As far as hours go, I’m not slacking per se, I’ve got around 600 hours now in the live game (still less than what I had in alpha 1) but I’m far from the people at the top of the leaderboards. I just don’t have the time for that between my other hobbies and things I like to do!
For the rest of the questions…
It’s safe to say that the project has exceeded nearly everyone’s wildest expectations that were around even a year ago. There have certainly been some unexpected growing pains coming from a group of developers suddenly having to also do community management for literally thousands of players they weren’t expecting but I’m personally happy with the decisions they’ve made to make the gameplay experience what it is today, as I’m still loving playing every minute, even if 99 thieving is a bit of a slog of a grind in 2004.
In alpha, I got so used to being the only person online that I felt beta coming around was going to be more of a, “Hey, I’ll have some more people to play with!” moment rather than the sudden appearance of a full economy, clans, and a massive highscores rush. Obviously, I was completely wrong! For beta to release, I had it pretty much pegged, there was going to be a massive jump in players and then things would start to die down as people ran out of content to do, and it would filter down to mostly highscores grinders and people that are finding their own love of the game. People that play to “reach the endgame” have probably already done so at this point and either moved on or are waiting for updates, which is fine!
For my testing, it’s really just part of how I play games. I love exploring the nooks and crannies of games, finding easter eggs, and seeing how I can “break” things. Naturally, this ends up turning me into someone who likes exploring bugs or glitches, and I tend to like reporting them so they get fixed if something is in live development too. I don’t say I have more or less enjoyment in what I’m playing when I’m looking for issues like that, it’s more of a different mode of play: I’m having a great time when I’m playing RS to play RS and I’m having a great time when I find something interesting and take a break from what I’m doing to explore it. There are always more bugs to find too, on P2p release, you could actually get all 3 family crest gloves for about a week until they patched it! (not sharing repro steps either way, but just an example of there are always more issues)
For the dev timeline, even in the leadup to that March 29th date I was saying “No way, not possible” until they finally announced that Legends Quest would NOT be coming with the P2p launch. Pazaz is a perfectionist, which you need for a server like this to be as authentic as it is, and it both made the F2p beta launch keep getting delayed and also made me feel like the P2p launch wouldn’t happen until Legends was done, but I did feel like Legends would be the last piece of content to wait for full release. The last piece of content part ended up being true, but I didn’t expect P2p to come out before Legends!
The hype has been, and still is, insane to me. I’d like to think I’m looking forward to the updates and playing the game as much as anyone else is, but the passion that I’ve seen some other players have for advocating for their favorite updates/content to come to the game faster is incredible, so I don’t know if I can keep up with that! I’ll be playing the server even if I’m the last person on it if that hype does die out some day, but that just means it’s back to alpha for me and the circle of life continues.
Thanks for the opportunity to ramble for a bit and I hope I covered what you wanted to know!