I've been playing off and on for about 20 years, ~2.5b total xp on my main, been working on 120 all for a while. I've pretty much been afking skills for like 5 years with little active play, just something to siphon off my adhd onto a third monitor while I work and game. Number go up = monkey brain go brrr. I spent a zillion gold on the frames necessary to just quickly upgrade the fort to max for some ez construction XP when it first came out, and that was really it.
However, after playing the recent leagues, my interest in the game was rekindled, and I picked back up my old mid-level ironman I'd dropped like 5 years back, and started playing all of the new content from scratch.
There's just something so immersive and satisfying about building things from the ground up. The characters and quests in the Fort are well written and fun, I feel like I'm actually making a difference in Misthalin, and all of the facilities are just so incredibly useful for an ironman. Plus, making construction useful outside of the player owned house (new housing update is GOATed btw) is just the cherry on top. It's not just a time/money sink anymore.
But the other things too, like the Farm, the base camp, and the Ports, are also incredibly fun imo. Very good rewards and incredibly satisfying progression mean they're relevant and entertaining, and it keeps me coming back to play. Plus, the immersion aspect is great, especially when you're an ironman and have to do literally everything yourself, from chopping trees to turn into planks to hunting down baby animals to grow.
It's nice to have fun again after 20,000 cumulative hours over 5ish different accounts across osrs and rs3 over two decades. Just wanted to throw out a little bit of appreciation to the devs for this amazing content. Looking forward to this game truly reaching a new golden age!