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.

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