My hours played are where I stopped baby mode (f2p) and swapped over to the official Jagex launcher and Runelite through there. You can set up Runelite on Steam but its a pain and doesn't track achievements once you do. I have since entered the "midgame" of OSRS and IYKYK

For those that don't know, the "midgame" of OSRS is pretty much the entire game before endgame content, which sounds logical and normal until you take into account the fact that getting to endgame is actually thousands, and thousands, and if you go slow, thousands more hour journey. Its no joke, playing OSRS and going for endgame content from scratch with no prior knowledge of the game is a massive undertaking, multi-year commitment, or less if you treat it like a fulltime job (please dont).

None of this might sound appealing to you, and thats okay, but what has myself and upwards of 100,000 daily players enraptured with OSRS over other MMOs and even RS3, the microtransaction heavy younger sibling of OSRS, is that more than any other game I have ever played, there are no shortcuts in OSRS. If you spend the time, the hours, the effort doing a difficult thing and achieve it? You earned it, and everyone else who has done that thing has earned it. You can't just throw money at the game and win, you have to spend the time on it, and that results in a feeling of accomplishment like no other game on the market.

It helps that this game does progression better than pretty much any MMO on the market, and OSRS isn't "just" old content, there has been significant and will continue to be significant content updates that improve QOL and just straight up are entirely new bosses/raids/skilling paths.

There will also be no microtransactions.

"How do you know that?" You might find yourself asking. Well, I know that because this game is easily one of the strongest gaming communities out there and if there was even a hint of MTX creeping its way towards the game, Jagex would be knowingly and intentionally shutting down their company forever. The sheer, tangible backlash that would happen were they to ever try it would go down in history books, so I am confident that they wont.

OSRS is intimidating, its confusing, its complicated, its a massive time dump, but its also a fantastic journey to take even now in the 2020s and beyond. I am a firm believer that this game and its community will outlast even the likes of WoW in some form. Give it a shot, you might just ruin your marriage and start something worse than a drug addiction; you might just have fun.