I wish the author got more into the weeds of anitcheat and how it evolved over time. Jagex was banning bots based on mouse movement heuristics in like 2005. 20 years later and there's some JS framework on the front page here heralding that same kind of analysis as some revolutionary new approach. I can only imagine what the modern anticheat engine entails, especially in the era of LLMs that can reliably emulate a human player. (Some of them can even write quite technical blog posts that almost escape detection ;)

Ultima online released in 1997 and required only a 28k modem.

I also would argue it was a more complex game.

Is this article just an analysis of the Lost City[0] codebase without linking Lost City?

[0] https://github.com/LostCityRS

Phantasy Star Online on the Sega Dreamcast worked great on dial up

> Before any networking occurs, the client runs a breadth-first search using the local collision map to build a path from where you are to where you clicked, and then writes the packet for the server to read. [...] The packet contains the absolute position of the first waypoint in the path, followed by the delta of each waypoint in the path against the first one

How come the client sends waypoints rather than just the destination? Naively it seems like sending less data would be better. Is the pathfinding so expensive that you'd want to avoid doing it on the server? I suppose it works out as long as it's cheap to validate/correct the client's path?

not to take away from the article, but some did with similar fidelity on 14.4k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_massively_multiplay...

i think the author would find ultima online emulators interesting

Lineage 2 was launched in 2003 with a stunning 3d graphics.

Sphera is even older.

MMORPGs are super old.

Oh man. The gamer cult around RuneScape was so hardcore and evangelical in 2004 that it is when it acquired the nickname "Run! Escape!"

I never fell in with the cult and I am glad I didn't. The Dofus cult in the next few years was small and hilarious and luckily the economics of that game made it a bit less fun beyond a certain level, like the real world, so you could get out before you lost your mind.

I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!

I love how when Runescape gets posted on here, there’s always a few proud stories of how people cheated. Today one is even admitting to RWT (real world trading) for tens of thousands of $, when elsewhere one shuts up about it because cheaters in multiplayer gaming are regarded as the antisocial scum that make the game worse for everybody else. It’s not really something to brag about.

I guess one thing antisocial people lack is self-awareness.

The algorithm is very cheap to run for a client (linear first, then diagonal to target, stitch together as many of these as it takes in the fewest number of hops), as they have full map data downloaded. For 2k concurrent players on mid range 2004 hardware (you have to remember they had kind of old school tech even for the time, though I'd love to be proven wrong on this), and with all the other interactions that needed to run before the next game cycle, I think they probably decided it was better to be clientside.

It's also possible they could have made it work, and it would have been a technical win, but just didn't need to since they had an MVP.

Validating that a path on a grid doesn't move through impassable objects is definitely much cheaper than running a pathfinding algorithm, especially on 2004 hardware. You'd have to make those checks as well in order to run the pathfinding.

You're putting the computation of waypoint finding on the all clients, or on your server.

People spam click, so it's cheaper to compute it once and pass it around.

Interesting, when I was a WoW GM our special “GM WoW Client” contained a lot of features that QA would use.

One of these was showing NPC pathing in the form of dots with lines in between. At any time the WoW client would know next 5 or so waypoints of a mob that was idle patrolling.

I guess it’s more efficient to send a batch of waypoints occasionally than one at a time more regularly.

It was a interesting watching boss fights where the pathing would update quite regularly, especially if the tank had just died and it was systematically clobbering everyone else.

It's a trade-off, especially for longer paths, especially when you count the cost of server RAM cache misses.

The other comments hit the big ones (didn't have to download, had a free tier, didn't have significant irreversible character choices, had meaningful solo or quasi-social activities, etc), but I think a major contributing factor was it appearing on miniclip.

It was free to play when that wasn’t a popular financial model for games at the time. The memberships were also much cheaper than WoW and accepted different payment methods that would be more available to minors at the time.

RuneScape was very popular at my local public library, and as a kid I only played the F2P content. I knew maybe one or two people around that time that played WoW. The paid subscription made it not a realistic option for me at the time. Though one of those WoW players did once bring his discs over for me to install the game and play on a private server with him. I don't think I kept playing WoW long for whatever reason. I was more into MapleStory, Graal Online, and RuneScape.

As a kid, I didn't have a computer that could run WoW, nor would I have been able to convince my parents to pay for the subscription. I suspect most of the popularity was from kids in a similar situation, probably playing it on library computers when they should've been studying.

MapleStory was also quite popular back then for similar reasons.

It's free and you could play it in the school library, for one. Also it came out a few years before WoW.

Besides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.

in addition to what others said...

2004 runescape, now "old school runescape", which is actually successor 2001 Runescape "Classic", were both playable in a browser.

and my (parent's) PC couldn't even install, let alone run WoW. despite me trying with all my might.

so I'm sure I wasn't alone.

it was absolutely magical to me.

They were two very different games and target audiences, with the incidental commonality that both are MMOs.

WoW needed a purchase, an expensive subscription, and a good PC. Runescape ran on a potato, was F2P, the P2P was 5$ a month, and you could get started in 2 minutes from Miniclip.

I was going to say a comment about “back in my day”; but your account is from 2011, so you should know what video gaming was like in ye olden era. Did you mod in a Mew, or 256 Masterballs in Pokemon Red with a Game Genie? Why not? How about doing some weird stuff with Missing No?

What about loading in some rare items in Diablo 1 on your local save and them importing them into Battlnet? especially before Diablo 2, 1.10?

How about Early Minecraft - we’re talking Beta days. Did you test out those X-Ray block packs that helped you see diamonds?

Cheating literally only matters when there’s a PvP or leaderboard or whatever glory-theft that comes from it. It’s only really shamed on when it hurts other people’s gameplay experience - like screwing with a leaderboard at the “low pain” end and ruining a multiplayer experience in the middle end. For everything else, it’s an experience modifier or a difficulty slider for your own private game experience. Lots of games nowadays add in those difficulty sliders directly or add sandbox modes where there used to be “cheating” that stuff in.

Why would they care about maintaining a reputation on a pseudonymous Hacker News account? They have tens of thousands of $, that's way better than not being known as a RWTer.

I think this is both a fair cultural observation and one that's a bit excessive. I think people regard it as a point of pride because it didn't necessarily harm anyone, and because that experience was one of their pivotal early programming challenges that has a tangible return and that they had relatively high agency over. I look back on my time as a player of WoW during the Glider days as one where I was largely pissed that botters were ruining the economy for actual players, but I look back on my time in RuneScape as one where I was completely fixated on running my little factory and not wanting to actually play what was kind of a boring tedious game. I'm not proud today of having scammed people when I did, but I was proud of having a modicum of ingenuity and figured out how to exploit various things in the system. Real world trading, like many rules, isn't inherently immoral, but deliberately stealing money or items from people is.

I highly doubt I'd have ever given a damn about programming if I hadn't tried my hand at Scar scripting as a kid for both RuneScape and Neopets. Simultaneously, I also scammed people and ripped off friends in various games, but that the two activities were mutually exclusive and I was just an asshole. I'm glad I got to explore the worst part of myself in a sandboxed environment rather than taking it to any serious level.