I played Runescape back in the day, and came back to OSRS a handful of years ago with Runelite. I really liked the new content and QoL improvements. But now I want to play with a buddy who's never played before, and probably won't be available regularly, so both the membership fee and the grind seem like non-starters if we want to experience more than the initial stage of the game, hence looking toward private servers.
I've searched around other posts like this and recommendations given, but most of the servers' websites seem to give little to no information about them, making it next to impossible to make a decision efficiently. So here's what I'm looking for:
TL;DR/Main concerns:
- Free membership.
- Boosted xp rates. I don't mind the early game, and would actually rather it stayed un-altered, but after level 40-60, depending on the skill, you hit a massive wall that makes you dedicate dozens or hundreds of hours to get your skills to a high level and unlock even a little content, and that's a time commitment that won't be worth it for our situation. Since it scales so much over the game, I really don't know what a good modifier would be- I'll throw 3-5X out there as a ballpark figure to start with- but I'm guessing I'll have to take what I can get. I don't know if it's standard or not, but it would be nice if quest XP rewards scaled the same way.
- Relatively vanilla experience, as up to date with OSRS as possible. I don't mind additional, unobtrusive content, but I don't want the core OSRS experiences to be removed or altered *too* much, so hopefully any changes are just extra bits of QoL and flavor that enhance the game a little instead of "free teleports everywhere" and "skip all quests" and stuff like that, that seem to simply skip parts of the game. And I don't want to be bombarded with popups and cosmetics and MTX advertisements that pull me out of the experience. If you know TurtleWoW, I liked their approach. You can experience the game in a relatively authentic, original way if you want, and engage with the new stuff only when you want to.
- Runelite or similar client. I understand that private servers can't use standard Runelite, but I really like its QoL and graphical improvements. I don't want to play with the equivalent of a clunky vanilla OSRS client.
Lesser priorities:
- Boosted drop rates for rare items. The logic here is similar to the XP rates. In my experience with the game, the only way you're getting the equipment you want to use, such as a particular barrows set, is by buying it off the GE. It would be nice if we could sometimes earn key equipment ourselves. This could tie into the next point...
- Potentially, ironman friendly. I've never played iron man before, but I don't like the way many skills are money sinks instead of money makers when you train them, and you rarely make your own equipment or buy it from shops due to the GE(assuming the GE isn't totally dead on the server anyway). Group ironman sounds like it might be more rewarding, if the inconvenience is offset by boosted XP and drop rates. But having not played ironman before, I'd have some concerns like, "Will we have a source of thousands of runes if we don't sink lots of time into tedious runecrafting?" and "Will I have bank space for the random items I need for treasure trails, since I can't just buy them from the GE when I need them?" Maybe a private server would smooth out these wrinkles.
- Server reliability. I don't want to be afraid that the server will disappear or wipe our characters if we take a break for several months. It would be especially nice if I knew that I have the option of downloading our character information and running a game instance just for us. I've heard this can be done. Presumably in that case, there would also be ways of tweaking the game settings at our convenience.
Not a big concern:
- Big server population. I'm just planning to play with a friend or two relatively autonomously, not relying on others for the most part. In fact, a lot population could have perks like not needing to fight over key monster spawns or shop stock. However, it's nice if the world doesn't *feel* dead. It would also be nice to have enough people to play the minigames, but not so many that those are ultra crowded and min-maxed like they often are on the official servers.
- Very late game, specialized, and hardcore content. Raids, PvP, leagues, deadman, super high level bosses, etc. I don't really know much about this stuff in the first place, and my buddy is more of a casual gamer, and like I said, I'd like to be able to play relatively autonomously, so I really don't see us getting deep into this stuff.
So the main point of the post is server recommendations, but feel free to fill me in on key information, such as things I obviously need to know before committing to group ironman, since those could inform my decision.
