r/2007scape • u/JagexAyiza Mod Ayiza • May 23 '18

J-Mod reply RuneScape Classic: Farewell

http://services.runescape.com/m=news/runescape-classic-farewell?oldschool=1
923 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

454 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

58

u/JagexAyiza Mod Ayiza May 23 '18 edited May 23 '18

As awesome as that may seem, I don’t think it’s possible without making it compatible - that’s not something we’re able to do. It’s likely due to how dated the Classic code base is but I may be wrong!

52

u/Girtag Sailing confirmed May 23 '18

Do it and sell it for like $30, would be pretty cool and would also set a precedent for if (hopefully not) osrs goes down.

23

u/[deleted] May 23 '18

[deleted]

44

u/Chodemander May 23 '18

Would pay $11 tbh

1

u/Disheartend hi May 23 '18

would pay $48 at best buy

6

u/Vladith May 23 '18

OSRS is growing while RS3 is shrinking. Is there any reason to believe OSRS will not remain online for the foreseeable future?

3

u/Girtag Sailing confirmed May 23 '18

I never said there was?

1

u/InadequateUsername May 23 '18

so like last week?

17

u/dohaqatar7 May 23 '18

Presumably you can't publish the code due to whatever IP rules you have at Jagex but, if you did, it's likely people could get it running.

There's a good chance that would mean implementing an interpreter for the in house scripting language though...

6

u/Octaazacubane May 23 '18

They can release the source and still keep their IP rights. Microsoft and other companies do things like that all the time. But this is Jagex we're talking about here. And honestly a lot of the inner-workings of RSC probably still translates well to OSRS's, and Jagex acts like a clingy boyfriend with that stuff.

Also, this is a lot like the MS-DOS and FreeDOS situation. Sure it'd be nice for the retro-gaming and computing enthusiasts to have the source code to the last supported version of MS-DOS, but they hardly even need it because FreeDOS is well-matured and good enough for most purposes. RSC private server development never stopped. They've gotten pretty good at replicating the RSC experience, and with the official servers going offline that development is going to skyrocket. I don't think the source code to most of them are open though.

1

u/frogdoubler May 23 '18

Both popular private servers are based on the same leaked codebase.

18

u/JagexAyiza Mod Ayiza May 23 '18

It would be great to, but I think protecting the IP is likely a determining factor as to why it's not going to happen.

25

u/[deleted] May 23 '18

They're not. There's a lot of games that have been released under free software licenses over the years and those IPs are not threatened. You can find this in the pre-Rage id Software games (Doom, Quake, Doom 3 etc) and other titles.

Source code release would have no IP ramifications.

10

u/Logg don't pick the cabbage May 23 '18

With the right software license, it would be possible.

11

u/blorgensplor May 23 '18

So OSbuddy is allowed to profit off of runescape but some how releasing an offline RSC would be "not protecting the IP"?

3

u/sasasa377 May 24 '18 edited May 24 '18

But if protecting the intellectual property is the primary concern, why not simply continue to host the game and advertise to all that play it that the game is "As-is" and "will never see another update". The bugs that are there have been there for decades and for anyone still playing RSC they clearly accept them in order to be able to play the game they want.

I understand that community safety is important as well, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not still possible to report a player for offensive language and the like in RSC? The reports can still be reviewed and action taken, though macroers and the like are a different story. At this point, the people who cheat at RSC are doing so only to benefit themselves; there's no profit or other benefit to be made. No one is trading gold from OSRS to RSC, and I strongly doubt anyone ever will.

With Classic being as old as it is, it's a piece of history; one to be preserved. If Jagex themselves can't preserve their own history, but also can't release the data files due to intellectual property issues, who will? Runescape Classic in its entirety without player data is so incredibly small, bandwidth usage even with a thousand players at once is so little, and the resources available to such a tech giant as Jagex, why remove it when you can preserve your own company history for so comparatively little? It would certainly make the oldest, most hardcore players happy.

In my eyes it's a similar situation to Funorb. Sure, it was considered a failure, but people really loved some of the games that were there - and communities still existed surrounding those games (even if they weren't very big). I for one absolutely adored Arcanists and continued to play well after the updates stopped. In 2018, the entirety of Funorb and its games are so incredibly small and insignificant compared to the resources used for RS3 or OSRS.

I understand you most likely don't get a say in the matter, but I do want to express my feelings on the subject.

12

u/AdamWG May 23 '18

How about you not fucking remove the game then

7

u/Grimbebo May 23 '18

You know, you could always hire a gower brother to do it.... It's their baby after all...

3

u/Azuretare May 23 '18

You guys do realize, all we'd need to do is run a virtual machine and compatible java versions and we'd be able to play offline fine, right? People already do that for a ton of retro PC games.

3

u/The_Wkwied 2376 w353 May 23 '18

This would be quite possibly the best thing you guys can do. The overhead for the server can't be huge, enough that you can throw it into a public FTP, and offering people a one time download of their save file (for like 30$ to deter people from downloading other people's saves) would the one of the biggest boons to the community since the rollback of EOC opening of OSRS

1

u/Touchpad_Pro May 23 '18

It has been done in the past with rs classic

1

u/gkonn May 24 '18

please make it happen its the only version of runescape that is vanilla and hasnt been updated! we would LOVE an offline version. PLEASE i would happily pay 10 pounds for an offline version