Updates
I've been taking a break from site maintenance and from RuneScape for about a month and a half.
A few site-breaking issues required intervention this week, which I took care of after a number of notifications from my scrapers:
The Hiscores Counts page was down for roughly four days after Jagex overhauled the Hiscores page.
This was work driven by Mod Anvil and Mod Ryan, largely due to a post I made on Reddit highlighting significant issues with the Ironman RuneScore totals, which Mod Anvil escalated.
I give Mod Anvil and Mod Ryan credit for ensuring Hiscores integrity, especially with a game as competitive as RuneScape is. With that said, the change broke a number of my automated processes, which I have now fixed on both this site and scape.watch.
The OSRS player count scraper had an issue yesterday with handling a double maintenance outage, which it overcorrected for.
Since the original data was kept on the back-end but was simply restricted from the main page aggregation, I was able to restore this data. The back-end issue has now been resolved.
If you notice that the chyron disappeared from the header, that just means I haven't made a post on the site in the last 30 days. It disappears after 30 days of no activity.
In the past month and a half, I've done two playthroughs of Dawnwalker, played some KCD2, and have been catching up on Dragonwilds post-Umbral Sands.
I do still intend to write a post-mortem of this year's RS3 Leagues.
Right now, the player counts look far weaker than I would have expected at this time. Some of that weakness may be competition for attention. Dragonwilds and WoW have had updates, which people may be trying out. This might be reducing the counts at the moment.
Havenhythe Part 2 launched on 9/28, with a bump in player counts from a low point. RS3's weekly average for 9/21–9/27 was its lowest since the week of 6/29–7/5.
I also plan to do more site updates to make some of the functionality more clear. For example, I doubt that people know that switching from Year to All Time gives you a different filter than the one available for Year.
Dragonwilds Tracking Updates
- I split Dragonwilds from the Steam overlay and it now has its own overlay using the same axis as OSRS and RS3. I did this largely due to the ongoing success of Dragonwilds with its recent updates.
- Added Dragonwilds to the peak, 30-day average, and one-year average boxes.
- Added Dragonwilds to the RuneScape time of day section and the Trends page.
Other Site Updates
- I reordered the sidebar tabs by the most popular pages: Population, Trends, Hiscores Counts, Maxed, etc. If you noticed that the order changed, you're not crazy.
- The year-over-year hover-over text now correctly denotes that clicking said button changes the tooltip indicator on the Trends page, which wasn't clear previously.
2004Scape: Lost City
It was requested that I add 2004Scape: Lost City tracking, but I'm not sure that is appropriate yet. I don't want to give the game too much exposure by putting it on this site. I don't want it to be considered a competitor with RuneScape and then be taken offline when it is functioning as a historical project.
I did create a scraper that archives its player counts on the Wayback Machine. If I ever did want to go back and track it here, Wayback is keeping that data. I'm just not keeping it in an official capacity in my databases.
Upcoming
RuneFest will be October 3–4. I expect to see an increase in player counts in October, not only from post-RuneFest excitement but also because of the holiday season and upcoming anticipated updates. I expect Halloween through November and into December to show increased player counts.
There is another Double XP event that has been announced, and Jagex is following through with removing numerous items from the game... Some of these changes I'm happy about. Some I think are fine. Others, like removing Oil of Enchantment, which I think should just be left as a rare, I'm not so happy about. I'm also not happy about Silverhawks being removed without a replacement for Agility. I think Jagex is too harshly punishing legacy players with these changes.
RS3's plugin update is coming, and it seems that a number of people are awaiting this update before jumping into RS3.
We should also expect an update for OSRS to transition to Jagex Accounts sometime by the end of the year. If that change occurs, it could mean that world data becomes unavailable, and if that's the case, my OSRS Worlds page will become useless.
Also of note, on December 25, this site will turn one year old.
Observations
I've noticed that traffic to my site has increased substantially over the last probably two and a half weeks. One of the reasons may be that the website osrsplayercount.com has been down for a week or two. However, I think it's more likely because of search engine optimization now that MisplacedItems has been torpedoed by both Google and LLMs.