RuneScape is a very addictive game, immersing you right from the get go and feeding your brain's desire for rewards. The feedback loop is unlike your run-of-the-mill MMOs; you can do your skills in any order, using any method that you want depending on how much attention you want to give the game. You want to go fish and cook all day in Catherby? Pull up a show you've been wanting to watch and go for it. You want to focus intently on the game for about an hour in order to get a cape that makes your melee attacks a little more effective? TzHaar Fight Cave. You want group content to focus on with others (friends or strangers)? Mazcab raid, or Elite Dungeons. The attention you give this game pays off (generally) with how much experience or rewards you receive, and it gives you a sense of reaping what you sow (double this feeling when/if you train farming).

The options are essentially limitless, but of course, the true bulk of the activities do require a subscription. You can still get a ton of hours of entertainment without a subscription, but it does eventually become necessary, otherwise your game will basically be over with 90% of the content untouched at a certain point. This isn't egregious practice or anything, it's just something to be aware of. If $13 USD is too much to handle monthly, the game does give you access to bonds, where you can use in-game gold to purchase 14 days of subscription per bond. A bit of a grind to get the money required for it, but you aren't solely limited to having to pay real money, which is a refreshing way of accessing exclusive content.

So, if I'm singing its praises so very much and love the gameplay, why am I not recommending this game? Jagex.

The customer service is atrocious, and if you ever get hacked or lose control of account, they have zero empathy. You can read horror stories from the rest of the reviews, this is another one. My account was created in 2005, I was 12 years old when I discovered this game. I have fond memories of playing with my friends, I have thousands of in-game hours logged slogging through the quests and skills, with a few level 99 skills. My account gets hacked and someone was using a macro, I'm assuming advertising some YouTube account or scamming people and infesting the Grand Exchange, as happens so very often in this game.

I appeal to Jagex, tell them I've never used a macro a day in my life, I love the gameplay grind and playing the game, there is no world in which I use a macro program, it defeats the purpose of the game itself. My account is decades old, where I've spent hundreds of dollars in subscriptions and countless hours of my life, why would I jeopardize my account at all by doing anything that could potentially get it banned? I go on to tell them in the appeal (limited to only about 300 characters FYI), I was assuredly hacked, let me get my account back and change my password. Any response to this at all and any further explanation?

No. A wait of several days while my appeal sat pending, only for it to change to "Appeal Denied", and no reasoning behind why it was denied supplied.

It's soul-crushing to spend so much of my life enjoying and honestly playing the game, hearing about but never using any of the macro programs that people discuss. I play it sincerely, as I have and do with any other game I've ever played in my entire life, and my investment gets evaporated instantly by some Jagex appeal reviewer. It sounds like a freak occurrence, but you can search the internet and find other cases of people having this same issue with Jagex. You can think, "Oh, my passwords are good, I won't be hacked" until you are, and then you're in the same position as everyone else who has ever experienced this with Jagex, and every bit of your progress and time spent gets demolished.

I'm not without solutions however, as I think Jagex needs to allow the ability to open a dialogue between people appealing and the person that reviews these appeals. As mentioned, the only dialogue is Jagex saying "We detected a macro, familiarize yourself with rules first" and your appeal getting denied, with no room for nuance between yourself and Jagex. They should allow you the ability to have a line of communication with the appeal reviewer during the appeal, so you can discuss the ban and not simply receive a "Denied" and that's the end of the discussion.

There's no coming back from this for me, an entire lifetime of playing gone in an instant. Even if Jagex reverses it now, they've lost a player that has been with them for almost two decades. My recommendation is to not play this game and to not involve yourself with a company that does not value or respect the user base that enables its existence. There are better games out there with better customer service relations. This is not worth it.