OSRS is my (and a lot of other people’s, if these forums are anything to go by) gold standard for an MMORPG that refuses to let its content become obsolete and has been designed with the same principles in mind from the very beginning.
You may not like it, as no entertainment is for everyone, but its playerbase has remained big and loyal for decades now.
I don’t get this disdain over people who haven’t roughed it through Vanilla content. It is one character per account, and might give people a taste to level alts.
This just in: Wow isn’t Runescape.
I know, i was surprised too. 
It’s hard to compare the two games. OSRS isn’t necessarily about getting to max combat level, as there’s so much to do outside of combat and so much of the endgame bossing content is open to you before reaching combat 126. (Actually all of it can be since it’s mostly locked behind quests that have non-combat skill requirements.) It’s also designed to be a grindy game, WoW isn’t and never has been designed to be a hardcore MMO.
WoW’s endgame is exclusively at level cap and the leveling experience is just a means to an end. The prepatch is going to be the prime time for leveling 1-60 with so many people rolling Shaman/Pallies. Azeroth will largely be dead once we can enter Outland anyway so you’d run into many of the same problems as you do now for instance.
Also don’t pretend that leveling 1-60 is the only place you can meet new people. TBC Heroics are a great place to make friends considering a reasonable level of teamwork is required to clear them. Doing a few dungeons in your Kara attunement with a group of randoms will make them acquaintances at least by the end of it.
After awhile it gets so boring watching people blow things outta proportion like they are with the boosts.
Mythic Raiding (or the previous iterations of Heroic Raiding and further back, hardmodes) is night-day difference from even Normal Raiding, let alone LFR.
Just because the boss is the same name, it doesn’t make it the same content.
This is like whining that the human NPCs in EPL aren’t new content because you kill so many other similar NPCs throughout the rest of the world and everyone can just go slaughter easy-to-kill versions Tirisfal Glades or Scarlet Monastery.
…what?
Anything except the heroic/mythic tiers of the latest raid and this expansion’s dungeons is dead, irrelevant content. When was the last time you did Throne of Thunder progression? It was an excellent raid. In Runescape you wouldn’t be able to raid the current tier if you have never even cleared content that is 8 years old, and that content mostly maintains its difficulty for people who are just now tackling it.
Content in OSRS is forever, in WoW it is chewed, spit out and never talked about again. Every expansion makes everything that came before
/headdesk
“Northshire Abbey is such useless and irrelevant content!!”
If not being dead requires it to be only the final most iteration of things, then most games have mostly dead and irrelevant content.
Well that explains why RuneScape is fairly irrelevant…
Because it doesn’t need a boost 
Neither does classic
www . misplaceditems . com/rs_tools/graph/
It has maintained its population stable since 2013 AT LEAST. Its population is GROWING, not decreasing. Which other MMORPG can claim the same thing? It stayed loyal to the people who enjoy it, and in turn those people stayed loyal to it. By not trying to please everyone and keeping to its niche, OSRS has managed to become an EXCELLENT game, even if it isn’t for everyone.
Meanwhile, WoW keeps decreasing in quality by trying to please everyone, which is simply impossible to do.
With very small numbers regardless. I get it catered to a niche crew of nostalgia-laden folks but these aren’t impressive numbers, especially when singular factions on WoW Classic dwarf them, let alone both together, let alone all of WoW.
Meanwhile a game like League of Legends is pulling daily numbers that dwarf all of that.
So like I said…
Yet still maintaining a rather massive player base on a very old game in a genre that is far less popular than so many others.
If you want to joust on which has performed better, it isn’t even a contest because WoW simply wins on every metric. I get that you personally love the RuneScape model over the WoW model, but that doesn’t really matter.
Actually the biggest dumps in WoW’s population were when blizzard started trying to go back to catering to the vanilla was the best crowd instead of just staying the course.
Don’t you find it impressive that a niche MMORPG has maintained a consistent playerbase of 140k CONCURRENT players over 10 years? Runescape has what? 2 million subscriptions? That is simply incredible for a game that is aimed at a niche.
How many subscriptions does WoW have? We don’t know. Blizzard doesn’t tell us.
Well they just lost half of them recently 
Most people dislike MMORPGs. It makes sense that the less it resembles a traditional MMORPG the more casual players it gets. Doesn’t mean it became good.
They aren’t nostalgia-laden folks, they genuinely appreciate the gameplay and the principles that the game design is based on. Come on now. I started playing OSRS again in 2015 and what the game became honestly blew my mind considering what it was in 2006.
Right that’s the thing about opinions, yes OSRS might appeal to handful of niche players like you who prefer that style of MMO RPG. That doesn’t mean it’s better than WoW.
I mean… sure I guess…?
But I mean if we’re going to try to compare apples-to-apples nostalgia trains and hype and various communities, we’ll be here all night snagging obscure stats and such.
It really isn’t the point though when we’re still talking about WoW here, the one MMORPG that kept the crown jewel pretty much ever since it came onto the scene.
/shrug
These aren’t mutually exclusive, and in fact one feeds into the other. There’s a reason I still dabble in D2 over D3, love firing up Secret of Mana on my phone, and a host of other comfy past times.
That plays into the appeal of WoW Classic as well. I’m already well versed on most of this stuff, and what I don’t remember or don’t know I can pick up very rapidly given all the other experience I have. Raiding is comfortable, familiar, enjoyable, and stress-free, even the “hard” stuff.
Nostalgia is huge because comfort and familiarity are insanely appealing.
Excatly, I joined a few days before tbc, once I got around 45 dungeons dried up. No one wanted to slog through zf or st, let alone brd, lbrs, strat, scholo, or dire maul. I had zero reason to quest in epl, sithilus, or wintergrasp and the zones where all dead, the goal at 45 is to just push to 58 as fast as possible so you can get to outland and start enjoying the game again.
Casuals complained that they were locked out of most endgame content (rightfully so.) Blizzard makes what seem to be appropriate adjustments. Even though it has no effect whatsoever on the hardcore crowd, they’ve gotta cry.
“You gave tnem purples! I had to work hard for my purples…”
“Yeah, but the free purples really aren’t that good.”
“But my purples!”
It never seems to end. 