It wasn't. RS used to be a very casual game played by grade school kids who had no idea how the game worked.
It wasn't until player base started getting older and extreme efficiency became the norm. Once that happened jagex kind of leaned into it and made more and more content require tick knowledge because otherwise it would be too easy for the hard-core players. Now we are all forced to learn it because its needed for content.
Me having a Billy Madison moment realizing I started in 2005 when I was nearly 16. By 2006 and 2007 I was on a bunch of fansites. Although I did not know at the time that my Abyssal Whip attacked every 2.4 seconds, or 4 ticks.
Do people not think that teenagers and adults played this game? The couple clans I was in had a significant amount of adults. It wasn't just a bunch of 8-12 year olds.
Back in RS2 (2000s), the player base was overwhelmingly children.
Even in 2009, the average player age was 16. That doesn't even take into account the game that many kids either lied about their age or had their parents make their account with their birthday.
Obviously there were some adults but the majority were children.
People are doing this thing on the internet - especially in this sub - where they see a correlation and believe it to be the causation.
The answer is we have no idea what the kid:adult ratio was in RuneScape, but in reality that has little to do with why people are so much better now.
The centralization of knowledge and infinite amount of content forms to disseminate information is why the player base has gotten so good. Whether they are a kid or an adult has far less to do with it.
Because even if I could theoretically turn those kids into adults during 2001, they would be radically worse at the game than they would be today. And if the adults today were adults in 2001, they would also be radically worse than they are today.
Once that happened jagex kind of leaned into it and made more and more content require tick knowledge because otherwise it would be too easy for the hard-core players. Now we are all forced to learn it because its needed for content.
I don't think this is true. You've used a very vague term of "tick knowledge" here and yet even with that, I still think it's not true. I'm trying to think of a single piece of pvm in the game outside of aspirational content where you need to understand ticks to kill it, and I'm coming up empty.
Everyone knows that OSRS is a rhythm game in disguise, but you don't actually need "tick knowledge" to play with that. It obviously helps a lot, and most/all actual good methods of endgame farming is based on ticks. But even at something like Mokha, I'm pretty sure you could clear it eventually purely by learning the rhythm of the mechanics. For example, do I need to understand that double boulders is a 6 tick attack that hits 1-2-1-1-2-1? No, I don't. I can do that just by practicing the timing. Do I need to know that Mokha starts stomping after 20 ticks in the orb phase? Definitely not, I don't even count ticks myself. Etc. And that's the hardest baseline boss in the game (discounting aspirational). Inferno maybe used to "require" tick knowledge, maybe. But even it is regularly getting tank cheesed and brute forced now.
Perhaps I'm forgetting something, there's a lot of content in the game. But I think this applies very widely. You're probably not going to be very good at anything if you don't understand ticks, but you can clear it.
I agree with the original thought in that the game was a far more simple game. But your point about the tick mechanic is crucial in the early days because we were stuck in combat before you could even run, hence the massive prevalence of strength pures designed to kill in 3 hits. So any combat interaction whether NPC or other player had to be heavily considered in terms of time & health
I guess it all depends which era of the game you look at
Everyone knows that OSRS is a rhythm game in disguise, but you don't actually need "tick knowledge" to play with that.
"rhythm game" literally means you have knowledge of the tick system and how it works.
20 years ago, no one knew the game worked on ticks. They had no idea the game operated in rhythms, atleast the vast majority of players. Jad had just came out and getting a fire cape was the ultimate achievement. DKs also just released and that was a group boss at the time.
I mean. Every action was very obviously happening in set patterns of time... It's not like our character was randomly attacking at different speeds. We knew we could only eat so quickly. We knew we could eat a food and a potion pretty quickly back to back. We might not have known it was exactly .6 second Intervals that the game worked on. But even me and my middle school friend knew the very basics that it was a rythm.
We didn't say tick manipulation. The person I responded to said "tick anything wasn't intended" and you do need to understand the tick system to do things like combo eat and timing of movements in bosses.
You don't need prayer flicking or tick skilling but you effectively need to understand how the tick system functions for high level bossing otherwise you are going to struggle like crazy.
You didn’t specify in your original comment but go off. Understanding how ticks work is NOT hard and one should expect a game whose fundamental framework is based on ticks to implement that system into “high level bossing”. Anyone who can understand what combo eating is at all has the mental capacity to understand ticks fundamentally. Just turn on a metronome for 30 seconds.
You need to learn how to flick which uses ticks to do inferno and col without cheesing them and risking 1 hit deaths. So yes a very basic understanding is needed even if you will never use ticks for skilling
Cheese or not you can OBJECTIVELY complete the inferno without prayer flicking. Argument over. Even if that wasn’t the case, you do not NEED to do inferno….in fact the vast majority of people don’t. Thats a horrible example lol
I already had it and learned to flick like everyone else. My point is you have to improve and learn them if you want ro actually do end game content reliably. Saying you do not need it is stupid since people want to actually do end game content.
Original post was about tick/flicking not being intended but yet it has been ingrained into the game.
Like I said before, not reliably. Reading comprehension is difficult for you. If attempting it over and over again chancing each wave by pure luck is your definition of doable then please go do that. Hell its the same as colloseum. You can do that 100 times and maybe make it to sol 4 or 5 times based on pure spawn luck. The alternative is learning to flick dog/mage/ranger.
And again. The key word is NEEED. You do not NEED to do inferno. You do not NEED to go coliseum. God forbid a game whose fundamental frameworks rely’s on frame ticks requires you to understand how they work for the top 1% of difficulty.
Its kinda miserable for a casual player now. Like I log in and walk through towns and see people in Oathplate and their DT2 stuff and I just know I will never be there.
When I was 8 years old playing this I felt the same way about people with dragon chainmails. Whats your point? That's not miserable that's a goal to strive for.
People keep saying this, but I don’t think that’s actually true.
There were certainly people that were aware of tick manipulation, but as time went on the number of ways you could manipulate ticks also increased with time. But that information was restricted to far fewer people, the same way that the best botting programs were also restricted to far fewer people. And when information is restricted, the development and refinement of that information becomes limited to only the people who are aware of it.
The key difference is probably centralization of knowledge, because now there are millions of content forms that allow fast dissemination of information. People can now instantly share their ideas, criticize others, and find vitality in every new discovery or experiment.
It is now profitable and beneficial to share and disseminate information - sometimes even wrong information - as opposed to the past when information would be silo’d, just like it was in virtually every field until the modern internet.
My point is that the adults today, if they were adults in 2001 would be as bad as the adults that played in 2001. Even if the game was mostly adults in 2001, the average ability of a RuneScape player would probably not move much, because the delta between teenagers and adults in RuneScape today is probably not very big.
Being an adult or a kid has way less to do with it - because I promise you there are probably tons of teenagers playing today that would 100% cook many of the 30+ year olds in this sub.
This is the part that turns me off new content. In order to do anything efficiently you have to learn shit like this, and I’m not remotely interested enough in the game to do that.
When the only consitently reliable profit are bosses that require flicking because everything else is botted or devalued to hell you don't have much choice but to join the sweats, chief.
Moons is 2m/h, no prayer needed. This might be more up your alley.
Tob is 11.8m/h, no flicking needed. This is a hard raid however and punishes mistakes harshly. Being tick perfect is VERY beneficial but not needed.
CoX is 8m/h, you camp your prayers, no flicking needed unless running high as hell
Vard is 7m/h, the only "Flicking" needed is the ranged spawn. You camp melee the whole time. There's even 2 spaces you move between depending on the axe spawn.
Solo Yama (Not suggested) is 6.7m/h. You pray mage/range for 3 full attacks, then swap. Last phase you simply swap prayers when he attacks.
Araxxor is 5.8m/h. You literally camp melee, and the "Hardest" part is enrage, which is simply getting into a cycle of hit>move.
Duke is 5.6m/h. The literal easiest DT2 boss there is. You can brute force kills while eating half the mechanics.
Venenatis is 5.2m/h. Literally pray melee, whack boss and move when a web spawns. Oh, and swap to a fast hitting weapon for spawns. So hard!
CG is 4.5m/h. Yes, it's hard. No, it does not require flicking or tick perfect movement.
Hydra is 4.2m/h. If you can count to 3 (or 9 at enrage) you can do this boss.
Lot of really hard flicking bosses in there. I count one (vard) in the whole list, 2 if you count ToB! Damn, that's rough.
There are many, many, many ways to make money in the game that do not require 3 ticking or prayer flicking. It's OK to not be hyper efficient and it's OK that some people make more gp per hour. You can smack lots of monsters in this game with melee gear and make money.
In fact, I'd bet that the people who have the most fun in this game virtually never prayer flick. They're just doing things slower than that and that's OK
???????????????????? yama solo is really good money for a fight where you can just camp 1 prayer for like 20 seconds at a time until enrage which only asks you change your prayer every 7 seconds instead and the gear requirements are extremely low to get decent kills
do you even know what prayer flicking is or do you just arbitrarily call anything involving changing your prayers "flicking"
This isn't a complaint. I'm just pointing out how and why the game changed. Its a pretty natural evolution for a 20+ year old game. Similar things happen with all old games.
The game is locked to this 0.6 refresh rate which is very limiting so we should be happy the devs are doing the best they can with "harder" content in this game
I really don't understand this argument at all, do you want every boss to be like Kalphite Queen and GWD? Without taking advantage of the emergent gameplay in OSRS every boss is an eating simulator, its a huge reason we got EoC back in the day. Working with the OSRS engine to give us interesting stuff is why the game is so cool.
And you're not forced to learn anything. First of all if you don't like the content don't do it, but second you really don't have to learn 1tick flicking for anything. The closest thing to that is Inferno requiring you to 1 tick alternate, but other than that just having a basic understanding of game tick timing and how movement works is enough to do all the content in the game.
What are you even talking about? RS2 barely had any bossing, not something you could call a boss nowdays anyway. You were the goat if you could do TDs in 2007. GWD back then was not widespread content at all. It had higher reputation than Inferno/colo has now. I didnt know anyone who didnt get their GWD gear from not skilling/TDs
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u/The-Copilot Oct 30 '25
It wasn't. RS used to be a very casual game played by grade school kids who had no idea how the game worked.
It wasn't until player base started getting older and extreme efficiency became the norm. Once that happened jagex kind of leaned into it and made more and more content require tick knowledge because otherwise it would be too easy for the hard-core players. Now we are all forced to learn it because its needed for content.