[sph]

Ironman here btw. I started playing Old School Runescape in 2018 in my 30s because of the swamp man. I fucking love this game.

I take frequent breaks from the grind, but I keep seeing a parallel with real life effort: nothing worthwhile is achievable unless you put your back and a LOT of time into it.

Like the meme says, Runescape players either are basement dwelling NEETs, or accomplished people with families, going to the gym every day. There's no in between.

(Grinding OSRS a couple hours a week is the only thing keeping me sane while trying to bootstrap a business)

[livueta]

I haven't played since maxing and finishing my 200ms circa 2016, but at least at that point your meme was pretty true of the efficient skilling community. A surprising number of high-ehp players held down professional jobs while legitimately competing with the NEETs for highscore ranks by pushing the envelope on high efficiency skilling methods like tick fishing. Iirc, a number of fairly prominent skillers like autumn elegy, mazhar, gingbino and other hexis people worked in tech.

[TZubiri]

200m in all skills without botting? Don't you deeply regret all that time wasted?

[sph]

Wasted doing what instead?

We all die, become dust and soon forgotten, whether your time is spent maxing RS or achieving world peace. The only judge will be yourself in your deathbed.

(It might now be obvious I was not raised Protestant nor Calvinist)

[livueta]

Not all, just 2277 + buyables/easy ones, but still well north of 20k hours (including rs2, so not just since 2013) all told. If it actually were 200m all I'd probably feel differently.

And no, not really.

One, it was a lot of fun. I guess I should clarify that I spent much of that playtime doing pvp of one sort or another and the stats were almost incidental. Mastery of one thing has always been more attractive than spreading time around a bunch of different games, and I have a lot of fond memories of what it was like to play that game at a high level and still have good friends from that time. So, from that angle I don't consider the time wasted any more than I'd consider time spent relaxing, playing any other games or reading a good book wasted. I was never a NEET and didn't really push it beyond what I'd call fairly typical entertainment hours per week, but those hours were just concentrated on this one thing over a long timeframe, and that adds up - especially when both leisure and competitive goals are satisfied by different aspects of the same thing. More a case of being unusually efficient in using my spare/entertainment time than of reshaping my life around it.

On that note, you develop some pretty intense split focus abilities regularly playing multiple accounts at once and/or doing high-intensity skilling. A lot of those hours were actually me, in some kind of zen robot state, bashing out actions while paying almost full attention to reading or watching something else. Read an awful lot of books while grinding, worked on my language, got some good treadmill/powerlifting time, that sort of stuff. I find that I'm more relaxed and creative when doing some kind of physical activity like running, and that same dynamic felt true of skilling. When not multilogging, skilling can be very meditative and relaxing. Something about having a task that takes some but not a ton of attention is just nice.

Two, I owe my professional tech career to it.

[qumpis]

Seems that the commenter has a positive tone about their experience, so maybe it was worth it?

[ditto664]

I would never have guessed that a 200m all player was here reading. That's an unreal amount of dedication that most people will never possess.

[livueta]

Sorry, as down-thread, I phrased that terribly - not 200m all, just 2277 and ~1b total xp, though I guess I was top 100-200 overall/ehp when I was playing. My distribution of xp is unique enough to identify me, so sorry for not naming the skills.