Runescape is generally acknowledged to be the granddaddy of the modern MMORPG genre of video games. It was released back in 2001 in a very primitive form. Fast forward almost two decades later, and the game holds the record for most number of online members at more than 250 million+ subscribers.

In essence, Runescape is the story of characters who are placed in a medieval fantasy setting. You begin your journey in the hometown of Lumbridge. From there you can move on to other parts of the open environment as you gather more skills, complete more quests, looting and rising through the power ranks to become the highest-class player.

The reason for Runescape's longevity can be attributed to many things. Instead of following the usual MO of RPGs where the player is sent on quests to gather seemingly random objects, the focus is on following an actual in-game plot and using your brains to solve puzzles and make complex decisions to continue further into the game.

The game is available for free and also on a monthly fee basis. Naturally, this means that players who are willing to fork over the dough have access to areas and abilities that the common non-paying subscriber does not. Both types of gameplay have amassed a vast global following, and many many pages of internet forums have been devoted to fans uncovering and sharing the most obscure bits and pieces of lore relating to the game.

Here are 25 crazy things that only the most hardcore fans know about Runescape:

24 Tradeable Items Broke The Game

In the original version of Runescape, every item that you possessed was something that you could trade for another item. This was a very valuable means of gaining points and increasing your class level and experience.

The only problem was, soon the players started trading everything. This became a problem since players would trade in items that were needed for finishing specific quests, thus essentially rendering the entire plot meaningless and breaking the narrative. To combat this, certain items were made untradeable. These were the items that were essential for moving the story arcs forward.

23 Beds Used To Have A Purpose

Botting was a huge problem in Runescape (and still is). That's when a player uses a third-party program called a 'bot' to play the game for them for hours, doing things like fishing and woodcutting to gather large amounts of gold over the efforts of actual players.

In order to combat this, the makers crafted something called the 'Fatigue system' that required you to sleep for some time after doing manual labor in order to get more XP points. If you kept working even though you were not getting any points, that meant you were a bot and could be banned from the game.

22 Bot-Catching Random Events

The fatigue system turned out to be a failure since it targeted real players in addition to bots and also affected the way honest players earned in-game points. That led to the makers of the game coming up with random events to catch bots instead.

In this strategy, random events within the game were tweaked slightly.

These new events could be completed easily by normal players but defeated the programming of a bot with a specific set of in-built directions. Players have often asked the creators to remove these events, but they're adamant that they help detect bots.

21 Personal Analyzed Forced Teleport

This was a glitch that players used to jump into another player's cutscene. The game had this mechanism for teleporting a player to a specific coordinate if the player happened to be standing in a certain region.

Players used to be able to stall the teleport while their own scenes loaded for the place they were supposed to teleport to. At the same time, if another player was experiencing a cutscene, the game would teleport you into that player's cutscene. This allowed players to enter areas of the game where they were not supposed to go and gather items that they should not have had access to.

20 The Sword Too Powerful To Wield

The Rune 2h sword is one of the most powerful weapons in the game because of how strong it is. In fact, in the early days of the game, the sword was not even allowed to be a part of the story.

It was considered too powerful and using it would break the game!

The sword required a 50 attack to wield, and did not degrade over time, unlike the more powerful, and only free-to-use sword, the Gravite 2h sword. Also, it used to look like a normal weapon, meaning players were often caught unprepared by another player wielding the sword.

19 Lord Of The Rings Reference

Since Runescape borrows so much from earlier works of fantasy literature, the makers naturally wanted to also pay tribute to their favorite works in the genre. And you can't mention 'fantasy quest' without someone bringing up The Lord of the Rings at some point.

In the game, you get an artifact known as the Ring of Kinship. If you hold the ring over a flame outside the dungeon, or if you try to destroy it at the Wilderness North Volcano, a message appears just as it did on the One Ring from Lord Of The Rings.

18 Norse Code Is Morse Code

The song called Norse Code is a little ditty that can be played only by the members of Fremmenik Isles and the respective quest. The interesting thing about the song is it also functions as a morse code message if you consider the short notes and the long notes as the two signals of morse language.

Naturally, fans listened to the song endlessly until someone finally figured out that it was a secret code. A few frantic hours of looking up morse signals and decoding the song later, the message was found to be... 'Runescape'.

17 Easy Gold For A Newbie

Acquiring gold depends on your ability to work hard completing the various tasks that are scattered across Runescape. One easy way to get a lot of gold even at low levels is by using the grand exchange.

For this, you need to have at least 600,000 gold units available in your account.

Go to Lumbridge and find a particular fishing shop. You can find it to the left of the doomsayer, where the shop owner sells feathers which cost 1,000 gold apiece. Take the feathers to the Grand Exchange and trade them in for 170,000,000 gold pieces.

16 Specialization Means More Money

Runescape is made to mimic the real world as much as possible, even if it is set thousands of years in the past in another dimension, and you know, magic is also a thing there. But the concept of work/reward works pretty much the same way in the game as it does in the real world.

So experienced players know that working smarter equals more reward. For example, if you work more on your mining and crafting skills, you will eventually reach a level where you can create items. You can sell these items and make greater profits quickly.

15 Free Weaponry

You have to work for everything you get in Runescape, even weapons to go on quests with. Just like in the real world. You can also often find a way to get that stuff for free if you know where to look, also just like in the real world.

For instance, in the beginning, you are a penniless noob with access to nothing that could be used as a weapon. But if you go to the shop in Lumbridge, you will find three people standing outside all clothed in blue. Speak to one of them to be handed a sword and shield for free.

14 Friends With Skiller Benefits

There are a lot of different types of people in the world of the game. One of those types are skillers. A skiller is a character that does not spend any time fighting or going on quests but works on improving his skills instead, such as woodcutting or mining.

It is possible to befriend a skiller in the game.

You can do so by occasionally 'skilling' with them. Once you become friends with the skiller, you will be able to buy items from them at a much lower price than what is available on the market.

13 Not According To Scale

One curious inconsistency that players have remarked upon time and again is the fact that the land we see encompassing the world of Runescape could not possibly be large enough to accommodate all the exotic locations and vast stretches of land that the quests take place in.

This is explained via Scale Theory. The theory posits that the actual land we see is filtered down to its bare basics, stripped of all the vast complexities that actually exist across its geography. That is why the land we see and what we experience are two different things.

12 So, So Many Playing Hours

We've already mentioned that Runescape is the most popular MMO in the world, like, ever. That means there are a whole lot of players doing a whole lot of playing in the game, and the game is keeping track of all those minutes spent playing.

It has been estimated that the combined playing time for Runescape comes out to 443 billion+ minutes.

To put that in perspective, if a single player was to be the one to play all that much Runescape, he'd have to have started playing the game all the way back in 840,000 BC!

11 A Very Funny Bunch Of People?

Another fact about the game that is more puzzling than it is impressive is how much the players like to lol in the game. It has been estimated that someone lols on an average every 10 seconds in the game. That's 6,048,000 lols in a week!

So is the game a hotbed for budding stand-up comics? Not really. Laughing is often a social lubricant for the times when you meet new people or are stuck in unexpected situations. Turns out you get a lot of those in Runescape, and hence all the nervous laughing by the players.

10 Make Solid Profits

It's not the goal of every player in the game to become a quadrillionaire. Some just want to have a solid amount of ready cash to buy weapons and go on quests. If you happen to be such a player, there are some simple activities which can result in large profits.

You can mine iron ore, and then sell the ore for 10,000gp each. You can eliminate hill giants, and then sell their bones for 3000gp each. Finally, you can mine coal and iron and sell the resulting bars of steel for a cool 500gp each.

9 The Mythical 'Rarest Armor'

NOTE: This isn't an actual part of the game, but rather one of the oldest myths about a special 'Satan Oracle Armor' that exists within the game which is fabulously expensive and ridiculously powerful, but can only be gained after completing a series of nigh-impossible tasks.

The Gameplay: Go to Al-Kharid and end 10 men. The last one will drop a red clue scroll titled 'The Scroll of Satan'. Read the scroll, which tells you to go to the forgotten graveyard and search in a coffin to find the 'Dictionary of [Heck]'.

Use the dictionary and a holy symbol to end a lesser demon. Then take the ashes and end three ghosts. The last one will drop the 'Necklace of [Heck]'. Use it to eliminate level 235 Satan. Wear the necklace, enter the underworld and battle three blood demons and Satan himself (Whew, good luck!). You will then receive the 'Satan Oracle Armor'.

8 Strike Rich: Rune Essence Mines

Here's a way to game the system for easy money and experience. First, you will need to complete the Rune Mysteries quest. Then enter the Rune essence mine with a pickaxe and teleport.

Now mine the essence till your hands can't mine any more essence.

Once you have all the essence you can carry, use the portal to go to the Varrock Rune Shop nearby to deposit the essence in return for healthy amounts of cash. You can repeat this process until you have gained as much money and experience as you feel you need.

7 Colorful Speech

In the classic version of Runescape, there is a special formatting feature that the more casual players rarely paid attention to. But it's a cool little detail for fans who notice it. You need to enter text while using the @ symbol to change the color of the text that you input in the speech bar.

So if you input @red@, the next piece of text that you enter will be in red. This little trick also works by inputting the first three letters of a color in between the @ symbols. So typing in @blue@ turns the text blue, etc.

6 All In A Day's Work

This is another method of getting your hands on some quick dough. For this method, you need to get to Port Sarim. There you will find the men in blue, whom you can ask to take a ship to Karamja. After you reach Karamja, make a beeline straight for the first house on the right that you see.

There you will find the man wearing black clothes who will offer you a job. The job itself is very simple. You just get 10 bananas and put them in a crate. In return for this 'work', you will receive 30gp. Rinse and repeat.

5 Population Explosion

As you will have understood by now, lots and lots and lots of people play Runescape. So many, in fact, that the combined might of all the players who are logged into the game, both on the free servers and the premium servers, would constitute the fifth largest population of a country in the real world!

That's right, Runescape's population is more than half of that of NA, more than three times the size of the UK, and almost nine times the population of Australia. Also, there's more cultural diversity among the players than any other nation on Earth.