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.