too easy, they are no longer fun, I say it is not that they are too easy. It is that there is no perception of progressing, improving, or reward. This is not the same thing as challenge. I am talking about a perception, which could even be a lie.

In Summary

Jagex should hire psychology consultants who understand how to survey and elicit feedback from the player base.

Surveys should not be a petition on whether people want something where signing up is an affirmation. They should allow people to say no.

Jagex should do better at de-emphasizing feedback from bad actors who just want to ruin someone else's game experience. I think it is obvious at this point that people who voted to get rid of MTX did not show up to RS3 after it was removed.

Many of the changes Jagex has made so far in the Road to Restoration are actually positive, I think. Jagex has simplified content and made things easier to understand. There are still many, many things needed in that category. However, the majority of people already playing RS3 want to AFK. They want the game to be a second-monitor game. And Jagex is running them off just like Jagex ran off PKers back in the day.

If Jagex loses another 25 to 30% of the player base for RS3, is there really going to be anyone left when people start noticing?

If Jagex wants a serious solution, it needs to fix low-level content. The game needs to be cool for low levels and needs to be a fun experience. I have been playing an Ironman on low-level content for the past two weeks, and there is hardly anyone at low-level locations, even on high-pop worlds.

Yet Another Indicator That RS3 Player Counts Have Not Hit Bottom Yet

May 24 was below May 17 on both Sunday average players (17,360 vs. 17,733) and Sunday peak players (22,744 vs. 23,739).

May 24 also showed basically the same average as Sunday, April 26, before Double XP (17,360 vs. 17,348). The peak was worse than April 26 too (22,744 vs. 23,355).

This is also not the only metric showing a downward trend. May 24 hiscores were 102,058, down from the prior Sunday (109,490) and close to the Sunday before Double XP (101,331).

This indicates most of the player retention from Double XP has been lost.

Looking at Sunday versus the prior Sunday is useful because it shows counts are still going lower. Accounting for that and the return to pre-Double XP levels, I would not be surprised if the rest of May pulls the monthly average counts below April's (17,377) from where May currently sits (~17.45k).

OSRS F2P: The Botpocalypse

The data show Jagex is winning the bot wars.

I started collecting OSRS world data back in December 2025. That data includes F2P and member servers.

With the April bot-ban data released by Jagex, we saw the inclusion of an F2P / P2P split. Roughly 97.5% of all OSRS bot bans for April were F2P (1.16 million of 1.19 million).

These bans are shrinking OSRS F2P player counts, which has become an interesting way to monitor Jagex's effectiveness at not only banning bots, but keeping them banned.

Through April, the anti-cheat data show about 6.2 million OSRS bot bans this year.

In March, F2P averaged about 30,600 players and made up about 25% of OSRS player counts. In May so far, F2P is averaging about 13,400, down about 56% from the March average, and is now about 12% of OSRS player counts.

Members had a big January, but since then the Members average has mostly been between roughly 90,000 and 111,000, suggesting perhaps that bot-ban effectiveness has been more persistent for OSRS members.

Using the January-March bot bans and comparing them to the February-April world averages reveals a very strong lagged relationship for F2P: r = -0.954. With this limited data set, 1 million OSRS bot bans is associated with ~8,100 fewer average OSRS F2P players the next month.

This is a small sample size that should be treated directionally, not as a definitive model.

Hiscores Are Offline. I Swear, It Wasn't Me. | OSRS Update

I'm getting the message below everywhere I attempt to access weekly or monthly hiscores.

I first noticed this message popping up around May 15th on the regular hiscores.

One funny thing I did see when the hiscores failed was my script parsed an error through as the hiscores count: 108,800. I noticed the 108,800 value going back the last several days, and I removed those from the data. You can now see the last good value was roughly around 50,000 accounts on the hiscores this morning.

When the hiscores updated yesterday night, I saw the 108,800 problem become much worse than it had been the last several days. Around 10 AM Central this morning, the weekly and monthly hiscores became inoperable.

This is entirely a problem on Jagex's end, and there is not much else I can do until the hiscores start returning usable data again.

One thing that I did on the site was make it so that now you can click on one of the OSRS activities below and it will give you the same chart at the top that you would see for a particular world if you selected it. So now you can take a look at Leagues and see how it performed over a certain period of time.

The hiscores are broken. There is a hiscores outage today. And as the man himself, Shaggy, once said, it wasn't me.

RS3 Is Entering the Summer Doldrums

The doldrums are a place on Earth near the equator, where the winds go quiet and ships sailing could be stuck for months awaiting a breeze to push them forward to their destination.

RuneScape is getting close to entering its summer doldrums.

The breeze could start blowing at any time. We could see lifts. We could see stagnation.

However, what we are most likely not going to see are big jumps in player counts now that we are heading into the summer, based on historical trends. The May-through-August stretch is historically flat, with one caveat being 2023, when Necromancy launched that August.

So, yes, my prediction is that even with 120 Construction on the way, and even with a possible Beach event this year, we might see some variance in counts, but we are not going to see big increases.

If Jagex does release a Beach event this year, the last three years are the apt comparisons. Jagex ran The Beach event in 2023, The Beach in 2024, and The Beach in 2025.

The Beach event did move the number a little. Compared with the 14 days before the event, the Beach window was up about 12% in 2023 and about 5% in both 2024 and 2025. However, 2026 is acting more like a depressed version of 2024 and 2025.

So my final prediction is that if Beach does return this year, and if 120 Construction releases at around the same time, I would expect a lift to be 5% or less.

So we ourselves are now awaiting to see if any wind will catch in the sails.

Jagex Raised Membership to $15; OSRS Players Responded by Paying $1.4M

RuneScape riots usually fail for a simple reason: Jagex will call your bluff.

This is observational, not judgmental.

I've played RS since 2003. I was actually at the Falador Massacre. I personally was following Durial321 when he logged out and did not log back in. I was at the clan support rally, which crashed the JMod meeting in Port Sarim. So I am very aware of RS's long history of group congregations!

What interests me is the gap between what players say and what players actually do, and how that gap influences what Jagex does or does not do.

Mod Mat K said rioting does nothing because players do not follow through. The one exception was EOC, which was different. Jagex publicly acknowledged that 25-30% of the players left the game.

Jagex increased monthly memberships to about $15 just a couple of months ago, and people were rightfully furious. They said they were quitting. They rioted in Falador on OSRS, and I actually attended to see how big the size of that crowd was.

But then OSRS Leagues VI happened.

And Leagues did not just do well. It blew up.

There are two different sets of numbers here. The OSRS average and peak are the total OSRS population during each period. The Leagues-only average, peak, and share come from worlds specifically labeled as Leagues worlds.

During launch week, Leagues worlds averaged about 98,000 players and represented about 54% of the OSRS player count. The Leagues-world peak was 141,334.

The 28-day pre-Leagues baseline was about 115,700 average OSRS players. During launch week, OSRS averaged about 177,800. That is a gain of roughly 62,000 concurrent players, and the peak hit 251,845.

That total OSRS peak is absurd. In the stored OSRS population data I have, 251,845 on April 19, 2026 is currently the fourth-highest daily OSRS peak. The only higher daily peaks I found were 259,495 on January 18, 2026, 258,618 on January 11, 2026, and 257,491 on September 1, 2025.

A lot of people pushed back when I posted this on Reddit previously and said this was mostly alt accounts. Fine. Fair. That is likely true to a large extent. It is probably easier to multi-log in OSRS, and people were likely playing Leagues while also playing other accounts.

But that does not address the point I was making. People said they were going to quit, but they did not. People rioted, but then they came back to the game. Leagues is also members-only. So not only did people come back to the game, they may have paid to come back to the game.

I do not know precisely how many of these accounts were new accounts, alt accounts, existing accounts, accounts that were already subscribed, accounts with memberships that were about to lapse, or accounts paid for with bonds. What I do know is that Leagues-only worlds sometimes reached nearly the same player count as the pre-Leagues baseline for all of OSRS.

In plain English, Leagues worlds were sometimes almost as large on their own as the normal OSRS baseline was before Leagues, while OSRS population counts were also holding steady at roughly the normal amount of players. That effectively doubled the OSRS population total at times.

No matter how you slice that, it means a lot of people were playing a members-only mode with a lot more accounts than normal. If we treat the Leagues-only worlds as averaging something like 90,000 to 100,000 member accounts at about $15 per month, the one-month membership-equivalent value would look like this:

What this shows is that there was roughly $1.4 million in one-month membership-equivalent value represented by those Leagues-only worlds. That does not prove Jagex made exactly that much new money from Leagues because we do not know all the membership details outlined above.

But these numbers and this amount of money are exactly why Jagex will continue to call the bluff.

People angrily populating one world and writing things in chat for a few days is not the same thing as a business problem.

Somebody on Reddit said rioting is just a RuneScape tradition. Maybe it is. Maybe riots should just become a regular yearly Jagex-sanctioned event so people can get it out of their system.

Maybe riots should even become a regular event like Easter.

Chart

Steam x 8.3

For each hour, I averaged the official RuneScape 3 count and averaged the Steam RuneScape 3 count. Then I compared those paired hours. So when I say Steam x 8.3, I mean: take the RuneScape 3 Steam hourly average and multiply it by about 8.3, and that gives you a rough estimate of the official RuneScape 3 hourly average. It is not perfect, but it is surprisingly close.

For example, if Steam says there are 2,411 RS3 players online, the simple multiplier estimate is about 20,000 official RS3 players. That is very close to the live player count I checked while writing this, which was about 19,100. It was only about 1,000 off from a one-time pull, not even an hourly average.

The relationship is strong enough that Steam can be used for directionality. If Steam spikes, official RS3 almost certainly spikes too. If Steam dips, official RS3 usually dips with it.

It is a slice of the player base, and it will not always be exactly Steam x 8.3, especially depending on the time of day that you look at it.

Double XP Still Moves RS3

The better question is whether Double XP moved RS3 less this year than it did in recent years.

So I looked at a baseline average of the 14 days immediately before each Double XP window to smooth out weekday/weekend noise and any one-off outliers. The table below shows what the baseline was, the average player count during Double XP, the lift, and the peak.

The lift was about the same as 2025, which suggests about the same baseline percentage of players came back for Double XP. However, that return came from a lower baseline, the Double XP average was lower, and RS3 never reached the same highs. This points to another year of weakness.

Double XP obviously creates a big visible moment and had a similar lift this year. However, all signs indicate that people are leaving the game, which is bad news.

This also undercuts a common argument that RuneScape should be about skilling, and that skilling should be hard. I disagree with that. I think the data bear that out.

Jagex is making the game harder, and fewer people are playing. If the goal is to make the game less populated, Jagex is winning.

However, my position is that RS3 should be about fun, interesting gameplay, new mechanics, new areas, and new exploration, just as it was when many of us found the game 20 plus years ago.

If we start seeing upticks in player counts that show the player base is growing, or that new players are actually coming into RS3, I am willing to change my position.

It seems like a lot of RS3 players want a game they can AFK, not a game they are forced to play very actively. They want a game that lets them feel some sense of achievement while still being able to live their real lives. If OSRS is the playground at school, RS3 might be the retirement home, and there is nothing wrong with that if you are bringing in new players.

This year, Jagex has been aggressively moving toward making RS3 more active and something more akin to a modified OSRS. OSRS-lite. In my opinion, if players want OSRS-lite, they can just go play OSRS proper. However, if people are forced to choose between real life and RuneScape, they are going to choose real life every time.

One final point: as someone who skilled way back in the early 2000s, and who has had most of my accounts since 2003, I understand why easier XP annoys people. It is depressing to see so many people populate the hiscores where you used to be ranked 100 in something, after all the effort you put in, and now you are ranked 50,000. I know what that feels like. I know it can feel like XP has been made easier, the skill has been made easier, and the old achievement has been cheapened.

But at some point, you have to get over yourself. This game has been around for 20 plus years. You are going to be passed. Jagex is going to make new content that makes old grinds easier. You can cry about it, but the game is never going to be perfectly balanced. I mean, Jagex killed off Guthix, the god of balance, in a major quest more than a decade ago. The game has been tilted toward imbalance for a very long time. In a way, it always has been, because people who knew how to exploit gameplay mechanics even 20 years ago had an advantage.

That is the way online games and most things work. People who were there first, people with an inordinate amount of time, and people who find an exploit are usually the ones who float to the top, whether that is fair or not. That itself is not balanced. That is the way online games work, and in another sense, it is the way real life works. There is no way to make all of this perfectly fair while still letting progression happen and keeping people interested in the game.

Your achievements are not set in stone unless maybe you solidify Rank 1 in something, and even that can change when new skills are released, if you go inactive, or if you get banned. Zezima was ranked one for years, and now he is ranked around 1,000 and still does not have 200 million Necromancy XP. Does Peter care? Probably not. Why? Because real life always becomes more important than a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

My friend Herbaman was ranked one in Thieving, and he did Thieving on Ardougne guards. Is it fair that basically that memory of him is gone from the hiscores? Maybe, maybe not. But things change.

People crying online about achievements being marred or disrespected because someone else had it easier need to enjoy life more. Who cares? It feels like RuneScape is one of the only games where people have this attitude. Maybe WoW has it. Maybe EverQuest had it. I have not played those. But I have played Elder Scrolls Online, and in that game, the point is the fun you have while you play.

In Elder Scrolls Online, the higher your level is and the better your build is, the more fun you can have from PvM, and the more positive interactions you can have with your teammates. That is why you level up, not for the sake of having a high level. A high level is not the endgame; it makes it easier to do endgame content.

Too many people make RuneScape about getting high levels, 120s, and 200 million XP, and then complain because Jagex made those things easier for subsequent generations of players. I think that complaint is generally fair, but it is also a waste of your time.

You can make the counter-argument, however, that Jagex has been caving to people for nearly a decade who wanted skilling to be easier, and that still did not grow the game.

They are not growing the game by giving easy XP. They are not growing the game by giving hard XP. True.

Setting aside the rant on achievement degradation, the bigger issue is that RS3 is simply not cool to people. In my opinion, that is more of a reputation problem because so many people play OSRS, and many OSRS players talk about RS3 like it is not legitimate. They have been successful at doing that since 2013.

You could argue that RS3 is not cool because it is not hard enough, but I do not think the data support that. RS3 players come back for Double XP weekends. They respond to Christmas and holiday events. They play when the game is more populated and when levels are easier to get. I do not think there is a strong data argument for harder XP.

You could also look at the skills people consider hard or annoying, like Agility, Summoning, Runecrafting, or Cooking, and ask whether more people max those skills because they are harder, or fewer people max them because they do not enjoy them. Do those skills have more prestige, or do people just dislike them? I do not generally hear people say great things about Runecrafting. Meanwhile, when a skill like Smithing gets a major rework and people can get millions of XP per hour at the high end, people often say good things about it. If there were evidence that harder XP was what RS3 needed, I would be its biggest advocate, but I do not see that evidence.

The stronger argument for why OSRS is more popular is simply that more people play it, it has a better reputation, it is streamed more, it feels more community-driven, and players have more visible feedback and control over what goes into the game. Those players also speak pretty negatively about RS3, and they have for a very long time.

There is also weird politics to be mindful of as someone who plays RS3. OSRS players can weigh in on RS3, and there are simply more of them. It would not surprise me if OSRS players who have never logged into RS3 voted heavily for the removal of MTX from RS3, then never played RS3 and never will. The monkey's paw curled on that one once membership prices went up.

Jagex has to address the reputation for RS3 by making it cool enough and interesting enough that dismissing it looks ridiculous. The answer is not to make RS3 into what OSRS players say they want. I think it is obvious at this point, with the declining numbers of players on RS3, that doing that has killed off a significant percentage of interest in RS3. Unless the goal is specifically to pull people from OSRS, even that would not work anyway because those players have friends who play OSRS and already have sunk costs in OSRS, just like RS3 players have sunk costs in RS3.

I am very happy with the Max Page. There has been a lot of positive feedback and a lot of activity on that page.

I think this will be a very useful tool for the community. If you have any feedback on that page or any other data points that I should add, I do hope that you join the Discord or reach out to me on Reddit.

Updates

I have had a lot going on IRL lately, so I have been a little quieter than usual. At the same time, I have still been sitting back and watching how updates like Havenhythe, Leagues, Double XP, and the rest have been landing.

Behind the scenes, I have also been steadily fixing bugs, cleaning up errors, partitioning my databases, and improving the site’s functionality. That includes new URL-state linking:

I have posted a few times on Reddit with what I thought were interesting data points, but most of those posts get downvoted, which is kind of funny, but it can also be annoying. People want to criticize, but often do not have valid critiques. "You should do a regression," one person said, when I already have that, and personally it is not that useful to me. Knowing we are losing 2K players per year is interesting, but those analyses are so sensitive that even Double XP can make the regressions look like we are gaining. So hearing that I need to do X, Y, or Z when it is already available seems like an odd reply, although it might be in good faith.

I called the downtrend back in the first or second week of February and was massively downvoted for it. That post had 50K+ views and 150+ comments, but now saying there is a downtrend feels a lot more popular on Reddit. The Road to Restoration does not seem to be landing the way people hoped it would. I do think it has more to do with the subscription increases, grandfathered-rate removals, and nerfs than MTX alone, but MTX is still part of it.

Here is the thing: for 13 years, some of the biggest flamers, tryhards, and loudest jerks have been on OSRS lauding it as the best version of the game. That tradition is as old as EoC. OSRS has that reputation and social momentum, whether it is fully earned or not. The only way RS3 overcomes that is by being more cool than OSRS. That is it. I thought PKing might add that, but after doing a good bit of research, I think I was wrong. Maybe it is more updates, maybe more modes, but becoming the painful grind that is OSRS is not the way.

I am awaiting the new bot data, which should be out soon. Check here. I would guess there were more bots during Leagues... oh Leagues. It is kind of shameful that OSRS players were supposedly quitting the game a few months ago and then set all-time highs during Leagues.

While hiscores counts are going down, we should not underestimate how many people were playing alt accounts who may no longer be doing so. Player counts have dropped, but they have done so more slowly than hiscores counts. That implies to me, at least, that fewer people are playing alts moreso than fewer people are playing, although fewer people are playing too.

There are still a couple things I would like to add to the site that I think would be especially interesting:

I have a couple more ideas too, but those are the ones I think would be the most interesting.

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.

Loading...

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.